Anarchism + Mysticism = Utopia? w/ Hayyim Rothman

Hayyim Rothman is a scholar of modern Jewish thought, focusing on political theology and Jewish Anarchist theology in specific. Hayyim was a Fulbright postdoctoral scholar at Bar Ilan University and taught at Boston College, where he earned his doctorate in philosophy focusing on the political thought of Baruch Spinoza. Hayyim is an ordained rabbi with advanced degrees in Jewish thought and education, from Yeshiva University and Florida International University.   

Hayyim is the author of No Masters but God, Portraits of Anarcho-Judaism, a study of Jewish religious anarchism, in which he brings to light the forgotten legacy of religious Jewish anarchism, and the adventures and ideas of its key figures.  

Set in the decades surrounding both world wars, No masters but God identifies a loosely connected group of rabbis and traditionalist thinkers who explicitly appealed to anarchist ideas in articulating the meaning of the Torah, traditional practice, Jewish life and the mission of modern Jewry. Full of archival discoveries and first translations from Yiddish and Hebrew, it explores anarcho-Judaism in its variety through the works of Yaakov Meir Zalkind, Yitshak Nahman Steinberg, Yehuda Leyb Don-Yahiya, Avraham Yehudah Hen, Natan Hofshi, Shmuel Alexandrov, Yehudah Ashlag and Shmuel Tamaret.   

With this ground-breaking account, Hayyim Rothman traces a complicated story about the modern entanglement of religion and anarchism, pacifism and Zionism, prophetic anti-authoritarianism and mystical antinomianism.  

In this conversation with Hayyim we discuss the legacy of Spinoza's rationalism, mysticism and anarchism in German Idealism and later Marxists thinkers, followed by focusing on two of thinkers in Hayyim’s research, Shmuel Alexandrov and Yehudah Ashlag, looking at their mystical anarchism, unitive metaphysics, nationalism and universalist politics, their optimism and response to Nazism, their apolitical messianism and critical utopianism.