Before I continue my series on Rabbi Eliezer Melamed and post his views of Christianity and other religions, I will take a digression and present on the classic book by Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, Where Judaism Differed (Macmillan, 1958). Rabbi Silver (d. 1963) was a renowned Reform Rabbi, a prolific author, orator, American Zionist leader, and fundraiser for the new state.. His most famous book, Where Judaism Differed, explained how Judaism is different from Christianity and other religions. The book was a pillar of the thinking of American Jewry. Whenever I explain my interfaith work to an older generation or explain what I am writing, I inevitably receive some form of Silver’s words in response. I teach in a program in Jewish Christian Studies, so I know there are hundreds of better books, yet Silver’s ideas that Judaism is completely the opposite of other religions still percolate in the writings of other authors such as Rabbi Yitz Greenberg or in sermons from all denominations, or are found on social media, hence these ideas are often the basis for much in ChatGPT. (We also have the opposite on ChatGPT that Judaism and Christianity share Biblical values, the commandments, and the Golden Rule.)
In short, Silver assumes that whatever Christianity teaches, Judaism is the opposite. According to Silver, Christianity is elite, and Judaism is democratic. Christianity is about sin and salvation; Judaism has no concern with sin and salvation. Christianity is ascetic, Judaism is not. Christianity is mythic and magical; Judaism is not. Christianity assumes that all is predetermined without free will, and Judaism offers free will and social progress. Christianity advocates celibacy, Judaism does not.
Christianity accepts a Trinity, Original Sin, Incarnation, a personal messiah, miracles, redemption through God, a virgin birth, and the need for salvation of the soul. Judaism rejects these concepts and every theological idea in Christianity. Christianity is a mystery religion, while in Judaism, “the moral life and the aspirations of man are the “sacraments: of Judaism.” (210) Christianity is otherworldly and concerned for the afterlife; Judaism has no interest in eschatology.
Christianity and Islam, in Silver’s view, wanted to be free from the law, meaning to break free from ethics and morals. (Hence, Rabbi David Novak had to pen an essay explaining to Jews that Christianity is not antinomian).
In his words, only Judaism of all the religions of the world believes in human progress. (171). Only Judaism is kind to the poor, teaches humility, and has reverence for human life as shown in his comparisons to Roman Latin authors.
Silver paints the other religions in terms of their most monastic other-worldly forms and he is especially negative toward Hinduism and Buddhism seeing them as world denying, ascetic, and having little to teach. They are fatalistic and life is predetermined; this is his explanation of karma. These Dharmic religions are pessimistic, focus on suffering, and afflicting the body. He credits Christianity and Islam with many of these same negative attributes. (Once should compare Rabbi Kook’s fascinating correspondence with Rabbi Shmuel Alexandrov for a sharp contrast, in which the Russian rabbis have positive appreciation of Buddhism). He paints the Asian religions as lacking any moral teachings. Needless to say, this is an entirely erroneous characterization. I do not need to show that they have extensive teachings on ethics, family life, forgiveness, correct speech, correct actions, and working on personal virtue.
Silver paints Judaism as engaged in a continuous historic battle against idolatry, idolatrous Canaanites, against Hellenism, against ancient paganism, against Christianity, which for him is really just part of the synthesis with pagan Greco-Roman world, and against the otherworldly pagan Calvinists of our own time. In contrast, Judaism teaches sober morality, personal piety, and the “prophetic tradition of social progress”!!!! (85) This reading of Jewish history was canonized by Heinrich Graetz in his 19th-century classic History of the Jews and the reading of Christianity as Greco-Roman, not Judaic, was the definitive position of the German theologian Adolf von Harnack. Silver cites the historian George Foot Moore’s Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era, but only seems to take from it that Judaism and God-fearers were “waging war with great energy against polytheism and idolatry.”
The book also typifies a Jewish trend of creating false historical genealogies crediting many aspects of Christianity to pagan influence. In 2025, I still see on social media, by people who should know better, the acceptance of the statement that Christmas Trees are from Roman paganism, a false statement, the earliest possible record is the 15th century, or that Easter/Pascha has anything to do with Ishtar.
In the end for Silver, Judaism is a pure ethical monotheism that is unique in believing in human progress. In the background of this, one hears echoes of Hermann Cohen’s views of Judaism as a unique monotheism striving toward messianic social progress but adapted for the popular pulpit. Judaism is the only religion not death-obsessed or about self-effacement, but rather affirming human progress.
The late 20th century popular Jewish maxims that Judaism does not engage with theology or have any theology, let this book linger long in people’s conceptions. Popular ideas that Judaism has no afterlife or eschatology dovetail with this book. I lose any ability to engage with the content of Rabbinic Judaism, midrash, Aggadah, kabbalah, or even medieval Jewish philosophy. Judaism is an abstraction and defined by negation of others. There is no message of the High Holy Days, the three festivals, Chanukah, prayer, or Jewish life.
To his credit, Silver was responding to several prior decades of liberal Jewish rabbis proclaiming that Judaism and Christianity taught a common universal message of prophetic ethics. However, his solution was to negate every idea of Christianity as the definition of where Judaism differed, without offering any serious positive theology of Judaism. Basically, being Jewish means rejecting a Christmas tree and every positive Christian value. The book was written in a different era, it was before Vatican II’s Nostra Aetate, and he was formed in the heyday of social progress of the first half of the 20th century.
A recent book on religious polemics portrays Silver as driven by the need for apologetics, to stem the tide of Jewish self-hatred, to respond to the stereotypes about Jews. (Jay Newman, Competition in Religious Life, 92). Silver’s work is “vitalized by the exaggeration and caricature that characterizes almost all apologetic works.” He excuses Judaism from all its weaknesses and finds the worst in other religions. He violates one of the prime directives in interfaith comparisons: Do not compare your best to their worst.
At the time of its release in 1956, the New York Times reviewed the book with praise for showing that Judaism is different than Christianity. The CCAR proclaimed that “the best introduction to Judaism that we know.” While a more cautious Felix A Levy, a Reform rabbi, praised the book as a new apologetic Hizzuk Emunah, referring to the 16th-century apologetic work by Isaac Troki, but faults him for leaving out revelation and halakha.
On the other hand, Lou H. Silverman, Professor of Jewish Literature and Thought at Vanderbilt University, in a 1958 review, faulted the book sharply for reducing Judaism to oppositional negation. Judaism is defined as not Pauline Christianity, but we do not learn at all how Rabbinic, philosophic, and mystical Judaism understood the same issues. Silverman opines that the book fails to do full justice to the texture of the tradition.
Silverman points out that the Jewish prayer book in any version is about God having sin, God’s mercy on us, and forgiving us. To say that Judaism has no sense of superiority or racial thinking and is the only universal religion rubs Silverman the wrong way. He points out that the Reform Union Prayer Book referred to the Jewish race until 1933 and it took until 1945 to remove the racial elements. Silverman as an exclamation, asks: Where is Yehudah Halevi, Franz Rosenzweig? Silverman asks: when Silver states that a concern with “eschatology represented a sharp deviation from Classical Judaism,” what does that even mean? Silverman notes that Silver certainly excludes explicit Rabbinic concerns. Silverman ends his review by wishing that Silver had written a confessional, mature statement of his beliefs as a Reform Jew, rather than just presenting Judaism as the negation of Christianity.
Msgr John M. Oesterreicher of the Institute of Judeo-Christian Studies at Seton Hall University wrote a nine-page negative review of the book. At the time, Oesterreicher was editing a journal called The Bridge which looked at similarities and differences between Judaism and Christianity, and was already working on the 1961 “Decree on the Jews” (Decretum de Iudaeis), which is considered the first draft of Nostra Aetate.
Oesterreicher points out that Silver removes any sense of the word of God or God’s call to Abraham, or Sinai, replacing those ideas with a prophetic Jewish religious genius and ideas that we follow Judaism as utilitarian, “opportune and useful for life.” He is especially irked that Silver refers to God as a due to the Jewish genius created the universal God idea, which Oesterreicher considers “not part of the truly Jewish vocabulary.”
Oesterreicher declares that “the light in Rabbi Silver’s book is not the light of scripture” and that he is at variance with Jewish tradition. For example, neither the Hebrew Bible nor Rabbinic texts see sin as degrading; rather, they have full theologies of sin, repentance, and atonement. (This is like Silverman’s critique above that you cannot state that Judaism has no eschatology). He also notes that Silver is against mysticism and mischaracterizes both Western and Eastern mysticism.
Oesterreicher obviously thinks Silver misreads and mischaracterizes Jesus, Paul, the New Testament, and Christian teachings in many places. For example, the Sermon on the Mount is clearly rabbinic in context and not to be relegated to foreign “Greco-oriental” values. Silver psychologizes Jesus’ disciples as unable to admit their teacher was arrested and killed so they go into psychological denial, delusion, and imagine him as still alive. Silver shows no knowledge of Jewish memra theology or the variety of first-century Jewish ideas.
In conclusion, Oesterreicher agrees that Judaism and Christianity are different and cites Silver approvingly that “to gloss over differences as a gesture of goodwill is a superficial act” (289) But that does not mean they are opposites. Rather, Oesterreicher ends by saying that the discussion of similarities and differences should be pursued with an “Untiring, even painfully, open eye.”
The digitized American Jewish Archives preserve the letters that Silver received from publishers about his book. Harper and Bros rejected it based on Reviewer #2. Simon and Shuster rejected it with a long letter including the following paragraph:
The third point is, I fear, a more sensitive one, but perhaps it would be best for our mutual understanding to state it baldly. All of us have been somewhat troubled throughout the book by the invidious comparisons of Christianity with Judaism. Enduring spiritual values, I feel, are self-demonstrative; they do not need to be singled out and lauded at the expense of something else. I realize that such comparisons have an enormous controversial value, but I also feel that they have the final effect of weakening your rich, positive statements, or detracting from the dignity of a great tradition. It is for this reason, as well as for the reason that such invidious comparisons may offend and repel people of other faiths, that I venture to suggest that you reconsider them.
In the end, Macmillan published it as written. But before publication, Silver had his friend Ludwig Lewisohn read the manuscript to offer comments. Ludwig Lewisohn (1882–1955), was a novelist, outspoken critic of Jewish assimilation, and a founding faculty member of Brandeis University.
Lewisohn flags the book’s thesis that history “manifests a clear upward movement in human development,” noting that this “seems to me violently contrary to historic experience and to negate by implication the special redemptive function or the Jewish people and the meaning of its martyrdom. I do not like to see concepts like “development” and “progress” applied to Jewish history. Unless we died for the eternal Law, what did we die for?” This defense of Western liberalization (so-called) has been totally invalidated by history. After the Holocaust, pre-war optimism seemed misguided.
Also noted is that Silver credits anything he does not like in Judaism to outside influences. Lewisohn writes: “Too much importance attached to the theories of Babylonian influences, etc. These are all grounded in malice, conscious or not, and the desire to eliminate the reproach of Judaism’s uniqueness.”
Once interesting observation from the book “Here, my eye catches one of those usages that lower tone. “Judaism has little sympathy with the spiritual lone wolf.” (138) That’s a screaming incongruity–like chalk scratching on a blackboard. And were not the prophets lonely and hence embattled souls?”
Lewisohn does not want to reject the spiritual and theological teaching of Judaism just to engage in negations. Lewisohn rejects the sharp contrast with Christianity
Of course. “original sin” in the Augustinian sense is nonsense. But does not Judaism, too, recognize deeply man’s rebellion against God? Is not therefore teshuvah the end and aim of life. And does not the classical liturgy make it clear that we need God’s grace–vayihi razon milfanecba. I’m frightened for the nobility and inwardness of Judaism when these things are stated after this fashion.
I’m sorry. I think the notion of “progress” in that sense –social progress without inner change-is totally discredited and Jews and Judaism will discredit themselves by clinging to it… The essence of the whole matter is in the Alenu. Progress means obedience to God’s Law and abstention from idolatry–of man, of State, of all the idols or the market-place. And that, thank God, is Judaism.
In conclusion, we are now blessed with sixty-five years of work showing the similarities and differences between Judaism and Christianity. We have fine works on the New Testament, Patristics, Rabbinic, medieval philosophy, and modern thought. No one would write like Abba Hillel Silver anymore. But the influence of this book remains vast in common understandings. I am still greeted with citations of this work. And if you want to judge the knowledge of Christianity by contemporary rabbis and Jewish thinkers, or the recent works showing a more open approach, the benchmark was already set low. So judge them, in this context.
The Book of Doctrines and Opinions: 