Ep. 22 | Islamic Studies, Jewish Studies, and the Legal Scholar Between Them | Prof. Noah Feldman

Episode 21

Release date: 

Hosts: Meryum Kazmi and Harry Bastermajian

Recording location: Media Production Center, Harvard University

Sound engineer: Jeffrey Valade

Audio editing: Meryum Kazmi

Audio elements: Over and Out by Ketsa via Free Music Archive

Photo: 

Transcription: Otter (modified for readability)

Noah Feldman  00:00

When I was 13, after my bar mitzvah, I asked my parents if I could take the bar mitzvah gift that we had gotten, and if I could go off to Israel. And I went to Israel, and I had a summer there, and I was completely captivated by the old city of Jerusalem, and by that I really mean less by the archeology than by the reality of wandering around an Arabic-speaking city, and when I came home, I told my parents, “I speak Hebrew already, I want to learn Arabic.” 

Shahab really insisted in What Is Islam? on something that very little academic writing about Islam, if any, really insists on, which is that it should be possible to identify some core components of what Islam is, even though there are many different ways to interpret and appreciate Islam, there are, as academics would like to say, Islams plural. You can recognize the diversity and the complexity and the disagreement, and still think there must be some common undertaking here. And so, I tried to do that for this book on contemporary Jewish thought and life. 

Meryum Kazmi  01:12

Welcome to the Harvard Islamica Podcast. I'm Meryum Kazmi,

Harry Bastermajian  01:15

and I'm Harry Bastermajian. Today we are honored to welcome Noah Feldman, Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard Law School, Chair of Harvard's Society of Fellows, and founder and director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli law.

Meryum Kazmi  01:34

Professor Feldman is the author of many books and articles, including After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy, What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State, The Arab Winter: A Tragedy, and To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People. He earned his bachelor's degree in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard, and later his doctorate at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where he wrote his dissertation on Aristotle's Ethics and their Islamic reception. He earned his J.D. at Yale Law School. Welcome, Professor Feldman.

Noah Feldman  02:09

Thank you for having me.

Harry Bastermajian  02:10

It's great to have you. So to get us started, can you tell us a little bit about your background and what brought you to the study of law, including Islamic law?

Noah Feldman  02:21

Sure, I'm from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I went to a school that for many, many years was in Brookline, which was called the Maimonides School. So that meant, from a very early age, I was aware that Jews and Muslims had not only lived side by side, but had been on very good terms frequently, and I was in a school that was named for someone who wrote his most important philosophical work in Arabic, and lived, of course, his entire life in the Islamic world, and the school was very good about teaching Jewish studies alongside secular studies, and they gave us a really rigorous Jewish education. And I would also describe the school as being what, at the time that I was there, which was from the time that I was six to the time that I was 18, I graduated in 1988, kind of middle of the road Zionist is how I would describe them as being in that period of time. And so they taught us Hebrew. And when I was 13, after my bar mitzvah, I asked my parents if I could take the bar mitzvah gifts that we had gotten and if I could go off to Israel, and spend a summer in Israel. And I was 13, so I was not a sophisticated person, but I spoke good Hebrew, and I went to Israel, and I had a summer there, and I was I stayed with family friends, but I was more or less on my own, and I was completely captivated by the old city of Jerusalem, and by that I really mean less by the archeology than by the reality of wandering around an Arabic-speaking city that had a substantial Muslim population, a substantial Christian Arabic-speaking population, an Armenian population that also spoke Arabic as its everyday language at home while simultaneously speaking Armenian, and I couldn't get over it. And when I came home, I told my parents, like I speak Hebrew already, I want to learn Arabic, and they said, "Okay, like let's ask around and find if there's a place, some place that will teach a small child to learn Arabic. And it took a year, but eventually I found an amazing man called Wilson Bishai, who is an Egyptian, a Copt, actually, who taught Arabic at Harvard for I don't even know how many years, has to have been in the high 30s. And I went to him and asked if I could take a summer school class. Actually, first I went to the registrar, the summer school, and asked if I could register. And they said, "No, you're too young to register for the summer school." So then I went straight to Professor Bishai and I met him in his office, and I said, "I want to take your class. And he said, "Let me call the registrar. So he picks up the phone. He calls the registrar. He says, "Yes, no, yes, no." He had a very distinctive English, like a very beautiful, full English. I don't know if any of you knew him. And he finally said to me, "Well, we have settled matters. You will study the Arabic language. There are two conditions: you may not take the final examination, and you may not pay tuition."

Meryum Kazmi  05:14

Not terrible conditions.

Noah Feldman  05:17

And so he took this little kid into his first year summer school Arabic class, which was five days a week, four hours a day, plus language lab, which we had in those days before AI. And it was the most exciting experience educationally you could imagine. And it began a process where I continued to study Arabic abroad, and then back at Harvard later with him and with Muhsin Mahdi. And I would say that the experience of learning Arabic for me just transformationally opened my world, because when you're taught another language, like I had been taught Hebrew at school, especially if you're taught it from a very early age, which I was from the time that I was four, it doesn't occur to you that there's anything surprising about learning this other language because you're too little. But at the moment when you learn a language that reveals a perspective fundamentally different than the one in which you're being raised, it blows your mind in the best possible sense, and for me, that's what Arabic was. And so, starting with the language, that's what opened me to a deep interest in Islam. And in my undergraduate years, I studied, I concentrated Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, which was the major here, and I studied pretty much in equal parts medieval Jewish and medieval Islamic studies. And I was not yet sure I was going to do law. And the courses all had some quasi-legal content, but there wasn't a class in Islamic law proper, nor was there a class in Jewish law proper. It was really about the philosophies of these traditions, which were bound up in their legal side. And then I went off to Oxford, and I was lucky enough to get funded to do a doctorate there. And I did that in medieval Islamic philosophy. And then I went to law school, and I guess I had this idea in law school that I would be able to bring these things together. And I tried really hard. I wrote some papers that tried to bring together Islamic law with statutory interpretation. I couldn't get anyone interested in them, and I eventually went on the teaching market in the spring of 2001 to become a law professor. And again, I was like, I can teach constitutional law. By then, I had clerked for the Supreme Court, I had written some papers in church and state, I had sort of like the American side down, but I was like, but I really also want to teach Islamic law and work on Islamic studies. I didn't actually mention the Jewish stuff at all at that point, and they were like, "Yeah, yeah, we're not interested in that." And I interviewed at many schools, and I was really lucky on the market. I got tons of job offers, which was like, I guess that's impossible nowadays for any human being. So I was really lucky. Nobody was interested in the Islamic legal stuff. Nobody. And my first week of my first job at NYU was 9/11, and I we couldn't go back to school for a couple weeks. And then when I came back, the dean knocked on my office door, and he said to me, "Did you say something about Islam? I was like, "Yeah, I was like telling you I want to work on that." He's like, "You can now." So, in a tragic way, in so far as it was the consequence of this awful event, as some historians of knowledge have pointed out, the United States underwent a kind of golden age of serious study of the Islamic world in the decades that followed 9/11. As scholars who had been doing it for many years suddenly had a public platform, and as lots more young people wanted to learn Arabic, wanted to understand the world, and of course that was over time also caught up in our kind of failed quasi-imperial ventures in Iraq and in Afghanistan, but the focus on knowledge suddenly became real and present. And so, at the urging of one of my professors from Yale Law School, Owen Fisk, who was a great mentor, he said to me, "You have to write something now about Islam, democracy, and what the United States should be advocating for in the region." He and I both thought we shouldn't be going to war to do it, but what should we should be advocating for? And I had been a strong believer that the United States had gotten things wrong in the Muslim world most broadly, but especially in the Arab-speaking part of the Muslim world, just because we were supporting every single dictator. And so I wrote this book, which became After Jihad, arguing that we needed to change our policy and recognize that the people who were most plausibly going to advocate for democracy in the Muslim world were Islamic democrats, and that there were strands of Islamic democracy that could be fully compatible with democracy as we would recognize it, with constitutional democracy. And it was very important to address all the challenges here, but it basically threw me headlong into contemporary versions of Islamic studies, which is not what I had studied, to be clear, like I was trained as a medievalist, but for good and for ill, in Islamic studies, it's often the case that people who are trained as medievalists end up working on the contemporary world, and I tried not to conflate. And that threw me into eventually, a few years, later being sent to Iraq as a constitutional advisor. And without going too far into that, I'll just say by then, I had discovered that I could make the study of Islamic law, particularly Islamic public law and constitutional law, an important part of my own scholarly work that would potentially have impact in the real world. It wasn't simple, and the late Edward Said, in one of his last publicly published articles, came after me. I mean, it wasn't exactly personal, and it was completely personal. He was like, "How can the United States have sent a guy over there who's like only 33 and isn't an Arab, and he was right about both of those things. But it's also true that no one else wanted to go. I was not anybody's first choice to go there. I was a Democrat. I litigated for Al Gore. But the other scholars in the field, no one no one would go. And so they eventually asked me, and I was like, "Yeah, like I don't think we should have invaded, but once we're there, I think we should do the least bad that we can. And I think we need to acknowledge that Iraq is a country where there are these Shi'a parties that are many of which are actually democratically oriented, and we're going to have to deal with them if we want to have a constitution. And so that's sort of how I got involved in it.

Harry Bastermajian  11:34

Yeah, yeah. Thank you.

Meryum Kazmi  11:36

Very interesting. Thank you. So we noticed that you dedicated your book, "The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State" in memory of the late Muhsin Mehdi, who was one of the professors that we featured in our timeline of the history of Islamic studies at Harvard. Can you tell us about your experience studying with Muhsin Mehdi and other scholars of Islamic studies as an undergraduate or thereafter?

Noah Feldman  12:03

Yeah, Professor Mahdi was an incredible figure because he was an incredibly learned scholar. He was both deeply learned in medieval Arabic and Islamic thought, and also a very sophisticated philosopher, and he was broadly speaking affiliated with the Straussian movement in political theory, which, for listeners, some listeners will think, "Oh wait, weren't the Straussians the neocons who advocated for the invasion of Iraq? The short answer is, it is true that people like Paul Wolfowitz were self-identified Straussians, but they were what a real Straussian would have called bad Straussians. They didn't really get Strauss's core teaching. And Strauss's core teaching-- this is oversimplified-- was that if you read medieval philosophers, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, you would see them dividing themselves into true philosophers-- that is, people who really bought the Aristotelian and Platonic worldview, and therefore rejected many elements of traditional Judaism, Islam, or Christianity, like the idea that God has specific foreknowledge of every particular thing that's going to happen in the world, and that they then, the ones who held that view, hid that view, and they wrote artfully, in a way that a close reader would be able to figure that out. Now, that's a very controversial thesis in the history of political thought, and there was a time when you could divide historians of political thought into the Straussians and the non-Straussians, and some of my other professors at the time in Jewish studies, like Professor Isadore Twersky, was a great example, who was the big star of Maimonides, were not Straussians. They were actually pretty skeptical of the Straussian approach, which was to read everything against the grain and to try to find the secret teachings in it. I think Twersky had a line in a review he wrote of an essay that Strauss had written in the beginning of a translation to the Guide of the Perplexed, and I'll probably not get the line exactly right, but Twersky said something like that: "There are secrets in the guide is certain; their nature, however, remains a mystery. So it was interesting because Mahdi and Twersky shared the approach of incredibly close textual reading. Every letter of every word was significant, and you had to use the original languages and you had to see it in context in order to do that. And so that was incredible. There were subtle nuances of difference of interpretation of what they thought the right reading was, and as an undergraduate, first I got the deep philological textual side of this. My first class professor Mahdi was-- actually it was billed as like advanced Arabic-- but it was in fact entirely a class in Islamic philosophy. It was like close readings of Farabi, and so I found it just completely engrossing. And he was completely charming. He was utterly lovely to me, and treated me in the classes that I took with him subsequently. Took an amazing seminar with him on prophecy. He treated me as though I were a graduate student, even though I was like tiny little kid. I mean, by then I was in college, but I was still a little kid. I was 18 or 19, and it was just he was so inspiring in that way, and I really loved him. And so that was those thoughts were very much in my mind when I when I dedicated the book to him. There were other amazing scholars that I had the occasion to work with. I worked for my dissertation with a guy called Fritz Zimmermann, a German scholar of medieval Islamic philosophy at Oxford, who I was completely terrified of. Professor Mahdi was incredibly warm, and Professor Zimmerman was extremely proper in German, which to me read as mean, but he wasn't mean. He was actually a softy, but I didn't know that till literally the day after I got my PhD. And he took me out to dinner, and said I should call him Fritz, which was inconceivable. I was never going to do that, and got drunk, drinking bottles of champagne in the only Lebanese restaurant in Oxford, where he was like exchanging dirty jokes with the waiters in Arabic, and I was just like, I didn't know this was, I didn't know this was even a thing. Another person who's worth mentioning, there were others, but Roy Mottahedeh was incredibly nice to me always, and then Wolfhart Heinrichs, who was genuinely a towering scholar of Arabic literature. I mean, towering. I mean, I remember going to have a conversation with him about my senior essay, which was about actually a poet who wrote some Arabic, a lot of Hebrew, some Spanish poetry, and I said to him, Professor Heinrichs, I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm working on this guy for my thesis. He said, Well, I don't, I don't really know that much of his poetry. I was like, okay. And I asked a question. He was like, Well, I mean, in this poem, and he started to recite from memory. And I was like, “Okay, I know what we're dealing with here, this guy who just knows everything.” Really, just an unbelievable person, and then last, and I've really been thinking about her recently, a scholar who I don't know if you've covered in your in the series, but Annemarie Schimmel.

Meryum Kazmi  17:24

Yeah, we have.

Noah Feldman  17:26

I mean, the most unusual, certainly professor, but one of the most unusual human beings I've ever met, who seemed to be in a Sufi trance, a high percentage of the time. I mean, I remember she was affiliated with Elliot House where I was an undergraduate, and one time after some event, I walked with her from Elliot House to Six Divinity Avenue, where the department was and still is, and that sounds like that's not a big deal, just walking across Cambridge. But it must have taken us an hour and a half because of how slowly she walked, and also she seemed to be in trance state. And we were she was speaking the whole time, but in this way where like you just had this feeling that you were in the presence of someone who was genuinely living her subject matter, in a way that's-- it's risky for an academic to live your subject matter that way, but it can also generate insights like no other. And she was just an she was a true Sufi and just an unbelievable person. And now, when I'm reading books about Sufism, there's every single book of a certain era has references to her, sure, but also like personal acknowledgements. Like I would never have written this book without Annemarie Schimmel. She was the-- it's really incredible. I mean, she really-- it's not an exaggeration to say that she gave birth to the field of Sufi studies in the United States.

Harry Bastermajian  18:47

Yeah, you were a student here at Harvard at an amazing time. I mean--

Noah Feldman  18:54

I was incredibly lucky. The only one I never met was Gibb. The only one I never met was Gibb. Yeah, we used his room. Widener, I think it was Widener H, which had all of his books and things in it. But he was no longer there.

Meryum Kazmi  19:09

Wow. Thank you. Yeah, we've done interviews, we did with Roy Mottahedeh, Bill Graham, and Ali Asani talking about their mentors and their professors. 

Noah Feldman  19:23

That's very cool.

Harry Bastermajian  19:24

It's always great to hear from former students about what intellectual life was like in Islamic studies and more broadly speaking, at Harvard around that period of time.

Noah Feldman  19:35

I should add one more person who didn't arrive at Harvard until 2000 and was my colleague as a junior fellow, and then became a junior professor here while I was off at NYU, and then I came back and we overlapped a little bit. And I mention him because we're talking about great Islamic studies scholars who've come through Harvard, and that's Shahab Ahmed. Shahab and I became extremely close, and in my generation, and we are the same generation. He was-- I'm using the past tense for listeners because he tragically died very, very quickly of a cancer. Now, a little more than a decade ago, he had not only this incredible erudition that a lot of these scholars had. He also had the grand vision of how you could contextualize the deep philological knowledge into the bigger story of what Islam could be and was. And his masterpiece, in my view, called What Is Islam? On the importance of Being Islamic, or The importance of being Islamic, is I think one of the best books in any field written by anyone in my generation as an academic, and it really repays deep, deep study. And Shahab had an ambivalent relationship with Harvard. He had a hard time. He wrote a ton, but he had a hard time getting himself to publish it. And What is Islam? didn't actually come out until just after he was denied tenure, and then shortly thereafter, months afterwards, actually the book was still had not fully been copy-- had not been copy edited when he got sick, and I was able to help out with the copy editing. And sounds like not a big deal, but the book is 600 pages long, and Shahab made sure, because he was such a good textual scholar, that every passage in every language that wasn't English was not only translated but transliterated. And there were 14 different languages, all of which he spoke, and I was able to help of a bunch of them, but one of the just to give you a sense of how much-- one of the languages I didn't even I never even heard of the language, which is a language called Saraiki, which turns out 20 million people in the Punjab speak this language, but I was innocent of it. So just somebody who had the grand vision, the scholarly capacity, and really just a transformational ability. It's always a tragedy when a when a young person dies, no matter what. When the person's brilliant, it's more of a tragedy. When they're a brilliant person who really was bringing transformational approaches to a whole field, it's even more, it's even more devastating.

Meryum Kazmi  22:15

So, going back to your work in Iraq, in 2003, you were appointed by the Bush administration to serve as senior constitutional advisor to the Coalition Occupation Forces and the Iraqi Governing Council in the making of Iraq's interim constitution. How did this experience shape your thinking on Islam in the state in the 21st century, as well as your subsequent book, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State?

Noah Feldman  22:44

It taught me that there was a lot of room for flexibility, provided nobody insisted on absolute ideological rules. So, the most significant contribution of the Iraqi constitution to the question of Islam and democracy was a is a single provision, which is kind of a two-faced provision. It simultaneously says that no law enacted by the government can violate the principles of the Shari'a, and it also says in the same sentence, or the principles of democracy. Now, technically, that doesn't. Now, I'm just going to be a lawyer for a second. Technically, that doesn't mean that they're the same principles. They're two different sets of principles, but it assumes and mandates overlap between them. Whatever law you pass has to satisfy both of these things. So if they were wholly incompatible, the provision would be incoherent. So this is not an accident. The idea of that formulation was to not insult anybody, not make it too ideologically pressured, but communicate that this was going to be an Islamic government in some meaningful way, and a democratic government in some meaningful way. Now, Iraq has turned out to be a country in which corruption is enormously high. Democracy functions in the sense that there are elections, and everyone agrees that those elections are mostly free and fair elections, but legal rights are very hard to get vindicated in the court system, which isn't efficient. Security has been lousy for large parts of that history. Many, many, many things are broken about Iraq. However, it's really interesting to note that this aspect of Iraq's troubles has never been a problem. There has actually never been a problem in Iraq around a struggle between Islam and democracy, which is kind of astonishing. So much so that if you talk to people who are not experts in the region and don't know anything about Dawah, which has been the leading Islamic Democratic Party through most of its history, and you say to them, like, just pull a pull up, maybe not a person off the street, but a policy advisor from the lower reaches of the State Department, and say, well, why have there not been problems with Islam and democracy in Iraq? And they'll say, well, because it's not an Islamic state. I'm like, are you joking? Not only is it textually an Islamic state in its constitution, the party that has formed the government, I think in every case without exception, from the beginning of the of the modern constitutional state, has always been an Islamic party. Always. It's just that since there's been no fighting over that, we come to take it for granted, and this is not some argument for like how great things turned out in Iraq. They turned out terribly, but it is to note that what many people thought was going to be the biggest problem in a post-Saddam Iraq never materialized into a problem. So there's a lot of takeaway there. I mean, one takeaway is that Islam and democracy are genuinely not incompatible, and if Iraq were a better functioning democracy, that would not make it less Islamic. So that's a pretty significant fact. I think the reason it's worked in practice is that the Shi'a religious leaders, the ulama, made a tactical decision from the beginning, and then it emerged into eventually a strategic decision, that they wanted Iraq to be a functioning democracy. Now they wanted that because Shi'a are in the majority, but in the history of democracies, there's never been anyone who knew they were going to lose every election who wanted it to be a democracy. That's like a general rule of democracies. If you're a permanent minority, you don't want democracy. So the fact that the majority wanted democracy is not like a bad thing or an anomaly. It's normal. So I think that's a pretty significant takeaway that people don't usually remember, and I think even the textbooks don't do a good job of acknowledging it or recognizing it. Then there are many, many negative lessons. The most significant of which is that I sometimes say about myself that I went into Iraq a bit of a Lockean, sort of like a lot of Americans, thinking that we get together as a people and we form a social contract, and from there we create a constitution. And we think that because in the United States, that is roughly speaking what the United States did after 1776, and I left a Hobbesian in the sense that Hobbes believed that you couldn't have any functioning state or any functioning justice or democracy until first you had a state capable of governing. The state comes first, and that was my takeaway. You can't-- it turns out there's no historical example of someone successfully building a functioning democracy in the midst of civil war, where the government isn't in control. It's never been done, and it wasn't done in Iraq. So that was a fundamental mistake that the United States pushed for, and we pushed for it because we knew our occupation was illegitimate, and we wanted it to be over quickly, which meant we wanted to transfer authority to an elected Iraqi government, which meant we wanted an interim constitution, which was not on its own illegitimate, but that was supposed to give rise to a permanent constitution. And then, when the elections were held, Sunni Arabic speakers in the country boycotted the election, and so then what was left were the Shi'a parties and the Kurdish parties, and they just made a constitution, and that left out a big percentage of the population, which, not coincidentally, ended up in an uprising, in rebellion, and that led to a protracted civil war. And many of Iraq's problems, and maybe nearly all of them, derive from that period of time. So, in retrospect, leave aside the United States obviously, should not have invaded, I think that's obvious to the whole world in retrospect, but if you are in a situation of disorder in a country, you can't then try to stand up a constitutional government. First, you need to stand up a system of order, and then you can, under conditions of safety, people can participate politically and try to create a functioning government for themselves.

Harry Bastermajian  28:55

Thank you. So, after the Arab Spring, you also advised the Tunisian Constituent Assembly, right? How did your experience in Tunisia compare with your experience in Iraq, especially with regards to the relationship between Islam and the state?

Noah Feldman  29:13

Well, my personal experience couldn't have been more different in that I came to Iraq with an occupying army, and I came to Tunisia as just a professor on my own with a research assistant, who showed up at a time when there were lots of other international constitutional advisors showing up. And I think what differentiated me was just I kept on showing up. I think I made six trips over the course of the time, and no one had to listen to me, and no one had to take a meeting with me, but I just tried to make myself useful, and very quickly, people were happy to talk to me, and then they started inviting me into the drafting rooms, and that was like an incredible experience. In particular, I ended up working very, very closely with people in the Constituent Assembly who were affiliated with the Nahda Party and Movement, which is an Islamic democratic movement, in my mind one of the most impressive such movements in the world, and their leader Rached Ghannouchi, Shaykh Rached, as people call him, as I call him, was someone who had written for many, many years about how you could have a liberal constitutional democracy that was fully consistent with Islam, and that was based on his deep commitment to the idea that there is no coercion in Islam, which is a teaching that every Muslim accepts as a matter of principle, but then you have to interpret what it means to say there's no coercion. And so, he and the party-- which is also a movement, that was an internal debate, were they a movement or a party? They talked about that a lot-- were faced with this fascinating experience. He had been imprisoned, tortured. He then was in exile for many years in Paris and in London, and here he came back. And secular Tunisians, secular is never the right word for talking about the Arab world, but it's a kind of shorthand to use here. Tunisians who were leftists or rightists and didn't vote for Islamic parties were very skeptical of this party because they said, "Well, these guys will be one man, one vote, one time. The usual anti-Islam kind of arguments. But the party managed to be so successful in negotiating compromises that they ended up part of coalition governments, and they ended up having the largest influence in the drafting of the constitution. But in that process, they did not they did not demand even a clause saying that provisions of the law that were inconsistent with Islam would be unconstitutional, so they were extremely open to a liberal constitution. They just wanted to preserve their right to participate in politics as Islamic democrats because they had the memory of when they were excluded and jailed, and the constitution they got was therefore much more classically liberal than the Iraqi constitution. And I think it's fair to say it was a really, really good constitution, with, as it turned out, one flaw, which I'll come to in a second. But for the better part of a decade, they participated both in and out of government. They would both do well in elections and participate in government, and then they would lose in elections and be out of the government, and then they'd be back. So they they're a demonstration proof. That party is a demonstration proof that you could have an Islamic Democratic Party that sometimes won elections, sometimes lost them, wasn't violent, wasn't terroristic in any way, shape, or form, in fact, fought against terrorism. And so, for me, it was kind of like the thrill of a lifetime to see that a view that I had been advocating for and arguing for at that point for about a decade-- it's now, I started doing this now it's now 25 years ago-- that I wasn't completely crazy that this policy was in fact doable and that these guys were, to my opinion, they weren't better or worse than any other politicians. They were trying to do their best to function, and they had broadly democratic commitments and values. Very, very sadly, Tunisia elected as president a constitutional law professor, which is my day job, and he exploited a gap in the constitution. So, in many Arabic-speaking countries, this has happened in other countries around the world, both Muslim and non-Muslim. The way a constitution gets subverted is that a president declares a state of emergency. Often, the constitution allows for a state of emergency, and then the president-- it's always supposed to be temporary under the constitution-- but then the president just governs under it, basically forever, and has an intelligence service that uses it as an excuse to arrest people and shuts down politics. So in the drafting of the Tunisian constitution, everyone was very concerned about this, and so we came up with a potentially really good solution, which was that if the president declared a state of emergency, the legislature then had the capacity to reconvene, and after a certain number of days, vote down the state of emergency. And if the president tried to block that, then it was supposed to be adjudicated by the constitutional court, which is supposed to be an independent court. So the idea was there's always going to be a struggle between a president and Congress or a parliament, but you'd have a third party to adjudicate. It was an original provision. I think it was a pretty good one. Well, what happened was that once the Constitution went into effect, the politics were such that they were never able to fill the constitutional court with justices. So imagine we had the U.S. Supreme Court established in Article Three of the U.S. Constitution, but there was just nobody in it. Like imagine the president nominated people, and the Senate always said no. It's actually not so hard to imagine. We've already had that happen in a limited way in the U.S. and we could be headed for a world where neither party will confirm someone from the other side. So that's what happened in Tunisia, but they didn't confirm anybody. So there was no one on the constitutional court. So then this new president, this constitutional law professor, he saw, he sensed the vulnerability. He declared a state of emergency. The legislature said, "You can't do this." It went to be adjudicated. There was no court there, and he was like, "Well, there's no court there, so I win." And the legislature said, "Well, that can't be right." And he said, "Well, watch me." And he was able to subvert the democratic structure. He then, having suppressed his opponents, drafted a new constitution, replacing the old one, and he jailed the leadership of the Islamic Democratic Party, and Rached Ghannouchi, who is now in his late 80s, maybe he may be 90 now, is back in prison where he's been for several years, and that's a horror to my mind. It's a tragedy, and a horror, and it's not for nothing. This was not the suppression of democracy did not happen at the hands of the Islamic Party. It happened in the hands of a nominally non-Islamic, more secular political party, and it's the Muslim democrats who are imprisoned. And unfortunately, the rest of the world largely has just acquiesced in that on the theory that well, this is an internal issue in any way they drafted this new constitution and people voted for it, so it's a tragedy. It's a real tragedy. And when I wrote the book, The Arab Winter: A Tragedy, the tragedies I was focused on were the tragedies of Egypt, where you had an Islamic democratic government that was then overthrown by the military, and the tragedy, the much greater, deeper tragedy of Syria, where of course you got this horrific civil war, and then the rise of Daesh, the Islamic State. But when I finished that book, the Tunisian constitution actually still had another five or six years to run, and so I was like, "See, there is this one sliver of hope, and then that went down. I still believe what I said in the last sentence of that book, which is that eventually, after the winter, there always comes another spring, but I don't think it's coming anytime, anytime soon. Sorry to be a downer.

Harry Bastermajian  36:58

No, that's all right. That's all right. I mean,

Noah Feldman  37:01

I'm trying to convey some of my own sense of the incredible excitement that, in 2011, eight years after the Iraq War, suddenly you had an uprising of people in many, many Arabic speaking countries demanding to control their own fate, which is incredibly moving and incredibly powerful, and beautiful, and I think anyone who saw that on TV wanted to side with them, and then it went wrong. And I don't think it went wrong-- and I try to argue this in the book, it didn't go wrong because of anything to do with Islam-- it went wrong for a lot of structural, political reasons. And again, in Egypt too, it was not the Islamic democrats who put an end to the democracy, it was the military.

Harry Bastermajian  37:49

So to bring us back to the topic of Harvard, you are the founding director of the Julis Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law at Harvard Law School. How did you come to start this program, and what, if any, role has your work on Islamic law and Islam and the state played in how you think about Jewish and Israeli law?

Noah Feldman  38:13

Until I did start this program a few years before it, I tried to, and I think I said this in my introduction to my Jewish book, my Jewish book was my 10th book, and of the previous books, four of them had been about Islam in one way or another. Some, the other rest had been about U.S. constitutional law, and I tried to sort of keep the Jewish stuff off the page. I think I felt I was too close to it, and that it was too locally contentious in some way, and a few years before this program was started, I moderated an event-- a really weird event-at Harvard Law School, which was a conversation between Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, who was the chief rabbi of the UK and had been put in the House of Lords, who was a kind of relatively moderate figure, at least in my view, certainly within the Jewish spectrum, and Alan Dershowitz, about whom the less said the better, and I was really I tried to just keep the peace in the debate, but I made a few comments about things, and a few of my students came up to me afterwards. A student came and said to me, "Wait, you seem to know a lot about Jewish stuff, and I was like, "Yeah, I spent a lot of my life studying it, and I still do." And they said, "Well, could we have like a reading group or something to explore classical rabbinic Jewish texts in relationship to law and to the broader world that we live in today?" And I was like, "Okay, let's experiment with it." So we started doing that, and then it became one of my favorite classes. It's a reading group that meets-- then it met every semester-- usually now it's every other semester, and it's very informal. But the idea of every semester is to start to take a theme, let's say it's one time the theme, the more obvious themes are like rabbinic authority and politics, another time, it's on been on magic, magic and Jewish law. Another time on gender, another time on angels. It's many different kinds of topics, states of consciousness, and we start with the most ancient texts, biblical and rabbinic, and then we work our way through medieval, early modern, modern, and end up in the contemporary Jewish world, often considering the way that religious Zionism has grappled with these texts, both positively and in many cases not positively. And it became really fun for me, and it kind of got some momentum, and, then my dean said to me, "Would you be open to formalizing this and doing broader kinds of programming? Because we've got some donors who are interested." And I said, "As long as we have total academic freedom, and as long as we can be a fully like a non-ideological, non-political entity that takes no political positions, and tries to represent all different points of view in terms of bringing people to the conversation, not because it's our job to represent them, but because if you want to study something, you have to hear from everybody." And they were like, "Yeah, that's fine." And the donors agreed to that too. I'm always very explicit when I'm talking to donors that, “I'm grateful to you. I appreciate your money, and once you give it to me, on behalf of the university, it's not your money anymore.” And we will follow our own approach, our own policies. I'm be really clear with you up front because later, when you come to me and you say, "Why did you do this and this? I'm going to answer you because I'm a polite person, but I'm not beholden to you in any way, shape, or form. So you need to know that in advance, and some donors at that point are like, "Oh, thanks for telling me that. No." And others are like, "Okay," and those are the ones you want to work with.

Harry Bastermajian  41:52

Correct. Yeah.

Noah Feldman  41:53

And so, we created the program, and I've really learned a lot from it from the very beginning. Our goal has been to be comparative. So our first conference was on lending and interest in canon law, Jewish law, and Islamic law, and it was amazing. I had muftis who were deep in the world of Islamic finance sitting there with rabbis who were deep in the world of halachic finance and arguing about like the technical details of the different theories of how you get around the problem of lending and interest, which is it's one of the most fascinating comparative topics in Jewish and Islamic law because both have thought about this extensively, and the conclusions are not identical, but the vocabulary is very similar. It's totally fascinating. We did a conference on the Temple Mount, al-Haram al -Sharif, and again comparative perspectives, really interesting representatives from all different points of view on one of the most contentious and complex topics and places, and so we've tried to maintain that kind of like theme of comparativism, and so it's been great to bring scholars of Islam to bear. And in fact, at our inaugural event, Malika Zeghal was one of the two speakers, and that was on purpose because I really wanted to convey the sense that this program was going to be a deeply comparative program. And the reason it's comparative is that all of these traditions have very interesting things on their own that are worth studying on their own, and that certainly includes Jewish law. But there are not that many Jews in the world, and Jewish law is not one of the-- it's not a legal tradition that for much of its history had much real world legal sway, because it wasn't the law of a state, and so Jewish law has often, always existed, really-- not often, always-- existed in interaction with other governing regimes, whether those were Roman or Islamic or Christian or secular modern. So it's sort of a good fit. And then with respect to the Israel part of it, the way we formulated it was, Israel has a legal system like any other legal system. There are law schools in Israel, and so to say something is Israeli law, you could be teaching the Israeli law of corporations or of tort or of contract. That's beyond our ambit. What we tried to focus on are those aspects of Israeli law that are distinctive to Israel, and roughly speaking, those are the relationship between religion and state in Israel, which we do very much comparatively. And there's a lot of interesting comparison to be done to India, to Pakistan, to lots of other countries. So we do an emphasis on that, and then the other aspect is the aspects of Israeli law that are have been connected to Palestinians, the treatment of Palestinians, the system of occupation, which it's never worth, it's never bad to repeat this again, is the Israeli legal system's own account of Israel's position in the West Bank and Gaza. It's more complex, but to this day, the Israeli legal system, no matter what the politicians say continues to treat most of the West Bank as an occupied territory. That's technical-- the technical-- it's occupied under international law, and Israeli law recognizes international law. So there's a whole jurisprudence about that that we have continued to cover, and it's been interesting to work on those aspects of Israeli law, especially in recent years, because the controversies have just gotten bigger and bigger and bigger, and the difficulty of being objective, to the extent it's humanly possible to be objective, and expressing different points of view has gotten harder and harder. And I don't see any end in sight to that. I think that the challenges are just building, and then on top of that, you've got real differences of opinion among students, among faculty, about the right way to think about the legal system of Israel, especially vis-a-vis Palestinians, but even more generally. So those are ongoing, real issues and challenges, to the extent that sometimes I mean I hope I'm not saying this out of turn, but sometimes it's almost a relief to, “Okay now let's talk about some very tough Talmudic tractates and some very technical problems of ritual law,” because it's hard to get that angry about that.

Meryum Kazmi  46:22

Thank you. Yeah, and hopefully now with Jessica Marglin, there can be more. I went to one of the-- a talk that she gave on the Shamama case. Yeah, that was really interesting. Just hearing about Jewish law within in the Muslim world and Ottoman world. 

Noah Feldman  46:41

Totally, totally. Yeah, Jessica Marglin's an amazing scholar. She'll be a great addition, and she's a perfect example of someone whose work is very much at the nexus of comparative law, legal history, the emergence of modernity. She's a wonderful Arabist. A lot of her work is writing on legal disputes that happened in Arab, Arabic-speaking countries, although often under Ottoman governance in the period that she works on, and she's also got a great knowledge of Jewish sources. She's a real Renaissance person, and will be a will be a great addition to our to our intellectual life for sure.

Harry Bastermajian  47:13

Definitely.

Meryum Kazmi  47:16

So yeah, we would love to talk now about your recent book, To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People, which was published in 2024. Can you tell us a bit about how you came to write this book and how you decided to focus on the themes of God, Israel, and the Jewish people in that order?

Noah Feldman  47:37

Well, I started writing the book well before October 7, 2023, more than a year before then. And in fact, the book was the way of publishing works is that if your book's going to come out in March, you submit it nine or 10 months previously. And I actually had a galley, the kind of version of the book that looks kind of like the book, like a paperback version of the book, though without all of the acknowledgments and footnotes necessarily completed. I had that the first week of October of 2023, and it actually had a different title at the time. It had a title that was meant to be a lighthearted title. It was the working title was "Bad Jew," and it became clear after October 7th that this wasn't the time to be lighthearted about these subjects. So that's a little bit of context. I came up with the idea of writing the book really growing out of the work I'd done on the Julis-Rabinowitz program, by then nearly a decade of running the program and thinking about the issues, it really had struck me that the worldview of contemporary Jews, and there are many worldviews there, but the worldviews of contemporary Jews had changed drastically in say the nearly 30 years-- the time I published the book-- from the time that I graduated from college—and I say that, and I sound like the old guy that I am, and that's a 30 years is a long time. But in a person's life, it doesn't feel like a long time at all, and it's kind of astonishing to feel that the ground has shifted so drastically in a set of worldviews, and also nobody writes about that because historians are like, well, call me back in 100 years, and we can look back on it, and then maybe we can say it was significant. And so I wanted to write a book that was a little more personal than anything I'd done before. I mean, I touched a little bit on personal things in some of my other books when I was describing my own experiences, but in the end, people came to those books not because they cared what I thought, because they wanted to know what was going on in the world. So here, I wanted to be a little more personal, and also take on what seemed to me the hardest questions. And the core of the argument of the book is that whereas at one time Israel and Zionism were a way for some Jews to express their Jewish identities over the last, now I would say close to a half century, but the book focuses more on the last 30-35 years, those Jewish communities that were skeptical of Zionism-- which at one point included left-wing Reform Judaism, right-wing in religious terms rather than political terms, ultra-orthodox or Haredi Judaism, and finally secular cultural Judaism-- had all come to be deeply infused by versions of Zionism, so that there was almost no space in mainstream Jewish institutional life where Zionism hadn't come to be a crucial component of people's belief system and identity. And when I sat down to write the book, I wanted to first identify this phenomenon and notice it as a very significant development in the history of Jewish thought, full stop. And then to notice that generationally, that younger Jews, especially politically liberal and progressive-- progressive is probably the right word-- Jews were starting to be troubled by this because of their perception that there was a fundamental incompatibility between their progressive politics and Zionism. So their parents, call them people today, you know, older Gen Xers and Boomers, many, many American Jews in that generation, and a non-trivial number of Israelis and Jews elsewhere, would have identified themselves as liberal Democrats, both small L, small D, and big L, big D, who were also liberal Zionists and saw that as a totally reasonable thing to be, and the younger generation sort of saying, "Well, that was all well and good if you believe there could be a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine problem, and that therefore, in the long run, Palestinians who chose to have Israeli citizenship would be full and equal democratic citizens, and Palestinians living in a Palestinian state would have their own constitutional democracy." Then that was a credible theory, at least according to the view of the liberal Zionists. I recognize there's also a very powerful critique of that, but that was their view, generationally. And the younger folks were saying like that's hopeless. Meanwhile, simultaneously, that same generation, call it Gen Z, roughly speaking, although there are also there are also a lot of millennials in there too, so a lot of lot of younger millennials and Gen Z, on the on the Jewish right, both in Israel and the United States, had shifted to saying, "Well, we don't actually care about liberal democracy. If it's a choice between sort of liberal Zionists had been saying to others for a long time: If you maintain the occupation of the West Bank and of Gaza, it'll become impossible for Israel to be a liberal democracy. And that was usually an argument that was made with the expectation people would say, "Well, then we have to have a two-state solution." But the more that argument was made, the more younger right wingers, Jewish right wingers, started saying, "Well, if that's our choice, fine, Israel doesn't have to be a democracy. It doesn't have to be a liberal democracy. I mean, democracy for the Jews in it, but not for anybody else in it." And so they too were moving away from their Zionism, in that case, was actually just pushing out their commitment to liberal democracy. So I mean, I think this is a kind of a this is, and that was before October 7. Post-October 7, every process that I had described just accelerated, and I had the experience in going through the whole book and like rewriting and editing in like a desperate, panicked, drive from the time that October 7 happened until the time that the book came out, that the book had to go to press, so I had like I don't know two and a half or three months of like total rewriting. It was really interesting that it turned out that my core arguments they hadn't changed, and in fact I had a lot more proof of them than I had before. A lot of what I had sort of suggested obliquely, well, if you read this, it sort of thinks that suddenly I had like people just saying these things extremely overtly and extremely clearly, and so the book ended up being much more relevant than it would have been perceived as otherwise. And I was like shocked when it made the New York Times bestseller list, which no book I'd ever written had ever done before. I expected this book would be like much smaller seller than anything else I'd ever written before because I thought it was kind of niche, but I think it mattered because of October 7 and because of the sense that things really had changed, the ground really had changed. So that that's really what the book is about. It's about this question of what are Jews going to do, and so the framework of God, Israel, and the Jewish people is that God is in the picture. A lot of Jews have a hard time saying God is in their picture, except if they're very, very religious. But there is a question of like, why are you Jewish? And Judaism is many things. It's an ethnic identity, it's a sense of peoplehood, it's a culture, and it's also a religion. It's all of those things in different ways. And so it's weird to talk about it without God, and I really tried to force God back into the conversation by asking people not where do you fall sociologically, but what do you actually believe? And Israel, for the reasons I've mentioned, had just become absolutely central to Jewish life much more than I think it had been in a previous couple of generations. And then Jewish peoplehood is itself tricky because the Jewish support for Israel outside of Israel is predicated on the idea that there is something like a Jewish people, but it's not obvious to everybody that Israel is the nation state of all Jews, although some people would say that it is, when there are American Jews who are critical of Israel, and they want to say, "Well, whatever Israel is doing, it's not doing in our name." They're in an ambivalent situation. On the one hand, they're insisting that it's not their country. On the other hand, like why are they insisting on it? They're insisting on it because there's a background assumption made often by the left and the right, that it is. And I just would conclude here by saying there's a ton to be said about Islamophobia and its distinctive histories in the West and in the U.S. in particular, and there's a lot to said to be said about antisemitism. Right now we're in a moment in the U.S. where antisemitism is visible on the left and on the right, and people on the left will tell you no, it's only on the right, and people on the right will tell it's only on the left, and other people might overstate its presence in each of these contexts. There's lots of room for debate, but it's there in a way. And part of the way that antisemitism works, this is true of Islamophobia or other forms of hate as well, is that when it becomes attractive for some political constituency to express its hatred because they think they'll gain from it, others will copy it. And I think it's possible to see this, as I said, in other contexts as well. If you do the fine-grained analysis of how we got the Armenian genocide, there too you can see different political factions almost exchanging who can be the most anti-Armenian in a given context, and so it's not unique to Islamophobia or antisemitism. But there are features of it that are very present, and right now we're just in a moment where everyone in the United States is sick of our politicians to a first approximation, and parties want to be truth-telling, and they want to appeal to young people. And part of appearing to be truth-telling is saying something that you're not allowed to say. And antisemitism has been a point of view that has been very hard to express because in the mainstream politics and mainstream media of the United States, it's been unacceptable to be an antisemite. But once people start saying things and they get away with it, there's an incentive for people on both sides to say it. And I think you can see the same with Islamophobia as well in the United States in the George W. Bush years. I mean, there's just this fascinating anomaly, which I don't think enough has been written about this. I've written a little bit about it, but only a little. So consider that after 9/11, the United States did not see a big rise in Islamophobia, notwithstanding that Bin Laden had attacked the United States in the name of Islam. And you might say, well, maybe the United States just wasn't that a place where there was going to be a lot of Islamophobia. Except that's not true because 15 years later, when Donald Trump ran for president, he ran on an overtly Islamophobic platform, and he got some good uptake with it. So why did nobody try it post 9/11? And part of the answer is that George W. Bush chose not to take an Islamophobic position, and this is a very unpopular thing to say, especially for people who are focused on how the War on Terror did, choose Muslims around the world and make them the enemy, which it certainly did. But in retrospect, it's clear that as a domestic political choice, Bush preferred to say, "We're not at war with Islam, and that's kind of remarkable. I mean, seven years after 9/11, we elected Barack Hussein Obama to be president of the United States. That's an incredible fact, and it's more incredible when you recognize that just eight years later we elected Donald Trump on a platform of Islamophobia. So you can see that how Islamophobia rises is that people say it and get away with it and think they're getting advantage from it, and then it starts to grow, and I think we're in another moment where there's danger of that happening in the United States too. We're in a fascinating moment where, on the one hand, the American Muslim community is coming into its own in terms of its capacity to express itself on a whole range of political issues and to have publicly Muslim politicians who are proud of their heritage and identify themselves as Muslim and express themselves on a whole range of views, including on Israel, in a way that is in some sense characteristic of probably the median Muslim American, and that's appropriate, I think, to the historical moment for American Muslims, and there's going to be backlash. That's just the reality, and it's the job of every reasonable person to try to make sure that we don't have meaningful Islamophobic backlash, or that we can try to manage that that backlash. And that's hard to do. It's like facing antisemitism. You just have to again and again and again repeat to people, the truth and the reality of Muslim American life in a democracy, and you just got to keep on saying that. And I think that's we're-- not going to go away. The need to keep on insisting on that. So, it's an exciting time I think from Muslim Americans' perspective, but also one of some concern and some trepidation. And I'll just say, at a personal note, what I really hope the most is that we don't get some deep tension between American Muslims and American Jews that is ultimately driven by Israel, by Gaza, that drives the groups to either group to embrace Islamophobic or antisemitic views of one another. I think that's that is a serious dead end for both groups, and it's a serious risk for both groups. And I think it could happen even among people of really goodwill, because of the thought that well, there's a fundamental policy disagreement about what should U.S. policy be towards Israel. What should U.S. policy be in the Middle East more broadly? What's crucial, and not in any way easy, I'm not trying to be a Pollyanna about this, but what's crucial is to have the policy disagreement without it turning into some deep intercommunal feud or hatred, and the risk is, the risk is there, the risk is absolutely there.

Meryum Kazmi  1:02:12

Yeah, I guess I'm just-- something we talk about sometimes. I guess, and it's a matter of your perspective to some extent, but I mean, I mean, I guess, to what extent do you feel like it crosses the line between just being about policy and becomes like an intercommunal tension or something? Maybe I'm in a bubble and I don't experience it as like a communal tension per se. But I feel like it's presented as such.

Noah Feldman  1:02:48

Look, the optimist in me wants to say that it is a policy debate more than it is deep communal tension. But I also saw on my own campus at the law at Harvard Law School in the post October 7 period how so as it just happens, two of the groups of students that historically I've spent a lot of time working with and mentoring have been Jewish students and Muslim students, and that's natural because those are two of the topics that I work on and I'm most interested in, and I feel personally connected to. And those communities have historically gotten along very, very well with each other at Harvard Law School, and at sometimes very well with each other around Harvard University. I mean, when I was an undergraduate, it's now a long time ago, but at the time there was no way to get halal food in the in the houses, and so a meaningfully large group of Muslim students ate every single day in the Harvard Hillel, which was at the time the only place where you could get kosher food on campus. And not only was there nothing weird about it, it actually created like really warm friendships and connections that I was a deep participant in. It meant it meant a lot to me, and it was a great thing. Was it that we didn't have disagreements about Israel then? We did. I mean, the First Intifada was still in play. I mean, all the way through my through my college years. So there was plenty to argue about politically, and we did. And yet, the interpersonal relationships were pretty strong. Well, but after October 7 at the Law School, I just saw the deep, deep tensions that started with each community feeling abandoned, isolated, and afraid, and really in parallel to each other. And even just saying those words, I know, like I know, when people listen to this, some of those students will come to me and they'll be like, "I can't believe you said that our situation was the same as their situation." And you know what? They're both going to say that to me because that's what people were saying to me on both sides the whole time. Like, I can't believe you're suggesting any degree of similarity or equivalence. It's like, look, I'm not saying it's the same situation. I'm saying that the feelings have a lot in common. A feeling that nobody's looking out for us, that our people that we care about die and it doesn't matter. The feeling that everyone's against us, and it's logically possible that everyone can be against both, but I don't think that's necessarily what was what was happening. It was just a deep feeling of alienation and isolation, and it made it really hard. That said, there were some students who worked their tails off to leaders to try to keep connections alive and to try to do joint programming, and boy, was it hard for them. And that's the hardest that I've seen it. I came to Harvard, if you don't count when I was a little kid taking Professor Bishai's Arabic class, I came as a student in 1988. It's a long time ago. And although I haven't always been at Harvard during that time, I taught at NYU for seven years, and I was a I was a student elsewhere. But I've spent a lot of the last 30 odd years on this campus, and I've never seen tension like that before. So I saw it, so I know that it can happen. And it's going to take work. It's just going to take a lot of work on everybody's part. And the thing, the only way it'll work is for everyone to remember, Jews in the United States and Muslims in the United States, that were both minorities, and the people out there who really don't like difference, and they exist, they really don't like either of us, and neither of us is going to win some game to be like, "Oh, we're the ones you should side with," whether it's on the right or the left. That's not a winning strategy for either of those communities in the long run. It's tempting, but it's not winning.

Harry Bastermajian  1:06:48

Thank you.

Meryum Kazmi  1:06:49

Thank you.

Harry Bastermajian  1:06:49

So, to take us back to you mentioned Shahab Ahmed, the late Shahab Ahmed, and how he influenced your work. And in your fifth chapter, "The Struggle," in a footnote, you mentioned that you know Shahab Ahmed influenced your work, and you owe a great amount of debt to him. How did his hermeneutic exploration of what makes Islam, Islam influence your thinking on the experience of being a Jew today?

Noah Feldman  1:07:32

In a lot of ways, but I'll name a couple of the most salient. One is Shahab really insisted in What is Islam? on something that very little academic writing about Islam, if any, really insists on, which is that it should be possible to identify some core components of what Islam is, even though there are many different ways to interpret and appreciate Islam. There, as academics would like to say, Islams plural. And one of the things that Shahab points out is like no Muslim walks around saying that. We might be-- Muslims might be arguing about what is the best version of Islam or what is the true version of Islam, but like you have to be some kind of academic to add the plural at the end of the word Islam, and therefore a good account of the phenomenon needs to take on board, like what are the core questions, texts, beliefs, ideals, values, and experiences, not because you think you're going to come up with a coherent solution, but because you're defining the problem, and that's really inspiring. It's the kind of thing that most academics they are terrified of. In in our generation, yours and-- Harry, yours and mine-- our generation, I'm probably older than you are, but in our generation of academics, we were brought up to think like never say that there's a coherent whole, like that's a way because someone's just going to write a book review or an analysis explaining that there's actually all these different moving parts, and you're going to look like an idiot. So we were brought up to split rather than to lump, to use a distinction that sometimes people use. We're a generation of splitters, not a generation of lumpers. I hate those terms, but they capture something. And Shahab was like, no, you can recognize the diversity and the complexity and the disagreement, and still think there must be some common undertaking here. And so I tried to do that for this book on contemporary Jewish thought and life. So that was the first way that he influenced me the most. Another was his constant insistence that you start with the finest grain details of the text and the philology, and then you try to say something coherent and bigger, even when there's going to be counterexamples and difficulties. And sometimes you end up with contradiction. And he was very interested in contradiction in Islam. I mean, the first part of that book is just a list of impossible paradoxes. And on the cover of the book is a Mughal emperor in an official, an official depiction, holding a wine glass, and that's because he's. The question is, how is this possible? Like it's as black and white as it could be. Wine is haram, and there he is. So, there's a willingness to say there are contradictions, and that's-- he doesn't have to say that's okay, but that's a reality. And I try to do the same here. I think there are deep contradictions within contemporary Jewish life and contemporary Jewish thought, there's cognitive dissonance, there's difficult, and maybe there's always been in certain respects, and that's why I focus on the struggle. The struggle, and I see, I see Jewishness ultimately as a kind of struggle, a kind of loving struggle, exemplified by the biblical story of Jacob struggling with the angel who is arguably God or godlike, and who is Jacob is then named Israel in that moment, and the word Israel literally means, "he who struggles with God." And so that idea is to me a kind of unifying structure, even in the face of difference. And Shahab's book is also about struggle, and Shahab was someone who really understood struggle very, very, very well. He was a he was he was a person who struggled himself in a lot of ways, as am I.

Harry Bastermajian  1:11:21

In What Is Islam? Shahab Ahmed argues that Islam coheres through its contradictions, as you just so eloquently put it. So some states call themselves Islamic republics, others consider themselves secular, and nearly all of them claim custodianship of Islam. And since 1924, there's been no caliph, right? So, many states and no state, right? Judaism seems to work in the inverse here. So there is one Jewish state, and its is its existence, not its absence, that generates the theological argument. Your book makes Israel a load-bearing structure of Jewish life. So is having one state so is having one state a fact about Judaism, or is it a fact about demography in the 20th century? So, and if to follow up, if there were a second Jewish state, would Judaism be a different thing?

Noah Feldman  1:12:27

Great and fascinating and hard question. One of the strange things about the modern state of Israel is that the people who founded it were committed to the idea that there had once been a Jewish state. But if you press them, like, when was there a Jewish state? They couldn't exactly pin it down. They spoke of a Jewish commonwealth under Herod, and the destruction of the temple by the Romans meant the end of the Jewish Commonwealth, but if you go back to it, Herod was not so clearly Jewish, although the term Jewish itself was very contested at the time. And so then you might say, well, well, there was the last-- what was the last Jewish state? Was it the Hasmonian state? Was it the state of the returnees from exile in Babylon under the Persian kings? Was it the last commonwealth of the Judaites or the Israelites of the late sixth century B.C.E.? There were a lot of candidates there. None of them is a perfect candidate. Among other things, the word Jewish didn't emerge in the sense that we use it today fully until very late. Closer to 2200 or even 2100 years ago, and so, and it's not totally clear that there was a properly Jewish state in that period of time. So the idea of a single Jewish state was kind of aspirational, and it really was a product to a large degree of modernity and the modern theory of nationalism. The early Zionists, they hit on Israel because there was a classical Jewish religious connection to the land of Israel, that's where the word Zion comes from, but they were largely secularists, and their secularism meant that they wanted a nation state because they were like, well, Jews are a nation because they have a common language, a common ethnic heritage, a common culture. They didn't actually have a common language fully, but they had a common historical language which could somehow be recovered and resuscitated, which they did. So it was a very modern idea, and it was an idea built of the idea that there should be a nation state, and the idea of a nation state is that there should be a nation state, but there can also be people who don't live in the nation state who still bear that identity. So there can be Armenia, as there is today, but then there can be an Armenian diaspora of people, and there could be multiple forms of the language, and as indeed there is an Armenian, you could have the full panoply of things. You could have a nation state, but also have a periphery. But one of the things about a nation state is it makes a claim, and it's not a religious claim; it's a nationalist claim. It says you are all part of me, and you owe me something, and it also says I'll do something for you. That was kind of the modern Zionist idea in its early form. Over time, the Zionist idea has itself come to be influenced by religion. So I didn't have a chance to mention this, I'll just say it now. It's not just that Zionism has infused Jewish religion; it's that Jewish religion has gradually come to infuse more and more of Zionism, and so religious Zionism, which purports to be a kind of perfect combination of these things, is actually more religious than it is politically Zionist. But if you ask where it came from, they will tell you it all came from the religion, but it didn't. It also came in meaningful ways from the nationalist part. So it's a kind of fusion of a nationalist, secularist view and a more religious view. And so once it gets that religious quality, it does start to want to claim to be the one legitimate state, and if there were to be a more legitimate Jewish state, according to the religious Zionists, it would have to be just a more Jewish version of the current state, which might be like 2.0 or 3.0, the way that France is on its fifth republic. Which is, I once a tech person once said to me, I said some reference to France French constitution, and they were like, "What are you talking about? I was like, "Well, just think of it as France 5.0." So these religious Zionists, some of them can imagine an Israel, they think this current Israel is 2.0, and there could be a 3.0 and a 4.0. And behind this is a messianic ideal of a state that would be obviously blessed by God. Although a lot of religious designers say, "Well, look around, like look how well we're doing. We are blessed by God," which is itself a, to my mind, a scary thing when you start believing that God is behind you. The part that I just would want to emphasize is, if you actually go back to Jewish religious tradition, all the way to the Bible and uninterruptedly through the rabbis to the present, one of the constant themes there was always a wish to return to Israel, always. That was never missing. There was always that form of a national aspiration, but 100% of the time it came with the threat that if you don't act in the way that God wants you to act, you will be specifically punished by your removal from the land, and that's the part of the Jewish tradition that I wonder if it's been kept alive because nationalists don't talk that way. Nationalists are like we have a right to be here because we're a nation state. This is our land, and what could cause us to lose that right? Nothing. From a religious standpoint, if you believe that God gave you this land, God can take it away from you. God gave it to Moses, according to the religious view. He took it away from the Israelites. God then brought them back, and he took it away again, in a traditionally religious point of view. So ironically, religion has within it the core of an ethical commitment to the idea that you have to do it right in the eyes of God. We can argue about what the right way to do it is, but if you don't do it the right way in the eyes of God, there are consequences, and those consequences are the loss of sovereignty. And so that's sort of where the rubber meets the road. And so, if there were a Jewish state in Argentina, or in Alaska, these are all places where various people proposed it, in Uganda, it wouldn't have the same qualities of religious aspiration. It would be a different kind of a state, and so to the people who think of Israel in religious terms, it wouldn't be the real deal. But if you're a pure nationalist, sure. I mean, that's one of the reasons the nationalists considered all these options. They were like, "We just need to be somewhere. It doesn't have to be here."

Harry Bastermajian  1:18:28

Thank you.

Meryum Kazmi  1:18:30

So, what's coming up next in your research or in your public intellectual work?

Noah Feldman  1:18:36

It's funny. I'm doing something completely different. I'm working on a book now about the importance of being human in the age of AI, which is much more for everybody. And the basic idea is that AI is it speaks to you so well when you talk to it, it's now a scholar in every imaginable subject. It can be your friend, it can be your buddy. For every relationship you have, including your relationship with yourself, you now have to ask, what's the value of having it with a human? And so the book is an attempt to say there are some values. And there's some Islamic philosophy in there. There's some Farabi, there's some Ibn Bajja, there's some Jewish thought in there, there's a lot of romantic poetry, there's Coleridge and drugs, and the Song of Songs and sex. There's all kinds of fun stuff in there. But the idea is to identify what is really worthwhile about being us, and to hold on to that. We're going to use AI for all kinds of functions, as long as we know what makes us us and preserve that, then it's just another technology. But if we outsource our ability to connect to other people, or we outsource our inner imaginative, prophetic, mystical capacities, those are use it or lose it skills. And if you don't use them, they'll atrophy. They'll disappear.

Meryum Kazmi  1:19:54

Very exciting. 

Harry Bastermajian  1:19:55

Yeah, very exciting. Well, thank you for joining us.

Noah Feldman  1:19:58

Thank you so much for having me.