More than fifty years ago, in a famous lecture entitled "The Non-Jewish Jew," Isaac Deutscher acclaimed the sort of Jewish intellectual who relinquished his or her heritage and proceeded to make vital contributions to the improvement of the world at large. A Polish-born Talmudic prodigy who exchanged Judaism for Marxism in his youth and ultimately attained renown as a biographer of Trotsky and Stalin, Deutscher singled out individual Communists as well as non-Communists as representative figures. Before mentioning any of them, however, he reflected briefly on the significance of the heretic he had known about since his childhood, the 1^st-century renegade from rabbinic Judaism, Elisha ben Abuyah (the student of Rabbi Meir also known as "Akher," or Other):

          The Jewish heretic who transcends Jewry belongs to a Jewish tradition. You may, if you like, view
          Akher as a prototype of those great revolutionaries of modern thought about whom I am going to
          speak this evening—you may do so, if you necessarily wish to place them within any Jewish tradition.

In his introduction to Not in the Heavens, David Biale analyzes what Deutscher says and eagerly accepts his invitation:

          By raising the question of the relationship of the orthodox Rabbi Meir and the heretic Elisha, Deutscher
          implied that even the heretic remains somehow connected to that which he rejects, for the source of
          his heresy may lie within that tradition. For Deutscher, Elisha was the prototype of "those great
          revolutionaries of modern thought: Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky and Freud." They
          were all heretics, yet their heresy might be understood as a rejection that grew out of the Jewish
          tradition itself.

Biale may or may not be right about Deutscher's assessment of Elisha ben Abuya's relationship to Jewish tradition, but he is probably reading too much into what he says about that of the other people on his list. There is, in fact, next to nothing in Deutscher's lecture that links the substance of Jewish tradition with the welcome heresies of his modern "non-Jewish Jews." The closest he comes to espousing the views that Biale attributes to him is an acknowledgment that "Spinoza's God and ethics were still Jewish, only that his was the Jewish monotheism carried to its logical conclusion and the Jewish universal God thought out to the end . . ." But this is a rather isolated statement in a lecture that makes no other connection between the substance of Jewish tradition and the grand ideas of Deutscher's heroes.

Deutscher does indeed say that the "non-Jewish Jews" had "in themselves something of the quintessence of Jewish life and of the Jewish intellect." But by this he means only that they "lived in the borderlines of various civilizations," and "in the nooks and crannies of their respective nations." Not some residue of their distinctive Jewish heritage but the experience of marginality is what "enabled them to rise in thought above their societies . . . and to strike out mentally into wide new horizons and far into the future." Biale may believe that he is emulating Deutscher when he argues "that Jewish secularism was a revolt grounded in the tradition it rejected," but he is really making a rather different type of claim.

Biale himself, to be sure, stresses the dissimilarity between his enterprise and Deutscher's much more than the resemblance. The intellectual tradition he wishes to construct in his book "is distinctively different from Deutscher's ‘Non-Jewish Jews,'" he tells us, "since it rests on those whose writings engage with the metaphysical, textual, political and cultural dimensions of the Jewish experience." Whether they intended to do so or not, the authors of these works created "a tradition of secular Jewish thought counter to the religious tradition called ‘Judaism.'"

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