Classical Liberalism and the Jewish Tradition

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Copyright © 2003 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Transaction Publishers, Rutgers—The State University, 35 Berrue Circle, Piscataway, New Jersey 088548042. This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2002028927 ISBN: 0-7658-0153-1 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Alexander, Edward, 1936Classical liberalism and the Jewish tradition / Edward Alexander. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Liberalism—Religious aspects—Judaism. 2. Jews—Civilization. I. Title BM538.L52 A44 2002 269.3'8—dc21 2002028927

For Leah “Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honeymoon in Eden, but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning of the home epic— the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.” —George Eliot


Contents Acknowledgements Introduction

ix xi

Part 1: Politics 1. John Stuart Mill and the Jews 2. Disraeli and Marx: Stammgenosse? 3. Israeli Intellectuals and Israeli Politics 4. Edward Said and the Modern Language Association 5. The Lipstadt-Irving Trial: New Yorker Version

3 15 23 39 49

Part 2: Religion 6. Dr. Arnold, Matthew Arnold, and the Jews 7. George Eliot’s Rabbi 8. A Talmud for Americans 9. Irving Howe and Secular Jewishness: An Elegy 10. Saying Kaddish

59 73 83 95 117

Part 3: Literature 11. Jews in English Departments 12. American History, 1950-70, by Philip Roth 13. Do Jews Need a Literary Canon? 14. I. B. Singer on the Couch

131 141 153 163

Index

171


Acknowledgements For help and suggestions of various kinds I received while writing this book, I am grateful to William Baker, Stephen D. Benin, Paul Bogdanor, Irving Louis Horowitz, Martin Jaffee, Abe Kriegel, Rafael Madoff, David Mesher, Asher Z. Milbauer, Jacob Neusner, John Rodden, Henry Staten, Ruth Willers, and Eliot Wolfson. I am grateful to the following journals for permission to reprint articles and reviews, in whole or in part: Commentary “A Talmud for Americans,” July 1990; all rights reserved. “George Eliot’s Rabbi,” July 1991; all rights reserved. Review of “Disraeli: A Biography” by Stanley Weintraub, June 1994; all rights reserved. Review of “A Requiem for Karl Marx” by Frank E. Manuel, October 1996; all rights reserved. Review of “Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life” by Janet Hadda, September 1997; all rights reserved. Review of “Enlarging America” by Susanne Klingenstein; April 1999; all rights reserved. Congress Monthly Review of “Jews in the American Academy” by Susanne Klingenstein, July/August 1992, volume 59, #5. Copyright 1992 American Jewish Congress. Midstream “Edward Said and the Modern Language Association,” May/June 2000. “The New Yorker’s Holocaust Problem,” May/June 2001. Review of Ruth R. Wisse, “The Modern Jewish Canon,” December 2000. New England Review “Philip Roth at Century’s End,” 20 (Spring 1999). World Affairs “Israeli Intellectuals and Israeli Politics,” 159 (1997). ix

x

Classical Liberalism and the Jewish Tradition

Society “John Stuart Mill and the Jews,” 38 (November/December 2000). Judaism “Saying Kaddish,” 192 (Fall 1999). Copyright 1999 American Jewish Congress.

Introduction The essays in this volume were written during the past ten years, and most during the past three or four years. They are diverse in subject, but all deal, unabashedly, with Jewish concerns, intellectual and existential. I have placed at the front of the volume the essay about the preeminent liberal thinker of the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill, and the Jews partly because several of the essays deal with the uneasy relationship between Albion and Zion, but mainly because the majority analyze or document the divergence between classical liberalism and Judaism, between the liberal imagination and the Jewish sense of the world. And not only this: they also judge liberalism by the standards of Judaism instead of following the usual procedure (particularly among modern Jews) of judging Judaism by the standards of liberalism. “The Liberal Imagination” is of course the title of Lionel Trilling’s justly famous 1950 volume of “essays on literature and society.” The central figure of Trilling’s preface to that volume was John Stuart Mill, invoked by Trilling primarily as a precedent for a liberal who, dissatisfied with the imaginative limitations and intellectual smugness of his own ideological party, urged his comrades to attend to the most powerful of contemporary conservative thinkers, who for Mill was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Trilling’s disenchantment with current liberalism did not begin in 1950; it had already been evident in his Matthew Arnold book of 1939, in which he celebrated Arnold precisely because he was (in Arnold’s own words) “a Liberal tempered by experience, reflection, and renouncement.”1 Neither had Trilling by 1950 divested himself entirely of self-righteous liberal smugness: he could find no twentieth-century Coleridges to stimulate liberal intellect, to stir it from its dogmatic slumbers by giving it a worthy adversary. “This,” said Trilling, “we will have to do for ourselves.”2 Trilling’s attempt “to recall liberalism to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility”3 was certainly not made on behalf of Jews or Judaism in The Liberal Imagination; neither does the xi

xii


book suggest that the stimulative antithesis to liberal lethargy will come from a Jewish source. Yet we know that Jewish matters were very much on Trilling’s mind in 1950 from the lecture he gave at Princeton that year on “Wordsworth and the Rabbis.” There he argued that the reason for Wordsworth’s current “unacceptability” was precisely a “Judaic” quality that went counter to “modern” sensibility. Using as his prooftext the Mishnaic treatise called Pirke Avot, (Chapters of the Fathers) Trilling argued that “between the Law as the Rabbis understood it and Nature as Wordsworth understood it...a pregnant similarity” exists; he also called Rabbi Hillel “a peculiarly Wordsworthian personality” because of his keen sense of the interplay between individuality and community.4 The image of the Jews that Trilling fashioned in this 1950 essay on Wordsworth was quite different from the “liberal and...modern” American Jews whom he had derided in an essay of 1944 on the state of Jewish “identity” in the Contemporary Jewish Record. A glance at that essay suggests that Trilling’s own failure as a young man to find sustenance in the American-Jewish community had much to do with the fact that this was a community worm-eaten with liberalism: “Jewish religion,” he wrote, “is, I am sure, very liberal and intelligent and modern. Its function is to provide, chiefly for people of no strong religious impulse, a social and rational defense against the world’s hostility...”5 To the extent that modern Judaism had made itself into a pale imitation of secular liberalism, another child of Enlightenment ideology (which many liberal Jews liked to fancy the child of Judaism), it left itself open to Trilling’s criticism of the liberal imagination in general. My essay on Mill and the Jews is one of several in the book that try to carry forward Trilling’s intimation of the opposition between liberal interests and Jewish ones. This opposition was clearly evident in the intense Jew-hatred of Thomas Arnold, the intellectual leader of the liberal branch of the Church of England in the Victorian period (and the subject of one of the essays in this book); it informs the campaign that has been waged for years by Israeli intellectuals against the idea of a Jewish state; and it underlies my analysis of the liberal Modern Language Association’s surrender to Edward Said (to whom Columbia University, in its unstinting devotion to Said, awarded a prize carrying the name of—Lionel Trilling). Trilling is an abiding, though by no means always an authoritative, presence in this book. He is a (perhaps the) key figure in the

Introduction

xiii

discussion of the emergence of Jews in English departments all across the United States. His complaint of 1944 that “One need only attend a Jewish funeral to have the sense of its deep inner uncertainty, its lack of grasp of life”6 provides one of the aids to reflection that precede “Saying Kaddish,” one of this volume’s essays on religion. The essay asks, among other questions, how much has changed in American Jews’ grasp of the essentials of life and death in the half century and more since Trilling made that sour remark. The uneasy relationship between liberalism and Judaism is also important in the “lead” essay of the book’s section on religion, an account of Irving Howe’s heroic attempt to salvage secular Jewishness, one major component of which has been the devotion to liberal politics. With another abiding concern of this collection of essays, namely, the attempt to get Jews to find sustenance in their own books rather than in current liberal idolatries, I am not sure that Trilling would have been in sympathy. My essay “A Talmud for Americans” deals with the ambitious project of the Israeli scholar Adin Steinsaltz, in his translation of the Talmud, to get Jews to read the book that constitutes, more than the Bible itself, the distinctive mark of their religious tradition. “George Eliot’s Rabbi” tells the story of a lonely and isolated precursor of Steinsaltz, the Prussian-born English Talmudist Emanuel Deutsch, and his relationship with the great Sybil of Victorian literature. “Do the Jews Need a Canon?” sets Ruth Wisse’s daring effort to tell the whole story of modern Jewry through literature in the context of the general debate during the last two decades over the canon in English and world literature. Two of the prominent figures in Wisse’s modern Jewish literary canon, I. B. Singer and Philip Roth, round out the section of this book dealing with Jewish literature. Singer, though he wrote in Yiddish, chose to define himself as a Jewish writer because the Yiddish tradition was, so he alleged, tainted by sentimentality and the mistaken view that Jews were put into this world to bring about universal social justice. Roth, ostensibly a liberal (and predictable signer of Peace Now petitions) has in the novels examined here subjected “Jewish” liberalism to sharp criticism. American Pastoral shows the descent from Jewish liberal parents to their radical (and barbarous) children; and I Married a Communist calls into question the simplistic liberal version of the McCarthy period. Trilling, we know, seemed to go out of his way to be sniffy and dismissive about both Jewish literature and literature about Jews.

xiv


The Talmud appears in his work only in the Wordsworth lecture mentioned above. In 1944 he grandiosely declared that Jewish religion in its modern forms had failed to provide “a single voice with the note of authority—of philosophical, or poetic, or even of rhetorical, let alone of religious, authority.” He further alleged that the American Jewish community was utterly incapable of giving spiritual sustenance to the American artist born a Jew. He even warned that writers who consciously aspire to be Jewish will abort their creative impulse and shorten their careers. “I know of writers who have used their Jewish experience as the subject of excellent work; I know of no writer in English who has added a micromillimetre to his stature in ‘realizing his Jewishness,’ although I know of some who have curtailed their promise by trying to heighten their Jewish consciousness.” 7 Trilling’s statement of belief (or rather disbelief), is notable as much for ignorance as for haughtiness. After all, among the voices that a willing ear might have heard in 1944 were Gershom Scholem (whose epoch-making lectures on Jewish mysticism had been delivered in 1938 a few blocks from where Trilling lived in Manhattan), Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, S. Y. Agnon, and many of the Yiddish writers whom Irving Howe would share with the American public (in translation) nine years later. Howe told me in 1983 that “Once, hearing I was working on Yiddish literature, [Trilling] told me, ‘I suspect Yiddish literature.’ This hurt and angered me deeply, and I never forgave him for it, since he didn’t know a damned thing about it...”8 Even in dealing with works which he knew very well indeed, Trilling could be wilfully blind to Jewish concerns. For George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, which Ruth Wisse describes in The Jewish Literary Canon as the novelistic equivalent of the Balfour Declaration, Trilling had little patience. In an early (1931) essay called “The Changing Myth of the Jew,” he grudgingly acknowledged that Deronda is the first work in English literature in which Jews are visualized not as gentiles see them “but in terms of their own life and their own problems.” But he responded sympathetically to only one character in the book: the Jewish antisemite who is Deronda’s mother (and who appears in the present volume in the essay on Marx and Disraeli). He rejects all the other Jewish characters as “unanimously noble” (which they certainly are not) and therefore mythical.9 Later, in Matthew Arnold, he denounced the book as an instance of Victorian race-thinking. 10

Introduction

xv

And yet there is a tantalizing hint here and there in his work that for Trilling too, as for Emanuel Deutsch and Adin Steinsaltz and Ruth Wisse, the centrality of textual study in Jewish tradition had a powerful appeal. For example, in his 1949 introduction to the Viking Portable Matthew Arnold Trilling describes Matthew Arnold’s habit, embodied in his notebooks, of meditating on “sayings” that encapsulated discovered truth. He calls it Arnold’s attempt to obey, as literally as a non-Jew could, “the commandment to fasten the truth upon the doorpost of his house and upon his hand, and to set it as a frontlet between his eyes.”11 Thus did Trilling hint that he was drawn to Arnold not only because he was a liberal “tempered by experience, reflection, and renouncement,” but because he was a liberal tempered by the textual emphasis of Judaism, a gentile who, precisely by taking the Jewish view that truth exists and can be known, gave himself an advantage over the liberal way. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Matthew Arnold, Introduction to Culture and Anarchy. The Liberal Imagination (New York: The Viking Press, 1950), viii. Ibid., xii. Lionel Trilling, The Opposing Self (New York: The Viking Press, 1955), 120, 1245, 127. Contemporary Jewish Record, 7 (February 1944), 16. Ibid. Ibid., 16-17. Letter from Howe to the author, 2 June 1983. “The Changing Myth of the Jew,” Commentary, 66 (August 1978), 33-34. Matthew Arnold (New York: Meridian Books, 1955), 213. Introduction to The Portable Matthew Arnold (New York: The Viking Press, 1949), 5. Arnold himself stresses the importance of the idea underlying the use of tefillin (phylacteries) in Literature and Dogma (180) “That they [the Hebrew people of the Bible] might keep them [the laws of righteousness] ever in mind, they wore them, went about with them, made talismans of them: ‘Bind them upon thy fingers, bind them about thy neck; write them upon the table of thine heart.’”


Part 1 Politics


1 John Stuart Mill and the Jews In the second chapter of his autobiography, shortly after describing how his father taught him to believe that the ne plus ultra of wickedness was embodied in the creed of Christianity as commonly understood, John Stuart Mill declared that he was “one of the very few examples, in this country, of one who has, not thrown off religious belief, but never had it” and grew up with a wholly negative view of it. Seeking to set himself apart from all those Victorians who looked back nostalgically to the lost Christianity of their youth, Mill said that “I looked upon the modern exactly as I did upon the ancient religion, as something which in no way concerned me. It did not seem to me more strange that English people should believe what I did not, than that the men whom I read of in Herodotus should have done so.”1 In fact, Mill (writing in the 1850s) overstates the extent of his separation from his Christian contemporaries. The posthumous publication (in 1874) of the Three Essays on Religion, two written between 1850 and 1858, the third between 1868 and 1870, revealed— to the consternation of many of his agnostic followers—that Mill was by no means the dogmatically secular “saint of rationalism” that many had supposed him to be. Neither had he been, in earlier years, as free of the premises (and prejudices) of Christendom as he later declared himself to be. This is evident in his (now astonishing) statement in the Westminster Review of July 1824, when he was supposed to be a devout Benthamite rationalist, that “Christianity is the only true faith in our opinion,” in his remarkably sympathetic letters to the Morning Chronicle in 1842 about the Tractarians,2 in his 1840 essay on Coleridge, and even in the assumptions that pervade On Liberty about the superiority of “the West” to “the East.” But nowhere is the unacknowledged Christian 3

4


substratum of Mill’s thought more apparent than in his remarks about Judaism and Jews. Most of his allusions to the Jews participate in the common Christian practice of self-congratulatory observations on the ethical inferiority of Jewish biblical practices to those of Christianity. In Utilitarianism (1861), for example, Mill expresses the cliché disapproval of the Jews’ (supposed) commitment to the retaliatory morality of “an eye for an eye.” “No rule on this subject recommends itself so strongly to the primitive and spontaneous sentiment of justice, as the lex talionis, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Though this principle of the Jewish and of the Mahomedan law has been generally abandoned in Europe as a practical maxim, there is, I suspect, in most minds, a secret hankering after it...” (CW, X, 253). Mill’s words show no awareness that (as Numbers 35: 31 indicates) this law of retaliation was carried out literally only in the case of murder and contain only the faintest hint that in actuality corporal punishment played a far larger role among the Christians than among the Jews of Europe. It goes without saying that Mill neglects to mention that even for Jews in ancient times “eye for an eye” meant, for physical injuries that were not fatal, a monetary payment rather than a literally retaliatory one, i.e., was a step forward, not backward, in moral history. Invariably, Mill assumes Christianity—even if, as On Liberty argues, it falls short of his own “secular” ethical ideals—to be the highest form of religion, the culmination of a long evolutionary process in which Judaism is (at best) a stepping-stone to higher things. Christianity is always regarded by Mill (as by the ministers of Christianity whom he so often scorned) as “the ultimate development of Monotheism.” Moreover, he insists, whenever the topic arises, that the reception of Hebrew monotheism by Gentiles “was only rendered possible by the slow preparation which the human mind had undergone from the philosophers” (CW, X, 274-75). So firmly fixed in Mill’s mind was the familiar Christian dogma that Christianity is a more fully realized and “developed” form of Judaism that when he happened upon incontrovertible evidence to the contrary he ignored it or relegated it to a bashful footnote. For example—in a passage in Three Essays on Religion so optimistic that if it had been written by a lesser eminence one would call it obtuse—Mill argues that the greatest moral truths of the past, of “the best and foremost portion of our species” (i.e., West Europeans) are

John Stuart Mill and the Jews

5

so deeply imbedded in the intellect and feelings of all good people that there is no danger of their being forgotten or ceasing to work on the human conscience; such a danger “may be pronounced, once for all, impossible.” In the course of this sanguine argument, Mill cites as illustrative of the highest moral goodness the precept in the gospel of John (13:34): “The ‘new’ commandment to love one another.’” But here Mill’s intellectual conscience and better than average knowledge of the Bible obliged him to add, albeit in a footnote: “Not, however, a new commandment. In justice to the great Hebrew lawgiver, it should always be remembered that the precept, to love thy neighbour as thyself, already existed in the Pentateuch; and [he feels compelled to add] very surprising it is to find it there” [Leviticus, 19:18]. Given Mill’s prejudices, very surprising indeed. Needless to add that, if Mill were of a mind to look for them, there are scores of such “surprises”; but an anthology of them would throw a monkey wrench into the argument for relentless progress from the Pentateuch to the Prophets to the New Testament (CW, X, 416). One finds something similar in The Subjection of Women, where Mill commends the Stoics for being the first to incorporate in their ethical system the moral obligations to slaves—”the first (except so far as the Jewish law constitutes an exception)” [CW, XXI, 266]. In his essay “The Utility of Religion,” Mill implies that the Jews were ethically inferior not only to the Christians who succeeded to their inheritance but even to the Romans who bested them in combat. In order to buttress his assertion that religious sanctions not backed by the sanctions of public opinion have very rarely had much influence, Mill invokes the history of the Jews. “If ever any people were taught that they were under a divine government, and that unfaithfulness to their religion and law would be visited from above with temporal chastisement, the Jews were so. Yet their history was a mere succession of lapses into Paganism. Their prophets and historians...never ceased to complain that their countrymen turned a deaf ear to their vaticinations; and hence, with the faith they held in a divine government operating by temporal penalties, they could not fail to anticipate...la culbute générale; an expectation which, luckily for the credit of their prophetic powers, was fulfilled...” (CW, X, 412). Thus Mill reads the fact that the prophetic voices of Israel blamed the defeat and exile of their people not upon their enemies or upon a God who had proved to be ineffectual, but upon themselves, as a

6


sign that the Jews were morally inferior to other peoples of the ancient Near East who also suffered defeat and exile at the hands of their enemies but blamed their misfortunes either upon those enemies or upon the inadequacy of their national gods. Since Mill, once again operating on the same premises that his Christian neighbors accepted unquestioningly, did not acknowledge that Judaism continued to exist and develop after the arrival of Christianity, he never asks what should be the obvious question: why did the Jews and Judaism survive in exile when other peoples of the ancient Near East who suffered a similar fate disappeared? Had Mill ever encountered a Hittite or a Girgashite or a Jebusite on his daily walks to and from work at the East India Company? Probably not—but in any case the fact did not prompt him to ask whether the Jews’ habit of accepting responsibility for what had befallen them might not explain why they, unlike their fellows in misfortune, remained loyal to their God even after they had been punished for their sins by being sent into exile. Neither does he see that the real drama inherent in prophetic censoriousness of a wayward people lies not in its threat of divine punishment of their unfaithfulness to religion and religious law. Rather it resides in the paradox of chosenness itself: “You only have I known among all the families of the earth; therefore, I will visit upon you all your iniquities” (Amos 3:2). Mill makes the naive assumption that prophetic condemnation of Jewish misbehavior means little more than that the Jews behaved very badly indeed. When there is scant historical evidence of such misbehavior, Mill simply takes it for granted and relies on surmise— as in the case of the law of the sabbatical year in Leviticus. “By the Jewish law property in immovables was only a temporary concession; on the Sabbatical year it returned to the common stock to be redistributed; though we may surmise that in the historical times of the Jewish state this rule may have been successfully evaded” (CW, V, 751, 254). (Although we might expect that a text which, like that outlining the laws of the sabbatical, culminates in the exhortation to “proclaim [in the jubilee year] liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof,” would strike a responsive chord in the author of On Liberty, it evokes no comment whatever from Mill.) Neither does Mill here demonstrate a clear understanding of biblical prophecy itself. A biblical prophet is successful when his “predictions” are not fulfilled, that is, when the people he exhorts to abandon their evil ways return to the Lord. (The book of Jonah is a


7

classic example.) Mill does acknowledge that he is aware of this, but only in private correspondence. In a letter of 4 November 1863, for example, he says that there really is no such thing as biblical prophecy in the sense of prediction. “With regard to prophecies, in the sense attached to the word by modern theologians I do not believe that any such ever were made. The splendid religious & patriotic poetry of Isaiah, Jeremiah & others so far as it contains any predictions of future events contains only such as are made by Carlyle or anybody who argues that moral degeneracy in a people must lead to a catastrophe” (CW, 895-96). At one point in his life Mill announced that he was revising his earlier, mistaken views about Jews and Judaism. In a letter of September 1842 to F. D. Maurice, he declares that he has recently been “cured of many of my crude notions about [the Jews].” This is an important document for understanding Mill’s views on Jewish history, but less important than it would be if we knew more about what those views had been prior to 1842; the disease must have been virulent indeed if the views herein expressed represent a cure. The agent of Mill’s cure was, he reports, “the writings of Salvador, a Jew by race and by national feeling, a Frenchman by birth, and a rationalist of the school of Paulus by opinion, whose book on the Mosaic institutions and on the Jewish people though somewhat ludicrous in its adaptation of Moses to a Voltairian public and in its attempts to prove that the Jews were Constitutional Liberals and Utilitarians is yet so full of strong facts and even arguments that it made a great impression on me when I read it a year or two ago” (CW, XVII, 1998). The author in question is Joseph Salvador (1796-1873), who wrote Jesus-Christ et sa doctrine. Histoire de la naissance del’Eglise, de son organisation et de ses progres pendant le premier siecle (Paris, 1838) and l’Histoire des Institutions de Moise et du peuple hebreu (Paris, 1828). In fact, Salvador, being born of a Catholic mother, was only half-Jewish by “race” and could not have been Jewish at all according to Jewish religious law unless he had been converted, which he was not. Not only did Mill know nothing of the inner life of Jews; he was so ignorant of Judaism that he appears to have been unaware of the fact that Jewish identity is determined matrilineally. Salvador, who had a medical degree, was known for his scholarly interest in the history of religions. He applied the methods of historical criticism to the study of religion in general and to Jesus in par-

8


ticular, thus becoming a forerunner of German scholarship. He tried to outline a “universal” creed, founded on a kind of reformed Judaism, or on the fusion of Judaism and Christianity into a single doctrine of “progress.” He imagined that the center of this syncretistic religion would be Jerusalem, and saw this ultimate faith as the lineal outgrowth of what he imagined classical Judaism to have been. In another letter earlier in the same year to Gustave D’Eichthal, who as the baptized son of Jewish parents who had converted to Catholicism was typical of the few “Jews” he knew,3 Mill reports a mixed impression of Salvador’s earlier work and a “wholly favourable” one of the Jesus book. The latter, he says, “is nearer the truth than even Strauss. Altogether it is a grand book & I have instigated several people to read it” (CW, XIII, 496-97). Although the first book made Mill think, or so he claims, in a new and unexpected way about “the Hebrew people & polity,” he found laughable Salvador’s strained arguments to “recommend poor Moses to the Constitutional Opposition & to shew that the Jews were liberals, political economists & Utilitarians, that they had properly speaking no religion...& were...worthy sons of the 18th century.” He mentions Salvador’s argument that the liberty of prophesying was equivalent in the Jewish polity to liberty of the press. Later in the same letter Mill complains that Salvador hasn’t been translated or even heard of in England, where nobody’s ripe for serious philosophical discussion of the Bible. “We are all either bigots or Voltairians” (CW, XIII, 496-97). Since we know so little of Mill’s ideas about Jews prior to 1842, it is hard to say what difference his reading of this “grand book” by Salvador brought about. Perhaps the best evidence of Salvador’s influence on Mill is to be found in Considerations on Representative Government, a work of 1861. Here, in the course of a discussion of how to determine the form of government that is best suited to a particular people, he introduces, by way of contrast to the Egyptians and Chinese, “the example of an opposite character afforded by another and a comparatively insignificant Oriental people—the Jews.” Although they too had an absolute monarchy and a hierarchy, and organized institutions of “sacerdotal origin,” neither their kings nor their priests obtained, as they did in Egypt and China, the exclusive power to mould their monarchy and hierarchy; their religion forbade that. “Their religion, which enabled persons of genius and a high religious tone to be regarded and to regard themselves as in-


9

spired from heaven, gave existence to an inestimably precious unorganized institution—the Order...of Prophets.” These prophets became a formidable power in the nation, “often more than a match for kings and priests, and kept up, in that little corner of the earth, the antagonism of influences which is the only real security for continued progress” (CW, XIX, 396-97). This belief in progression resulting from contraries is, of course, standard Mill doctrine, going back before 1842 at least to the Bentham and Coleridge essays of 1838 and 1840.4 But the 1861 passage is nevertheless striking because here, for once, religion is not, as generally Mill views it, “a consecration of all that was once established, and a barrier against further improvement.” He graciously attributes this notion about the Jews to the remark of “a distinguished Hebrew, M. Salvador, that the Prophets were, in Church and State, the equivalent of the modern liberty of the press.” He proceeds to call this notion just, even if not fully adequate to explain “the part fulfilled in national and universal history by this great element of Jewish life.” Admitting the legitimacy of prophecy was, Mill asserts, equivalent to admitting that the canon of inspiration was never complete, but always in process of development. The formal validation of prophecy meant that “the persons most eminent in genius and moral feeling could not only denounce and reprobate, with the direct authority of the Almighty, whatever appeared to them deserving of such treatment, but could give forth better and higher interpretations of the national religion, which thenceforth became part of the religion.” Thus, if one can rid oneself of the habit of reading the Bible as if it were a single book (an error Mill imputes to Christians as well as to unbelievers), he will see “with admiration the vast interval between the morality and religion of the Pentateuch, or even of the historical books (the unmistakable work of Hebrew Conservatives of the sacerdotal order), and the morality and religion of the Prophecies: a distance as wide as between these last and the Gospels” (CW, XIX, 397) [italics added]. This historical scheme does give the Jews a high place among Mill’s heroes of progression. They created conditions very favorable to progress as understood by him: “... the Jews, instead of being stationary like other Asiatics, were, next to the Greeks, the most progressive people of antiquity, and, jointly with them, have been the starting-point and main propelling agency of modern cultivation.” Nevertheless, Mill, just like his Christian neighbors in Victo-

10


rian England, assumes an evolutionary progression from the Pentateuch and the “historical books” to the Prophets and thence to—the culminating point—Christianity. Given the drift of his discussion of the Hebrew prophets up to this point, one might expect Mill now to ask what, if any, countervailing power to that of the priests and monarchs of Christendom received the legitimacy that the prophets had in ancient Israel. Instead, Mill falls back upon the well-worn cliches of Christian supercessionists and accepts without question or hesitation the assumption that the morality of the prophets (presumably including the prophet Samuel, who instructed Saul to “spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings” [I Samuel 15:3]) is a great advance over the morality of the narrator of the Binding of Isaac and, in turn, that Matthew 10:34 (“Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”) is as superior ethically to Isaiah 2:4 (“Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,/Neither shall they learn war any more.”) as Isaiah was to Leviticus. In his book on Comte (1865) Mill explicitly calls Christianity “the highest form of Monotheism” (CW, X, 274). Since Mill took the view that Christianity represented an advance over Judaism in most things he valued, it is not surprising that, despite his liberalism, he is very sparing of sympathy towards the travails of the Jews in their post-biblical existence. In one of his early historical essays (“Modern French Historical Works,” 1826) Mill takes rather a cool and detached attitude towards the persecution of the Jews in medieval England. “The celebrated anecdote of King John and the Jew’s teeth, as it has, besides the cruelty, something whimsical in it, fixes itself in the memory; and is perpetually quoted as an extraordinary instance of the cruel treatment to which the Jews were subject in that reign. Yet what is this, compared to what we here see practised by one seigneur upon another” (CW, XX, 29). This is not quite in the class of Carlyle’s praise of King John for ripping the gold teeth out of Jewish mouths (and imagining himself doing the same to Lord Rothschild).5 But in referring to this barbaric act as “whimsy” and making it a minor cruelty when compared with the torture of one landed proprietor of knightly caste by another in feudal Europe, Mill shows—how should one put it?—a slight deficiency of sympathy in the Jewish direction. And what was his attitude towards the Jews of his own time and country? Jews had been banished from England from 1290 until the


11

1650s, and their struggle to gain some measure of civic equality with their Christian neighbors was laborious and slow.But Mill showed little interest in Jewish emancipation, though he did not, of course, oppose it. In 1849 he was incensed by Lord John Russell’s “Bill to Alter the Oaths to Be Taken by Members of the Two Houses of Parliament Not Professing the Roman Catholic Religion.” The bill’s immediate purpose, as Mill well knew, was to admit Jews into parliament. But for him it was a “piece of meanness” because it reinserted in the new oath the words “on the true faith of a Christian” for all persons except Jews. Mill’s anger was not, to be sure, about the admission of Jews but about the exclusion of those non-Christians who did not declare themselves to be Jews. Lord John Russell, Mill complains, “opens the door of parliament just wide enough to allow one particular class of dissenters from Christianity to slip in, and closes it...against all others.” The admission of Jews was not for Mill a sufficiently weighty matter to justify trampling on the rights of atheists. “We say nothing about Jews, whom this very measure is intended to let in.”6 A similar hardheartedness with respect to his Jewish contemporaries is evident in The Subjection of Women, where Mill asserts, astonishingly, in chapter 1 that only in the case of women is any group still legally discriminated against on grounds of birth: “even religious disabilities (besides that in England and in Europe they have practically almost ceased to exist) do not close any career to the disqualified person in case of conversion” (CW, XXI, 275). If only the Jews would become Christians, all careers would be open to them. Still more indicative of a certain moral blindness to the predicament of Jews in Christendom is Mill’s treatment of them in On Liberty. Every reader of that work recalls just where the Jews do come into view. They supply, in chapter 2 (“Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion”) one illustration of the folly of established authority acting on the premise of its infallibility to silence dissenting opinion. Mill comments on the paradox that that those who are shocked by the behavior of the Jewish high priestly authorities toward Jesus would have acted precisely as the (now despised) Jews did had they been alive then and born Jews. These Jewish priests, says Mill, were “not bad men...but rather the contrary; men who possessed in a full, or somewhat more than a full measure, the religious, moral, and patriotic feelings of their time and people” (CW, X, 65). Most of the Christians who now shudder at the conduct of the high priest described in Matthew (26:55) would have done exactly as he did.

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Here the Jews of late antiquity supply the epitome of those who, committing the sin of supposing themselves infallible, do terrible mischief. But at the very time Mill was composing his great treatise in favor of liberty and against the assumption of infallibility, it was precisely the Jews who were being victimized by the invocation of infallibility, in a case that in its time was as momentous a scandal as the Dreyfus Affair would be at century’s end. In June 1858, Edgardo Mortara, a six-year-old child of a Jewish family in Bologna, was, by order of the Inquisition, kidnapped by the papal police from his parents and taken to Rome, where he was confined in the House of Catechumens. The rationale for the kidnapping was that the child had been secretly baptized five years earlier by a Christian servant who believed him to be seriously ill and in danger of dying. Although the Roman Church had sanctioned numerous previous kidnappings of this sort, the Mortara affair seemed to many Europeans, especially those of a liberal bent, a particularly flagrant invocation of the ancient dogma of the infallibility of the Church. In this case, after all, that alleged infallibility had been given precedence by the Inquisition—this in 1858!—and Pope Pius IX over parental rights and religious freedom and, some argued, natural law itself. Emperor Napoleon III was one of those who protested the Church’s actions; and the Mortara affair led to the founding of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in 1860 to “defend the civil rights and religious freedom of the Jews.” It seems very likely that the uproar contributed to the end of the church’s secular power and the loss of its territories a decade later, though also—in reaction to the prospect of losing that power—to the new dogma of the infallibility of the pope. But of all this Mill has not a single word to say in On Liberty, where the Jews appear as the exponents and not the victims of the mistaken belief in infallibility. But there is a still more serious deficiency in On Liberty with respect to the Jews, one that was noticed by no less formidable a contemporary of Mill’s than George Eliot. As we have seen, Mill fell readily into the habit of his Christian countrymen of celebrating and espousing the “universalism” of Christianity in opposition to the particularism of Judaism (and several other religions). In his essay on Sedgwick, for example, he wrote that “Christianity does not deliver a code of morals, any more than a code of laws. Its practical morality is altogether indefinite, and was meant to be so. This indefiniteness has been considered by some of the ablest defenders of


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Christianity as one of its most signal merits, and among the strongest proofs of its divine origin: being the quality which fits it to be an universal religion, and distinguishes it both from the Jewish dispensation, and from all other religions...” But the drift of On Liberty is entirely contrary to such “universalism,” for it proclaims the undesirability of unanimity and insists vigorously on the importance of variety, possibility, eccentricity, even going so for as to say that if opponents of all important doctrines do not exist, it is necessary to invent them. Eliot recognized clearly the Jewish blind spot in Mill’s magnum opus: “A modern book on Liberty has maintained that from the freedom of individual men to persist in idiosyncrasies the world may be enriched. Why should we not apply this argument to the idiosyncrasy of a nation, and pause in our haste to hoot it down? There is still a great function for the steadfastness of the Jew...” If the logic of On Liberty is transferred from individuals to nations, then liberals should recognize in the Jewish people a “beneficent individuality among the nations.” Elsewhere in “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!,” the essay of 1878 in which this remark about On Liberty appears, George Eliot suggests that liberals as a group have a “Jewish problem.” Among her contemporaries, she charges, “anti-Judaic advocates usually belong to a party which has felt itself glorified in winning for Jews...the full privileges of citizenship.” Paradoxically, however, “these liberal gentlemen, too late enlightened by disagreeable events,” routinely blame the Jews themselves for the inability of liberalism to protect them. 7 Eliot’s generalization does not really cover Mill: on the one hand, he was only mildly interested in winning civil rights for Jews; on the other he tended simply to avert his eyes from the troubles of the Jews rather than blaming them for the malignance of their enemies. But Eliot’s observations about the inability of liberals to deal with the Jewish problem, coming as they do in close proximity to her remarks about Mill’s magnum opus, prompt us to ask whether the inadequacy of his treatment of Jews and Judaism was not a foreshadowing of the failures of his intellectual inheritors. Perhaps, too, the inability of the outstanding liberal thinker of the Victorian period to get beyond the assumptions about Judaism of the very Christianity he believed himself freed from by his heterodox education casts an ironic light upon the assumption of so many modern Jews that liberalism is the essence of Judaism itself.

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Notes 1.

2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

Autobiography and Literary Essays, ed. John M. Robson and Jack Stillinger, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), I, 45. (Subsequent references to the Collected Works will be cited parenthetically in the text as CW.) See Prefaces to Liberty, ed. Bernard Wishy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959). pp. 78, 203-16. Another was David Ricardo, the famous economist who was the best friend of James Mill and was always very kind to the young John Stuart. Ricardo repudiated his Jewish faith upon marriage to a Quaker. In the Coleridge essay, however, the Jews stood for permanence, not progression. Mill illustrated his second principle of permanence in a well-ordered state, that is, of something secure against disturbance or change, as follows: “This feeling may attach itself, as among the Jews...to a common God or gods, the protectors and guardians of their State” (CW, X, 134). See pp. 73-74 below. Wishy, Prefaces to Liberty, 232-33. George Eliot, “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” Impressions of Theophrastus Such, Miscellaneous Essays (New York: Doubleday, 1901), 423-24, 413.

2 Disraeli and Marx: Stammgenosse? Although Karl Marx wrote many thousands of words (nearly all vituperative, and many salacious) about Jews, he seems to have mentioned his own Jewish origins only once. In a letter to Lion Philips, a Dutch uncle who founded the Philips Electronics dynasty and was a major source of (capitalist) income to young Marx, he remarks that Benjamin Disraeli is their Stammgenosse, that is, of the same stock.1 Why, one wonders, should the fierce Promethean rebel against established society and Western imperialism, claim kinship with the quintessential insider—the traditionalist (and imperialist) Tory politician Disraeli? Although he was willing to grant that Young England, the political movement and parliamentary faction headed by Disraeli, occasionally struck the bourgeoisie “in the very heart’s core” by its witty and incisive criticisms, Marx nevertheless dismissed it as a fantastical sentimentalism, with a “total incapacity to comprehend the march of history.”2 Of course Marx would have known, if not in particular detail, that Disraeli, like himself, came from a Jewish family that had formally abandoned its religious traditions and might have felt some affinity with him on that account. Their experiences of separation from Judaism have a broad similarity, but are by no means identical. Although born to Jewish parents, Marx was baptized at age six into the Lutheran faith in the Rhineland city of Trier, whose rabbi was his uncle. Although his Voltairean father had joined the Lutheran church a year earlier (1817), Karl’s mother held out against conversion until age thirty-eight, when her father, a rabbi of Nigmejen, Holland, died. For this tardiness as well as other “despised remnants of Judaic practice,” Marx remained permanently resentful of her. She was also guilty of remarking, “If only Karell had made Capital instead of writing about it.”3 He openly expressed to Engels his wish 15

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that his mother would drop dead, and she complied within a year of his entreaty. Indeed, Marx wished the same for any relative likely to bequeath money to him and his wife Jenny, the daughter of a German baron. Marx’s treatment of his family and his willingness to sacrifice his wife and children to “the revolution” are likely to remind us of the English novelist George Eliot’s advice that “It is sometimes better not to follow great reformers of abuses beyond the threshold of their homes.”4 Given the fact that, for thousands of admirers as well as detractors, “the Jew Marx” has the fixity of Homeric epithet, it is worth recalling that Marx’s Lutheran education was stringent, not perfunctory, and that it had deep and lasting effects upon him. Despite the incessant labelling, from that day to this, of Marx as a Jew, his extant papers contain not so much as a scribble of a Hebrew letter, whereas his style is permeated by the language and even worldview of the Lutheran Bible. “Luther,” Marx’s biographer Frank Manuel observes, “is one of the few religious leaders Marx ever cited with approval,”5(10) and in Das Kapital he is invoked as an authority on the economic transformations of sixteenth-century Germany. Disraeli remarked that “I was not bred among my race and was nourished in great prejudice against them.”6 His grandmother, Sarah Shiprut de Gabay, was a Jewish antisemite so venomous that Disraeli’s biographer Stanley Weintraub speculates that she may have provided (via Disraeli’s memoir of his father) the germ for George Eliot’s feminist antisemite in her “Jewish” novel Daniel Deronda, Princess Alcharisi. Disraeli’s father, Isaac D’Israeli, was, in Cynthia Ozick’s words, “the perfect English man-of-letters, easily comparable to, in America now [she wrote in 1970], Lionel Trilling.”7 He did have his son circumcised—an occasion Weintraub describes as “the only Judaic rite in which [Ben] would be a central figure,”8 but thereafter showed himself to be, just as Heinrich Marx was, the loyal disciple of his beloved Voltaire in matters concerning Judaism. In 1813 he was selected to be a warden of his congregation (Bevis Marks); he rejected the honor, but refused to pay the fine of forty pounds imposed on someone who declined such an office. In March 1817, as young Ben was approaching bar mitzvah age, his father responded with alacrity to a Christian friend’s suggestion that he have his children baptized into the Church of England, so that they could have the opportunities available to other English children. On July 11, younger brothers Raphael and Jacobus were duly baptized (and trans-

Disraeli and Marx: Stammgenosse?

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formed into Ralph and James). Ben was reluctant, but succumbed on July 31, with his sister Sarah following shortly after. Thus Benjamin Disraeli was a Jew for seven years longer than Karl Marx, who became a little Lutheran at age six. But Disraeli’s parents, unlike Marx’s, remained unbaptized. Hannah Arendt once asserted that assimilated (which in the nineteenth century generally meant converted) Jews often became more obsessed with “Jewishness” than Jews who remained loyal to their religion and their people: “...The more the fact of Jewish birth lost its religious, national, and social-economic significance, the more obsessive Jewishness became; Jews were obsessed by it as one may be by a physical defect or advantage, and addicted to it as one may be to a vice.”9 There is some evidence for this claim in the parallel careers of Marx and Disraeli. Marx, perhaps with the help of his revered Martin Luther, became a ferocious Jew-hater. Throughout his career he mocked the “Jewish” characters of his rivals for revolutionary leadership in the Communist and working-class movements. Moses Hess was “Moysi the communist rabbi,” and Eduard Bernstein “the little Jew Bernstein.” His choicest epithets, however, were reserved for Ferdinand Lassalle. “It is now completely clear to me,” wrote Marx to Engels, “that, as his cranial formation and hair show, he is a descendant of the Negroes who attached themselves to the march of Moses out of Egypt (assuming his mother or grandmother on the paternal side had not crossed with a nigger. Now this union of Judaism and Germanism with a basic negroid substance must yield a strange product. The pushiness of the fellow is also Nigger-like.” Moses Mendelssohn was a “shit-windbag”; Polish Jews were said by Marx to multiply like lice and to be the “filthiest of all races.” On a holiday in Ramsgate he complained that the place “is full of Jews and fleas.” Despite the loneliness of that single reference to Disraeli as his Jewish kin, Frank Manuel argues that Marx was at some subconscious level always aware of the profound effects that Jewish antisemitism can have upon Jews. “Self-contempt,” Marx wrote in a youthful essay prefiguring his own psychic fate, “is a serpent constantly gnawing at one’s breast; it sucks the life-blood out of the heart and mixes it with the venom of the hatred of man and of despair.”10 Frank Manuel’s central idea about Marx, in fact, is that his selfhatred was transformed into a universal rage against the existing order of society and bred a utopian fantasy of redemption. “If to

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Marx Jews were dirty morally and physically and he was a Jew, his denied origins gnawed at his guts on some level of consciousness throughout his life.”11If the carbuncles that plagued him were the bodily sign of his self-loathing, his utopian hatred of existing society and uncontrollable rages and vendettas against Jewish rivals were its intellectual and political expressions. Although this idea seems too broadly stated—it is easier to see Marx’s self-deception about his Jewish origin at work in his fatuous dismissal of nationalism and ethnicity as forces in political consciousness than in, say his theory of surplus value—Manuel makes it seem plausible. He is less convincing in his insistence that Marx, despite his exclusively Lutheran education, his Jewish illiteracy (“there is no evidence that he could spell a Hebrew word,” and his Jew-hatred, was after all “rabbinic,” just like his repudiated ancestors. Apparently, not even the shrewdest and best-informed observers can resist the widespread temptation to draft Marx onto the team of Diaspora All-Stars (whose starting line-up also includes, of course, Freud and Einstein). “For anyone who has read Luther’s The Jews and Their Lies,” says Manuel, “a Jewish Lutheran must appear a monstrous oxymoron. But Western culture has shown a penchant for the most outlandish syncretisms, and young Marx’s [graduation] essay bears traces of both religious strains....a mixed Judeo-Lutheran rhetoric.” But from whence did the Judaic strain come? Did Marx inherit in his genes what Manuel calls “the messianic hope...passed on through generations of rabbis among both his father’s and his mother’s forebears”?12 One person who might have thought so was Benjamin Disraeli. Disraeli, despite his youthful conversion to Church of England Christianity, was thought of by friends, colleagues, enemies, and himself as a Jew. The philosemitic Matthew Arnold observed that Lord Beaconsfield [Disraeli] “treat[s] Hellenic things with the scornful negligence natural to a Hebrew...” The relentlessly antisemitic Radical magazine Punch depicted the Disraeli of 1867 as Fagin, stealing the opposition’s bill from its back pocket. Carlyle ranted against Disraeli as “a cursed old Jew, not worth his weight in cold bacon.” Balliol’s famous classical scholar Benjamin Jowett complained about the nation being run by “a wandering Jew.” The poet Coventry Patmore bemoaned 1867 as “The year of the great crime,/When the false English nobles, and their Jew,/By God demented, slew/The trust they stood twice pledged to keep from wrong.” The former prime


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minister Palmerston declared, “We are all dreadfully disgusted at the prospect of having a Jew for our Prime Minister.” The future Liberal prime minister W. E. Gladstone (who had once been Disraeli’s rival in the Tory Party) would allege that Disraeli’s long-standing proOttoman sympathies and Russophobia were a function of his Jewish sympathies for co-religionists under Russian rule: “Though he has been baptized, his Jew feelings are the most radical & the most real . . . portion of his profoundly falsified nature.”13 But was Disraeli in fact a Jew? For some time, his inner world, like his outer, showed little sign of his Jewish “background.” When he travelled to the Holy Land as a young man, “of Jewish places of worship he saw nothing,” and his glowing description of Jerusalem makes no mention of Jews whatever. Such facts would not surprise those of his critics who have alleged that Disraeli’s ideas of Jewishness were never disturbed by any actual knowledge of the subject. Nevertheless, in The Wondrous Tale of Alroy (1833), he seemed to propose restoring Jerusalem to the Jews. In 1834, he described Alroy as a “celebration of a gorgeous incident in that sacred and romantic people from whom I derive my blood and name.” Why, his biographer asks, would Disraeli, at the very beginning of a parliamentary career (and frequently thereafter) in a country that still banned real, unconverted Jews from Parliament, glorify his Jewish origins?14 Although the answer given by Disraeli’s preeminent modern biographer Weintraub is essentially that, however dishonorable Disraeli’s behavior may have been with women (in youth he contemned that fraud called “Love”) and finance and the grime of political maneuver, he always behaved honorably and “proudly” towards the Jewish background from which he had been severed by his father, the full explanation remains buried deep within the bizarre mixture of sense and (mostly) nonsense that is Disraeli’s theory of “racial Judaism.” Starting with the plausible notion that, as a character in Tancred says, Jesus “was born a Jew, lived a Jew, and died a Jew,” (a statement cautiously trimmed in Disraeli’s House of Commons allusion to Judaism as “the religion in the bosom of which my Lord and Saviour was born”), Disraeli, very much a Victorian “Jew for Jesus,” goes on to refer to Christianity as “completed Judaism” without even the slightest awareness that he thereby confirms the very Christian assumptions he appears to derogate. His novelistic spokesmen urge Jews to be grateful to Christianity because “half

20


Christendom worships a Jewess, and the other half a Jew,” and because the Church perpetuates Jewish beliefs, history, literature, culture, and institutions.15 Disraeli’s ignorance of Judaism was formidable (he was unaware of the dietary laws, and a clergyman in his employ had to remind him—and was fired for doing so—that the Sabbath of which he was so contemptuous was a Jewish institution). But could he really have been blind to the fact that Christianity’s vital energy derives from a powerful myth that casts Jews as the enemies of God who, because they rejected and killed Christ, were superseded by a new people and a new covenant? Typically, he referred to himself as “the blank page between the Old Testament and the New”16 without being aware that he was using terminology that literate Jews consider calumny. In one sense, Disraeli shared the very racism or at least race-thinking that led English Jew-haters to attack him. Like them, he viewed the Jews not as a community with a specific religion, nationality, shared memories and hopes, but as a “race,” united by blood and even by a conspiracy to rule the world. In Tancred (1847), Sidonia, perhaps the most important of Disraeli’s fictional spokesmen, sees crypto-Jews managing affairs everywhere, as professors, ambassadors, generals, cabinet members; he also wonders whether Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven were Jewish too.17 In Lord George Bentinck (1851) we are told, “The first Jesuits were Jews; that mysterious Russian diplomacy which so alarms Western Europe is organized and principally carried on by Jews. . . men of Jewish race are found at the head of every one of (communist and socialist) groups. The people of God co-operates with atheists; the most skilful accumulators of property ally themselves with communists...”18 In Endymion, a novel that Disraeli (with characteristically unflagging energy) wrote just after retiring from politics in 1880, a sympathetic character observes that “Semites now exercise a vast influence over affairs through their smallest though most peculiar family, the Jews.”19 Hannah Arendt, in perhaps the fiercest attack on Disraeli ever written by a Jew, correctly pointed out that he “produced the entire set of theories about Jewish influence and organization that we usually find in the more vicious forms of antisemitism.” He did so, she alleged, “almost automatically,” that is to say, as a result of carrying to extreme or radical form what she calls the characteristic superstition of assimilated Jews—namely, that Judaism is nothing more than a fact of birth. “Disraeli, though certainly not the only ‘exception


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Jew’ to believe in his own chosenness without believing in Him who chooses and rejects, was the only one who produced a full-blown race doctrine out of this empty concept of a historic mission.”20 Although Arendt is not able to show that the European antisemites who are her main concern were influenced by so (to them) obscure a source as Disraeli’s written work, there is no doubt that some of the most savage attacks on Disraeli by his English contemporaries were provoked by his insistence that “all is race.” Perhaps the most shocking of them is that by George Eliot, writing in 1848: D’Israeli [sic] is unquestionably an able man, and I always enjoy his tirades against liberal principles as opposed to popular principles—the name by which he distinguishes his own. As to his theory of races, it has not a leg to stand on, and can only be buoyed up by such windy eloquence as—You chubby-faced, squabby-nosed Europeans owe your commerce, your arts, your religion, to the Hebrews,—nay, the Hebrews lead your armies: in proof of which he can tell us that Massena, a second-rate general of Napoleon’s, was a Jew, whose real name was Manasseh....The fellowship of race, to which D’Israeli so exultingly refers the munificence of Sidonia, is so evidently an inferior impulse, which must ultimately be superseded, that I wonder even he, Jew as he is, dares to boast of it. My Gentile nature kicks most resolutely against any assumption of superiority in the Jews, and is almost ready to echo Voltaire’s vituperation. I bow to the supremacy of Hebrew poetry, but much of their early mythology, and almost all their history, is utterly revolting.21

This is the same George Eliot now revered by Jews as a Judeophile and early Zionist, the woman for whom a street is named (deservedly) in each of Israel’s three major cities. A street is also named in Jerusalem for Benjamin Disraeli himself. Just why, one wonders? Is it because he was obsessed with “Jewishness” in his writings? Is it because, despite having been turned into a Christian by his father, he behaved “honorably” in relation to his Jewish ancestry? Is it perhaps because several of his works, such as Alroy, can be construed as Zionist in idea or impulse, and he often spoke to friends about his dream of “restoring the Jews to their own land”?22 Or is it because he played a crucial role in committing England to the democratic dispensation and making it into the only European nation which, almost sixty years after his death, resolutely and effectively opposed Hitler’s conquest of the world? Although Marx does not have any streets named after him in Israel, he has for many decades been widely revered by the Israeli left. Shimon Peres, for example, recalls in his memoir Battling for Peace how as a young man he courted his beloved Sonia “by reading to her, sometimes by the light of the moon, selected passages from Marx’s Das Kapital.”23

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Since one assumes that Marx’s heroic stature among Israeli leftists cannot be due to the fact that he brought into the world a tremendous power for evil which led to the murder of millions of people around the globe, it must have something to do with the doctrine of economic determinism that helps them to “understand” the apparently permanent state of siege in which they live. Indeed, Peres’s constantly reiterated “Marxist” belief that supplying Israel’s Arab adversaries with computers and the other accoutrements of modern economic prosperity would lead to a “new Middle East” in which Israel would become a respected member of the Arab League, led to the Oslo Accords of 1993, which in turn led to the catastrophic Oslo War launched by Yasser Arafat in September 2000. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

Frank E. Manuel, A Requiem for Karl Marx (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 19. Stanley Weintraub, Disraeli: A Biography (New York: Truman Talley Books/Dutton, 1993), 208. Manuel, 11, 101. Adam Bede (1859), Part First, Chapter V. Manuel, 10. Quoted in Hannah Arendt, Antisemitism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1951), 70n. “Toward a New Yiddish,” Art and Ardor (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 167. Weintraub, 18. Antisemitism, 84. Manuel, 188, 210, 195, 15, 16, 11. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 21. Even the usually astute Paul Johnson, fully informed as to the fact of Marx’s Jewish illiteracy, declares that “virtually all his work…has the hallmark of Talmudic study.” (Intellectuals [New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), 53. Introduction to Literature and Dogma, in Dissent and Dogma, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), 164; Weintraub, 536, 441, 453, 462, 577. Ibid., 105, 113. Ibid., 262, 277, 242, 267. Ibid., xii, 278. Ibid., 308. Lord George Bentinck (London, 1851), 497. Weintraub, 635. Some modern commentators on Disraeli seem to have inherited his bizarre race-thinking. Thus Ruth apRoberts in her book Arnold and God (Berkeley: Univesity of California Press, 1983), remarks (p. 172): “Moses, Solomon, Jesus— we can be sure Disraeli felt the blood of them in his veins, and their capacities likewise, for law, for administration, and for reform.” Antisemitism, 71, 73. J.W. Cross, Life of George Eliot (New York, 1884), 87-88. Weintraub, 301-02. Battling for Peace: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1995), 25.

3 Israeli Intellectuals and Israeli Politics “When it comes to defaming Jews, the Palestinians are pisherkehs next to Ha’aretz.” —Philip Roth, Operation Shylock (1993)

In his essay of 1838 on Jeremy Bentham, J. S. Mill wrote that “speculative philosophy, which to the superficial appears a thing so remote from the business of life and the outward interests of men, is in reality the thing on earth which most influences them, and in the long run overbears every other influence save those which it must itself obey.” Of course, Mill was not always willing to wait for the long run and was often tempted by shortcuts whereby speculative philosophers and other intellectuals could make their influence felt upon government. Frightened by Tocqueville’s observations of American democracy, Mill sought to prevent the “tyranny of the majority” by an elaborate scheme of plural voting which would give everybody one vote but intellectuals a larger number; when he awoke to the folly and danger of such a scheme he switched his allegiance to proportional representation as a means of allowing what he calls in On Liberty the wise and noble few to exercise their due influence over the mindless majority. By now we have had enough experience of the influence of intellectuals in politics to be skeptical of Mill’s schemes. To look back over the major intellectual journals of this country in the years prior to and during the Second World War—not only Trotskyist publications like New International or Dwight Macdonald’s Politics, but the highbrow modernist and Marxist Partisan Review—is to be appalled by the spectacle of the finest minds of America vociferous in opposition to prosecuting the war against Hitler, which in their view was just a parochial struggle between two dying capitalist forces. The pacifism of English intellectuals in the late thirties led George Orwell 23

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to declare that some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals could believe them; and in one of his Tribune columns of 1943 he said of the left-wing rumor in London that America had entered the war only in order to crush a budding English socialist revolution that “one has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe something like that. No ordinary man could be such a fool.” If we look at the influence of Israeli intellectuals upon Israeli policy in recent decades, and especially during the Yitzhak Rabin-Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak governments, we may conclude that Mill and Orwell were both right, Mill in stressing the remarkable power of ideas, Orwell in insisting that such power often works evil, not good. Among the numerous misfortunes that have beset the Zionist enterprise from its inception—the unyielding hardness of the land allegedly flowing with milk and honey, the failure of the Jews of the Diaspora to move to Zion except under duress, the constant burden of peril arising from Arab racism and imperialism—was the premature birth of an intellectual class, especially a literary intelligentsia. The quality of Israel’s intelligentsia may be a matter of dispute. Gershom Scholem once remarked, mischievously, that talent goes where it is needed, and in Israel it was needed far more urgently in the military than in the universities, the literary community, the arts, and journalism. But the influence of this intelligentsia is less open to dispute than its quality. When Shimon Peres (who views himself as an intellectual) launched his ill-fated election campaign of spring 1996 he surrounded himself with artists and intellectuals on the stage of Tel Aviv’s Mann Auditorium.1 Three months earlier, he had listed as one of the three future stars of the Labor Party the internationally famous novelist Amos Oz, the same Amos Oz who was notorious among religiously observant Jewish “settlers” for having referred to their organization Gush Emunim (Block of the Faithful) in a speech of June 1989, in language generally reserved for thieves and murderers: they were, he told a Peace Now gathering of about 20,000 people in Tel Aviv’s Malchei Yisrael Square, “a small sect, a messianic sect, obtuse and cruel, [who] emerged a few years ago from a dark corner of Judaism, and [are] threatening to...impose on us a wild and insane blood ritual....They are guilty of crimes against humanity.” 2 Intellectuals in many countries have adopted the motto, “the other country, right or wrong,” and worked mightily to undermine na-

Israeli Intellectuals and Israeli Politics

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tional confidence in their country’s heritage, founding principles, raison d’être. But such intellectuals do not usually arise within fifty years of their country’s founding, and in no case except Israel have intellectuals cultivated their “alienation” in a country whose “right to exist” is considered an acceptable subject of discussion among otherwise respectable people and nations. As Midge Decter shrewdly put it in May 1996, “A country only half a century old is not supposed to have a full fledged accomplished literary intelligentsia....This is an extravagance only an old and stable country should be allowed to indulge in.”3 The seeds of trouble amongst intellectuals in Zion antedated the state itself. On May Day 1936 the Labor Zionist leader Berl Katznelson asked, angrily, “Is there another people on earth whose sons are so emotionally and mentally twisted that they consider everything their nation does despicable and hateful, while every murder, rape and robbery committed by their enemies fills their hearts with admiration and awe? As long as a Jewish child...can come to the Land of Israel, and here catch the virus of self-hate...let not our conscience be still.”4 But what for Katznelson was a sick aberration would later become the normal condition among a very large segment of Israeli intellectuals. A major turning point came in 1967, when the doctors of Israel’s soul, a numerous fraternity, concluded that in winning a defensive war which, if lost, would have brought about its destruction, Israel had bartered its soul for a piece of land. The Arab nations, shrewdly sensing that Jews were far less capable of waging the war of ideas than the war of planes and tanks, quickly transformed the rhetoric of their opposition to Israel’s existence from the Right to the Left, from the aspiration to “turn the Mediterranean red with Jewish blood” (the battle cry of the months preceding the Six-Day War) to the pretended search for a haven for the homeless. This calculated appeal to liberals, as Ruth Wisse has amply demonstrated,5 created legions of critics of the Jewish state, especially among devout believers in the progressive improvement and increasing enlightenment of the human race. Israeli intellectuals who were willing to express, especially in dramatic hyperbole, criticism of their own country’s alleged racism, imperialism, and religious fanaticism quickly became celebrities in the American press. They were exalted by people like Anthony Lewis as courageous voices of dissent, even though what they had joined was, of course, a community of consent.

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But it was not until a decade later that the Israeli intelligentsia turned massively against the state, against Zionism, against Judaism itself. For in 1977 the Labor Party lost its twenty-nine-year-old ownership of government to people it considered its cultural inferiors, people Meron Benvenisti described as follows: “I remember traveling on a Haifa bus and looking around at my fellow passengers with contempt and indifference—almost as lower forms of human life.”6 Such hysteria (which burst forth again in May 1996 when Benjamin Netanyahu won the election) now became the standard pose of the alienated Israeli intellectual, and it was aggressively disseminated by American publications such as the New York Times, ever eager for Israeli-accented confirmation of its own views. Amos Oz, for example, took to the pages of the New York Times Magazine during the Lebanon war to deplore the imminent demise of Israel’s “soul”: “Israel could have become an exemplary state...a small-scale laboratory for democratic socialism.” But that great hope, Oz lamented, was dashed by the arrival of Holocaust refugees, various “anti-socialist” Zionists, “chauvinistic, militaristic, and xenophobic” North African Jews, and so forth.7 (These are essentially the reasons why it was not until Menachem Begin became prime minister that the Ethiopian Jews could come to Israel.) By 1995 Oz was telling New York Times readers that supporters of the Likud party were accomplices of Hamas. Even after spiritual brethren of Hamas massacred almost three thousand people in the United States on 11 September 2001 Oz declared that the enemy was not in any sense the radical Islamist or Arabic mentality but simply “fanaticism,” and that in any case the most pressing matter he could think of was to give “Palestinians their natural right to self-determination.” For good measure he added the patently false assertion that “almost all [Muslims] are as shocked and aggrieved [by the suicide bombings of America] as the rest of mankind.”8Apparently Oz had missed all those photos of Muslims round the world handing out candy, ululating, dancing, and jubilating over dead Jews and dead Americans. It was a remarkable performance, which made one wonder whether Oz gets to write about politics because he is a novelist or gets his reputation as a novelist because of his political views. People like Benvenisti—sociologist, deputy mayor of Jerusalem until fired by Teddy Kollek, and favorite authority on Israel for many years of the New York Times and New York Review of Books—foreshadowed the boasting of the intellectual spokesmen of recent La-


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bor governments that they were not only post-Zionist but also postJewish in their thinking. Benvenisti, writing in 1987, recalled proudly how “We would observe Yom Kippur by loading quantities of food onto a raft and swimming out with it to an offshore islet in the Mediterranean, and there we would while away the whole day feasting. It was a flagrant demonstration of our rejection of religious and Diaspora values.” 9 Anecdotal evidence of the increasingly shrill anti-Israelism (or worse) of Israeli intellectuals is only too easy to amass. Some years ago the sculptor Yigal Tumarkin stated that “When I see the blackcoated haredim with the children they spawn, I can understand the Holocaust.”10 Ze’ev Sternhell, Hebrew University expert on fascism, proposed destroying the Jewish settlements with IDF tanks as a means of boosting national morale.11 In 1969 the guru of Labor Party intellectuals, the late Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, began to talk of the inevitable “Nazification” of the Israeli nation and society. By the time of the Lebanon War he had become an international celebrity because of his use of the epithet “Judeo-Nazi” to describe the Israeli army. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, he outdid even himself by declaring (in words redolent of what Katznelson had deplored in 1936): “Everything Israel has done, and I emphasize everything, in the past 23 years is either evil stupidity or stupidly evil.”12 And in 1993 Leibowitz would be honored by the government of Yitzhak Rabin with the Israel Prize. In third place after Oz and Benvenisti among the resources of intellectual insight into Israel’s soul frequently mined by Anthony Lewis, Thomas Friedman, and like-minded journalists is David Grossman, the novelist. Grossman established his credentials as an alienated intellectual commentator on the state of his country’s mind in a book of 1988 called The Yellow Wind, an account of his sevenweek journey through the “West Bank,” a journey undertaken in order to understand “how an entire nation like mine, an enlightened nation by all accounts, is able to train itself to live as a conqueror without making its own life wretched.”13 This is a complicated book, not without occasional patches of honesty. But its true flavor can be suggested by two successive chapters dealing with culture and books, especially religious ones. Grossman first visits the Jewish settlement of Ofra, at which he arrives fully armed with suspicion, hostility, and partisanship, a “wary stranger” among people who remind him, he says, of nothing human, especially when they are “in the season

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of their messianic heat”(52). In Ofra, Grossman does not want “to let down his guard” and be “seduced” by the Sabbath “warmth” and “festivity” of these wily Jews (34). Although most of his remarks to Arabs in conversation recounted in The Yellow Wind are the perfunctory gestures of a straight man to whom his interlocutors pay no serious attention, he angrily complains that the Jewish settlers don’t listen to or “display a real interest” in him. He asks them to “imagine themselves in their Arab neighbors’ places” (37) and is very much the angry schoolmaster when they don’t dance to his tune or accept his pretense that this act of sympathetic imagination is devoid of political meaning. Neither are the settlers nimble enough to make the appropriate reply to Grossman: “My dear fellow, we will imagine ourselves as Arabs if you will imagine yourself as a Jew.” But Grossman has no intention of suspending his own rhythms of existence long enough to penetrate the inner life of these alien people: “What have I to do with them?” (48). His resentment is as much cultural as political. He complains that the settlers have “little use for culture,” speak bad Hebrew, indulge in “Old Diaspora type” humor, and own no books, “with the exception of religious texts” (46). And these, far from mitigating the barbarity of their owners, aggravate it. The final image of the Jews in this long chapter is of “potential [!] terrorists now rocking over their books” (51). For Grossman, the conjectural terrorism of Jews is a far more grievous matter than the actual terrorism of Arabs. The following chapter also treats of culture and books, including religious ones. Grossman has come to Bethlehem University, one of several universities in the territories that have been punningly described as branches of PLO State. Here Grossman, though he admits the school to be “a stronghold of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine,” sees no terrorists rocking over books, but rather idyllic scenes that remind him of “the pictures of Plato’s school in Athens” (57). Bubbling with affection, eager to ascribe only the highest motives, Grossman is now willing to forgive even readers of religious books. He has not so much as a snort or a sneer for the Bethlehem English professor who ascribes Arabs’ supreme sensitivity to lyric rhythm in English poetry to the “rhythm of the Koran flow[ing] through their blood” (59). The author’s ability to spot racism at a distance of twenty miles when he is among Jews slackens when timeless racial categories are invoked in Bethlehem.


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When the Labor Party returned to power in 1992, so too did the Israeli intellectuals and their disciples. People once (rather naively) casually referred to as extremists moved to the centers of power in Israeli government and policy formation. Dedi Zucker, who used to accuse Jewish “settlers” of drinking blood on Passover, and Yossi Sarid, who once shocked Israelis by declaring that Holocaust Memorial Day meant nothing to him, and Shulamit Aloni, whose statements about religious Jews would probably have landed her in jail in European countries that have laws against antisemitic provocation, all became cabinet ministers or prominent spokesmen in the government of Rabin. Two previously obscure professors laid the foundations for the embrace of Yasser Arafat, one of the major war criminals of the twentieth century, responsible for the murder of more Jews than anyone since Hitler and Stalin. The Oslo process put the PLO well on the way to an independent Palestinian state (a state, it should be added, that commands the allegiance of far more Israeli intellectuals than does the idea of a Jewish one). Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua and David Grossman were delighted, with the last of this trio assuring Anthony Lewis that Israel had finally given up its “instinctive suspicion,” and that although “we have the worst terrorism,” “we are making peace.”14 Benvenisti proved harder to satisfy: in 1995, he published a book called Intimate Enemies, the ads for which carried glowing endorsements from Thomas Friedman and Professor Ian Lustick, in which he proposed dissolution of the state of Israel. Only a few figures within Israel’s cultural establishment expressed dismay at what was happening. The philosopher Eliezer Schweid warned that a nation which starts by abandoning its cultural memories ends by abandoning its physical existence.15Amos Perlmutter analyzed the “post-Zionism” of Israeli academics as an all-out attack on the validity of the state.16 A still more notable exception to the general euphoria of this class was Aharon Megged. In June of 1994 this well-known writer and longtime supporter of the Labor Party wrote an explosive article in Ha’aretz on “The Israeli Suicide Drive” in which he connected the Rabin government’s record of endless unreciprocated concessions to a PLO that had not even cancelled its Charter calling for Israel’s destruction, to the self-destructiveness that had long before infected Israel’s intellectual classes. “Since the Six Day War,” Megged wrote, “and at an increasing pace, we have witnessed a phenomenon which probably has no parallel in

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history: an emotional and moral identification by the majority of Israel’s intelligentsia with people openly committed to our annihilation.” Megged argued that since 1967 the Israeli intelligentsia had more and more come “to regard religious, cultural, and emotional affinity to the land...with sheer contempt”; and he observed that the equation of Israelis with Nazis had become an article of faith and the central idea of “thousands [emphasis added] of articles and reports in the press, hundreds of poems, ... dozens of documentary and feature films, exhibitions and paintings and photos.” He also shrewdly remarked on the methods by which anti-Zionist Israeli intellectuals disseminated their message and reputations. Writers like Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, and Baruch Kimmerling “mostly publish first in English to gain the praise of the West’s ‘justice seekers.’ Their works are then quickly translated into Arabic and displayed in Damascus, Cairo and Tunis. Their conclusion is almost uniform: that in practice Zionism amounts to an evil, colonialist conspiracy...”17 The minds of the majority of those who carried on the Oslo Process of the Israel government from 1993 to 1996 were formed by the writers, artists, and publicists whom Megged excoriated. Although Shimon Peres’ utterances about the endless war for independence which his country has been forced to wage often seemed to come from a man who had taken leave of the actual world, they were rooted in the “post-Zionist,” post-Jewish, and universalist assumptions of the Israeli intelligentsia. Just as they were contemptuous of any tie with the land of Israel, so he repeatedly alleged that land plays no part in Judaism or even in the Jewish political philosophy that names itself after a specific mountain called Zion. Like the Israeli intelligentsia, he accused Israel’s religious Jews of an atavistic attachment to territory over “spirit,” claiming that Judaism is “ethical/moral and spiritual, and not an idolatry of soil-worship.”18 Just as Israeli intellectuals nimbly pursued and imitated the latest cultural fads of America and Europe, hoping to be assimilated by the great world outside Israel, so did Peres hope that Israel would one day be admitted into the Arab League.19 Despite the enlistment of then President William Clinton as his campaign manager, and the nearly unanimous support he received from the Israeli and world news media, to say nothing of the herd of independent thinkers from the universities, and the rented academics of the think tanks, Shimon Peres and his Oslo process were decisively rejected by the Jewish voters of Israel. Predictably, the Israeli


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intellectuals (not guessing that Labor’s successors would blindly continue the process) reacted with melodramatic hysteria. David Grossman, in the New York Times of 31 May, wailed sanctimoniously that “Israel has moved toward the extreme right...more militant, more religious, more fundamentalist, more tribal and more racist.”20 Among the American liberal supporters of Israel’s intellectual elite, only the New Republic appeared somewhat chastened by the election result. Having for years, perhaps decades, celebrated the ineffable genius of Shimon Peres and his coterie, the magazine turned angrily upon the Israeli intellectuals for failing to grasp that “their association with Peres was one of the causes of his defeat.” “Disdainful of [Jews] from traditional communities, they thought of and called such people ‘stupid Sephardim.’ This contempt for Arab Jews expresses itself in a cruel paradox, for it coexists with a credulity about, and esteem for, the Middle East’s Christians and Muslims— Arab Arabs. Such esteem, coupled with a derisive attitude toward Jewish symbols and texts, rituals, remembrances and anxieties, sent tens of thousands to Netanyahu.”21 The most ambitious attempt to trace the history and analyze the causes of the maladies of Israeli intellectuals is Yoram Hazony’s book The Jewish State, which appeared early in the year 2000. Within months of its publication the dire consequences of the Oslo accords, post-Zionism’s major political achievement, became visible to everybody in Israel in the form of Intifada II, otherwise known as the Oslo War, a campaign of unremitting atrocities launched by Yasser Arafat when only 97 percent of his demands, including an independent Palestinian state, had been met by the government of the hapless Ehud Barak. The Jewish State is a broadside aimed at those Israelis who, in what its author calls “a carnival of self-loathing,”22 are busily eating away at the Jewish foundations of that state. The book’s very title is a conscious affront to Israel’s branja, a slang term for the “progressive” and “enlightened” experts whose views, according to Supreme Court Chief Justice Aharon Barak, should determine the court’s decisions on crucial matters. For these illuminati have sought to enlist no less a figure than Theodor Herzl in their campaign to de-Judaize the state of Israel. Nearly all the “post-Zionists” discussed in The Jewish State claim that Herzl did not intend the title of his famous book to be The Jewish State at all, that the state he proposed was in

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no significant sense intrinsically Jewish, and that he believed in a total separation of religion from the state. Hazony argues (and massively demonstrates) that Herzl believed a Jewish state was essential to rescue the Jewish people from both antisemitism and assimilation, the forces that were destroying Jewish life throughout the Diaspora. (Most of Herzl’s rabbinic opponents, of course, argued that Zionism was itself but a thinly veiled form of assimilation.) Hazony’s The Jewish State has two purposes. The first is to show that “the idea of the Jewish state is under systematic attack from its own cultural and intellectual establishment”(xxvii). These “culture makers” have not only renounced the idea of a Jewish state—”A state,” claims Amos Oz, “cannot be Jewish, just as a chair or a bus cannot be Jewish” (338). The writers who dominate Israeli culture, Hazony argues, are adept at imagining what it is like to be an Arab; they have, like the aforementioned David Grossman, much more trouble imagining what it is like to be a Jew. If Israeli intellectuals were merely supplying their own illustration of Orwell’s quip about the unique susceptibility of intellectuals to stupid ideas, their hostility to Israel’s Jewish traditions and Zionist character would not merit much concern. But Hazony shows that they have had spectacular success, amounting to a virtual coup d’état, in their political struggle for a post-Jewish state. “What is perhaps most remarkable about the advance of the new ideas in Israeli government policy is the way in which even the most sweeping changes in Israel’s character as a Jewish state can be effected by a handful of intellectuals, with only the most minimal of opposition from the country’s political leaders or the public” (52). The post-Zionists have imposed their views in the new publicschool curriculum, in the Basic Laws of the country, and in the IDF, whose code of ethics now excludes any allusion to Jewish or Zionist principles. The author of the code is Asa Kasher, one of Israel’s most enterprising post-Zionists, who has modestly described his composition as “the most profound code of ethics in the world of military ethics, in particular, and in the world of professional ethics, in general”—so terminally profound, in fact, that an Israeli soldier “doesn’t need to think or philosophize anymore. Someone else already ... did the thinking and decided. There are no dilemmas” (53, 56). The ultimate triumph of post-Zionism, Hazony argues, came in its conquest of the Foreign Ministry and the mind of Shimon Peres. Both came to the conclusion that Israel must retreat from the idea of


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an independent Jewish state. In the accord reached with Egypt in 1978 and even in the 1994 accord with Jordan, Israeli governments had insisted that the Arab signatories recognize the Jewish state’s “sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence” (58). But the Oslo accords with the fanatically anti-Zionist PLO conceded on every one of these issues; and if the agreement with the PLO was partly an effect of post-Zionism, it was an effect that became in turn a cause—giving respectability and wide exposure to post-Zionist political prejudices formerly confined to coteries in Rehavia and Ramat-Aviv. Thereafter, Peres and his Foreign Office routinely promoted the interests not of a sovereign Jewish state but of the (largely Arab) Middle East. In a reversal of policy akin to that of the Soviet Foreign Ministry in the wake of Stalin’s pact with Hitler, Uri Savir and other Foreign Ministry officials exhorted American Jews who had for decades resisted the Arab campaign to blacken Israel’s reputation to support U.S. foreign aid to the two chief blackeners, the PLO and Syria. They—it was alleged—needed dollars much more than Israel. Peres himself, as we observed earlier, carried the post-Zionist campaign for assimilation and universalism to the global level, grandly announcing in December 1994 that “Israel’s next goal should be to become a member of the Arab League” (67). The second (and much longer and more nuanced) part of Hazony’s book has a twofold purpose. The first is to write the history of the ideological and political struggle within the Jewish world itself over the idea of the Jewish state, paying particular attention to how that ideal, which a few decades ago had been axiomatic among virtually all Jews the world over, had so quickly “been brought to ruin among the cultural leadership of the Jewish state itself” (78). Hazony’s second aim as historian is to demonstrate the power of ideas, especially the truth of John Stuart Mill’s axiom about the practical potency, in the long run, of (apparently useless) speculative philosophy. It was the power of ideas that enabled philosopher Martin Buber and other opponents of the Jewish state to break Ben-Gurion and to undermine the practical-minded stalwarts of Labor Zionism. (Likud hardly figures in this book. The quarrels between Ben-Gurion and Begin have from Hazony’s perspective “the character of a squabble between the captain and the first mate of a sinking ship” [79].) Hazony is a masterful political and cultural historian, and his fascinating account of the long struggle of Buber (and his Hebrew

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University acolytes) against Herzl and Ben-Gurion’s conception of a genuinely Jewish state is told with tremendous verve and insight. Buber is at once the villain and the hero of this book. He is the villain in his relentless opposition to a Jewish state; in his licentious equations between Labor Zionists and Nazis; in his fierce anti-(Jewish) immigration stance (announced the day after he himself had immigrated from Germany in 1938). But he is the hero because his posthumous ideological victory over Labor Zionism—most of today’s leading postZionists claim that their minds were formed by Buber and his bi-nationalist Brit Shalom/Ihud allies at Hebrew University—is in Hazony’s view the most stunning example of how ideas and myths are in the long run of more political importance than kibbutzim and settlements. Because Buber understood the way in which culture eventually determines politics and grasped the potency of books and journals and (most of all) universities, his (to Hazony) malignant influence now carries the day in Israel’s political as well as its cultural wars. Hazony argues that since the fall of Ben-Gurion Israel has had no prime minister—not Golda Meir, not Menachem Begin—who was an “idea-maker.” Even the very shrewd Ben-Gurion and Berl Katznelson (who presciently warned of the dangers lurking in the “intellectual famine” [299] of Labor Israel) were slow to recognize the potentially disastrous consequences of entrusting the higher education of their children to a university largely controlled (for twentyfour years) by the anti-Zionist Judah Magnes and largely staffed by faculty he recruited. Magnes, in language foreshadowing the cliches of today’s post-Zionists, charged that the Jewish settlement in Palestine had been “born in sin”(203); moreover, he believed that seeing history from the Arabs’ historical perspective was one of the main reasons for establishing the Hebrew University. Hazony’s book is written backwards, something like a murder mystery. He begins with a dismaying, indeed terrifying picture of a nearly moribund people, exhausted, confused, aimless—their traditional Labor Zionist assumptions declared “effectively dead” by their formerly Labor Zionist leaders, most crucially Shimon Peres. He then moves backward to seek the reasons why the Zionist enterprise is in danger of being dismantled, not by Israel’s Arab enemies (who gleefully watch the spectacle unfold), but by its own heavily petted intellectual, artistic, and political elite—professors, writers, luminaries in the visual arts. The material in the early chapters is shocking, and I speak as one who thought he had seen it all: the visiting sociologist from Hebrew


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University who adorned his office at my university with a PLO recruiting poster; the Tel-Aviv University philosophy professor who supplied Noam Chomsky’s supporters with a letter of kashrut certifying the “lifelong dedication to Israel” of their (Israel-hating) idol; the Haifa University sociologist active in the American-Arab AntiDiscrimination League (a PLO front group); the contingent of Israeli professors taking up arms on behalf of the great prevaricator Edward Said. But the material Hazony has collected (and dissected) from Israel’s post-Zionist and post-Jewish intellectuals shocks me nevertheless. Compared with the Baruch Kimmerlings, the Asa Kashers, the Ilan Pappes, and other protagonists in Hazony’s tragedy, Austria’s Jorge Haider, the right-wing demagogue about whom the Israeli government kicked up such a fuss not so long ago, is a Judeophile and Lover of Zion. Hazony carefully refrains from applying the term “antisemitic” to even the most extreme defamations of Jewish tradition and of the Jewish state by post-Zionists and their epigones. But surely such reticence is unnecessary when the secret has long been out. As far back as May 1987 the Israeli humorist and cartoonist Dosh, in a column in Ma’ariv, drew a picture of a shopper in a store that specialized in antisemitic merchandise reaching for the top shelf—on which lay the most expensive item, adorned by a Stürmer-like caricature of a Jew and prominently labelled “Made in Israel.” The article this cartoon illustrated spoke of Israel’s need to increase exports by embellishing products available elsewhere in the world with unique local characteristics. Israel had done this with certain fruits and vegetables in the past, and now she was doing it with defamations of Israel, produced in Israel. Customers were getting more selective, no longer willing to make do with grade B merchandise produced by British leftists or French neo-Nazis. No, they wanted authentic material, from local sources; and Israeli intellectuals, artists, playwrights, were responding with alacrity to the opportunity. But Dosh had spoken merely of a specialty shop. To accommodate the abundant production of Hazony’s gallery of post-Zionist/ post-Jewish defamers of Israel (both the people and the Land) would require a department store twice the size of Macy’s or Harrod’s. On bargain day, one imagines the following recitation by the elevator operator: “First floor, Moshe Zimmermann, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, and sixty-eight other members of the progressive and universalist community on Israelis as Nazis; second floor, A. B. Yehoshua on the

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need for Israeli Jews to become “normal” by converting to Christianity or Islam; third floor, Boaz Evron in justification of Vichy France’s anti-Jewish measures; fourth floor, Idith Zertal on Zionist absorption of Holocaust refugees as a form of rape; fifth floor, Benny Morris on Zionism as ethnic cleansing; attic, Shulamit Aloni on Zionism (also Judaism) as racism; basement, Ya’akov Yovel justifying the medieval blood libel; sub-basement, Yigal Tumarkin justifying Nazi murder of (religious) Jews. Watch your step, please.” The Jewish State is a formidable but not a flawless book. In his discussion of Israeli writers, Hazony sometimes forgets the difference between imaginative literature and discursive essays or public statements. He also occasionally overreaches himself, as when he drops Aharon Appelfeld into the same political-cultural boat, where I am sure he does not belong, with Amos Oz and David Grossman. In the second part of the book, he lays blame on BenGurion’s Hebrew University antagonists for forming the minds of the post-Zionists, but does not account for the fact that the politically most important post-Zionist, Peres, was the personal protégé of Ben-Gurion himself. On one or two occasions, too, he forgets that ideas are radically defenseless against the uses (and misuses) to which they are put. The fact that Shulamit Aloni assigns Buber responsibility for her views does not necessarily mean he entirely deserves that burden. Although Hazony’s argument for the large role played by Israel’s professoriat in dismantling Labor Zionism is convincing, it cannot be a sufficient cause of current post-Zionism and post-Judaism. The habitual language of post-Zionists, and most especially their hammering insistence on the contradiction between being Jewish and being human, is exactly the language of European Jewish ideologues of assimilation over a century ago. Gidon Samet, one of the numerous resident ideologues of post-Judaism and post-Zionism at Ha’aretz, is not far from the truth when he likens their attractions to those of American junk food and junk music: “Madonna and Big Macs,” Samet says,”are only the most peripheral of examples” of the wonderful blessings of Israel’s new “normalness” (71-72). Of course, whatever we may think of those who in 1900 urged fellowJews to cease being Jewish in order to join universal humanity, they at least were not promoting this sinister distinction in full knowledge of how it would be used by Hitler; the same cannot be said of contemporary Israeli ideologues of assimilation and universalism.


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Most readers of post-Zionist outpourings have little to fall back on except their native mistrust of intellectuals. Thus, when Hebrew University professor Moshe Zimmermann declares that Zionism “imported” antisemitism into the Middle East (11), it requires knowledge (not much, to be sure) of history to recognize the statement as preposterous. But sometimes the post-Zionists are tripped up by overconfidence into lies that even the uninstructed can easily detect. Thus Avishai Margalit, a Hebrew University philosophy professor spiritually close to, if not quite a card-carrying member of, the postZionists, in a New York Review of Books essay of 1988 called “The Kitsch of Israel,” heaped scorn upon the “children’s room” at Yad Vashem with its “tape-recorded” voices of children crying out in Yiddish, ‘Mame, Tate [Mother, Father].’” Yad Vashem is a favorite target of the post-Zionists because they believe it encourages Jews to think not only that they were singled out for annihilation by the Nazis but also—how unreasonable of them!—to want to make sure they do not get singled out for destruction again. But, as any Jerusalemite or tourist who can get over to Mount Herzl will quickly discover, there is no “children’s room” and there are no taped voices at Yad Vashem. There is a memorial to the murdered children and a taperecorded voice that reads their names.23 Margalit’s skullduggery is by no means the worst of its kind among those Israelis involved in derogating the memory and history of the country’s Jewish population. But it comes as no surprise to learn from Hazony that Margalit believes Israel is morally obligated to offer Arabs “special rights” for the protection of their culture and to be “neutral” toward the Jews (13). With such neutrality as Margalit’s, who needs belligerence? In Hazony Israel has perhaps found its latter-day Jeremiah, but given the widespread tone-deafness of the country’s enlightened classes to their Jewish heritage, perhaps what is needed at the moment is an Israeli Jonathan Swift, especially the Swift who in his versified will “gave the little wealth he had/To build a house for fools and mad;/And showed by one satiric touch,/No nation wanted it so much.” I began this essay with statements by J. S. Mill and George Orwell about the role of intellectuals and their ideas in politics, and I shall conclude in the same way. The first statement, by Mill, might usefully be recommended as an aid to reflection by the intellectuals of Israel: “The collective mind,” wrote Mill in 1838, “does not penetrate below the surface, but it sees all the surface; which profound thinkers, even by reason of their profundity, often fail to do...” The

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second statement, by Orwell, seems particularly relevant as the Oslo War rages on: “if the radical intellectuals in England had had their way in the 20’s and 30’s,” said Orwell,”the Gestapo would have been walking the streets of London in 1940.”24 Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

Jerusalem Post, 6 April 1996. Yediot Aharonot, August 6, 1989. Midge Decter, “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” Outpost, May 1996, 7. Kitvei B. Katznelson (Tel Aviv: Workers’ Party of Israel, 1961), VIII, 18. Ruth R. Wisse, If I Am Not for Myself...The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews (New York: Free Press, 1992). Meron Benvenisti, Conflicts and Contradictions(New York: Villard, 1986), 70. New York Times Magazine, 11 July 1982. New York Times, 11 April 1995; “Struggling against Fanaticism,” New York Times, 14 September 2001. Conflicts and Contradictions, 34. Jerusalem Post, 1 December 1990. Ibid. Jerusalem Post, 16 January 1993. The Yellow Wind, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988), 212. Subsequent references to this work will be cited in text. 17 May 1996, New York Times, 17 May 1996. Jerusalem Post International Edition, 15 April 1995. “Egalitarians Gone Mad,” Jerusalem Post InternationalEdition, 28 October 1995. Aharon Megged, “The Israeli Suicide Drive,” Jerusalem Post International Edition, 2 July 1994. Quoted in Moshe Kohn, “Check Your Quotes,” Jerusalem Post International Edition, 16 October 1993. The Arab League contemptuously replied that Israel could become a member only “after the complete collapse of the Zionist national myth, and the complete conversion of historical Palestine into one democratic state to which all the Palestinians will return.” “The Fortress Within,” New York Times, 31 May 1996. “Revolt of the Masses,” New Republic, 24 June 1996. The Jewish State (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 339. Subsequent references to this work will be cited in parentheses in the text. Ten years later, Margalit reprinted this piece in a collection of his essays called Views in Review. There he says he has omitted a sentence from the original essay that “had wrong information in it about the children’s memorial room at Yad Vashem.” But he blames this on “an employee” who misled him. Margalit’s sleight of hand here reveals two things: 1. When he says in his introduction to the book that “I am not even an eyewitness to much of what I write about,” we can believe him; 2. The Yiddish writer Shmuel Niger was correct to say that “we suffer not only from Jews who are too coarse, but also from Jews who are too sensitive.” In The Lion and the Unicorn (1941) Orwell also wrote, “The really important fact about the English intelligentsia is their severance from the common culture of the country....In the general patriotism, they form an island of dissident thought. England is the only great nation whose intellectuals are ashamed of their country.” This, not to put too fine a point upon it, no longer seems true.

4 Edward Said and the Modern Language Association In the spring of 1989, when the intifada was at its height, Professor Edward Said, who holds an endowed chair in English and comparative literature at Columbia University, published an essay in defense of the actions of the PLO, which had been murdering people at a higher than usual rate at the time. The essay included the following passage: When Farouk Kaddumi or Abu Iyad [PLO leaders] say that collaborators would be shot or that “our people in the interior recognize their responsibilities”—passages quoted by Griffin [Robert Griffin of Tel-Aviv University, who had criticized an earlier article by Said on the subject of Zionism]—surely even he must be aware that the UN Charter and every other known document or protocol entitles a people under foreign occupation not only to resist but also by extension to deal severely with collaborators. Why is it somehow OK for white people...to punish collaborators during periods of military occupation, and not OK for Palestinians to do the same?1

This farrago of nonsense in defense of the PLO’s legally sanctioned right to murder its opponents was not surprising, given the well-known character of its author and his political position at the time. Said already had by 1989 a well-established reputation for confidently reciting the most preposterous falsehoods, especially when he wrote about matters touching Jews and Israel. “The historical duration of a Jewish state [in Palestine],” he had written, “was a sixty-year period two millennia ago”2; the Holocaust, he had insisted, served to “protect” Palestinian Jews “with the world’s compassion”3; the Jews, he had asserted, are not really a people because their identity in the Diaspora has been wholly a function of persecution,4 and so on ad nauseam, ad absurdum. Said was also in 1989 still a member of the Palestine National Council and a close advisor to Yasser Arafat5(whom he would later, after the Oslo accords, repudiate for 39

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being “soft” on Israel), and so he might have been expected to defend the PLO’s “right” to murder political opponents. What was surprising was not the content or the truculent and abusive style of the essay, but its location. It was published not in the Nation or Tikkun or Al Ahram, where his political manifestoes usually appeared, but in the spring issue of Critical Inquiry, a journal of literary theory published by the University of Chicago Press. Here, amidst the mouldy futilities that typically fill the pages of this quarterly magazine, was Said’s simmering incendiary charge. People not familiar with the drift of literary criticism in this country during the last twenty years might well have wondered just what place Said’s advocacy of the short and ready way of dealing with “collaborators” had in an ostensibly literary journal. Had the literary theorists who write for and read Critical Inquiry laid aside not only their old copies of I. A. Richards’s How to Read a Page but also the old understanding we once tried to impart to our students of literature as an art meant to encourage moral awareness and humane understanding? After all, it was one thing to allow an official of an international terrorist organization to discourse (as Said had in the past done) on strictly literary subjects, but another to publish his apologia for political murder, an apologia buttressed by “factual” assertions about the UN Charter and “every other known document or protocol” whose absurdity would have been spotted by a normally attentive sixthgrader, but apparently did not perturb the editors of Critical Inquiry. When I published in Commentary a short essay lamenting the fact that Said’s “double career as literary scholar and ideologue of terrorism is a potent argument against those who believe in the corrective power of humanistic values,”4 I was bombarded with acrimonious letters of outrage from Said’s belletristic defenders, and especially those Irving Howe used to call “guerrillas with tenure.” The best known of them, Said’s Columbia colleague and now leading tribune of “international feminism,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, accused me of attacking Said’s “professional distinction” merely because he had used “words for Palestinian solidarity.” Another professor of English, her grammar as shaky as her ethical sense, offered windy panegyrics to this “courageous and compassionate person who [sic] many of us value”; and she added for good measure the allegation that I had argued that Said “must be a terrorist because he wrote about...Joseph Conrad.” The editors of Critical Inquiry pooled their talents to write a group letter unearthing the secret that I had “aligned”

Edward Said and the Modern Language Association

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myself with the political outlook of Commentary. Paul Bové, the editor of another journal of literary theory, Boundary 2, claimed to have uncovered a conspiracy between “pro-Israeli, Zionist forces” and followers of the English poet-critic Matthew Arnold “to defend the exclusion of the powerless from the privileges of the powerful” and (somewhat contradictorily) to wrest “political and cultural authority” from Bové and his friends.6 It was clear from the tone and tenor of this sorry collection of vituperative letters that a very considerable number of the gaggle of pedants and theorists who now “profess” literature at the universities are people who are jealous of literature or even hate it—unless it can serve their political ambitions. The extent to which Edward Said appealed to the political urges of countless professors of literature and language became fully evident when, in 1996, they elected Said as second vice president of the Modern Language Association, thereby putting him in line to succeed (as he did) to the presidency in January 1999. The MLA is the major professional organization in this country (and has members in ninety-nine others) of college teachers of English and foreign languages. It has existed since 1883—its second president was James Russell Lowell—and by now exercises nearly total control over the job market for literature and language positions at colleges and universities. As late as 1964, when Edmund Wilson and Lewis Mumford attacked its editions of classic American writers for pedantry, it had the reputation of a staid, even stuffy group. But it was soon to be politicized to such an extent that it became clear that the Marxism which had so dismally failed as a social and political philosophy had now taken up residence in the universities; whereas Marxists once aspired to take over governments, now they aspired only to take command of the English and foreign language departments—and the MLA. Thirty years have passed since members of the MLA elected one Louis Kampf of MIT, an acknowledged spokesman for “leftist” English professors, to be president of the organization. Acceding to that position in 1971, he provided teachers and critics who never cared much for literature in the first place with a rationale for their hostility to literary studies that has served well ever since—to wit, literature is both a result and an instrument of class oppression. Kampf appealed to the fantasies of countless professors about revolution through the English departments. For the first time since

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the waning of Stalinism in American literary circles, Kampf and the many thousands of MLA members who had made him their spokesman were calling into question the value of literature itself, particularly when there was no utilitarian rationale for reading or studying it. He and his fellow radicals—so he constantly complained—were estranged from the whole English literary tradition because they had discovered that many great writers of the past did not think as the MLA members would have liked them to and—Kampf actually made such complaints with a straight face—Swift and Pope would probably not have allowed Kampf into their homes. But if Kampf looked back to Stalinism he also looked forward to “multiculturalism.” He was wary of giving the “oppressed classes” access to “the cultural treasures of the West” because these (supposed) classics could become “a weapon in the hands of those who rule” and because the oppressed already have “a culture of their own.” Although no subsequent president of the MLA rivalled Kampf for boorishness (or humorlessness), he had succeeded in putting his stamp on the organization. In the 1980s the MLA enthusiastically embraced the new trinity of gender, class, and race, threw out the traditional “canon” of literature, reduced its commitment to traditional scholarship and criticism, and treated dissenters with the intolerance one has come to expect of liberals. During the last decade the MLA has become famous for its involvement in the whole gamut of left-wing causes—sexual politics, Latin American insurrections, Gay and Lesbian Studies (including “Queer Theory”), multiculturalism, victimology, disability studies (recently, tracking down perpetrators of “ableism” nearly superseded the search for sexism, racism, capitalism, classism, homophobia, and looksism). For the School of Dryden and the School of Pope the MLA has substituted (in Harold Bloom’s famous quip) the School of Resentment. Some MLA members who still believed in the integrity, autonomy, and intrinsic value of literature resigned from the organization. I still recall my late colleague Elizabeth Dipple sending an acid letter to MLA—which had asked her to reconsider her resignation—in which she said that, as a Canadian citizen, she was not permitted to belong to foreign political organizations. In 1994 a number of prominent literary scholars unhappy with the new orthodoxies of the MLA formed the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, which within a few years could boast a membership of several thousand. But the great majority of literary insurrectionists found the politicized char-


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acter of the MLA exactly suited to their tastes. Said was an especially worthy continuator of the line of Kampf, vigorously recommending that “Eurocentrism and the set of dominating [and] ethnocentric attitudes that accompany it” be ousted “definitively” from the teaching of literature and, in his own writing, setting an example of political correctness by finding “racism” in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.7 As a novelist friend of mine archly remarked, he was the perfect man for the MLA job: “Let him worry about Jane Austen’s racism while his colleagues discuss the nature of Lesbian orgasm in countless other (delegitimated) Western classics.” Of all the 30,000 members of the MLA, only one took it upon himself publicly to resign from the organization in conscientious protest of the accession of Said to its presidency. This was Professor Jon Whitman, a distinguished medievalist at Hebrew University. His lengthy letter of resignation appeared in the “Forum” section of MLA’s main publication (Publications of the Modern Language Association, or PMLA for short) in January of 1999. It was an act of considerable courage, all the more so for having been written by an academic in the Israeli university ambience, where criticism of Said is a more risky business than it is in America. Whitman’s restrained and dignified letter did not object to Said’s political involvements or to his incessant defamation of the State of Israel (as worse than Nazism) or to his egregious remarks about the Jewish people but to “his public assaults against individuals whose views reasonably differ from his own.” Said’s famously rude, insulting, slanging polemics, Whitman argued, “deeply violate fundamental values repeatedly professed by the MLA. At times such assaults...have passed into acts of aggressive contempt and blatant dehumanization.” Whitman offered a rich and varied collection of Said’s hatchet attacks on opponents, ranging from the aforementioned Griffin to Yale scholar Geoffrey Hartman to leftist political theorist Michael Walzer and a whole gallery of Arabists, including not only Jews like Bernard Lewis but numerous Arab intellectuals like Fouad Ajami. Said’s incivility in public discourse could not, said Whitman, be excused by the passion of his commitment to his (Palestinian) cause. “Others with urgent causes of their own have persisted in seeking a language of civil exchange under severely trying conditions.” Whitman stressed that Said’s was an offense not merely against etiquette but against ethics, that is, “the obligation to engage even adversaries as human beings with a capacity for understanding.”

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Whitman felt obliged to resign from the MLA because he would be misrepresented as soon as Said professed to speak for (or about) him. Said, in his reply, printed in PMLA along with Whitman’s letter, proceeded at once to do the latter, that is, to speak mainly about Whitman rather than the issue he had raised. True, he did (in a rare departure from form) admit to the incivility of discourse of which Whitman had accused him. But he claimed that all instances of it had occurred in his responses to still more uncivil attacks on him. (In fact, nearly all the vituperation cited by Whitman had been in response to compositions overly respectful of Said, even if falling short of the oily sycophancy that he expects from, for example, New York Times interviewers like Janny Scott,8 or NPR acolytes like Scott Simon, or their British colleagues in the Guardian and Observer.) But Said’s letter made clear that this heavily petted intellectual believes any criticism of his views or his manners constitutes an act of lèse majesté meriting summary execution. By way of explaining his bad epistolary behavior in “extremely combative contexts” he cited two exonerating causes: “relentless verbal attacks on me (e.g. Edward Alexander—also a literary scholar—’The Professor of Terror,” Commentary Aug. 1989)” and “the death threats I’ve received or the burning of my office in 1985 by people [Whitman] would perhaps recognize politically.” Thus was my (by this time ten-year old) essay linked by Said to arsonists—to whom he in turn linked Whitman. Nor was this all. Since Said is incapable of conducting any dispute, great or trivial, political or literary, without resorting to ad hominem argument, he accused Whitman of acting out an “oedipal rebellion” against fatherly Said, with whom he had taken undergraduate courses at Columbia College once upon a time. Moreover, alleged Said, Whitman’s stress upon Said’s aggressive incivility was no more than a cover for partisan Zionist hostility toward a Palestinian. Since Said had singled me out as the epitome of “relentless verbal attacks on him” I sent a letter of reply to the PMLA Forum. But I was told by an assistant editor of the journal that it could not be considered for publication “because your name does not appear in the MLA membership records”; should I choose to reinstate my long-lapsed membership (at a cost of $95) my letter could “be considered for inclusion in the May 1999 issue of the journal.” Suspecting a faint touch of irony in this reply to a letter concerning a dispute precisely


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about membership in a Said-ruled MLA, I appealed to the editor in chief of the journal, Professor Martha Banta of UCLA. But she supported the legal ruling of her assistant barring letters from non-members. Whitman fared somewhat better. The arcane regulations of Professor Banta, so he was told, prohibited him from replying to Said’s very personal attack on him because PMLA’s policy prohibits publication of a “letter that continues a Forum exchange in which the writer participated.” But he was allowed to reply to several scurrilous letters (all of which of course continued that exchange) singing the praises of Said and flinging at Whitman the usual epithet—without which many academics would be rendered virtually speechless— of “racist.” Whitman’s carefully reasoned reply dissected the evasive and contorted apologetics of the letters and concluded as follows: “Displaying scorn for professional and ethical norms, Edward Said’s unconscionable record of disparagement and distortion is not only his own problem. As apologetic attitudes toward his record confirm, it is also the acute problem of the organization he publicly represents. The imperious author of the derisive attacks cited in my original letter is now the officially authorized spokesman of the Modern Language Association of America.” By the time this exchange of letters appeared, of course, Said and the MLA had a much bigger problem on their hands: namely, the unmasking of Said, publicized all over the world, as a fabricator of his personal history. In the September 1999 issue of Commentary, Justus Reid Weiner, in an exhaustively researched and massively documented essay entitled “‘My Beautiful Old House’ and Other Fabrications by Edward Said,” demonstrated, beyond any possibility of refutation, that Said’s frequently told parable of his idyllic childhood in Jerusalem until he was driven from his school and dispossessed of his beautiful family house, and his father was deprived of a thriving business by the wicked Zionists, was an elaborately conceived hoax built out of one or two accidental circumstances and a host of inventions. Prior to this revelation of his scholarly fraud perpetrated in several books, the MLA had implicitly declared that neither past membership in a terrorist organization nor flagrant violations of scholarly standards nor incivility of discourse was an impediment to becoming president of the organization. Now it would— or so a naive person might have expected—have to face up to the question of whether blatant disregard for truth-telling, once upon a

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time assumed to be the point of honor, the duty, the sine qua non, of a disinterested scholar, raised any doubts about Said’s fitness to continue in his presidential post. Could it be that the leaders of the MLA would prove as indifferent as Said’s employers at Columbia University to the traditional belief that it is the particular duty of a scholar and teacher, on due occasion, to die for the truth, not his particular privilege to be exonerated for falsehood? The answer was not long in coming. I sent some of the Weiner material to Professor Banta for her editorial reaction. What I got in response was a superciliously condescending message to the effect that she was very glad that I continued to take a keen interest in matters that concerned me—the implication being that this little matter of Said’s scholarly dishonesty could only concern a Jewish zealot. Banta’s superiors at the MLA also professed themselves entirely indifferent to the matter when they were asked by Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, what action they proposed to take in response to the revelation of Said’s prevarications. Writing on behalf of the MLA Executive Council, Professor Linda Hutcheon (who was to succeed Said as president of the organization), disregarded the question of how Said’s documented lack of probity might be relevant to his position as head of an organization devoted to (among other things) probity, and declared that “Members of the Executive Council have read your letter and feel strongly that Edward Said should continue in his position as president of the association.” Her final flourish was mere gibberish about how “judgments about an association’s governance arrangements are generally best made by colleagues in the field.”9 *

*

*

The late Marie Syrkin, a long-time friend of mine, once told me that as you grow older you become more and more inured to the fact that almost nothing you write, however important it seems to you in the heat of composition, makes any great difference to the world. I am aware that nothing I say here is likely to impede the ascent of Said to ever greater celebrity and esteem (or the descent of literary studies to ever greater ignominy and absurdity). Every critique or unmasking of Said has led to intensified celebration of his intellectual virtues and sterling character; every commentary on his disgraceful attempts to blacken the image of Israel—the people and the land—has led to more obsequious fawning on Said by Jews. (In-


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deed, no fierce critic of Jews and Israel has ever been more fully justified than Said in saying that some [one sometimes suspects all] of his best friends are Jews.) Still, I cling to the belief that a true chronicle of events, just like the study of literature, can be an end in itself; and, as the defenders of that tradition of liberal learning betrayed by Said and the MLA used to say, a sufficient remuneration of hours, even years, of labor, though nothing practical come of it. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

“An Exchange on Edward Said and Difference,” Critical Inquiry, 15 (Spring 1989), 641. The Question of Palestine (New York: Times Books, 1979). After the Last Sky (New York : Pantheon, 1986). “Professor of Terror,” Commentary, 88 (August 1989).49-50. In the happier days of his collaboration with Arafat, Said wrote as follows: “The microscopic grasp that Arafat has of politics, not as grand strategy, in the pompous Kissingerian sense, but as daily, even hourly movement of people and attitudes, in the Gramscian or Foucauldian sense, appeared to me in startling relief...” Interview, December 1988. Quoted in Neal Kozodoy, “The Many-Headed Edward Said (with a Cap for Each),” Contentions, February 1989. “‘Professor of Terror’: An Exchange/Edward Alexander & Critics,” Commentary, 88 (December 1989), 2-15. See PMLA, 115 (May 2000), 287 and Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 84-97. The best and most trenchant account of the devastating effect of Said’s work on the academic profession generally and Middle East studies in particular is Martin Kramer’s Ivory Towers on Sand (Washington, D.C.: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2001). See, e.g., Janny Scott, “A Palestinian Confronts Time,” New York Times, 19 September 1998. Letter of 1 September 1999.


5 The Lipstadt-Irving Trial: New Yorker Version In 1961 the New Yorker sent the eminent political thinker Hannah Arendt to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Her account and analysis of the trial first appeared in the February and March 1963 issues of that magazine. The articles were published as a book in May of the same year, with the contentious title Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The book aroused a terrific storm of controversy primarily because it alleged that the Jews had cooperated significantly in their own destruction: “Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership,” Arendt maintained, “almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis.”1Except among her most passionate disciples, it is now generally accepted that Arendt was woefully and wilfully mistaken in this central assertion. At the time she wrote, very little serious historical research had been done on the subject of the Judenrate, the Jewish councils that the Germans established to help them administer the ghettos of Eastern Europe until they were disbanded and their inhabitants deported and murdered. But even to the meager historical material available she paid little attention, preferring to use secondary sources that would lend support to her accusation of Jewish collaboration with the Nazis. The abrasive effect of the book was increased by the fact that it first appeared in the New Yorker—the discussions of mass murder alongside the ads for perfume, mink coats, and sports cars—and that the sections on the Jewish leaders were in a tone that the great scholar Gershom Scholem, Arendt’s old friend, characterized in a letter to her as “heartless, frequently almost sneering and malicious.”2 Irving Howe, for one, was deeply troubled by Arendt’s articles, both by their content and by their location in the New Yorker, a maga49

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zine then infamous for not allowing letters to the editor challenging or refuting articles it had published. Marie Syrkin, one of Arendt’s most trenchant critics, had urged Howe to consider: how many New Yorker readers had ever before cared to read a word of the vast literature about Jewish resistance, martyrdom, and occasional survival during the Holocaust? How many of these readers would ever know that the distinguished Jewish historian, Jacob Robinson, had discovered a huge number of factual errors in Arendt’s articles, which he later enumerated in a page-by-page refutation of her book entitled And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight (1965). Howe was outraged by the fact that Arendt’s articles, which had brought the most serious charges against the European Jews, against their institutions and leaders and character, had been distributed to a mass audience unequipped to judge them critically, and had then been sealed shut against criticism in the New Yorker itself. “For the New Yorker, as for the whole cultural style it represents, the publication of Miss Arendt’s articles disposed, in effect, of the issue: there was nothing more for it to say or allow to be said in its columns, except to defend Miss Arendt in a lugubrious editorial against those who had presumed to notice that she wrote with insufficient scholarship or humane sympathies.” Arendt had branded the Jewish leadership in Europe as cowardly, incompetent, collaborationist; she had accused it of helping the Nazis destroy the Jews of Europe; and she had alleged that if the Jews had not “cooperated” with the Nazis many fewer than six million would have been killed. Responsible and scholarly opponents disputed her factual statements and her conclusions; yet as far as the imperious New Yorker was concerned, “Miss Arendt has the first, the last, the only word.”3 Thus, Howe saw in the Arendt controversy not mainly a Jewish problem, but one of social control and the nature and power of modern journalism. The publication by the New Yorker of April 16, 2001 of Ian Buruma’s account of Hitler-admirer David Irving’s lawsuit in London against Deborah Lipstadt showed that, despite its publication of important work by Aharon Appelfeld, despite its having “broken” the story of Jedwabne, the New Yorker had not quite subdued its Holocaust problem of thirty-seven years earlier. Buruma’s story, perversely titled “Blood Libel,” begins with the nonsensical declaration that “Irving is not so much an outright Holocaust denier as a Holocaust minimizer.”4 This, of course, is to endorse Irving’s claim

The Lipstadt-Irving Trial: New Yorker Version

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without doing so explicitly. It is also to suggest—what the rest of the piece amply demonstrates—that Buruma, the New Yorker’s designated expert on the trial, has not read the very book that occasioned the lawsuit. In that book, Denying the Holocaust (New York: Free Press, 1993), Lipstadt claimed that Irving had graduated in 1988 from Hitler-worshiper to Holocaust-denier; it was that claim that Irving challenged (unsuccessfully) in court. Either there was a Holocaust—that is to say, a systematic German campaign to destroy European Jewry—or there wasn’t; Irving either denied it took place, or he didn’t. To say he “minimized” it is to talk jabberwocky. After this unhappy beginning, Buruma informs his readers that Irving is deemed a “serious,” indeed a “brilliant” historian by “serious admirers,” including such “serious people” as the military historian John Keegan and the journalist Christopher Hitchens. (That omnipresent expert on all matters touching the Jews pronounced Irving “a great historian of Fascism.” Buruma’s favored guide to the whole business, however, is yet another exemplar of “serious reflection,” the “brilliant” D. D. Guttenplan, from whose venomous book The Holocaust on Trial (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001) Buruma borrows the sublimely condescending formulation that “Lipstadt’s concern was that Irving was bad for the Jews.” Guttenplan, in the murky depths of his soul, believes Irving was good for the Jews because he himself shares many, perhaps most, of Irving’s deepest convictions—that the Jews “conspired against him,” that Jews “exploit” the Holocaust, that Zionists “exploit” the Holocaust, that Lucy Dawidowicz “demonized” the Nazis, that the Anti-Defamation League is a spy organization, and so on ad nauseam. He also shares what might be called Irving’s moral style, shamelessly on display in Guttenplan’s description of Deborah Lipstadt as “a woman with a bad back and a New York manner—more Bette Midler than Bess Myerson.” One hesitates to call the self-adoring (and presumably straight-backed and Hollywood pretty) Guttenplan—an American living in London and well-attuned to efflorescent British antisemitism—a gutter journalist; and one hesitates not because he has been employed by the New York Times and Atlantic Monthly and the Guardian to write about the trial, but because sewer journalist seems a more adequate term. Antisemitism has a long history in Europe, but the Holocaust gave it a bad name, even among people who thought it a perfectly respectable piece of bigotry prior to World War II.Now come the Ho-

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locaust deniers, the assorted Butzes, Leuchters, Faurissons, to proclaim that the Nazi form of antisemitism was not that bad after all: so why not give Nazism a second chance? But Buruma thinks that a Nazi revival in Europe is essentially a parochial “Jewish” concern, or what the inimitable Guttenplan would call “a Jewish sideshow,” even now that there are very few Jews in Europe outside of the cemeteries. Buruma also borrows from Guttenplan the equation between sectarian “narrowness” and Jewishness, a nearly fatal speck in Lipstadt’s eye which makes her book “problematic.” (One wonders whether David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, would let pass an equation between being devotedly Catholic and being narrow, or between being devotedly liberal and being narrow.) But it is axiomatic for Buruma as for Guttenplan that dedication to Jewish “causes” such as Holocaust memory and the survival of Israel constitutes “narrowness.”5 And just as Guttenplan, the journalist who’s read a few books, lurks beneath Buruma, the journalist who won’t even read the one he’s writing about, so beneath Guttenplan we find the professorial and (ostensibly) scholarly Peter Novick, whose popular polemic The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999) was his inspiration. Beneath “the lowest deep a lower deep,” as Milton’s Satan observed. Novick, with characteristic delicacy, contended that their Holocaust memory is a Jewish scheme for grabbing “the gold medal in the Victimization Olympics” and for self-aggrandizement at the expense of other victimized peoples. By this point in Buruma’s quaint and curious lucubrations upon the trial, one begins to wonder: how, from this superabundance of “serious” and “brilliant” fellows—Hitchens and Guttenplan and Novick—does so much egregious nonsense arise? Offensive and jejune as this equation between “Jewish” and “parochial” ordinarily is, it requires special obtuseness to apply it to the Holocaust and Israel, Lipstadt’s “sectarian” causes. One is almost embarrassed to have to point out to all these terminally “serious” people that precisely because the Germans cut off Jews from humanity and denied them the right to exist, Jews have since Auschwitz come, in Emil Fackenheim’s words, to “represent all humanity when they affirm their Jewishness and deny the Nazi denial.”6 That is why the foundation of Israel was one of the few redeeming acts of the century of blood and shame just ended. Like many who eschew Jewish “narrowness” for universality, Buruma ends up with a narrowness of his own, in the form of adher-


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ence to the English code of manners. In a way, he is the suitable chronicler of the Irving-Lipstadt trial for a country like England, where disputes about beliefs and ideas are often reduced to distinctions of manners, and traitors who continue to wear their Cambridge ties in Moscow and order their suits from Savile Row elicit much sympathy in intellectual circles. Although at first Buruma seems to mock this anti-intellectual bent as it appears in both Irving and some of his apologists, he finds himself strongly tempted “to share [Irving witness] Keegan’s view of Irving as a class act marred by some crazy ideas” because Irving is excellently dressed and has “a posh accent.” Irving’s historian adversary Richard Evans, by contrast, addressed the court, remarks Buruma, “in the nasal monotone of the outer London suburbs, [and] came across as the kind of state-educated Briton who gets jumpy at the sound of an upper-class voice”(84). This is low-level Anthony Trollope, but what can it possibly tell American readers about the ideological motives of the principals in this conflict? Are Christopher Hitchens’ effusive praise of Irving and compulsion to throw rotten eggs at the “Zionist establishment” (Buruma’s phrase) functions of his father having been in “the middle ranks of the Royal Navy” and of his own education in a “minor” private school? Or do they have something to do with his having graduated with honors from the Alexander Cockburn/Edward Said Institute on the Israeli Question? In fact, the most disingenuous feature of Buruma’s piece (and there are plenty more, like his pretended astonishment that Irving should find Guttenplan “an objective author”) is its silence about the place of Israel in the writings of Holocaust deniers and their apologists and defenders. If Buruma is to be believed, “left-wing radicals” like Hitchens and Noam Chomsky have come to the defense of right-wing Holocaust-deniers mainly because of their devotion to free speech and their desire to épater le bourgeois; but nothing could be farther from the truth. Israel occupies a crucial place in the demonology of Hitchens and Chomsky, just as it does in the world of the deniers. “Chomsky’s defense of [Robert] Faurisson,” wrote Nathan Glazer a few years ago, “is connected to some of Chomsky’s deepest political orientations, in particular his unwavering animus toward the United States and Israel.” 7 Even though Chomsky does not directly endorse the claims of the French Holocaust-deniers, he wishes them well in their endeavors; for he evidently believes that to undermine belief in the Holocaust is to under-

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mine belief in the legitimacy of the state of Israel, which many people suppose (mistakenly) to have come into existence because of Western bad conscience over what was done to the Jews in World War II. As Pierre Vidal-Naquet wrote in his discussion of Chomsky’s collaboration with French neo-Nazis in Assassins of Memory (New York, 1992), the linguist’s zeal on behalf of Faurisson is unlikely to cool until the French republic passes a law requiring that Faurisson’s works be read in public schools and advertised and sold at the entrance to synagogues. But of this seething cauldron of Israel-hatred—not only in Irving but in Hitchens and Guttenplan and Novick and Chomsky 8—the New Yorker’s readers are left blissfully ignorant by Buruma. Although they all follow David Irving in accusing the conspiratorial Jews of “exploiting” the Holocaust to secure the state of Israel, it is in fact they who build upon the destruction of European Jewry to undermine the legitimacy of the State of Israel: first by encouraging the Arabs to hold out for “equal treatment,” that is for a “solution” of their Jewish problem similar to that achieved by the Europeans; second by transferring, whether knowingly or unknowingly, the Nazis’ denial of European Jewry’s right to live to the question of the sovereign state of Israel’s “right to exist.” (Arafat has by now sold to the world that used Buick called “recognition of Israel’s right to exist” at least six times; and the Buick remains undelivered.) Is Buruma’s delicate omission of this topic merely another instance of the laziness of a journalist who can’t take the trouble to read the book that occasioned the trial he is reporting (or bother to check Irving’s allegation that Lipstadt is not a professional historian), or something worse? Whatever the underlying reason, Buruma, like his predecessor of forty years ago, Hannah Arendt, is more disapproving of those vulgar Jews who unaccountably (and so unreasonably!) “reduce” the Holocaust to “good Jews and bad Germans” than he is of Irving and his apologists for their assault on memory and truth. When Primo Levi published his now-classic memoir of Auschwitz in 1947, he already foresaw the assault on Holocaust memory that pervades the work of the aggressive polemicists discussed above. Indeed, he seemed to address them directly in the poem that served as a preface to Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man): “Meditate that this came about:/I commend these words to you./Carve them in your hearts/At home, in the street,/Going to bed, rising;/Repeat them to your children,/Or


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may your house fall apart,/May illness impede you,/May your children turn their faces from you.”

Notes 1. 2.

3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Revised and enlarged edition (New York: Viking, 1964), 125. Scholem also wrote, “Which of us can say today what decisions the elders of the Jews...ought to have arrived at in the circumstances....Some among them were swine, others saints....there were among them also many people in no way different from ourselves, who were compelled to make terrible decisions in circumstances that we cannot even begin to reproduce or reconstruct. I do not know whether they were right or wrong. Nor do I presume to judge. I was not there.”—”Eichmann in Jerusalem: An Exchange of Letters between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt,” Encounter, 22 (January 1964), 52. “‘The New Yorker’ and Hannah Arendt,” Commentary, 36 (October 1963), 319. New Yorker, April 16, 2001. Just how incensed Buruma gets when confronted by anyone who is Jewish in other than a passive, technical sense was evident when, in the New York Review of Books in spring 1998, he tarred Cynthia Ozick with a Nazi brush because she applied the word “deracinated” to Otto Frank. Buruma is, of course, far more circumspect about applying the Nazi label to David Irving. Emil Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History (New York: New York University Press, 1970), 86. Quoted on back cover of Werner Cohn, Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers (Cambridge, Mass.: Avukah Press, 1995). To say nothing of Chomsky’s disciple, Norman Finkelstein, whose book The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London: Verso, 2000) has been a recommended text in neo-Nazi circles and even outsold Novick’s book in Germany. For a cogent analysis of Novick and Finkelstein and a host of other polemicists who seek “to reduce the catastrophe to an ideological construct of vested interests” see Alvin H. Rosenfeld, “The Assault on Holocaust Memory” (New York: American Jewish Year Book, 2001), 3-20.


Part 2 Religion


6 Dr. Arnold, Matthew Arnold, and the Jews “Perhaps the Reverend Dr Arnold, Head Master of Rugby School near Birmingham, would be a proper person. He is one of the most enlightened and liberal of our clergy.” —John Stuart Mill, letter of 6 December 18311

On April 5, 1830, in his maiden speech to the House of Commons, Thomas Macaulay spoke eloquently in favor of Robert Grant’s bill for the Removal of Jewish Disabilities. Alluding to but not actually naming, Nathan Rothschild (who had financed the Allied armies ranged against Napoleon), Macaulay noted that “as things now stand, a Jew may be the richest man in England. . . . The influence of a Jew may be of the first consequences in a war which shakes Europe to the centre,” and yet the Jews have no legal right to vote or to sit in Parliament. “Three hundred years ago they had no legal right to the teeth in their heads.”2 If some members of the House thought it indecent of Macaulay to dredge up this nasty old business about King John extracting gold teeth from Jewish heads, certain opponents of Jewish Emancipation found it still much the best policy. According to J. A. Froude, his biographer, Thomas Carlyle, standing in front of Rothschild’s great house at Hyde Park Corner, exclaimed, “I do not mean that I want King John back again, but if you ask me which mode of treating these people to have been nearest to the will of the Almighty about them—to build them palaces like that, or to take the pincers for them, I declare for the pincers.” Carlyle even fancied himself in the role of a Victorian King John, with Baron Rothschild at his mercy: “Now, Sir, the State requires some of these millions you have heaped together with your financing work. ‘You won’t? Very well’—and the speaker gave a twist with his wrist—’Now will you?’—and then another twist till the millions were yielded.”3 Although Macaulay was a liberal, he did not speak for all liberals, some of whom stood much closer to Carlyle on the Jewish question. 59

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One of these was Thomas Arnold, the famous headmaster of Rugby and intellectual leader of the liberal or Broad Church branch of the Church of England. Arnold set himself against conservatism as the most dangerously revolutionary of principles: “there is nothing so unnatural and so convulsive to society as the strain to keep things fixed, when all the world is by the very law of its creation in eternal progress.”4 When John Henry Newman, leader of the Anglo-Catholic (or “High”) branch of the Church of England, declared that liberalism was “the enemy,” and that by liberalism he meant “the Antidogmatic Principle,” Arnold was among the principal culprits he had in mind, particularly “some free views of Arnold about the Old Testament.”5 But Arnold’s preference of improvement to preservation and of free views to dogma drew up short where the Jews were concerned. He might excoriate the High Church party for having, throughout English history, opposed improving measures of any kind; but he shared with his Anglo-Catholic adversaries the conviction that Christianity must be the law of the land. In 1834 (a year after the Jewish Emancipation Bill had been passed by the Commons but rejected by the Lords) Arnold insisted that he “must petition against the Jew Bill” because it is based on “that low Jacobinical notion of citizenship, that a man acquires a right to it by the accident of his being littered inter quatuor maria [between the four seas, i.e., on the nation’s soil] or because he pays taxes.”6 That indelicate word “littered” suggests that Arnold’s opposition to Jewish emancipation was not purely doctrinal, but had a strong admixture of compulsive nastiness (or worse). Arnold took the view that the world is made up of Christians and non-Christians; with the former, unity was essential, with the latter, impossible or, where possible, deplorable. Parliament should be thanked for having achieved the great liberal desideratum of doing away with distinctions between Christian and Christian. But “I would pray that distinctions be kept up between Christian and non-Christian.” Jews, Arnold argued, had no claim whatever to political rights because “the Jews are strangers in England, and have no more claim to legislate for it, than a lodger has to share with the landlord in the management of his house. . . England is the land of Englishmen, not of Jews. . . . my German friends agree with me.”7 The only way in which Jews could claim English citizenship was by becoming Christians. “They . . . have no claim to become citi-

Dr. Arnold, Matthew Arnold, and the Jews

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zens but by conforming to our moral law, which is the Gospel.” Arnold even speculated about deporting the Jews from England, “to a land where they might live by themselves independent.” Indeed, he would even feel morally obligated to make a financial contribution to the costs of deportation.8 If the Jews were to be accorded citizenship,Arnold feared, they might one day become magistrates or judges, an appalling prospect. Since Arnold’s hostility to Jews was obsessive and irrational, not merely doctrinal, it could burst forth in the most unlikely places. In a letter of May 9, 1836, for example, Arnold appears to be discussing the relative importance of scientific and moral subjects in education, one of his favorite hobby-horses. “Rather than have [physical science] the principal thing in my son’s mind, I would gladly have him think that the sun went round the earth, and that the stars were so many spangles set in the bright blue firmament.” So far, so good, especially since Arnold here sounds a note that will be played, with many embellishments and variations, by his son Matthew. But by the next sentence the eternal enemy has crossed and disturbed his field of vision. “Surely the one thing needful for a Christian and an Englishman to study is Christian and moral and political philosophy, and then we should see our way a little more clearly without falling into Judaism or Toryism, or Jacobinism or any other ism whatever.” 9 Insofar as it can be rationally defined, what Arnold means by “Judaism” in such passages is the High Church Party of John Henry Newman and Edward B. Pusey. Of all the abusive epithets Arnold hurled at his Anglo-Catholic enemies—”the Oxford Malignants,” “White Jacobins,” Romanizers, the most spiteful and (in his view) damning was “formalist, Judaizing fanatics.”10Arnold saw in “the Jews and Judaizers of the New Testament” the forerunners of the High Churchmen of Oxford. (One reason why Arnold took up the defense of the appointment of Renn Dickson Hampden to the Regius Professorship of Divinity at Oxford in 1836 was that Conservatives [including the High Church party] objected to Hampden’s support for the abolition of religious tests for admission to Oxford. Two years later Arnold would insist on the religious test for Jews at London University. Needless to say, he failed to see any irony or contradiction in his position.) When Arnold beheld the Oxford high churchmen contending for the apostolic succession or sacerdotal authority, his mind’s eye was riveted upon “the zealots of circumcision and

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the ceremonies of the law.” It was in the Jewish “enemies and revilers” of Jesus, “and in these alone,” that the Oxford “conspirators” found their perfect prototype. But the Jews serve not merely as polemical counters with which Arnold can taint the Christian purity of the High Church critics of his friend Hampden. His venom against Judaism itself bursts forth more than once in his essay. “The poisonous plant of Judaism was cut down or withered away; but the root was left in the ground; and thus, when its season returned, it sprung up again, and is now growing rankly.”11(So insistent was Arnold in designating the High Church Party as Jewish that there must have been more than a little rebelliousness or filial impiety in his son Matthew’s later [indeed, after his father was dead] insistence that the puritan non-conformist dissenters, the polar opposites of the Oxford Party, were “Hebraizers.”) Arnold’s unswerving conviction that, as he wrote in April 1837, “‘Religion,’ in the king’s mouth, can mean only Christianity,” was central to his idea of education and its establishments. When he found that he could not turn the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (an organization formed in 1827 whose executive committee included such militant secularists as James Mill) into a Christian organization, he abandoned it. Then, as a member of the first senate of the newly chartered London University, Arnold found himself up against “fierce “ opposition to his insistence on examining all students in the New Testament. He had been a supporter of the new university in large part because (unlike Oxford and Cambridge) it was to be open to all Christians, including Dissenters, “which in common speech does not mean, I think, Dissenters from Christianity.” But he soon found that “every single member of the Senate except myself was convinced of the necessity, according to the Charter, of giving the Jews Degrees.”12 A university, in Arnold’s view, can aid the cause of general education only if it has a Christian character.13 This means, among other things, that all students must be examined in the New Testament, for Christianity is no mere branch of knowledge but its very basis. When he tried to imagine examining a Jewish student in a sacred history “of which he would not admit a single fact,” or tried to imagine having to abstain “from calling our Lord by any other name than Jesus” (because for the Jews, of course, Jesus was not “the Christ”), he rebelled. Who would be served by ripping out the core of education? “Are we really for the sake of a few Jews . . . who may like to


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have a Degree in Arts . . . to destroy our only chance of our being even either useful or respected as an Institution of national education? . . . It would be the first time that education in England was avowedly unchristianized for the sake of accommodating Jews. . . .”14 Finding himself the sole member of the London University senate opposed to giving Jews degrees (and exempting them from New Testament examinations), Arnold resigned his position. The objections to Arnold’s position hardly need to be emphasized. His stress on the Christian character of English education and citizenship was inseparable from a racial idea of English character and an obvious distaste for Jewish people. It was clear (even to Arnold himself) that it was not only “a few Jews” (and “one or two Muslims”) who would be excluded from his “non-sectarian” Christian university, but also a large and growing number of home-grown English unbelievers, especially those who had been touched by the criticism of the New Testament which tended to support “Jewish” views of Jesus as an observant Jew who neither was nor aspired to be a Messiah, especially in the sense Christians give to that term. To English Jews, Thomas Arnold must have seemed a Hesperidean dragon trying to preserve what Tennyson called, in a poem of 1832, “the treasure/Of the wisdom of the West” from barbarous intruders, a bigot denying them full rights of academic citizenship. Yet one must note, if only in passing, that Arnold’s exclusiveness rested on a grasp, albeit a partial one, of a truth that Jews eager for “emancipation” and “enlightenment” tended to miss altogether: namely, that when you study Western history and literature, you are studying not just revolutions and poems, but the mind of Western Christianity. Arnold knew, far better than the Jews did, that anyone who studied English history and literature, even at a nonsectarian London University, must perforce submit to a whole world of assumptions that were alien and presumably offensive to him: namely, that the “Jewish God” is a fierce, tribal deity who was supplanted in the progressive movement of the world by the gentle and “universal” Christian one; that the Jews had rejected Jesus’ more “spiritual” teaching because they were attached to the old Law and couldn’t see that his message of love and forgiveness had made it obsolete; that although their Bible had foretold his birth, death, resurrection, etc., they rejected him as their Messiah because they found his claim to divinity blasphemous and condemned him to death; that what Jews call Torah is an “Old Testament” that had to be edited,

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interpreted, complemented, fulfilled, superseded, by the New Testament; and that Jewish collective existence since the inception of Christianity was a prolonged illustration of the spiritual blindness derided in the Gospels.15 Even without the compulsory examination in New Testament that Arnold so much insisted on, the education Jews would receive at London University exacted a price for national citizenship in the form of a distortion and narrowing of Jewish self-definition. Paradoxically, Jews might have been better off, as Jews, had the exclusionist Arnold and not his more liberal and secular opponents won the struggle over university admissions. Nearly a century later, Morris Joseph, addressing Jewish students at Cambridge, pointed to the snares that awaited Jewish undergraduates at the great English universities. These included not only what seemed (especially to those— an ever-growing multitude—ignorant of traditional Jewish learning, from the siddur to the Talmud) to be a wider learning and culture than that of their ancestors, but even the physical surroundings. Gothic architecture, as Pugin had argued in the 1830s, was essentially Christian architecture, even if the buildings were not (and many of them were) chapels. The Jewish student, said Joseph, “is set in an intensely Christian atmosphere, all the more potent because of the historic associations that go to the making of it; and the simple services of the plain brick structure that does duty for a synagogue present a glaring contrast to the impressive form and environment of the public worship of the University churches.”16 The risks that university life entailed for Jews may be measured in part by the experience of those whom Dr. Arnold did not consider “dissenters from Christianity” and to whom churches and chapels, Gothic and otherwise, were not alien. Todd Endelman has pointed out that Nonconformists, that is, Protestants who did not belong to the Established Church, had experiences at universities during the Victorian period that were similar to that of the Jews. They often became Anglicans in order to overcome their sense of being outsiders and to embrace the culture (and career possibilities) of the dominant majority. Catholics, also outside the Established Church, would have faced similar dangers at the English universities, but their church, drawing upon its greater fund of worldly experience and political wisdom, showed no interest in having the universities opened to their young people. Indeed, a writer in the Catholic journal The Rambler said in 1851, “Thanks be to God, the Protestantism of England


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has shut out Catholics from Oxford, and with few exceptions indeed, from Cambridge also.”17 Matthew Arnold “In spite of all which in them and in their character is unattractive, nay, repellent,—in spite of their shortcomings even in righteousness itself and their insignificance in everything else,—this petty, unsuccessful, unamiable people, without politics, without science, without art, without charm, deserve their great place in the world’s regard, and are likely to have it more, as the world goes on, rather than less.”—Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma18

The question of how important and advantageous it is to belong to an established church, wedded to the state, and to be absorbed by its institutions was a central concern of Dr. Arnold’s son, the poet and critic Matthew Arnold. “In my notions about the State,” he wrote to his mother in February 1864, “I am quite papa’s son, and his continuator.”19 Continuator perhaps he was, but with respect to the Jews, in a greatly nuanced and far more complicated and indeed attractive form. In his introduction to Culture and Anarchy Arnold, by way of explaining his opposition to proposals by the religious Nonconformists and Liberal statesmen to disestablish the Church of Ireland (that is, the Church of England in Ireland), argues that the great figures of European civilization have all belonged to or been trained in Establishments. The seminal figures of the English Puritan tradition that wars against the Established Church were, Arnold insists, themselves trained within its pale; and he cites as examples Milton, Baxter, Wesley. He grants but two exceptions to his iron rule, two religious disciplines that “seem exempted, or comparatively exempted, from the operation of the law which appears to forbid the rearing, outside of national Churches, of men of the highest spiritual significance.” These two are the Roman Catholic and the Jewish. But the contradiction is more apparent than real, for these “rest on Establishments, which, though not indeed national, are cosmopolitan.” Catholics and Jews do not, therefore, lose in their intellectual culture what English Nonconformists do by being outside the Established Church; but the States of which they are citizens lose something because the conditions in which Jews and Catholics are reared make them, in a spiritual sense, less than full citizens. (Unlike his father, Matthew Arnold never suggests denying the Jews English citizenship.)

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For Arnold, religious establishments are the existential realizations of the idea of integration in the main stream of human life, than which nothing is more important for a human being. Christianity, he believed, at its inception uprooted its various adherents from their foundations in Jewish and Greek culture, and would have lost itself in “a multitude of hole-and-corner churches like the churches of English Nonconformity” if Constantine had not established it as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century. From that act of establishment (which for Victorians like J. S. Mill marked the decline of Christianity) flowed “the main stream of human life” in Europe; to have been cut off or to have separated oneself from that mainstream is to have been irreparably damaged. To illustrate his meaning, Arnold invokes the speculations of a French Protestant theologian named Albert Réville, who had very “advanced” views for his age. M. Albert Réville, whose religious writings are always interesting, says that the conception which cultivated and philosophical Jews now entertain of Christianity and its Founder, is probably destined to become the conception which Christians themselves will entertain. . . . Now, even if this were true, it would still have been better for a man, during the last eighteen hundred years, to have been a Christian and a member of one of the great Christian communions, than to have been a Jew . . . because the being in contact with the main stream of human life is of more moment for a man’s total spiritual growth, and for his bringing to perfection the gifts committed to him . . . than any speculative opinion which he may hold or think he holds.21

For Arnold, eighteen hundred years of Jewish existence, the collective life of millions of people bound by covenant to the living God and by history to one another, was nothing more than “speculative opinion.” Although Arnold had (as would become evident from his religious books of the following decade) already discarded several of the central doctrines of Christianity, he still in 1869 adhered to a secularized and softened version of the Christian myth. According to this myth, because the Jews had rejected and killed Christ they, in turn, were rejected as God’s chosen people, who in future would be drawn from the Gentiles. The Jews would be preserved but in misery. In one sense Arnold is so far removed from the old Christian myth that he does not even feel it necessary to spring to the defense of the Christian doctrine of Jesus’ Messiahship. Yet his insistence that Jewish existence is mere “speculative opinion,” and that Jewish life since the appearance of Jesus has been a diversionary ripple leading its adherents away from the “main stream” into


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dusty irrelevance shows the tenacity of the myth. Judaism is no longer presented, as traditionally it was in Christian iconography, as blind to the truth, but as blind to the future course of civilization’s development, “inveterate,” as Arnold would say in a later work, “in its fated isolation.”22 But there is another side to all this. Arnold had far more experience of Jews and Jewish ideas than his father did. His position as an inspector of schools frequently brought him to Jewish institutions such as the Jews’ Free School in London, and he treated them with sympathy and respect.23 He came to know several members of the Rothschild family, and was a particular friend (some believe more than a friend) of Lady Louisa de Rothschild. He claimed, in a letter of 23 December 1871, to have made enough progress in Hebrew to want to acquire a Hebrew Bible.24 He read such ex-Jews as Benedict Spinoza and Heinrich Heine with a sharp eye out for their “Jewish” characteristics. Arnold also met and read some of the work of Emanuel Deutsch, known to Arnold and other Victorians open to Jewish influences as “the Talmud man.”25 He wrote to Lady de Rothschild in 1867 that “the abundance of Christian doctrine and dispositions present in Judaism toward the time of the Christian era, and such phenomena as Hillel’s ownership of the Golden Rule, for instance—I knew already, from the writings of the Strasburg school.... But the long extracts from the Talmud itself were quite fresh to me, and gave me huge satisfaction.” He even surmised that the English people, from constitution and training, were far more likely to be brought to “a more philosophical conception of religion” through Judaism than through Hellenism.26 This is one of the rare occasions on which Arnold proposed that English Protestantism was in greater need of leavening by Hebraism than by Hellenism—but one must remember that his correspondent was a Jew, even if one whose intellectual culture was not much above the (modest) level of most English Jews of the upper class. Arnold’s attitude towards the prospect of bringing Jews into the educational system while respecting the integrity of their religious culture stands in sharp contrast to that of his father. He praised the French system of education, for example, because it accepted, without necessarily encouraging, religious division. The spirit of sect, Arnold observed, was noxious, but less noxious than the spirit of religious persecution. The French, with a population of 36 million,

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recognized three, and three only, religious divisions for educational purposes: “Protestantism, Roman Catholicism,...Judaism.” The English system, despite its smaller population of 21 million, recognized no less than seven religious divisions—six Protestant, one Catholic, none Jewish.27 Matthew Arnold’s ideas about the place of Jews in higher education also diverged sharply from his father’s. Again, he praised France as “a model of reason and justice” for its contrast to Prussia, which, “keeping in view the christlichen Grundcharakter of itself and its public schools,” barred Jews from the office of public teacher. “In a country where the Jews are so many and so able, this exclusion makes itself felt.” As for the universities in Prussia, Jews could hold professorships in medicine and mathematics, but not in history or philosophy. “France,” he concluded “is in all these matters a model of reason and justice, and as much ahead of Germany as she is of England.” He applauded the French for leaving religious instruction in their schools to clergymen and “ask[ing] no other instructor any questions about his religious persuasion.”28 But the most striking example of Arnold’s breaking away from the prejudices of his father (and indeed of his class) with respect to Jews and Judaism is to be found in his religious books of the seventies. St. Paul and Protestantism (1871) treats “the great mediaeval Jewish school of Biblical critics” with a respect rare among Victorian Christian writers, mainly because they provide support for Arnold’s view that the Bible is a work of literature and not of (exploded) science. The medieval Jewish commentators enunciated “the admirable maxim,” forgotten for centuries by virtually all Christian exegetes, that “The Law speaks with the tongue of the children of men,—a maxim which is the very foundation of all sane Biblical criticism.”29 In Arnold’s next book, Literature and Dogma: An Essay Towards A Better Appreciation of the Bible, first published in 1873, “Jewish” concerns play a central role. In this formidable work, Arnold tried to convince literate Englishmen that the main prerequisite for understanding the Bible was tact, a talent of literary critics rather than of “scientific” theologians. His declared aim was to demonstrate only the effect of their religion upon the language of the Jews who were the authors and protagonists of the Hebrew Bible. But in pursuit of this aim he spread his net much wider and at least came close to allowing that Jews had (and have) a religious culture and inner world of their own.


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He begins, to be sure, with a linguistic matter, namely, the Hebrew people’s mode of naming God. The name they used, Arnold insists, was “The Eternal” and not Jehovah, “which gives us the notion of a mere mythological deity, or by a wrong translation, Lord, which gives us the notion of a magnified and non-natural man” (182). What they meant by this name, Arnold argues, was “the Eternal righteous, who loveth righteousness.” Arnold thus makes the (Biblical) Jews into a foil for certain “Archbishops of York,” who import into the Bible extraneous notions of moral philosophy when they expand “the Eternal” into “the Eternal cause.” No, the Jews “had dwelt upon the thought of conduct, and of right and wrong, until the not ourselves, which is in us and all around us, became to them...a power which makes for righteousness...and is therefore called The Eternal.”30 Arnold’s crucial encounter with Biblical Judaism comes in the fifth part of chapter I. Here he argues that literary tact and a fair mind will show that all the standard objections to the Hebrew people of the Bible are shallow and mistaken. First, he rebuts those who ask why, if the Hebrews of the Bible really had the unique sense for righteousness that Arnold ascribes to them, “does it not equally distinguish the Jews now?” (196). Using the concessive rhetoric that was a hallmark of his argumentative prose, Arnold allows that “a change of circumstances may change a people’s character”; but he then asks whether “the modern Jews lost more of what distinguished their ancestors, or even so much, as the modern Greeks of what distinguished theirs?” To those who claim that the Jews’ God was not, in fact, the eternal power that makes for righteousness but merely their tribal God, Arnold replies with a question: “How, then, comes their literature to be full of such things as ‘Shew me thy ways, O Eternal, and teach me thy paths; let integrity and uprightness preserve me, for I put my trust in thee! if I incline unto wickedness with my heart, the Eternal will not hear me.’” To Christian polemicists who say that the Jews’ divine law was a merely traditional and external code, kept in superstitious dread of the almighty, Arnold retorts by citing yet more prooftexts: “‘Teach me thy statutes, Teach me thy way, Show thou me the way that I shall walk in, Open mine eyes, Make me to understand wisdom secretly!”31 Why, if the Law already stood, stark and written before their eyes, would they repeatedly say such things? True, Arnold does not (how could he and still remain a Christian?) entirely abandon the spirit of Christian triumphalism over the

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“old” law. Although genuine, the Jewish conception of righteousness was, he says, often “narrow” until the prophets brought into play the more profound elements of personal religion such as conscience. In fact, says Arnold, “Every time that the words contrition or humility drop from the lips of prophet or psalmist, Christianity appears.” 32 This may remind us of Arnold’s contemporary John Ruskin, an intensely Protestant figure, trying to explain his attraction to architectural ornaments on medieval Catholic buildings: he calls them budding Protestantism, trying to burst forth from the constricting formalism of Rome—thereby licentiously applying a religious label he likes to a style of art that he likes. But for the most part Arnold’s discussion is a defense lawyer’s brief for the accused, indeed accursed, Jews. He insists that they had a unique sense of the natural and necessary link between conduct and happiness, and will therefore always be the signal embodiment of this endowment of human nature. Arnold’s ringing declaration is one of the most amazing things in the whole body of his voluminous writings: “as long as the world lasts, all who want to make progress in righteousness will come to Israel for inspiration, as to the people who have had the sense for righteousness most glowing and strongest...”33 Perhaps Arnold is only referring to the Jews of the Bible here, but there are also hints that—whether rightly or wrongly—he was intrigued by the possibility that there was more than a thread of continuity between those Jews of long ago and the politically debased Jews whom his father wanted to harry out of the country. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in his Table-Talk entry for August 14, 1833: “The two images farthest removed from each other which can be comprehended under one term, are, I think, Isaiah—’Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth!’—and Levi of Holywell Street—‘Old Clothes!’—both of them Jews, you’ll observe.” Coleridge’s conclusion, rendered in a burst of Latin, was immane quantum discrepant (how great is the difference). Arnold, to his credit, could never be quite sure that it was; and he was more likely than Coleridge to know that Levi could read Isaiah in the original. Notes 1. 2.

Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill: 1812-1848, ed. F. E. Mineka (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 1963), I, 92. G. O. Trevelyan, Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), I, 148.

Dr. Arnold, Matthew Arnold, and the Jews 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

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Montagu Frank Modder, The Jew in the Literature of England (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1960), 171-72. Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D. D., 2 vols. (London, 1844), I, 258-59. J. H. Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), Chapter one and the Note on Liberalism. Stanley, Life of Arnold, I, 341. Ibid., II, 32-33. Ibid., II, 32, 35. Ibid., II, 37. “The Oxford Malignants and Dr. Hampden”, in Victorian Literature: Prose, ed. G. B. Tennyson and D. J. Gray (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 17. “Oxford Malignants,” 18-19. Stanley, Life of Arnold, II, 84, 94, 105. It might be interesting to compare the liberal Arnold’s views on this matter with those of his “conservative” adversary John Henry Newman, who in Idea of a University is at pains to point out that the liberal education imparted by a university produces not the Catholic or the Christian but the gentleman. (This is not to say that Newman was any more inclined than Arnold to countenance the presence of Jews in the university. London University, in fact, was for him the epitome of what a university should not be partly because it admitted Jews and Dissenters.) Stanley, Life of Arnold, II, 93. See on this subject Cynthia Ozick’s “Still Another Autobiography of an Assimilated Jew,” New York Times, 28 December 1978. Todd Endelman, Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History, 1656-1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 109. Ibid., 112. Literature and Dogma (1873), in Dissent and Dogma, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), 199. Letters of Matthew Arnold: 1848-1888, 2 vols. in 1,ed. G. W. E. Russell (London and New York: Macmillan, 1900), I, 263. Culture and Anarchy, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1932), 13-14. Ibid., 29-30. Democratic Education, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), 143. See, e.g., his speech at a banquet for the school on May 21, 1884, printed in the Appendix to volume X of Super’s edition of Arnold’s prose works. Letters of Matthew Arnold, II, 86. Ibid., II, 59. Ibid., I, 434. Democratic Education, 142-43. Schools and Universities on the Continent, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964), 232. St. Paul and Protestantism, in Dissent and Dogma, 21. Literature and Dogma, in Dissent and Dogma, 183. Ibid., 196-97. Ibid., 197. Ibid., 199.


7 George Eliot’s Rabbi In l848 a twenty-nine year old Englishwoman named Mary Ann Evans, infuriated by the idea of “race fellowship” among Jews that she thought she detected in Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Coningsby, told a friend that she was “almost ready to echo Voltaire’s vituperation. I bow to the supremacy of Hebrew poetry, but much of their early mythology and almost all their history, is utterly revolting. Their stock has produced a Moses and a Jesus but Moses was impregnated with Egyptian philosophy, and Jesus is venerated and adored by us only for that wherein he transcended or resisted Judaism. . . . Everything specifically Jewish is of a low grade.” This being so, she could even ruminate about how “Extermination . . . seems to be the law for inferior races,” including “even the Hebrew caucasian.”1 Exactly one hundred years later, when the state of Israel was established, each of its three major cities—Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv, and Haifa—had a street named after George Eliot, the pseudonym by which Mary Ann Evans had become famous as a novelist. In nineteenth-century England, Mary Ann Evans’ disparaging and spiteful view of Jewish civilization and Jews was hardly unusual. Macaulay, in his April l830 address to the House of Commons on the second reading of the (unsuccessful) bill for the Removal of Jewish Disabilities, reminded his colleagues who disputed the Jews’ legal right to political participation that “three hundred years ago they had no legal right to the teeth in their heads.”2 Parliamentarians who found Macaulay’s allusion too cryptic could have been enlightened by Thomas Carlyle. He was reported by his friend J. A. Froude to have remarked, while standing in front of Rothschild’s house at Hyde Park Corner: “I do not mean that I want King John back again, but if you ask me which mode of treating these people to have been the nearest to the will of the Almighty about them—to build them 73

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palaces like that, or to take the pincers for them, I declare for the pincers.” Then, says Froude, Carlyle imagined himself to be King John, with the Baron on the bench before him: “Now, Sir, the State requires some of these millions you have heaped together with your financing work. ‘You wont? Very well’—and the speaker gave a twist with his wrist—’Now will you?’—and then another twist, till the millions were yielded.”3 In l833, Coleridge, who usually prided himself on the ability to reconcile apparently discordant qualities, could find no relation between the Jew of the Hebrew Bible and the Jew of modern England. “The two images farthest removed from each other which can be comprehended under one term, are, I think, Isaiah—‘Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth!—and Levi of Holywell Street—’Old Clothes!’—both of them Jews, you’ll observe.”4Coleridge was the spiritual father of the Liberal or Broad Church movement, led in early Victorian England by Dr. Thomas Arnold of Rugby. In Arnold’s view, Jews had no right to full citizenship or to the privileges attendant upon it, such as entry to the universities. England, he argued, was the land of Englishmen, not of “lodgers” who had claims to nothing more than honorary citizenship. “‘Religion,’ in the king’s mouth,” Arnold insisted, “can mean only Christianity.”5 He was infuriated by the notion of a Jew serving as one of the Governors of the Christ’s Hospital School, and in l838 resigned his position on London University’s board of examiners rather than countenance the admission of Jews to the university whose “non-sectarianism” had, ironically, been such a scandal to High Church writers like John Henry Newman. In that very year Dickens completed publication of OliverTwist, in which the atavistic potentialities of the debate on the Jewish question were fully realized. Carlyle might hearken back to the days of King John, but Dickens, in the figure of Fagin, dredged up—in the midst of a “modern” novel, replete with knowing sociological allusions to slums, criminals’ habits and jargon—nearly every antisemitic nightmare of Christendom: “the Jew” (this with hammering insistence) as Satanic reptile, Judas, Christ-killer, thief, corrupter of children, sexual pervert. About the only thing Dickens left out of his portrait was the belief, widely and tenaciously held by Christian theologians into the seventeenth century, that Jewish males menstruated. That Dickens could do this without, apparently, harboring any malicious intention towards Jews, shows the depth of subterranean feel-

George Eliot’s Rabbi

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ing that might lurk beneath debates in parliament or the universities over the place of real, living Jews in modern society. Some even expressed doubts as to whether these Jews were truly alive or merely akin to the fossils of which Victorian geologists were writing. Newman was fond of quoting Origen’s complacent declaration that “in the fullness of time, Judaism came to naught”6; and he wrote a poem called “Judaism” to express his view that the Jews were spiritually dead, even if physically alive. “O Piteous race! Fearful to look upon,/Once standing in high place, Heaven’s eldest son/ O aged blind Unvenerable.” In Loss and Gain, his autobiographical novel of l848, Newman heaped scorn on Jews who aspired to rebuild Jerusalem as a cabal of mercenary and ridiculous speculators. Matthew Arnold, the disciple both of Newman and of Newman’s rival in the Church of England, his father Thomas Arnold, had a richer appreciation both of Jewish history and Jewish theology than either of his masters. He placed a high value upon the religious experience of the people Israel as the unique source of righteousness, but deplored their “insignificance in everything else,—this petty, unsuccessful, unamiable people, without politics, without science, without art, without charm.”7 Gradually, in the course of the Victorian period, English Jews achieved a level of legal tolerance, emancipation, and integration that far exceeded what most of their cousins on the continent had.8 But the imperious, condescending view of Jewish culture, the haughty contempt for what Carlyle (in Sartor Resartus and elsewhere) called “Hebrew old clothes,” and for the inner, spiritual life of Jews continued to infect the “instructed” classes. How, then, did Mary Ann Evans, almost alone among her contemporaries, surmount it? Although her essays for the Westminster Review that touch on religion, and especially on the preachers of her own family’s evangelical persuasion, had been acrid in their irony, she no sooner began to write fiction (her first book, Scenes of Clerical Life, appeared in l857) than she ceased to speak contemptuously of any religious faith. In December l859 she wrote that “I have no longer any antagonism towards any faith in which human sorrow and human longing for purity have expressed themselves. . . . Many things that I should have argued against ten years ago, I now feel myself too ignorant, and too limited in moral sensibility, to speak of with confident disapprobation.”9

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Not the least important of these things was the Jews. In l858 she and her beloved G. H. Lewes, traveling in Europe, found that “the most interesting things” in Prague were the Jewish burial-ground (Alter Friedhof) and the old (Altneu) synagogue. The multitude of quaint tombs in the cemetery struck her as the existential realization of Jewish history, “the fragments of a great building . . . shaken by an earthquake.” But ruins were not the whole story. “We saw a lovely dark-eyed Jewish child here, which we were glad to kiss in all its dirt. Then came the sombre old synagogue, with its smoked groins, and lamp forever burning. An intelligent Jew was our cicerone, and read us some Hebrew out of the precious old book of the law.”10 But the real turning point in George Eliot’s attitude towards “everything specifically Jewish” came in l866, when she met Emanuel Deutsch. Her evangelical background and her translations of D. F. Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu and Spinoza’s Ethics had inevitably involved her in Jewish history and thought, yet done little to dislodge her from the view that “to say ‘Jewish philosopher’ seems almost like saying a round square.”11 Deutsch, profoundly immersed in the most “specifically Jewish” thing in the world, the Talmud, was a revelation to her. Born at Neisse in Prussian Silesia in l829, Deutsch studied at the gymnasium for two years, but then came under the tutelage of an uncle in Mislowitz who was a rabbi and a Talmudic scholar. After becoming bar-mitzvah, he resumed his gymnasium studies, and then proceeded to the University of Berlin, where he devoted himself chiefly to theology while continuing his Talmudic studies. He was a living embodiment of Arnold’s ideal union of Hebraism and Hellenism. “As I grew up,” Deutsch recalled in a memoir of l872, “Homer and Virgil stood side by side on my boyish bookshelf with the Mishnah and the Midrash. . . . Before I was inured in the Akademe of Plato and his friends, it was deemed well to steep my soul for a time absolutely in that ocean called the Talmud . . . and . . . I learnt to contrast the fierce lightnings that shook the rafters of Sura and Pumbeditha with the mild, serene, ironically smiling lips of Sokrates.”12 In Berlin Deutsch mastered the English language and its literature; and in l855 he moved to England and became an assistant in the library department of the British Museum. During the next eighteen years, he published hundreds of articles on a large variety of oriental and semitic subjects, ranging from the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Moabite Stone to Islam and Judeo-Arabic meta-


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physics. His ultimate ambition, however, was to produce a treatise on the Talmud. In October l867 Deutsch leaped into fame with a lengthy general article on the Talmud in the Quarterly Review. Since it recounted the Talmud’s history of persecution and censorship in Christendom, it was widely attacked. But, perhaps because of its sweet-tempered insistence on the brotherhood of Judaism and Christianity in late antiquity, it was also generously celebrated. The British Museum was pestered with inquiries about Deutsch; the Viceroy of Egypt invited him to the opening of the Suez Canal; flattering invitations reached him to visit America and deliver lectures; one of the Royal Princesses was delighted to secure the first manuscript page of the article; Matthew Arnold proudly reported to his good friend Lady de Rothschild in a letter of August 1868 that “I met Mr. Deutsch the other day, and had a long talk with him about Hebraism and Hellenism.” He was even invited to dine with the prime minister. Disraeli, who took office in February 1868, declared (with characteristic exaggeration on this particular topic) that Deutsch’s article “proves that everything gentle and sublime in the religious code of the New Testament is a mere transcript from the so-called oral law of the Jews.”13 But all the acclaim led, so it seemed, to nothing. Some of the very people who heaped praise upon Deutsch for an essay that carefully explained the true nature of the Sabbath, of the Pharisees, of the Talmudic subversion of the lex talionis, of the abundant mercifulness of the God of Jonah, were soon speaking of the Jewish Sabbath as a day of grim austerity emulated by English Puritanism, of the Pharisees as a sect of literalist, narrow-minded hypocrites, of “the Jewish belief in an eye for an eye,” and of the “Jewish God” as a vengeful tyrant superseded by the Christian God of Love. Matthew Arnold may have truly enjoyed talking with Deutsch about his Talmud article in August l868, but the joy did not keep him from writing disparagingly, just a few weeks later, in his preface to Culture and Anarchy, of all post-biblical Jewish existence as little more than a “speculative opinion.”14 Most galling to Deutsch was the refusal of the British Museum itself to grant institutional recognition of his labors by forming a semitic department. A document signed by the Dean of Westminster, Lord Strangford, Lane Layard, George Rawlinson, and other prominent men of learning petitioning parliament to establish a post for Deutsch as keeper of semitic antiquities at the British Museum was quietly shelved.

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The only lasting effect that Deutsch’s labors had was on George Eliot’s writing about Jews and Zionism. Indeed, it was she who urged him to consider only lasting effects and to ignore both the attacks and celebrations provoked by what she called his “glorious article.”15 Work steadily, she advises him in December l867, “without reference to any temporary chit-chat . . . the noise of admiration is always half of it contemptible in its quality . . . and the spite, the headshaking, the depreciation . . . are the muddier reflux of muddy waters.” 16 For this sage counsel, Deutsch reciprocated with weekly Hebrew lessons for the gloomy sibyl of English fiction. Deutsch’s knowledge of Amharic and its cognate languages brought an invitation to accompany the British Army to Abyssinia, where, it was thought, valuable manuscripts and other antiquities might be discovered. He declined the proposal, but it made him think seriously enough about travel in the East to respond with alacrity to a British Museum commission that would enable him to visit the Holy Land in spring l869. “The East: all my wild yearnings fulfilled at last!”17 A friend described how Deutsch “was himself astonished at the emotion that choked him when he found himself among his own people at the Wailing place in Jerusalem, and he could seldom speak of it without tears.”18 At the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street on May 29, l869, he began by speaking of the past, of “the touching sight of the faces, with their thousand years of woe written in them that lean against the wailing-place on the walls of Jerusalem.” But he concluded by speaking of the future, insisting that the destiny of “the once proscribed and detested Jews . . . is not yet fulfilled.”19 Within days of his return, Eliot and Lewes were eager to hear for themselves of his reactions to Palestine. “Thrice welcome! Keep next Sunday for us. . . . We shall not be satisfied with a small allowance of talk.”20 In fact, since Deutsch now began to dine with the Leweses once a week, they received a very ample allowance, whose contents we can best construe in the character of Mordecai in Daniel Deronda. Not long after his return from Palestine, Deutsch began to suffer terribly from the cancer that would kill him in l873, after three years which, in the words of a friend, “consisted of nothing but a series of medical and surgical appliances, some of inconceivable horror.”21 Eliot, guided by her profound sense that it is not the utilitarian pursuit of happiness but the idea of a community of suffering that provides the basis of ethical doctrine, felt personally called to keep Deutsch from suicide during these years. Speaking to him as “a fel-


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low Houyhnhnm who is bearing the yoke with you,” she tells her “dear Rabbi” that “I have been ailing and in the Slough of Despond too,” and even intimates that she herself might once in her life have contemplated self-destruction: “Remember, it has happened to many to be glad they did not commit suicide, though they once ran for the final leap, or as Mary Wollstonecraft did, wetted their garments well in the rain hoping to sink the better when they plunged.”22 Deutsch did not put an end to himself; but neither did he live to know real joy or satisfaction. “I have certain words in my possession which have been given me that they might be said to others, few or many. . . . I know also that I shall not find peace or rest until I have said my whole say, and yet I cannot do it. . . . For a long time now I have been frozen in every way. . . . As I work on with my metaphysical Talmud-developments, and see how wasted all that grace, and keenness, and catholicity of the minority has been on the majority . . . I feel what many a braver, stouter heart has felt: the futility of my own self-sacrifice.”23 As he declined rapidly from cancer, his friends collected money to fulfill his desire for a second trip to the Holy Land. But by the time he reached Egypt, he sensed that “all this is the last flicker!” On his deathbed, Deutsch was overwhelmed by the tragic irony of his life: “A whole flood of thoughts old and new . . . storm in upon me with every breath.”24 Yet the tomb-world of Egypt reminded him that no man, and he least of all, can stop the decay of his body. He died in Alexandria on l2 May l873, and was buried in the city’s Jewish cemetery. George Eliot heard the news as she was planning Daniel Deronda. She, who had urged Deutsch to view his work under the aspect of eternity, now took upon herself the obligation to prolong his existence in the Jewish, more specifically Zionist, ambience of the novel. Her friend George Grove, the musicologist and founder of the Palestine Exploration Fund, thought he saw Deutsch in the figure of Mirah: “You must have thought of our dear Deutsch when you conceived her character. . . . My memory welled up.”25 But it is far more likely that Eliot endowed Deutsch with a life beyond life in the fictional character of Mirah’s brother, Mordecai, “a man steeped in poverty and obscurity, weakened by disease, consciously within the shadow of advancing death, but living an intense life in an invisible past and future, careless of his personal lot, except for its possibly making some obstruction to a conceived good which he would never share except as a brief inward vision.”26

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Eliot’s identification with Deutsch was intensified by the hostile reaction of Victorian intellectual circles to precisely those parts of Deronda that reflected his influence. She told Harriet Beecher Stowe, As to the Jewish element in ‘Deronda,’ I expected from first to last in writing it, that it would create much stronger resistance and even repulsion than it has actually met with. But precisely because I felt that the usual attitude of Christians towards Jew is—I hardly know whether to say more impious or more stupid when viewed in the light of their professed principles, I therefore felt urged to treat Jews with such sympathy and understanding as my nature and knowledge could attain to. . . . Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called “educated” making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty in insulting? . . . I find men educated at Rugby supposing that Christ spoke Greek. To my feeling, this deadness to the history which has prepared half our world for us . . . lies very close to the worst kind of irreligion. . . . It is a sign of the intellectual narrowness— in plain English, the stupidity, which is still the average mark of our culture.27

Ultimately, however, it was Deutsch’s hope and not his despair that was transmitted to the future by Eliot. We see its reflection in Daniel Deronda and “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” a contentious essay against English liberals who are keen to promote every nationalism except the Jewish one. Eager to celebrate the dignity of populations of which they have never seen a single specimen, English liberals, she alleges, “sneer at the notion of a renovated national dignity for the Jews,” and impatiently desire (just as Mary Ann Evans once did) the “complete fusion” of the Jews with the people among whom they are dispersed. 28 Deutsch’s hope found more private expression in Eliot’s notebooks, filled not only with her laborious notes on piel and pual, hiphil and huphal that she took after each Hebrew lesson with Deutsch, but with such visionary musings as the following: “Mother singing Hebrew prayers & texts over her sleeping infant. How a language may sleep, & wake again!”29 The most illustrious reawakener of that “sleeping” language, Eliezer ben-Yehuda, describes in his autobiographical memoirs how his “mad” dream of Jewish national revival made him a pariah among his fellow university students in Russia. “But one day [in l878] one of them told me of a character in an English novel, who had the very same dream. After I read the novel, Daniel Deronda, in a Russian translation, several times [!] I decided to leave the University of Dynaburg for Paris, where I would learn all that was necessary for my work in Eretz Yisrael.”30 Deutsch had concluded his essay on the Talmud with a little anthology of its most telling proverbs, culminating with an adage that


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“solemnly, as a warning and as a comfort . . . strikes on our ear: ‘And it is not incumbent upon thee to complete the work.’”31 Dying in Egypt and, like many another Victorian, beckoning towards a promised land that it would not be his to enter, Deutsch would have been justified in finding comfort in that Talmudic consolation; and one hopes that he did. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Life of George Eliot, ed. J. W. Cross (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 87-88. (Cited below as Cross.) G. O.Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), I, 148. M. F. Modder, The Jew in the Literature of England (New York: Meridian Books, 1960), 171-72. Coleridge, Table-Talk, 14 August 1833. Arthur P. Stanley, Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold,D.D., 2 vols. (London, 1884), I, 341; II, 32, 84. J. H. Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, chapter I. Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma (1873). Italy, after it eliminated the ghetto in 1870, was a notable exception. Its Jews then quickly achieved a level of acceptance not matched in other European countries. Italian Jews served as general, cabinet minister, and prime ministers. Cross, 326. Ibid., 274-75. Ibid., 84. Emily Strangford, ed., Literary Remains of the Late Emanuel Deutsch, with a Brief Memoir (London: John Murray, 1874), viii. Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1848-1888,2 vols. in 1, ed. G. W. E. Russell (London and New York: Macmillan, 1900), II, 458; Stanley Weintraub, Disraeli: A Biography (New York: Truman Talley Books/Dutton, 1993), 453. Preface to Culture and Anarchy (1869). Cross, 500. Selections from George Eliot’s Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1985), 339. Literary Remains, xi. Ibid. ”Notes of Three Lectures on Semitic Culture,” Literary Remains, 159, 169. Selections from George Eliot’s Letters, 364. H. R. Haweis, “Emanuel Deutsch: A Memorial,” Contemporary Review, 23 (April 1874), 785. Selections from George Eliot’s Letters, 389-90. Literary Remains, xiii. Ibid., xviii-xix. Letters of George Eliot, 469. Daniel Deronda, chapter 42. Letters of George Eliot, 7 vols., ed. Gordon S. Haight (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1954-55), VI, 301-02. “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” in Miscellaneous Essays (New York: Doubleday, 1901), 421-22.

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29.

Some George Eliot Notebooks, vol. III, Notebook Ms. 711 (Salzburg: Institut für Englisch Sprache und Literatur, 1980), f. 65. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, The Dream and Its Realization (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Gesher, 1974), 16-17. Literary Remains, 58.

30. 31.

8 A Talmud for Americans What is a Shas? Readers of the daily press who follow accounts of the sordid post-election bargaining of Israel’s small political parties may reply: an ultra-Orthodox Sephardi political party whose Knesset members can make and break governments. Religiously observant Jews are far more likely to reply: Shas is an abbreviation of the two Hebrew words for “six orders,” that is to say, the six major sections into which the sixty-three tractates of the Mishnah (the first written summary of the Oral Law, ca. 200 C.E .) and the Gemara (commentary on the Mishnah) are divided, the two together, Mishnah and Gemara, making up the Talmud. Who among “enlightened” Jews a century ago could have predicted that in the Zionist state of Israel a “Talmud party” would determine governments? For that matter, who could have imagined that in April 1990, 20,000 Jews would have gathered in New York’s Madison Square Garden to celebrate the completion (siyyum) of all 2,711 folio pages of the Talmud in a method of study called Daf Yomi (daily page)? Smaller commemorations were held in Israel and in Europe of this ninth completion of the cycle since the practice was synchronized in Vienna in 1923 in the hope of keeping Talmud study alive in the modern era. Between dying and dead, the novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer has said, is a long way in Jewish history. Singer was referring mainly to the fate of the Yiddish language, but he might have said the same of the study of Talmud. Modern Jewish writing, from the mid-nineteenth century onward, is full of accounts of rejection of the Talmud by Jews advancing (or was it withdrawing?) toward Emancipation and Enlightenment. In many a Yiddish story, a son’s rebellion against his father and the world of his fathers will begin sartorially and tonsorially, with a shortening of his jacket and hair, proceed to a 83

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shortening of his memory, and culminate by his hiding a short French or Yiddish novel in the folds of a huge volume of the Talmud that he is (apparently) studying. Singer himself recalls, in an autobiographical tale called “Guests on a Winter Night,” how his older brother Israel Joshua (later, as I. J. Singer, also to become an eminent Yiddish novelist) revolted against the traditional piety of his father. “Joshua had become enlightened...he refused to study the Talmud....How much longer were [the Jews] going to study the law concerning the egg that was hatched on a holiday? Europe, my brother said, had awakened, but the Jews in Poland were still in the Middle Ages.” 1 It may well be the voice of his dead older brother that we hear in all those Singer characters who complain that (as the hero of his novel The Slave puts it) “One law in the Torah generated a dozen in the Mishnah and five dozen in the Gemara; [and] in the later commentaries laws were as numerous as the sands of the desert....If this continued, nothing would be kosher. What would the Jews live on then? Hot coals?”2 Israel Joshua Singer died young, in 1944, but he lived long enough to see that it would have been far better had Europe remained asleep. European “enlightenment” terminated in a new dark age, compared with which the era of Talmudic ascendancy among the Jews had indeed been an age of light. The secular wisdom that had enraptured Jewish enlighteners looked good in fair weather but not in foul. As a character in the work of another eminent Yiddish writer, Chaim Grade, said, “There came in the West a booted ruler with a little mustache, and in the East a booted ruler with a big mustache, and both of them together struck the wise man to the ground.”3 Grade had witnessed the 1939 occupation of Vilna by the forces of the ruler with the big mustache. But on September 1, 1943, the forces of the ruler with the little mustache surrounded the ghetto of Vilna. Their aim was to remove the remaining few thousand Jews to the death camps. The Jewish resistance fighters, unable to find sand in the ghetto to make the sandbags needed for defense, resorted to Jewish books for the purpose. These existed in abundance in a city long known to East European Jews as the Jerusalem of Lithuania because of its great scholars and educational institutions. Among the latter was a 200-year-old library whose director, a maskil (enlightener), hanged himself rather than witness the destruction of his books by the Nazi conquerors.

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But this last director of the Vilna Jewish library “was wrong,” wrote Abba Kovner, commander of the Vilna resistance fighters and later to become a distinguished Hebrew poet in Israel. On that morning of 1943, I gave the order to collect the remaining books and to use them to provide cover for the fighters....There were the classics, in the original and in translation. There were the avant-garde Yiddish poets, but their books were too thin and in soft covers. There were also the books of Sholem Aleichem, who taught us to laugh with one eye and cry with the other. The central pillars, however, were the great volumes of the Talmud in their brown leather binding. Only a few blocks away [at the publishing house of Romm] the Talmud had been printed continuously for the last 150 years.

In 1975, thinking back, Kovner claimed to see in this episode a revelation of the true meaning of “life in writing,” hayyim she-bikhtav, the only phrase in classical Hebrew that signifies literature. So far from being, as some of its detractors called it, the Book of the Dead, or what yet another great Yiddish writer, I. L. Peretz, called “the Diasporal rope that winds from generation to generation around the Jewish neck and throttles and almost chokes him out of his breath”5 the Talmud epitomized hayyim she-bi-khtav. Certainly in Vilna, the great volumes of the Romm edition of the Talmud had preserved life, if not exactly in the way envisioned by the Talmudic sages from 30 B.C.E. to 500 C.E. I was reminded of Kovner’s story about the volumes of the Talmud as “the central pillars” of Jewish self-defense by the very first sentence of Adin Steinsaltz’s introduction to his reference guide to the study of the Talmud: “Just as the Bible is the foundation of Judaism,” writes Steinsaltz, “the Talmud is the central pillar supporting the entire spiritual and intellectual edifice of Jewish life.”6 This belief in the Talmud as the distinguishing mark of Jewish existence is very old, among Christians as well as among Jews. According to an ancient midrash, all the nations might at some time in the future claim that they too were Jewish: “Then the Holy One, Blessed be He, will say: he who holds my mystery in his hand, he is truly Israel. And what is this mystery?—it is the Mishnah.”7 The Hebrew Bible may have been “converted” by the imperial Christian intellect into the “Old Testament,” but the Talmud remained incorrigibly Jewish, as recalcitrant and unswallowable as the Jews themselves. “In my entire life, no Jew,” insisted the Christian jurist-scholar Johannes Reuchlin in 1510, “has ever been baptized who has understood the Talmud or has even been able to read it.”8 Perhaps this

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is why the Popes, starting in the thirteenth century (and often urged on by Jewish apostates), ordered the burning of the Talmud, and why milder, Protestant regimes amended and censored it. But enlightenment, secularization, and modernity proved far more potent than popes and censors in separating Jews from the Talmud. I hope I am not guilty of impropriety in offering myself as an illustration of how far Jewish life in this country has drifted from Talmudic foundations. In the Orthodox school that I attended as a child in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, on weekday afternoons and Sunday mornings, we studied Hebrew, Yiddish, Chumash (Bible), but not Talmud except insofar as we heard tales (which I much enjoyed) of the great Talmudic sages like Hillel, Shammai, and especially Akiva. My only exposure to Talmud came once a year, on the morning before the first Passover seder, when, at the behest of my grandfather, I would rise at what then seemed an ungodly hour of the morning to attend a siyyum (the completion of study of a tractate of the Mishnah) in order to be exempted from the fast that is otherwise incumbent on first-born sons on that day. Later, as an undergraduate English major at Columbia, I, of course, came upon many ignorant, offensive, and ridiculous allusions to the Talmud. These ranged from Marx’s assertion that capitalism is nothing other than the Talmud rewritten in the “real” language of the Jews, which is neither Hebrew nor Yiddish but “haggling,”9 to the solemn pronouncements of literary critics about the “Talmudic” complication and layers of meaning in any work of more than ordinary complexity written by a Jewish novelist.10 Ignorant though I may have been, one thing I did know was that Talmudic learning could not be acquired genetically, and that Jewish writers who had never turned a folio of Talmud could hardly be “Talmudic” in their lucubrations or style. Like many other students of English at Columbia in the fifties, I was familiar with only one example of serious literary criticism arising from Talmud study. This was the essay, mentioned elsewhere in this book, on “Wordsworth and the Rabbis,” by Lionel Trilling. Originally a lecture given at Princeton in 1950, it claimed that the reason for Wordsworth’s “unacceptability” (then) was precisely “a Judaic quality” that ran counter to the sensibility defined as modernism. Trilling said that he himself, despite being infected by modernism, had responded warmly to Wordsworth because of his [Trilling’s] intimacy with the mishnaic tractate Pirke Avot, or “Ethics of the Fa-


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thers,” as it is usually rendered in English. In an engaging yet highly strained argument, Trilling asserted a “pregnant similarity” between the rabbinical understanding of the Law and Wordsworth’s understanding of Nature. Torah for the rabbis and Nature for Wordsworth were surrogates of God, really divine objects “to which one can be in an intimate passionate relationship.” Moreover, the sages whose sayings make up Pirke Avot are presented by Trilling as precursors and relatives of Wordsworth; Hillel in particular was “a peculiarly Wordsworthian personality.”11 But those of us who were inspired by Trilling’s essay to browse in the Soncino Press translation of the Talmud quickly discovered that this tractate (also readily available in the daily prayerbook) is sui generis, distinguished from all the others because it does not deal with halakhic (legal) issues but with ethical duties. If, as John Stuart Mill maintained, Wordsworth is just the right poet for “unpoetical natures,”12 then Ethics of the Fathers” is just the right Talmudic treatise for untalmudic natures. My curiosity about the Talmud thereafter burned with a very subdued flame until, over a decade ago, it was rekindled by two of my academic colleagues in Israel. Both belonged to that 84 percent of Israelis who, according to polls, have never read any of the Talmud. Neither of them had participated in a synagogue service since becoming bar mitzvah, and one of them had once stunned me by saying, in praise of a candidate for academic appointment who had a thin bibliography, that “at least he has none of that damned Jewish stuff among his articles.” Now, I was shocked to hear, both had been attending lectures on the Talmud by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz of Jerusalem. Who is the man who has been able to interest so many Jews in Israel in a work whose supposed source—namely, the divine revelation of Torah—a large proportion of them do not acknowledge? Steinsaltz was brought up in Jewish Palestine according to the tenets of left-wing socialist Zionism. The sacred texts of his early education were Lenin and Freud. But his father was not so dogmatic a secularist that he failed to see the importance of making his son a literate, if not a believing, Jew. Adin therefore was tutored in Talmud and attended a religious high school. His university work was in physics and mathematics, yet he became religious, and by age twentyseven had decided to create a modern edition of the Talmud. The first volume of this edition appeared in 1967. It has been followed

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by nineteen more, published under the aegis of his Israel Institute for Talmudic Publication. Although his intention was “not to popularize the argument or the subject matter”13 of the Talmud, Steinsaltz was convinced that much (not all) of the notorious “difficulty” of Talmud study (or “learning”) was a matter of technical obstacles which he likened to reading a philosophical text only in manuscript composed in illegible handwriting. Consequently, he inserted the vowel marks and punctuation missing from standard editions, translated the sections written in Aramaic (most of the Gemara) into modern Hebrew, and also explained the many words from other languages that appear in the text. About a million copies of the Hebrew edition (planned for completion in about 2003) have been sold. They have earned for Steinsaltz worldwide acclaim, the Israel Prize (in 1988), and adoring followers in even the most unlikely quarters. It only needs to be added that they have also earned him the condemnation of some among Israel’s ultra-Orthodox who in the newspaper published by the Shas party accused him of “heresy,” and specifically of implying through his work that the Oral Law was not given with the Written Law at Sinai. (To the dismay of many Israelis, Steinsaltz responded to these attacks by admitting “mistakes” in some of his popular booklets and offering to refund the purchase price. When asked to explain what one Israeli journalist called his “almost Galileo-like recantation,” Steinsaltz said, “I prefer to be considered a fool all my life than to be considered in the eyes of God a wicked person.”14 Steinsaltz’s Talmud has since 1990 been appearing in English, for the benefit of readers like myself with small Hebrew, less Aramaic, and no ability at all to fill in the ellipses of the original text. The first two volumes, translated and edited by Rabbi Israel V. Berman and three associates, are the reference guide (cited earlier) intended for use in Talmud study generally and not exclusively for Steinsaltz’s edition, and the first of the ten chapters of Bava Metzia (“The Middle Gate”), a tractate on civil law from the Fourth Order of the Talmud, Nezikin (“Damages”). The reference guide is comprised of discussions of the Talmud’s “essential nature,” its historical background and its make-up, Aramaic, mishnaic methodology, Talmudic terminology and hermeneutics, halakhic concepts and terms, Talmudic weights and measures, rules governing halakhic decision-making, and common abbreviations.


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In a book of 1976, The Essential Talmud, Steinsaltz likened the Talmud to a living organism, a tree that has reached the stage where it is unlikely to change substantially, yet “continues to live, grow, and proliferate,”15 endlessly producing new shoots that become part of a complex unity of leaf, blossom, and bole. This figure is graphically realized in the traditional layout of the Talmud page, with the main text running down the center of he page, flanked by the commentary of Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo ben Yitzhak, the great French commentator of 1040-1105) on the inner side of the page, and the Tosafot (additional interpretations by Rashi’s twelfth-century disciples) on the outer column of the page. Still farther from the trunk, at the margins of the page, are other exegeses of the text, references to relevant halakhic works and biblical quotations, parallel texts and crossreferences, and proposed emendations (some as late as the nineteenth century) in the text of the Gemara. Something of this sense of the Talmud as a great, rooted blossomer, a glorious living unity in multiplicity, is inevitably lost in the English version of Steinsaltz’s edition. The page here is similar to the original in structure but not in substance or texture. The Hebrew-Aramaic text is again in the center (vocalized and punctuated and with abbreviated terms fully spelled out). To the right of the text is a literal translation into English (often, however, with auxiliary words added). On the left side, also in English, is Steinsaltz’s own translation and commentary, “an integrated exposition of the entire text.” Thus, to give but one example at random, the literal translation of a brief passage on folio page 5a reads: “Rav Zera said: If the first [ruling] of Rabbi Hiyya is [accepted], he must swear regarding the rest.” Across the page, Steinsaltz’s translation and commentary read: “Rav Zera said regarding this case: If Rabbi Hiyya’s first ruling is accepted, then in this case the shepherd must take an oath regarding the remaining animals, affirming that he never received them; otherwise, he must pay in full not only for the animals about which the witnesses have testified, but also for all the rest claimed by the owners. For Rabbi Hiyya ruled (3a) that...,” and so forth, for another ten or so lines of explication. Underneath the literal translation is Rashi’s Hebrew commentary, not translated. Near the bottom of the page is a Notes section, which often includes allusions to or summaries of the interpretations of those commentators who appear in the original but no longer speak for themselves here. At the margins of many pages are items of back-

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ground information, occasionally with drawings. At the very bottom, which some readers will deem the least and others the most important position, is the section on halakhah, the law. This explains the links between legal decisions and the text under consideration. Steinsaltz has been accused (sometimes by the selfsame critic) of “presumption” in substituting himself for the classic commentators and of timidity for not going beyond the literal meaning in his commentary. A more generous view would be that Steinsaltz is a selfeffacing commentator whose learning is everywhere, his “personality” nowhere. This self-restraint has enabled him to convey the drama of a vibrant dialogue carried on through generations of scholars, as real and living today as ever it was. If we grant his starting assumptions—that much of his English readership knows exactly nothing of the Talmud, and that “the vast majority of concepts discussed throughout the Talmud are not defined in the Talmud itself”—his decision to replace the classic commentators with disinterested explanation of these concepts is perfectly reasonable. But what is the point of this interminable debate? The first chapter of Bava Metzia, called “Two are holding,” has as its ostensible purpose the determination of the law that should obtain in circumstances where two people claim ownership of the same found object. An important topic, no doubt, and one whose principles of argument may be applicable to issues that press urgently upon the Jewish people today. But once the legal determination is made, once the halakhic decision is final, why, one might ask, go on through centuries of hair-splitting and logic-chopping? One reply is that the real point of the Gemara and the commentaries on the Gemara is the cultivation of the intellect as an end in itself. But if the only purpose of Talmudic debate is intellectual calisthenics, then Jewish mental athletes might just as well take their exercise on profane texts as on sacred; philosophy (in which, Steinsaltz claims, the rabbis were not interested) will serve as well as Torah. The answer to this question can only be that God is pleased by the sinewy logic of these strenuous debates because the solution of theoretical problems ultimately strengthens the commitment to, and belief in, the religious law of Judaism. Steinsaltz has written that the Talmud is “the only sacred book in all of world culture that permits and even encourages the student to question it.”16 The Talmudic practice of preserving minority opinion, rejected arguments, doctrines that have proved fruitless—a practice that to the mind of a zealot


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may seem inconsistent with the search for truth—might in fact be said to be the only stable foundation for a just reliance on the victorious doctrine or interpretation, the very condition that justifies acting upon it. It is as if no truth could be anything more than a dead dogma unless it contained its own opposite, that is, unless the possibility of refuting it continued to exist. To quote the rabbis, “Both are the words of the Living God, and the decision is in accordance with the House of Hillel.” The Talmud’s moral poise is evident in its recognition that one must ask about every ancient opinion that issued from a sage not only, Is it true? but also, What is the meaning of it? For Steinsaltz himself, study of the Talmud is a useful rather than a liberal exercise: questions of detail are crucial to him because they may determine his own place in the world to come. But he is aware, perhaps too much so, that for many of his prospective readers (if one can be said to “read” the Talmud), such study will be liberal rather than useful. In his treatment of halakhah there is an ambivalence that seems to derive from his desire to produce a Talmud that will, as the clothing manufacturers say, “fit all sizes.” His potential students, he knows, will vary widely not only in linguistic and mental capacity, but in willingness to obey any authority higher than their own minds, any moral law external to themselves. The effects of Steinsaltz’s ambivalence are everywhere apparent. Thus, in the Bava Metzia volume he says that “the solution of halakhic problems, and in particular the findings of definitive halakhic rulings, is not the main purpose of the Talmud.”17 Yet, in newspaper interviews he has said of his edition, more sternly, “I would like people to study it. I would like even more for people to obey it.”18 Again, in The Essential Talmud he refers to knowledge of the law as an end in itself rather than instrumental to observance; but immediately afterward he cites, with apparent approval, the Talmudic dictum that he who studies and does not observe what he studies would better never have been born. In his introduction to the reference guide (which should prove a tremendous help to Talmud students at every level), Steinsaltz is more direct, writing that “the Talmud’s purpose is to seek out the exclusive Torah connection with any given subject.”19The truth of Talmud, then, is for him the truth of Torah, of which Talmud is a part. Yet this too is problematic, for in working one’s way through Bava Metzia, a neophyte like myself, noting a certain paucity of references to Scripture, which is after all the final ground of Jewish

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religious authority, will often have the feeling that Steinsaltz takes for granted what is at issue. What, then, is the relation between the written Torah, the Hebrew Bible, and the oral Torah, or Talmud? The Mishnah itself remarks in one place that “the Sabbath laws, the laws of holiday offerings and sacrilege are like mountains hanging by a hair, for they contain little scriptural support, but many laws.”20 In Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah (1982), a summary of his prodigious, virtually heroic work of the previous decade on the Mishnah, the American scholar Jacob Neusner states the problem with admirable precision: “Formally, redactionally, and linguistically, the Mishnah stands in splendid isolation from Scripture.” Mishnah, Neusner maintains, “is not simply a secondary expansion and extension of Scripture. The Mishnah is a construction, a system, formed out of an essentially independent and fresh perspective. Only after coming to a full expression was it drawn to pertinent Scripture.”21 This distinction underlies Neusner’s conception of the ancient Mishnah as a model “city of the mind” that replaced a no-longeraccessible earthly Jerusalem after it was destroyed in 70 C.E. by the Romans. Perhaps one can say, however, that his metaphor of an intellectual Jerusalem and Steinsaltz’s metaphor of the Talmud as a living organism do not really contradict each other in the end. There is order in a classical temple, but there is order of another kind in a forest. Although I can imagine that some learned Jews who pick up Steinsaltz’s Talmud will feel that its author is addressing them as if he were a patient schoolmaster in an idiot school, most readers will be grateful to him for having succeeded in what he set out to do: namely, remove the technical obstacles to Talmud study. Thanks to Steinsaltz, anyone who wishes to take the trouble to do so can now begin to acquaint himself with the Talmud. Yet when in the eleventh century Rashi produced a commentary on the Pentateuch that could be understood by ordinary people, he could be confident of the effectiveness of his pedagogy among readers who were pious. Steinsaltz faces a very different situation. He can remove from Jewish shoulders such burdens as mastering Hebrew and Aramaic. But in religious matters it often happens that the lighter a burden is made, the heavier the remainder is to bear. People who fast twice a week have less difficulty fasting than those who do it once a year. People who attend synagogue every morning do so with less effort than those who turn up thrice a year.


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The English historian Macaulay once wrote, in praise of a work of biblical exegesis called Paradise Lost, that “the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius”22 is a great poem produced in an enlightened age. A commentary on the Talmud as a whole was an impressive achievement in the ages of faith; it will be an extraordinary one in this age of doubt, in which one’s reputation for intelligence usually increases in direct proportion to the degree of one’s disbelief. In his Invitation to the Talmud (1973), Neusner remarks that “Before modern America, it is difficult to find a Jewish community so remote from the classical sources of the faith of Israel as that found in this country.”23 That remoteness is spiritual as well as intellectual. it forces us to ask whether a work that purports to regulate every detail of daily life— cooking, eating, praying, washing, lovemaking—can find an abiding place in the mental world of people for whom the very notion of moral restraint is often repudiated as a violation of privacy. Can Jews reenter a vast religious edifice without acknowledging its source? The answer may well be no. But if, however improbably, it turns out to be yes, then we shall all be indebted to those scholarteachers, Steinsaltz preeminently among them, who, in Matthew Arnold’s words, have “labored to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanize it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and thought...and a true source, therefore, of sweetness and light.”24 Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

A Friend of Kafka and Other Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), 26-27. The Slave (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1962), 117-18. Chaim Grade, “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner,” in A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (New York: Viking, 1954), 592. MS of a speech prepared as an address to the PEN club in New York in February 1975, trans. H. M. Daleski, but never delivered. Quoted in Charles Madison, Yiddish Literature: Its Scope and Major Writers (New York: Schocken, 1971), 107-08. The Talmud: The Steinsaltz Edition: A Reference Guide (New York: Random House, 1989), 1. Mishnah Pesiqta Rabbati; or Midrash Tanhuma, Vayyera, 5. Quoted in Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 43. See Marx’s 1844 essay “On the Jewish Question.” A typical example of this genre is provided by the egregious Gore Vidal. Complaining (in 1980 in the New York Review of Books) of the depredations visited upon the

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Classical Liberalism and the Jewish Tradition purity of the English language, Vidal offers the following explanation of why Jewish writers such as Bellow, Malamud, and Roth appear to be dealing with ideas: “They arrived post-James. Jewish writers over forty...comprise a new, not quite American class, more closely connected with ideological, argumentative Europe (and talmudic studies) than with whose of us whose ancestors killed Indians, pursued the white whale...”

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

“Wordsworth and the Rabbis,” in The OpposingSelf (New York: Viking, 1959). 11. See Chapter V of Mill’s Autobiography. “Topping the charts with the Talmud,” Jerusalem Post, International Edition, 17 March 1990. Ibid. One is reminded of the rabbi in I. B. Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool,” who tells Gimpel: “It is written, better to be a fool all your days than for one hour to be evil.” The Essential Talmud (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 272. Essential Talmud, 9. Bava Metzia, x. “Topping the charts with the Talmud,” 10. The Talmud: Reference Guide, 2. Mishnah tractate Hagigah, 1:8. Jacob Neusner, Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), xiv. “Milton,” Edinburgh Review (1825). Jacob Neusner, Invitation to the Talmud (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), xxi. Culture and Anarchy (1869), chapter 1.

9 Irving Howe and Secular Jewishness: An Elegy It’s as hard to return to old-fashioned words as to sad synagogues, those thresholds of faith. You know exactly where they are. Troubled, you can still hear their undertones. Sometimes you come close and look longingly at them through the windowpanes. You who still take your ease in the shadow of biblical trees, O sing me the cool solace of all you remember, all that you know. —Jacob Glatstein, “Without Gifts”1

The last letter Irving Howe wrote to me was dated April 30, 1993, five days before his death. He reported in it that 1992 had been “a dreadful year” for him, with three operations immediately after each other, but that he was “OK now.” Nevertheless, what he mainly wanted to tell me was this: “I have ‘lived’ for the last 4 months with the group of young people who led the Warsaw Uprising—a wonderful bunch of kids.”2 Irving was referring to the then recently published, 700-page book of memoirs of Yitzhak Zuckerman, a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. At first sight it may appear unremarkable that Howe should have been, in his last days, imaginatively immersed in the heroic armed defense, mainly by Zionist socialists, of the ghetto. But one must remember that this is the same Irving Howe who had, at least as early as 1953, committed himself to the salvage of Yiddish literature partly because its great themes were “the virtue of powerlessness, the power of helplessness”3 and who had often commented acerbically on Zionist impatience with 95

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Yiddish literature precisely because of its anti-heroic bent. Howe’s sympathetic involvement, during his last months, in the memoirs of a Zionist hero, was a sign not only of his intellectual flexibility but also a reminder of what he had once, ruefully, said to me about the values of the Yiddish tradition. They would, he thought, sustain him for the rest of his life, but they could not (and perhaps should not) be prolonged beyond that. “One of the arts of life,” he used to say, “is to know how to end.”4 This last letter from Irving prompted me to go back to the first one he sent me, in 1972, an unsolicited response to the first piece I ever wrote on a Jewish subject, an essay on Chaim Grade in Judaism magazine. “That’s a very fine essay on Grade’s story; I always wondered why [“My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner”] didn’t attract more attention; but then I wondered why the anthology in which it appears never got reviewed in any American literary magazine. As a friend once said to me, ‘In the warmest of hearts there’s always a cold spot for the Jews.’ Perhaps.”5 The parochial and unearned condescension toward Yiddish literature (especially among Jewish critics) was among the few literary offenses that could ruffle Irving’s sweetness of temper in his later years. “You are right,” he told me in 1983, “in thinking [Lionel] Trilling spoke differently about Jews depending on whether he spoke to Jews or gentiles. Once, hearing I was working on Yiddish literature, he told me, ‘I suspect Yiddish literature.’ This hurt and angered me deeply, and I never forgave him for it, since he didn’t know a damned thing about it—though we did become friends.”6 Irving’s ability to recognize, over the years, the dangers in the Jewish tradition of passivity and his ability to “become friends” with opponents were but two of the signs of his extraordinary disinterestedness. It was this quality which, combined with his acuteness of insight, his profound life-wisdom, his uncanny gift for le mot juste, his supple and lucid prose, and his unerring literary tact, made him the greatest critic (and not just “literary” critic) of our age. When Matthew Arnold in 1865 called disinterestedness the sine qua non of the critic, he defined it as “a free play of the mind on all subjects which it touches . . . steadily refusing to lend itself to . . . ulterior, political, practical considerations about ideas.”7 Whether he wrote of literature or Jewish quandaries or politics (a realm in which he made many serious mistakes), Irving disdained the sectarian approach, which says “let us all stick to each other, and back each other up, since we are all in the same movement.”

Irving Howe and Secular Jewishness: An Elegy

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Probably no socialist thinker, with the possible exception of George Orwell, aroused—by his unvarnished, often unfashionable honesty— more hatred among other socialists than did Irving Howe. Who but he, among socialists, would have said that the reason why American Jewish workers never swerved from support of Roosevelt despite his administration’s “shameful” record in helping to save or admit Jewish refugees from Hitler was that his domestic policies “seemed like a partial realization of their old socialist program”? What other Jewish radical could write that “Rebelling against the parochialism of traditional Jewish life, the Jewish radicals improvised a parochialism of their own—but with this difference; they called it ‘universalism.’”8 What other (ex-) Marxist could so perfectly encapsulate the absurdity of the current academic breed of Marxists as Howe did when he called them people who, having replaced the old-fashioned goal of taking over the government with the new one of taking over the English Department, had “gone to the universities to die in comfort”?9 (He also pointed to the paradox whereby Marxist literary theorists now write in a prose of such “stupefying ... opacity”10 that it is incomprehensible to the common reader; and he recommended that they “speak in English, a language that for some time served criticism well.”11 Even Howe’s well-known dislike of Menachem Begin had an element of socialist self-criticism in it: “Begin: ex-socialists form the worst kind of reactionaries. They bring all the bad old habits to a bad new conviction.”12 One wonders that Howe, so familiar from his youth with the “bad old habits” of socialists, should have been as surprised as he was when, as he put it, “some of [the New Left] spokesmen wanted not just to refute my opinions... but also to erase, to eliminate, to ‘smash’ people like me.”13 Irving never, to be sure, wavered in his conviction that socialism is a worthy (if also a lost) cause. This tenacity was disturbing to many of his admirers. Once, in conversation with him, I heard I. B. Singer groan, “A wonderful man, Irving Howe. He’s done so much for Yiddish literature and for me. But he’s not a youngster anymore, and still, still with this socialist meshugas!” Like Orwell before him, Howe would reiterate, as much in grief as in justification: “Good causes attract poor advocates.” He was equally free of the constricting spirit of sect and party in literary matters. His very first teaching stint was at my own school, the University of Washington, to which he came, as he described himself decades later, “green and nervous,” in the summer of 1952.

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The department was then divided between the disciples of Vernon Parrington, most of them leftish, committed social democrats (or even communists) and the New Critics, under the sway of the formalist methods developed by T. S. Eliot and the reactionary Southern Agrarian critics. Howe found himself drawn to the latter group rather than to his “natural” allies. “Your kindness,” he later wrote to the most eminent of the New Critics in Seattle, Robert Heilman, “was shared. . . by almost all the New Critics whom I met. . . . Polemical disputes apart, there was a kind of largeness of spirit . . . which I’ve seldom found since then.”14 I myself must have benefited from Howe’s own largeness of spirit towards opponents: he sometimes called me his “favorite reactionary.” Once, shortly after his father had died late in 1977, I was in New York to visit my own father, who was hospitalized not far from Irving’s apartment. “Come over,” he said, “and let’s talk about life and death—no politics.” Although I can hardly imagine teaching literature or thinking about Jewish life without resorting to Irving Howe’s work, it is the memory of his sweetness, moral refinement, delicacy, or what he liked to call edelkeit that I treasure most. One could see this best in his devotion to his own parents, whose moral image plays an important role in his writing. The finishing touch to his demolition of Kate Millett’s inane book Sexual Politics is the sketch of his mother and father sharing years of trouble and affection during the Depression, working for slave wages in the garment center, helping one another, in shop, subways, and home, through dreadful years. “Was my mother a drudge in subordination to the ‘master group’? No more a drudge than my father who used to come home with hands and feet blistered from his job as presser. Was she a ‘sexual object’? I would never have thought to ask, but now, in the shadow of decades, I should like to think that at least sometimes she was.”15 This affection was reciprocated by his parents, sometimes perhaps even to excess. I once had to collect Howe from his Seattle hotel room to deliver him to a lecture he was to give at the university, and we were delayed by a phone call. Irving listened for awhile, with rising impatience, and then said, “For God’s sake, Pop, I’m 56 years old; you don’t have to remind me to put on rubbers when it’s raining.” One of Howe’s central ideas, to be discussed later in this essay, was that a religious faith apparently abandoned could exercise a far more powerful hold over a man than new, secular faiths adopted.


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Howe was not, in any accepted sense of the term, a religious man, yet I recall how once, when we were going (at his request) to Sabbath services at Seattle’s Sephardic Bikur Cholim Congregation, he blurted out, “Tell me, Eddie, do you believe in God?” The question was entirely earnest, without a hint of irony or condescension; neither was it a prelude to debate or even discussion. But it was still, in his heart of hearts, the preeminent question. What answer he himself gave to it we cannot know. But it seems clear that for him as for the Yiddish writers he revered, the old faith, even the partial or minimal Judaism that he inherited, was finally a far more imperious presence than such new creeds as socialism. He wrote that a good part of his book World of Our Fathers was no more than an extension of what he knew about his own father and the immigrant Jewish values and feelings he represented. Though he could see what was parochial in these values and feelings, “they also formed the firmest moral norms I would ever encounter. Again and again I would ‘fail’ my father. . . . But his solidarity never wavered, and I came to feel that it was a solidarity more than familial, deriving from some unexpressed sense of what a Jew owed his son. Reading Mani Leib’s sonnets and Moishe Leib [Halpern]’s poems, I learned to value that solidarity. Reading those sonnets and poems I learned where I had come from and how I was likely to end.”16 This discovery of origins, this reconquest of Jewishness was begun relatively late in Howe’s career. Before the Second World War, as he admitted in his autobiography, he had been indifferent to Jewishness and, indeed, to the Jews. During the 1930s and 1940s, Howe, like Lionel Trilling and Philip Rahv, was primarily interested in the fate of the Soviet Union, and in the progress of socialism in America, not in the little difficulties the Jews were having in Europe and Palestine. The Jewish intellectuals who did concern themselves with the Jews during those years—such writers as Hayim Greenberg, Marie Syrkin, Ben Halpern, Ludwig Lewisohn, Maurice Samuel17— would have laughed at anybody who predicted, let us say in 1942, that Irving Howe would one day become a Jewish literary hero writing books that would become standard bar-mitzvah presents. “In the years before the war,” Howe confessed, “people like me tended to subordinate our sense of Jewishness to cosmopolitan culture and socialist politics. We did not think well or deeply on the matter of Jewishness—you might say we avoided thinking about it. . . . Jewishness did not form part of a conscious commitment, it was not

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regarded as a major component of the culture I wanted to make my own, and I felt no particular responsibility for its survival or renewal.” 18 Like his comrades in the Trotskyite movement, Howe argued strongly against American participation in the war against Hitler, taking the position that this was a war between two imperial and capitalist systems. He did serve over three years in the U.S. army and later referred to his political position towards the war as a “deep error.” Nevertheless, as Midge Decter (his one-time editor at Harper’s) remarked in a hostile essay, “for a Jew, any Jew, to have proclaimed World War II merely a war between two ‘imperialisms’. . . had to have been a significant and haunting act. . . . Mr. Howe had taken himself beyond the cultural, and personal, identity given him by his birth into an immigrant Jewish family.”19 According to William Phillips, longtime editor of PartisanReview, Howe “was haunted by the question of why our intellectual community . . . had paid so little attention to the Holocaust in the early 1940s. . . . He wanted to know why we had failed to respond more strongly to the gravity of events. He asked me why we had written and talked so little about the Holocaust at the time it was taking place.”20 At the time it was taking place, of course, and even for a time after the war, Howe and his closest colleagues had no taste for and little interest in Judaism as a religion. They did not then acknowledge themselves as part of an American Jewish community, since socialist dogma stipulated (erroneously, of course) that class loyalties and class conflicts were decisive and superseded differences between Gentile and Jew. Nevertheless, starting in about 1948, Howe’s attempt to grapple with the Holocaust led him to reconsider what it meant to be Jewish, even though he later admitted that if American socialism had not “reached an impasse in the postwar years,” he might have continued to think of himself as “a cosmopolitan activist of Jewish origin, rather than a Jewish intellectual with cosmopolitan tastes.”21 A crucial turning point for him was Harold Rosenberg’s rebuttal of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question juive, which had appeared serially in Partisan Review and Commentary in 1946 and 1947. Sartre had argued that the Jews have no history, that “the sole tie that binds them is the hostility and disdain of the societies which surround them.”22 This thesis, which can be traced back to Spinoza, alleges that antisemitism itself creates Jewish consciousness, Jewish


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peoplehood, and Jewish persistence. The thesis, as Hannah Arendt and others have pointed out, fails to explain why other people in the ancient Near East who suffered misfortunes similar to those of the Jews interpreted those misfortunes as proof that their national god had failed them and chose to surrender their religious loyalties in order to assimilate into the surrounding cultures. The Jews, also conquered, banished, and persecuted, chose to cling to their religion and national identity in exile. The real question, therefore, should have been not how antisemitism created Jewish consciousness but, on the contrary, what inner compulsion led the Jews, unlike other unfortunate nations, to remain loyal to their god—to God—despite persecution. Rosenberg answered the question by arguing that two thousand years of statelessness and powerlessness did not annul a people’s history or its right to survive. Howe was impressed by the way in which Rosenberg demonstrated that the Jews “had lived in the narrow spaces of an autonomous history and a self-affirmed tradition”23 and had survived because of an inner necessity derived from collective memory. Although Howe saw that Rosenberg, like Sartre, failed to weigh the significance of the emerging state of Israel—a powerful declaration of the Jewish people’s will to live—he felt that Rosenberg, in his “insistence upon the integrity of the inner history of the Jews, despite the absence of governments, armies, and diplomacies,” spoke for him and other “partial Jews,” who believed that, without being a race or a nation or a religious community, Jews could nevertheless remain together as a people (in Rosenberg’s words) “in a net of memory and expectation.” But, in the very moment of identification with Rosenberg’s affirmation of a Jewish identity rooted in history rather than religion, Howe introduced a devil’s advocate into the midst of his most cherished belief. He conjectured that, had Sartre troubled to reply to Rosenberg, “he could have raised the question of whether the present historical condition of the Jews would long permit them to claim or keep ties with their ‘ultimate beginnings.’” There might be a net of memory and expectation, but “what if the net grows increasingly full of holes?”24 Although Howe tended to associate secular Jewishness, the creed he now adopted, with Polish Jewry between the two world wars, and with the immigrant quarters in America, its history may be traced back to a much earlier time. Writing about nineteenth-century European Jewry, Arendt, in her study of antisemitism, had described a

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new Jewish type defined not by nationality or religion but by certain psychological attributes and reactions, the sum total of which was supposed to constitute “Jewishness.” She even foresaw the political direction that this perversion of Judaism would take: “ . . . without faith in chosenness, which charged one specific people with the redemption of the world, Messianic hope evaporated into the dim cloud of general philanthropy and universalism which became so characteristic of specifically Jewish political enthusiasm.”25 (Arendt thus preceded Howe in pointing out that universalism is the specifically Jewish form of parochialism.) Howe was too intelligent and honest a man to scant the problems bound to afflict Jews who did not believe in Judaism as a religion. Like Arendt, he saw the danger inherent in separating the concept of chosenness from the messianic hope. In World of Our Fathers he wrote that “A good portion of what was best in Jewish life, as also what was worst, derived from this secularized messianism as it passed on from generation to generation. The intense moral seriousness...was shadowed by a streak of madness, the purity of messianic yearning by an apocalyptic frenzy.”26 Even when he was lured into participating in one of Michael Lerner’s grotesque jamborees designed to demonstrate that Torah follows an arrow-straight course from Sinai to the left wing of the Democratic Party, Howe would stand back and declare that there is no sanction in Jewish religion for liberal politics. “To claim there is a connection,” he said in 1989, “can lead to parochial sentimentalism or ethnic vanity.”27 Neither did he conceal from himself the amorphous quality of this secular faith. “The very term ‘Jewishness,’” he acknowledged, “suggests, of course, a certain vagueness, pointing to the diffusion of a cultural heritage. When one speaks of Judaism or the Jewish religion, it is to invoke a coherent tradition of belief and custom; when one speaks of ‘Jewishness,’ it is to invoke a spectrum of styles and symbols, a range of cultural memories, no longer as ordered or weighty as once they were yet still able to affect experience.”28 In the late forties, Howe’s feelings of “Jewishness” were strong but shapeless; in order to lend them coherence, in order to provide for secular Jews a substitute for Torah, he hit upon the idea of establishing what we might call an objective body of almost sacred texts for the creed of secular Jewishness. These texts would be the stories, poems, and essays of that most secular body of Jewish writing, Yiddish literature. Editing and translating this body of literature would


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become a major of activity of Howe for the remainder of his life. “This wasn’t, of course, a very forthright way of confronting my own troubled sense of Jewishness, but that was the way I took. Sometimes you have to make roundabout journeys without quite knowing where they will lead to.”29 One might add, too, that in order to make a return journey you must first leave. For someone grappling with the implications of the Holocaust, Yiddish was a natural (although not inevitable) place to turn. It was the language of the majority of the victims of Nazism. As a character in Cynthia Ozick’s story “Envy; or, Yiddish in America” (1969) laments, “A little while ago there were twelve million people . . . who lived inside this tongue, and now what is left? A language that never had a territory except Jewish mouths, and half the Jewish mouths on earth already stopped up with German worms.”30 But Yiddish was also the language of many of Stalin’s victims, most particularly the Soviet Union’s Jewish writers. If misgivings over his failure to attend to the fate of European Jewry led Howe to Yiddish literature, so too did his guilty awareness that an entire “generation of gifted Yiddish novelists and poets came to its end in the prison cells or labor camps”31 of the state whose “experiment” in transforming human nature had been the primary magnet drawing Howe’s attention away from the little problems of the Jews in the thirties and forties. Yiddish literature had begun, in the mid-nineteenth century, as an intensely secular enterprise, a result of the disintegration of the traditional world of East European Judaism. Its only religious aspect was what Howe liked to call the “religious intensity”32 with which its practitioners turned to the idea of secular expression. Isaac Bashevis Singer recalls how, when he was a young man in Warsaw in the twenties, religious Jews “considered all the secular writers to be heretics, all unbelievers—they really were too, most of them. To become a literat was to them almost as bad as becoming a meshumed, one who forsakes the faith. My father used to say that secular writers like Peretz were leading the Jews to heresy. He said everything they wrote was against God. Even though Peretz wrote in a religious vein, my father called his writing ‘sweetened poison,’ but poison nevertheless. And from his point of view, he was right.”33 But in the aftermath of the Holocaust this largely secular literature could easily take on a religious aspect. Traditionally, in the bilingual Jewish cultural household, Hebrew had been the sacred tongue, Yiddish the mameloshen or vernacular; but now Yiddish became for many the “dead”

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language of martyrdom while Hebrew was being used for, among other things, purchasing unkosher meat in Tel-Aviv. As Jacob Glatstein, whose poetry Howe championed above that of all other post-Holocaust Yiddish poets, wrote, “Poet, take the faintest Yiddish speech,/fill it with faith, make it holy again.”34 In retrospect, we might view Zionism and Yiddishism as competitors for the loyalty of those who have, in this century, believed that Jewish life could be perpetuated in secular form; the Zionists insisted that this miracle could take place only in the Land of Israel, the Yiddishists believed it could happen in the Diaspora. For Howe, Zionism was not a serious option because he had little taste for nationalism and he “wasn’t one of those who danced in the streets when Ben Gurion made his famous pronouncement that the Jews, like other peoples, now had a state of their own.” What he himself called his ingrained “biases”—cosmopolitan socialism—kept him from such vulgar joy as might accrue from images of “a sunny paradise with stern pioneers on kibbutzim, rows of young trees, and the best hospitals in the world.”35 In what sense, then, was Yiddish literature a seminal source for the creed of secular Jewishness? Howe first undertook to tell its “brief and tragic history” in his lengthy introduction to A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, a crucial document in his intellectual history because it is the first public expression of his “reconquest” of Jewishness. It is at once a celebration and a mourning. The survival of Yiddish over the centuries, he says, “reflects the miracle of Jewish survival itself.” Yet Yiddish literature itself began at an ending, and this long before the Holocaust. Yiddish literature deals with the shtetl when Jewish life there still has a culture and an inner world of its own but is under fierce attack from modernizing and external influences. “Yiddish reaches its climax of expressive power,” he asserts, “as the world it portrays begins to come apart.”36 So intrigued was Howe by this phenomenon that he would later come close to making it a touchstone of value in literature. In his introduction to Jewish-American Stories he says that in both Southern regional writing and AmericanJewish writing, “a subculture finds its voice and its passion at exactly the moment it approaches disintegration.”37 Yiddish literature flourished, he argued, in the historical interim between the dominance of religion and the ascendance of nationality; hence Yiddish literature “became a central means of collective expression for the East European Jews, fulfilling some of the functions of both religion


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and the idea of nationality.”38 Unwittingly, perhaps, Howe here suggests the eventual triumph of Zionism—for which he had very little affection in 1953—over Yiddishism; or at least he intimates that once Yiddish had served the purpose of keeping Hebrew alive in a kind of warm storage over the centuries it would retreat and leave the two real adversaries—religion and nationalism—to contend against one another. At the same time (as noted in the beginning of this essay) Howe praised Yiddish literature and the culture it reflected most warmly for the very characteristics that made the opposing camp of secular Jews, the Zionists, reject it: “The virtue of powerlessness, the power of helplessness, the company of the dispossessed, the sanctity of the insulted and the injured—these, finally, are the great themes of Yiddish literature.”39 Howe does not take up the question of whether pride in powerlessness is justified when there was no alternative to it. To a Zionist writer like Hillel Halkin, of course, it seems the obvious question: “We Jews have been unique among the peoples of the earth,” says Halkin, “for having lifted our hands against no one; yet is it not belaboring the obvious to point out that being so downtrodden ourselves, there was no one to lift them against? . . . It makes as much sense to take pride in such a record, or to attribute it to our superior moral instincts, as it does for a man starving for lack of money to buy food to boast of his self-control in keeping thin.”40 Writing at a time when the young state of Israel had already for five years been under what would prove to be a permanent state of siege by the Arab nations, Howe defiantly set the sacred texts of Yiddish literature in opposition to the imperatives of Zionism: “the prevalence of this [anti-heroic] theme may also help explain why Zionists have been tempted to look with impatience upon Yiddish literature. In the nature of their effort, the Zionists desired to retrieve—or improvise—an image of Jewish heroism; and in doing so they could not help finding large portions of Yiddish literature an impediment. The fact that Yiddish literature had to assume the burden of sustaining a national sense of identity did not therefore make it amenable to the needs of a national ideology.”41 Among the founding fathers of Yiddish literature, the figure most immediate to Howe’s own concerns and sensibility was I. L. Peretz, the Polish writer who believed in and strove for Jewish national revival—a mainly cultural revival in Poland, not a political one in Palestine. Peretz, like Howe after him, was strongly opposed to reli-

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gious orthodoxy: “Pious Jews are a suppressing majority. To the pious Jew everything is holy. The pettiest law recorded in Hebrew lore, the most insignificant and foolish custom—the entire Diasporal rope that winds from generation to generation around his neck and throttles and almost chokes him out of his breath—he regards as holy!” And yet Peretz was reluctant to undermine the foundations of traditional faith. “Yet one must confess—tragic as it may be and strange as it may sound—that this shortening of breath, this opiating of the Jewish life-pulse, has greatly helped the Jews to withstand and to endure the coal-black and blood-red times of the Inquisition, the massacres, and the like periods of woe that no other nation could survive....” 42 Howe was like Peretz in searching for a secular version of Jewishness which would not only stiffen the Jews’ collective wish to survive, despite the price to be paid for survival, but also the individual’s will to live and to adhere to an ethical code. He was attracted to George Eliot, the English novelist, for example, partly because, though she was deemed the first great godless writer of English fiction, “her ‘godlessness’ . . . kept prompting her to search for equivalents to belief that would give moral weight to human existence.” 43 One should not confuse Howe’s frequent disparagement of organized religious life or the virtual absence of synagogues, yeshivas, and rabbis from World of Our Fathers with a contempt for religion itself. His complaint that “the temples grew in size and there was much busywork and eloquence, but God seldom figured as a dominant presence”44 is not the snarl of an atheist. He could chide socialists for their obtuse disregard for the unexpected difficulties that the weakening of religious belief, a development to which socialists had greatly contributed, brought to the lives of skeptics. “No matter how alien we remain to the religious outlook, we must ask ourselves whether the malaise of this time isn’t partly a consequence of that despairing emptiness which followed the breakup in the nineteenth century of traditional religious systems; whether the nihilism every sensitive person feels encompassing his life like a spiritual smog isn’t itself a kind of inverted religious aspiration . . . and whether the sense of disorientation that afflicts us isn’t due to the difficulties of keeping alive a high civilization without a sustaining belief....”45 Peretz was not a praying Jew; he rarely went to a synagogue; he never put on prayer shawl and tefillin at home. Maurice Samuel wrote of him that “Peretz paid no attention to the dietary laws, and he


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never made the benediction before eating a piece of fruit or drinking a glass of water—or of brandy. But what the benediction before food and the grace after it meant to a Chassid, he alone makes the nonChassid understand. . . . If we who resemble him in these matters want to understand with what intimate joy they were invested for the Chassidim, we shall do best to go to Peretz.”46 Convinced that large portions of the Jewish community in Poland were turning away from religion to a secular European perspective, Peretz sought (like George Eliot) to establish, through literature, worldly equivalents for values that the religious tradition, in his view, no longer could sustain. Howe singled out, as a revealing instance of both the promise and the limits of Peretz’s secular Jewishness, the story called “If Not Higher.” In it an anti-Hasidic Litvak, skeptical of claims that the great Hasidic rabbi of Nemirov disappears during the penitential season before Rosh Hashanah to intercede in heaven for the Jewish people, hides himself under the rebbe’s bed to observe his rival. He discovers that at the time when the rebbe’s followers suppose him to be ascending to heaven to conciliate the invisible powers he is in fact, in the guise of a peasant, felling a tree to supply a sick woman with firewood. While he lights the fire for her, he recites the penitential prayers. Witnessing this, the Litvak is “converted” to Hasidism. The rebbe really has been ascending to heaven, “if not higher.” That is, he impresses the doubting Litvak as a saint after all, but a secular saint, whose religion is justified because it inspires him to selfless ethical behavior. Howe interprets the story as “a parable of [Peretz’z] own literary situation,” making the Litvak a persona of Peretz himself, who can say nearly everything in favor of Hasidism—it is conducive to joy, to morality, to Jewish survival—everything except that it is true. “From Hasidism,” Howe concludes, “Peretz tried to extract its life-strength, without finally crediting its source. The attempt was impossible. . .” Yet Peretz was able to transform Hasidic material into “fascinating parables of a dilemma that was not his alone.”47 It was the dilemma of Howe himself and, so he believed, of growing numbers of Jews no longer willing to credit or be controlled by religious tradition. But if Peretz’s attempt to substitute literature for religion was “impossible,” how much more so Howe’s attempt, given an audience of Jews without Jewish memories (and, of course, without Yiddish)? At the very outset of his project to establish Yiddish literature as the spiritual source of secular Jewishness, Howe sounded a note of skepticism.

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Peretz’s ambivalent relation to Hasidic materials and Hasidic faith became for Howe the paradigmatic emblem of late nineteenth-century writers (gentile as well as Jewish) convinced of the utility of a faith they no longer believed in: He had abandoned strict faith, yet it must be remembered—this is perhaps the single overriding fact in the experience of Yiddish writers at the end of the nineteenth century—that faith abandoned could still be a far more imperious presence than new creeds adopted. Like such Western writers as George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, he found himself enabled to draw upon traditional faiths and feelings precisely through the act of denying them intellectually; indeed, the greatest influence on the work of such writers is the rich entanglement of images, symbols, language, and ceremonies associated with a discarded belief.”48

Yiddish literature flourished in an age of equipoise that could never come again. Had haskalah and Zionism and socialism not encouraged secularism among Eastern European Jews, Yiddish literature could not have developed or survived. But if secularism had succeeded in obliterating traditional faith and rabbinical authority, Yiddish literature would have withered and died, or—a subject I shall turn to shortly—”evolved” prematurely into something like American Jewish writing in the Yiddish language. Instead, there was a “wonderful interregnum” in which “the opposing impulses of faith and skepticism stand poised, locked in opposition yet sharing a community of culture. This interregnum, which began about the middle of the nineteenth century and has not yet come to an end, found its setting in tsarist Russia, Poland between wars, and in various points of Western exile and immigration, notably the United States.”49 The sacred texts of secular Jewishness to which Howe directed American Jewry in his volumes of translated stories, poems, and essays were redolent not of a self-confident golden age but of a precariously balanced one, with the forces of permanence and progression represented in creative tension: “You could denounce religion as superstition and worse, but the Yom Kippur service shook the heart and the voices of the Talmud lured the mind. You could decry the secular writers as apostates and worse, but no one with a scrap of Yiddish could resist Mendele’s acrid satires or Sholom Aleichem’s sadly ironic stories.”50 But if the great Yiddish writers like Peretz already stood at one considerable remove from the faith which they celebrated without crediting, and Yiddish literature was itself a major break within, even from, the Jewish tradition, could modern Jews derive strength and


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identity from that faith by reading the Yiddish writers?51 That Howe himself did we cannot doubt, despite his protestations that he would not let his work in Yiddish literature “become an unearned substitute for a defined Jewishness—especially at a moment when undefined Jewishness was too readily becoming a substitute for traditional Judaism.” He was strongly attracted to the idea of a Jewishness split away from yet dependent upon traditional Judaism, and the poems and stories helped him to renew his bond with his father as he embodied immigrant Jewishness. He claimed to have no thought of making his work in Yiddish a basis for some program that younger Jews might follow, especially those younger Jews “pinched into the narrowing sector of Jewish secularism.”52 Yet, given the permanently problematic condition of American Jewish life, the increasing unlikelihood either of a full return to religious faith or of a total abandonment of Jewish identification, who can doubt that Howe for a long time thought of his numerous volumes of Yiddish translations as offering a third way of being Jewish, neither religious nor nationalistic? And why not? By now, as Jacob Neusner and others have pointed out, we have had two generations of American Jews educated in a Jewishness as far removed from their own immediate experience as Yiddish culture is. The Jewishness based on the European Jewish experience of the Holocaust and the Jewishness based on the Israeli Jewish experience of a constant burden of struggle against relentless enemies have been tried, and found wanting—if the epidemic proportion of intermarriage between Jews and unconverted gentiles and the suicidally low birth rate of Jews may be taken as valid indications of a people’s loss of the will to live.53 We have also had, in the past quarter-century, the proliferation of Jewish Studies programs at the universities. Since, as Alvin Rosenfeld has pointed out,54 these programs have developed on campuses at a time when a large portion of American Jewry is in the process of disappearing, the question of their relation to the constituency that often supports them financially and politically is a pressing and delicate one. Although scholars of Jewish Studies profess purely academic rather than parochial aims, everybody knows that funding of Jewish Studies programs often comes from people who expect these programs somehow to solve the national and cultural problems of the Jewish students who form a large segment of their clientele. But the problems have proliferated even faster than the programs. (Per-

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haps it should come as no surprise that studying about Jews and Jewish history and culture does not produce Jews: we don’t hire chemists when we require cooks, or mineralogists where masons and carpenters are needed.) In such circumstances, Howe might have been forgiven for thinking, even if he never quite said, that Yiddish literature was as good a basis for secular Jewishness as any other. Once upon a time, of course, American Jews did not require books to nourish the roots of secular Jewishness and connect them with their past. They had brought these from the old country, or they had parents who had brought them. Howe’s most ambitious Jewish book, World of Our Fathers, celebrated the code of menshlichkeit in the immigrant Jewish milieu as a rich and complicated ethic, “a persuasion that human existence is a deeply serious matter for which all of us are finally accountable.” He acknowledged that “We cannot be our fathers, we cannot live like our mothers, but we may look to their experience for images of rectitude and purities of devotion.”55 Nevertheless, he observed, very little of what had held the immigrant Jews together—customs, traditions, language—had been able to survive much beyond a century; American society, by the very lure of its receptiveness, induced the Jews to surrender their collective self. If, in Howe’s mind, Yiddish literature flourished, paradoxically, by depicting a traditional, religious society on the verge of disintegration, then American-Jewish literature found its voice in depicting the immigrant milieu, which is to say the society based upon secular Jewishness, on the verge of its disintegration. In his introduction to Jewish-American Stories, Howe argued that the distinctive note of second-generation Jewish writers in this country was “the continued power of origins, the ineradicable stamp of New York or Chicago slums, even upon grandsons and granddaughters who may never have lived in or seen them. But is that not an essential aspect of the Jewish experience?—the way the past grips and forms us and will not allow us to escape even when we desperately want to.” 56 But if Yiddish writers were at one large remove from Jewish tradition, then American Jewish writers who began with the secularized culture of Yiddish could have only the most feeble relationship with Jewish tradition in its fullness. Nevertheless, just as the Hasidic faith that Peretz cast aside had a more powerful hold over him than the secular faiths he adopted, so did the “broken and crippled” tradition


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of Yiddish and secular Jewishness still display enormous power over writers apparently ready, even eager to shake it off. This did not mean that every Jewish writer who made gestures in this direction was authentic. Howe saw the need, even when dealing with what might be called an imitation of an imitation, to enforce distinctions and uphold standards. Philip Roth, for example, wrote out of “a thin personal culture,” which meant either that he came “at the end of a tradition which can no longer nourish his imagination or that he has . . . chosen to tear himself away from that tradition.”57 The spiritually anemic middle-class American Jews who were responsible for the travesty of Sholem Aleichem called Fiddler on the Roof were compounding their guilt for losing touch with their past by indulging in unearned nostalgia. Their popularization of Sholem Aleichem showed that Yiddish culture in this country was declining not from neglect, nor hostility, nor even ignorance, but from love and (a highly significant choice of word) “tampering.”58 Of all the American Jewish writers of the last few decades, Saul Bellow was for Howe not only the most gifted but the most serious, and the most Jewish in his seriousness. He wrote in a style that drew heavily from the Yiddish in intonation and rhythm, and showed a more confident and authoritative relation to Yiddish than most other American Jewish writers. “In him alone, or almost alone, the tradition of immigrant Jewishness, minus the Schmaltz and schmutz the decades have stuccoed onto it, survives with a stern dignity.”59 If, by the 1980s, there were no young writers in Yiddish, there were very few writing in English who were capable of much more than revisiting the old neighborhoods and the old Bolshevist politics.60 In the very volume where he sought to make a case for the American-Jewish writers as a kind of regional sub-division of American literature, Howe declared that “My own view is that American Jewish fiction has probably moved past its high point. Insofar as this body of writing draws heavily from the immigrant experience, it must suffer a depletion of resources, a thinning-out of materials and memories....”61 That is to say, the younger practitioners of American-Jewish literature could not sustain themselves on the shards of secular Jewishness. And what of Irving Howe himself? One of the sternest, most heroic aspects of his character was his insistence that Jewish authenticity “means not to claim more than one has a right to.” He never claimed to be more than “a partial Jew.” He knew that, with his usual talent for attaching himself to lost causes, he had moved

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close to the Yiddish milieu just when it was nearing its end and that his own relationship with secular Jewishness was a reenactment of the relationship that had existed between the secular Jewishness of the Yiddish writers and traditional Judaism. Secular Jewishness had served him well (though not better than he served it), and “helped me get through my time,” but whatever his initial hopes for the work in editing English traditions of Yiddish literature might have been, he eventually “stopped pretending that this tradition could provide answers to the questions young people asked.”62 In July 1977, shortly after the death of his long-time collaborator on the Yiddish volumes, Eliezer Greenberg, Howe wrote to me that “Greenberg’s death has been very hard—personally, but still in other ways. He was my last significant contact with the world he represented, and now I feel that I’ve lost touch, been cut off. I guess ‘my’ Jewish world has come or is coming to an end, and I don’t much like whatever else is in sight.”63 Soon he even admitted that the competing party in secular Jewishness had vanquished his own. “When the writer Hillel Halkin sent from Israel a powerful book arguing that the Jews in the West now had only two long-range choices if they wished to remain Jews— religion and Israel, faith and nationhood—I searched for arguments with which to answer him. But finally I gave it up, since it seemed clear that the perspective from which I lived as ‘a partial Jew’ had reached a historical dead end and there, at ease or not, I would have to remain.”64 This does not mean that the party to which he appears to have conceded victory is itself out of danger—by no means. Halkin himself, in the very book that convinced Howe of the obsolescence of his enterprise, had expressed the fear (already widespread among American Zionist thinkers like Maurice Samuel and Ludwig Lewisohn from the thirties onward) that the state of the Jews might one day be ruled, intellectually and politically, by Hebrew-speaking Gentiles, who would not merely outgrow but throw away their religious past: “I do not believe,” Halkin wrote, “that a polity of Israelis who are not culturally Jews, whose roots in this land go no deeper than thirty years and no wider than the boundaries of an arid nation-state, has a future in the Middle East for very long. In one way or another . . . it will be blown away like chaff as though it never were, leaving neither Jews nor Israelis behind it.”65 In a 1994 essay in Commentary, he observed that the hatred for Judaism of a very large segment of Israeli intellectuals, including many who set the tone for govern-


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ment leaders, had now become a hatred of Zionism itself.66 Another shrewd Israeli writer, the late Daniel Elazar, observed in the same year that “the non- or anti-Zionists within the Israeli peace camp ... see in the goals and values of Zionism, as in those of Judaism much more generally, their bête noire.” Secular Jewishness in its Zionist incarnation, he argued, had once upon a time offered its adherents tasks and challenges equivalent to those of religious Judaism and, for a time, even more compelling. “But,” Elazar continued, “as those tasks have been completed and challenges overcome, it has gone the way of every other secular movement in Jewish life that has made secularism its Jewish end.” That is to say, it no longer suffices to motivate people to postpone the pursuit of happiness in favor of larger and distinctively Jewish aims. The debate over the so-called “peace process,” according to Elazar, had sharpened and exacerbated the split “between those [Israeli] Jews who seek normalcy and those who feel in some way obligated or bound by their Jewishness....Normalcy may be good for Jews but, left alone to unfold, will end the Jewish state as such.”67 None of this should be taken to mean that Irving Howe despaired prematurely over the fate of his version of secular Jewishness, only— only!—that the overall situation of the Jews may be even more desperate than he imagined. The shopworn state of Zionism should not excuse those who now invoke Irving Howe as a prophet of secular Jewishness68 in the Diaspora from facing up to the fact that its most brilliant expositor, the man who endowed it with a special twilight beauty, ceased to believe in it long before he died. A Postscript The extraordinary range and volume of Howe’s written work once led the astute critic Alvin Rosenfeld to ask whether this was a man or an industry at work. Yet his integrity was such that I think it fair to say he never wrote an essay or published a book in whose intrinsic value he did not believe. After he gave a series of lectures in Seattle in January 1977 entitled “Modern Jewish Literature,” the University of Washington Press (and I) tried to persuade him to publish them (and perhaps a few other pieces) as a book. But Irving doggedly resisted, claiming there was no point in publishing a book which wasn’t really a book. Finally, he put an end to our efforts by writing an (imaginary) review of an imaginary book called A Few Jewish Voices(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977. 84 pp. $5.95)

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I quote a few sentences from this virtually unknown piece, entitled “Swelling Head,” and signed by the imaginary critic “Northrop Kazin”: “This very thin collection of essays by a writer whose most recent book [World of Our Fathers] is anything but thin, leaves one with a mild sense of depression. . . . There is little to be said against the individual pieces, about as little as there is to be said for the book as a whole. . . . What we have here, in short, is a non-book, even if a rather good one. . . . We all know the temptation of writers who achieve a bit of fame to feel that every word they have ever put to print must be immortalized in books. (If, that is, that is what books do.) But one would have thought that a man of Mr. Howe’s good sense would have resisted the temptation.” This is full of Irving Howe’s ineffable charm, moral poise, and security of values. Nevertheless, it is wrong. Now that he is gone from us, we must feel more than ever the need to salvage and preserve all that he wrote in his maturity; we may find a substitute for secular Jewishness, but not for Irving Howe. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

The Selected Poems of Jacob Glatstein, trans. Ruth Whitman (New York: October House, 1972), 109. Letter to the author, 30 April 1993. A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, ed. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (New York: Viking, 1953), 38. A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1982), 264. Letter to the author, undated. Letter to the author, 2 June 1983. See A Margin of Hope, 265. “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” in Essays in Criticism: First Series. World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 392, 291. “The Treason of the Critics,” New Republic, 12 June 1989, 31. “The Value of the Canon,” New Republic, 18 February 1991, 42. “The Treason of the Critics,” 31. Letter to the author, 18 July 1977. A Margin of Hope, 314. Letter to Robert B. Heilman, 21 March 1991. The Critical Point (New York: Dell, 1973), 232. A Margin of Hope, 269. See, on this group, The ‘Other’ New York Jewish Intellectuals, ed. Carole S. Kessner (New York: New York University Press, 1994. A Margin of Hope, 251. Midge Decter, “Socialism and Its Irresponsibilities: The Case of Irving Howe,” Commentary, 74 (December 1982), 27. William Phillips, “A Skeptic and a Believer,” Forward, 14 May 1993. A Margin of Hope, 275-76.

Irving Howe and Secular Jewishness: An Elegy 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54.

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Quoted by Howe in A Margin of Hope, 254. A Margin of Hope, 255. A Margin of Hope, 256-57. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1951), III, 74. World of Our Fathers, 646. Edward Rothstein, “Broken Vessel,” New Republic 6 March 1989, 19. Introduction to Jewish-American Stories (New York: New American Library, 1977), 9-10. A Margin of Hope, 260. Cynthia Ozick, “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” Commentary, 48 (November 1969), 44. Ashes Out of Hope: Fiction by Soviet-Yiddish Writers, ed. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (New York: Schocken, 1977, 1. Voices from the Yiddish: Essays, Memoirs, Diaries, ed. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 2. Joel Blocker and Richard Elman, “An Interview with Isaac Bashevis Singer,” Commentary, 36 (November 1963), 368. “In a Ghetto,” Selected Poems of Glatstein, 110. A Margin of Hope, 276-77. A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, 21, 28. Jewish-American Stories, 3. A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, 30. A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, 38. Letters to An American Jewish Friend: A Zionist’s Polemic (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1977), 94. A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, 39. Quoted in Charles Madison, Yiddish Literature: Its Scope and Major Writers (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 107-08. Selected Writings: 1950-1990 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), 350. A Margin of Hope, 278. The Critical Point, 16, 27. Prince of the Ghetto (New York: Meridian, 1948), 178-79. A Treasury of Yiddish Stories,58. Selected Stories: I. L. Peretz, ed. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (New York: Schocken, 1974), 10. A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry, ed. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), 10. Voices from the Yiddish, 5. To some extent, Christians had already experimented with the idea of literature as a substitute for religion. As early as 1841, John Henry Newman wrote derisively that “a literary religion is . . . little to be depended upon; it looks well in fair weather, but its doctrines are opinions, and, when called to suffer for them, it slips them between its folios, or burns them at its hearth.” Nevertheless, Matthew Arnold, almost forty years later in “The Study of Poetry,” insisted that “The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.” A Margin of Hope, 267-69. See Jacob Neusner, “Jewish Secularism in Retreat,” Jewish Spectator (Winter 199495), 25-29. Alvin H. Rosenfeld, “Jewish Studies in the University in Comparative Contexts: The United States,” Teaching JewishCivilization: A Global Approach to Education, ed. Moshe Davis (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 40-46.

116 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67.

68.

Classical Liberalism and the Jewish Tradition World of Our Fathers, 645. Jewish-American Stories, 6. The Critical Point, 147. “Tevye on Broadway,” Commentary, 38 (November 1964), 75. The Critical Point, 135. See, on this subject, Cynthia Ozick: “Nothing is less original, by now, than, say, Parisian or New York novelists ‘of Jewish extraction’ who write as if they had never heard of a Jewish idea, especially if, as is likely, they never have....It becomes increasingly tedious to read about these hopelessly limited and parochial characters in so-called Jewish fiction whose Jewish connections appear solely in the form of neighborhood origin or played-out imitative sentence structure or superannuated exhausted Bolshevik leaning.” —Metaphor and Memory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 234. Jewish-American Stories, 16. A Margin of Hope, 280-82. Letter to the author, 18 July 1977. A Margin of Hope, 281. Letters to An American Jewish Friend, 199-200. “Israel Against Itself,” Commentary, 98 (November 1994).In 1995, not long after Halkin’s essay appeared, “study days” were held at Tel Aviv and Haifa universities in which professors laid out the conditions for Israel’s “survival.” These included nullifying the Law of Return, replacing the Israeli flag with another that does not have a Magen David, substituting for the Hatikvah a national anthem that also expresses the aspirations of the Arabs, cancelling the definition of Israel as the “state of the Jewish nation” and defining it instead as a state of Israeli citizens, and so forth. “The Peace Process & the Jewishness of the Jewish State,” Congress Monthly, 61 (November/December 1994), 3-4. The first sentence quoted from Elazar’s original essay did not appear in the version printed in Congress Monthly, but was quoted in Halkin’s Commentary essay. See, for example, the late Mordechai Richler in his memoir This Year in Jerusalem. He “refutes” the Zionist thesis of Halkin by listing prominent Jews who, by virtue of living in the Diaspora, are supposed to demonstrate that this is where the Jewish future lies. Among his exemplars of Diasporism and secular Jewishness is Irving Howe.

10 Saying Kaddish In Memoriam: Harry Alexander (1910-1998) Orphan’s Kaddish Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world which he has created according to his will. May he establish his kingdom in your lifetime and during your days, and within the life of the entire house of Israel, speedily and soon; and say, Amen. May his great name be blessed forever and to all eternity. Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted, extolled and honored, adored and lauded be the name of the Holy One, blessed be he, beyond all the blessings and hymns, praises and consolations that are ever spoken in the world; and say, Amen. May there be abundant peace from heaven, and life, for us and for all Israel; and say, Amen. He who creates peace in his celestial heights, may he create peace for us and for all Israel; and say, Amen.

*

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God had closed the womb of the rebbetsin....”Adopt a child and bring it up, and a hundred years from now it will say Kaddish for you.” The two of them shook their heads. The rebbe answered, “How can I instruct a strange child in Torah and good deeds if I am not responsible for his sins? And the rebbetsin said, “How will I be able to love a strange child if he has not cost me my blood?” One after the other, in the flow of eternity, the years passed by. On a morning they were found dead. They were sitting on their beds, facing each other, in the same nightshirts, clasping their hands, like children, around their knees....And in the air of the old house, as though the words still hummed: When our son will grow up... When our Kaddish will grow older. —Lamed Shapiro, “The Rebbe and the Rebbetsin” (1909), translated by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg.

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Classical Liberalism and the Jewish Tradition “Jewish religion is...very liberal and intelligent and modern. Its function is to provide, chiefly for people of no strong religious impulse, a social and rational defense against the world’s hostility....One need only attend a Jewish funeral to have the sense of its deep inner uncertainty, its lack of grasp of life.” —Lionel Trilling, Contemporary Jewish Record (February, 1944). “He opened the book he was carrying, and staring into it, his head down and his voice uncertain, appeared to gulp out, ‘I’m going to read the Kaddish.’ ‘Oh! Allen Ginsberg! What a wonderful idea!’ Charlotte whispered.” —Johanna Kaplan, O My America! (1980)

The practice of reciting the mourner’s kaddish seems to have begun in the years just after the Crusades, when a superabundance of mourners led to the tradition of linking personal grief with the collective grief of the Jewish people. But the medieval rabbis claimed that the kaddish originated much earlier. The founding myth of the kaddish is the medieval story of Rabbi Akiva found in Mahzor Vitry. Walking in a cemetery, he meets a naked man, carrying wood on his head and apparently alive. Stopping him, Akiva asks why he does such onerous work and just who he is. The man replies that he is dead, and that in life he had been a tax collector who favored the rich and killed the poor. Akiva asks whether his “superiors” have told him how he might relieve his condition. The unfortunate man, “black as coal,” says there is probably no relief for him, but that he has heard that if he had a son and his son were to stand before the congregation and recite “Bless the Lord who is blessed!” and the congregation were to answer amen, and the son were also to say “May the Great Name be blessed” [a sentence from the kaddish] “they would release him from his punishment.” Unfortunately, the man never had a son, although he did leave his wife pregnant when he died. But even if she gave birth to a boy, who would teach Torah to the son of a friendless man? At this point Akiva volunteered to discover whether the man had indeed produced a son, so that he himself might teach the son Torah and enable him to lead the congregation in prayers. He discovered the son and circumcised him, but the boy was a miscreant like his parents and refused to learn Torah. In distress, Akiva fasted for forty days; and God responded by opening the boy’s heart to Torah and enabling him to recite “Bless the Lord who is blessed!” to a congregation that responded “May the Great Name be blessed!” “At that moment,” Mahzor Vitry continues, “the man was released from his punishment [and] came to Rabbi Akiva in a dream, and said: “May it be the will of the Lord

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that your soul find delight in the Garden of Eden, for you have saved me from the sentence of Gehenna.” The main themes of this seminal myth of the kaddish, as Leon Wieseltier interprets it in his Kaddish, are “That the dead are in need of spiritual rescue; and that the agent of spiritual rescue is the son; and that the instrument of spiritual rescue is prayer, notably the kaddish.” 1 But is the kaddish really a prayer for the dead, or even a prayer at all? A considerable weight of rabbinic opinion says no—the son’s kaddish does not request a good fate for his father, but demonstrates why the father deserves a good fate: namely, because he taught the son to sanctify God before the congregation. The son is said to “acquit the father” because the father, whatever his sins may have been, arranged for his son to study Torah and to do good deeds. For years before my father died, I had thought about saying kaddish for him. This was partly because he had been ill, indeed dying, for many years; I became aware that he was failing in 1990, when for the first time in our lives it was he and not I who proposed leaving shul “early.” Also, he kept returning to the subject of kaddish, albeit from two different directions. On the one hand, without ever explicitly asking me to recite kaddish, he would often say “you’re the only son I can depend on to say kaddish for me when I’m dead.” But I also remember, only too vividly, how often he would signal me to sit down and be quiet when we happened to be in a shul where it was the custom for everybody to stand for, or even join in, the recitation of kaddish. He had been brought up to believe that it was “bad luck” for a son even to give the appearance of being a mourner while his parents were still alive. And so now, when I started going to shul twice a day to recite the kaddish for my father’s soul, I could at last feel that I was obeying his deepest wishes without offending his ingrained superstitions. And, of course, by having spent more time in shul in a few months than I had in the previous five decades, I was doing for my father dead what I would not do for him while he was alive. As an unidentified friend in Wieseltier’s book says to the author: “The angel of death is the best sexton” (53). In “preparing” for my father’s death, I did look at several books on the Jewish approach to bereavement and mourning. The strictly orthodox ones, like Maurice Lamm’s The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning2 proved to be of great practical use, but were mechani-

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cally conceived and turgidly written—besides which they often made even a distinctly non-feminist reader wonder whether the author ever conceived of the possibility that women die too. The others, like Anita Diamant’s Saying Kaddish,3 tended to be what Wieseltier contemptuously but correctly calls “psychology tricked out as religion” (250) and annoyed me with their stress on how comforting saying kaddish is to the person saying it, how it is “really” said for the benefit of the living, not the dead. Diamant’s book suffers too from the taint of parochialism: she addresses herself only to “non-Orthodox” and “liberal” Jews whose spiritual sophistication causes them “to view halachah as reference point and guide rather than mandate.” For example, if Diamant is to be believed, many liberal Jews find filling a grave “too painful” and therefore arrange for the coffin to be delivered to the cemetery and lowered into the grave before they arrive, “especially when children are among the principle [sic] mourners, and drop flowers onto the coffin instead of earth” (88). As for the kaddish itself, she seems to think that it, like the revelation from Sinai, is yet another mandate for liberal Jews to realize peace and justice through “human action rather than divine intervention” (18). She is delighted by Broadway popularizations of the kaddish (e.g., Angels in America)—popularizations of the sort that, as Irving Howe said about Fiddler on the Roof, should cause Jews to turn their heads in dismay—that assume a “Jewishly sophisticated” (29) audience. From such sophistication God preserve us! Wieseltier, to be sure, is also a liberal, but one (belatedly) capable of being surprised out of the dogmatism that so often accompanies that persuasion: “‘A distinction must be made,’ the young man [giving the dvar Torah] observes, ‘between what the Torah wants and what the Republican Party wants.’ I wonder whether the young man also believes that a distinction must be made between what the Torah wants and what the Democratic Party wants” (146).4 Although Wieseltier’s book appeared shortly before my father’s death, I resisted it for some time because of my estimate of its author’s character (though not his mind). But, as my mother said to me after reading Philip Roth’s Patrimony, it’s possible to be a good son without being a good Jew or a good person. And a casual glance at Kaddish quickly revealed that its author (the literary editor of the New Republic) was also aware of this: “After the evening prayers I

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was overcome by a feeling of revulsion at myself. All this fidelity, all this reflection on fidelity: I am becoming sanctimonious. My gloomy year in shul is turning into an occasion for self-congratulation. But I have not forgotten how I have lived. The fulfillment of this duty cannot erase what I know about myself. A good student is not the same thing as a good man. A good son is not the same thing as a good man” (166). I liked this, not only because it struck me as being true about Wieseltier, but because it was also true about myself. Indeed, the more I read of Wieseltier’s diary of the eleven months in which he recited the kaddish for his father5while searching out the origins and innermost meaning of this “prayer for the dead” which never mentions death, the more I was struck by the similarities in our (and for all I know, in everyone’s) experience. Like him, I had a cousin who proposed to my mother that she find and hire a chassid who would be more reliable than I could be in performing this duty (which, however, only a son can perform). (Unlike him, I also had a cousin whose main religious contribution to the shivah gathering was an ecstatic account of the “fantastic” high mass she had recently attended.) Like Wieseltier, I was impressed by the presence of a young woman in shul saying kaddish for a father, but who seemed to mistake my curiosity about her presence there for flirtation. Like Wieseltier, I recited the kaddish for months before noticing that most siddurim mistranslate kaddish yatom, which means “orphan’s kaddish,” as “mourner’s kaddish.” Like him, I have been impressed to find—in a synagogue, no less!—every morning and evening a group of Jews who actually believe in God and who feel a powerful obligation to help the mourner fulfill his obligation. As Wieseltier puts it, “I am in a gathering of genuinely religious people. All the other explanations for what they are doing here are moot [sic]. Their faith is an irreducible quantum. They are here because they believe, and I am here because they believe” (211). Once, uncertain about the time of the evening service at the conclusion of Passover, I stumbled into Seattle’s Chabad shul about two minutes after ma’ariv had concluded and large numbers of people were headed for the exit. “Wait,” said one of the black-hat regulars (who bore some facial resemblance to the young Dostoevsky), “let’s see what we can do.” He hastily consulted the rabbi, who summoned everybody [several score people on this particular evening] back for a two-minute Talmud session that would be followed by my recitation of kaddish.

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Amazing!—and all the more so when I learned that over a quarter of these black-clad chassidim worked for Microsoft! And one wonders whether they did this to enable me to perform my filial and religious duty or because they believe that performing this duty redeems the deceased from hell or (only) because they believe that reciting kaddish is a son’s way of showing why his parent deserves a good fate. I have shared with Wieseltier too the negative side of reciting kaddish: “In shul and out of shul, dawn and dusk, day after day after day. Spirituality is declining into schedules...” (227). “This morning there was not a single word of the prayers that held my attention. Not a single word” (255). The mind wanders; and one begins to understand why the veterans say prayers aloud, thereby disciplining themselves against the temptations of wayward thoughts—not necessarily in the sense of Claudius’ “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go”—but thoughts about the intended beneficiary of the kaddish. Like Wieseltier I have been fearful of the possible delusoriness of the hour wrapped in tallit and bound in tefillin: “and then there are the rest of us, who do not waken in purity but bind ourselves nonetheless in these grim black straps, so that we may permit ourselves to think, for at least as long as we are bound, that we are good” (338). Kaddish takes the form of a diary in which the author moves between the present of his daily recitation of the kaddish and the past which he conjures up in his daily study of and reflections upon the vast literature, Halakhic and Talmudic (“In the absence of the Talmud, there is no Judaism. There is only Jewishness”), about life and death, immortality and posterity, determinism and free will, and, most of all, the meaning of the kaddish. Both the form and the substance of the book call to mind—this may sound odd—Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850), also a kind of spiritual diary occasioned by the death of a loved one (his friend Arthur Henry Hallam) treated as if it were the fact of death in the world, but extending over sixteen years rather than eleven months, and given regularity not by thrice daily recitations of kaddish but by a tetrameter quatrain adhered to through 131 sections plus a prologue and epithalamium. In both works immortality is sometimes assumed, sometimes denied, science acknowledged yet fiercely disputed, mystical experience allowed, albeit tentatively,6 and doubt celebrated at least as much as faith. (Tennyson: “There lives more faith in honest doubt,/ Believe me, than in half the

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creeds” [section 96]. Wieseltier: “It is not only faith that humbles. Doubt humbles, too.... doubt is the candor of a discouraged mind” [440]). Indeed, in reading Kaddish one is sometimes reminded of T. S. Eliot’s famous dictum about In Memoriam: “It is not religious because of the quality of its faith, but because of the quality of its doubt.” Above all, both works, while lamenting the lack of words to articulate the author’s grief, are eloquent, often aphoristic tributes laid at the graveside of the deceased. But in Wieseltier’s case the tribute is magnified by the year of concentrated study of the kaddish that he was reciting, study that sometimes competed with the recitation itself. Very little of the material that Wieseltier quotes and analyzes was previously available in English translation, so that even readers who reject his conclusions or his manner of reaching them owe him a debt of gratitude for making available (in lengthy quotations) what was previously obscure. He provides, too, a vivid sense of the continuity of rabbinic discussions and debates over the centuries,—”It all coheres, it all coheres” (335).—their return again and again to the great general questions that are encompassed in the specific questions about who may recite the kaddish and for whom it may or should be recited. Although he is at times “ashamed” that he has “never devoted myself to the study of the Talmud to an extent that is commensurate with my understanding of its place in Judaism,” Wieseltier does not hesitate to enter the Talmudists’ debate, mindful of the weight of the past, but contemplating it from the perspective of somebody living in the late twentieth century. Take, for example, the question of whether a woman maysay kaddish, a question whose true import is felt, Wieseltier shrewdly observes, as soon as we substitute the word “daughter” for “woman” (178). Wieseltier happens upon a brief responsum by Yair ben Hayyim Bacharach, a Talmudist and jurist of seventeenth-century Germany: “A man died without leaving a son, and prior to his death he requested that, for the twelve months after his death, ten men should be retained to study in his house, and at the conclusion of their studying his daughter should say the kaddish. And the scholars and officers of the congregation did nothing to stop her” (179). Wieseltier praises the man who, anticipating objections to his daughter’s saying kaddish, covered her by specifying that it should be said in his study, not the shul, and in the presence of a minyan as traditionally defined. He also praises Bacharach himself because,

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though eventually opposing the woman’s kaddish because it goes against “the customs of Israel, which are also Torah,” analyzes it in a way that really legitimates it: “Women, too, are commanded to sanctify the Name, and there was a quorum of ten Jewish men present—and even though the tale of Rabbi Akiva, which is the basis for the recitation of kaddish by mourners, speaks only of a son...it is reasonable to assume that a daughter, too, may bring benefit and calm to the soul of the dead, for she, too, is his progeny” (179). With characteristic tenacity, Wieseltier follows the history of Bacharach’s analysis and reasoning. He even unearths a responsum of the next generation in which the daughter of a man in Kreuznach— a daughter who is all of four years old—is permitted, by rabbinical authority but under the same restrictions that applied in the earlier case, to recite kaddish for her father. True, the nineteenth-century history of Bacharach’s ruling backtracks in a way displeasing to Wieseltier. But at no point does he approach this particular subject in the style of those feminists who assume that Judaism has no inner structure of its own, but must always bend to the trendy idolatries of the moment and call them straight up to the Torah. Rather, he caps his discussion by recounting the case of Henrietta Szold, who, when her mother died in 1916, declined the offer of a male friend to recite the kaddish in her place: “The Kaddish,” she wrote, “means to me that the survivor publicly manifests his wish and intention to assume the relation to the Jewish community which his parent had, and that the chain of tradition remains unbroken from generation to generation....You can do that for the generations of your family. I must do that for the generations of my family” (189).7 Another, far more unsettling modern instance of continuity in the halakhic debate over the kaddish concerns the old question of whether we mourn martyrs. One traditional position, plausible enough, is that we do not, because someone who has been murdered by gentiles is forgiven at once, “even before the torments of the grave begin.” But one morning Wieseltier comes upon “an instance of continuity in the Jewish tradition that shatters me.” It is from a work by Ephraim Oshry, a rabbi in the ghetto of Kovno from 1941-44. Three days after the Nazis murdered nine thousand Jews in outdoor killing centers, a survivor asked Oshry “whether we are required to mourn the martyrs and to recite the kaddish for them.” Oshry, after consulting the relevant precedents (relating to those who were killed for Kiddush Hashem) answers yes: “On the basis of these sources, I

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instructed the inquirer that there is to be mourning for the martyrs of the Ninth Fort, and kaddish is to be said for them. Indeed, it was an awesome and terrifying sight to see, when the congregation that survived in the ghetto said kaddish together, with one voice, for those dear to their hearts.” About this startling tale Wieseltier observes, with characteristic astuteness, that “to deny the Nazis the attainment of their objective, which was not only the extinction of the Jews but also the extinction of Judaism—the survivors of 1941 consulted the survivors of 1389" (537-39)! Finally, we come to the question of just what is the true rationale for recitation of kaddish. Wieseltier himself is a mourner for whom death is oblivion; what he believes in is not immortality, but posterity, “the version of immortality that reason can accept, that tradition can count on” (243). He does not believe the kaddish’s implied claim that the son can save the father because, despite all his hymns to custom, duty, family, and tradition as the forces that mandate kaddish, there is one thing that he cannot say of the theology, cosmology, and eschatology implied by the kaddish: that they are true. He may scorn those ignoramuses who treat the whole business as nonsense and be grateful that he was taught to believe in it, but finally he rejects the cosmos which includes such a “pious absurdity” (421) as a prayer for the dead. He not only denies the resurrection of the dead—thereby, as he acknowledges, forfeiting his right to a kaddish of his own—but even flirts with the very nihilism that this book powerfully repudiates. “A man is in a dark room. He sees nothing. Yet he is not blind. A man who sees nothing is not a blind man, if nothing is what there is to see” (415). But for most of the people with whom Wieseltier was saying kaddish for eleven months, the reverse is true, and might go something like this: “Light is a quality of matter, but blind people don’t see it; truth is a quality of Judaism, but people who are spiritually blind, i.e., morally at fault, will not see it.” The people who take this view are a formidable presence in Kaddish and help determine its ultimate meaning. Nearly half way through the book Wieseltier expresses fear that being “absorbed into the fellowship of these excellent people” (273) will detract from the disinterestedness of his observations. But when, much later, he admits that he was a pariah in the Jewish world until he became a mourner, his homecoming is partly a return to these (mostly elderly) people. In the Brooklyn bookstore that supplies him with many of

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the texts that he examines in his Washington, D. C. teahouse each morning, he is “surrounded by black hats and black beards and black caftans” and feels that he “must never leave this musty place again.” In shul, the Galicianer accents of the old country force him to recognize that “soon they will be gone. Soon we will be entirely on our own. Then we will see” (362). But since Wieseltier has already made it clear that the contrast between those who enable him to recite kaddish and the great majority of their co-religionists is not only a contrast between learning and (unprecedented) illiteracy, but between belief and (unearned) skepticism, there is not much suspense regarding what “we will see.” Wieseltier may eventually become in the realm of Jewish theology what a writer like I. L. Peretz, as we observed in the previous essay, was in Jewish literature. What Chassidic life and folklore were to Peretz, the Talmud is to Wieseltier. Even though he is incessantly “bothered by the shallowness of my knowledge of Talmud” (531), he has enabled the non-Talmudical reader to gain a sense of what the intellectual and spiritual life of Talmud might be. And Wieseltier goes Peretz one better because he himself does pray and lead prayer and study Torah and recite the kaddish, believing not so much in its otherworldly efficacy as that, in the words of a converso who had to explain to the Inquisition why he recited the kaddish for his parents who had died as Jews: “What is done well is never lost and may do some good” (321). Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

Kaddish (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), pp. 126-27. Subsequent references will be parentheses in the text. New York: Jonathan David, 1969. Saying Kaddish: How to Comfort the Dying, Bury the Dead & Mourn as a Jew (New York: Schocken Books, 1998). Subsequent references will be parentheses in the text. Another instance of Wieseltier’s surrender of a cherished liberal dogma comes in his concession that Emil Fackenheim’s formulation of a 614th commandment—”the authentic Jew of today is forbidden to hand Hitler yet another, posthumous victory”—was essentially correct because, contrary to Fackenheim’s glib critics, “There is no survival without meaning, and there is no meaning without survival” (515). But Wieseltier’s concession is a grudging one: he cannot bring himself to mention Fackenheim’s name. Because the wicked undergo punishment for a full year, the rabbis, as if to reject the severity of their own traditions, reduced the obligation of kaddish to eleven months, thus allowing the son to declare, by the eloquence of silence in month twelve, that his parent is not among the wicked. But even the latter, unlike those consigned to the

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Christian hell of eternal fire, eventually find release from their agony: “And after twelve months their body is no more and their soul is extinguished in flames and a wind disperses them beneath the feet of the righteous” (134). There is, to be sure, a group of sinners permanently damned, but since they would, as defined by Mordecai ben Hillel of the thirteenth century—”sectarians and apostates and Epicureans and those who separated themselves from the ways of the community”(336)—comprise about eighty percent of the modern world’s Jewish population—Wieseltier’s democratic proclivities lead him to the (sanguine) conclusion that these standards can no longer apply: “Judaism needs the Jews as much as the Jews need Judaism” (337). Does it follow that no theological doctrine is more than an opinion held by large numbers of people? If so, what is to preserve us from the Diamant doctrine that whatever Jews believe or do must be Jewish? “I closed my eyes. Suddenly I felt a shadow pass over me. I opened my eyes. Nothing around me had moved. I closed my eyes. I felt a shadow pass over me again.”—Kaddish, 262. Diamant also alludes to the Szold anecdote but of course reduces it to “a classic statement of Jewish women’s self-empowerment” (29). Wieseltier, on the other hand, expresses dismay that egalitarian congregations generally feel compelled to tamper with other elements of the tradition—including frequency of kaddish recitation—in order to demonstrate their anti-misogynistic credentials. Perhaps the foil to Szold in Kaddish is Aby Warburg, who in 1910 refused to recite kaddish for his father because “My respect for him lies in my not hushing up the absolute antithesis of Weltanschauung through an external cultic act: for I am dissident....My character of Dissident must be respected just as much as the character of the Orthodox.” Wieseltier rightly calls these sentiments “repugnant. They are so self-regarding, so adolescent in their infatuation with sedition, so absurdly confident about philosophical opinions whose origins are transparently psychological” (154).


Part 3 Literature


11 Jews in English Departments Ludwig Lewisohn, a Berlin-born Jew who made himself into a Southern Christian gentleman in Charleston, had to leave Columbia University in 1903 without his doctorate because he was, in the eyes of Columbia’s English faculty, irredeemably Jewish. Like many a Jewish student of English after him (the names of Irvin Ehrenpreis and Arnold Stein spring readily to mind), Lewisohn was told that he should not (or could not) proceed in his studies because the prejudice against hiring Jews in English departments was insuperable. Two decades later, reflecting on the appointment of a number of Jewish scholars in American colleges and universities, he noted that in one discipline alone the old resistance remained firm: “There are a number of Jewish scholars in American colleges and universities. . . . The older men got in because nativistic anti-Semitism was not nearly as strong twenty-five years ago as it is to-day. . . . In regard to the younger men . . . they were appointed through personal friendship, family or financial prestige or some other abnormal relenting of the iron prejudice which is the rule. But that prejudice has not . . . relented in a single instance in regard to the teaching of English.”1 Perhaps this was because the study of English, unlike that of science or even philosophy, was intimately bound up with the particularities of culture, for it was precisely the study of the mind of Western Christianity. What Bernard Berenson called the “Angry Saxons”2 who ran the English departments were mindful of what Tennyson had written in “The Hesperides”:“the treasure /of the wisdom of the West” needed to be guarded well and warily “Lest one from the East come and take it away.” In the twentieth century, the would-be invaders of the sacred preserve were barbarous Eastern European Jews. Susanne Klingenstein, a German-born Jewish teacher of writing at MIT who did her graduate work and research at Harvard, has 131

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made the story of resistance to and eventual acceptance of Jews by the English departments (mainly of Harvard and Columbia) her special province. Her first book, Jews in the American Academy:19001940 3 provided brief intellectual biographies of philologist Leo Wiener, philosophers Harry Wolfson, Horace Kallen and Morris Cohen; and professors of English Lewisohn, Joel Spingarn, Jacob Zeitlin, and Lionel Trilling. In fact,the whole book leads up to a lengthy discussion of Trilling, whose successful career, the author contends, “brings the story of the Jewish folly of embarking on academic careers in the humanities against the double odds of antiSemitism and economic hardships to a happy end” (136). Klingenstein’s studies of these lively and sometimes heroic figures are essentially biographies of minds, so that her analyses are mainly of their ideas and their psychology. Two structural principles determine her treatment of them all. First, the intellectual positions at which they arrived, which she calls communities of “consent,” are to be understood from the perspective of their points of departure, or “descent culture.” Second, “they all in their responses to America developed a mode of thinking in dichotomies. Their dialectic mode of thought reflects on the one hand their sociological circumstances, their passage from an old into a new world, and on the other reactivates intellectual structures acquired in their fathers’ world” (xiii). At times, the author invokes a Jewish academic’s “descent culture” to explain his behavior as a citizen of the academic community. Why did Harry Wolfson keep silent during Harvard’s attempt to establish a Jewish quota in 1922 or its later rejection of refugee scholars from Nazi Germany? It was, she charitably explains, because of “the traditional respect of the talmudist for the institution that shelters his learning. Harvard had clearly succeeded Slobodka Yeshivah in Wolfson’s reverence” (22). More often, Klingenstein applies her descent/consent and binary principles to show how these men redefined Judaism (or Jewishness) to fit the American experience, and also reinterpreted America to fit Jewish modes of thought. Naturally, what seemed compromise to one man might look like betrayal to another. Whereas Wolfson and the linguist Leo Wiener sought to replace descent with consent, to “transcend” their Jewish particularity in a universal philosophical or linguistic community, the philosopher Horace Kallen argued that Jews could be most American precisely by realizing themselves as

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Jews. In his 1915 essay “Democracy Versus the Melting Pot,” Kallen interpreted “equal” as “the right to be different.” If there is anything sound in all the contemporary noise about “diversity,” it originates in Kallen’s Jewish redefinition of Americanness as the retention rather than the abandonment of one’s ethnic culture. It goes without saying that modern apostles of diversity would not accept Kallen’s claim that Zionism itself is quintessentially American because its nationalist philosophy “is an extension of the assumptions of liberalism from the individual to the group” (49). The discussion of Trilling is the culminating and much the longest chapter of Jews in the American Academy. The Victorian ticket of admission to Columbia that was not honored in Lewisohn’s hands worked, albeit after considerable difficulties, for Trilling. 4 Like Lewisohn the author of a book on Matthew Arnold, Trilling aspired to conquer Morningside Heights “without paying the price of complete intellectual assimilation” (141). Although Klingenstein’s broad learning and luminous intelligence are still active here, the chapter is a disappointment. Here the stress on the descent culture descends into determinism. “Trilling was not free to choose who he was to become” (159). Why not? It’s only after events have occurred that they appear to have been inevitable; they were not inevitable before they happened. How can Trilling’s strong appreciation of the ordinary be attributed to his father when his father has been depicted by Klingenstein as a luftmensch who went broke making raccoon coats for drivers of open cars just as such cars were disappearing? Nor is the reductivism ameliorated by changing to the plural, as in “The rabbinic mind of the fathers became the novelistic mind of the son” (159). In view of all Klingenstein’s speculation on this subject, one wonders how she can have entirely ignored Trilling’s lengthy discussion in his Arnold book (1939) of the relation between Dr. Thomas Arnold and his son Matthew, a relation Trilling adduces to demonstrate that “Every man’s biography is to be understood in relation to his father.”5 Since Trilling was writing about Dr. Arnold’s antisemitism and particularly his opposition to the admission of Jews to London University at the very time when Trilling’s own future at Columbia was in jeopardy, Klingenstein’s omission is all the more egregious. Not omitted but mishandled is Trilling’s discussion of “Wordsworth and the Rabbis,” which she calls “his 1955 essay.” In fact, it was originally a lecture of 1950 (entitled “Wordsworth and the Iron Time”)

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given at Princeton on the centenary of the poet’s death. Princeton’s English department was not in 1950 famous for its receptivity to Jewish persons or interests. Yet Trilling—one of the most civilized, indeed courtly, men in the profession—went out of his way to flaunt his Jewish background and identity, as if it had now become a point of honor to be as Jewish among the goyim as he had formerly been goyish among the Jews. One also misses in Klingenstein’s discussion some mention of Trilling’s changing views of Zionism and Israel, and his intention, foiled by serious illness, to teach at the Hebrew University (as Paley professor).6 Despite his long engagement with the literature and culture of the English, Trilling did not visit England until 1957 (a fact that many a British literary academic was in those days fond of noting, with predictable scorn). I was a student in Trilling’s Victorian seminar at the time, and I remember being taken aback by his telling the class one day that he would be replaced for several weeks by a junior member of the faculty (Eugenio Villicana) so that he could visit England. Not long after he returned, I happened to meet him on the subway heading south from 116th Street and Broadway. He was full of enthusiastic admiration for the English university system, and said that although admission to Oxford and Cambridge was very difficult, once you got in all your expenses were paid—no doubt an impressive fact for an American Jew who had had to struggle not only against antisemitism but also economic hardship to make his academic career. Klingenstein’s second book deals only with literary scholars, and remains locked into the Harvard and Columbia worlds except for excursions to the University of Minnesota to trace the development of American Studies. She centers her story on two generations of scholars, one born in the 1910s, the other in the 1930s; and she claims that her thirteen personal portraits represent the complete story of social and intellectual integration of Jews into the English departments of America. Whereas her earlier book was structured by theories about “descent culture” and a supposedly Jewish penchant for “thinking in dichotomies,” she claims here to be primarily concerned with biographical narratives that will supply the raw material from which theorists can weave their webs. Indeed, she makes a point of telling how Harry Levin, her first Jewish scholar, threatened to withhold his


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permission to quote from his interviews with and letters to her if she insisted on forcing him into a theory of American ethnicity. The book’s first section, “The Harvard Circle,” begins with a sketch of that university’s resistance to Jewish interlopers, especially in the literature departments, the development of the quota system in its various forms, and the “higher” antisemitism of Santayana, Henry Adams, and T. S. Eliot. It then describes and analyzes the careers and literary ideas of Levin, a pioneering explicator of modernism’s high priests (Joyce, Proust, Eliot), M. H. Abrams, the greatest modern scholar of English Romanticism, and Daniel Aaron, a seminal figure in American Studies. Since these Jews who entered literary studies from the twenties through the forties were people who had, according to Klingenstein, no intellectual interest in their Jewish heritage and were not religious, in what sense was their Jewishness relevant to themselves or their scholarship? Were they anything more than brilliantly successful “facsimile WASPS”? Klingenstein makes half-hearted stabs at finding their “Jewish” component. Levin, like his Harvard mentors Irving Babbitt and F. O. Matthiessen, had a “secret blemish” which established his kinship with them: Babbitt came from a family inclined to crackpot religion; Matthiessen was homosexual; and Levin “was Jewish in a world where Jewishness was still perceived as a stigma”7 Abrams, wishing to establish a relation to Christian culture (and he was honest enough to grant that English literature had not ceased to be Christian in the nineteenth century) without committing emotion or belief to it, developed (with help from the Romantic poets and critics he wrote about) the doctrine of imaginative sympathy and consent. Dante’s Catholic universe, he argued, could be extradited, through the formal medium of poetry, to “all of us, whether Catholic, Protestant, or agnostic” (84). (Jews are notably missing from Abrams’ version of the American priest-minister-rabbi formula.) Even Aaron, far more distant than either Levin or Abrams from a Jewish identity, is held by Klingenstein finally to have “written a Jewish book” when he edited the diary of Arthur Inman because impersonation is linked to “an all-consuming obsession in postmodern Jewish Literature, namely, the uncertainty of what and who is real” (129-30). Just how strained is this attempt to put some distance between these Jewish English professors and the reigning orthodoxies of T. S. Eliot and literary modernism is evident if we remember how Irv-

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ing Howe, himself under the spell of Eliot and modernism, could unambiguously declare his independence from them. In 1954 Howe published his Treasury of Yiddish Stories, and in the introduction set Sholom Aleichem in (triumphant) opposition to Eliot and modernism. When she moves on to the post-war Harvard figure of Leo Marx, trained in Harvard’s American Civilization program, Klingenstein wisely refrains from any attempt to identify a Jewish element in academic success. Indeed, Marx himself warns her, in an interview, not to impose the burden of Jewish ancestry on him (even as he boasts of the “Yankee ancestry” [449n.] of his non-Jewish wife). Marx left Harvard for Minnesota in 1949 and founded the American Studies program. Staffed largely by students of Matthiessen like J. C. Levenson, it attracted for graduate work the subjects of Klingenstein’s next two portraits, Allen Guttmann, who “cared as little about being Jewish as Marx” (158) (and reacted to what he deemed excessive Jewish fussing over the Holocaust by naming his children Hans and Erika) and Guttmann’s foil, the engaging (if, until very recently, less productive) Jules Chametzky. Chametzky was encouraged to be precisely what he was—a Jew from Brooklyn—not by Marx but by another Minnesota professor, Henry Nash Smith, also Harvard-educated but, like many of Minnesota’s professors of English, a Southerner.8 Chametzky rejected the cosmopolitan idea of American literature, stressed regional, ethnic, racial and sexual factors, and made a point of providing a forum for those previously “unheard voices” (191)—of whom we now hear so much. The second half of Enlarging America shifts from the Harvard culture of professors to the Columbia culture of literary critics. Klingenstein begins with four (relatively short) “refractions of Lionel Trilling” which purport to show the various ways in which he made possible the integration of Jews into American literary academe and culture. The four are the novelist-critic Cynthia Ozick, the magazine editor Norman Podhoretz, the academic literary critic Steven Marcus, and the feminist literary scholar Carolyn Heilbrun. Several of the many splendid anecdotes that enrich the book are to be found here. One is Ozick’s account of Trilling’s reaction to her asking, in a seminar, whether the fact that Freud, Marx, and Einstein were Jewish signified something: “Trilling’s reaction was out of proportion even to such gaucherie. He blew up at me, was enraged, outraged...I had sullied—vulgarized...his class” (226). 9 Trilling’s growing unease


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about the wayward path taken by some of his students and disciples is vividly conveyed in Klingenstein’s shrewd and sympathetic discussion of Podhoretz’s career. The book’s concluding section is called “The Rediscovery of Origins” and uses Robert Alter, Ruth Wisse, and (unconvincingly) Sacvan Bercovitch to exemplify literary scholars who had gotten doctorates in English in the 1960s but used the knowledge of Hebrew and Yiddish that they had acquired as children or adolescents to move into Jewish studies in the 1970s and 1980s, applying modern critical methods to the interpretation of Jewish texts. Alter, a student of both Trilling and Levin, added to their legacies “an oeuvre [interpretation of Hebrew literature] that was unimaginable when Trilling and Levin attended college” (302). Wisse’s appointment to a chair in Yiddish at Harvard symbolized both “closure and a new beginning” (336). Assimilated Jewish scholars working on “mainstream” literatures had long been handsomely rewarded for giving up their “particularity” with places in departments considered central to the university’s purpose; with Wisse’s appointment to a chair in Yiddish and Comparative Literature in 1992 a Jewish scholar working on a Jewish subject was admitted to the inner sanctum of the university. Bercovitch, who for Klingenstein represents the condition to which all literary scholarship should aspire, is likened to the Vilna Gaon even though the “Jewish” element of his work is almost as elusive as that of Aaron. This is a formidable book, prodigiously researched and written with analytic precision and vigor. Klingenstein is at various points a Boswell with a tape recorder, a Johnson writing Lives of the English Poets, a hagiographer chronicling Lives of the Saints. She is diligent in tracing personal and intellectual influences; she lacks the gift of knowing when to stop. Do we really require the complete story of Bercovitch’s parents and of Jewish life in their Ukrainian town to fathom his work? But on some crucial matters Klingenstein is mysteriously reticent. Typically she moves deliberately from book to book by her subjects, yet Wisse’s If I Am Not for Myself...The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews (1992), one of the most important Jewish books of the past fifty years, goes unmentioned in text, bibliography, and index (though surfacing twice in endnotes). Neither do we hear of the sledgehammer assault on the book in 1992 by Alter, ludicrously depicted as an “unpolemical” (293) person who in his maturity would never use

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literary criticism “to advise a people on what it should or should not do” (291). In fact, Alter imputed “Masada”-like paranoia to Wisse, precisely as he had imputed it to Golda Meir and other Israelis in a (very literary) Commentary article of July 1973 which urged “greater flexibility and more readiness for diplomatic risk-taking” upon the Israelis—who were still pondering Alter’s advice when the Arabs launched the Yom Kippur War in October. By ignoring the rancorous dispute between Wisse and Alter over whether the safety of Jews or the imperatives of liberalism (espoused by virtually every professor in this book except for Wisse) should take precedence, Klingenstein misses a fine opportunity to bring her overall argument into focus and face the question of what good this enlargement of America has done the Jews themselves. Given the success stories of Jewish integration into the English departments and the resulting enlargement of literary scholarship, why is it that 90 percent of Jewish English professors cannot read their way around a dreydl and that an equal percentage of the professors of Jewish Studies, whose enterprise flourished (not accidentally) in the wake of the Six-Day War, would as soon come to the defense of Israel on campus as they would endorse the flat-earth theory? But Klingenstein’s Panglossian manner—she presents Israel as an adopted child of American academe—tends to override such qualms. True, she ends her book by remarking that Jewish “integration into literary academe, unlike that of any other group, was accompanied by the almost complete loss of their cultural heritage and concomitant communal self-esteem” (426); but in view of the triumphalism of the previous four hundred pages this recognition seems too little, too late. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

Up Stream: An American Chronicle (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922), 124. Susanne Klingenstein, Enlarging America: The Cultural Work ofJewish Literary Scholars, 1930-1990 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1998), 22. Susanne Klingenstein, Jews in the American Academy, 1900-1940:The Dynamics of Intellectual Assimilation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 98. Subsequent references to this work will appear in parentheses in the text. But Klingenstein’s real foil to Lewisohn, whom she derides as a windbag and egomaniac, is Jacob Zeitlin, who stands forth as the Jackie Robinson of Jewish English professors, a Russian Jew whose “toughness and self-discipline” enabled him to become the first tenured Jewish professor in an American English department (University of Illinois). Matthew Arnold (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939).

Jews in English Departments 6.

7. 8. 9.

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In a letter of 25 June 1975 to Professor Sholom J. Kahn of the Hebrew University, Trilling wrote that “We still hold on to the hope that we will have a piece of time which will be wholly our own and one of the first priorities of such autonomy as we may gain is a trip to Israel.” Enlarging America, 55-56. Subsequent references to this work will be cited in parentheses in the text. At one time, Minnesota’s was one of the most “Southern” English departments in the country. Its faculty included Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Henry Nash Smith, Samuel Monk, and Robert E. Moore. For Ozick’s fuller rendition of her sense of Trilling, see her essay “The Buried Life,” New Yorker, October 2, 2000.


12 American History, 1950-70, by Philip Roth Philip Roth has linked American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998) as parallel demonstrations of how difficult it is to escape immersion in and definition by one’s historical moment, how easy to become a historical casualty. “I found,” says Roth, “that dealing with a very important, powerful decade in American life, the Vietnam years, enabled me to write in ways I hadn’t written before. I began to wonder about what other time was like that in my experience. I realized of course that it was the McCarthy era.”1 By writing “in ways I hadn’t written before,” Roth seems to mean several things. Back in 1960 he complained that American life was becoming so fantastic that it was outstripping the capacity of the novelist’s imagination and forcing him to abandon “the grander social and political phenomena of our times” for “a celebration of the self,”2 a celebration in which Roth was to become a major participant. For decades, and most fruitfully in the Zuckerman Bound trilogy, Roth has been contemplating (among other things) his own navel and making what he calls “fake biography, false history...a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life.”3 Now he has turned outward, from what Matthew Arnold called the “unlit gulph of the self,” to the more “objective” world of American history. Nathan Zuckerman is the (or at least a) narrator of both of Roth’s most recent novels, but (especially in American Pastoral) no longer their main subject. And whereas most of Roth’s novels have centered on protagonists one would not have wanted as dinner guests, the central figure of American Pastoral is actually a splendid fellow, even though a card-carrying member of that bourgeois world which Roth began his career by excoriating (and cutting off from its memories, especially if they happened to be Jewish). If the “historical” dimension of these two rich and elegantly constructed novels is (relatively) new, so too is the depiction of the writer 141

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Nathan Zuckerman as an aging hermit in rural New England (the Berkshires in the first novel, Connecticut in the second) leading a monastic existence and, in his mid-sixties, brooding over his belated discovery that life consists mainly of mistakes. “The fact remains,” says Nathan in American Pastoral, “that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living....that’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong.”4 In I Married a Communist, Nathan, after having listened for six nights to the reminiscences and reflections of his ninety-year-old former English teacher, the novel’s co-narrator, concludes, once again: “It’s all error....Isn’t that what you’ve been telling me? There’s only error. There’s the heart of the world. Nobody finds his life. That is life” (319). Humble acknowledgment of his fallibility, rather than narcissistic display of the endlessly ambiguous relations between art and life, truth and falsehood, is the new keynote of Nathan Zuckerman. American Pastoral Who could have predicted, from the long and troubled relationship between Irving Howe and Philip Roth (who skewered his most savage critic as a pornographer in The Anatomy Lesson [1983]), that Roth would produce a novel that is the existential realization of Howe’s criticism of the moral and political style of the New Left (a term he popularized) of the sixties? In Anatomy Lesson, Roth’s alter ego Nathan Zuckerman says of Howe’s fictional representative Milton Appel: “I hate his guts, and obviously the sixties have driven him batty, but that doesn’t make him a fool, you know...” (Anatomy Lesson, 507-08). In a series of essays from 1965-68, Howe enumerated the characteristics of leftist dabblers in apocalypse, stressing their moral absolutism, their political obtuseness, their undemocratic values, their attraction to “third world” dictatorial heroes like Castro, their “crude, unqualified anti-Americanism,” their loathing of liberalism (the creed of their flabbily indulgent middle-class parents), their fascination with violence. The chief villain of American Pastoral—”the little murderer herself...the monster Merry” (67) (or, as her classmates call her, Ho Chi Levov) is the perfect embodiment of all these traits. The petted daughter of the novel’s (nominally) Jewish protagonist, Seymour “Swede” Levov and his (somewhat less nominally) Catholic wife Dawn, both tolerant, kindly, well-intentioned, she feeds her six-foot frame on every trendy New Left cliché: “Everything is political. Brush-

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ing your teeth is political” (104). She drives her parents to distraction by the saccharine piety with which she discusses the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, “a country she spoke of with such patriotic feeling that, according to Dawn, one would have thought she’d been born not at the Newark Beth Israel but at the Beth Israel in Hanoi” (100). Her telescopic philanthropy also attracts her to Algeria and to Fidel Castro, “who had eradicated injustice with socialism” (260). Like so many sixties radicals, she comes to believe the popular fiction (which made them the most unteachable generation— because they already knew everything—in American history) that she and her comrades are super-intelligent when in fact they are just the opposite. “She’s not smart at all,” says her mother. “She’s become stupid, Seymour; she gets more and more stupid each time we talk” (102). Merry’s loathing of America is described as “ignorant hatred” (213). In February 1968 she decides to “bring the war home” to the rural New Jersey town where the Levovs live by blowing up the tiny post office in the general store and killing the local doctor. Her very unsympathetic uncle Jerry merely gives extreme and radical form to the verdict passed on Merry by the novel itself: “People don’t like to admit how much they resent other people’s children, but this kid made it easy for you. She was miserable, self-righteous— little shit was no good from the time she was born” (279). It is Merry’s bombings (she later kills, less accidentally, three people in Oregon) that transport her father, a bulwark of duty, ethical obligation, and large-heartedness (Levov is Hebrew for heart) “out of the longed-for American Pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral—into the indigenous American berserk” (86). Nor is Merry the novel’s only embodiment of sixties radicalism. There is also the psychopathic terrorist and con-artist Rita Cohen, who “expresses perfectly the stupidity of her kind” (371), a stupidity compounded of thoughts “engendered...by the likes of The Communist Manifesto” (165). Cohen upbraids Levov, after he shows her through his glove factory, for being “nothing but a shitty little capitalist who exploits the brown and yellow people of the world and lives in luxury behind the nigger-proof security gates of his mansion” (133). And, of course, there is the inevitable English professor, the malodorous “strident yenta” Marcia Umanoff, inveterate antiwar marcher and “militant nonconformist of staggering self-certainty

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much given to...calculatedly apocalyptic pronouncements designed to bring discomfort to the lords of the earth”(339-40) . But the truly potent critic of sixties radicalism in American Pastoral is neither Roth’s narrator Zuckerman nor his high-school hero, the three-letter star athlete Swede Levov, nor any other character sickened by the arrogant ignorance of the kamikaze radicals; rather it is the counter-image of productive labor in the glove-factory that the Swede (after turning down an offer to play professional baseball) takes over from his father. (This is the only novel by Roth in which glove-making gets far more attention than love-making.) Newark Maid manufactures the country’s best ladies’ glove; and Swede is justly proud of being part of a tradition in glove families, going back hundreds of years, of trade talk—which Roth plentifully supplies, devoting page after page to loving description of the process from the tannery to the finished product. Work is real; idealistic sloganeering about exploitation of workers by profit-hungry bosses is idle wind. In a burst of anti-intellectualism reminiscent of Carlyle, also a great believer in work, Swede says to himself, “These deep thinkers were the only people he could not stand to be around for long, these people who’d never manufactured anything...who did not know what things were made of...who knew nothing of the intricacies or the risks of building a business or running a factory but who nonetheless imagined that they knew everything worth knowing” (413). Early in the novel Zuckerman asks about Swede, who got his nickname in a largely Jewish high school for the blue eyes and blond hair and great height that made him “a boy as close to a goy as we were going to get (3),” and an adult for whom Judaism is “that stuff” which “means nothing” (314-15): “Where was the Jew in him? You couldn’t find it and yet you knew it was there” (20). If it is there, it is in the idea embedded in the dual use of the Hebrew word avodah for labor and for prayer (in the ancient temple service). The medieval monks took over this idea in their motto laborare est orare, work is worship. The labor of three generations of Americans built the city of Newark, an abiding and vividly realized presence in the novel even as it is being destroyed in 1967 by rioters and looters, transformed from “the city where they manufactured everything” into “the car-theft capital of the world” (24). The love of and gratitude to America of those three generations, beginning with immigrants very glad to be


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out of the old country, suddenly comes to nothing in the fourth, with the violent hatred of Merry and her vandalizing comrades. Just how deeply felt (and also, according to my Newark-born and raised mother, just how accurate) is the richly detailed evocation of Newark becomes clear in Zuckerman’s description of the first meeting of Merry’s grandfathers: “Two great memories meet...They are on to something even more serious than Judaism and Catholicism—they are on to Newark and Elizabeth...” (400). This submergence of religion is also part of the American Pastoral ideal. That is why the holiday of Thanksgiving is the “American Pastoral par excellence” (402)—neutral, religionless, everybody gorging on turkey, nobody indulging in “funny” foods like gefilte fish or bitter herbs. But Thanksgiving, as the thankless children of the sixties remind their sanguine parents, lasts only twenty-four hours. American Pastoral is, however, about more than what happened to this country in the sixties. The expulsion of Swede Levov from “Paradise Remembered” (as the book’s first section is called) is also “every man’s tragedy” because it involves discovery of “the evil ineradicable from human dealings” (81). The largeness of Roth’s intentions in this brilliantly realized novel is evident not only in the mythical framework in which he places Swede (likened to Johnny Appleseed and John Kennedy) but in his repeated invocation of one of the most ambitious pieces of fiction ever written: Tolstoy’s short story The Death of Ivan Ilych. When Zuckerman begins his research into the story of Levov, the golden boy of his youthful memories, he still believes in what historians used to call “American exceptionalism” (one aspect of which was that, as Werner Sombart famously put it, America was “the promised land of capitalism,” where “on the reefs of roast beef and apple pie socialist Utopias...are sent to their doom”). Perhaps Tolstoy was correct in pronouncing that Ivan Ilych’s life “had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible. Maybe so. Maybe in Russia in 1886. But in Old Rimrock, New Jersey, in 1995, when the Ivan Ilyches come trooping back to lunch...after their morning round of golf and start to crow, ‘It doesn’t get any better than this,’ they may be a lot closer to the truth than Leo Tolstoy ever was. Swede Levov’s life, for all I knew, had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore just great, right in the American grain”(30-31). But by the time Zuckerman, himself beset by intimations of mortality, finishes the research that excavates all the old griefs of Levov,

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he knows just how evasive is the pastoral ideal of ordinariness, just how little of life is orderly or makes any sense. Repeatedly the novel asks how Swede and Dawn led to Merry. And nobody, neither the narrator (and, for once, definitely not protagonist) Zuckerman, nor the hero Swede, nor his brother Jerry, nor his generally self-confident father has a convincing reply. Indeed, the “explanation” of Merry’s madness and hatred proffered by old Lou Levov—who, like Polonius and Middlemarch’s Mr. Brooke, mixes wisdom with foolishness, provides one of the few comic moments of this unusually (for Roth) somber novel. “If, God forbid, their parents are no longer oppressed for a while, they run where they think they can find oppression. Can’t live without it. Once Jews ran away from oppression; now they run away from no-oppression. Once they ran away from being poor; now they run away from being rich. It’s crazy. They have parents they can’t hate anymore because their parents are so good to them, so they hate America instead” (255). Yet he continues to insist that the Levovs are an ordinary family up until the moment when Merry, now a veiled Jain (having mercurially lurched from super-violent to super non-violent), dirty, squalid, smelly, returns to tell her grandfather that she has killed four people— whereupon he dies (or rather seems to) of a heart attack. (Roth’s sympathetic presentation of old Levov is a stark contrast to his scornful presentation, once upon a time, of the moral and psychic consequences of the transformation of Jewish life from proletarian immigrant poverty to middle-class suburban comfort.) Tolstoy was, then, as Roth views the matter, doubly wrong. He was wrong to assume that ordinariness is a given, and wrong to assume that it is terrible. Roth demonstrates that, in some strange sense, ordinariness is one of those noble things that are as difficult as they are rare. But, in the estimation of American Pastoral’s narrator, its difficulty and elusiveness do not diminish its stature: “And what,” he asks in the novel’s concluding sentences, “is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs” (423)? I Married a Communist The wrongness of Tolstoy is a central motif of I Married a Communist as well. Murray Ringold, a ninety-year old ex-high school English teacher, who shares the narration of the story with the Connecticut hermit Nathan Zuckerman, tells (over six nights at


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Zuckerman’s rural retreat), the story of Ira Ringold, the infamous Communist whose career is ruined by the McCarthyite “witch-hunt” of the fifties and by his wife’s scandalous book about him (a mendacious “exposé” modelled on Claire Bloom’s bitter and resentful memoir about ex-husband Philip Roth). But what Nathan mainly learns from the old man’s tale is that even the person “who’d chosen to be nothing more extraordinary than a high school teacher had failed to elude the turmoil of his time and place and ended up no less a historical casualty than his brother.”5 Eschewing the public arena in which his brother cut so spectacular a figure—as Communist, as star radio actor, and as podium Abe Lincoln—Murray could not achieve ordinariness. He was fired from his job because of refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, but six years later was reinstated (and reimbursed) by the state of New Jersey. Not long after his reinstatement, the Newark riots erupted and, just like Swede Levov, he elected to stay in the ravaged city. As Swede was loyal to his black workers, Murray remains in order to teach English to the black kids at South Side High School whom his colleagues had pronounced unteachable. A novelist of cliché would show Murray succeeding where his colleagues had failed; but Roth is not a novelist of cliché. Murray wastes ten years of his life in futile efforts merely to maintain discipline. He is mugged twice, but as a liberal intoxicated “with the myth of [his] own goodness” (317-18), he stays on in Newark until his wife is murdered while walking from the hospital where she works to their home right across the street. In a novel where betrayal is the generic sin, Murray—the story’s most principled character, who had refused to betray his brother (after Ira murdered a man), refused to betray the poor blacks of Newark, spurned the delusions of religion, ideology, and Communism—betrays his wife: she pays the price for his exalted civic virtue. Although Roth refers to “the Vietnam years” as the historical setting for American Pastoral, he does not refer to “the Korean years” as the background for I Married a Communist.One might plausibly argue that if this country had not been at war with the Communist regimes of North Korea and China, the whole panoply of McCarthyite outrages in the name of anti-Communism—the blacklists and political dismissals that play so large a role in this novel—might never have occurred. Nevertheless, Roth’s presentation of “the McCarthy era” is by no means the simplistic liberal version that some conser-

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vative critics have alleged it to be. Ira Ringold, the self-educated, six-foot-six-inch ditchdigger who replaces the (only slightly shorter) Swede Levov here as the object of young Nathan’s hero-worship, is not an innocent liberal whose radio career is brought to an end in 1952 because he got on the wrong mailing list or signed the wrong petition or got himself photographed with Paul Robeson. He is indeed a member of the Communist Party (though denying it, in a crucial confrontation, to both Nathan and Nathan’s father), taking his orders from Moscow and spouting the party line on every subject from aardvark to zymosis. He belongs to the Communist Party “heart and soul.” He obeys every 180 degree shift in policy and swallows the “dialectical” justification for every barbaric act of Stalin. The tireless harangue with which he savagely bores his young hero to despair is comprised of two prophecies: that the evil United States is on the road to fascism and will make atomic war on the USSR. Murray, himself a victim of McCarthyism (and as totally reliable a narrator as one is likely to find in a Roth novel), warns Nathan (who loses a Fulbright because of his link to Ira), not to confuse McCarthyism with totalitarianism. Murray derides the Marxist “utopian cant” of Johnny O’Day, the Leninist steelworker who indoctrinates Ira, “an adult...not too skilled in brainwork, with the intellectual glamour of Big Sweeping Ideas” (60). (Here, as in American Pastoral, the novel’s main radical figure is presented as both stupid and murderous.) Neither does Roth fail to depict the rank dishonesty of many leftist critics of McCarthyism. After Ira’s star actress wife Eve Frame (a Jewish antisemite born Chava Fromkin) retaliates the injuries she believes he’s inflicted on her by telling all about his party ties in I Married a Communist, Ira is defended by fellow-traveling journalists from the Nation and New Republic. They brazenly declare that Ira was never a Communist, that he never had anything to do with the Party, that the Communist plot to infiltrate the broadcasting industry was a concoction of lies. Their lies, like McCarthy’s, can ruin careers; and this counterattack finishes Eve in the ultraliberal world of New York entertainers, who also know a thing or two about ostracism. As Murray shrewdly remarks, “By the time all these savage intellects, with their fidelity to the facts, were finished with the woman, to find anything anywhere of the ugly truth that was the story of Ira and Eve, you would have needed a microscope” (308). The fifties, then, as presented in this novel, was not simply (as Irving Howe


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called it in an influential Partisan Review essay of 1954), the Age of Conformity, but the age of gossip, of betrayal, of the entertainment value of disgrace and the pleasures of paranoia. In American Pastoral Nathan Zuckerman is the narrator,but the novel does really center on the protagonist, Swede Levov. Here a great deal hinges on the question of which of the many voices he hears will penetrate to Nathan’s core and which of his mentors will become his model. At first this looks like a political contest. Ira the Communist is looking not just for a party recruit, but for a son. But Ira is not a pure model because he lets private life—the bourgeois temptations of wife, family, home, mistresses—sully political devotion and destroy him. Johnny O’Day, a true fanatic who has no private life, nearly recruits Nathan and brings him to the verge of leaving college to move to a steel town in Indiana. But the true contest for Nathan’s allegiance turns out to be more literary than political, since his destiny is to be a writer, not a union organizer. Ira’s idea of writing is that of the Communists: “try to force into the script every corny party cliché, every so-called progressive sentiment they could get away with, manipulating the script to stick whatever ideological junk they thought of as Communist content into any historical context whatsoever” (272). Nathan of Newark, as he is mockingly called by Eve Frame’s half-mad daughter Sylphid (even more of a Jew-hater than her mother) for a time aspires to be a radio writer of the tendentious sort. But he is disabused of this virtuous conception of the artistic mission by his college literature professor Leo Glucksman, who has the literary (and also amorous) instincts of Oscar Wilde. He persuasively lectures Nathan on the need to curb his benevolence: “Art as the advocate of good things? Who taught you all this? Who taught you art is slogans? Who taught you art is in the service of ‘the people’? Art is in the service of art.... What is the motive for writing serious literature, Mr. Zuckerman? To disarm the enemies of price control?...Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than an artist’s desire to prove that he’s good....You must achieve mastery over your idealism, over your virtue as well as over your vice...” (218). This aesthetic credo is good enough to woo Nathan away from Ira (and Howard Fast and Arthur Miller), but not from Ira’s brother Murray, who was Nathan’s first English teacher and proves finally to have been his best. Unlike the sexual predator Glucksman, Murray

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exemplifies manliness as well as humane literacy rather than art for art’s sake. Never trying to recruit Nathan for a party or ideology, he defines by example Nathan’s literary vocation. When he used to read scenes from Macbeth to his students, Nathan was powerfully impressed “by how manly literature seemed in his enactment of it” (314). Murray, who has come to Connecticut in July 1997 to attend a college course on “Shakespeare at the Millennium,” pauses frequently, in telling his brother’s story, to chastise people for misreadings or misuse of crucial lines from Shakespeare’s plays. Henry Kissinger, one of numerous politicians mocked for their egregious hypocrisy at Nixon’s funeral, his voice “dipped in sludge” (278), quotes Hamlet on his father when he should be quoting Hamlet on his uncle. Other misreaders assume that when Macduff says “He has no children,” he is speaking of Macbeth. But in fact, as read by Ringold, the “he” to whom Macduff refers is Macduff himself (314). The ensuing “close reading” of a Shakespeare text (not the novel’s only one), as recalled by Nathan from his high school English class of a half-century earlier, is prelude to one of the book’s overwhelming moments. It is overwhelming because Murray now carries in his head all the dead of the tragic story he has told and because Nathan himself, “receding from the agitation of the autobiographical,” has himself now entered into competition with death, “the final business” (72). “All my pretty ones?/Did you say all?...All?/What, all my pretty chickens and their dam/ At one fell swoop?” And now Malcolm speaks, Mr. Ringold/Malcolm, harshly, as though to shake Macduff: “Dispute it like a man.” “I shall do so,” says Mr. Ringold/ Macduff. Then the simple line that would assert itself, in Murray Ringold’s voice, a hundred times, a thousand times, during the remainder of my life: “But I must also feel it as a man.” “Ten syllables,” Mr. Ringold tells us the next day, “that’s all. Ten syllables, five beats, pentameter...nine words, the third iambic stress falling perfectly and naturally on the fifth and most important word...eight monosyllables and the one word of two syllables a word as common and ordinary and serviceable as any there is in everyday English...and yet, all together, and coming where it does, what power! Simple, simple— and like a hammer! “But I must also feel it as a man,” and Mr. Ringold closes the big book of Shakespeare’s plays, says to us, as he does at the end of each class, “Be seein’ya,” and leaves the room. (314-15)

In such scenes one feels that Roth, like the Tolstoy who wrote The Death of Ivan Ilych, has burned away the vanity and self-fascination that plagued much of his earlier work and afforded us a glimpse into the innermost recesses of human experience.


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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Quoted by Roth’s publisher Houghton Mifflin, in its publicity flyer. Speech of 1960 at Stanford University, reprinted in Philip Roth, Reading Myself and Others (New York: Penguin, 1985), 180 Interview in Paris Review (1983-84). Reprinted in Conversations with Philip Roth (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1992). American Pastoral (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 35. Subsequent references to the novel will be cited in parentheses. I Married a Communist (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 318. Subsequent references to the novel will be cited in parentheses.


13 Do Jews Need a Literary Canon? “Yiddish literature can boast no Shakespeares, no Dantes, no Tolstois.” So said the great champion of Yiddish literature, Irving Howe, in 1954.1 As recently as 1970, Cynthia Ozick declared that “there are no major works of Jewish imaginative genius written in any Gentile language, sprung out of any Gentile culture.”2 But now, in strenuous opposition, emerges the literary critic Ruth Wisse confidently comparing Sholom Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman with Shakespeare’s Lear, and Isaac Babel with Leo Tolstoy, and boldly claiming an equal place among the major literatures of the world for the multilingual yet coherent body of twentieth-century writing by the tiny minority called the Jews. For several decades I have taught a course called Modern Jewish Literature in Translation without imposing a much stricter definition of prerequisites for admission to the reading list than the author’s being Jewish and centrally concerned with Jewish fate. Wisse’s standards, as laid out in the introductory chapter of The Modern Jewish Canon, are somewhat stricter, although the results of her selection are very similar. Recognizing that exclusion is as much a function of intellect as inclusion, she limits the Jewish canon to Jewish writers who, whether they write in a Jewish language (Yiddish or Hebrew) or a Gentile tongue, evince respect for the autonomy of Jewishness and the centrality of Jewish national experience. Their work “attests to the indissolubility of the Jews,”3 albeit not necessarily in a positive way. (The Bible affords a formidable precedent for Jewish writers who take the sour view that the Jews are an eternal people but occasionally a nasty one.) Wisse’s skeletal theory of modern Jewish literature acquires flesh and muscle tissue as she makes her case for the quality as well as the existence of a Jewish canon in ten more or less chronologically ar153

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ranged chapters about its major figures or schools or specific works. The chronological order is indispensable in a book that in effect proposes to tell the story of the Jewish people in the twentieth century through analysis of its major literary works and their authors because “modern Jewish literature is the repository of modern Jewish experience” (4). Her ten chapters center on the following writers, works, and themes: Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman; Franz Kafka and the Hebrew writer Yosef Haim Brenner; the Jewish writers of tsarist and Communist Russia, from Babel to Vasily Grossman; the literature (in Yiddish by all three writers of the famous Singer family and by Singer’s antagonist Jacob Glatstein, and in Hebrew by S. Y. Agnon) of and about the Poland of the 1930s; the literature of the Holocaust; literature in English (including, by honorary membership for relevant goyim, George Eliot’s DanielDeronda and James Joyce’s Ulysses) about the Zionist enterprise; works tracing the movement of the immigrant masses of Europe from Yiddish to English; recent American Jewish writers; and Israeli Literature (“A Chapter in the Making”). The intellectual background to Wisse’s original and ambitious work is complicated. In the first instance, it consists of her keen awareness of the way in which Jews have preserved (and been preserved by) the biblical canon, but also of her distress over the extent to which Jews, once am ha-sefer (people of the book) have become am b’li ha-sefer (people without the book), either resistant to, or incapable of, reading their own books, ancient and modern. Indeed, she had in the seventies qualified her praise of Hillel Halkin’s Letters to an American-Jewish Friend by remarking that it was far too literate a book for its intended audience—that is, American Jews. She was also keenly aware of the academic debate that had already been raging for almost two decades when she put pen to paper over the value of a traditional canon, of basing a curriculum on the idea of schooling in great books. Her collaborator in editing anthologies of Yiddish literature (itself an effort in Jewish canonizing), Irving Howe, had prominently joined the debate in 1991, and his lengthy New Republic essay called “The Value of the Canon” affords an excellent summary of the arguments that were being made against and for the canon. Since most of the anti-traditionalist insurgents who led the charge against traditional survey courses of world and English literature usually thought of themselves as leftists—feminists, black activists, homosexuals, Marxists, deconstructionists—

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Howe’s rebuttal of them exploited his strong credentials as a literary critic who had found a legitimate way to combine criticism with political insurgency. He argued that it was not leftism that animated the devotees of political correctness in literature, but “a strange mixture of American populist sentiment and French critical theorizing. . . . The populism releases anti-elitist rhetoric, the theorizing releases highly elitist language.”4 The theorizing engendered a nihilism that called into question distinctions of value and the value of distinctions. “If you can find projections of racial, class, and gender bias in both a Western by Louis L’Amour and a classical Greek play, and if you have decided to reject the ‘elitism’ said to be at the core of literary distinctions, then you might as well teach the Western as the Greek play” (42). In the eighties and nineties as in the sixties, the academic insurgents clamored for “relevance,” a slogan which, according to Howe, not only proceeds from an impoverished view of political life but is usually “ephemeral in its excitements and transient in its impact,” prone to “the provincialism of the contemporary” (43). Of course, serious education in a democratic society should assume a critical stance toward the very culture that sustains it; but a criticism that loses touch with the heritage of the past becomes frivolous, a litany of momentary complaints. Howe then takes up the objections to traditional humanistic education based on an established canon. The first is that by requiring students to read the classics, the university imposes upon them, in a grossly “elitist” act, a certain worldview. “In its extreme version,” says Howe, “this idea is not very interesting, since it is not clear how the human race could survive if there were not some ‘imposition’ from one generation to the next” (44). But everything depends on the spirit in which the individual teacher approaches a dialogue of Plato or an essay by Mill or a novel by Lawrence. They can be taught as sacred texts, instruments of indoctrination, or they can be taught in a spirit of openness, which encourages students to read carefully, think independently, and ask questions. For a university to propose a few required courses so that ill-read students, survivors of America’s miserable high schools, may examine what they do not know, isn’t necessarily elitist. The second argument of the academic insurgents is that the list of canonical classics includes only dead, white males, linked to the values of Western hegemony. The first part of Howe’s reply is a

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reminder that any such lists that go past the middle of the eighteenth century will include numerous “women” writers; but he doubts whether having taught and written about such writers made him a better teacher or person. The absence of women from the literature of earlier centuries is a result of historical inequities that have only recently been remedied. But even if the circumstances in which the achievement of “dead, white males” occurred were execrable, the achievements themselves remain precious. The third objection to Howe’s “traditionalist” position is that to isolate any group of texts as “the canon” is to establish a hierarchy of bias, in behalf of which there can never be certainty of judgment. In response, Howe identifies a confusion of social and intellectual uses in the term “hierarchy.” It is reasonable to criticize a social hierarchy that entails maldistribution of income and power. But a literary “hierarchy” signifies a judgment, usually based on the sound principle that time is the only reliable literary critic, that some works are of great, abiding value, others of lesser value, still others without value. “To prefer Elizabeth Bishop to Judith Krantz is not of the same order as sanctioning the inequality of wealth in the United States” (46). The fourth objection to disinterested teaching and scholarship is that all texts have a social and political bias, and those who teach them should admit that politics and ideology pervade everything. Well, of course, says Howe, if you “look hard (or foolishly) enough,” you can find social and political traces everywhere, just as you could also find religion everywhere. But although politics may be “in” everything, not everything is politics: “To see politics everywhere is to diminish the weight of politics”(46). The fifth and final objection that has been made to conserving the traditional curriculum that Howe is defending is that the traditional canon was based on elitist ideologies, the values of Western imperialism, racism, sexism. It is now necessary, say the insurgents, to introduce non-Western voices so that minority students may gain in self-esteem by learning about their origins. Howe replies that the argument that minority students will gain in self-esteem by reading about themselves (or their ancestors) is not only difficult to prove, it is also grossly patronizing in suggesting that variety and multiplicity are suitable for middle-class white students, but not for minority students, whose literary regimen must be racially determined. Are the devotees of multiculturalism sure that arranging the curriculum by racial criteria will not undermine rather than encourage the self-es-


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teem of ethnic minorities? And since when was the function of the humanities to inculcate self-esteem? The third segment of the background to Wisse’s canonizing enterprise is one that she explicitly takes account of in her introduction: Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, in which, as Wisse puts it, “Bloom turns all barrels on members of what he calls the ‘school of resentment,’ journalists and teachers who want to overthrow the canon in order to advance their program of social change” (2). But whereas Howe’s defense of the canon was in the tradition of Matthew Arnold, proceeding from a deep belief that literature was the criticism of life made with high truth and high seriousness, Bloom followed the line of Oscar Wilde, that is, that art is perfectly useless and that there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book, only well-written and badly written ones. Bloom wanted to uphold the Western Canon but only for its aesthetic power, not its spiritual, political, or moral force (or consequences). Nothing, as we shall see, could be farther from Wisse’s intentions in establishing a hierarchy of writers in whom Jewish experience is the central concern. Bloom, moreover, made a point of excluding considerations of national context in the works he examined; Wisse believes that finding a usable tradition for one’s own group “is one of the highest critical functions [readers] can undertake” (3). As we might expect from the author of If I Am Not forMyself...The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews, every chapter of The Modern Jewish Canon displays Wisse’s extraordinary talent for integrating literary criticism not only with ideological and historical background but with political astuteness. Her lengthy analysis of Kafka’s The Trial, for example, begins by noting that he had been following accounts of the notorious blood-libel trial of Mendel Beilis in Russia, which were frequently referred to in the Prague Zionist press simply as Der Prozess (i.e., the trial). Did Kafka transform this true story of a persecuted Jew into his universal fable of innocent victimization? In her discussion of the work of Isaac Babel and the Soviet Yiddish writers, all of them murdered by Stalin, Wisse observes that “Communism was a vendetta of intellectuals who seized control of a state in the name of ideas and used ideas to maintain their control over it. Since it was based on a theoretical misdiagnosis of the human condition, Communism needed writers [including some, like Itzik Feffer and David Bergelson, who would themselves be murdered] to maintain the fiction of its progress” (128).

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But any work defining a “canon” or a mainstream or a great tradition inevitably prompts questions about Who’s In and Who’s Out— and Why? As we proceed through the book, the nature of Wisse’s touchstones for recognizing genuinely Jewish writers becomes clear. She concludes her discussion of Tevye the Dairyman by observing that the (commercially successful) travesty of it called Fiddler on the Roof retailored Tevye not only to salute Broadway and Herald Square but also to affirm liberal values over Jewish ones. Whereas the Tevye stories were “conservative” in outlook, championing the traditional wisdom of the father over his daughters’ abandonment of it (for conversion or individuality or—most destructive of all to Jewish life—socialism), the clever Jews of Broadway equated Tevye’s “reactionary” desire to remain Jewish with the antisemites’ persecution (pogroms included) of Jews. For Wisse, this transformation of Tevye the Dairyman into Fiddler on the Roof “goes to the very heart of this book about the Jewish canon” (63) because it espouses the liberalism which requires Jewish assimilation as the price of its tolerance. She concludes that no artistic creation that ignores this potential conflict between liberal dogmatism and Jewish self-respect can qualify as a Jewish work. For a related reason Wisse calls into question Bernard Malamud’s place in the modern Jewish canon. Once a member in good standing of the Bellow-Malamud-Roth triad (jocularly known as the Hart, Schaffner, and Marx of Jewish writing) Malamud has been replaced in Wisse’s canon by Ozick. This is not only because Ozick is an observant Jew and a far more literate one than Malamud was. It is because for Malamud suffering is the core Jewish experience and his world-class sufferers are presented as the true Christians. (In his book about the aforementioned Beilis, Malamud transformed his hero from the observant, traditional Jew he actually was into a version of Spinoza, the quintessential non-Jewish Jew.) Ozick, by contrast, is praised by Wisse precisely because she “affirms Jewish trust in life by denying the Holocaust its primacy as the defining event of Jewish experience.” [317]) Among the high priests of early twentieth-century literature, only two have to any appreciable degree been thought of as Jews: Proust and Kafka. Wisse, albeit with much regret, rejects Proust because “in Jewish literature the authors or characters know and let the reader know that they are Jews”(18). Obviously, Proust falls short here. But is it really the case that Kafka, who hardly ever mentions Jews


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in his stories, passes the test? Wisse makes a persuasive case for “admitting” Kafka, but she can do so only by employing a double standard. And what about those Israeli writers, starting with Yonatan Ratosh, who not only do not consider themselves Jewish but for whom the desire to épater les Juifs is a rampant impulse? Some will quarrel altogether with this approach by observing that writers, especially modern writers, are notoriously “unreliable” in relation to their own cultures, famously unwilling to step into the role of spokesmen. The ranks of Irish, American and (of course) Israeli writers would be considerably diminished if we were to demand that they be spokesmen for their cultures. But Wisse might justifiably reply to these objections by saying, first, that each literature has its distinctive ethos, and second, that one may confirm the indissolubility of Jewish culture in a negative way as well as a positive one. Wisse’s talent for weaving Jewish concerns into the analysis of non-Jewish works as well as well as Jewish ones is on display in the chapter called “The Zionist Fate in English Hands.” It reverses the pattern of its six predecessors by studying a body of writing that arose not alongside ideologies and political movements hostile to the very existence of a Jewish people, but in the midst of “the world’s most hospitable culture” (237), that is to say the culture of English, in its British, Irish, American, and Canadian forms. This chapter also brings prominently into view (though not, of course, into the Jewish canon) major books by Gentile (if not exactly Christian) writers: George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), “the imaginative equivalent of the Balfour Declaration,” (244) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Wisse has high praise for Eliot (called by her Victorian contemporary W. H. Mallock “the first great godless novelist”), because she understood that Jews, whether individually lovable or obnoxious, have a separate culture, history, and national destiny. Joyce, by contrast, could not (any more than Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice) allow that the Jew had anything more than biology. Thus Ulysses’ treatment of Zionism turned out to be “no more respectful of Jewish distinctiveness than is the mean-spirited modernism of [T. S.] Eliot and Pound” (247). Here Wisse follows the lead of Henry Roth, who wrote a blistering attack in Mercy of a Rude Stream on Joyce’s erasure, in his character Leopold Bloom, of the Jewish Jew as a separate intelligent being. After illuminating discussions of the (in her view flawed) efforts of Ludwig Lewisohn, Maurice Samuel, and Arthur Koestler to give

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imaginative expression to the struggle for Zion, Wisse directs her wrath against the Zionist best-seller, Leon Uris’s Exodus, which (after a fashion) taught a culturally debased American Jewish reading public its national history. Uris, needless to say, is not a candidate for admission to the Wisse canon, but he does provoke her to some classic utterances, such as: “Miscegenation is not just acceptable to Uris, it is the only kind of union that he allows....Thus, there are no Jewish marriages in this book about Israel, no more than there are in Hollywood films or television” (258). The most fully realized Zionist novel, Wisse argues, is that of her fellow Canadian, A. M. Klein, The Second Scroll. In this novel, she argues, Klein turned the tables on James Joyce by Judaizing English and forcing English modernism to pay homage to Hebrew through the power of his wit. This chapter on the Zionist fate in English hands prompts the question of whether Wisse’s own book is a Zionist enterprise.Wisse herself is, of course, not only a committed Zionist but one of Zionism’s most powerful polemicists. Her attempt to “canonize” a Jewish literature that is on a par with the major literatures of the goyim and worthy of a ticket of admission to Western civilization (which had wrongly excluded it) is permeated by a Jewish self-respect that was once upon a time thought to be one of the aims of Zionism. She also claims (not very convincingly) that “Hebrew ... is by now the dominant branch of modern Jewish literature and certain to become even more so in the century ahead” (323). One is therefore tempted to suggest that the Zionist idea, which has been brought to ruin (perhaps along with the State of Israel itself) by Israeli intellectuals, now flourishes, but culturally rather than politically, in American Jewish Studies, an enterprise that would never have come into being without the State of Israel. On the other hand, both the contents and the integrating premise of Wisse’s argument are distinctly international, and in fact a transposition of the old model for Yiddish as an international literature onto writing by Jews in other languages.5 Traditional Jews, whose canon extends several millennia beyond Wisse’s (and who are sparsely represented in her list of authors), will probably react to her attempt to place Jewish literature on a par with Gentile in the way that E. M. Forster’s Cyril Fielding reacts at the end of A Passage to India to the prospect of India’s independence: “India a nation! What an apotheosis! Last comer to the drab nineteenth-century sisterhood!...She, whose only peer was the Holy Roman empire, shall rank with Guatemala and Belgium perhaps!” This


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is precisely how traditional Jews reacted a century ago to Zionism’s attempt to normalize Jewish political existence; they were wrong then, and they might be wrong now to resist Wisse’s analogous attempt to normalize Jewish literary culture. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (New York: Viking, 1954), 2. “Toward a New Yiddish,” Art and Ardor (New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1983), 16768. Ruth R. Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey Through Language and Culture (New York: Free Press, 2000), 15. Subsequent references to this work will be cited in parentheses in the text. “The Value of the Canon,” New Republic, 18 February 1991, 42. Subsequent references to this work will be found in the text. Perhaps this is why it was the National Yiddish Book Center (in Amherst, Massachusetts) that, not long after publication of Wisse’s book, asked her and six other literary scholars to create an “official” Jewish canon of one hundred modern literary works. Wisse, speaking at the Thirteenth World Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem in August 2001, said that the purpose of the project, which defined “modern” as beginning with the Haskalah, was to translate the canonized books into Hebrew and English, perhaps also Spanish and Russian, so as to make them available to Jewish readers and the general public around the world (Forward, August 31, 2001).


14 I. B. Singer on the Couch In October 1988 Isaac Bashevis Singer, addressing a sizable audience in Memphis, Tennessee, told the assembled (and dumbfounded) dinner guests that “it’s true that you can never go home again, but it’s good to be among all my old friends from Warsaw tonight.” Singer was by this time beginning to suffer from Alzheimer’s Disease (a fact which, though evident to nearly everyone, did not deter his wife Alma from arranging profitable lectures for him). Moreover, his (possible) confusion may have been aggravated by the fact that the he had been collected at the airport the previous night by a Memphian who, like Singer, had briefly attended the Tachkemoni Rabbinical Seminary in Warsaw, and that he had, a few minutes prior to the dinner, been chatting in Yiddish with another Memphian, the daughter of Yudl Mark (the famous Yiddish philologist), to whom, in my foolish zeal to make Singer feel “at home” in Memphis, I had introduced him. But who could be sure that this was not a literary conceit, a typical Singer blend of naivèté and shrewdness, a reminder of his numerous autobiographical tales in which the narrator suddenly feels that he must check his citizenship papers to be sure that his decades in America have not been an invention? The incident was a reminder that, although he left Poland in 1935, vowing that he would never return to that hell, he not only continued to write about Polish-Jewish communities such as Lublin, Bilgoray, and Kreshev as if they still existed, but often gave the impression that a vanished Poland was more real to him than the American cities, New York and Miami, where he lived until his death in 1991. Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in Poland in 1904 into a world of almost medieval Jewish orthodoxy which no longer exists in Eu163

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rope, and of which there are only traces left in Israel and America. Despite his chassidic father’s conviction that secular Yiddish writers like I. L. Peretz were leading the Jews to heresy, Singer, like his older brother Israel Joshua, pursued a literary career, publishing his first story (“In Old Age”) in 1925 and quickly establishing his presence among the important Yiddish writers of Warsaw. Troubled though he was by the doubtful future of the Yiddish language, resentful as he was of the tradition that a Yiddish writer must be not merely an artist but a spokesman for his people, distressed as he was by his brother’s public assertion that to write in Yiddish was to debase oneself as an artist, Singer was undeterred from his vocation. Nothing shows better his severe dedication to his craft and his indifference to the idle winds of literary and political fashion than his decision to set his first novel, Satan in Goray, begun in 1933, in seventeenth-century Poland. Refusing to descend to the “relevance” demanded in Yiddishist circles, he adhered to his conviction that truth was to be found not in philosophy, psychology, and sociology, but in folklore, dreams, and fantasies. Still, sophisticated readers of this study of deranged Messianism must have recognized that it was by no means the exclusive possession of seventeenth-century Jewry. In 1935, Singer bade farewell to Poland, as well as to his mistress Ronye, their five-year-old child Yisroel, and his mother and little brother. Once in America, he had to deal with his ambivalent feelings towards Israel Joshua, who had brought him to this country and was already well established as a successful writer (in the language he once despised), and with the formidable problems of a writer cut off from his native resources. The Yiddish writer transplanted to America found his characters dead, his language silenced, his artistic foundation destroyed along with Jewish Poland; he could now draw only from memories. Singer was dismissive of American Yiddish writing, and of American Jewry itself: “There is a crazy Jewish people here which keeps slightly kosher and peddles...and awaits Marxism for the people of the world...but it doesn’t need Yiddish literature.”1 Although he found employment, both as writer and journalist, with Der Forverts (the Jewish Daily Forward) Singer’s creative work languished, and he came close to being struck dumb by what America revealed about the future of Yiddish: “When I came to this country I lived through a terrible disappointment....In Poland, Yiddish was still very much alive when I left. When I came here it seemed to me that

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Yiddish was finished....The result was that for five or six or maybe seven years I couldn’t write a word....writing became so difficult a chore that my grammar was affected. I couldn’t write a single worthwhile sentence. I became like a man who was a great lover and is suddenly impotent, knowing at the same time that ultimately he will regain his power.”2 Regain his power Singer certainly did. Emerging in 1943 from his five-year period of “hiding,” he published two important essays in which he argued that the only future for Yiddish literature was to turn to the past, recreating the world being destroyed by the Nazis. “The Diaspora—the Jewish communities and their leaders, rabbis, ritual slaughterers, trustees and scholars, the pious shopkeeper and the artisan...the yeshiva boy and the child bride—this is and shall remain the subject of Yiddish literature and the determinant of its content and form” (106). He also reissued Satan in Goray along with five new stories. In 1945, he commenced the massive chronicle FamilyMoskat, which traced the disintegration of the world of European Jewry prior to the Holocaust. It was published serially in the Forward through 1948 and then appeared in book form in 1950. Its English translation sold 35,000 copies and gave Singer for the first time a glimpse of the huge audience that awaited him outside the Yiddish world. Then, in 1952, the publication of Saul Bellow’s translation of “Gimpel the Fool,” a rare post-Holocaust celebration of the schlemiel, gave Singer’s work the imprimatur of the high priests of literary modernism and helped to gain for his work an acclaim beyond what any Yiddish writer had ever received in non-Yiddish literary circles. (Sholem Asch had been a best-selling Yiddish writer, but was scorned by many of his fellow-writers.) Thereafter, Singer went from triumph to triumph. His output was enormous—short stories, novels, children’s books—and he was honored with every major literary award. After two decades of abject poverty, he grew rich as well as famous. In 1978, thirty-five years after the destruction of the subject of Yiddish literature, Singer became the first (and will surely be the last) Yiddish writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. But for his biographer, Janet Hadda, this external tale of the progress of Singer’s artistry and fame is far too simple and happy. At the center of her psychobiographical interpretation of his life and work is a conflict between Bashevis—the worldly-wise, modernist Yiddish writer of Poland who had taken on his mother’s given name—

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and the transplanted (and translated) Isaac Singer beloved in America as simple, old-fashioned, grandfatherly sprite. She starts with, and in a sense never quite leaves, his family, placing special emphasis on the ill-mated parents, Rabbi Pinkhos Menakhem Mendel and Basheve. Although Singer located the conflict between his parents in the realm of ideas—his father was a chassid and his mother a rationalist daughter of the Bilgoray rabbi, who was a misnagid (opponent of chassidism)—Hadda is confident that the real explanation lies in “confusion over gender roles” (17). This disorder (a malady that Hadda, who is a practicing psychoanalyst as well as a Yiddish scholar, diagnoses in Singer’s grandparents as well) stymied young Yitskhok in his search for a parental “role model” (a cant phrase used obsessively in her book)3 and deprived him of calm, safety, attention, and love. As if two bad parents were not enough, young Singer really, says Hadda, had to endure four, since his brother Shiye (Israel Joshua) was ten years older than he, and his sister Hinde thirteen years older. To Hinde’s epilepsy, which Hadda analyzes at inordinate length, as well as various psychological illnesses, she imputes all of Singer’s complicated relations with women; and in the same fashion all his qualities of mind and art are said to be “rooted in Krochmalna Street [their Warsaw address], Radzymin, and Bilgoray—all the places where the young boy witnessed the clashes between tradition and modernity, male and female, depression and enthusiasm, reason and ecstasy” (45). Given this approach, it comes as no surprise that Hadda should analyze Satan in Goray as being in large part about “inadequate parental care” (72) or criticize Singer for “shrouding” the psychological and autobiographically based material of the novel with “superstition,” such as dybbuks and demons (75); similarly, she can only explain the fact that The Family Moskat stresses the internal loss of values and morality among Polish Jewry rather than the external threat of Nazism as an expression of the author’s “guilt” for having survived while the members of his family who stayed in Poland were murdered. Thus is the work of a great writer reduced to his search for psychotherapy through the writing of fiction. Singer was rescued from the prison of Yiddish when he was “discovered” in the early 1950s by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg and the editors of Commentary and Partisan Review, which pub-


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lished Bellow’s translation of “Gimpel.” But if he was now on the road to American fame and success, he was also—as Hadda tells his story—succumbing to impersonation and distortion. “Consciously or not, he had learned that Bashevis, the enfant terrible, would never capture the heart of an American audience....Bashevis had correctly, if intuitively, perceived that for readers of English, an Eastern European Jew had to be old-fashioned, mild-mannered, even naive in order to be believable....Bashevis was never the innocent he claimed to be, according to Saul Bellow: ‘He was sophisticated. He was an opportunist. He was a careerist’” (131). Hadda lays some of the blame for Singer’s (alleged) masquerade on “his English-language critics who...communicated to Bashevis that the only way to successfully memorialize his beloved Eastern European Jews was to stick them— and himself—into a timeless shtetl, to cut himself from the same cloth he had created in ‘Short Friday’” (136-37), a lyrical tribute to the immortal sanctity of the apparently dead Jews of Eastern Europe. (It should be noted that by English-language critics Hadda does not mean Howe or Ruth Wisse or Cynthia Ozick, whose writings on Singer go unmentioned in her book, but an assortment of journalists.) Although some have viewed Singer’s ability to sustain several different Yiddish voices in the Forward—Yitskhok Bashevis for serious literary work, Y. Varshavsky (the man from Warsaw) and D. Segal for popular journalism—as an artful way to accommodate different audiences, Hadda views it as an aspect or foreshadowing of a larger conflict, even of duplicity. She claims, for example, that as a social critic Singer was “harsh and conservative”(137) when writing in Yiddish but apolitical and unworldly when writing in English (a claim it would be easy to confute). As the years passed, the temptations grew, and so too, Hadda charges, did his “two-faced insincerity.” If he wanted to find a place in America, he would have to relinquish part of his essence. “The more he became Isaac Bashevis Singer [the name that appears on the English translations], the less he could continue to be Bashevis.” (138-39) One aspect of Singer’s duality which Hadda presents very effectively is the paradoxical relation between his vegetarianism and what might be called his piggishness. She points out that the “conversion” to vegetarianism did not come until Singer was almost sixty years old. She treats it as “a secular version of kashrus, the Jewish dietary laws,” (142) but neglects to remark that kashrus served to

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bind the individual to the community, whereas vegetarianism, as she does note, achieves the opposite result. She also suggests that it was an attempt “to cleanse himself.” For decades Singer had been in the habit of “hint[ing] at his sense of inner pollution through the comical doodle that he used as a signature: it was a pig” (146). His wife reported that, during their courtship, he often signed letters to her with a pig. It is a remarkable tribute to Cynthia Ozick’s intuition that, without knowing anything of Singer’s peculiar habit of identification with this particularly Jewish symbol of uncleanliness, she has Singer’s envious Yiddish literary rivals in her story “Envy; or, Yiddish in America”—which also goes unmentioned by Hadda—call him “der chazer. He was named Pig because of his extraordinarily white skin, like a tissue of pale ham...” Bellow—not an envious Yiddish writer but a resentful American one (Singer gratuitously insulted him at the Nobel Prize ceremonies in 1978)—, also registered the paradox: “He may have been on a green diet, but he hadn’t stopped drinking blood” (180). Hadda, as usual, is not content to rest in paradox, but hastens to overinterpret: “By abandoning orthodoxy, he had rejected [his parents’] values; by moving to the United States and marrying a German-Jewish woman who understood no Yiddish, he had thrown away a sacred lifestyle that was now facing extinction. Above all, if the Yiddish language stood for all that was purely Eastern European Jewish,...Singer’s increasing attention to an English-reading public proved his corruption. He—a pig—had survived while millions of chaste souls had perished. He was debased” (147). The last chapters of Hadda’s book trace the unraveling of Singer’s literary integrity as he begins to reap the rewards of fame and fortune following upon the award of the Nobel Prize. If there was already “something mendacious about creating in one voice for consumption in another” (171), how much greater the mendacity in having one’s writing “translated” not just into another language but into other media, such as film, stage, television, opera. Although one may derive some pleasure from the way that Hadda dissects the inanities of numerous show-business airheads, it is hard to escape the feeling that she has here lost the focus of her book. Even her considerable critical acumen seems to fail, as when she remarks that “Singer had Streisand [whose Yentl infuriated him] to thank for her role in the preservation of his destroyed culture” (202). This is like thanking the producers of Fiddler on the Roof for “pre-


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serving” the world of Sholom Aleichem. One wonders too about Hadda’s sense of proportion: in this biography of a Yiddish writer struggling to integrate his European and American experiences, we get no consideration whatever of the savage attack on Singer’s Americanization of himself by the American-Yiddish poet Jacob Glatstein (about whom Hadda has written a whole book) but page after page about Singer’s encounters with the spiritual anemia of Broadway and Hollywood. There is, nevertheless, much to praise in this short biography of Singer, the only serious one that exists. Hadda has made good use of the Singer archives at University of Texas (where the papers of the last great writer of Yiddish prose fiction rest alongside those of Marcel Proust and Charlotte Bronte) and of interviews with Singer’s family and colleagues. When she dismounts from her psychological hobbyhorse, as in her good discussions of “Gimpel,” “The Little Shoemakers” (a dazzling nightmare encapsulation of the whole of modern Jewish experience), and “Short Friday,” she can be a very good critic. But she sometimes forgets that, as Ozick once pointed out, “Singer is an artist and transcendent inventor, not a curator.”5 To fathom a writer like Singer, who surrenders himself so thoroughly to the life of the imagination, one also needs a larger quantity than Hadda possesses of what Keats called “Negative Capability,” that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason...”6 I myself have often wondered how to construe a remark Singer made to me about twenty-five years ago, when we were sitting in the Seattle airport. He had recently lectured at the University of Virginia, where he had been hosted by Ralph Cohen, editor of New Literary History, the magazine mainly responsible for importing European literary theory into this country. “He is a fine man, he treated me like a prince,” said Singer. “And he gave me an issue of his new literary magazine to read on the plane. I couldn’t understand a word of it; but of course I’m only a writer.” Was this the naive remark of somebody who often claimed he didn’t even know what “modernism” meant, or the biting comment of a professional literary man on the stupefying opacity of much contemporary literary theory? About some things we should be content to rest in uncertainty.

170


Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Janet Hadda, Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 84. Subsequent references to this work will appear in parentheses in the text. Quoted in Edward Alexander, Isaac Bashevis Singer (Boston; Twayne, 1980), 19. See, e.g., 27,31,41,46,65. Commentary, November 1969. Art and Ardor (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 220. John Keats, letter of 21 December 1817.

Index Aaron, Daniel, 135 Abrams, M. H., 135 Adams, Henry, 135 Agnon, S. Y., xiv Akiva, Rabbi, 86, 118, 124 Alexander, Harry, 119 Aloni, Shulamit, 36 Alter, Robert, 137-38 antisemitism, 20-21, 29, 31, 100, 101, 133, 134, 135 Appelfeld, Aharon, 36, 50 apRoberts, Ruth, 22n Arafat, Yasser, 39, 47 Arendt, 17, 20-21, 49-50, 101-02 Arnold, Matthew, 18, 41, 61-62, 65-71, 75, 77, 93, 96, 115n, 133, 141, 157 Arnold, Thomas, xii, 59-64, 65, 71n, 74, 75, 133 Asch, Sholem, 165 Austen, Jane, 43

Buber, Martin, xiv, 33-34 Buruma, Ian, 50-55 Carlyle, Thomas, 7, 10, 18, 59, 73-74, 75 Chametzky, Jules, 136 Chomsky, Noam, 35, 53-54 Clinton, William J., 30 Cohen, Ralph, 169 Coleridge, S. T., xi, 3, 9, 14n, 70, 74 Decter, Midge, 25, 100 Deutsch, Emanuel, xiii, xv, 76-81 Diamant, Anita, 120, 127n Dickens, Charles, 74-75 Dipple, Elizabeth, 42 D’Israeli, Isaac, 16 Disraeli, Benjamin, 15-22, 73 Dosh, 35 Ehrenpreis, Irvin, 131 Eichmann, Adolf, 49, 50 Elazar, Daniel, 113 Eliot, George, xiii, 12-13, 21, 73, 7576,78-80, 106, 107, 108, 154, 159 Eliot, T. S., 98, 123, 135, 136, 159 Evron, Boaz, 36

Babbitt, Irving, 135 Babel, 153, 157 Bacharach, Yair ben Hayyim, 123-24 Banta, Martha, 45 Barak, Aharon, 31 Barak, Ehud, 24, 31 Begin, Menachem, 33, 97 Bellow, Saul, 94n, 111, 158, 165, 166, 167, 168 Ben-Gurion, David, 33, 34, 36, 104 Benvenisti, Meron, 26, 27 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 137 Berenson, Bernard, 131 Bishop, Elizabeth, 156 Bloom, Claire, 147 Bloom, Harold, 42, 157 Bove, Paul, 41 Brenner, Yosef Haim, 154 Bronte, Charlotte, 169

Fackenheim, Emil L., 52, 126n Finkelstein, Norman, 55n Froude, J. A., 73-74 Gladstone, William, 19 Glatstein, 95, 104, 154, 169 Glazer, Nathan, 53 Grade, Chaim, 84, 96 Greenberg, Eliezer, 112 Griffin, Robert, 39, 43 Grossman, David, 27-28, 29, 31, 32, 36 Guttenplan, D. D., 51-54

171

172


Guttmann, Allen, 136 Hadda, Janet, 165-70 Haider, Jorge, 35 Halkin, Hillel, 105, 112-13, 116n, 154 Halpern, Moishe Leib, 99 Hazony, Yoram, 31-38 Heilman, Robert B., 98 Heine, Heinrich, 67 Hillel, Rabbi, xii, 67, 86-87, 91 Herzl, Theodor, 31-32 Hitchens, Christopher, 51-55 Howe, Irving, xiv, 49-50, 95-116, 120, 135-36, 142, 148-49, 153, 154-57, 166, 167 Hutchen, Linda, 46 Irving, David, 50-55 Israel, State of, 24-38, 52 John (king of England), 59 Joyce, James, 135, 154, 159, 160 Kafka, Franz, 154, 157, 158-59 Kallen, Horace, 132-33 Kampf, Louis, 41-42 Kasher, Asa, 32 Katznelson, Berl, 25, 34 Keats, John, 169 Keegan, John, 51, 53 Kimmerling, Baruch, 30 Kissinger, Henry, 150 Klein, A. M., 160 Klingenstein, Susanne, 131-39 Koestler, Arthur, 159 Kovner, Abba, 85 Lamm, Maurice, 119 Leibowitz, Yeshayahu, 27, 35 Lerner, Michael, 102 Levenson, J. C., 136 Levi, Primo, 54-55 Levin, Harry, 134-35, 136 Lewes, George Henry, 76, 78 Lewisohn, Ludwig, 99, 112, 131, 132, 133, 138, 159 lex talionis, 4, 77 Lipstadt, Deborah E., 50-55 Lustick, Ian, 29 Macaulay, Thomas B., 59, 93 Macdonald, Dwight, 23

Magnes, Judah, 34 Malamud, Bernard, 158 Manuel, Frank, 16, 17-18 Margalit, Avishai, 37, 38n Mark, Yudl, 163 Marx, Karl, 15-22, 86, 93n, 136 Marx, Leo, 136 Matthiessen, F. O., 135 Megged, Aharon, 29-30 Mill, James, 62 Mill, John Stuart, xi, xii, 3-14, 23, 24, 33, 37, 56, 66, 87, 155 Millett, Kate, 98 Morris, Benny, 30, 36 Mortara, Edgardo, 12 Mumford, Lewis, 41 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 26, 31 Neusner, Jacob, 92, 93, 109 Newman, John Henry, 60, 61, 71n, 75, 115n Novick, Peter, 52 Orwell, George, 23-24, 37-38, 97 Oshry, Ephraim, 124 Oz, Amos, 24, 26, 29, 32, 36 Ozick, Cynthia, 16, 103, 116n, 136, 139n, 153, 158, 167, 168 Pappe, Ilan, 30 Palmerston, Viscount (Henry John Temple), 19 Patmore, Coventry, 18 Peres, Shimon, 21-22, 24, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36 Peretz, I. L., 85, 103, 105-08,110, 126, 164 Perlmutter, Amos, 29 Phillips, William, 100 Podhoretz, Norman, 136-37 Post-Zionism, 31-38 Proust, Marcel, 158, 169 Rabin, Yitzhak, 24, 27 Rahv, Philip, 99 Remnick, David,52 Reuchlin, Johannes, 85 Reville, Albert, 66 Richler, Mordechai, 116n Robeson, Paul, 148 Robinson, Jacob, 50 Rosenberg, Harold, 100-01

Index

173

Rosenfeld, Alvin, 55n, 109, 113 Roth, Henry, 159 Roth, Philip, xiii, 23, 94n, 111, 120, 141-51 Rothschild, Lady Louisa de, 67 Russell, Lord John, 11

tefillin, xv Tennyson, Alfred, 63, 122, 131 Tolstoy, Leo, 145, 150, 153 Trilling, Lionel, xi-xv, 16, 86-87, 96, 99, 118, 132-34, 136, 137, 139n Tumarkin, Yigal, 27, 36

Said, Edward, xii, 35,39-47 Salvador, Joseph, 7-9 Samet, Gidon, 36 Samuel, Maurice, 99, 112, 126, 159 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 100-01 Scholem, Gershon, 24, 55n Schweid, Eliezer, 29 Scott, Janny, 44 Shakespeare, William, 150, 153, 159 Sholem Aleichem, 85, 108, 111, 136, 153, 154, 158, 168 Singer, I. B., xiii, 83-84, 94n, 97, 103, 154, 163-69 Singer, Israel Joshua, 84, 164 Smith, Henry Nash, 136 Spinoza, Benedict, 67, 76, 100-01, 158 Spivak, Gayatri C., 40 Stein, Arnold, 131 Steinsaltz, Adin, xiii, xv, 85, 87-93 Sternhell, Ze-ev, 27 Streisand, Barbra, 168 Swift, Jonathan, 37, 42 Syrkin, Marie, 46, 99, 50 Szold, Henrietta, 124, 127

University of Minnesota, 134, 136 Uris, Leon, 160

Talmud, xii, 83-94, 108, 121, 122, 123, 126

Vidal, Gore, 93n Warburg, Aby, 127 Weiner, Justus Reid, 45, 46 Weintraub, Stanley, 16, 19 Whitman, Jon, 43-44 Wiener, Leo, 132 Wieseltier, Leon, 119-27 Wilde, Oscar, 149, 157 Wilson, Edmund, 41 Wisse, Ruth, xiii, 25, 137-38, 153-61 Wolfson, Harry, 132 Wordsworth, William, xii, xiv, 86-87 Yehoshua, A. B., 29, 35 Yovel, Ya’akov, 36 Zeitlin, Jacob, 132, 138n Zertal, Idith, 36 Zimmermann, Moshe, 35 Zionism, 87, 104-05, 108, 113, 133, 134, 159, 160-61 Zucker, Dedi, 29 Zuckerman, Yitzhak, 95

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