THE CHALLENGE OF TOLERATION VERSUS PLURALISM: ALEXANDER ALTMANN AND AVI SAGI

IN HIS 1957 lecture before the Council of Christians and Jews in London, my teacher Alexander Altmann discussed tolerance and the Jewish tradition. In Altmann's analysis, Jews in the biblical and rabbinic periods found ways to tolerate non-Jews while rejecting internal toleration of Jewish dissent. Altmann then argued that Jews and Christians today meet on secular ground, while their theologies remain mutually exclusive. Therefore, he concluded, although theologically Jews and Christians cannot ‘tolerate’ each other's religions, they need each other for a common stand in the face of contemporary ‘virulent paganism’. Thus, while theology divides; religion, which is broader than theology, can bring the two groups together by emulating God's love.

Altmann's lecture, of course, was given prior to the radical changes in Christian–Jewish relationships since Vatican II, and could not take into account later developments. He questioned the possibility of theological toleration; half a century later, we face the question of whether we can move from mere toleration to a pluralistic acceptance of each other. Nevertheless, Altmann's perceptive distinction of internal or intra-Jewish toleration of dissent from external, interreligious toleration continues to challenge Jews involved in interreligious dialogue and promoting pluralism today, and was a problem explicitly addressed some two centuries previously by Moses Mendelssohn, on whose thought Altmann was the leading authority.

John Locke had argued that if the state cannot religiously coerce the Jew, it certainly cannot coerce dissenting Christians:

Mendelssohn inverted Locke's argument when he opposed the rabbinic ban of excommunication (ḥerem): if the Jews now enjoy external toleration by the Christians among whom they live, how can they not practise internal toleration of dissenting opinion within their own community?