What’s The Intellectual Condition Of Orthodox Judaism?

Ezra Glinter writes for the Forward about Marc B. Shapiro’s new book Changing the Immutable: All this could make for a hearty polemic against the Orthodox scholars, publishers and editors who are more concerned with enforcing ideological conformity than with dealing with historical truth. Yet for all his provocative material, Shapiro is no polemicist. Although he compares Orthodox censorship with the Soviet kind — “what was accepted as fact one day could be entirely rewritten the next” — he also shows how its practice is consistent with classical and medieval conceptions of historical truth that predate contemporary notions of academic scholarship.
So, too, Shapiro goes out of his way to show that censorship of Jewish texts isn’t just an Orthodox practice. In many cases, non-Haredi publishers have been guilty of similar distortions, sometimes out of concern for what liberal readers might think. Finally, in the last chapter of the book, Shapiro examines the concept of lying in Jewish law, and shows how some authorities believed it permissible to lie in order to encourage obedience to rabbinic leadership. Shapiro warns us that these examples might be shocking, but he often seems to be defending Orthodox censorship by showing its consistency with traditional practice. Maimonides himself warns, in the introduction to his “The Guide for the Perplexed,” that not everything he wrote was the pure truth, but was still a “necessary belief” for the masses.
Shapiro’s evenhanded, evidence-heavy approach will perhaps make the book more convincing to its detractors. But his argument could also have benefited from a more critical thrust. Although he claims that censorship has increased in recent decades, he does little to analyze the causes or consequences of this phenomenon. In a recent interview with radio host Zev Brenner, he noted that part of the rise in censorship is due to so many more books being published and to older books being reset, and in “Changing the Immutable” he notes the rise in Orthodox publishing for a nonscholarly readership, including many works of biography and history.
But he doesn’t go far enough in examining what role Haredi fundamentalism may have to play, and whether current Orthodoxy is more or less inclined to censor texts than Jewish communities of the past were. The phrase “ da’as Torah ” — an arguably contemporary notion that implies obedience to rabbinic authority independent of halachic justification — appears just once in the book, and is explained only in a footnote. And although Shapiro does address the particular role translation plays in censorship, he does little to address the phenomenon of increased Haredi literacy, whether through access to yeshiva education, English translations by publishers like ArtScroll or the return of Hebrew as a vernacular language in the State of Israel. Most noticeably lacking is any consideration of the effect that censorship has had on the Orthodox community itself. If Orthodox censorship is comparable to the Soviet variety, what does that say about the intellectual conditions of Orthodox life?