The Jewish View of the Soul's Immortality

By Kaufmann Kohler

"The belief that the soul continues its existence after the dissolution of the body is a matter of philosophical or theological speculation rather than of simple faith, and is accordingly nowhere expressly taught in Holy Scripture. As long as the soul was conceived to be merely a breath ("nefesh"; "neshamah"; comp. "anima"), and inseparably connected, if not identified, with the life-blood (Gen. ix. 4, comp. iv. 11; Lev. xvii. 11), no real substance could be ascribed to it.

"The belief in the immortality of the soul came to the Jews from contact with Greek thought and chiefly through the philosophy of Plato, its principal exponent, who was led to it through Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries in which Babylonian and Egyptian views were strangely blended, as the Semitic name "Minos" (comp. "Minotaurus"), and the Egyptian "Rhadamanthys" ("Ra of Ament," "Ruler of Hades"; Naville, "La Litanie du Soleil," 1875, p. 13) with others, sufficiently prove. Consult especially E. Rhode, "Psyche: Seelencult und Unsterblichkeitsglaube der Griechen," 1894, pp. 555 et seq. A blessed immortality awaiting the spirit while the bones rest in the earth is mentioned in Jubilees xxiii. 31 and Enoch iii. 4. Immortality, the "dwelling near God's throne" "free from the load of the body," is "the fruit of righteousness," says the Book of Wisdom (i. 15; iii. 4; iv. 1; viii. 13, 17; xv. 3). In IV Maccabees, also (ix. 8, 22; x. 15; xiv. 5; xv. 2; xvi. 13; xvii. 5, 18), immortality of the soul is represented as life with God in heaven, and declared to be the reward for righteousness and martyrdom. The souls of the righteous are transplanted into heaven and transformed into holy souls (ib. xiii. 17, xviii. 23). According to Philo, the soul exists before it enters the body, a prison-house from which death liberates it; to return to God and live in constant contemplation of Him is man's highest destiny (Philo, "De Opificio Mundi," §§ 46, 47; idem, "De Allegoriis Legum," i., §§ 33, 65; iii., §§ 14, 37; idem, "Quis Rerum Divinarum Hæres Sit," §§ 38, 57).

"It is not quite clear whether the Sadducees, in denying resurrection (Josephus, "Ant." xviii. 1, § 4; idem, "B. J." ii. 12; Mark xii. 18; Acts xxiii. 8; comp. Sanh. 90b), denied also the immortality of the soul (see Ab. R. N., recension B. x. [ed. Schechter, 26]). Certain it is that the Pharisaic belief in resurrection had not even a name for the immortality of the soul. For them, man was made for two worlds, the world that now is, and the world to come, where life does not end in death (Gen. R. viii.; Yer. Meg. ii. 73b; M. Ḳ. iii. 83b, where the words, Ps. xlviii. 15, are translated by Aquilas as if they read, "no death," ἀθανασία).

While medieval philosophy dwelt on the intellectual, moral, or spiritual nature of the soul to prove its immortality, the cabalists endeavored to explain the soul as a light from heaven, after Prov. xx. 27, and immortality as a return to the celestial world of pure light (Baḥya b. Asher to Gen. i. 3; Zohar, Terumah, 127a). But the belief in the preexistence of the soul led the mystics to the adoption, with all its weird notions and superstitions, of the Pythagorean system of the metempsychosis, transmigration of the soul. Of this mystic view Manasseh ben Israel also was an exponent, as his "Nishmat Ḥayyim" shows.

It was the merit of Moses Mendelssohn, the most prominent philosopher of the deistic school in an era of enlightenment and skepticism, to have revived by his "Phædon" the Platonic doctrine of immortality, and to have asserted the divine nature of man by presenting new arguments in behalf of the spiritual substance of the soul (see Kayserling, "Moses Mendelssohn," 1862, pp. 148-169). Thenceforth Judaism, and especially progressive or Reform Judaism, emphasized the doctrine of immortality, in both its religious instruction and its liturgy, while the dogma of resurrection was gradually discarded and, in the Reform rituals, eliminated from the prayer-books.