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Daniel C. Matt Before the Big Bang

Shlomo Avineri Herzl's Great Bad Novel

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LETTERS 4 Too Much Chometz?

FEATURES

5 Daniel C. Matt Before the Big Bang Cosmologist Lawrence Krauss thinks he knows how the universe began. Novelist Alan Lightman takes a wild narrative guess. 7 Allan Arkush War & Peace & Judaism Robert Eisen was walking to campus on 9/11 when he saw a dark cloud above the Pentagon. Alick Isaacs was in Lebanon with the IDF when he began to think about peace and Judaism. reviews 11 Adam Kirsch The Mighty Jacobson Whatever It Is, I Don’t Like It: The Best Of Howard Jacobson by Howard Jacobson The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson • Kalooki Nights by Howard Jacobson • The Mighty Walzer by Howard Jacobson • No More Mr. Nice Guy by Howard Jacobson 14 Norman A. Stillman Reorientation Jews, Christians, and the Abode of Islam: Modern Scholarship, Medieval Realities by Jacob Lassner

15 Michah Gottlieb Are We All Protestants Now? How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought by Leora Batnitzky 19 Jonathan L. Silver Where Wisdom Begins Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion by Alain de Botton 20 Gary A. Anderson Who Is Man? Demonic Desires: “Yetzer Hara” and the Problem of Evil in Late Antiquity by Ishay Rosen-Zvi Sin: The Early History Of an Idea by Paula Fredriksen 23 Paul Reitter Dust-to-Dust Song Nelly Sachs: Flight and Metamorphosis: An Illustrated Biography by Aris Fioretos, translated by Tomas Tranæus 24 Alan Mintz Israel's Arab Sholem Aleichem Second Person Singular by Sayed Kashua, translated by Mitch Ginsburg 26 Nadia Kalman A Neoplatonic Affair Melisande! What Are Dreams? by Hillel Halkin 28 Anne Trubek Muddling Through The World Without You by Joshua Henkin 29 Jeremy Rabkin Lawfare Israel and the Struggle Over the International Laws of War by Peter Berkowitz Readings 33 Ilan Stavans Borges, the Jew 35 Shlomo Avineri Rereading Herzl's Old-New Land

The Arts 39 Catherine C. Bock- Matisse and His Jewish Patrons Weiss 42 Amy Newman Smith Homage to Mahj

Lost & Found 45 Yechiel Yaakov Berdyczewski, Blasphemy, and Belief Weinberg Last word 47 Abraham Socher Something Antigonus Said

On the cover: “Matisse and the Big Bang” by Mark Anderson. LETTERS

Too Much Chometz? only, it becomes a slam, and a particularly cheap am one of the many American Jews who has no one at that, in which the “reviewer” avails himself Iknowledge of Hebrew and can only sound out n Chronicles II 25:12, there is a horrifying image of every opportunity to establish his nobility even the words without understanding the meaning of Iof the sons of Judah throwing their captives off at the far edges of relevance. And yet, despite his more than a dozen of them. Of course, as a woman, a cliff, dashing them to pieces on the rocks below. erudition, I believe that Mr. Wieseltier has failed to it would have been rare at any time in Jewish history This image came to mind as I was reading Leon grasp some important distinctions, and in doing so for me to have known much more than I do now. Wieseltier’s savaging of the New American Hagga- missed the larger picture entirely. And I question how many men whose religious dah (“Comes the Comer,” Spring 2012). In an age To his first complaint: The language of benedic- education began in the cheder (religious primary when all sorts of abuse are being called out, this re- tion is not prose, and it’s laden with meaning that is school) and ended when they turned 13 would have view suggests a new species—the “abuse of scholar- not ordinary. (Is there anything ordinary about this been much more fluent. There is a reason that the ship,” assuming one believes scholarship is meant to story?) It’s a formulation—a mantra, repeated again Jews of Eastern Europe communicated in Yiddish, enlighten, not to pummel an opponent who is un- and again throughout the service. So, to say “God- not Hebrew. able to respond. of-Us” once may fall strangely on the ear, but repeat- My father, who had an Orthodox upbringing I write this letter not out of loyalty to the ed, as it is throughout the Seder, it becomes some- and a good enough command of Hebrew to get by author/translator. (I am a moderate fan of England- thing else, and I, for one, feel we can only benefit in an Israeli kibbutz after World War II, never at- er’s fiction and have never met him.) But, as a reader from the particularity of treatment given to eloheinu tempted to interpret the text of the Haggadah to us. of Jewish text, literature, and the Jewish Review of We either read the Maxwell House translation or lis- Books, I feel ill served and even offended by Wiesel- tened to my father race through the Seder without tier’s intemperate, condescending review. any comprehension. In my brief time as a supple- After the first half-dozen times that Wieseltier mental school student, I learned to chant the four challenges Englander’s translation/interpretation questions without being able to understand them, of a word or phrase, I realized that he believes the their function in the Seder, or their history. translation winnows out the intent and “mystery” Given that background, I am very grateful for Mr. of the Haggadah and is not always mellifluous. Wi- Englander’s new translation. I find the “God-of-Us” eseltier bundles his criticisms in allusions to a suf- and other stretches of English usage refreshing and ficient number and diversity of sources to suggest thought-provoking. Even among those of us who do his own mastery of Jewish texts. But after twenty- not understand the Hebrew, the new translation has five to thirty such critical blows, prompting him inspired questions about what the text really means to characterize Englander’s work as “foolish,” “lu- and why. Even though I cannot really imagine that dicrous,” “clumsy,” and “ridiculous”—perhaps ar- I myself was a slave in Egypt or that God liberated rogant charges leveled against a writer of serious me personally, this translation and the commentar- purpose—Wieseltier seems more like a man de- ies that accompany it encourage me to think about termined to overwhelm us with his own scholar- the Seder as an expression of my cultural heritage ship rather than to discredit the translator’s. After or Jewish identity and about how to present it to my a good 1,500 words of vitriol, Wieseltier seems to friends and family as something more than a shared realize his excess and offers us a witty one-word meal. Admittedly Judaism lite, but mine, such as it is. paragraph as a salve. The word isdayenu . Unfortu- Gilah Goldsmith nately, he is already many outstretched arms past via jewishreviewofbooks.com dayenu. The problem that inspires this letter is that aside from shamelessly dashing the defenseless reat review. In the Haggadah itself, I was im- Englander to pieces on the rocks below, Wieseltier by Mr. Englander. “God-of-Us” implies a mutually Gpressed by the carelessness regarding histori- demeans the reader of this journal as well. (I wish enveloping relationship, not a single-sided one. It’s cal details and interpretations—also, the typos. Two the editorial wisdom of the Jewish Review of Books a stretch, perhaps, but one to which many of us as- examples: had saved him from his relentlessness.) Even if the pire—it has kavana. I mention this because a Hag- a) Mount Gezerim (for Gerizim). That might be re- New American Haggadah fails to meet Wieseltier’s gadah, commentaries aside, is not a book to be read venge by Englander’s subconscious for his joke in requirements for a “faithful” translation of the as prose, and shouldn’t be criticized as such. Rather, naming a fictional character something like Edgar Haggadah, his review implies through its excess it’s a book to be experienced in a unique service in Gezer after Etgar Keret gezer ( being Hebrew for and invectives that anyone finding value or mean- our own homes, where we are free to vary and inter- carrot.) ing or an expanded kavana through Englander’s pret as we wish. Some might say the more halting, b) In the hineni mukhan u-mezuman before some take on the Pesach text is a muttonhead. Wieseltier the better, and let it rise above the picayune. What’s cups of wine, he uses the word “besurat” instead of may have an axe to grind with Englander, or with more is that Mr. Safran Foer has given us some very the expected besorat (tidings of), for besora, tidings. American Jews in general (he bemoans “the mag- lively table company, a group of pesachdik ushpizin Perhaps besurat is the construct for the Spanish nitude of their illiteracy” in his first paragraph), (guests) with whom we can argue or agree as the basura (trash). but that doesn’t give him the right to subject us to case may be. Gideon Weisz this hatchet job. But these are only trees, not the forest. In say- via jewishreviewofbooks.com Len Lyons ing nothing about the book’s quirky architecture or Newton Highlands, MA what it feels like in use, and not a word about its Leon Wieseltier Responds: profuse illustrations (all of it the work of the outstanding graphic artist Oded Ezer), Mr. Wieseltier am sorry if I ruined anybody’s Pesach. The eight hat Leon Wieseltier has given us is not a re- seems insensate to the experience of this Haggadah. Idays are hard enough without such polemical Wview at all, but an editor’s mark-up of a man- Would he look at the great Haggadahs of old, say nastiness, I know. I had hoped to welcome the New uscript, the sort of thing sent back to an author, who the Golden or Birds’ Head, and see only the mis- American Haggadah to the world, not least because might accept some of the points and argue down spellings? And did he notice that there are no trans- its editor is (or perhaps was) my friend, and its trans- others, sometimes changing the mind of the editor literations, ubiquitous in American Haggadahs? If lator, with whom I have enjoyed cordial relations, along the way. There’s a kind of role-play in such ex- any book is greater than the sum of its parts, it’s the seemed well equipped for his task. But I take these changes, in which the editor is obliged to assume an Haggadah, and this one presents us with a very large things—Hebrew, English, my duty as a scholar, my almost prosecutorial stance, while the author plays sum indeed. duty as a critic, my duty as a Jew—very seriously, the defendant. For obvious reasons, such exchanges Scott-Martin Kosofsky are strictly private. Presented here, from one side Lexington, MA (Continued on page 46)

4 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2012 FEATURES Before the Big Bang

BY DANIEL C. MATT

which humanity has ever had to grapple. It is he might also expand his understanding of what A Universe from Nothing: Why There a picture whose creation emphasizes the best “God” could mean, or has meant over the last five is Something Rather than Nothing about what it is to be human—our ability to hundred (or one thousand) years of theology. by Lawrence M. Krauss imagine the vast possibilities of existence and Among other conceptions of the divine are sev- Free Press, 202 pp., $24.99 the adventurousness to bravely explore them— eral that figure prominently in Kabbalah. One of without passing the buck to a vague creative these is Ein Sof, Infinity (literally, “there is no end”). Mr g: A Novel About the Creation force or to a creator who is, by definition, Ein Sof is the ultimate divine reality, or (to borrow by Alan Lightman forever unfathomable. a phrase from the great Christian mystic, Meister Pantheon, 214 pp., $24.95 “Theology,” Krauss writes, “has made no contribution to knowledge in the past five hundred years, since the an we explain how the universe began dawn of science." without invoking God? Certainly, answers the noted cosmologist Lawrence For Krauss, it’s either/or—the clear-eyed, ratio- Eckhart) the “God beyond God.” Where, you might Krauss in A Universe from Nothing: Why nal project of science or the outmoded, blinkered ask, does Ein Sof appear in the Bible? Kabbalah ac- ThereC Is Something Rather Than Nothing, because, bias of religion. “Theology,” he writes, “has made no knowledges that it is never mentioned explicitly, but bizarre as it sounds, “nothingness” contains contribution to knowledge in the past five hundred the author of the Zohar uncovers it in the very first energy. Near the beginning of time (approximately years, since the dawn of science.” words of Genesis. 13.72 billion years ago), through a process of Read hyperliterally, the first words rapid expansion, this energy of empty space was of the Bible don’t mean, “In the begin- converted into the energy of something—particles ning God created . . .” but rather “With and radiation. Beginning (identified with Wisdom), It The modern scientific creation story goes like created God.” The invisible subject “It” this: Within a second or so after the Big Bang, refers to Ein Sof, while “God” designates the building blocks of atoms emerged—protons, one of the emerging aspects (or sefirot) neutrons, and electrons. By the end of three of divine being, specifically, in this case, minutes, protons and neutrons joined, forming the the Divine Mother, Binah (Understand- first atomic nuclei. But roughly 300,000 years passed ing). According to the kabbalists, the before things cooled down enough for electrons to divine personality or being that emerges combine with these nuclei to create full-fledged from Ein Sof is dynamic and continu- atoms. Over the next billion years, giant clouds of ally unfolding, a God that includes both such primordial atoms coalesced to form stars and male and female elements whose union galaxies. Deep within these stars, nuclear reactions depends on virtuous human conduct. gave birth to heavier elements such as carbon and iron. When the stars grew old, they exploded, spew- ne way to understand this radical ing these elements into the universe. Eventually this Orereading is as a critique of matter was recycled into solar systems such as ours. previous theology. Our notions of God Krauss writes, “One of the most poetic facts I cannot encompass the true nature of know about the universe is that essentially every divinity; such imaginings are puny and atom in your body was once inside a star that secondary compared with the vastness exploded.” We, along with everything else, are of Ein Sof. At best we can imagine literally made of stardust. the God of the sefirot, where Infinity Taken together with the elegant laws that govern manifests, as the personal God. the universe, such facts evoke a sense of wonder. Sometimes the kabbalists use a more As Krauss writes, “for Einstein, the existence of radical name than Ein Sof. This is the order in the universe provided a sense of such name Ayin, Nothingness. We encounter profound wonder that he felt a spiritual attachment this bizarre term among Christian mys- to it, which he labeled . . . ‘God.’” Although Krauss tics too: Johannes Scotus Eriugena calls knows that Einstein’s God was not the God of the God Nihil; Eckhart, Nichts; St. John of Bible, he stills wants none of it: “‘something’ can the Cross, Nada. To call God “Nothing- ness” does not mean that God does not arise out of nothing without the need for any divine “Genesis” from the Bowyer Bible. (Bolton Museum, England.) guidance.” Science, not religion, provides the path exist. Rather, it conveys the idea that to understanding, and a picture of reality that is God is no thing. God animates all things he God that Krauss dismisses is “some exter- and cannot be contained by any of them. God is the based on the work of tens of thousands of Tnal agency existing separate from space, time, oneness that is no particular thing, “no thingness.” dedicated minds over the past century, building and indeed from physical reality itself.” How- This mystical nothingness is neither empty nor some of the most complex machines ever ever, this is far from the only definition of God. barren; it is fertile and overflowing, engendering devised and developing some of the most Just as Krauss depends on a new conception of the myriad forms of life. The mystics teach that the beautiful and also the most complex ideas with “nothing”—“empty space endowed with energy”— universe emanated from divine nothingness, a view

Summer 2012 • Jewish Review of BooKS 5 that resonates surprisingly with Krauss’ description the first day in the universe. I noted when this fer and come to harm. But this, it seems, is unavoid- of unstable nothingness, out of which something happened, and it was good (or at least satisfying), able. As Belhor explains to Mr g: is constantly liable to spring—or with the vacuum and this was the end of the first day on that state: “empty space endowed with energy.” planet. Then, in another galaxy . . . another You have created a universe with minds. It is Yet, the mystical description of matter and en- planet completed its first rotation, its first day, the nature of mortal minds to suffer, just as it ergy is composed in a different key. Material exis- and I noted when this happened, and it was also is the nature of flesh to expire. The higher the tence emerges out of Ayin, the pool of divine energy. good, and this was the end of the first day on that intelligence, the greater the capacity for suffering. Ultimately, the world is not other than God, for this planet. Then . . . another, and another . . . all with energy is concealed within all forms of being. Were different rates of rotation, completed their first There is no turning back, and humans must learn it not concealed, there could be no individual exis- days . . . There were billions and trillions of first to live with chance, free will, and vulnerability. Yet, days, all of them good. their intelligence also enables these feeble mortals to We along with everything else discover music, mathematics, and the laws of nature, Mr g observes many planets, and sees bolts of to realize how they are connected to the galaxies and are literally made of stardust. electricity slamming energy into their atmospheres, the stars. forming complex new molecules. “I could hardly They begin to speculate, too, about Mr g him- tence; everything would dissolve back into oneness, wait to see what would happen.” Eventually, self- self. “The creatures have made up their own ideas or nothingness. replicating cells emerge, and then animate matter. about me . . . They have religions.” Mr g understands Leaving aside Krauss’ anti-religious bias (the “As was now apparent to me, animate matter was that humans need to believe in something, to give book contains a characteristically strident afterword meaning to their lives, and he from arch-polemicist Richard Dawkins), his book admires them for that. Since is a superb summary of the latest cosmological re- they cannot be immortal, search and speculation, in which Krauss himself has “they want something to be played a significant role. immortal. They come and go so quickly. They want some- lan Lightman’s new novel Mr g: A Novel About thing to last.” Athe Creation begins with a casual bang: “As I Mr g realizes that humans remember, I had just woken up from a nap when I are just guessing, that they decided to create the universe.” are missing the true reality of A theoretical physicist by training, Lightman God, which is basically Infin- burst onto the literary scene nearly twenty years ity and the Void. But he con- ago with Einstein’s Dreams. In Mr g, he approaches cludes that “guessing is not so Creation as a novelist imagining his way into the bad.” Humans “feel a mystery divine perspective. This God has a simple, folksy, about it all,” which yields in- lower-case personality, and Lightman’s tone is cor- spiration. He hopes to give respondingly light, but before long he and Mr g are them at least a glimpse of the delving into profound questions of existence. Void, so that they may un- Mr g begins by issuing certain basic organiza- derstand that their brief lives tional principles, for instance the principle of cau- partake of an endless stream. sality: “Every event should be necessarily caused by To some extent like the a previous event.” But he ensures that humanity will God of the kabbalists, Light- retain a sense of wonder. man’s Mr g is a God who evolves, who is enriched by his Even if a very intelligent creature within this Creation. As galaxies and stars universe could trace each event to a previous form, he feels “as if new things event, and trace that event to a previous event, had been created within Me.” and so on, back and back, the creature could His imagination is amplified, not penetrate earlier than the First Event. The and he discovers things he creature could never know where that First hadn’t known before. As inde- Event came from because it came from outside pendent creatures chart their the universe, just as the creature could never own course, Mr g learns that experience the Void. The origin of the First not everything can be con- th Event would always remain unknowable, and First page of Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Creation), 15 century. (© Gianni trolled. “Events spill out and the creature would be left wondering, and Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.) slide and defeat attempts to that wondering would leave a mystery. So my explain . . . This I have learned universe would have logic and rationality and from the new universe.” He organizational principles, but it would also have an inevitable consequence of a universe with mat- learns, too, that he can take chances, that he can act, spirituality and mystery. ter and energy and a few initial parameters . . . If I even with doubts. wanted, I could destroy life. But I was only a specta- Lawrence Krauss is sure that he can explain how If you’re writing a novel about God and Cre- tor in its creation.” the world came into existence. Alan Lightman dares ation, how do you deal with the traditional account to take a wild guess. If you go along for the ride, you in the Bible? At times, Lightman fashions a kind of et all is not blissful. Mr g has an antagonist— won’t stop wondering for a long while afterward. cosmological midrash. He riffs, for example, on the Yor a shadow side—called Belhor (a variant of famous refrain in the opening lines of Genesis: God Belial, the name of the Devil in some pseudepi- saw . . . that it was good . . . There was evening and graphic literature). This unsettling figure (“my dim Daniel C. Matt, author of God & the Big Bang: there was morning, one day. But, being scientifically shadow . . . my antipodal companion”), demonic Discovering Harmony Between Science & Spirituality accurate, he expands the cosmic zone: yet wise, argues that Mr g should relinquish some (Jewish Lights), taught at the Graduate Theological of his omnipotence and allow intelligent beings to Union in Berkeley, California for more than twenty At a certain moment of time, a particular planet act on their own. “Let the creatures act without years. The seventh volume of his ongoing translation and in the universe completed its first rotation, before your foreknowledge.” commentary, The Zohar: Pritzker Edition (Stanford any other planet, the end of its first day. This was Mr g hesitates; he is concerned that they will suf- University Press), will appear this fall.

6 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2012 War & Peace & Judaism

BY Allan Arkush

predict violence against the Gentile nations during stance, the greatest of the medieval Jewish philoso- THE PEACE AND VIOLENCE OF JUDAISM: the messianic era.” On the other hand, the “vast ma- phers, seems to have interpreted the Bible’s standing FROM THE BIBLE TO MODERN ZIONISM jority of non-Israelites” who appear in the Bible “are order to annihilate the Amalekites as a command- by Robert Eisen not the object of scorn, much less genocide.” In many ment that “is focused on the eradication of incorrect Oxford University Press, 280 pp., $29.95 respects, in fact, the Bible “promotes peace between philosophical conceptions and is therefore not con- Israelite and non-Israelite.” Most notably, there are cerned with physical violence.” At the same time, A PROPHETIC PEACE: JUDAISM, RELIGION, the prophetic passages that “describe the messianic however, he “justifies the war against the Canaanites AND POLITICS period as an idyllic era in which the Gentile nations on the basis of philosophical considerations, leav- by Alick Isaacs will acknowledge God’s sovereignty, humanity will ing the violence of the biblical narrative in place.” Indiana University Press, 224 pp., $27.95 be unified, and universal peace will reign.” Kabbalah is intolerant toward non-Jews and “its Despite his clear preferences, Eisen doesn’t rush doctrines, therefore, indirectly promote violence to make the kind of pronouncements one might against them.” But popular Kabbalah in our own expect. Instead, he asks, among other things, “Why day has a universalistic orientation. “Both religious obert Eisen was walking to his office at George Washington University on Septem- ber 11, 2001 when he caught sight of an omi- Eisen decided that he had to come out of the ivory tower nousR dark cloud in the vicinity of the Pentagon. This moment marked the beginning of a great change in of medieval Jewish philosophy to work on global issues. his life. Once he had absorbed the impact of what had occurred, he reports in The Peace and Violence should we choose the peaceful passages in the and secular Zionism have exhibited violent strains of Judaism, he came to realize that he could “no lon- Prophets over the bellicose ones?” The answer, Eisen throughout their history,” but both have also dis- ger remain aloof from broad global concerns.” He makes clear, cannot be found through recourse to played more pacific tendencies. had to “come out of the ivory tower” of medieval the rabbis. “Jewish scholars and ethicists,” he tells Unfortunately, history can’t solve the problem Jewish philosophy and “work on global issues in- us, “commonly see rabbinic Judaism as a school that created by our tradition’s duality by teaching us how volving religious conflict.” rejected much of the violence in the Bible and in progress makes it possible for “violent Jewish sourc- Religious violence, according to Eisen, “has be- its stead favored a more peaceful understanding of es” to “be defanged through interpretation.” For “one come one of the most—if not the most pressing is- Judaism.” They’re right. But as Eisen takes pains to has to be prepared for the possibility that in our pe- sue of our time,” and the Jewish religion itself con- demonstrate, “another reading of rabbinic Judaism is riod interpretation might yield views that are more stitutes no small part of the problem—not in the possible, according to which the rabbis preserved the violent than their predecessors.” Indeed, that has al- Diaspora, of course, but in and around Israel. violence of the Bible.” And this reading is right too! ready happened in the case of the “readings of Juda- Nor can any subsequent school of Jewish ism espoused by Meir Kahane and Zvi Yehuda Kook, The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians thought tell us which of these readings is really the which have promoted exceptionally militant forms is at the center of the tensions between the correct one. Among the rationalists and the mystics, of Zionism.” And who’s to say that their interpreta- Western and Islamic worlds, and it is no and among the Zionists, religious and secular alike, tions are illegitimate? Not Eisen, anyhow, much as he exaggeration to say that the well-being of our the two divergent viewpoints he has located in the deplores their violence-prone theologies. world in the long term may depend on its Bible are amply represented. Maimonides, for in- Eisen concludes the main part of his book on a outcome.

Eisen believes that he can help to mitigate the threat that this conflict poses by clarifying the extent to which Judaism has helped to heat it up, as well as the ways in which it could help to cool it down. In ad- dition to providing his readers with an inventory of both the violent and the peaceful strains of Judaism, he ventures in his epilogue to offer some tentative suggestions as to how peace-seeking Jews might con- strue what is admittedly an ambiguous tradition in such a way as to make the Middle East a safer place. Eisen freely acknowledges the worst things about the Bible. Above all, it authorized God’s chosen people to commit genocide against the inhabitants of the land that He had promised to them. And even if the modern scholars who consider the account of the extermination of the Canaanites to be altogether fictional are correct, this doesn’t eliminate the problem. “The biblical text is still reprehensible for de- picting genocide as a good thing; after all, it is commanded by God and carried out at His behest.” In other ways, too, “the Bible encourages its adherents to act violently against outsiders.” There are, for one thing, the passages in the prophetic literature “that The Pentagon, Arlington, VA, September 11, 2001. (© Alex Wong/Getty Images.)

Summer 2012 • Jewish Review of BooKS 7 modest note of hope that his analysis of his religion’s that strategy because it would pull the rug out touch with the peaceful side of their own religion. dual nature will inspire scholars who belong to oth- from under the radical elements in the Arab In the context of the interfaith peace work in er Abrahamic communities “to examine their own world, who have used the Palestinian issue to which he has been extensively engaged, Eisen has traditions and engage in the same kind of reflec- drum up support for their cause. encountered over the years many Palestinians, tion.” From the language that Eisen employs here, Arabs, and Muslims who have little knowledge of one might suspect that he views Christian religious I know Jews who agree with Eisen’s policy recom- Judaism and many prejudices against it. He once sat, extremism as just as much a threat to the world as mendations, and I know others who don’t. But I’m he tells us, “with an Iranian ayatollah at an interfaith conference in Italy who asked me whether it was true that all Jews believed that their messianic king- Isaacs follows in the footsteps of other Israeli thinkers who dom would stretch from the Nile to the Euphrates.” People who share this cleric’s misconceptions could have tried, like him, to drive a wedge between religious learn otherwise and much else from The Peace and Violence of Judaism. I hope that Eisen can get them aspirations and politics. to read it.

Muslim extremism. It is more likely, however, that not going to tell any of them that the epilogue to The ike Robert Eisen, Alick Isaacs traces his own his even-handedness stems from his irenic outlook. Peace and Violence of Judaism is required reading. Lbook back to a moment of violence. In the early He doesn’t seem to want to say anything that might The former will learn nothing new from Eisen’s cur- 1980s, when he was walking home from a Talmud smack of Islamophobia. In any case, his main focus sory tour of the present situation, and the latter will class in Birmingham, England at the age of 14, a is on the Jewish world, to which he finally speaks, be unlikely to find his policy recommendations very gang of teenage skinheads spotted his kippa and in his book’s epilogue, in ways meant not merely to persuasive. For they generally think that they are be- beat him up badly. While they were still hitting inform it but to shift it in the right direction. ing pragmatic, too, in opposing the creation of a Pal- him, he made three vows: “to settle in the land of Eisen is not someone who is prepared to “declare estinian state precisely because they feel that it would Israel and to enlist and to serve in an Israeli mili- in postmodern fashion that both readings of Juda- constitute an unacceptable threat to Israel’s survival. tary combat unit.” ism in our study are legitimate and we should leave This is good evidence of what Eisen himself recog- By the time the first intifada erupted, in 1987, the decision about which view is correct to the individual conscience.” But if, indeed, we want help in making our own decisions, he tells us, “our only al- ternative is to go outside the texts and engage the real world. We must focus on the realm of the empiri- cal. More specifically, we must ask which viewpoint makes more sense on the basis of pragmatic and practical concerns.” The reader who arrives at these statements on page 220 (of 280) can be forgiven for regretting the amount of time he or she invested in sorting through and keeping straight the multi- tude of sources Eisen assembles. What’s the point of learning about them, one might ask, if they just cancel each other out? True, Eisen hastens to identify strains of pragmatic thinking in the writings of the rabbis themselves. But he doesn’t pretend that they are of decisive importance, for, as he acknowledges, he might with comparable ease have collected rabbinic sources that militated against pragmatism.

hat, in any case, does Eisen think would be Wthe truly pragmatic course of action for Is- rael to pursue in its conflict with the Palestinians, a conflict on which, as he puts it, the “well-being of our world” may ultimately depend? It’s not exactly the same as that recommended by the ancient rabbis in the aftermath of the destruction of the Second Temple. “They encouraged their followers to give up their political independence, eschew violence “Battle of Joshua against the Amalekites,” 1625, by Nicolas Poussin. (© Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.) against their enemies, and accommodate themselves to gentile rule. They valued the preservation of the Jewish community over independence.” nizes, i.e., “[w]hat is considered pragmatic will vary Isaacs, who had fulfilled his vows, occupied a post Eisen, for his part, “does not deny that Israel considerably from person to person,” and it demon- in the real world that forced him to use a truncheon should have a strong army and that it should use strates the insufficiency of the guidelines he offers us. against Palestinian demonstrators. He did so with force in some circumstances.” Where he does follow Eisen has every right, of course, to emerge from misgivings that he had failed to face the challenge the rabbis, however, is in making survival his central his ivory tower to help resolve the world’s problems, “of behaving humanely in the face of adversity.” But concern. And Israel, he asserts, but he doesn’t seem to have brought with him any- it was only his service as a reservist in the Second thing that will be particularly useful in accomplishing Lebanon War in 2006 that spurred him, two de- has the best chance of surviving if it adopts his goals within the Jewish world, nor does he have cades later, to write A Prophetic Peace. a strategy that involves shrewd diplomacy anything new to say. If he succeeds, however, in his While Eisen tells us only that there was a time in designed to separate radical Palestinians, Arabs, announced goal of inspiring Abrahamic imitators, his his life when he was drawn to the viewpoint from and Muslims from moderates by offering labors will not have been in vain—especially if there which Judaism is “supportive of violence,” Isaacs re- incentives to them to live in peace with Israel turn out to be some Ishmaelites among them. For it ports—with some shame—how whole-heartedly he while at the same time isolating the radicals. is the Muslims of the world, far more than the likely once adhered to it. “I prayed hard at war” in Leba- Creating a Palestinian state would be part of Jewish readers of a book like his, who need to get in non, Isaacs tells us.

8 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2012 I wielded “the God of Israel, who gives strength describes as having “demystified the messianic age, undermines the scholar’s sense of his power and power unto His people. Blessed be God” concretizing it in their brand of Religious Zionism, as a legislator of divine law, and leads him to like a sword. I prayed to God “with a two-edged dragging Judaism with them into fierce ideological display his fallibility before God. It disarms the sword in my hand; to execute vengeance upon conflict.” Isaacs’ treatment of rabbinic literature has potential zealotry that emerges when legislators the nations, and punishments upon the peoples; a rather different polemical edge to it. The under- of religious law believe that they are the to bind their kings in chains and their nobles standing of the rabbis that he is combating is not that executors of his will. with fetters of iron.” of Religious Zionists as such but one that generally characterizes Orthodoxy as a whole. It is one that is Deprived of any sense that they are in sole pos- After having prayed so avidly in the course of the shared, he notes, even by the liberal pluralists with session of the truth, rabbinic scholars can be ex- fighting, however, Isaacs faces a predicament. whom he respectfully disagrees, such as Avi Sagi emplars of genuine religious humility, which then “becomes a crucial aspect of the irenic quality of I cannot strive in my daily practice to rabbinic law and its capacity to serve as a model emulate my greatest prayers. My most urgent Is it really time for what for negotiating peace.” If this model were to be gen- supplications to God and most complete Issacs calls "theological erally followed, Isaacs appears to believe, people experiences of communion with the words of would cease to fight over the divine will in public the siddur are of no use to me. They are no use disarmament"? and “search for God in private.” because I am ashamed of them. In his treatment of both biblical and rabbinic literature, Isaacs follows in the footsteps of other Is- But rather than renounce them in horror, Isaacs and Menachem Fisch, who maintain that “the hal- raeli thinkers who have tried, like him, to drive “a has written a book devoted to defanging these parts akha seeks—through interpretation or the assump- wedge between religious aspirations and politics.” of the prayer book as well as the rest of the bellicose tion of rabbinic authority—to determine either the While he thinks that he has improved on them, he language found in other layers of the Jewish tradi- ‘original’ or the ‘current’ intentions of revelation in does not pretend that his book constitutes the last tion and forging “a theologically disarmed religion.” definitive terms.” word on the subject. “Indeed,” he says, “I have de- Isaacs agrees with Eisen that one cannot simply Isaacs declines to participate in this search for veloped only one of several possible Jewish paths to bypass the unappealing texts by identifying a contrary certainty because he believes that everyone who en- peace.” tendency within the tradition. He understood from gages in such an enterprise runs the risk of engaging I’m not sure how good a path it is. If it leads the start of his new enterprise that “dismantling the in “religious tyranny” through the imposition of his away from a politics infused with messianism and connection between violence and religion would take or her own view on others. A better way to under- toward greater moderation, it is one that I would more than a dovishly selective reading of the Bible or be content to see other Israelis pursue. But where the Talmud or a prayer book.” Unlike Eisen, however, does it end? It is Isaacs’ goal, he says, to soften “Is- Isaacs doesn’t see the peace-promoting dimension of rael’s ambitions and convictions” and utilize “the Jewish literature, taken by itself, as the best point of religious tradition to undermine the state’s moral departure for further ruminations. What he seeks to certitude.” He does not neglect to ask whether this supply instead are “theological readings of biblical, can be done “within a context that continues to af- rabbinic, and prayer texts in an attempt to make good firm both the validity of state power and the Jew- on both biblical and rabbinic statements that present ishness of the state.” In fact, he believes that it can, the entire Torah as a path to peace.” but says little more. To do this, one has to go beneath the surface and It would have been reassuring to read in this uncover “the implicit imaginative understanding of book, so deeply soaked in the kind of postmodern- faith that courses through the veins of religious ex- ism that looks askance at the modern state as an perience, animating it from within.” Isaacs therefore instrument of oppression, something like Robert proceeds to walk his readers along his “post-Witt- Eisen’s unequivocal affirmation “that Israel should gensteinian, post-Derridean path to the implicit have a strong army and that it should use force in side of Judaism.” Yet as he himself acknowledges at some circumstances.” the end of A Prophetic Peace, his arguments and interpretations don’t “make for light reading.” In truth, isen and Isaacs’ books both owe their origins to this is an understatement. I will confine myself to Ethe violent turmoil of the first decade of the 21st stringing together some of his more accessible state- century. Eisen traces his back to a horrifying terror- ments in an effort to clarify, to some degree, the goal ist attack on America; Isaacs wrote in the aftermath at which he finally arrives. of his participation in Israel’s retaliation against a “Despite explicit appearances,” Isaacs tells us, terrorist attack on its armed forces. But both of these “God—and, by way of extension, everything in the authors are preoccupied much less with the threat Bible (and, as we learned from the story of Babel, posed by enemy terrorism than with counteract- everything in language)—defies absolute or specific ing the late 20th-century political theology upheld “Let Us Beat Our Swords into Ploughshares” translation into human politics.” “Isaiah’s vision of by some of their own co-religionists, the “disciples by Evgeniy Vuchetich, United Nations, NY. peace,” for instance, “is an impossible one for human of Rabbi Kook.” Both seem to have adhered to it hands to mold,” since its accomplishment would in the past, and both want to replace it now with a require the unimaginable elimination of human stand the halakha is to conceive of it as something tradition-based approach to politics that could claim baseness. “Peace,” therefore, “is part of an implicit vastly more open-ended. at least as much legitimacy. Finally, both men have prophetic vision that cannot become political with sought to advance this purpose by spelling out their anything less than the greatest caution. By framing When viewed in terms of the implicit religious ideas in books published by university presses. But prophecies of peace in messianic time, the prophets purpose of halakhic argumentation, the isn’t this, on some level, rather strange? leave Jewish history with the legacy of anticipating manipulation of logic and language produces For virtually all of the readers of such mono- the impossible.” Consequently, the “messianic vi- a body of literature that is perpetually graphs, the high value of peace is a given, as is the sion, rather than fueling our flight toward the end deconstructive and puzzling. Ultimately, it compatibility of Judaism with such a priority. Most of of history, quenches or weakens our impulse to drive offers an apophatic—backward—path away the people who hold the beliefs that Eisen and Isaacs history toward any kind of ultimate end.” from singular claims about law, ethics, and are challenging live in Israel and don’t read academic These remarks reflect what might be considered justice. The implicit rabbinic voice confounds studies of Jewish thought published by American and to be the main thrust of Isaacs’ book: his rejection of arrogant delusions about the scholarly British university presses—as both of our authors no the path of the “disciples of Rabbi Kook,” whom he acquisition of immutable or divine truth, doubt know. It seems, in the end, that their books

Summer 2012 • Jewish Review of BooKS 9 and Muslims—separately and together—offer each other their version of peace’s meaning for careful and thoughtful consideration.” It is hard for me to imagine an argument as dense as Isaacs’ receiving much attention in such a setting, but if his presentation of his thoughts could help to diminish anyone’s antagonism toward Israel that could only be a welcome development. In the end, however, the books under review here provide at least as much grounds for concern as for satisfaction. Is it really time for what Isaacs calls “theological disarmament”? Would one want to see his arguments, or perhaps even Eisen’s, couched in more accessible language, put into He- brew, and widely consulted in the circles that are, in their opinion, in greatest need of them? Even those of us who share some of these authors’ qualms about the ideology currently animating the national religious camp in Israel have to acknowledge that it has been singularly effective in inspiring young people to do what is necessary to keep their country secure. As has been widely pub- licized, in recent years representatives of this camp have come to constitute a very largely dispropor- Israeli soldiers wait on the Israel-Lebanon border August 14, 2006. (© Denis Sinyakov/AFP/ tionate and steadily growing percentage of the IDF Getty Images.) officer corps and combat units. If they are theologically disarmed, will they still show up for this kind of duty? If one is to be truly pragmatic, such ques- constitute not so much attempts to exert influence in very much involved in interfaith peace work, in tions cannot be brushed aside. places where it might be effective as they do public which The Peace and Violence of Judaism might be battles with their own private demons. of some assistance. Isaacs, for his part, describes A Allan Arkush is professor of Judaic studies at Binghamton But if this is true, it is only insofar as the Jew- Prophetic Peace as his own Jewish contribution to a University and senior contributing editor of the Jewish ish world is concerned. Eisen, we know, is already future dialogue in which he would like to see “Jews Review of Books.

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10 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2012 Reviews The Mighty Jacobson

BY ADAM KIRSCH

at ease when processions of weeping Catholics to the English pressure to be respectable by writing WHATEVER IT IS, I DON'T LIKE IT: THE BEST passed my house carrying plaster saints. Didn’t about Jewishness in terms that are deliberately un- OF HOWARD JACOBSON feel at ease at school when they sang hymns in respectable, even offensive. by Howard Jacobson assembly about famous men I’d never heard Offensive it is, of course, potentially more so to Bloomsbury USA, 352 pp., $18 of, or accused ‘some boy’ of stealing toilet Jews even than to Gentiles, as Jacobson knows well. rolls. Didn’t feel at ease at university where . . . His alter ego Max is a cartoonist whose graphic THE FINKLER QUESTION moral tutors called me Abrahamson, Isaacson, novel about Jewish history, Five Thousand Years of by Howard Jacobson Greenberg, and Cohen. Don’t feel at ease in the Bitterness, earns him the reproach of Jewish read- Bloomsbury USA, 320 pp., $15 Atheneum, or Glyndebourne, or the Courts of ers. “But a cartoonist isn’t there to help,” he protests, Justice, or any police station, racetrack, garden in terms that unmistakably apply to Jacobson’s own KALOOKI NIGHTS brand of comedy. “Not in the conventional sense, by Howard Jacobson at any rate. A cartoonist is there to make the com- Simon and Schuster, 464 pp., $15 Jacobson’s work feels placent quake and the uncomfortable more uncom- THE MIGHTY WALZER fortable still.” like a visit from a wild, Kalooki Nights is certainly calculated to make by Howard Jacobson readers uncomfortable by the relentlessness with Bloomsbury USA, 400 pp., $16 disreputable uncle. which it excavates the strata of Anglo-Jewish iden- NO MORE MR. NICE GUY tity, both conscious and subconscious. The novel is by Howard Jacobson fete, rap concert, or pole-dancing establishment. set in postwar Manchester, the scene of Jacobson’s Bloomsbury USA, 272 pp., $16 Many are the ways a person whose family hasn’t own childhood: “Thus did I grow up in Crumpsall owned land on these islands for a thousand years Park in the 1950s, somewhere between the ghettoes might feel frightened, discomfited, embarrassed, and the greenery of North Manchester, with ‘exter- or just not one hundred per cent at home. mination’ in my vocabulary and the Nazis in my living room.” The recent memory of the Holocaust, hristendom,” one of the contrast- This tirade comes from Whatever It Is, I Don’t the immigrant clannishness of the Jewish commu- ing histories imagined for Nathan Like It, a collection of the columns Jacobson writes nity, their envy and fear of the surrounding Gentile Zuckerman in Philip Roth’s The for The Independent newspaper. But the sentiment world, combine to make Jewishness a burden that Counterlife, finds Zuckerman vis- Jacobson avows here can be found again and again drives the Jews a little crazy: “Why, why, why, as “Citing his wife Maria’s family in England. In the cli- in his fiction, where it is the spur for some of his my father asked . . . does everything always have to mactic scene, the American Jew and his English most frantic comedy. Take the scene in his first come back to Jew, Jew, Jew?” wife are at dinner in a restaurant when an elderly novel, the campus comedy Coming from Behind, In the case of Max’s friend Manny Washinsky, woman at another table stares at them and loudly published in 1983. Sefton Goldberg, the thwarted the burden makes him more than a little crazy. tells the waiter, “You must open a window immedi- professorial anti-hero, is “used to Gentiles making Manny, we learn early on, murdered his parents by ately—there’s a terrible smell in here.” Zuckerman, him uncomfortable. One way or another they all gassing them in their sleep, and the novel takes the convinced that this is anti-Semitic jibe—“She is hy- did.” When Goldberg gets into a standoff with his form of the adult Max’s inquest into the reason for persensitive to Jewish emanations”—stands up for colleagues over a parking space, he defuses his fear the crime. As this unfolds, Jacobson lays bare the himself and confronts the woman, to the dismay of of anti-Semitism by wildly inviting it: intense resentment and shame felt by modernizing, Maria, who thinks he is “being absurd.” What makes assimilating Jews like the Glickmans for Orthodox the scene so exquisitely uncomfortable is that it’s He would have loved them to say something and traditional Jews like the Washinskys. Max is impossible to be certain whether the insult Zucker- about Jews. In his present responsive and ashamed of his friendship with the feeble, unath- man hears really is an insult. Is the consciousness of vibrating state he could have picked up an anti- letic, unworldly Manny, and actively repelled by Jewish difference more acute among the English or Semitic remark delivered in a guilty whisper a Manny’s father, Selick, who is a tailor: among the Jews themselves? Is anti-Semitism real hundred miles away. In an attempt to elicit one or a figment of the imagination—and which is more a little closer to hand he shrugged his shoulders Indulge my genius for racial stereotypy. See destructive of Jewish self-confidence, a real threat or in an exaggerated manner like Topol, fiddled him bent, airless, avid, not a light shining a threat one can never be sure is real? with his nose like Jonathan Miller, squinted behind or above him, saving money—better to Imagine this uncertainty prolonged from a like Menachem Begin, mopped the sweat from ruin his eyes than pay an electricity bill—his dinner to a lifetime, and you begin to enter the his neck like Itzhak Perlman, and in that voice body wrapped in shawls . . . a stunted growth psychological world of Howard Jacobson, who is which ancient money-lenders employed to of perturbations not a man, the ruination of both a magnificently funny writer and one of the deny they had just devoured a pair of Protestant his sons to whom he bequeathed not a single most serious Jewish novelists at work today. For an babies in their soup he repeated, smacking his grace, a blot on the clean sheet my father American Jew to read Jacobson is to understand rubbery lips, ‘Me?’ imagined for us . . . just how different the situation of English Jews is from our own. It has been several generations since It is as if Nathan Zuckerman, instead of con- When Manny kills his parents, then, the crime most American Jews would profess themselves un- fronting the woman who said he smelled bad, re- seems to implicate all the secret ambivalences of comfortable in America—alienated, self-conscious, sponded by setting off a stink bomb. “But I was an Max’s own Jewishness. Did Manny finally rebel knowing themselves to be here on sufferance—the English Jew—that was my dysfunction—and some- against everything his parents represented? Did way Jacobson claims to be in England: how English Jews have had all the rudery squeezed he come to hate the religion that forbade his older out of them,” complains Max Glickman, the protag- brother Asher from marrying the Gentile girl he What’s sacrosanct about ease? Nothing about onist of Kalooki Nights (2006), Jacobson’s best novel. loved? Was his use of gas to commit murder a twist- this country has ever put me at ease. I didn’t feel Jacobson squeezes the rudeness back in, replying ed reminiscence of the Holocaust, which forms the

Summer 2012 • Jewish Review of BooKS 11 secret subject of all the boys’ fantasy lives (includ- Jewishness. After he is the victim of what may or He wasn’t sure . . . whether it was any longer ing, shockingly, their erotic fantasies)? And what may not be an anti-Semitic attack, Treslove happily defensible even to use the word Jew in a public about Max himself, with his history of marrying decides that he could be Jewish after all. Eventually place. After everything that had happened, women who turn out to be anti-Semites: has his fa- he falls in love with a Jewish woman, Hephzibah wasn’t it a word for private consumption only? ther’s ideal of “muscular” normality turned out to Weizenbaum, who tutors him in Jewishness while Out there in the raging public world it was a be any better a guide to Jewish life? fulfilling his fantasy of the exotic Jewess. (“It’s the goad to every sort of violence and extremism. It The explosive comedy of Kalooki Nights—the ess that does it,” Jacobson writes in his 1999 novel was a password to madness. Jew. One little word title comes from the name of a card game played by The Mighty Walzer. “It’s the ess that gives it the juice. with no hiding place for reason in it. Say ‘Jew’ Max’s mother—is in direct proportion to the explo- Jewess. Ess. Ess for Sarah. Ess for Sahara. Ess for So and it was like throwing a bomb.

If Jewishness and politics is a formula for in- Jacobson clings to a serious world because it is only when creasing anxiety in Jacobson’s work, the intersec- tion of Jewishness and sex offers a compensating taboos are weighty that their violation is exhilarating. liberation. It is unfair to Jacobson that so many American discussions of his work, like this one, siveness of the psychic material it handles. “Colorful Who Needs a Shikse. Ess for Slut.”) begin by invoking Philip Roth. (He has joked that language did never yet proceed from confidence,” Jacobson shows how Jews, philo-Semites, and when he is called an English Philip Roth, he likes Jacobson writes. “The confident are languid in their anti-Semites in England are involved in a folie a to counter that he is actually a Jewish Jane Austen.) contempt; what fuels the vivacity of our mistrust is trois, each projecting their fantasies about what But the comparison with Roth, and also with the fear.” Jews are and should be onto ordinary flawed indi- Canadian Mordecai Richler, is inevitable. Jacobson viduals like Sam Finkler (whose name in the title clearly belongs to the same genus as those crazily f so, it makes a kind of sense that it is Jacobson’s becomes a synonym for “The Jewish Question”). Yet sex-obsessed comedians. As he writes, “Sex, surely, Imost fearful book, The Finkler Question, that fi- the comedy in this novel is eventually outweighed once we’ve put the animal state behind us, is an ab- nally won him the prestigious Man Booker Prize, in by Jacobson’s earnest fear of what the future has in erration, and therefore, for it to be sex at all, must 2010. (Several of Jacobson’s earlier novels were not store for English Jews. As anti-Israel cant evolves thrive on imbalance and reversal, on usurpation published in America and, in the wake of the prize, into indulgence of anti-Semitism, the novel shows of the decencies, on disregard for what is usually they began to appear in the United States for the us a Jewish museum being vandalized and an Or- owing.” first time, in a series of Bloomsbury paperbacks.) thodox schoolboy being menaced by a gang of chil- The kinship between Jacobson and mid-period What makes this book angrier and narrower than dren. Finkler himself reaps what he has sown, to his Roth is all the more notable because this style of Kalooki Nights is the fact that the fears it confronts horror, when his own son attacks an Orthodox Jew manic transgression has largely disappeared from are no longer historical and inward, but political at an anti-Israel demonstration: contemporary American Jewish fiction. The rising and immediate. Written in the aftermath of Israel’s invasion of Gaza in 2008, The Finkler Question reflects a climate of opinion in which English and Eu- ropean anti-Zionism have begun to turn into a new anti-Semitism. In this unsettling moment—which also produced the columns on Israel and British anti-Zionism collected in Whatever It Is, I Don’t Like It—Jacobson composed a novel focused on the strange dialectic of philo-Semitism, anti- Semitism, and Jewish self-hatred. Sam Finkler, the novel’s Jewish protagonist, is a middlebrow writer who achieves a new level of fame when he becomes the public face of an anti-Zionist group called “ASHamed Jews.” (The capitalized “ASH” is an allusion to the Holocaust, a blackly comic touch.) Jacobson de- ploys all his malicious wit in laying bare the psychology of Jews “who only assumed the mantle of Jew- ishness so they could throw it off.” (Several well-known examples are caricatured in The Finkler Question, including Jacqueline Rose, literary critic and author of The Question of Zion.) “It’s not peculiar to Jews to dislike what some Jews do,” Finkler tells a Jew- ish friend, who replies, “No, but it’s peculiar to Jews to be ashamed of it. It’s our shtick. Nobody does it better. We know the weak spots.” At the same time that Fin- kler is trying to escape his Jewish identity, his non-Jewish friend Julian Treslove is growing obsessed with Jews and Howard Jacobson. (Illustration by Mark Anderson.)

12 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2012 or risen generation of American Jewish novelists— key to Jacobson’s comedy. This theme makes its ap- dramatic irony?” Jacobson remains, in the words the group that includes Michael Chabon, Jonathan pearance from the very first scene of his first novel, Philip Larkin used to describe himself, “one of Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, and their contempo- Coming from Behind (a title whose entendre can those old-time natural fouled-up guys,” and so do raries—is two or three generations removed from barely be called double). As we meet Sefton Gold- his best characters. the golden age of Bellow, Roth, and Malamud. Such berg, a faculty member at a third-rate English col- Naturally, it is impossible to separate the sexual writers are no longer wrestling with the temptations lege, he remembers the time he was having sex with anxieties in Jacobson’s fiction from the Jewish anxi- of and obstacles to assimilation; they confront as- a student on the floor of his office, when the campus eties. Writing so graphically about sex is itself a vio- similation as a fait accompli and try to imagine their postman barged in and, with perfect aplomb, left a lation of English literary decorum that is especially way back into the Jewishness they feel themselves letter “between the now motionless, frozen cheeks fraught for a Jewish writer. (“There had been a time to have lost. (They are, notably, much more respect- of Sefton Goldberg’s buttocks.” But this genial slap- when his race, too, had occasioned phallic terror in ful of and interested in Judaism as a religion than stick becomes truly Jacobsonian when we learn that the minds of English Gentiles. It would be nice to their elders were.) Against this background, the ap- the letter so delivered was a bill from a bookstore for bring a bit of that back,” muses Sefton Goldberg.) pearance of Jacobson’s work feels like a visit from a F.R. Leavis’ Nor Shall My Sword. More profoundly, however, Jacobson sees sexual wild, disreputable uncle. How long has it been since To get the full flavor of the joke, and of Jacobson’s taboos and their violation as a constitutive experi- an American Jewish novelist sounded the note we hear in Jacobson’s 1998 novel No More Mister Nice Guy: “When all else was said and done, he consid- Jacobson has joked that when he is called an ered himself to be a Rabelaisian man. He drank, he fornicated, he pigged out, he belched, he farted, he English Philip Roth, he likes to counter that he is slept, he rose on the arched dolphin back of his dick, ready to breast the wild waves of existence all over actually a Jewish Jane Austen. again. He was a force of nature, wasn’t he.” Or, again: “But he’s a man; the only truly passionate pursuit of comic persona, it’s useful to know that F.R. Leavis ence for English Jews. In The Mighty Walzer, draw- his life has been fucking. There’s a mathematical ne- was the superego of mid-century English literary ing on his own Manchester childhood, he writes of cessity involved in this. M.A.N.=F.U.C.K. If he’s now criticism, a fiercely earnest and moralistic critic how Jewish teenagers of both genders confine their to believe that a man his age isn’t for fucking, then who looked to literature for the same kind of spiri- sexual explorations to non-Jews, because “you can what the fuck is a man of his age for?” tual nourishment that, centuries before, a dissenting only be mad for what’s different from yourself.” What separates Jacobson from Roth, and makes preacher might have found in the King James Bible. In another column in Whatever It Is, I Don’t Like him a more genuinely comic writer, is the note of Jacobson himself began his career at Cambridge as It, Jacobson formulates his personal credo by re- self-skepticism we hear in these reflections. For a disciple of Leavis and went on to a series of minor turning once again to Leavis: Roth, sex has something metaphysical about it; it academic jobs before becoming a full-time writer. is an assertion of individuality in the face of death, In this Chaucerian scene, then, Jacobson is satiriz- According to his wife, the great critic F.R. which is why it must be performed again and again, ing the very Leavisite seriousness that left an inerad- Leavis took Othello and that other great work ever more flagrantly and flauntingly, in an almost icable mark on his own mind and work. of sexual jealousy, The Kreutzer Sonata, away Sisyphean spirit. For Jacobson, on the other hand, on their honeymoon. We laughed, we students sex is sad because it is a scene of self-delusion, and ny doubts about whether Jacobson has left of Leavis, when we heard that. But we laughed it is funny for exactly the same reason. In No More ALeavisite seriousness behind disappear after with a sneaking regard. It was an example to us Mr. Nice Guy, we follow Frank Ritz, another of Ja- reading Whatever It Is, I Don’t Like It. In his ob- all. Stay serious. Serious is more fun than not cobson’s horny, lonely, sentimental protagonists, as servations on contemporary British life, Jacobson serious. And if you want a holiday from serious, he drives around England visiting the scenes of ear- often sounds like a moralist and a conservative, try being more serious still. lier erotic disasters. In one town he seduced his best inveighing against political correctness, multi- friend’s wife; in another he solicited grim, unenthu- culturalism, pop-culture trash, and the spread of Finally, Jewishness functions in Jacobson’s work siastic prostitutes; he spent a week in a third town technology. That last bugbear comes up when Ja- as the supreme expression and enforcer of serious- with his wife and another woman. cobson writes about a case in which a Welsh librar- ness. This kind of seriousness is what he describes Yet the graphic descriptions of passion are all ian evicted a man who was watching pornography in The Mighty Walzer as a hybrid of “self-respect suffused with a sense of melancholy, and the ques- on the library’s computer. As the author of many and metaphysics—what you owe your soul. Your tion that lingers—“what the fuck is a man of his age pages that are very like pornography, Jacobson is neshome, as we used to call it in the days when we for?”—grows more and more urgent. In the novel’s hardly in a position to condemn filth. What en- talked metaphysics.” It is clear that, for him, this last section, Frank, defeated by his memories and rages him is not what the man was using the com- metaphysics has nothing necessarily to do with Ju- appetites, decides to take refuge in a Catholic mon- puter for, but the fact that there was a computer in daism as a religion. Indeed, like many modern Jews, astery. But the novel’s crowning joke is that Frank, a library at all. “Call me a pedant, but I think of he finds in his rejection of Jewish religion the ulti- in his unhappiness, is spiritually more advanced a library as a place that houses books,” Jacobson mate expression of Jewish earnestness: “Honoring than the monks, who beneath their cowls are entire- writes; let the book be the Marquis de Sade’s, as God isn’t compulsory, you know, even if He exists. ly conventional. When he seeks counsel from Father long as it’s a book. A grown-up book, that is: “All You may choose not to. That was our big contribu- Lawrence, it is Frank who quotes Saint Benedict that I hope now is that [the librarian] keeps her job tion however many years ago. We discriminated. and invokes “that term you Christian philosophers and starts evicting any adult she catches reading We chose.” Yet inevitably, when it comes to finding employ: hesychia. Tranquility, I think it means.” To Harry Potter.” (The theme of the decline of literacy a symbol of this kind of intellectual discrimination, which Father Lawrence responds, “I had a wonder- will also be canvassed in Jacobson’s next novel, Zoo Jacobson turns back to the Judaism he has rejected, ful holiday in Israel last year. I went for about six Time, which is due this fall.) to the concept of havdalah (separation): “The older weeks. In a group.” The scene drives home the es- As this piece suggests, Jacobson clings to a I get, the more enamored I grow of the principle of sential point about Jacobson’s comedy, which is that, serious world because it is only when taboos are havdalah. Keep the meat from the milk, keep the to him as to so many modern comedians, transgres- weighty that their violation can give the sensation holy from the profane, keep the living from the sion is more serious than obedience: “Slowly, Frank of exhilarating weightlessness. Sade is transgres- dead. And the goyim from the Jews? As an incor- is coming to realize that he is far more censorious of sive, whereas Internet porn is merely utilitarian. rigible mixer, with the bruises to show for it, I am the world than they are. He’s the real monk. They’re That’s why Frank Ritz is as appalled as anyone at still thinking about that.” not in flight, he is . . . They could never understand the carefree promiscuity of today’s young: “How is what he finds in [the world] that makes him so vio- he going to make it in a world where people wear lently angry.” what they mean and mean what they say; where Adam Kirsch is senior editor at The New Republic, a In sexual matters as in Jewish ones, the secret the genitals are not a sort of joke about genitals; columnist for Tablet, and the author of Why Trilling twinship of seriousness and outrageousness is the where there’s no dissonance, no counterpoint, no Matters (Yale University Press).

Summer 2012 • Jewish Review of BooKS 13 Reorientation

BY norman A. stillman

Apart from exploring the origins of Islam and its Said and his disciples, unhelpful as they have been. Jews, Christians, and the Abode relation to its monotheistic predecessors, the orien- Lassner dismisses their work, but appears to disagree of Islam: Modern Scholarship, talists reawakened interest in “disciplines of a dis- with Lewis (whom he admires) about the damage Medieval Realities tinctly Islamic character that had become underval- they have done. Most “philologically grounded spe- by Jacob Lassner ued by their Muslim contemporaries, for example, cialists in Near Eastern history and religious institu- The University of Chicago Press, 336 pp., $45 Arabic historical writing.” They produced, among tions” never fell under their influence, he maintains, many other things, outstanding critical editions of and today Said is increasingly subject to criticism, long-neglected Muslim classics like the writings of even in Arabic-language scholarship. iddle Eastern studies in this the great medieval historian Ibn Khaldun. Far from If the orientalists’ influence has failed to pen- country is dominated by the Saidians,” complained the doy- For all of his influence, Said is increasingly criticized en of traditional Middle East “Mhistorians Bernard Lewis in a recent interview in today, even in Arabic-language scholarship. The Chronicle of Higher Education. “The situation is very bad. Saidianism has become an orthodoxy confining themselves to written texts, they took an etrate very deeply into the contemporary Arab that is enforced with a rigor unknown in the West- “active interest in cataloging and studying Islamic world, it is not because the post-colonialists have ern world since the Middle Ages. If you buck the painting, pottery, metalwork, carpets, and the like, stood in their way but because of the opposition Saidian orthodoxy, you’re making life very difficult not simply as collectable objects of treasure but as stemming from the local guardians of Muslim tra- for yourself.” significant markers of Islamic cultural production.” dition. They reject out of hand “the challenge pre- If this is indeed the rule in American academia, Scholars, like the late S. D. Goitein, have already sented by orientalists and their historical methods Jacob Lassner is undoubtedly one of a small, but by opened new vistas into the daily life of the medieval to Muslim self-understanding and behavior.” It is no means insignificant cohort of notable exceptions Lassner’s impression, however, that they are no to it. Although he devotes only a few pages of his longer very much disposed to rail against it. “Over new book to direct combat with Edward Said, its time,” it seems to him, “they have become more first half constitutes in many respects an extended confident of their ability to insulate the believers and unabashed defense of what the late professor of from the depraved views of the Western academy English at Columbia so successfully stigmatized as and its intellectual camp followers.” This, at any “Orientalism,” a clever but misleading conflation of rate, is Lassner’s assessment of the situation in the the name of a 19th-century romantic movement in Arab heartland of the Muslim world. More “inter- art and belles lettres and the academic discipline of esting reactions of Muslims to Oriental studies and Oriental studies. In the second half, Lassner prac- the challenges of modern culture are taking place,” tices what he preaches with respect to his main area he informs us, in Southeast Asia, Turkey, and Iran. of expertise, the history of the Jews and Christians But Lassner leaves discussion of these develop- in the medieval Muslim world. ments to others. Despite Lassner’s claim that it is “modestly con- One thing Lassner is fully prepared to review, ceived,” this book is a very substantial undertak- however, is the overall situation of Jews and Chris- ing, tightly packed with both detail and analysis. tians in the medieval Muslim world. In treating Sketching the history of Oriental studies, Lassner this subject, it is not his intention to make (what devotes special attention to the pivotal contribution would be for him) yet another contribution to the of European Jewish scholars in the 19th and 20th scholarship but to provide an informative and foot- centuries to the development of modern Islamic note-free, yet reliable and up-to-date survey for the studies. This began in Germany with Abraham benefit primarily of “intellectually curious readers Geiger, better known today as one of the founding outside the academy.” What such readers should not fathers of Reform Judaism, whose doctoral disser- be led by this announcement to expect, however, is tation was entitled “What Did Muhammad Bor- Portrait of Abraham Geiger by Lesser Ury, ca. 1905. simple and definitive answers to all of the complex row from Judaism?” “Geiger brought to bear his questions he raises. vast knowledge of post-biblical Jewish texts, that Lassner is extremely reluctant, for example, to is, the rabbinic permutations of biblical narratives Islamic world, and as they continue to comb through arrive at firm conclusions with regard to what actu- that made their way into Muslim scripture.” He was the “neglected trove of more than 100,000” Arabic ally happened during Muhammad’s hostile—and in the first Westerner to view Muhammad as a sincere papyri, and many thousands of Judeo-Arabic docu- one famous instance bloody—encounters with the religious individual and not a cynical charlatan, as ments from the Cairo Geniza, they may yet succeed Jews of Arabia. The traditional Muslim accounts Europeans had maintained since the Middle Ages. in “reconstructing the fabric of economic and social of these events were set down in writing at least a Among his many successors was Ignaz Goldziher, life to which other Arabic literary sources pay inade- century after they occurred and, for reasons that the Hungarian Jew who is to this day widely re- quate attention.” Instead of “colonizing Islamic schol- Lassner skillfully elucidates, cannot be taken at face garded as the father of Islamology. The role of all arship,” as the people Bernard Lewis labels Saidians value. of these scholars “in advancing our knowledge of have contended, “orientalists and their successors lib- Lassner generally deals with these sources with Islam and the Muslims,” Lassner tells us, “was sub- erated it for the benefit of worldly Arab Muslims and great respect, but sometimes allows a little humor stantial if not indeed central to the larger orientalist Christians” and indeed for all humanity. to peek through his review of them. He mentions, project.” What really defined this project, however, for instance, the story of the Jewish woman from the was not the ethnic origin of some of the scholars nfortunately, however, “worldly” Arabs who oasis of Khaybar who gave Muhammed poisoned involved in it but the broad range of its aims and Umight be receptive to the teachings of the ori- donkey meat after his slaughter of the Jewish forces accomplishments. entalists are in short supply. This is not the fault of there.

14 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2012 One could readily understand, given “a blanket acceptance of others and their religious tribal sensibilities, why she would have views and behavior.” But even as he demonstrates chosen to avenge her murdered kinfolk. the vast differences between the situation in the However, in this case, the meat would medieval Muslim world and the most enlightened appear more seasoned with irony than modern societies, Lassner rightly notes that “in the any deadly substance. So delicate was best of times during the formative period of medi- the poison applied, the Prophet only eval Islam, the three monotheistic faiths interacting succumbed to the tainted meat some with each other produced a vibrant civilization to four years later. which the entire world remains deeply indebted until this very day.” Unfortunately, this tale and other less After observing that the Islamic world ultimate- laughable reports laid the lasting founda- ly failed to capitalize on its own medieval scientific tions for popular and scholarly perceptions and philosophical heritage, Lassner concludes with of Jews that were generally more negative the hope that it will once again be able to draw cre- than those that Muslims held of Christians. ative inspiration from outside and find a synthesis Of the many subjects that Lassner discuss- between Islamic belief and modern science and ines, the one that is likely to be of most interest novation. He even entertains the hope that perhaps to his target audience is the question of “toler- Jews—this time the Jews of the technologically dy- ance and coercion in medieval Islam.” While namic state of Israel—will once again play a part in acknowledging that apart from the rough this project. After all, “some early Zionist and cur- treatment accorded to the Jews by Muham- rent Israeli visionaries saw and continue to see the mad himself, “there was little in the Jewish Jews as playing a central role in the transfer of valued experience under medieval Islamic rule to knowledge. In this idealized vision, the intellectual compare with the likes of the periodic Jew- traffic will flow once more over a Jewish bridge that ish persecution in Europe,” Lassner does not connects the Muslim East and the Christian West.” leap to unwarrantedly sunny conclusions. He While he ends his thought-provoking book with neither celebrates a “Golden Age” of Jewish- these optimistic musings, Lassner knows all too well Muslim coexistence, nor advocates the “neo- what obstacles stand in the way of their realization. lachrymose” vision of unmitigated Jewish “The recent Islamic revival has created internal issues subjection and suffering under Islamic rule. still to be settled within the Abode of Islam,” he writes Fragment of a Judeo-Arabic Despite the best efforts of some mod- at the end of his book, in characteristic understatement. grammar of Classical Arabic from the ern Muslim scholars to locate in their tra- Cairo Geniza. Cambridge University ditional texts something like the “kind of Norman A. Stillman is the Schusterman/Josey Professor Library, T-S Ar. 31.254. (Courtesy of tolerance trumpeted by liberal forces in the of Judaic History at the University of Oklahoma. He is Syndics of Cambridge University democratic societies of the West,” medi- the executive editor of Encyclopedia of the Jews in the Library.) eval Muslims were quite far from offering Islamic World (Brill).

Are We All Protestants Now?

BY Michah Gottlieb

forward, she also discusses German-Jewish theolo- Her unifying thesis is that modern Jewish think- HOW JUDAISM BECAME A RELIGION: gians and historians like Abraham Geiger, Samson ers invented the notion that Judaism is a religion in AN INTRODUCTION TO MODERN JEWISH Raphael Hirsch, and Heinrich Graetz; Eastern Eu- response to the distinctive challenges of European THOUGHT ropean Yiddishists, Zionists, and ultra-Orthodox modernity. In the pre-modern period, “it simply by Leora Batnitzky thinkers, and Americans from Mordecai Kaplan was not possible . . . to conceive Jewish religion, na- Princeton University Press, 224 pp., $27.95 to Leo Strauss. This is not to say that Batnitzky tionality, and what we call culture as distinct from has been entirely comprehensive. Italians and Sep- one another.” This was because Jewish communities hardim, modern mystics, and feminist theologians were corporate entities whose authority over their are largely absent from her account. But it would members was recognized by the state. The com- eora Batnitzky’s How Judaism Became a scarcely have been possible for her to deal with ev- munity collected taxes, adjudicated civil disputes Religion is a bold new interpretation of ery important group of modern Jewish thinkers in a through rabbinic courts, and enforced halakhic modern Jewish thought by one of the lead- thematic study of roughly two hundred pages. norms by punishing religious deviants through ing scholars in the field. The fruit of an Batnitzky anchors these thinkers in their social fines, corporal punishments, or excommunication. undergraduateL course that she has been teaching at and political context. Historians of Jewish thought When enlightened thinkers proposed that the Princeton for over a decade, it provides a panoramic have all too often taken a “history of ideas” approach, Jews be incorporated into European states as fully view of Jewish efforts to come to terms with mo- in which later writers are described as solving philo- equal citizens, their opponents argued against eman- dernity. Unlike Julius Guttmann, whose chapters sophical problems that they uncover in earlier writers cipation on the grounds that the Jews formed a sepa- on modern Jewish thought in his 1933 classic The only to generate new problems to be solved by the rate and inherently disloyal nation. In response to Philosophy of Judaism are confined almost entirely next generation. Batnitzky shows that Jewish thought this accusation, Batnitzky claims, Western European to German-Jewish philosophers, Batnitzky rang- is a historical phenomenon that cannot be separated Jewish thinkers began to conceive of Judaism as a re- es widely. Although she covers the German high from the political fate of the Jewish people. This gives ligion in the Protestant sense. Since religion in this philosophical tradition from Moses Mendelssohn her book a sense of real intellectual urgency. sense “denotes a sphere of life separate and distinct

Summer 2012 • Jewish Review of BooKS 15 from all others,” a sphere that is “largely private and halakhic observance received its most extreme ex- thinking as exemplified by the Lithuanian-Jewish not public, voluntary and not compulsory,” people pression in the thought of Yeshayahu Leibowitz philosopher and skeptic Solomon Maimon; and who were Jews solely by religion ought to be con- who disconnected halakhic observance so com- highly creative Talmud study as exemplified by the sidered just as eligible for citizenship as anyone else. pletely from scientific truth, ethics, and politics that 19th-century Lithuanian Volozhin yeshiva under Elsewhere, the situation was different. By the end he labeled any attempt to link it with these spheres the leadership of R. Hayyim of Volozhin. Batnitz- of the 18th century, Batnitzky notes, “the Habsburg, as idolatrous. In a characteristically penetrating ob- ky claims that what unites these three seemingly Ottoman, and Russian Empires had absorbed all servation, Batnitzky notes that “Leibowitz’s notion divergent approaches to Judaism is their common of the previously independent countries of Eastern of Judaism is . . . more Protestant than either So- stress on individuality, whether through commu- and Central Europe,” and retained corporate struc- loveitchik or Cohen’s conceptions.” nion with God (Ba’al Shem Tov), the freedom to tures composed of estates. These states continued to Batnitzky’s analytic focus allows her to group reason (Maimon), or Torah study for its own sake (R. Hayyim of Volozhin). She does not, however, go so far as to claim that these three figures adopt- Batnitzky argues that both Reform Judaism and ed a Protestant view of religion, since all of them were engaged in spiritual quests that took place Modern Orthodoxy followed Mendelssohn in defining “against the backdrop of a Jewish communal life that however weakened, shares common forms of Judaism as a religion. public practice and speculation, otherwise known as religious law and tradition.” define Jews “legally, politically, and theologically” as thinkers in unconventional ways throughout the At the heart of Batnitzky’s argument is her multi- members of the Jewish community. Consequently, book. Thus, she concludes her discussion of “Juda- dimensional account of the Protestant conception the notion of Judaism as a religion “was largely irrel- ism as a Religion,” with the Religious Zionists think- of religion: evant” to 19th-century Eastern European Jews, who ers Abraham Isaac Kook, his son Zvi Yehuda Kook, proceeded, as they encountered modernity, to de- and the French phenomenologist Emmanuel Levi- (a)“Religion denotes a sphere of life separate velop notions of Jewish affiliation that highlighted nas. She frankly acknowledges that her thesis is less and distinct from all others” such as “politics, national and cultural distinctiveness. than completely applicable to the younger Kook and morality, science and economics.” Levinas, since they both “reject the promise of mo- (b) Religion is a “largely private affair, not public.” atnitzky begins her account with the great dernity as expressed in the modern nation-state as (c) Religion is “voluntary and not compulsory.” B18th-century philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, well as the privatization of religion.” Rather than be- (d) Religion is about “personal belief or faith,” whom she credits with being, or whom she identi- lieving that religion required legitimation from the which she contrasts with the view that fies as the inventor of “the modern idea that Juda- nation-state, Kook and Levinas claim that, “only the religion is primarily about ritual practice or ism is a religion.” Rejecting the arguments of the Jewish religion . . . can justify and give meaning to “performance.” opponents of Jewish Emancipation in Prussia, Men- the state.” Still, these thinkers belong in the part of delssohn maintained that adherence to Judaism did her book entitled “Judaism as a Religion,” since they The problem with this is that no figure that Bat- not conflict with the demands of citizenship since continue to “view modern Judaism in terms of the nitzky discusses in the “Judaism as a Religion” sec- Judaism was an apolitical religion centered around relation between religion on one side and politics tion (Part I) of the book actually defines Judaism voluntary commitment to halakha. According to Batnitzky, Mendelssohn acknowledged that the Jews remained a theological community, but he denied that they shared a national Jewish identity. Batnitzky argues that both Reform Judaism and Modern Orthodoxy followed Mendelssohn in defining Judaism as a religion, although, of course, they did so in different ways. Abraham Geiger, the ideological father of 19th-century Reform Judaism, described Judaism as the voluntary acceptance of a set of theological beliefs that were both rational and moral. Hermann Cohen, the most distinguished philosopher associated with Reform, defined the “genuine Jew” as an ethical monotheist. The Ortho- dox thinker Samson Raphael Hirsch, a contemporary of Geiger’s, argued that “genuine Judaism” was constituted by a community of individuals united by their voluntary commitment to halakha as the immutable word of God. In 1876, Hirsch led his community in Frankfurt to secede from the mainstream Jewish community, which was then controlled by Reformers, by invoking the right to freedom of conscience. Hirsch, no less than Geiger, invoked a Rabbi Abraham I. Kook, April 1924. (Courtesy of the Emmanuel Levinas, Paris, 1991. (Courtesy of Bracha distinctly Protestant and distinctively modern and Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.) L. Ettinger.) notion of religion to frame and defend his position. In the 20th century, the preeminent Modern Or- thodox thinker, Joseph Soloveitchik described Juda- of sovereign national states on other.” While invert- as possessing all four of these characteristics. Fur- ism as a halakhic system, which “is not political but ing the relationship between the two, they “do not ther, some of the figures Batnitzky describes in Part instead concerns the intellectual and spiritual di- change the terms of the conversation.” II (“Detaching Judaism from Religion”) possess at mensions of human experience.” This highlights the least some of them. way in which, the primacy of halakha notwithstand- atnitzky begins the second part of her book, Mendelssohn, the seminal figure in Part I, stress- ing, Soloveitchik is part of the same discourse as the B“Detaching Judaism from Religion” by group- es that Judaism must be based on rational convic- great early 20th-century “philosophers of Jewish ex- ing three trends together: Eastern European Ha- tion and rejects religious coercion. In this sense, he perience,” Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. sidism as exemplified by the movement’s 18th-cen- seems to accept (a) and (c). But Mendelssohn’s af- The Orthodox identification of Judaism with tury founder Israel Ba’al Shem Tov; Jewish free- firmation that halakhic observance is voluntary in a

16 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2012 practice. In creating a separate religious community or not Judaism is a religion.” According to Bat- based on halakhic observance, Hirsch sought to re- nitzky, the primary architect of this rejection was establish a vision of Judaism that was clearly at odds the 19th-century Hungarian rabbi Moses Sofer with the prevailing Protestant concept of religion (known at the Hatam Sofer), who sought to pre- that conceives of religion as one sphere of life sepa- serve the pre-modern integrity of Jewish life by rate from all others. “Judaism is not a religion, the segregating Judaism as much as possible from the synagogue is not a church,” Hirsch writes. “Judaism broader culture. He therefore famously ruled that is not a mere adjunct to life: it comprises all of life.” Jews should distinguish themselves from Gen- Batnitzky is aware of this feature of Hirsch’s thought tiles through their dress, names, and language and indeed she quotes this very passage. She does (Yiddish). Members of his community were also not believe that it militates against her overall argu- required to bring civil disputes to Jewish courts. The ultra-Orthodox justify their separatism by appealing to religious freedom but restrict the freedom of their individual members.

ment, however, since Hirsch’s “claim for the endur- The ultra-Orthodox justify such separatism by ap- ing authority of Jewish law” was predicated on the pealing to religious conscience. Thus, as Batnitzky premise “that Judaism, and in particular Jewish law, wittily remarks, the “ultra-Orthodox wholeness is is by definition not political.” Still, by highlighting wholly dependent on the nation-state’s protection certain elements of Hirsch’s thought that can be of religious freedom.” This creates a paradox, or at characterized as, in some sense, Protestant, she ar- least exposes an ambiguity in the right to religious Title page of Haggadah with commentary by Rabbi rives at the rather extreme conclusion that “Hirsch’s freedom. Samson Raphael Hirsch. orthodoxy is not only modern but rather in a cer- Much of ultra-Orthodoxy today seeks to retain sense the most modern of modern Judaisms in establish not only the fusion of religion, culture, molding itself as a religion on the German Protes- and nationality that was characteristic of the pre- political sense does not prevent him from also hold- tant model.” modern community, but also its ability to coerce ing that from a theological perspective such obser- At times, Batnitzky seems to acknowledge the its members into conformity. While the modern vance is binding on all Jews. “No sophistry of ours problematic character of her division of Jewish nation-state stripped Jewish leaders of the author- can free us,” he writes, “from the strict obedience we thinkers into those who define Judaism as religion ity to enforce religious norms through threats and owe to the law.” and those who do not. “Mendelssohn’s attempt to punishments, ultra-Orthodoxy has turned to social Moreover, to say that for Mendelssohn Judaism is define Judaism within the Protestant category of pressure and disapproval. Non-conformists in ultra- “individual and private” is not fully accurate. While religion,” she writes, “brings with it no-so-subtle Orthodox communities know that they will find it he does place individual conviction at the center of criticisms of this very category.” Likewise, she notes difficult to arrange their children’s marriages. They Judaism, Mendelssohn also stresses that Jews consti- that the 19th-century historian Heinrich Graetz “in- are also confined to their communities by their poor tute a nation. Near the end of his Jerusalem, Men- dicates that Judaism does not quite fit the category command of English and lack of secular education. delssohn writes that one function of biblical narra- of religion.” They know how difficult it would be to try to make tive is to recount the history of Israel that “contains their way in the alien, outside world. These barri- the foundation for national cohesion (National- t the conclusion of her book, Batnitzky dis- ers to leaving the community constitute a powerful verbindung).” In his final work, To Lessing’s Friends, Acusses the legal battles of the ultra-Orthodox de facto form of religious coercion. The paradox is Mendelssohn explicitly that while the ultra-Orthodox justify their separat- rejects the idea that Ju- ism by appealing to religious freedom, they use that daism is a religion in the freedom to restrict the freedom of their individual Protestant sense. Pointing members. to the fact that revealed Batnitzky’s account shows that the tension be- belief is at the heart of tween accepting and rejecting Protestant notions the Protestant notion of of religion is to some extent characteristic of all the religion, while Judaism forms of modern Judaism. This should not surprise consists essentially of re- us for the struggle over Protestantism is inherent in vealed law, Mendelssohn modernity itself. As moderns, we are all, to some observes that “The He- extent, conflicted Protestants who struggle with brew language has no ac- the choice between individualism and community, tual word for what we call between autonomy and authority. This creative ten- ‘religion.’” sion is a source of much of the vitality of modern In her discussion of Western civilization. It is also the secret of Jewish Samson Raphael Hirsch, survival in modernity. Near the end of her book, Batnitzky correctly notes Batnitzky writes, “it is, among other things, the dif- that he affirmed the vol- ficulty of answering the question of what Judaism untary nature of the Jew- is in the modern world that makes modern Jewish ish religious community, thought so interesting. [It] lives because there are which must be based on Sign at the entrance to Kiryas Joel. questions that are difficult to answer.” the convictions of its individual members. But in other ways Hirsch, too, Satmar community of Kiryas Joel, in upstate New departed from the Protestant model. For Hirsch, Ju- York. She describes such ultra-Orthodoxy as “a Michah Gottlieb is assistant professor of Hebrew and daism was primarily about practice rather than be- wholesale rejection of all the modern attempts Judaic studies at NYU. His book Faith, Reason, and lief, although he recognized the necessity of having to divide human life into different spheres and Politics: Essays on the History of Jewish Thought certain beliefs in order to ground the authority of thereby a refusal to engage the question whether (Academic Studies Press) will appear later this summer.

Summer 2012 • Jewish Review of BooKS 17 New iN the Jewish Lives series An intimate view of one of israel’s most complex and fascinating figures.

Mordechai Bar-On, Dayan’s bureau chief during the Sinai War and eminent historian of Israel, explores Dayan’s private life, public career, and political controversies, set against a highly perceptive and original analysis of Israel’s political environment from pre-Mandate Palestine through the 1980s.

“well-written and absorbing . . . Doing justice to the complex and intriguing persona of Dayan, Bar-On writes for a wide audience, both general readers and students of Israel and the Middle East. I read it with great interest and profit.” — Itamar Rabinovich, former Israeli ambassador to the U.S.

Go to JewishLives.org to discover more about Jewish lives in this remarkable series of interpretive biography. Current titles include Robert Gottlieb on Sarah Bernhardt, Vivian Gornick on Emma Goldman, Mark Kurlansky on Hank Greenberg, Joshua Rubenstein on Leon Trotsky, Steven Weitzman on Solomon, and Shmuel Feiner on Moses Mendelssohn. Forthcoming titles include Rachel Cohen on Bernard Berenson, Yehuda Mirsky on Rav Kook, and Saul Friedlander on Franz Kafka.

Find us on Facebook at facebook.com/JewishLives Available wherever books and ebooks are sold

18 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2012 Where Wisdom Begins

BY JONATHAN L. SILVER

but as Plato responded to the Presocratics and as theories about ethics and metaphysics with a practi- Religion for Atheists: A Non- Levinas responded to Heidegger: the good is higher cal involvement in education, fashion, politics, travel, Believer’s Guide to the Uses of than the truth. hostelry, initiation ceremonies, publishing, art, and Religion The premise of Religion for Atheists is that reli- by Alain de Botton gions were Pantheon, 320 pp., $26.95 Rather than denigrate invented to serve two central needs which religions, atheists should continue to this day and which secular society has not been able to solve with any particular steal from them. uring the charmed years between the skill: the need to live together in communities end of the Cold War and the onset of in harmony, despite our deeply rooted selfish architecture—a range of interests that puts to shame the War on Terror, a great many po- and violent impulses. And second, the need to the scope of the achievements of even the greatest litical scientists believed that as citizens cope with terrifying degrees of pain which arise and most influential secular movements and indi- Dand states marched into modern times they would from our vulnerability to professional failure, viduals in history. shed one religious atavism after another until the to troubled relationships, to the death of loved Rather than denigrate religions, atheists should secular, freedom-loving nations of the world came ones and to our decay and demise. steal from them. to trade with each other in perpetual peace. Few sober thinkers still believe this. “It is by a sort of in- n chapters on community, kindness, educa- tellectual aberration,” Tocqueville writes, “and in a Ition, tenderness, pessimism, perspective, art, way, by doing moral violence to their own nature, architecture, and institutions, de Botton critically that men detach themselves from religious beliefs; analyzes shortcomings of secular society, explains an invincible inclination draws them back. Incredu- how religions have avoided those shortcomings, lity is an accident; faith is the only permanent state and suggests a secular adaptation of the religious of mankind.” strategy. The chapter on community showcases his But the religion that has returned to our public approach. For de Botton as for Tocqueville, our debates has been coarsened by an unconscious al- problem is loneliness and alienation: liance between the New Atheists and their literalist counterparts. When the New Atheists read Genesis, Whereas the Bedouin whose tent surveys a they are scandalized that so many people still be- hundred kilometers of desolate sand has the lieve in myths from the Bronze Age. But the real psychological wherewithal to offer each stranger a scandal is that biblical literalists have rushed to de- warm welcome, his urban contemporaries . . . — in fend scripture by accepting the categories and con- order to preserve a modicum of inner serenity— ceptions of their opponents. God either did or did give no sign of even noticing the millions of not create the world in six days. There either is the humans who are eating, sleeping, arguing, creation of Genesis or there is an ongoing contest copulating, and dying only centimeters away from of adaption and survival without inherent moral them on all sides. meaning. Both the New Atheists and biblical literalists agree on these alternatives and, in so agreeing, But religion knows of our loneliness, and al- are united in their opposition to traditional modes though a “Catholic Mass is not, to be sure, the ideal of monotheistic theology. Such thinking does not habitat for an atheist,” even so, “the ceremony is re- attend to the conceptual power of Augustine or the plete with elements which subtly strengthen congre- exegetical subtlety of Rashi, and it cannot compre- gants’ bonds of affection, and which atheists would hend the traditional forms of religious life passed on do well to study.” To begin with, Catholicism realizes as an inheritance from father to son since Abraham Top: Moses receives the Tablets of the Law; Bottom: the power of setting. The physical space of the church passed monotheism to Isaac. Moses shows the tablets to the Jews; from the Moutier- gives attendees “rare permission to lean over and Enter Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists: A Grandval Bible, Add. 10546, Folio No: 25v, British say hello to a stranger without any danger of being Non-believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion, which Library, London. (© HIP/Art Resource, NY.) thought predatory or insane.” Through its “enormous begins with this extraordinary sentence. “The most prestige, accrued through age, learning, and architec- boring and unproductive question one can ask of Although he examines Christian, Jewish, and tural grandeur” the Catholic Mass permits “our shy any religion is whether or not it is true—in terms Buddhist practices, de Botton does not interpret, desire to open ourselves to someone new.” of being handed down from heaven to the sound of and certainly does not endorse these traditions. For It is now too easy to customize our lives and trumpets and supernaturally governed by prophets “they have their own apologists.” Instead, de Botton avoid citizens unlike ourselves, but walking into and celestial beings.” De Botton, a Swiss essayist and writes for atheists like himself who have overlooked a Catholic Mass, one sees “a random sampling of intellectual entrepreneur living in London, “hopes “how many aspects of the faiths remain relevant souls united only by their shared commitment to to rescue some of what is beautiful, touching, and even after their central tenets have been dismissed.” certain values.” Attending a church service “breaks wise from all that no longer seems true.” The de- Secularism itself is not wrong, but “we have too of- down the economic and status subgroups within scendant of Abraham de Boton, a 16th-century ten secularized badly—inasmuch as, in the course which we normally operate, casting us into a wider Talmudist and author of the classic Sephardic com- of ridding ourselves of unfeasible ideas, we have sea of humanity.” Being cast into the wider sea of mentary on Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, de Bot- unnecessarily surrendered some of the most use- humanity might seem to be the opposite of commu- ton responds to the atheist-literalist debates of our ful and attractive parts of the faiths.” Unlike secular nal, but de Botton’s point is that the homogeneous day not from the perspective of traditional religion institutions, religions have succeeded in combining relationships inspired by secular values and enabled

Summer 2012 • Jewish Review of BooKS 19 by technology allow us to blind ourselves to the ters on our own, he is careful to warn against the ton stands at the end of a long and distinguished line. naturally circumscribed community of our physi- temptation to fetishize the community. Civil religion is at the core of the republican visions cal space. Though we all have digital friends around of Machiavelli and Rousseau and was central in the the world who are essentially like us, walking into Religions understand that to belong to a debates of the American framers. Like the theorists a church forces us to confront the wider sea of hu- community is both very desirable and not of civil religion before him, de Botton’s work occupies manity, even and especially in its poverty and frailty. very easy. In this respect, they are greatly an intermediary moral position. On the one hand, In one remarkable passage, de Botton writes that more sophisticated than those secular political though de Botton does not specify the content of mo- the Church knows “we strive to be powerful chiefly theorists who write lyrically about the loss rality, he does insist that we have public and private because we are afraid of . . . being stripped of digni- of a sense of community, while refusing to moral needs. But in jettisoning God, de Botton runs ty, being patronized, lacking friends, and having to acknowledge the inherently dark aspects of into the philosophical challenge that must be posed spend our days in coarse and dispiriting surround- social life. to all the philosophers of civil religion. How does ings.” Thomas Hobbes proposed that mankind the atheist looking to adapt religious insights decide naturally suffers these exact problems—excessive hroughout Religion for Atheists, there are photo- which religious insights to adapt? sensitivity to wounded pride, solitude, the ugliness Tgraphs and architectural renderings, some with De Botton draws from Judaism, Christianity, of existence—and on account of these problems we aphoristic descriptions that illustrate a religious in- and Buddhism, each presenting different and, at are possessed by a “perpetual and restless desire for sight. These images help de Botton describe the per- times, divergent ethical visions. On what basis can power after power, that ceaseth only in death.” The sonal and social benefits of religious life exquisitely, the atheist arbitrate between these competing tradi- Catholic Church and Hobbes are not often thought with the effect of chastening the materialist and so- tions? Indeed, de Botton’s work invites Nietzsche’s to agree on much, but de Botton reminds us that lipsistic excesses of secular liberalism. Liberals yearn great challenge: If revelation is untrue, if God is the they share a common diagnosis of our troubles. for liberty, but de Botton contends that projection of a wounded animal or a willful found- Religions are simply better at helping us manage er, if morality is freely chosen and not commanded, these troubles than secular society is. For instance, A lack of freedom is no longer, in most then why is kindness better than cruelty, or good the liturgical design of the Catholic Mass takes our developed societies, the problem. Our downfall better than evil? What is the value of values? From sensitivity to pride (or fear of embarrassment) and lies in our inability to make the most of the this critical perspective, Religion For Atheists can our longing to be with others (or fear of solitude) into freedom that our ancestors painfully secured encourage us to have nice ethics and fulfilling lives. account by “taking people into a distinct venue which for us over three centuries. We have grown But are nice ethics sustainable if they are arbitrary? ought itself to be attractive enough to evoke the en- sick from being left to do as we please without Is self-fulfillment all there is? thusiasm for the notion of a group” and allowing sufficient wisdom to exploit our liberty. I can hazard a guess as to what de Botton’s re- individuals “to suspend their customary frightened sponse might be. Suffering cultures and souls need egoism in favor of a joyful immersion in a collective Now that we are free we are left to cast about with- triage, not treatise. Do as Rome did. Appropri- spirit.” The Mass demonstrates “the importance of out knowing where to go; that is the great problem ate whatever is of value from wherever you find it, putting forward rules to direct people in their inter- for which religions are, if not answers, then social re- building eclectically and putting everything beauti- actions with one another.” The missal, as the siddur, sources. We need patterns, forms, rituals, and habits ful and good into a central system that can be trans- “compels the congregants to look up, stand, kneel, to equip our souls for moral and humane action. We mitted, if not by the civilization of empire, then by sing, pray, drink, and eat at given points.” need these things because, though our reason may apostolic succession. In perceptive interpretations of religious cere- tell us what is right, we undermine our own resolu- Religion for Atheists will frustrate orthodox be- monies, de Botton notes how they tend to preserve a tions to live with integrity. On the basis of this psy- lievers who will be offended at de Botton’s smor- note of sobriety beneath the celebration. Weddings chological truth, that each of us is at war with our- gasbord approach to extracting religious practices mark “the entombment of sexual liberty and indi- selves, atheists should appropriate religion’s strategy from whole religions, and it will frustrate orthodox vidual curiosity for the sake of children and social of finding consistent and even structural ways to for- atheists who believe each individual truly is a ratio- stability.” The custom of Bar Mitzvah is designed tify our better selves. “We continue to need exhorta- nally autonomous sovereign. But, in this hour, when “to assuage [the] inner tensions” that parents feel tions to be sympathetic and just, even if we do not religion has returned to public life, de Botton chal- as they both welcome the maturation of their child believe that there is a God who has a hand in wishing lenges religious people to think critically about how while harboring “complex regrets that the nurturing to make us so,” de Botton writes. Religion is the most they can improve rather than accommodate secular period which began with their son’s birth is drawing impressive library of strategies for the delivery of the liberalism, and he challenges atheists to retain the to a close and—especially in the case of the father— very wisdom we need to avoid becoming enslaved to wisdom, beauty, and goodness of religious life. that they will soon have to grapple with their own our worst selves in the pursuit of ever more freedom. decline.” Though de Botton believes that religions In attempting to marshal the resources of reli- Jonathan L. Silver studies and teaches in the Department are wise in not expecting us to deal with such mat- gious life for utilitarian and public purposes, de Bot- of Government at Georgetown University. Who Is Man?

BY Gary A. Anderson

aint Augustine believed that human beings midrash commenting on Genesis 2:7 (“Then God Demonic Desires: “Yetzer Hara” constantly rebelled against God as a result formed man from the dust of the ground”) is often and The Problem of Evil in Late of the sin of Adam and Eve. The ill-effects of cited. The verb for formed vayyitzar( ) is spelled here Antiquity that sin, Augustine famously contended, are with two yuds, according to this interpretation, be- by Ishay Rosen-Zvi symbolizedS by the male member—it rises on occa- cause God created humans with two inclinations University of Pennsylvania Press, 264 pp., $69.95 sions when not desired and fails at moments when (yetzarim): one for good and one for evil, and each desire burns most intensely. In short, we cannot ac- person has the capacity to choose between the two. Sin: The Early History of an Idea complish the good that we will while we find our- In his groundbreaking book, Ishay Rosen-Zvi ar- by Paula Fredriksen selves committing the evil we fear. gues that the rabbinic picture is optimistic, but also Princeton University Press, 208 pp, $24.95 The rabbinic picture, we are frequently told, op- that it is actually far more complex than this citation poses such pessimism. In support of this a famous would suggest. This idea of two warring inclinations

20 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2012 did not really crystallize until the 3rd century, and it ified rabbinic being.” The biblical understanding of tion. Rather, Rosen-Zvi uses the term in an extended had a complex, literally demonic genealogy. yetzer, he shows, remained more or less unchanged sense to refer to a power that is “fully internalized” As a noun, the word yetzer appears in Genesis 6:5 as late as the early 2nd century BCE, when the Wis- within the person. This is a subtle but crucial point. in reference to the evil tendency of man’s thoughts, dom of Sirach appeared. But the sect at Qumran The yetzer is demonic but internal to the domain of and in Genesis 8:2 God reflects that theyetzer of man’s held to a cosmological dualism. Those on the side the “self.” Unlike the pessimists at Qumran, the rab- heart is evil (ra) from his youth. But as Ishay Rosen- of good were believed to be elected by God and gov- bis believed that it could be overcome with divine Zvi makes clear, neither of these verses nor any others erned by the power of light, while the wicked were help. One was not at the mercy of nefarious cosmic in the Bible presents the yetzer as an independent en- seen as the lot of Belial and constrained to do evil. forces operating outside the domain of one’s free will. tity, let alone an evil one. For that, we have to wait for This could “account for the election of the sect, but It is only in later stages of rabbinic literature that the rabbis. But where did they get the notion? And at what point did they oppose it to a good yetzer? Unlike the pessimists at Qumran, the rabbis believed Rosen-Zvi’s answer to the first of these questions takes us back before the rabbinic era, to Qumran, that the yetzer could be overcome with divine help. the community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls. “My claim is that at Qumran yetzer occupies a mid- not for the depravity and sinfulness of its members.” the notion of a good yetzer is regularly opposed to dle ground between the biblical ‘thought’ and the re- The answer to the latter was that the yetzer tempted an evil one. In all of the earlier tannaitic literature even the sons of light to do evil. there is only one text that speaks of such a compe- At Qumran, the yetzer hara fit into a demonologi- tition in the sense of the midrash with which we cal context, “as a counterpart of Satan, Belial, and the began. In Mishnah Berakhot 9:5, we are told of the spirit of impurity—and in an anthropological one—as famous verse in Shema, “And you shall love the a component of human depravity.” The rabbis, for their Lord your God, with all your heart and all your part, refused “to accept grand cosmological models soul . . . ” (Deut. 6:5) that “with all your heart” means subjecting humans to external superhuman forces” the two yetzarim, the one for good and the one for evil. and “left the yetzer alone to account for their sinful- Some scholars have sought an external impetus ness, thus making it the center of their anthropology.” for this innovation, but neither Qumran nor any oth- In early rabbinic literature, Rabbi Akiva pre- er postbiblical source has ever been located. Others served the biblical concept of the yetzer, while have suggested that the idea actually arose from close Rabbi Ishmael adopted a version with some midrashic readings of the Bible. But these interpreta- simiarities to the Qumranic one. In Akiva’s tions are found only much later, in amoraic sources usage, the yetzer was never qualified as “evil.” R. and appear to be justifying a pre-existing idea. More- Ishmael, on the other hand, cast the yetzer in a dark- over, such a fundamental claim about the nature of er light and frequently identified its power with the the human person is likely to have its origin in some- domain of the demonic. As proof of this, Rosen-Zvi thing other than intensive exegesis. cites a midrash from Sifre Numbers that describes The twoyetzarim of the Mishnah have to be con- the evil yetzer tormenting Boaz during the night that sidered in their literary context. The goal of chapter Ruth slept at his feet on the threshing floor. “Strong, 9 as a whole is to counter any sort of dualistic cos- sophisticated, and demonic as the yetzer may be,” mology. The second mishnah, for example, exhorts Rosen-Zvi concludes, “it is still external . . . Boaz does the reader to say a blessing for both good and bad not need a good yetzer to best his evil one; he strug- tidings; the third mishnah rules that a benediction gles with it and defeats it himself.” must be said for good and bad fortune, while the fifth mishnah provides the biblical source for these very t is not Rosen-Zvi’s claim that fully developed de- obligations. It is within this fifth mishnah that we find “Adam and Eve” from the Falnama (Book of Imonic figures are at play in these texts. Satan is no- our sole tannaitic reference to a two-fold yetzer. “This Omens), Ja´far al-Sadiq, ca. 1550. where invoked as the one who orchestrates tempta- context makes polemic with dualistic doctrines quite fitting,” Rosen-Zvi concludes, saying:

A dual yetzer structure internalizes dualism and submits it to the free will of the person hosting the yetzarim. In this polemical, anti-dualistic context, it is quite understandable that the same homily that presents a rare dualistic model also present an exceptionally dialectic one. The evil yetzer is not necessarily an enemy, for it too can be enlisted in God’s service.”

Throughout this study, Rosen-Zvi argues against any particular linkage of the yetzer with sex, the early midrash concerning Boaz notwithstanding. Ultimately, however, in the Babylonian Talmud, especially in its latest editorial layer, the yetzer does become sexualized.

Eight out of nine narratives that mention the evil yetzer in the Bavli discuss sexual issues. Despite their variegated topics, they all present an image that is fundamentally similar: the yetzer appears as sexual desire, with which men, usually sages, are in constant struggle, and that demands “Boaz and Ruth” by Charles Lock Eastlake, ca. 1853. (Shipley Art Gallery, Gateshead, Tyne & Wear, external assistance or supervision in order to UK/ © Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums/The Bridgeman Art Library.) win.

Summer 2012 • Jewish Review of BooKS 21 Confirmation of the late nature of this development can be gathered from Syriac sources. As On the Origins scholars have long noted, several Syriac Christian of Jewish writers, who were rough contemporaries with Self-Hatred the amoraim, utilize the rabbinic idea of an “evil Paul Reitter yetzer.” Yet these Christian sources never identify the yetzer as having a particular role in sexual temptation, which is the domain of Satan alone. “Had the Jewish idiom any sexual connotation [in the early amoraic period],” Rosen-Zvi concludes, “it would be reasonable to expect it to [have left] traces in Syriac literature as well.” The conclusion seems inescapable—the linkage of the yetzer to sexual desire was an innovation of the final redac- “On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred is an impressively tors of the Talmud. fluent, deeply learned, and morally responsible Rosen-Zvi’s learned book opens up new vistas treatment of what can be an incendiary label. Reitter’s for the discussion of Jewish theological anthropol- major revelation is that the concept of Jewish self- hatred emerged as part of an affirmative discourse ogy. His careful philological work traces the nu- rather than as a label of denunciation. This stylish essay merous connections between rabbinic and early should have a wide impact.” Christian conceptions of human nature and sin. —Samuel Moyn, Columbia University Ultimately, Rosen-Zvi emphatically endorses the Origen, Christian theologian. Cloth $26.95 978-0-691-11922-9 view that the rabbinic conception of the human person is fundamentally optimistic. Our human bodies were not evil as the gnostics like Valentinus had asserted, they were the means Winner of the 2010 National Jewish Book aula Fredriksen’s latest book is not a learned through which our return to God would be won. Award in American Pmonograph like that of Rosen-Zvi. Rather, it Origen also claimed that God intended every soul Jewish Studies, Jewish is a concise and elegantly written history of how he had fashioned to be saved. But how could this be Book Council the early church understood the sinful character of squared with free will? Clearly some persons will pre- The Rebbe humanity and the solutions it provided. Beginning fer rebellion over obedience. Origen countered that The Life and Afterlife with the New Testament, Fredricksen claims that each soul was created by God and naturally tended of Menachem Jesus is to be located securely within the Judaism toward the good. If that soul was re-incarnated a suf- Mendel Schneerson of his day. His interests were focused on the resto- ficient number of times, it would eventually come Samuel Heilman ration of Israel and its current plight as an occu- around and choose the path toward salvation. This & Menachem pied nation awaiting the fulfillment of its destiny. doctrine found few followers and was eventually con- Friedman Paul of Tarsus radically expanded the picture by demned by the Church. For this reason Origen never putting emphasis on the plight of the Gentiles and enjoyed the honor that his brilliance deserved. “[A]n outstanding biography. . . . This well-written their inclusion in the salvation offered to Israel. In presentation, based on exhaustive scholarship, will stand as the definitive statement.” order to accomplish this, Paul developed a con- ugustine is certainly the most important and —Publishers Weekly cept of sin and redemption that encompassed both Ainfluential figure that Fredriksen treats. What Israel and the nations. In Fredriksen’s account— interested Augustine was the fact that human be- “[A]n important biography. . . . [A]s full and reliable an which would be contested by many—Paul preached ings could know the good and yet be unable to account of the life of this towering spiritual leader as we are likely to get.” a universalism in which all would be saved. choose it. The human will is damaged and easily —Saul Rosenberg, New York Sun Everything changed dramatically in the 2nd conquered by the desires of the body, a condition Paper $19.95 978-0-691-15442-8 century when the church fully entered the Greco- we all inherit from Adam and Eve. (The fact that 90 Roman world and began to shape its teaching percent of all diets and exercise programs go un- around the philosophical categories of Middle heeded in spite of their obvious benefits would not A Short Platonism. The key players here were Valentinus, have been a mystery to him.) History of a gnostic theologian; Marcion of Sinope, an early The answer to this problem, according to Augus- the Jews Christian bishop whose teachings were ultimate- tine, was to be found in the “grace” of God. Drawing Michael Brenner ly denounced as heretical; and Justin Martyr, a on God’s arbitrary preference of Jacob over Esau in Translated by “Church Father” and early defender of the Chris- Genesis, a choice made on the basis of no human Jeremiah Riemer tian faith. Fredriksen’s final chapter engages two of action, Augustine argued that salvation was totally the most brilliant thinkers of the early church, Ori- dependent on God. Humanity as a whole, he rea- gen and St. Augustine, who transformed this early soned, was a “lump of perdition” and not deserving discourse. of eternal life. When God exercises his wrath, for in- For Origen, humanity was created with an ethereal stance in the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart, it is not body that was subject to change. Before the creation of so much that God makes persons do evil as that he the material world, these spiritual creatures were sated simply leaves them on their own. Their fallen nature “In this concise but all-encompassing account of the with the goodness of God and yet momentarily turned will inevitably generate the sins. Jews, Brenner . . . does a remarkable job of escorting from him, each in his own fashion. In order to rectify As Fredriksen wisely observes, the question for readers from the biblical narrative of Abraham’s this error, God created the material world as a site for Augustine is not how is God just in condemning the journey from Ur and idolatry through the treacherous, monotheistic course of Jewish history, concluding with repentance and restoration. This explanation allowed sinner, but how is God just in redeeming the elect? modern-day Israeli society.” Origen to explain why each person is so different de- If both were equally culpable prior to the infusion —Publishers Weekly Religion Book Line spite having common origins: of grace, what criteria did God use to justify Jacob Paper $24.95 978-0-691-15497-8 but condemn Esau? Augustine’s answer is that it is a Now since the present world is so varied and mystery known only to God. comprises so great a diversity of beings, what else can we assign to the cause of its existence Gary A. Anderson is the Hesburgh Professor of Catholic See our E-Books at press.princeton.edu except the diversity in the fall of those who Theology at the University of Notre Dame and the author, declined from unity in dissimilar ways? most recently, of Sin: A History (Yale University Press).

22 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2012 Dust-to-Dust Song

BY Paul Reitter

lustrated biography” (it accompanied a traveling also underwent bouts of paranoia; at one point in NELLY SACHS: FLIGHT AND museum exhibition and looks like an exhibition the 1960s, she became consumed by the belief that METAMORPHOSIS, AN ILLUSTRATED catalog), he also lingers here on the material cir- a neo-Nazi terrorist group was responsible for the BIOGRAPHY cumstances of Sachs’ life. There are, for example, random noises in her home. Fioretos suggests, by Aris Fioretos, translated by Tomas Tranæus long descriptions of the tiny apartment where imaginatively and not implausibly, that the en- Stanford University Press, 320 pp., $90 Fioretos tries to fill in the space that Sachs left blank— the space between personal woe and collective destiny. n 1940, when Nelly Sachs and her mother arrived in Sweden, having escaped the Third Sachs lived and worked and in which S. Y. Agnon gagement with mysticism and mental illness were, Reich only a week before they would have visited her after they were jointly awarded the No- for Sachs, related. Certainly, the idea that another gone to a concentration camp, the idea that bel Prize in 1966. But Fioretos is also skillful in world inhabits our everyday reality is a crucial motif Ishe would one day win the Nobel Prize for Litera- his discussion of the influences on Sachs’ poetry, in Sachs’ late work. ture would have seemed absurd. Pushing 50, Sachs and their relationship to the many developments Fioretos’ reflections on what endured from was lightly published, and her poems to that point flight through metamorphosis are rarely, if ever, anticipated the force or inventiveness sometimes less successful. Sachs’ of her post-Holocaust work. Sachs was, to be sure, father was an entrepreneur and in- always a deft writer, but she was not yet a deeply ventor who created, among other original one. things, “the expander,” a fitness de- Legenden und Erzählungen (Legends and Tales), vice that worked very much like the Sachs’ debut, captured the style of Selma Lagerlöf strengthening bands of today. (The so exactly that it elicited wry praise from her liter- book contains several reproduc- ary idol: I couldn’t, Lagerlöf more or less said, have tions from the expander’s marketing done it better myself. Sachs’ poetry of the 1920s and materials.) Having doubted that the 1930s is more original, but hardly unconventional. contraption helped William Sachs’ Her poems from this period appeared in the presti- nervous daughter, Fioretos specu- gious Berliner Tageblatt and often featured the motif lates that nonetheless “stretching of the threatened idyll. But they also dealt in neat survived as a poetic principle. Lines rhymes, familiar metrics, and a tender handling of and cords appear repeatedly in her animals. When Sachs tried out freer forms, the re- texts, just as do the expansive veins sult was, in the words of her most recent biographer, and arteries of language.” Were it “epigonal exercises in sentimentality.” not an unpardonable pun, it would It was only with the publication of her first col- be tempting to call this a stretch. lection of poems, In den Wohnungen des Todes After all, where exactly is the taut- (In the Dwellings of Death), which Sachs wrote in ness in the illustration Fioretos of- Swedish exile and dedicated to her “dead brothers fers? Fioretos may be succumbing and sisters,” that she established herself as an im- to a hazard of his genre experiment. portant poetic voice. “Death,” she said, “was my A biographer who fills the margins teacher.” The title Aris Fioretos has chosen for his of his biography with catalog-style biography is taken from the title of a later collection images will naturally want them to of poems, but it also describes her literary career. play a narrative role. Fioretos’ elegantly written biography is the first More often, however, Fioretos of Sachs to appear in English. Another fitting title is thoughtful and careful in simul- from Sachs might have been even more apt: Glüh- taneously reinforcing and compli- ende Rätsel (Glowing Enigmas). Fioretos sees the cating the idea of Sachs’ metamor- late work that bears this name as the “high point” of phosis. Perhaps the key event in this Sachs’ career. Moreover, as much as Fioretos plays Nelly Sachs and her mother, Margarete, shortly after their arrival in effort is the romantic trauma that up the extent of Sachs’ remarkable transformation Sweden, 1940. (© Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar.) Sachs experienced in 1908, when in middle age, he seems uneasy with his own con- she was 17. What exactly happened ceit. Indeed, he devotes most of his interpretive en- is unclear; in fact, Sachs refused to ergy to puzzling over the possible connections be- in her Sweden years. These included the death of disclose the identity of the unattainable object of tween Sachs’ early sensibilities and the poetry that her beloved mother in 1950, which precipitated her adoration, an episode she would repeat twice made her famous, to the extent that Sachs became a breakdown, and her friendship and correspon- more. In this first instance, the emotional dam- famous. She is well known in Sweden and Germa- dence with her “brother poet,” Paul Celan. In adage was such that Sachs refused to eat and had to ny, but mainly as a figure; her writings aren’t widely dition, Sachs was close to many younger Swedish spend more than a year residing in a kind of psy- read in either country. poets whom she translated into German in order chiatric halfway house. to make ends meet, including Tomas Tranströmer, Picking up on Sachs’ cryptic reference to the epi- ioretos spends more than half of the book the current Nobel laureate. sode as the “source of my endeavor to take on po- Fchronicling the three decades that Sachs, who During these years she developed an interest in etically our people’s greatest tragedy,” Fioretos tries died in 1970, spent in Stockholm. As befits “an il- Jewish mysticism. Toward the end of her life she to fill in the space that she left blank—the space

Summer 2012 • Jewish Review of BooKS 23 between personal woe and collec- the cleverly designed dwellings of death / When Is- tive destiny—exploring at length rael’s body dispersed in smoke.) the loneliness of Sachs’ life as an If this poem was part of the project for which only child in the well-to-do Ber- “Sachs wished to be remembered,” its aesthetic val- lin home of her assimilated Jewish ue, in Fioretos’ view, lies in its preparing “the tone parents. There were cousins and a for what was to come”—namely, the enigmatic, lap- couple of dear friends around, and idary late work whose light comes from luminous Sachs was extraordinarily close to images: both her parents, but she also felt a pronounced feeling of “differ- Mankind, delivered up for so short a time ence” at school, which was exac- Who in this case can speak of love erbated by the isolation caused by The sea has longer words her mental illness. Around 1930, and the crystal-spectered earth when Sachs was no longer young, with its prophetic form she had her second romantic This suffering paper trauma. It was this long-standing already ill with the dust-to-dust song loneliness, according to Fioretos, abducting the blessed word that allowed for Sachs’ intense back perhaps to its magnetic point identification with the Jews, as which is God-porous well as for her poetic project of the 1940s. He stresses that Sachs Nelly Sachs with S. Y. Agnon before the ceremony where they shared the Of course, not everyone will share Fioretos’ liter- herself observed after the war, “It Nobel Prize for Literature, 1966. (Courtesy of the Nobel Foundation.) ary enthusiasm. For some readers, Sachs’ poetry will is my fate to be alone, as it is the go from being too obvious to too obscure. fate of my people.” And without Her life, with its heartbreak and literary perse- saying when exactly this began to be the case, Fio- o its credit, Fioretos’ lucid, well-researched verance, is a different story, and it is more likely to retos asserts, “Loneliness became the distinguish- Tbook never feels hagiographic, despite its resonate in the English-speaking world, where it is ing mark of [Sachs’] poetry. Without it, no poems.” abundant expressions of admiration for its subject. newly available. From there he proceeds to suggest that the “most About Sachs’ most famous poem, “O the Chim- intimate texts” in the “Prayers for a Dead Bride- neys,” written in 1947, Fioretos soberly admits “if a Paul Reitter is a professor in the German department at groom” cycle, which has been seen as emblematic poet were to use such imagery today, he would risk The Ohio State University and the author, most recently, of Sachs’ metamorphosis, “may actually have been counteracting its purpose. The diagnosis would be of On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred (Princeton written before the flight.” evident: Holocaust kitsch.” (O the chimneys / On University Press).

Israel's Arab Sholem Aleichem

BY Alan Mintz

Kashua has turned the dilemmas of living entangled ingly, is comprised of Arabs. Kashua is embarrassed Second Person Singular in these two identities into an opportunity for antic by sitting in an office with an air conditioner and by Sayed Kashua, translated by Mitch Ginsburg observation rather than portentous agonizing. He a computer while other Arabs are lugging around Grove Press, 352 pp., $25 has a gift for taking the small absurdities of every- mops and pails. His improvised solution is to lock day existence and the comic humiliations of family his office and, without explanation, refuse to have life, themselves served up with self-effacing dead- it cleaned; when the grime gets too much for him, pan humor, and making them comment on the big- he does it himself. He can’t start up a chatty con- ger, and often darker, contradictions of his life and versation in Arabic with the cleaners because he is or some years now the 37-year-old Arab the two cultures in which he lives. self-conscious about how they will view his mixing Israeli Hebrew writer Sayed Kashua has equally among the Jewish writers and producers. So been contributing a column to the week- he contrives to get up before dawn, bring a raft of end magazine of Ha’aretz that is a min- Kashua (or his persona) gulps cleaning equipment from home to work, scour his Fiature marvel of self-presentation. Kashua writes down a cocktail made of equal office, and hide the equipment behind the couch. first-person vignettes in an easy, every-guy voice as Hoping to make his getaway after dark, Kashua is if he were just another working stiff, married with parts of self-importance, importuned by a cleaner, who addresses him in He- kids, who is trying to make his way in the world. brew because he does not realize that Kashua is an If that were all, his little tales would still have a lot scruple, and embarrassment. Arab. The column concludes with this exchange: going for them. But that is not all. He is an Israeli Arab who writes in Hebrew and has made it within Take, for example, the confusions in a column “Why” he asked in Hebrew. “Why do you have the world of Israeli Jewish journalism and popular from March 2012 entitled “A Clean Getaway.” (Hap- this?” culture while remaining proud of his Arab identity pily, Kashua’s columns can be read online in the “What do you mean?” I answered in Hebrew. and illusionless about the civil disabilities of Israel’s English edition of Ha’aretz.) In this sketch, Kashua, There was absolutely no chance I could hide the Arab citizens. Prized by Hebrew readers for the or someone very much like him, works among Is- mop and the bucket. uniqueness of his voice, Kashua has been vilified raeli Jews on a TV series in an office building in “Because of people like you they said they would in the Arab press for being a cultural collaborator. West Jerusalem, whose cleaning staff, unsurpris- fire me, sir,” he said.

24 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2012 “What?” I sputtered. “Why? I’m not even . . .” “But why are you doing this to us?” he persisted, still speaking in Hebrew. Now all I wanted to do was flee, run away and never come back to this place. “Is it because we are Arabs?”

Kashua (or his persona) gulps down a cocktail made of equal parts of self-importance, scruple, and embarrassment. He is clearly satisfied with himself for working on an equal footing with his Jewish co- workers; but his pleasure is undercut by his awareness that he is doing so in the presence of Arabs per- forming “Arab labor”—the name of the successful TV show he writes—even though they have no clue he is one of them. And his efforts to remain morally spotless end up endangering the livelihood of these real Arab laborers. These smart little performances, so ingenuously economical in their telling, depend for their success on the garrulous persona of a speaker, a kind of Parting Ways Arab schlemiel, who is always inadvertently reveal- Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism ing more about his foibles than he intends. It is all so chatty and home-cooked that it seems to resist Sayed Kashua. (Photo by Dan Porges, Judith Butler literariness; but the fact is that Kashua’s writing in courtesy of Grove Press.) “This book is the product of a deep ethical urge, a com- these columns is the lineal descendent of the Rus- plex political sensibility, and a rigorous philosophical sian skaz and the European feuilleton, as well as the colony of well-to-do and high-achieving profession- mind. It is also a work of extraordinary courage and monologues of Yiddish literature. It is a nice irony als (accountants, doctors, and other lawyers) who personal urgency ... I think it is, perhaps even without to consider that the Hebrew writer today whose occupy a self-ascribed social status superior to the our knowing it, the book on this subject that we have way with the monologue is closest to that of Sholem villagers they left behind, as well as the locals among all been waiting for.” Aleichem’s is an Arab. whom they live in East Jerusalem. — Akeel Bilgrami, Columbia University Kashua is at his mordant best in describing the ob- ut it is a long way from the syncopated pre- session with status that rules the lawyer’s life. For ex- Bcision of a weekly column to the expansive ample, the lawyer envies his Jewish friends their fuel- polyphony of a novel. One opens Kashua’s new efficient Japanese cars they can keep for years on end. Second Person Singular wondering whether he He, alas, can do no such thing. “He knew that if he did can shift gears and adapt his gifts to a very differ- not upgrade his car to a model that surpassed what the ent genre. The good news is that, although he may competition was driving, it would be seen as a retreat not be a novelist of elegance and depth, Kashua has . . . If one of his competitors bought a BMW with a V6 a solid grasp of three key opportunities afforded and three hundred horsepower, then he had to get the by the novel that cannot be realized in his weekly Benz with the V8 and a few hundred more horses un- performances. The first is the chance to present a der the hood.” In dress, he has to know the difference systematic and sustained account of the Arab Is- between Ralph Lauren and Versace because his respect raeli professional elite to which he belongs. The as an Arab depends on his appearance and will make second is the availability of plot as a means of trac- the difference in whether or not he is stopped at a crossing the conflict and entanglement among different ing by the Border Police. He married early because he versions of Israeli Arab identity. Finally, the novel knew his Arab clients would not trust a bachelor. His offers Kashua relief from the burden of continually wife is beautiful, educated, and a good mother, but he having to write in the first person singular. demeans her work as a therapist-social worker because The novel contains two separate narratives told in of its insignificant income compared to his, and he has alternating sections. The protagonist of one is a suc- in fact never truly fallen in love with her. Sinning in the Hebrew Bible cessful criminal lawyer living in East Jerusalem and practicing in the West. The protagonist of the other hat he most envies in his Jewish friends is How The Worst Stories Speak for Its Truth narrative, also an Israeli Arab, is an introverted for- Wtheir easy familiarity with Western cul- Alan F. Segal mer social worker who works as caretaker for a young ture, the fruit of several generations of adaption to Israeli Jewish man his age who is severely ill. The two modernity. He compulsively puts together lists of “Segal’s posthumous book displays in abundance his are ignorant of each other’s existence until the final the books recommended in Ha’aretz and makes a life-long reputation as a superb teacher. Using the pages of the novel, although the reader is privy to the weekly visit to a bookstore to load up on works in lens of doublets — parallel stories scattered through- slight but consequential connection between them. hopes of remediating his cultural deficit. And it is out the biblical narrative — Segal guides the reader The lawyer has plenty of his own tics, but remains one of these visits that turns out to be his down- through the thickets of biblical history and a century nameless, apparently because he is meant to repre- fall. From the pages of a second-hand volume of of biblical scholarship. This book is an excellent sent a whole class of Israeli Arabs who have gradu- Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata—itself a story about guide for all students who wish to penetrate beneath ated from Israeli universities and make their living jealous rage—falls a note in his wife’s Arabic hand the surface of the biblical text to discover the events representing the interests of Arabs in Israeli courts that hints at the existence of a romantic liaison. and narratives that shaped our sacred Scriptures.” and elsewhere. The lawyer grew up the son of un- The lawyer becomes unhinged as he wildly—and — Rabbi Burton L. Visotzky, Jewish Theological educated parents in one of the Arab villages in the of course, mistakenly—imagines the most flagrant Seminary, author of Sage Tales: Wisdom and Wonder Triangle (along the eastern Sharon Plain among the sorts of marital betrayal or, even worse, the possi- from the Rabbis of the Talmud Samarian foothills), excelled in school, took a law bility that his wife slept with another man before degree at the Hebrew University, and then made the marriage. In one stroke, the entire complex of pro- crucial decision to stay in Jerusalem rather than re- fessional achievement and social ascendance and www.cup.columbia.edu · cupblog.org turn to his village. In doing so, the lawyer joined a enlightened attitudes the lawyer has labored so

Summer 2012 • Jewish Review of BooKS 25 hard to erect begins to unravel. The distance he has the young man’s death, his caretaker assumes his novel about the construction and performance of endeavored to place between himself and the tribal identity in name and in spirit. Amir Lahab becomes identity, Kashua’s characters by definition cannot codes that legitimate honor killings is swept away Yonatan Forschmidt and continues to pass as an be deep or given to self-reflection. This is prob- by homicidal rage against his wife. Israeli Jew who is embarking on a promising career ably not, in any case, Kashua’s temperament as a The investigations the lawyer undertakes to probe as a photographic artist. novelist. He has a sharper eye for the absurdities his wife’s supposed infidelities eventually bring him of self-presentation and intra-group discrimina- in contact with the young Israeli Arab, a doppelgän- tion than he does for what goes on inside the soul. ger of sorts, who is the protagonist of the contrapun- There is a lot in Kashua’s This absence at the center suggests a provocative tal sections of the novel. (His sections are told in the novel that reminds one of the skepticism about whether the Palestinian narrative first person, the lawyer’s in the third.) Amir Lahab is possesses enough cultural substance to nurture the the son of an Arab who was murdered after working early Philip Roth, the Roth roots of Israeli Arab identity. with the Israelis; he grows up as an outsider in a vil- There is a lot in Kashua’s novel that reminds lage not his own and uses his good grades to escape who scandalized the American one of the early Philip Roth, the Roth who scan- to Jerusalem and obtain a university degree. He is dalized the American Jewish community by ex- shy and uncouth and shares little with other young Jewish community. posing the unruly appetites and ambitions behind Israeli Arab men in Jerusalem who chain smoke, are the decorous march of acculturation. One imag- obsessed with girls, and are marking time in their Why does Kashua divide Second Person Singu- ines Israeli Arab readers being discomforted in bureaucratic jobs until they can return with their lar into two narratives with two protagonists? What the same way, and like American Jews, one hopes, degrees to their home villages. He becomes fasci- connects the two, beyond the note that indicates becoming less anxious over time about such fic- nated instead with the cultural world of Yonatan, that Amir and the lawyer’s wife once met? Kashua tional acts of truth telling. Not so oddly perhaps, the young man in a vegetative state for whom he appears to have taken the bumbling but grounded Kashua’s voice is the closest thing in Israeli litera- cares in the evenings. Yonatan had been a preco- persona of his newspaper columns and split it into ture to the quandaries of identity that absorb di- cious student in the elite circles of professors’ chil- its two more extreme and unstable components. aspora Jewish literature. His writing, both in his dren, and it is among his books and CDs during the The grandiose lawyer is a send-up of the Israeli columns and his novels, probes a common ques- long nights of caring for him that Amir discovers Arab who is obsessed with status and the accou- tion about assimilation: not whether it is good or an engrossing new cultural universe. Availing him- trements of Western culture and defines himself bad but whether it is possible. self of Yonatan’s sophisticated camera, he discovers in contrast to his more “primitive” brethren. The a passion for photography and, with the approval withdrawn and reticent Amir/Yonatan grows up of Yonatan’s mother, he applies and is accepted to in an atmosphere of emotional and cultural depri- Alan Mintz is the Chana Kekst Professor of Hebrew the Bezalel Academy using Yonatan’s name rather vation and sees little in the new or the old Arab Literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary of than his own. (Ironically, Bezalel rolls out the red culture worth emulating. The fact that both figures America and the author, most recently, of Sanctuary in carpet for Arab applicants, but Amir does not want lack a core sense of self explains why their char- the Wilderness: A Critical Introduction to American to be taken on the basis of affirmative action.) Upon acterization is superficial. Because he is writing a Hebrew Poetry (Stanford University Press).

A Neoplatonic Affair

By Nadia Kalman

The truth belongs to love alone intricate and satisfying design, its careful arrange- MELISANDE! WHAT ARE DREAMS? And, always fair one, I love you. ment of “signs and wonders,” as the narrator calls by Hillel Halkin them, echoing the biblical phrase. Although their Granta, 224 pp., £14.99 Mellie, the wife of this novel’s narrator, was placement may seem casual at first glance, as the tap- named after the poem’s Countess Melisande. She estry unfurls, we see how perfectly each part fits into meets and nicknames the narrator, “Hoo,” while the larger pattern. Names—of the literary magazine, editing a high-school literary magazine with a third of a restaurant, of a dog—carry meaning without friend, Ricky. Ricky is adventurous, Hoo is studious, bending under the strain. The novel alludes not only seventy-something debutant” is how and, at different times, Mellie is drawn to each of to Heine’s poem but also to Maurice Maeterlinck’s the back cover of this first novel de- them, first dating Hoo, and then sleeping with Ricky Pelléas and Mélisande, Neoplatonic philosophy, Bud- scribes its author, the translator, bi- the summer after graduation. dhism, Catullus, and Christian scriptures—and each ographer, and essayist Hillel Halkin. While Hoo and Mellie attend college, Ricky allusion enriches and elucidates the story. Perhaps“A befittingly, then, Melisande! What Are takes a different path, traveling east and studying The book moves forward and backward in time, Dreams? reinvents the classic story of boy (or clas- Buddhism. The three reunite in New York City, but interweaving politics and history with the characters’ sicist) meets girl. Ricky’s boldness is slipping into madness—he hears lives. Ricky and Hoo meet while arguing over the The title comes from a line in a Heinrich Heine voices and seems to be suffering from schizophre- Korean War in the high school cafeteria. At a party poem, “Geoffroy Rudèl und Melisande von Tripo- nia. Eventually, Mellie chooses Hoo. in the 1960s, a man bursts in, wired and proud—he’s li.” The titular lovers, who only met for a few mo- Hoo becomes a classics professor; Mellie becomes just thrown a bomb through the window of a police ments while they were alive, meet again within one a weaver; Ricky eventually commits suicide. Hoo and station. After leaving the party, Hoo and Mellie real- of Melisande’s tapestries, and take a ghostly moonlit Mellie are happy for a time, and then unhappy for a ize who the man was: “My friend Peter Spatz, who stroll. Melisande speaks with gratitude of the loving time. After a betrayal, she leaves him. The novel is his passed me clever notes in Caroline Ames’ writing God who has worked this wonder. Geoffroy replies: attempt to understand what went wrong and to win class.” In the 1970s, during a time of decline (the cou- her back. It is, in fact, a love letter. ple’s “Cimmerian years,”) Hoo dreams about telling Melisande! What are dreams? Yet, to summarize Melisande! What Are Dreams? Nixon something that will help him avoid impeach- What is death? A vain to-do. as the story of a love triangle fails to do justice to its ment: of finding the words to stave off the inevitable.

26 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2012 If this novel is like a tapestry, then, thus far, we nice breasts.” His approach to love and sex is schol- have examined its design from several feet away. But arly, as well as deeply idealistic. (He has chosen the when one steps closer, some of stitching is uneven. Neoplatonist philosophers as an area of academic A clear, concise introduction to some The description of Ricky’s nose after an operation— focus, possibly to his personal detriment.) of the major confrontations in Jewish “It looked as if the surgeon had forgotten to sand it Sex is holy, he believes. Thus, fantasies about history, often leaving us thinking ‘both when he was done”—is accurate and concise. So is Jane Russell are sins crying out for retribution: sides are right.’ Perfect for adult or teen the passage about Hoo’s failure to greet Ricky’s fa- study groups.”—Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of ther on the street: Afterwards, I prayed you wouldn’t conceive. When Bad Things Happen to Good People In the Middle Ages men believed in succubi, There are big things one regrets and there are beautiful demons who came to them in their little things. The little things can seem less dreams and bore them children from their seed. forgivable, because it would have been easier I was afraid we might have a demon child. to do them differently. I don’t know whether it would have given Ralph pleasure had I gone over When the couple does, indeed, have trouble con- and said something about Ricky or whether it ceiving, he puts forth similarly rigid (so to speak) would have caused him pain by reminding him ideas about artificial insemination: “I want to sow of what—perhaps only for a minute, perhaps an my seed in you.” hour or a day—he had managed to forget. I only Mellie replies, “That’s very biblical. But you know I should have done it. might not have enough seed or my mucus might not agree with it.” The writing here is wise, honest, spare, and true, “I’d have to think about it,” Hoo says. “No!” this as it is in many other places in the book. However, reader wanted to tell him. “No more thinking for there are also sections that lack these qualities. you!”—though this is likely an intended effect on Hoo writes about love in the grand style. He goes Halkin’s part. swimming with Mellie: “I saw the pond tremble at As in the novels of Saul Bellow, romantic intel- your splendor.” He watches her sleep, and notices, lectualism collides with earthy pragmatism. An in- “your bare shoulder, from which the blanket had terlude in which Hoo and Mellie make love like ti- slipped as if the dawn had begun to undress you and gers, slugs, and a menagerie of other creatures ends stopped to stare in enchantment.” Later in life, and in an argument about the sink. Some years later, Judaism’s Great Debates less than gallantly, he speculates about her future ap- when they are discussing the possibility of adopt- Timeless Controversies from Abraham pearance— “I can’t bear to think I might look at you ing a child, Hoo suggests, “Life could be telling us, to Herzl one day and not find you beautiful,”—and exclaims: ‘Here’s your chance,’” to be childless. Mellie says, Rabbi Barry L. Schwartz “O my love! When did our love become a cage in “We could tell life, ‘Thanks for nothing.’” Still, in the In this important survey, Rabbi Barry L. which we tear and tear at each other?” Mellie seems end, she gives in to Hoo’s perspective and gives up Schwartz presents the provocative and vibrant to enjoy such outpourings, even the last two, which on adopting a child. “I wanted a child to grow in- thesis that debate and disputation are not she finds in a letter in his study. However, to a reader side me . . . I’m like you. If we didn’t make it, I don’t only encouraged within Judaism but reside at who is not also the narrator’s wife, they might seem want it.” Childless, they become isolated, dependent the very heart of Jewish history and theology. a little theatrical. upon routines, buried in work. Eventually, Hoo has In graceful, engaging, and creative prose, Schwartz presents an introduction to an Some of the sex scenes also have a conventional an affair. (He does not flee to the library, after all.) intellectual history of Judaism through the art romanticism to them: “Wondrous, we lay thrown Mellie finds out and leaves him. Hoo retires from of argumentation. together on the shore,” is a typical post-coital obser- the academy and moves to a Greek island, as the two . paperback vation. Other passages are less conventional: of them had talked about doing together someday. On the last pages of the book, he renounces his The thrusts of his loins were fierce, famished. Neoplatonists and the central conceit of Heine’s poem: FORTHCOMING FALL She met each with one of her own. He, she, he, she: they were wielding a two-handled saw. It What good would it do us to be ghosts? What took the tree a long time to topple. Who would good would it do to be Geoffroy and Melisande, believe how long it held out, even as it groaned holding hands that never touch, kissing with for deliverance? lips that never meet? . . . They were wrong, Mellie . . . Ammonius, Plotinus, Porphyry . . . This sex-as-forestry analogy, though novel, is They thought the soul, the wise soul, would be From Gods to God The Life of somewhat alarming and less than evocative. One glad to lay down its burden. They didn’t know How the Bible can imagine Hoo writing these lines, but why are it would be inconsolable, that it would always Glückel of Hameln Debunked, A Memoir we reading them? grieve for the legs that had carried it, the arms Suppressed, or 1. paperback It is often said that every professor has a novel that did its work, the mouth that fed it, the Changed Ancient lying in his desk drawer. Halkin is a disintinguished cheeks that felt the wind. Myths and Legends We Are Children man of letters, not a professor, but there are times . paperback Just the Same in Melisande! What Are Dreams? when he seems This passage ends in an imagined shower of Vedem, the Secret Seasons of to have opened that drawer. Just as, in Netherland, sperm, which restores the lovers to their child- Magazine by the Our Joy Joseph O’Neill wrote the novel a brilliant banker hood selves. (Al-Ghazali wrote of such things, Hoo Boys of Terezín A Modern Guide to . paperback might produce; so, here, Halkin writes with the eru- notes—you can take the classics professor out of the Jewish Holidays dition, care, and, at times, with the stilted sentimen- the university library, but you can’t. . .) The image 1. paperback tality of his professor-narrator. is both ridiculous—and not. He imagines a return to Martha’s Vineyard, where they both vacationed For complete descriptions and ho, then, is Hoo? He is the kind of man who as children, without ever meeting. Now, he finds a to order, visit www.jpsbooks.com Wskips a date to catch up on his reading, the bicycle and rides off to her. kind of man who, contemplating an affair, won- Perhaps there’s hope for Hoo yet. The Jewish Publication Society ders whether to flee to the library instead, the kind -- • www.jpsbooks.com of man who observes a woman’s physique and cau- Nadia Kalman is the author of The Cosmopolitans tiously hypothesizes, “She had what appeared to be (Livingston Press) and an NEA Literature Fellow.

Summer 2012 • Jewish Review of BooKS 27 Muddling Through

By AnnE Trubek

triarch, David’s mother, married three CEOs and is that day . . . Even now, when she wants to irk The World Without You a billionaire. (One is reminded a little of Rebecca her mother, she’ll say “I’m in Israel because by Joshua Henkin Goldstein’s recent novel 36 Arguments for the Exis- of you, Mom. I saw you cheering that day in Pantheon, 336 pp., $29.95 tence of God, in which every character seemed to be front of the TV, and I got inspired.” a genius or at least Harold Bloom.) Yet the achievements of the Frankels are simply assumed: of course For the other Frankels, Israel is something they this group of upper-west side Jews would be so ac- “read about in the Times,” as the 94-year matriarch complished—now let’s get on with their problems. who shows up at the end of the weekend, puts it. ear the beginning of Joshua Henkin’s The problem is, of course, the hole that Leo has left Although her husband Amram is unemployed new novel The World Without You, a in their world. and unimpressive (singularly so in this family), No- couple in their late 30s agonize over an Novulation test. The achievements of the Frankels are simply assumed: She hands the stick to Nathaniel. “What do you of course this group of upper-west side Jews would be so think?” accomplished—now let’s get on with their problems. “The control is darker.” “Are you sure?” He nods. She breaks the stick in half and throws it uring her year of mourning, Marilyn has elle is happy with her choices when the novel opens. against the wall. “Clarissa . . .” Ddecided to leave David, her husband of forty She is comfortable in her kerchief and long skirts, years. The breaking point may have been when, though her sisters and the narrator comment upon “Please,” she says, “don’t patronize me.” “I asked how many kids they have, he said “three” them throughout. Their disapproval works: By the haven’t even said anything.” She returns with and she said “four.” Marilyn is shattered—Leo end of the weekend at home, she begins to question another ovulation test and shreds the wrapper. was everybody’s favorite, the irrepressible trouble- why she is obeying Amram and her religion’s rules. “Here,” she says, “you pee on it.” “What?” It’s a maker. Marilyn has grieved by publishing twenty- Although the novel ends with a satisfyingly cathar- waste of a good pee stick, she understands, but four newspaper op-eds against the Iraq War. (One tic memorial service and a good novelistic sorting she’s been wasting these sticks for months now, does wonder how she found so many newspapers out of dilemmas, the character whose life one con- and she wants him to feel what it’s like. accepting editorials.) David is grieving too, but he tinues to think about is Noelle. has withdrawn by taken up running and reading Henkin is a skillful writer, alternately witty and And what will she do if Nathaniel tests positive? opera librettos at night. moving, but there are some oddly unrealistic mo- Sue the company?” Nathaniel pees on the stick. The characters’ grief is crosshatched by their ments in this realist novel, many of them involving “You’re not ovulating, “she says. “No, I’m not.” individual woes. Clarissa, who decided after Leo’s children. In general, the five children under age 8 She starts to cry. death that she wanted children, finds that she can- who are spending one weekend together are far too not conceive. Thisbe, mother to their 3-year-old well-behaved, and their mothers a bit too relaxed A century ago the naturalist American writer son, is wracked with guilt by how she left things about parenting. Thisbe blithely leaves her toddler Frank Norris described realism as “tragedy in a with Leo and for falling too quickly in love with an- for three hours to go rollerblading with Noelle. In tea cup,” and the movingly rendered scene of this other man. Lily, the childless, unmarried one of the this closely rendered scene, neither mother seems upper-middle class New York couple might be de- group, whose work sustains her, is plagued mainly to even delegate taking care of the children to the scribed as tragedy in a pee cup. But Henkin is actu- by her annoyance with Noelle, who is the most in- grandparents. ally up to something more than another proficient teresting Frankel, though she received the the few- There are also some striking inconsistencies at the domestic novel. est A’s in school. end of the novel. Looking at Noelle, Thisbe thinks, The th4 of July weekend is coming up and Clar- Noelle has become an Orthodox Jew and lives “despite the kerchief and the dress, despite having issa and Nathaniel are on their way to her parents’ in Jerusalem with her husband and four Hebrew- given birth only three months earlier, Noelle was summer home in Lenox, Massachusetts for the speaking children. Beautiful and insecure, she was anything but dowdy . . . she was still lovely.” No doubt, memorial of her younger brother, Leo. Leo was the the girl available to every boy in high school. “Only but her youngest son who they left back at the house golden boy of the Frankel family and a reporter in in a boy’s arms: that was the one time she felt she is 3 years old. Although it could easily have been Iraq who was captured and killed in a very public belonged.” She was “self-punishing” as a baby, and fixed (and someone at Pantheon ought to have fixed Daniel Pearl-esque tragedy. as a teenager pulled out clumps of her hair. it), this is more than a typo. A toddler is not a new- Clarissa and Nathaniel are fantastically talented. Her move to Israel and religious turn is another born and three years is not post-partum. A little later, She could have been a world-class cellist but took form of rebellion against her secular, progressive Amram wears jeans and a rumpled button-down and up a career in international aid instead, and he is a Jewish family, although not entirely. One of her ear- then finds himself in a t-shirt and dungaree cutoffs, neuroscientist whose name comes up frequently in liest memories is Entebbe. On another July 4th in without any narrative downtime for a change. Nobel Prize discussions—and the rest of the Fran- Lenox, she remembers sitting with her sisters Still, The World Without You entertains, and kel family is similarly impressive. Clarissa’s mother, politics serve as a backdrop against which to prop Marilyn, is a septuagenarian doctor whose tennis eating roast beef sandwiches while in the questions about family bonds. Even after great loss, game is tournament-ready, and her father, David, is background the TV played. She recalls the everyday ruins of difficult marriages, sibling -ri a menschy, even saintly man. The other two chil- footage of the boats tracking up the Hudson, valries, and blended families remain. The Frankels dren are Lily, who clerked on the Supreme Court then the news reports breaking in, her muddle through. and lives with a gourmet chef, and Noelle, who was parents cheering at the announcement that an underachiever academically, but drop-dead gor- Israeli commandos had stormed the airport Anne Trubek is a professor of Rhetoric and English at geous. Thisbe, Leo’s young widow, is a graduate stu- and saved the hostages . . . Noelle can’t Oberlin College and the author of A Skeptic’s Guide To dent in anthropology at Berkeley. Finally, the ma- explain it, but she felt pride watching TV Writers’ Houses (University of Pennsylvania Press)

28 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2012 Lawfare

By Jeremy Rabkin

foreordained. Goldstone’s commission from the UN guards in the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention on ISRAEL AND THE STRUGGLE OVER THE Human Rights Council was framed from the outset the treatment of civilians in occupied territory. This INTERNATIONAL LAWS OF WAR as an inquiry into “Israeli war crimes,” with no men- argument presumes, however, that Gaza is still a ter- by Peter Berkowitz tion of what Hamas might have done. Goldstone’s ritory “occupied” by Israel—a premise contrary to Hoover Institution Press, 112 pp., $19.95 recent history, common sense, and indeed to legal Goldstone’s report has retained usage in other conflict zones. its authority, even after his erkowitz does an admirable job of getting Isra- n this brisk survey of recent disputes, Peter Bel off the hook on which its enemies have tried Berkowitz defends Israel against some of the belated repudiation of it. to place it—but only up to a point. He doesn’t do more outrageous accusations leveled against very much to enlighten his readers about the ori- it. He makes a quite compelling case that Israel investigators were in no position to make factual gins and design of this hook—the contemporary Iwas not guilty of violating generally accepted laws of findings from an inquiry that did not have access understanding of the “laws of war.” Early on, he war in 2008, when it sent its army into Gaza to sup- to Israeli military records or personnel and could refers to the “master concepts of the international press terrorist attacks on civilians in Israel. He also not provide security to Gaza civilians it did inter- laws of war governing combat operations.” One demonstrates that Israel acted consistently with in- view, who might otherwise have challenged official of these, he says, is “the principle of distinction,” ternational law in 2010 when it sent its navy to stop Hamas claims. which “requires parties to a conflict to distinguish the Mavi Marmara and other ships from breaking between civilians and civilian objects, and com- its blockade of Gaza. batants and military objects, and prohibits target- The UN Human Rights Council commissioned ing the former.” The other main principle, accord- the Goldstone Report to investigate “war crimes” by ing to Berkowitz, is that of proportionality, which the IDF in “Operation Cast Lead,” Israel’s military “requires that the force used in the pursuit of legit- campaign against Hamas strongholds in Gaza in the imate military objectives be reasonably expected winter of 2008-2009. South African judge Richard not to cause harm to civilians or to civilian objects Goldstone, who had helped launch the international that would be excessive in relation to the anticipat- criminal tribunal for Yugoslavia in the 1990s, lent his ed military advantage.” How and when did these name to the inquiry. As Berkowitz recounts, the deck restrictions come to undergird the laws of war? was stacked against Israel from the outset. The com- Only in the very last paragraph of the book does mittee relied, for the most part, on one-sided accounts Berkowitz acknowledge that these “master con- supplied by Hamas sympathizers in Gaza and always cepts” have not always been treated as absolute obli- put the worst construction on Israel’s actual motives. gations through the long history of war or even the The report accuses the Israeli armed forces, for history of modern war. “In the aftermath of World instance, of relying on a concept of “supporting War II,” he writes, “a great revolution in military af- infrastructure” that transforms “civilians and civil- fairs brought the conduct of war under vastly great- ian objects into legitimate targets.” But as Berkow- er legal supervision. The revolution has accelerated itz rightly protests, this is a “perverse inversion.” In over the last several decades and continues apace.” fact, in Gaza, “the unlawful transformation of civil- Nothing in this book helps readers to understand Richard Goldstone (Courtesy of United Nations ians and civilian objects into supporting infrastruc- this claim. Is he referring here to the Nuremberg Information Service, Geneva.) ture for violent jihad against Israel was not a result and Tokyo War Crimes Trials in 1945 and 1946? Is of Israel’s framing but rather an essential feature he thinking of the 1949 Geneva Conventions? Is that of Hamas’ strategy.” Despite Hamas’ worst efforts, This one-sidedness was entirely consistent with where we get these basic principles? But in the fol- Berkowitz shows, Israel did as much as was possible the general orientation of the UN Human Rights lowing decade, the United States began accumulat- in its 2008 incursion into Gaza to attack legitimate Council, as Berkowitz notes. ing an arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles military targets without harming civilians. with thermonuclear warheads, eventually stockpil- In another revealing example, the Goldstone Re- A majority of its members appear to take a ing thousands of such missiles. Were we only going port contends that Israel’s response to Hamas prov- cynical view of international law, conceiving of to use them on “military objectives”? Did we think ocations caused disproportionate harm to innocent it as a tool for punishing enemies and rewarding that, in the event of an actual nuclear exchange with civilians in Gaza and was therefore unlawful—in- friends, and regarding Israel as the most the Soviet Union, the tens of millions of anticipated deed, that Israel’s actions reached the level of “war odious of enemies and the principal threat to civilian casualties would not be “excessive”? crimes.” But, as Berkowitz argues, it arrived at this international order. If the “revolution” was a reaction to World War conclusion without the required recourse to “fac- II, it was a long time in coming. Not one of the actual findings about what commanders and soldiers No wonder the Council has refused to reconsider cused at Nuremberg or Tokyo was prosecuted for knew and intended, on complex calculations about its endorsement of the Goldstone Report, even after bombing civilians, since the Allies were not will- tactics and strategy, on the care with which deci- Goldstone himself publicly retracted its most extreme ing to brand their own tactics as criminal. Nor did sions were made, on the prudential steps and pre- charge, that Israel deliberately targeted civilians. the 1949 Geneva Conventions say anything about cautions taken, and on the propriety of sometimes While Berkowitz concentrates most of his at- the principles of distinction and proportionality. instant judgments in life and death situations.” The tention on the flaws in the Goldstone Report, he The postwar conventions dealt with protections for findings of a report that routinely ignored such “le- also devotes a chapter to the dispute about Israel’s wounded combatants, shipwrecked combatants, gally essential considerations,” Berkowitz correctly interception of the Turkish flotilla. As he explains, prisoners of war, and civilians in occupied terri- concludes, are of no value whatever. frequent denunciations of the Gaza blockade as “il- tories. Apart from ambulances and hospital ships, The conclusions of the Goldstone Report were legal” depict it as a violation of humanitarian safe- they put no restrictions on targeting in war zones.

Summer 2012 • Jewish Review of BooKS 29 These principles do have some roots in humanitarian admonitions expressed in older treaties, start- ing with the convention on the “law and custom of war” adopted at The Hague Peace Conference in 1899. But the resulting convention described its restrictions as aiming to “diminish the evils of war, as far as military requirements permit”—and was quite clear that many restrictions were therefore condi- tional on the circumstances of particular conflicts. It was not until 1977 that Berkowitz’s master concepts were set down as universal, absolute obligations, in Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, known as AP I. That treaty had many innovations that have generated continuing controversy.

dditional Protocol I was the first treaty on war Ato confer prisoner of war protections on guerilla fighters who disguised themselves as civilians. All previous treaties had assumed that combatants who hid among civilians would inevitably force the opposing fighters to fire on actual civilians. Observing the Turkish ship, Mavi Marmara, from the coast of Ashdod, May 31, 2010. But by 1977, the additional protocols approved this (© David Buimovitch/AFP/Getty Images.) concession to the demands of “national liberation” movements, which relied on previously prohibited guerilla tactics. While accommodating guerillas, AP I also sought to restrain the power of more advanced states that might be fighting against them; it set down far more detailed and constraining limits on permissible targets for bombing or artil- lery attacks than any previous treaty. AP I also launched another controversial innovation. It was the first treaty to insist that its restrictions remain binding, even against an enemy that did not adhere to them. Previous treaties spoke about obligations of the “contracting parties,” acknowledging that non-adherents could not expect the same protections as those who accepted the agreed restraints. Thus, to cite the textbook example, when Germany used poison gas and attacked neutral shipping early in World War I, Britain and France asserted they would now be under no obligation to heed prewar restrictions on such tactics. Bombing of cities in Hague Peace Conference, 1899. (Wood engraving from the Illustrated London News.) World War II was justified in the same way—the Germans (and Japanese) started it. By eliminating traditional notions of reciprocity around awkward gaps in the ratification of AP I by ocusing on recent conflicts involving Israel, (and permissible reprisal when reciprocity breaks claiming that all its provisions had become bind- FBerkowitz’s book does not alert readers that down), AP I invited precisely the situation that Is- ing on all nations as a matter of customary interna- there are serious, ongoing disputes about what the rael faced in Gaza. Hamas denied any obligation tional law. Historically, much international law has law of war is and where it applies. U.S. military to the restraints set down in AP I, notably those been grounded in custom, for instance, rules about manuals, for example, insist it is legitimate to tar- against attacking civilians, who were the main tar- the treatment of ambassadors or of neutral ships get anything that contributes to an enemy’s “war gets of its rocket attacks on Israel, and deliberately in wartime. But “customary law” was supposed to fighting capacity.” Prominent European commen- placed its weapons, fighters, and command centers emerge from the actual practice of states. Instead, tators protest that this standard could be extended in civilian neighborhoods. When Israel tried to de- the ICRC grounded its conclusions on mere verbal to justify attacks on almost any civilian target, molish Hamas military sites in its incursion into pronouncements, which it assiduously collected since disruptions in the civilian economy could af- Gaza in December of 2008, Hamas—and much of with mindless disregard for context. fect “war fighting capacity.” the world—put all the blame on Israel for the ensu- To demonstrate the customary status of restric- There were, in fact, many disputes between U.S. ing civilian casualties. tions on targeting civilians, the ICRC study repeat- commanders and NATO allies about proper tar- This result was entirely foreseeable. It is one edly cites statements of Amnesty International and geting in the air war against Serbia in 1999. Some reason why the United States has never ratified AP Human Rights Watch, as if they could vouch for the American commanders acknowledged that they I—nor, for that matter, has Israel. Britain, France, conduct of armies. It also cites statements from Sad- hoped that bombing, which “incidentally” hit civil- Germany, Canada, Australia, and a number of other dam Hussein and Hafez al-Assad. It even reports a ian infrastructure, would undermine civilian sup- western states have ratified it but only with reserva- statement from Neville Chamberlain in 1940, af- port for Slobodan Milosevic. Today, the Obama tions stipulating that they will not be bound by all firming that it would be wrong to bomb “civilian ob- administration insists that its drone strikes are the restrictions against an enemy that defies them. jects” in Germany. The study never bothers to con- perfectly consistent with international law—even Instead of acknowledging these complica- sider whether these edifying pronouncements corre- when directed at clerics or propagandists who seem tions, Berkowitz offers, as grounding for his “mas- sponded to the actual practice of these governments. to play no direct role in military operations—while ter concepts,” the study published by the Inter- The ICRC study is at best a compendium of inter- UN-sponsored studies and many European com- national Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) in national rhetoric relating to the conduct of war. The mentators urge the opposite. 2005, Customary International Humanitarian Law. United States government formally repudiated it as Israel itself takes issue with various restrictions The point of this multi-volume study was to get any sort of authoritative guide to actual state practice. in AP I. During the second intifada, for example, the

30 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2012 IDF (with the approval of Israel’s Supreme Court) n practice, what Berkowitz calls the “laws of Berkowitz presents it as complying even with the deliberately knocked down the family homes of sui- Iwar” often function as a set of “gotcha” clauses Red Cross version. cide bombers. The point was to show future bomb- to be invoked against Israel without regard to what Why don’t defenders of Israeli policies—why ers that their families would still pay a price for their other countries do (let alone what Israel’s immedi- doesn’t the government of Israel itself—offer more attacks. Prominent Israeli legal commentators have ate enemies do in provoking its actions). The gov- forthright challenges to the unreasonable expec- argued that states remain within their rights to en- ernment of Israel has, in fact, quietly asserted its tations now associated with the laws of war? One reason, surely, is that Israel wants to present itself What Berkowitz calls the “laws of war” often function as a set as always acting lawfully. It wouldn’t help its case to advertise its objections to the law. Even the United of “gotcha” clauses to be invoked against Israel without regard States government began by insisting that deten- tion of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo was en- to what other countries do. tirely lawful, then wound up promising (as early as George Bush’s second term) to work toward closing gage in reprisals—at least against “inanimate civil- right to depart from the ICRC version of the laws down that facility. Israel has more reason to be sen- ian objects”—to punish violations of the laws of war of war. But in Berkowitz’s account, the laws of war sitive to criticism, particularly in Europe. with retaliatory strikes. Professor Yoram Dinstein of are essentially sound and the Red Cross a reliable These issues are not just a matter of public rela- Tel Aviv University argues in his classic treatise The exponent of their requirements. tions. A number of European countries still have Conduct of Hostilities Under the Law of International In this, Berkowitz follows the lead of Israeli legal provisions authorizing national prosecutors Armed Conflict that the Additional Protocol “is pre- government’s rebuttals to the Goldstone Report. to exercise “universal jurisdiction” against the mised on the unreasonable expectation that” when The IDF does seem to have gone to great lengths most serious crimes—war crimes or crimes against a state is attacked in ways that violate international to minimize loss of life and physical injury to ci- humanity—if they cannot be addressed elsewhere. law, it should “turn the other cheek” to its attackers: vilians, by sending helicopters, for instance, over Earlier this year, the ICC rejected a long-standing “That sounds more like an exercise in theology than buildings that were going to be attacked to give an Palestinian effort to have the court’s prosecutor in- in the laws of war.” advance “knock”—a warning to civilians to leave. vestigate Israeli tactics in the Gaza campaign on It is hardly a coincidence that Additional Proto- But Berkowitz expresses indignation at claims in the grounds that Palestine is not a state. In 2009, col I is so often invoked against Israel. The political the Goldstone Report that Israel intended to cause a UK magistrate issued a warrant for the arrest momentum for this convention actually began with harm to civilian infrastructure to “demoralize ci- of Tzipi Livni, forcing her to cancel a diplomatic a conference in Iran a few months after Israel’s vic- vilians.” That would not, in fact, be at odds with trip to London for fear she would actually be put tory in 1967. The Third World majority there insisted past IDF practice. It would be consistent with a on trial while there. The possibility remains, how- that international human rights had to embrace the blockade that—while always allowing food and ever, that the ICC will decide that it does, after laws of war. In 1975, delegates from more than a hun- medical supplies to reach civilians—did try to im- all, have jurisdiction over Israeli attacks on the dred countries, the majority of them from the Third pose economic hardship evidently with the aim of Palestinians or a neighboring state. But the ICC, World, assembled in Geneva to draft additions to the undermining support for Hamas among the civil too, is supposed to defer to national authorities earlier Geneva conventions. Only a few months later, population in Gaza. But since the Israeli govern- when they are investigating in good faith. If Israel the same Third World majority endorsed the infa- ment insists that it does respect the laws of war, were to highlight its disagreements with particular mous resolution equating Zionism with racism at the UN General Assembly. Among the invited guests at the Geneva drafting conference were representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization, who expressed full satisfaction with the results. 500,000 Jewish school students For centuries, commentators on the laws of war—basing their opinions on actual practice—insisted that the rules governing the conduct of war 10,000 Jewish school teachers (jus in bello) must be insulated from disputes about the justice of the cause on either side (jus ad bellum). 2000 Jewish schools AP I discarded this formula to give special claims to “people fighting against racist regimes.” Meanwhile, ordinary domestic rebels still could be crushed by 100s of principals almost any tactics that non-“racist” regimes might choose. By 1998, the international conference drafting the treaty for the International Criminal Court (ICC) agreed to language classifying among “war 1 Lookstein Center crimes” the policy of allowing civilians to settle in

“occupied territory”—a provision aimed directly NETWORK * LEARN * GROW and seemingly exclusively at Israeli practice in the disputed Palestinian territories. Through its programs and professional resources, The Lookstein A dozen years later, as Berkowitz notes, at the Center nurtures and supports formal and informal Jewish educators very same session of the Human Rights Council that commissioned Goldstone’s inquiry, the Council and educational leadership from the broad range of the Jewish rejected a proposal to investigate war crimes in Sri community in North America and worldwide. Lanka. In the last months of the civil war there, the Sri Lankan government bombed civilian refugees to get at insurgent guerrillas, killing somewhere For more information, visit www.lookstein.org between 20,000 and 30,000 civilians. This display of indifference was hardly unique. Berkowitz could have mentioned half a dozen other episodes in The Lookstein Center for Jewish Education which civilian casualties in war zones have far ex- Bar-Ilan University, School of Education ceeded the losses in Gaza (as with Russian bombing Ramat Gan, Israel 52900 in Chechnya) but received scant attention from the [email protected] UN or the international community.

Summer 2012 • Jewish Review of BooKS 31 international standards, it would not help its claim that it can be trusted to investigate its own military actions. But there’s more to it than legal strategy. At a deeper level, the IDF clearly seeks to reassure itself that it is acting properly, decently, lawfully—main- Enhance what you read. taining the “purity” of its “weapons,” by not engaging in unrestrained violence. I have met quite a few American military specialists who concede (at least Enhance what you know. in private) that international legal standards are sometimes just a nuisance to get around. By con- In 2009, a UK magistrate Commentary issued a warrant for the Magazine. arrest of Tzipi Livni, forcing her to cancel a diplomatic Enhanced. trip to London. trast, I’ve never met an Israeli analyst who does not express serious concern about establishing proper limits on force. The IDF submits to lawsuits in which the Israeli Supreme Court weighs the legality of particular targeting decisions, sometimes even in the midst of ongoing military operations. The Israeli Supreme Court says, in turn, that de- mocracies must fight with restraint but it does not, in fact, defer to the actual practice of other democ- racies. It sets its own standard, often more restrictive than that displayed in American combat operations (if more permissive than those found in European military manuals). I am not sure how many Israe- lis accept such restraints as a matter of democratic theory, but there does seem to be widespread acceptance that a Jewish state cannot sink to the barba- rism of its enemies. Nonetheless, war imposes harsh discipline. When enemies attack, the defense must adapt to the Commentary nature of the attack rather than the ideals of third parties. Israel can’t simply conduct its wars as Red Cross lawyers in Geneva might think most proper. Magazine. Israel has much reason to scoff at international law, which so often seems to amount to edifying admonitions with little claim on anyone—except when Now on the iPad. Israel’s enemies invoke it with determined malice and its fair-weather friends invoke it with utopian #3 fantasy. It is entitled to scoff at the advice it receives from nations that do not face constant serious secu- Features: Get enhanced, interactive rity threats and probably could not deal with them issues of America’s most • Easy-to-use navigation that if they did. inﬂ uential monthly plus puts every article just a touch away. It is, in a way, a tribute to Israel that its defend- • Download issues to your devise ers don’t scoff. They want to see Israel—as it wants bonus content such as to read without an internet to see itself—as struggling to conform to lawful re- slideshows, video, audio connection. straints in its conduct of war. Israel gropes for a law and more. Share articles • Store and access back issues that it can actually treat as law, even if it turns out to be its own law rather than an impractical set of with friends and book- all in one place. • Share all your favorite ideals, universally lauded in speech and routinely mark your favorites. disregarded in practice. This attitude towards law Commentary articles. Annual or monthly sub- is much older than Zionism. Israel’s friends should • Purchase your subscription be prepared to view the resulting strains with some scriptions now available. or buy individual issues. patience and respect. The story does not need to be sugarcoated. Commentary Magazine on the iPad. Go Deeper. Jeremy Rabkin is professor of law at George Mason Commentary University and the author, most recently, of Law Without Nations? Why Constitutional Government Requires Sovereign States (Princeton University Press).

32 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2012 Readings Borges, the Jew

BY ILAN STAVANS

n 1934 an Argentinian fascist magazine ac- Divine Comedy, which discusses the mystical val- few years ago, Penguin, Borges’ American cused Jorge Luis Borges of being a Jew. Borges, ues of the Hebrew alphabet. As an aspiring young Apublisher, released five small thematic collec- 35 at the time, responded in a brave and witty writer, Borges read Spinoza, Gustav Meyrink’s fan- tions of his writings. One was about the art of writ- little essay he titled “I, a Jew.” tasy Der Golem, Buber’s Hasidic tales, a translation ing, another gathered many of Borges’ sonnets, a I of the Zohar, and almost anything else of Jewish third comprised poems about darkness and blind- Who has not, at one point or another, played with thoughts of his ancestors, with the He discovered Isaac Babel before Trilling and was prehistory of his flesh and blood? I have done so many times, and many times it has not scandalized by Toynbee’s pseudo-historical discussion displeased me, to think of myself as Jewish. It is an idle hypothesis, a frugal and sedentary of Judaism. adventure that harms no one, not even the name of Israel, as my Judaism is wordless, interest he could get his hands on. (He discovered ness. (Borges became progressively blind until, in like the songs of Mendelssohn. The magazine Isaac Babel before Trilling and was scandalized his later years, he was only able to see vaguely two Crisol [“Crucible”], in its issue of January 30, by Toynbee’s pseudo-historical discussion of Ju- or three colors and no silhouettes.) A fourth was has decided to gratify this retrospective hope; daism.) Perhaps most significantly, the stories of on mysticism, and the fifth wasOn Argentina. This it speaks of my “Jewish ancestry, maliciously was, to some extent, a publisher’s hidden” (the participle and the adverb amaze gimmick. Borges’ genius is, perhaps, and delight me). better served by eclectic juxtaposi- tion than thematic unity. Nonethe- Unfortunately, he goes on to say, it turns out that less, it might have been interesting the ancestor most likely to have been Jewish, Don had the publisher decided to collect Pedro de Azevedo, whose surname suggests “Judeo- Borges’ Jewish writing, which would Portuguese stock,” was “irreparably Spanish.” have included some of his very best Nonetheless, Borges wrote, “I am grateful for stories, written in his literary prime. the stimulus provided by Crisol, though hope Such a volume might begin with is dimming that I will ever be able to discover “The Aleph.” The story is indebted to my link to the Table of the Breads and the Sea of Dante, but, as I have noted, Borges Bronze; to Heine, Gleizer, and the ten Sephiroth; to connected kabbalistic letter-mysti- Ecclesiastes and Chaplin.” A few years later, dur- cism with the Divine Comedy. The ing World War II, when Borges offended both the plot, which is partly autobiographical, local Germanophiles and Argentina’s dictator Juan follows the narrator’s love affair with a Domingo Perón by siding with the Allies against woman named Beatriz. But it is also Hitler, he was subjected to a campaign of intimida- inspired by H.G. Wells’ story “The tion that culminated in his demotion from librar- Crystal Egg,” in which the item of the ian to inspector of poultry and rabbits in a munici- title turns out to provide a window pal market. onto Mars. In Borges’ more metaphys- But the idiosyncrasy of Borges’ short, seemingly ical vision, the Aleph is “one of the extemporaneous list of Jewish touchstones, shows points in space that contain all points,” that his philo-semitism—if that is a strong enough turns out to be in a cellar, and it en- word—was not merely, or even primarily, a matter ables whoever possesses it to see the of anti-fascist politics or a romantic embrace of the world from a God’s-eye point of view. cultural outsider. He associated Judaism not only It is, says the excited poet who dis- with his friend Manuel Gleizer (an avant-garde covered it, “the place where, without publisher and bookseller) Heinrich Heine, and admixture or confusion, all the world, Charlie Chaplin (who was, in fact, no more Jewish seen from every angle, coexists.” than Borges), but with biblical wisdom, the myster- Why did Borges choose that let- ies of the Temple, and the doctrines of Kabbalah, by Jorge Luis Borges. (Illustration by Hadley Hooper.) ter? He never gave a definitive an- which Borges remained fascinated all of his life. Nor swer, but in his writing, Hebrew plays is this all. an important role. It is used in differ- One of Borges’ early literary mentors was Al- Kafka were among his deepest literary influences. ent places to announce, perhaps playfully, that God berto Gerchunoff, a Russian-Jewish immigrant He wrote a perceptive essay on Kafka’s precursors communicates with humans in that language, and who, inspired by Don Quixote, switched from Yid- and even translated “Before the Law,” the famous not in Latin or any other. It is the ur-language, the dish to Spanish and wrote The Jewish Gauchos of parable from The Trial. natural language of the universe. the Pampas, a series of vignettes about Argentinian Borges’ life-long passion for lo Judío, Jewish “Emma Zunz,” which was first collected along- Jewish cowboys that owed something to Sholem themes, has been noted, but it has yet to be fully side “The Aleph,” is a memorable story of revenge Aleichem. By the time Borges met Gerchunoff he reckoned with in the ever-expanding world of Borg- set entirely among Jews. Although the story is per- had been obsessively reading books by and about es commentary. It is almost invisible, for instance, haps the least bookish that Borges ever conceived Jews since childhood. He first discovered Kabbalah in Borges: A Life, the standard English biography by (the plot was given to him by a female friend), the in an appendix to Longfellow’s translation of the Oxford scholar Edwin Williamson. protagonist’s last name might be a literary allusion—

Summer 2012 • Jewish Review of BooKS 33 a tribute by Argentina’s great librarian-writer to the losophy of Robert Fludd; a literal translation of the to meet the great scholar of Jewish mysticism Ger- 19th-century scholar, and preeminent bibliographer, Sefer Yetzirah; . . . A History the Hasidim; a mono- shom Scholem, a real-life counterpart of Borgesian Leopold Zunz, who helped found the 19th-century graph in German on the Tetragrammaton.” Jewish scholar-heroes like Hladik and Yarmolinsky. movement for the academic study of Judaism (Wis- In a typewriter in the hotel room where his body (Scholem had already appeared, in rhyming trib- senschaft des Judentums). When Emma avenges the is found is a note: “The first letter of the Name has ute, in Borges’ gorgeous poem “El Golem” in 1958.) death of her father, at great cost to herself, the narra- been written.” Likewise, a note is found near the While in Israel, he wrote three poems. They are not tive ends with a characteristic Borgesian flourish: “The his best work, but they do impart a vivid sense of story was unbelievable, yes—and yet it convinced The mysteries of the divine, his loyalty—it is not too strong a word—to the peo- everyone, because in substance it was true . . . all that ple of Israel and some of his characteristic Jewish was false were the circumstances, the time, and or a theme in Kafka’s oeuvre, themes. In “Israel,” he apostrophizes: two proper names.” Emma Zunz may or may not have been based are also Borges’ concern. a man who in spite of humankind on a real person. But she is almost unique among is Spinoza and the Baal Shem and the kabbalists, Borges’ creations in not being interested in litera- body of the next victim, another Jew named Daniel a man that is a Book, ture. Jaromir Hladik, the protagonist of “The Secret Simon Azevado: “The second letter of the Name has a mouth praising heaven’s justice Miracle” is more typical. Hladik is a Czech writer in been written.” from the abyss, Prague, whom the Nazis imprison in 1939 for the Is it significant that this Jewish victim has virtu- an attorney or a dentist crime of being a Jew. He is a writer of a metaphysical ally the same surname as that of Borges’ possibly- who talked with God in a mountain, bent, who has written on “Boehme, Ibn Ezra, and putative-would-be-Jewish forebears? No doubt, as it a man condemned to ridicule and abomination, Fludd,” and translated the mysterious kabbalistic showcases his empathy with Jews, and his desire to a Jew, text Sefer Yetzirah, which purports to show how the see himself as part of the persecuted. The story was an ancient man, burnt and drowned in lethal world was created from permutations of the He- chambers, brew alphabet. Hladik, Borges writes, “like every an obstinate man who is immortal other writer, measured other men’s virtues by what and now has returned to battle, they had accomplished, yet asked that other men to the violent light of victory, measure him by what he someday planned to do.” beautiful like a lion at noon. None of his works strike him as enduring—with the exception of an unfinished play,The Enemies. In A few years earlier, Borges had spoken, per- desperation, Hladik asks God for a miracle. haps more subtly, on the Israeli Nobel Laureate S.Y. Agnon at the Instituto Cultural Argentino-Israelí in “If,” he prayed, “I do somehow exist, if I am not Buenos Aires. Near the beginning of that talk, he one of Thy repetitions or errata, then I exist as posed a “simple yet complex question”: the author of The Enemies. In order to complete that play, which can justify me, and justify Thee What is a nation? My first reaction is to as well, I need one more year. Grant me the days, offer a geographical answer, but it would be Thou who art the centuries and time itself.” insufficient. Instead, let us envision a nation as the series of memories stored at the heart of a Borges’ story is remarkable in that the miracle people . . . To me there isn’t a clearer example of does take place, though secretly: “the German bullet a nation than Israel, whose origins are almost would kill him at the determined hour, in Hladik’s confused with the world entire . . . Memory mind a year would pass between the order to fire is often approached … as [either] a barren and the discharge of the rifles.” The external clock collection of dates [or] a catalog of curiosities. stops ticking but internally he has an entire year to But there’s another approach, neither endorsed finish writing the play. by historians, nor by students of folklore: The plot, which turns on notions of time, infin- memory as experience incarnated in a people. ity, and a kind of message (the bullet that destroys This, precisely, is what I find in Agnon. European Jewry in something like slow motion) is a tribute to Kafka. In fact, Hladik’s residence on Zel- First edition of The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges, Borges envied Agnon, Scholem, Spinoza, Kafka, tregasse is a direct homage, since it’s where Kafka Buenos Aires, 1949. and Gerchunoff for having what he didn’t: an insid- himself lived. The mysteries of the divine, a theme er’s understanding of Judaism. Maybe it wasn’t envy in Kafka’s oeuvre, are also Borges’ concern here. per se but sheer adulation. In any case, a sentence of collected in Ficciones in 1944, at the height of the his essay “I, the Jew” resonates loudly: “I have done nother story that would have to be in any col- Nazi annihilation of European Jews. so many times, and many times it has not displeased Alection of Borges’ Jewish stories is “Death and The pattern continues with an apparent third me, to think of myself as Jewish.” He spent his whole the Compass.” It is a mystery that begins with a victim. Realizing that only the fourth letter of the life wishing, or at least imagining through his fic- murder at the “Third Talmudic Congress ” and divine name is missing, Lönnrot deduces where a tion, that he was Jewish, or was privy to the gnostic whose solution lies in the Tetragrammaton, the fourth and last murder is likely to take place. He wisdom of the Kabbalah, although, in the end, he ineffable name of God. Spinoza also makes an ap- goes there only to find out he himself is the fourth understood quite well that he lacked that “experi- pearance. The protagonist is detective Erik Lönnrot, and final victim. ence incarnated in a people.” a Gentile with a Borgesian interest in Jewish texts. Borges’ is a famously cerebral writer and there is His task is to solve a series of deaths committed in certainly something cold in “Death and the Com- a mysteriously geometrical order: at the points of pass,” including the literary games he plays with Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American an equilateral triangle (North, East, and West) and Jewish motifs and characters. But this is true of all of and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His illustrated numerically on the same day of consecutive months his work. His Jewish characters are a bit bloodless, memoir Return to Centro Histórico: A Mexican Jew (December 3, January 3, February 3). not so much because of his failure to get beyond ste- Looks for His Roots (Rutgers University Press) was just The first victim is Dr. Marcelo Yarmolinsky, a reotypes, but because he was a writer of metaphysi- published in January. The FSG Book of Twentieth- scholar at the conference whose interests would cal fiction and philosophical and theological poems. Century Latin American Poetry (Farrar, Straus and seem to overlap with those of the condemned Borges visited Israel twice near the end of his life Giroux), which he edited, has recently appeared in Prague writer Jaromir Hladik. He is the author of in 1969 and 1971, the second time to collect the Je- paperback. He is currently at work on a biography of “A Vindication of the Kabbalah; A Study of the Phi- rusalem Prize. On both of his visits, he made sure Isaac Bashevis Singer.

34 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2012 Rereading Herzl’s Old-New Land

BY Shlomo Avineri

heodor Herzl’s Altneuland (Old-New Land) movement that produced not only manifestos, In 1923, the New Society of the Old-New Land is a bad novel, but an important and pre- programs, and declarations about its cause, but a is in the midst of a heated electoral campaign. A re- scient book. It addresses three issues that document describing in detail what its ultimate goal cently arrived immigrant has just established a new are today at the core of Israel’s politics and would look like. political party, which calls for the disenfranchise- Tpublic discourse: the question of equal citizenship, Herzl was not a great, or even a good, novelist ment of its non-Jewish inhabitants. The leader of the social and economic structure of the country, and but he was a sophisticated and practical political this racist party is a certain Rabbi Dr. Geyer. (Geyer the relations between state and religion. thinker who had been a correspondent and editor of means vulture in German; Herzl was not subtle.) When the novel was published exactly one hun- Vienna’s Neue Freie Presse, one of Europe’s leading Geyer maintains that citizenship and voting rights dred and ten years ago in 1902, Herzl was already newspapers. If one overcomes the novel’s outmoded should be restricted to Jews in a Jewish state. Arabs the leader of the Zionist movement. But this move- narrative, replete with lengthy speeches and framed and other non-Jews should not be expelled, but they ment, which he had more or less called into being at within an incongruous, even kitschy, romantic plot, should not be part of the body politic either. the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, was still The campaign becomes a battle for the country’s a fledgling creature, criticized by both Orthodox soul. At the core of the novel are dramatic accounts and Reform rabbis as well as by secular Jewish lib- of election rallies, in which the country’s liberal erals and socialists. According to its opponents, the establishment fights the racist challenges of Geyer idea of a Jewish political entity in the Land of Israel and his followers. Herzl’s dramatic rendering of the was either blasphemous, outlandish, outmoded, speeches of both the liberal and the racist protago- outrageously dangerous, if not outright crazy—or nists clearly reflect his journalistic experience as a all of the above. parliamentary correspondent in France and else- Despite his repeated failure to enlist any of the where. Eventually, Geyer’s party is beaten, the liber- many statesmen he met to further the Zionist cause, als win, and the defeated candidate is reported to be he had made real institutional progress. By 1902, leaving the country in ignominy. the permanent structures of the Zionist movement Anyone familiar with Herzl’s biography and fin were already in place: an annual congress, elected de siècle European history will immediately recog- by the organization’s dues-paying members in more nize that Rabbi Dr. Geyer is the mirror image of the than two dozen countries; an executive commit- Viennese politician Dr. Karl Lueger, who emerged tee, elected by the congress and accountable to it; a in the 1890s as the leader of the anti-Semitic Chris- central newspaper (Die Welt), with many local and tian Social Party and whose election as mayor of regional papers; and the rudiments of a financial Vienna helped to convince Herzl of the necessity structure, selling shares and bonds to sympathiz- of Zionism. When he sat down to write the novel, ers of the movement all over the world, mainly to Herzl put some of Lueger’s anti-Semitic statements buy land in Palestine. Together, these constituted in Geyer’s mouth, changing only the name of the the infrastructure of what would be later called in vilified group. The liberals in Old-New Land , on the Zionist jargon ha-medina ba-derekh—“the state-in- other hand, use two kinds of arguments: the uni- the-making.” versalistic affirmations of equal civil rights of the When Herzl published his novel he could rightly European tradition, and principles drawn from Ju- claim—as he did in his preface—that this was not a daism: “Remember that you have been a stranger in mere utopian dream, but a projection into the fu- the land of Egypt” and “You should have one law for ture of a historical enterprise that had already be- you and the stranger within your gates.” The mes- gun to be realized. Unlike other social utopias of the sage of the Geyer episode in Old-New Land is plain time such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backwards and powerful: What failed in Europe—liberalism (which featured a similarly creaky Rip Van Winkle Theodor Herzl. (Illustration by Mark Anderson.) and equal rights—will triumph in Zion. In contem- plot device), Old-New Land extended an existing porary language, what Herzl advocated was that the reality. Old-New Land should be both Jewish and demo- Within a few years, the novel was translated into Old-New Land is a still-useful standard by which cratic—a Jewish nation-state, but one that would English, Russian, French, Polish, Hebrew, Yiddish, contemporary Israel can look at itself and judge its preserve equal rights for its non-Jewish population, and, eventually, Ladino. Though its characters were achievements—and failures. not half-heartedly, but as a major tenet of its politi- flat and its dialogue mostly wooden, it was the most cal and moral credo. popular and widely circulated articulation of the Zi- he Jewish commonwealth of Old-New Land onist vision. The Hebrew translation was the work Tis based on universal suffrage, which in Her- hile Herzl envisaged equal rights for the of the Warsaw-based journalist Nahum Sokolov, lat- zl’s day did not exist in any Western democracy, WArab population and its participation in the er to become president of the Zionist Organization, save New Zealand. Yet despite what is sometimes political process, he did not foresee the emergence who chose the inspired title Tel Aviv (Hill of Spring claimed by critics of Zionism, Herzl was well aware of a Palestinian national movement that would or, to Anglo-Americanize, Springhill). In 1909, the of the existence of a sizeable Arab population in the draw much of its ideological energy from oppos- founders of a new garden suburb north of Jaffa ad- country and dreamed that they would possess not ing the Zionist project itself. While one might fault opted it as the name for their embryonic city. Vision only political equality, but would also share fully in him for this, it is important to note that when he and reality were thus intertwined in the very history the new polity’s social and economic achievements. was writing, there was no Arab national movement of the novel’s publication. Reshid Bey, an Arab engineer from Haifa, is one in existence—neither in Palestine, nor anywhere It is this interface between literary creativity and of the new country’s leaders and a central figure in else. Arab nationalism’s emergence as a political historical agency that continues to give the novel its the novel. In fact, the issue of equal rights for the force dates to World War I, when the British fos- topicality even today. Zionism is the rare national non-Jewish population is central to the novel’s plot. tered it in order to undermine Ottoman rule in the

Summer 2012 • Jewish Review of BooKS 35 region. Herzl was, in this respect, far from being and instituted a system aimed at avoiding both the New Zion. Herzl believed that a transformative the only person who failed to transcend the limita- extremes of free market capitalism and the dangers project like the establishment of a Jewish polity in tions of his age. No liberal or socialist thinker in of socialism. They embrace the virtues inherent the Land of Israel could not be achieved through Europe thought about the possibility or legitimacy in both systems—learning freedom and initiative the competitive methods of an unbridled capitalist of national movements in their colonies. Nor, for from capitalism and equality and justice from so- market economy, which would undermine social that matter, did the French in Algeria or the British cialism. This intermediate solution, which Herzl solidarity and mutual responsibility. in India grant the local inhabitants equal citizen- (following some utopian socialists) called “mutual- The Jewish community in Palestine, and later ship or voting rights. ism,” looks something like what would later come the State of Israel, in fact developed along the gen- The Zionist movement and the emerging State of to be called a welfare state, “a third way” between eral lines of Herzl’s vision. This was, admittedly, Israel followed the path marked out by Herzl, which capitalism and socialism. due far less to any attachment to a Herzlian master plan than to trial and error and the exigen- Herzl was clearly able to distinguish between personal cies of the times. The need to buy land from local Arab landowners called for concentrated efforts devotion (or lack of it) and the symbolic meaning of on a large scale, rather than individual purchases. Likewise, the need for credit called for cooperative respect for religion in the public sphere. rather than individual efforts. The mixed, social- democratic economy of the pre-state Jewish com- was obviously neither self-evident nor easy, not least In Herzl’s New Society, the land is publicly munity, with its emphasis on social solidarity and because of Arab opposition. The complex situation owned, as are natural resources (especially electric- a more or less egalitarian wage system, was a con- of Israel’s Arab citizens today—determined to a ity works, which play a central role in Herzl’s fu- sequence not only out of the ideology and infra- large extent by the history of Arab-Israeli wars—is turistic vision); major industries are co-operatively structure of “the state-in-the-making,” but because admittedly less than ideal. The fact remains, howev- owned by their employees, as are agricultural settle- a state could not be constructed from a small and er, that upon declaring independence Israel granted ments, but retail trade is in private hands. Members weak Jewish enclave in Ottoman (and later British) citizenship and voting rights to those Palestinians of the society enjoy a wide range of social services: Palestine on the basis of the profit motive. who remained within its borders, maintained Ara- free universal education, free medical care, retire- This trial-and-error welfare state was the lode- bic as its second official language, and allowed Arab ment pensions, and old-age homes—all revolution- star of Israel’s early years, when the embattled coun- citizens to send their children to state schools where ary for 1902. try was faced with the mass immigration of desti- the instruction was in Arabic and within a frame- tute Holocaust survivors and equally impoverished work of a curriculum respecting—albeit perhaps refugees from the Middle East. It also made Israel insufficiently—Arab culture and history. One does into something of a model for many socially con- not have to compare this with the way the United scious movements in the West, inspiring Israelis States treated its own citizens of Japanese ancestry and many Diaspora Jews with pride that the Jewish after Pearl Harbor, or how Germany and France state was becoming “a light unto the nations.” deal today with their mostly Muslim minorities, to Over the past two decades, much of this system realize that Israel measures up as far from the worst of social solidarity has been dismantled and replaced of democratic nations that have been confronted by an uncritical adoration of a highly competitive with serious minority problems. Herzl’s legacy, and market economy, characterized by an at times over- his novel, have been crucial in forging and main- heated stock exchange. Many publicly held indus- taining this liberal approach. tries (either state-owned or Histadrut-controlled) Recent political developments in Israel have, have been privatized, sometimes at rock-bottom however, cast a pall on this legacy. Some legislative prices; public land has been turned over to private proposals now coming from some of the right-wing entrepreneurs and speculators; much of the egali- parties in the Knesset are more reminiscent of the tarian medical insurance and public hospital sys- imaginary Rabbi Dr. Geyer than of Herzl. While tem has been supplanted by private medicine; wage most of these obnoxious and racist draft laws will and salary differentials have grown to unheard-of not be passed by the Knesset or will be annulled by dimensions. The Histadrut has ceased to represent the Supreme Court, some have been adopted, and the weaker sectors of the working population. Kib- the very fact that the others were raised and debated butzim and moshavim have abandoned their collec- has had a poisonous effect on the political and moral tive structures and have ceased to be role models for climate of the country. That they play into the hands society at large. Some of this has been due to neo- of Israel’s enemies is also obvious. These steps are capitalist trends in a globalized economy; some is not only anti-democratic; they are also anti-Zionist Ladino version of Altneuland, 1913-1914, the outcome of local forces, reflected in the political and undermine the vision of the Jewish nation-state Salonica. structure of the country. as a member of the family of nations. The fact that With the dismantling of much of its welfare Herzl himself was aware of such a racist potential While Herzl did not envisage any need for mili- state, Israel is today not only rather similar to West- reminds us both of his remarkable stature and the tary service—Old-New Land would be established ern capitalist market societies, but miles away from need for Israel to be true to his legacy. through an international agreement, ratified by the Herzl’s vision of a “mutualist” society. Last sum- Ottoman sovereign—there is national service. At mer’s massive social protests expressed the frustra- erzl was no socialist—he was a typical bour- age 18, all young men and women undertake two tions of many young Israelis, regardless of political Hgeois liberal with a conservative bent, and he years of national service, in which they serve as affiliation or ideology, with the way Israeli society shied away from socialism, especially in its revo- teachers, instructors, sanitation workers, hospital has evolved. In calling for a more just distribution lutionary variety, fearing its potential for violence nurses, and caregivers for seniors, thus giving back of the country’s wealth, they were, consciously or and chaos. Yet his 1898 play Das Neue Ghetto (The to society what it has already invested in their edu- unconsciously, reviving the Zionist vision of Herzl’s New Ghetto) includes a scathing critique of the sit- cation, and reciprocating in advance for what they Old -New Land. uation of miners in a stockbroker-owned mine, and will receive when they themselves are sick, feeble, Old-New Land reflects the same social awareness. or old. n Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), Herzl’s Herzl presents the social and economic structure of Interestingly, and in tune with his criticism Ifirst Zionist manifesto, he famously stated that, the new Jewish society as a synthesis of capitalism of the stock market as an institution in which too “while we respect our rabbis, we will keep them to and socialism. The society’s imaginary founders many Jews found employment in late-19th-century their synagogues, just as the army will be kept to have learned the lessons of European social history Europe, there was to be no stock exchange in the its barracks.” Secular Israelis often cite this adage

36 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2012 to reinforce the idea that Herzl advocated a clear umns, Yachin and Boaz, and in its vestibule, the It is also a dynamic social contract, open to the separation of state and religion. In reality, his po- “Sea of Copper” has been constructed “as in olden vagaries of democratic electoral politics, coali- sition on this question was more complex. When days, when King Solomon ruled the land.” Yet this tion haggling, political blackmail, and sometimes Herzl made arrangements for the convening of is obviously a different, modern institution. There unsavory horse-trading. The process is obviously the First Zionist Congress in Basel, he directed his are no animal sacrifices and no priestly ceremonies. unpleasant, but it has given the country a modus assistants to make sure there was a kosher restau- The Friday night prayer service is a modernized vivendi based on compromise. Despite all its internal rant in town. On the Saturday preceding the open- version of the traditional Kabbalat Shabbat. contradictions, this approach has guaranteed rela- ing of the congress, Herzl—not exactly a regular This is a mixed message, whose basic wisdom tive political stability based on minimal solidarity. It synagogue-goer—visited the local synagogue, the pre-state Jewish community and the nascent sounds perhaps flippant, but it is a fact that because where he was honored with an aliyah. He admit- State of Israel tried more or less to uphold. Lacking a Israel does not have a constitution, it has never expe- ted to his diary that he was more deeply moved on constitution, Israel possesses an implied social con- rienced a constitutional crisis; coalition crises—yes, this occasion than by his opening speech the next tract, with roots in the Mandate period, colloquially but a fundamental structural, constitutional crisis— day. Upon visiting Palestine in 1898 with a Zionist known as the Status Quo. This unsystematic hodge- no. Yeshayahu Leibowitz once lambasted Israel for delegation, Herzl made sure to demonstrate pub- podge tries to combine respect for religion in the being “a secular state living in concubinage with religion” (medina chilonit ha-yedu’a ba-tzbibur ke-datit). I take that as a compliment, as would Herzl. Yeshayahu Leibowitz once lambasted Israel for being In recent years, this delicate balance that was in “a secular public living in concubinage with religion.” tune with Herzl’s vision appears to be unraveling. Because the religious parties are now much stron- I take that as a compliment, as would Herzl. ger than in the first decades after 1948, religious demands on the state are increasing; because of de- lic respect for religious sensitivities. When their public sphere —with the preservation of individual mographic changes, central spheres of Israeli life, train from Jaffa was delayed and arrived in Jerusa- freedom not only of religion but also from religion. including the army, are now under pressure to fol- lem after the setting of the sun on Friday evening, Hence, there is no public transportation on Satur- low religious precepts much more thoroughly than he and his entourage proceeded on foot from the day, while at the same time hundreds of thousands ever before. Within the religious community itself, train station to their hotel near Jerusalem’s Jaffa of Israelis flock to beaches and picnic areas in their the more radical elements are feeling stronger and gate—a considerable distance. Although he was private cars. There is no civil marriage, but there is more empowered, and have made unprecedented running a fever and had difficulty walking, Herzl an acceptance by state authorities and the courts of radical demands—like separation between men and found it unacceptable for a Zionist delegation to cohabitation and a form of common law marriage women on public transport. enter Jerusalem riding in carriages on the Sabbath. as well as of pre-nuptial agreements. It is an uneasy This haredization of the religious community A few days later, visiting the Western Wall (where balance, which keeps both the Orthodox and the has contributed to a radical, extremely secular- he found the atmosphere of neglect and the pres- secularists unhappy. ist reaction on the part of certain segments of the ence of beggars repugnant) he decided not to visit the mosques on the Temple Mount, “as there is a rabbinical interdict” against this. Although he had led a basically non-religious life, Herzl was clearly able to distinguish between personal devotion (or lack of it) and the symbolic meaning of respect for religion in the public sphere. This is equally manifest in Old-New Land. De- spite being a modern, highly technological, and basically secular project, the New Society is marked by many features that attest to a spiritual link to the Jewish religious tradition. Indeed the very idea of Zionism is first introduced inOld-New Land by “Dr. Weiss, a simple rabbi from Moravia”—to the derision of the fin de siècle Jewish sophisticates amongst whom he finds himself. One of the central events described in the novel is a Passover Seder, held in Tiberias, presided over by the president of the New Society, at which non-Jewish dignitaries, residents, and tourists, are present. The traditional Hagaddah is read, but it is followed by a detailed rendition of what is called the New Exodus—the story of the mass immigration of Jews from all over the world to the Old New Land. This same two-tiered approach is reflected in the description of the New Jerusalem. While Haifa is the commercial hub, Jerusalem is the capital, the seat of the country’s legislature, its academy, and other institutions. Herzl describes how the bustling, now modern city, slowly prepares for the Sabbath— shops close, people rush home for family meals or to synagogue: “the Sabbath is evidently dwelling in people’s hearts.” Not only that: The Temple is being built, though not on the site of the mosques, whose silhouette continues to characterize Jerusalem’s skyline. Yet, Herzl insists, the Temple is built “because the time has come.” Its entrance is adorned by the two col-

Summer 2012 • Jewish Review of BooKS 37 non-religious population. Some groups have lately moved from a tolerant liberalism to a sometimes violent anti-clericalism that appears to be totally JEWISH DAILY alienated from Judaism as such. Both developments, by undermining the wishy-washy historical IDEAS compromises that enabled the Zionist project to thrive, are fundamentally destructive. They bring into the Jewish state the historical cleavages of the The best of Jewish thought. Diaspora, where there was no Jewish public sphere, no single authority speaking on behalf of the Jewish A Jewish state can only survive on compromises The Moral Costs of Jewish and halfway measures, Day School which cannot possibly By Aryeh Klapper satisfy either side. The discussion has Thesebeen about questions There is a lot of hand-wringing these days about whether the rising costs people. It was precisely this lack of a Jewish central of Jewish day schools are sustainable. authority and public sphere that led to Haredi self- money: How can we get more? How can we spend less? ghettoization on the one hand, and radical anti- miss the point: The largest costs of high day school tuition are not financial clericalism and atheism on the other. When there but moral, and the. key to solving the financial dilemma is to address the is a Jewish public authority, it can only survive on moral problem jidaily.com/moralcosts compromises and halfway measures, which cannot possibly satisfy either side. Here, too, it would be helpful to take a leaf out of Herzl’s Old-New Land.

The Baron-Cohens and he idea of writing a futuristic novel first oc- Tcurred to Herzl in Paris in 1895, when he was the Problem of Evil as yet unsure how to convey his Zionist ideas to the general public. One of his acquaintances, the By Allan Nadler French author Alphonse Daudet, urged that he The pervasiveness of evil and the suffering of innocents have write a novel, arguing that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s confounded religious believers throughout history. Jews, with their Uncle Tom’s Cabin did more for abolition than did history marked by abundant evidence of evil and their faith in an many learned tomes. At first, Herzl considered but chose not to follow this path and instead ap- omnipotent and benevolent God, have unsurprisingly produced a proached Jewish magnates like Baron Hirsch and vast Jewish literature that attempts to reconcile God’s justice with the Rothschilds, with his plans instead. When this evil’s apparent dominion, in works ranging from the book of Job to failed, he opted for publishing his programmatic Harold Kushner’s best-selling When Bad Things Happen to Good The Jewish State, which led to the convening of the People.www.jidaily.com/baroncohens First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897. But the idea of a novel never left him. He returned to the idea in 1901, by which time his Zionist ideas had already been embodied in institutions and activities emerging from the an- The Tenth Commandment nual Zionist congresses. So when he claimed, in his preface, that Old-New Land was not a mere utopian and Thoughtcrime novel, but an ideal extension of an already existing By Yehudah Mirsky reality, he was not being completely unrealistic. The famous motto Herzl chose for his novel—“If The Ten Commandments lay out a blueprint for relations, first, between God you will it, it is no dream”—has a clear implication. and Israel and then, between God and humanity; the Shabbat serves as the - No historical determinism decides the fate of nations. hinge between the two. The prohibitions on murder, theft, and adultery, and The crucial ingredient is human agency, not “objec- the principle of the inviolability of words, emerge as human society’s funda tive” conditions. Ask any schoolchild in Israel who mental building blocks. Then comes one more commandment, which seeks said im tirzu ein zo agadda, and they will immediat- www.jidaily.com/jidaily.com/tenthcommandmentto implant social boundaries within us: “You shall not covet your fellow’s edly recognize it as Herzl’s saying. This insistence on house; you shall not covet your fellow’s wife, or his male servant, or female the creative and transformative power of human will is as relevant today relevant as it was one hundred Join the most and ten years ago, when it was inscribed by Herzl on provocative conversation the front page of his great non-utopian novel. on the web at Shlomo Avineri teaches political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of Herzl: An www.jewishideasdaily.com Intellectual Biography (Shazar). He also wrote the historical introduction to the Hebrew edition of Herzl’s diaries Inyan Ha-Yehudim: Sifrei Yoman (Histadrut).

38 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2012 ARTS Matisse and His Jewish Patrons

BY Catherine C. Bock-Weiss

matchmakers; credulous or wily peasants; and dis- New York and will be at the Vancouver Art Gallery The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, putatious, gesticulating merchants. It may have through this summer. and the Parisian Avant-Garde been a gift from one of Matisse’s Jewish dealers, edited by Janet Bishop, Cécile Debray, and Rebecca Rabinow who included Bernheim-Jeune, Léonce and Paul s his earliest patrons, the four Steins—sib- San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Yale University Rosenberg, Georges Petit, and Valentine Dudens- Alings Leo, Gertrude, and Michael, and Mi- Press, 492 pp., $75 ing. But his relations with these men were never chael’s wife Sarah—witnessed his efforts, listened much more than cordial and occasionally conten- to his professorial explanations, absorbed his ex- Collecting Matisse and Modern tious. It seems more likely that Matisse received periments, and suffered with him when his work Masters: The Cone Sisters of Baltimore by Karen Levitov The Jewish Museum of New York and Yale University Press, Gertrude Stein wrote herself into the center of her 80 pp., $112 family’s patronage of Matisse. In fact, she was the visual illiterate of the family.

nly four still life paintings by Henri the book from one of his early collectors, many of provoked derision. They bought “Woman with Matisse include books with legible whom were also Jewish. In his first years of pub- a Hat,” “The Joy of Life,” and “Blue Nude” at the titles. The most surprising of them lic ridicule, from 1904 to 1911, he forged lasting very moment gallery-goers were mocking them. anchors the objects in The Philadel- and intimate friendships with his earliest and most Matisse frequently dined with them, attended phiaO Museum’s large “Still Life: Histoires Juives.” loyal patrons, the Stein family and, later, the Cone their soireés, and even vacationed with them. Histoires Juives is a volume in the Gallimard series sisters of Baltimore. Two recent exhibitions and As Americans and Jews the Steins were doubly Les Documents Bleus. The book’s editor, Raymond their accompanying catalogs tell the story—The outsiders to French society. Through their early Geiger, described it as a collection of “stories with Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian purchases, the Steins themselves became noto- a moral, and narratives that belong to that treasure Avant-Garde, which opened at the San Francisco rious in Paris art circles and used this notori- of popular Jewish folklore transmitted by oral tra- Museum of Modern Art and recently closed at ety to create the avant-garde audience that made dition.” This might be a bit high-flown for the con- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Collecting Matisse’s name. tents, which consisted of Yiddish jokes in French Matisse and Modern Masters: The Cone Sisters of Gertrude Stein, of course, wrote herself into the translation. For instance: Baltimore, which opened at the Jewish Museum in center of the group’s choices in her book The Autobi-

Two Jews had a rough crossing. A terrible storm sank their boat. An hour later, however, the two were on the shore, safe and sound. People were astonished: “How did you swim ashore so successfully?” “We didn’t swim.” “Then how . . .?” Gesticulating with their hands, they said: “We simply conversed.”

Or:

The old rabbi Mordechai is in heaven. Unfor- tunately, he never stops his disputations with everyone he meets. He harasses with questions Abraham, Moses, and even God himself. One day he said to the latter: “Lord, tell me what a million years is to you.” “To me? As one minute.” “And a million pounds sterling?” “A million pounds sterling? As one penny.” “Then Lord, make me the gift of a penny.” “Certainly. Wait . . . a minute.”

The fact that Matisse had this book—full of shtetl stereotypes—probably testifies to the fact that the artist was trusted by Jewish friends to enjoy the book’s crude humor without prejudice. An “Still Life: Histoires Juives” by Henri Matisse, 1924. (Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Samuel excellent mimic and raconteur himself, Matisse S. White 3rd and Vera White Collection. (© Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society could be counted on to enjoy these stories about ARS, New York.)

Summer 2012 • Jewish Review of BooKS 39 ography of Alice B. Toklas. In fact, she was the visual his doubts with her. As a young eyewitness, Theresa Renaissance Western painting. After his experimen- illiterate of the family. The ambitious and informa- Ehrman, recalled: tal Fauve period (1904-1908), Matisse had branched tive catalog for The Steins Collect, however, sets the into two modes of “decorative” painting—the mu- record straight in two excellent essays on Leo Stein She was the one who fascinated him with ral-like figurative work he was doing for his Russian by Gary Tinterow and Martha Lucy. Gertrude had her sense of appreciation of values among patron, Sergei Shchukin, (“Music,” “Dance,” “Game no pictorial sensitivity whatsoever when she arrived all who came to see his paintings . . . Sarah of Bowls”) and the highly patterned, tapestry-like paintings such as “La Dessert” and “Interior with But the person Matisse called "the really intelligently Eggplants.” It was then, around 1910, that both Leo and Gertrude withdrew their support from Matisse. sensitive member of the family" was Michael Stein's Leo turned to Renoir, Gertrude to Cezanne and Picasso. wife Sarah. Although Gertrude first described “Three Lives” as having been written under the influence of “Swift in Paris to live with her elder brother Leo, but she would tell him what she thought of things, and Matisse,” she later eliminated Matisse and quickly absorbed both his interest in painting and sometimes rather bluntly. He’d seem to always claimed that it was really looking at Cézanne’s “Ma- most of his opinions. It was Leo who had labored listen and always argue about it, and I must dame Cézanne with a Fan” that stimulated her writ- the previous five years at “the work of seeing,” as he say, I was sometimes quite bored because the ing. The catalog essays on Gertrude Stein empha- put it. conversations were very lengthy and very size her relationship with Picasso, whose flouting of An aspiring painter himself, Leo was interested philosophical and sort of beyond me. pictorial tradition gave Gertrude the permission to in art theory and the psychology of perception. He was, as Tinterow shows, a friend and intellectual peer of Bernard Berenson, the great art historian, with whom he often argued. The concepts of “tac- tile sensations” and “plastic values” were being ex- plored in Leo’s Florentine circle, and he was able to apply them in his evaluation of Cézanne and later of the new work of Matisse and Picasso. He already understood the tension in Cézanne’s work between “the shifting planes and the resolute masses, spatial illusionism and the flatness of the picture plane.” In Paris, Leo was the acknowledged connoisseur of the new art. But the person Matisse called “the really intelligently sensitive member of the family” was Mi- chael Stein’s wife, Sarah (Sally) Stein, née Samu- els. He had the deepest respect and most tender regard for this married, matronly contemporary with her plain, alert, kindly face, rimless glasses, and halo of frizzy hair. If Matisse was her “religion” as Claudine Grammont’s catalog essay has it, then Sarah Stein was his patron saint. Shortly before the artist’s death, Matisse sent her a book by way of an American visitor with the inscrip- tion: “To Mme. Sarah Stein, who so often aided me in my weaknesses.” Before coming to Paris, Sarah drew and painted, “Portrait of Michael Stein” and “Portrait of Sarah Stein” by Henri Matisse, 1916. (San Francisco studied psychology and art criticism, collected art, Museum of Modern Art, Sarah and Michael Stein Memorial Collection, gift of Nathan Cummings, and presided over something of a salon in her native left, and Elise S. Haas, right. © Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.) San Francisco. She and her husband brought their fine collection of Japanese and Chinese prints with them to Paris. Michael was interested in architec- Ehrman wasn’t exaggerating. After she had seen write Tender Buttons, the work that kicked away the ture, commissioning an Arts and Crafts-oriented a version of his 1911 painting, “The Artist’s Fam- scaffolding of 19th-century genres. Along with that architect to design his innovative rental flats in San ily,” Sarah wrote the artist a characteristically candid scaffolding, she rejected Matisse, and sold all of his Francisco. When they arrived in Paris in January and penetrating letter. paintings. 1903, Leo guided them through the city’s museums Sarah and Michael Stein remained faithful to and galleries. As for the family portrait . . . for me, there Matisse. In August 1914, most of their collection of At their apartment on the rue Madame, Sarah are contradictions in the treatment—which Matisse paintings was on exhibition at a gallery in assumed Leo’s role in explaining the work to visi- take away from its sincerity of expression; it’s Berlin, when it was threatened with seizure by the tors. It was also Sarah who initiated and managed neither family portrait nor pure decoration. The German government, which was now at war with the school that Matisse opened in 1908, the Acadé- profusion and dominance of the ornamentation France. They hastily managed to sell the works to mie Matisse. Sarah took careful notes on Matisse’s undermine its status as portrait, while a certain Swedish collectors, but were devastated at the loss. instructions to his pupils, which were later pub- intensity in some of the figures undermines its Matisse’s double portraits of Sarah and Michael in lished by Alfred A. Barr in 1951, after her death. status as decoration—but I see by your letter 1915 were a kind of compensatory gesture to them Sarah and Michael also lent their paintings freely that we’ll speak of all this. for this loss. (Gertrude resented the fact that Matisse to exhibitions in order to enhance Matisse’s reputa- never offered to paint her portrait.) The likeness of tion, especially in the United States, where she pros- This is a precise diagnosis of the artistic problem Sarah was transformed from a simple, descriptive elytized for new believers. Matisse confronted. He was struggling to reconcile likeness to a kind of icon in a gold frame, where her Matisse responded eagerly to this unconditional painting as a decoration, colored and flat, as is done aura expands upward in an inverted triangle. Her homage. He brought his paintings to Sarah, asked in the Orient, with painting of a populated world, round face is idealized in a gentle, ethereal visage for her opinions, and discussed his aspirations and substantial and volumetric, as is done in post- dominated by far-seeing eyes. It is entirely possible

40 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2012 that, as Sarah experienced a rush of clarity and ener- upper-class Jewish women who educated them- er, thinker. Nevertheless, when Matisse was bold, gy, a “profane state of grace” in the presence of Ma- selves in the arts, enjoyed surrounding them- she boldly acquired. Etta’s purchase of the daring tisse’s work, so the artist experienced inner certainty selves with beautiful objects, and traveled yearly “Large Reclining Nude (Pink Nude)” of 1935 hung and calming reassurance in the presence of Sarah’s to see and to buy. Claribel had a distinguished in her apartment facing her sister’s acquisition of the notorious “Blue Nude” of 1908. Her last purchase, “Two Girls, Red and Green Background,” was in 1949, the year of her death. Matisse was especially responsive to the sym- pathy of these capable, independent-minded women who, like his mother, “loved everything he did.” The respectable tweedy Matisse found kindred souls in these upholstered Victorian ladies of his generation who departed from the conventional expectations of their times, as he himself did, only when they ventured into the uncharted territory of vanguard art. Like Matisse, their spirit of iconoclasm and their radical choices were grounded in the bourgeois respectability of traditional cultural values. The religion of art, with its ability to sublimate the baser instincts and provide a “disinterested” spiritual joy, was a vital aspect of the aesthetic movement of the period, and Matisse was as much a true believer in it as his acculturated Jewish patrons. Susceptible to the most modern fads and fashions of their day, they collected Eastern art and bibelots (the Cones by the trunks-full), vegetarian diets and self-help therapies, aesthetic theories and popular psychology, and, with the same firm faith in progress, they embraced the new in art. Matisse worked alone. He belonged to no group, no school, no collective progressive endeavor. This made him a lonely figure who relied on his patrons for their appreciation and approval as much as for The Steins in the courtyard of 27 rue de Fleurus, ca. 1905. From left: Leo Stein, Allan Stein (son of Michael and Sarah), Gertrude Stein, Theresa Ehrman (family friend), Sarah Stein, Michael Stein. their financial support. Claude Duthuit remem- (The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.) bered him saying, “If it hadn’t been for the Rus- sians and the Americans, I would have starved.” vibrant belief in him. career as a physician, pathologist, and teacher. Catherine C. Bock-Weiss is professor emerita at the n 1926 Michael and Sarah commissioned a pri- She spent extended periods in Germany doing re- School of The Art Institute of Chicago and the author, Ivate villa from Le Corbusier, who was given a search, while Etta, the younger sister, maintained most recently, of Henri Matisse: Modernist Against the free hand to demonstrate the theories of his ideal Grain (Penn State University Press). of a house as a machine for living. “The house is It is sometimes charged that clean and pure, far beyond anything we have done: a kind of obvious, indisputable manifesto,” he Etta's later purchases were wrote to his mother about the villa. Carrie Pilto’s essay on the villa does justice to Michael Steins’ unadventurous, but, when The Association of Jewish Libraries continued patronage of modern art. Once more, Guide to Yiddish Short Stories they were hosts to visitors who came to investigate Matisse was bold, she boldly and admire, including Matisse. Among the first By Bennett Muraskin visitors to the new villa were the Cone Sisters, Dr. acquired. Claribel and Etta, for whom the Steins often acted • Plot summaries of 135 stories from a wide as European agents. the Baltimore household. The Baltimore salon of range of Yiddish writers, including short bios The Cones, whom Matisse called “my two Bal- the Cone sisters at the turn of the century was • Organized by topic: holidays, ethics, social timore ladies,” had been collectors of the first hour. the model for that of the Steins in Paris. Close to injustice moral choices, women, family, anti- They attended the Salon d’Automne of 1905 when Sarah and Gertrude, Etta also became an intimate Semitism “Woman with a Hat” was purchased by Gertrude of Matisse’s wife, Amélie, and his daughter, Mar- • English and original Yiddish sources and Leo. Soon after, Sarah Stein brought Etta to guerite. The latter’s son (and Matisse’s grandson), • Essay on history of the translation project Matisse’s studio, where she promptly bought two Claude Duthuit, remembered that “even as a little drawings and a painting. The sisters were to pur- boy, I felt that my mother, after seeing Miss Cone, “Bennett Muraskin has created a resource that chase some of the artist’s most important works was regenerated.” He added: “She had extraordi- makes Yiddish stories (in translation) accessible. in the next two decades. After Claribel’s death in narily good, strong taste. The best of Matisse she Any institution with an interest in Jewish culture 1929, Etta went on to amass more than five hun- bought, really.” ought to find this book very helpful.” dred works by Matisse, which are now housed per- It is sometimes charged that Etta’s later pur- —Dr. Sheva Zucker, Yiddish scholar manently at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Their chases were unadventurous. As a single woman wealth derived from their family’s textile mills, with strong female friendships, she was especial- $14.95 from Ben Yehuda Press which sold denim and corduroy cloth to compa- ly receptive to paintings of the female figure in a www.benyehudapress.com nies like Levi Strauss. decorative interior, of two women together, or a Like Sarah Stein, the Cones were cultivated single woman in the role of dancer, reader, paint-

Summer 2012 • Jewish Review of BooKS 41 Homage to Mahj

BY amy newman Smith

Parker Brothers started selling the game with Chi- monishes, “just play, don’t talk.” At the center of the Project Mah Jongg nese character tiles that was to become so closely room stands a mah jongg table, set, insisting that Curated by Melissa Martens, Museum of Jewish Heritage associated with American Jewish women. mah jongg is to be played, not contemplated. Skirball Cultural Center through September 2, 2012 At Project Mah Jongg, nostalgic photographs Jewish Museum of Florida in Miami Beach, of televised game lessons, players around a floating nterspersed throughout are newly commissioned October 16, 2012 until March 17, 2013 game board, and smiling women playing mahj in Iworks of mah-jongg-inspired art by famed fash- their bathing suits in a Catskills resort dominate the ion designer Isaac Mizrahi, New Yorker illustrator MAH JONGG: CRAK, BAM, DOT gallery walls, memorializing a disappeared world Bruce McCall, designer Christoph Niemann, and (Exhibit Companion Guide) (or a postwar movie come to life) that seems simpler Israeli-American writer and artist Maira Kalman. edited by Abbot Miller, Patsy Tarr and yet somehow hipper than the one we inhabit to- Fully three feet tall and five and a half feet long, 2wiceBooks, 84 pp., $40 day, a world we would want to step into, if we could. these creations capture the eye, providing balance The exhibit doesn’t ignore the aural component of for the freestanding displays. the game; CDs mounted on the gallery walls invite The Skirball Cultural Center, which is hosting visitors to pull a cord to hear the sound of the game the show in Los Angeles through early September, in play, with coffee being served as the tiles click has planned a night of mah-jongg inspired com- ny Miami Jewess worth her salt has and conversation bubbles up before one player ad- edy, featuring actors, writers, and producers from a poolside mah jongg game once a week,” the designer Isaac Mizrahi de- clares in his contribution to Project Mah“A Jongg, which debuted at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. The show is now travelling the Jewish museum circuit introducing the rummy-like tile game to those who have never seen the craks, bams, and dots—the Chinese characters, bamboo sticks, and circles that decorate the game pieces. After an appearance at the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage in Cleveland, the show is now at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, with a planned engagement at the Jewish Museum of Flor- ida running into 2013. The exhibit, which is under- written by the National Mah Jongg League, lays out the game’s Jewish yichus in a visually appealing display designed to attract a new generation of players in the current era of resurgent poker and retro-chic. But mah jongg is not poker, and the Jewish en- claves that nurtured it—mid-century Jewish sub- urbs, Jewish country clubs, Catskill resorts—have either disappeared or changed. Most importantly, of course, Jewish women, like other American women, have entered the workforce, which leaves little time “Project Mah Jongg” exhibit. (Courtesy of Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage.) for long afternoons at the mahj table. Still, mah jongg maintains its appeal. The tiles are beautiful, feel pleasing in the hand, and swish and click satisfyingly as the game moves along. Project Mah Jongg successfully echoes the game’s aesthetic power, with tall freestanding display cases that imi- tate the shape and colors of mah jongg’s iconic tiles intersected by glass boxes that evoke a game table. The exhibit walks visitors through a quick history of the game: It originated in China—by legend Confu- cius was its creator—and grew from being a pastime of the upper-class who could afford the hand-made tiles to a recreation of the nation. It was banned in the Cultural Revolution but (like Confucius) has had a post-Mao resurgence. An American oil executive discovered the game while working in China a century ago. He published the first set of rules in English and trademarked the game’s English name, touching off a full-fledged craze in the 1920s. All- Playing a floating game of mah jongg, 1924. (Courtesy of the Library of American firms such as Abercrombie & Fitch and Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.)

42 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2012 television shows including Dexter, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and Seinfeld, as well as children’s game-playing sessions and mah jongg lessons for adults, all attempts to get visitors to experience mah jongg not as a quaint cultural artifact, but a living Fabricating Palestinian History part of Jewish America. An American oil executive Middle East Quarterly discovered the game while Edited by Efraim Karsh, published by Daniel Pipes, $12 reveals how the Palestinians invent history working in China a century to delegitimize the Jewish state.

SUMMER 2012

ago, and turned it into a full- Palestinian Myths VOLUME 19, NUMBER 3 • Alex Joffe explores why Palestinian Debunked Phyllis Chesler nonsensical rhetoric resonates and Nathan Bloom fledged craze in the 1920s. Alex Joffe Hindu vs. Muslim in the West. The Rhetoric of Nonsense Honor Killings Ofra Bengio As beautiful as is it is physically, and with the pa- David Bukay Iraq and Turkey as • David Bukay exposes how the Usurping Jewish History Models for Arab nache of celebrity and interactive bells and whistles, Democracy? Palestinians have appropriated Jewish Shaul Bartal the exhibit fails to satisfy. If there is anything illu- Denying a Jewish Jerusalem Ilan Berman Iran’s Beachhead history to create their own fake past. in Latin America minating about the game’s role in American Jewish Havatzelet Yahel culture or the Jewish role in the game’s history, one Ruth Kark, , Bruce • Shaul Bartal challenges the attempt Seth J. Frantzmanand Maddy-Weitzman won’t find it here. The exhibit is also poorly labeled. The Arab League’s to erase the historical Jewish connection The Negev Bedouin New Relevance One example: a large archival photo is labeled “Dor- Are Not Indigenous to Jerusalem. Hilal Khashan othy S. Meyerson teaching mah jongg on television, Lebanon’s Shiite-Maronite 1951.” Missing from the label is the information that • Havatzelet Yahel, Ruth Kark, and Alliance Meyerson was the author of one of the first guides Seth J. Frantzman debunk Bedouin claims to mah jongg, aimed at Jews, a book that was in its to be indigenous to Israel’s Negev desert. fourth printing barely a year and a half after it was issued. (In its additions to the core exhibit, the Maltz Museum in Cleveland included a stunning tableau Individual rate: $50/yr. of models dressed in vintage fashion, labeled, as one 1-717-632-3535 (Ext. 8188) • E-mail: [email protected] expects in a museum exhibit, with maker, date, and Web: www.MEQuarterly.org description; the kind of information missing from the rest of the exhibit’s artifacts).

fter its introduction in the United States, mah Ajongg took off like a rocket, with game sup- pliers at times unable to keep up with demand. As is true of any craze, mah jongg had its detractors from the start. It was regarded as a dangerous gam- bling game, tainted by its “heathen” origins, fuel for rebellious flappers, and the scourge of happy homes, as wives and mothers ignored their family in the quest for the next winning hand. Mah jongg was also part of a larger interest in things Chinese. One case of the exhibit is devoted to Chinese-inspired objects, including a doll and teacup. They are exquisite, but like virtually everything in the display cases, are not individually labeled, and no dating or provenance is given. Nor does the exhibit dwell on the fact that at the height of the mah jongg craze with all its attendant Chinese décor and clothing, the US Congress was enacting the Johnson-Reed Act, which excluded virtually all immigration from an “Asiatic Barred Zone” (it also tightened quotas on Eastern European immigration). Popular singers of the 20s sang the lyrics to “Since Ma Is Playing Mah Jongg,” in which Pa “wants all ‘Chinks’ hung.” Chinese tsotchkes yes, actual Chinese, no. The exhibit briefly explores mah jongg’s use as a fundraiser by groups as large as Hadassah and as small as individual synagogue sisterhoods. Here, again, however, Project Mah Jongg tells the truth without being entirely truthful. While it comfortably informs visitors that proceeds from mah jongg events sent humanitarian aid to China during World War II, donated a mobile kitchen to England under the Blitz, and raised money for Jewish refugees in Palestine “and

Summer 2012 • Jewish Review of BooKS 43 jongg,” and German-born illustrator Christoph Nie- mann, who reshapes the dots and bamboo sticks of mahj tiles into kitschy Jewish symbols, including a star of David and a bowl of matzah ball soup—is not much more than a paid celebrity endorsement. McCall’s witty painting has ancient Confucian sages handing down the tradition to Jewish women in a Miami condo.

Like the four sides of the mah jongg table, Proj- ect Mah Jongg rounds out its quartet of celebrity contributions with a painting by Bruce McCall. Mc- Call’s witty, clean-lined “Miami Mah Jongg” imagines a world in which ancient Confucian sages hand down the tradition to a group of American Jewish women in a condo high above Miami Beach. This is a good joke; but one wonders whether the curators fully appreciate the irony. “Miami Mah Jongg,” by Bruce McCall for Mah Jongg: Crak, Bam, Dot. (Courtesy of the publisher.) The Catskills are mountains of course, but tiles aren’t tablets. The world of American mah jongg was beyond,” the exhibit shies away from specifying that puffs, three bam / They’re in a concentration camp / largely Jewish without preserving any substantive the “beyond” included Jews trapped under the shad- And here I am.” Jewishness. Is it worthwhile for Jewish museums to ow of the Holocaust. “Jewish federations asked wom- But of course, such a somber reminder of Jew- expend limited resources to try to create a new gen- en to give up their weekly allowances for items such ish history and American acculturation has no real eration of mah jongg players, or to moon over the as millinery and mah jongg during the war years,” place next to a “fictional ‘mah jongg collection’” from days when American Jewish women swished and but fails to specify that cigarettes were also on the list Isaac Mizrahi, with its beaded evening gown, cock- clicked as they kvetched and kvelled? and, more importantly, where the money raised was tail dress, outfit for daytime and swimsuit. Mizrahi’s headed. An appeal of the time, quoted in Mah Jongg: contribution—along with that of Maira Kalman, who Amy Newman Smith is assistant editor at the Jewish Crak, Bam, Dot, was not so squeamish: “One hat, two writes that “Women in my family did not play mah Review of Books.

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44 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2012 Lost & Found Berdyczewski, Blasphemy, and Belief

By YECHIEL YAAKOV WEINBERG, TRANSLATED BY MARC B. SHAPIRO

icha Josef Berdyczewski (1865-1921), contemporary rabbis—but not all of them. from him about the nature of religious faith and the the son of a rabbi in the insular Ha- In the excerpt below, we find a surprisingly sym- struggle that characterizes its highest form. Wein- sidic community of Medzibezh, wast- pathetic portrayal of Berdyczewski by one of the tow- berg presents what is not only an unusual example ed no time in expanding his horizons. ering figures of the rabbinical establishment, Rabbi of Orthodox appreciation of Berdyczewski, but also MAlready in his adolescence he dipped into such suspi- Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg (1884-1966). A promi- a sophisticated portrayal of belief, one far removed cious modern works as Nathan Krochmal’s Guide to from the popular presentation of religion as helpful the Perplexed of the Time. For that, at the age of 17, in bringing about “peace of mind.” he paid a high price—the wreckage of his marriage Belief that is tranquil and prospects. But it was not until eight years later, af- satisfied testifies to an e is a unique writer. One cannot find another ter a period of study at the famous Volozhin yeshiva, Hwho provokes so much bitterness and protest that he broke with the world of orthodoxy altogeth- inner emptiness and lack in the hearts of the pious. Before him, no one dared er. After studying in Germany and Switzerland, he express such shocking heresy (apikorsut) as that earned a Ph.D. in philosophy, but his enduring fame of thought. which is sprung from his pen. His heresy strikes at is due the novels and essays that he wrote mostly in the heart of the believer, leaving him dumbfound- the Hebrew language. ed. Such blasphemy no Jew has yet heard, and his While other Hebrew writers of his generation nent Torah scholar who would eventually head the impudence towards Heaven crosses all boundaries. sought either to modernize the Jewish religion or to famous Rabbinical Seminary of Berlin, Weinberg Yet at the same time, no other writer is so close to a translate its values into acceptably secular terms, achieved recognition in the years following World pure religious soul. He has no equal when it comes Berdyczewski wanted to make a fresh start. He War II as one of the world’s leading halakhic au- to penetrating the heart of the believer, touch- urged his generation to be not the “last of the Jews” thorities. He was also an avid reader of modern He- ing its most delicate cords. Here you are angered but “the first of the Hebrews.” This would entail, brew literature. Writing in Jeschurun, the journal at him, and there you follow after him. At times in the Nietzschean language that he employed, a of Berlin’s intellectual Orthodox, in 1921, Weinberg his rebellion against Heaven causes you pain, pro- “transvaluation of values,” a departure of the Jews maintained that Berdyczewski’s strident opposition vokes your anger, and desecrates the Holy of Holies from the desiccated world of “the scroll” to the vi- to traditional Judaism was at bottom more deeply in your heart. You want to stamp your feet, grind tal world of “the sword.” Propagating this message, religious than many people’s unreflecting adherence your teeth, and scream at him: “Desecrator of that Berdyczewski incurred the wrath of any number of to it. Orthodox Jews could in fact learn something which is holy, Troubler of Israel!” Yet at the same time you feel yourself captivated by his charms. The pain and anger are sunk deep in your soul without you being able to express them verbally. You must hate him, but you cannot debase him; you want to place him under a ban, but you do not want to push him away. Despite his poisonous pronouncements directed towards Heaven, you remain attached to him. With shame you are forced to admit: We have a spiritual connection and a closeness of hearts. What is the reason? It is because of a shared origin. The heresy of Berdyczewski is Jewish at its roots and branches. It arises from the same spiritual source from which the [Jewish] religion is nour- ished and supported—from the depth of spiritual yearnings and desires. Belief and denial do not always oppose one another. There is belief that is itself denial—a man’s denial of himself, his negation of his essence, and his surrender of who he is. There is also denial that has in it an element of belief, and has nothing to do with arrogant abandon. For the latter is nothing more than throwing off the yoke of the Law. Belief that is tranquil and satisfied testifies to an inner emptiness and lack of thought. Shrinking in the face of powerful impressions for which one is not spiritually prepared drains one’s essence of its strength. A man is swept away, trapped by the external flow, which influences his senses. His will is broken and he cannot rise up or protest. He believes because he no longer has the strength to deny. Micha Josef Berdyczewski and Rabbi Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg. (Illustration by Val Bochkov, Belief such as this is not worthy of its name; it © The Bochkov Studio.) is merely a lack of disbelief. It cannot be a source

Summer 2012 • Jewish Review of BooKS 45 for creativity. Perfect belief, worthy of the term, is which they have been hewn. The Sages spoke of has been powerfully prompted to do so by an in- both religious and creative, and it is by nature tem- a true heretic, not one who simply throws off the ner force. The fire found in his bones ejects from his pestuous. It comes from an abundance of strength yoke of the Law. mouth sharp words that sting one’s soul. One senses and moral power. This type of belief is not a pas- Berdyczewski is a religious heretic. His heresy that it is not from irresponsibility or arrogance that sive spirituality, but a forceful expression of spiri- was acquired not through casual reading of hereti- he says what he says. tual activism that creates and conquers. It is not cal literature, but through spiritual torments and Berdyczewski is not one of those writers who carefully measures all of his words. When he speaks he closes his eyes and sends down fire and The Sages set forth a principle: There is no belief without brimstone. He does not concern himself with his listener and or with the latter’s most exalted reli- denial, and there is no positive without negation. gious feelings. What is he like at such a moment? A boiling kettle, bubbling over until its heat weakens. one that surrenders and is disciplined, but one that great sacrifices. When we examine his oeuvre, Berdyczewski, whose opinions are so far removed decrees and determines, demands and overcomes. we sense the difficult inner struggle, the convul- from religious Jewry, has a style and pathos that Such belief does not arrive after denial has ceased in sions of a grieving soul. Every one of his words is leaves the impression of a religious castigator, who the heart of man and lost its vitality. Rather, it pre- soaked in the essence of his blood. This is a true stands at the gate and urges service to the Creator. cedes denial, or arrives together with it, arising and heretic, one who used to believe and now denies, It sometimes appears that even in his battle against sprouting from within it . . . who once had faith but has just seen it die before religion there is a great deal of religiosity in him. It The Sages set forth a principle: There is no his eyes, and has witnessed its death-throes. This is is not religion that is defective in his eyes, but the belief without denial, and there is no positive an ethical heretic, a Jewish heretic, whose heresy is apathy of its adherents that repels him. Religion, without negation. A true believer is also a partial suffused with the spirit, which enlivens faith. He whose first appearance in the world was marked by denier (kofer). He bows to God and destroys the still stands at the well of religion, stirring it with strength and courage, has become a sign of weak- idol. With one hand he builds an altar and in the his feet and muddying its water. At times he bows ness, a place where old women can distinguish other he tears down a high place of idolatry. From his head, drawing with his mouth, and quenching themselves. this you learn that the great distance between the his thirst. believer and the heretic looms large to the na- The unique pathos of Berdyczewski makes an ked eye, which sees their outward form, but not impression on the pious reader. One senses im- Marc B. Shapiro holds the Weinberg Chair in Judaic to one who examines the matter closely, looking mediately that this man has not assumed his place Studies at the University of Scranton and is the author of into the folds of their souls and the source from on the literary stage in order to “say his piece,” but The Limits of Orthodox Theology (Littman Library).

LETTERS (continued from page 4) and in my view the fault for any unpleasantness lies interpretation—that I found in a book that would to prevent the tradition from surviving this far, or not in my insistence upon demonstrating the inad- be used by many Jews at many tables. I thought I at all. But the persecutions of the Jews did not pre- equacies of this Haggadah but in the inadequacies was being helpful. (Since Stuart-Martin Kosofsky vail against the preservationist genius of the Jews. themselves. Presenting a new version of a central lectures me about “trees” and “forests,” I should They preserved their tradition because they prized text of Judaism, and making large claims for its su- point out to him that there are indeed translitera- it, not because they were persecuted. We are the periority to previous versions, is not a trifling matter, tions in the New American Haggadah. There are no custodians of what they, our ancestors, recent and and the standard by which it must be judged is not forests without trees.) ancient, preserved. We hold it in trust for those Maxwell House, unless of course everything Jewish Gilah Goldsmith’s letter includes two sentences who will come after us. We claim to revere it, and is to be prized mainly for its ethnic cuteness. Nathan that take my breath away and make me tremble for to be its beneficiaries. So by what right, by what Englander is no more “defenseless” than any writer or my brethren. The first is this: “Of course, as a wom- arrogance and ingratitude, do we condemn large translator who puts a book before the public. Indeed, an, it would have been rare at any time in Jewish portions of it, with our ignorance and our indiffer- too many American Jewish readers are defenseless history for me to have known much more than I do ence, to oblivion? The Jewish tradition, the Jewish against his mistakes and misrepresentations. now.” This, after she has admitted to “no knowledge God too, is not owed blind obedience, even ac- I did not imply, not for a moment, that “anyone of Hebrew.” But she is not living then, she is living cording to some canonical accounts of Jewish faith: finding value or meaning or an expanded kavana now. If, now, after the re-establishment of Hebrew Over the centuries many elements of the tradition through Englander’s take on the Pesach text is a as a living language, and in a Jewish community in have been rejected, or made obsolete by internally muttonhead.” It’s a free country, and different peo- which Hebrew instruction is not too hard to find, justified reform. But you cannot reject or reform ple attain spiritual enlargement in different ways. a Jewish woman, a woman who takes pride in her what you do not know. Dissent must be literate Souls come in many varieties, and for the soul it is Jewishness, knows no Hebrew, then she has only for it to have a strong claim on the inherited ways. always catch as catch can. If The Prince of Egypt lifts herself to blame. It can only be because she does not Otherwise it is just glibness or scorn. The stubborn you up, then be uplifted! ButThe Prince of Egypt is wish to know Hebrew, and believes that as a Jew she historical truth is that the primary instrument of not Abravanel or the Maharal, and it is just a shab- can do without it. Misogyny, religious or secular, is Jewish preservation and Jewish development has by internecine relativism to pretend otherwise. We no longer what stands in her way. Goldsmith now been Jewish knowledge, attended (but not always) are indeed “free to vary and interpret as we wish,” excludes herself with the memory of exclusion. This by Jewish practice. So “Judaism lite” is Judaism but the freedom to interpret does not vouch for is a chosen exclusion. weightless, and losing gravity; Judaism attenuated the quality of the interpretation. Kavana, at least Like many American Jews, Goldsmith is very and abandoned; our very own race to the bottom. in its traditional conception, is not whatever gets charitable about her Jewish shortcomings. And so I would not boast about it. you through the night. The integrity of its deriva- she writes, in her second unforgettable sentence: tion is a part of what makes it powerful. The soul “Admittedly Judaism lite, but mine such as it is.” I Lost and Misplaced operates, or should, in some relationship to the wonder if she is so blithe and self-forgiving about mind, which makes distinctions between spiritual her other passions and obligations. Against such The University of Chicago library that holds the opportunities. In the Jewish tradition even mys- relaxation, I would remind her of the following. two-volume album (“The Lost Textual Treasures of tics are intellectuals. Why would anybody want to This deep and beautiful tradition of ours has made a Hasidic Community,” Spring 2012) is the Regen- soar on wings of error? So it was important to me it all the way to us after a journey of over two thou- stein, not the Regensburg, Library. to expose the errors of translation and interpreta- sand years. It was not inevitable that this would be Rachelle Gold tion—and the error of mistaking translation for so. It was an agonizing journey. Many forces tried Chicago, IL

46 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2012 Last word Something Antigonus Said

BY Abraham Socher not: “let the fear of heaven be upon you.” sume was not payment for services rendered. It was, t is a custom to read a chapter of the Mishnah It is a severe teaching, and one, moreover, that instead, a gift given out of generosity or even grace. Pirkei Avot, “Ethics of the Fathers,” on each of seems to contradict the general tenor of Pirkei Avot, Rather than expect such kindness, a servant ought the six Sabbaths that fall between Passover and each chapter of which is traditionally prefaced with to serve his master out of love, a love that is precisely Shavuot. The traditional reason given for this the otherworldly (and somewhat implausible) rab- constituted by regarding the service as its own re- Iis that derekh eretz kadma le-torah, that is that ethics binic interpretation of a verse in Isaiah, which, on the ward. Just as a student studies at first for the reward are prior to, or a necessary prerequisite for, receiv- face of it, makes a promise of land to the people of of grades, honors, degrees, but (eventually, ideally) ing the Torah, which is what the summer festival of Israel rather than immortality to individual Israelites. he studies Torah for the sake of Torah itself. Shavuot (at least in rabbinic tradition) celebrates. If this divine-service-for-divine-service’s sake This is a nice thought but it isn’t entirely satisfy- All Israel has a share in the World to Come, as constitutes love, why did Antigonus end his teaching, since Pirkei Avot everywhere presumes revela- it is said: “And your people are all righteous, ing with the fear of heaven? Because, says Mai- tion and extolls the life lived in its strong light. As they shall inherit the land forever; they are the monides, the tradition understands that love is, the great literary critic Lionel Trilling once noted, branch of My planting, My handiwork, in which practically speaking, not always enough. It must Pirkei Avot views the Torah in something like the to take pride.” be paired with fear or awe. The pairing of love and way Wordsworth viewed Nature, as “a great object fear is certainly a rabbinic teaching, but was it An- which is from God and might be said to represent Or, to take a characteristic teaching within Pirkei tigonus’? In truth we have only this handful of He- Him as a sort of a surrogate, a divine object to which Avot, consider Rabbi Yaakov’s famous saying that brew words from Antigonus to go on, but none of one can be in an … active relationship.” “This world is comparable to the antechamber be- them mentions love. Trilling was no kind of rabbinic scholar—he was fore the World to Come. Prepare yourself in the familiar with Avot from idly flipping to the back of antechamber so that you may enter the banquet n 1951, Elias Bickerman asked Maimonides a his prayerbook as a bored, bookish child in syna- hall.” Isn’t this precisely what Antigonus would have Igood question: “What is the merit of a slave who gogue—but his remark is characteristically insight- called serving the master for the sake of a reward? works without hoping for a tip?” His answer was ful. Pirkei Avot famously begins: (One manuscript tradition is so uncomfortable with that Antigonus’ saying was far more radical than Antigonus that it adds a blatantly implausible last Maimonides had imagined. Peras was not a tip at Moses received the Torah from Sinai and gave it clause to his saying: “… and let the fear of heaven be all. It was the basic daily living allowance due a over to Joshua. Joshua gave it over to the Elders, upon you, so that your reward in the world to come slave. What Antigonus was saying was that there the Elders to the Prophets, and the Prophets will be doubled.”) was no payment for good actions, at least none gave it over to the Men of the Great Assembly. one could count on. Nonetheless, says Bickerman, They said three things: Be cautious in judgment. o the ethical teachings of the rabbinic tradi- Judaism taught “absolute obedience to the divine Establish many pupils. And make a fence Dtion more or less begin, then, with a denial will,” without any promise of a final reckoning in around the Torah. of the prospect of rewards for good deeds in either the afterlife. this life or the afterlife—or at least of the relevance Bickerman, who had escaped the Holocaust, hy- After this chain of tradition is established, the of any such reward? pothesized that Antigonus lived “shortly before or Mishnah proceeds to quote the sayings of individu- The answer of the later tradition would seem to during the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes,” als, the first of whom, Simon the Righteous, was a be not really, but almost. Avot de-Rabi Natan, an the Hellenist tyrant whose vicious repression led High Priest and “among the survivors of the Great early talmudic commentary on Pirkei Avot, tells the the Maccabees to revolt. But even if Bickerman’s Assembly” sometime in the early Second Temple following story: historical hypothesis is true, would Antigonus’ say- period, who said that “the world stands on three ing have been preserved in Pirkei Avot, if this was things: Torah, service [in the Temple], and acts of Antigonus of Sokho had two disciples [Zadok all there was to it, if it was only a dark teaching in a kindness.” and Boethius] who used to study his words. dark time? The next mishnah is the first to invoke a “father” They taught them to their disciples, and their Vladimir Nabokov had a character whose proof who is not a prophet or a priest or—in the case of disciples to their disciples. These proceeded of eternity was based on a misprint. According to the Great Assembly—an amorphous body shroud- to examine the words closely and demanded: the rabbis, their opponents the Sadducees did some- ed in myth. “Why did our ancestors see fit to say this thing? thing like the opposite: They lost eternity based on a Is it possible that a laborer should do his work misreading of Antigonus. But why, in any case, did Antigonus of Sokho received the tradition all day and not take his peras in the evening? the rabbinic tradition preserve his saying? It seems from Simon the Righteous. He said: Do not . . .” So they arose and withdrew from the to me that Antigonus’ teaching stands at or near be as servants, who serve their master on the Torah and split into two, the Sadducees and the the very beginning of a tradition that views humble condition of receiving a peras (remuneration). Boethusians … and they used silver vessels and obedience to an external law as a virtue, as, in fact, a Rather, be as servants who serve their master gold vessels all their lives … the Sadducees said central feature of a life well-lived. Antigonus’ teach- not for the sake of peras. And let the fear of “it is a tradition amongst the Pharisees to afflict ing, on this reading, is not a statement of pessimism, heaven be upon you. themselves in the world, but in the world to it’s a description of moral life: this is what it feels like come they will have nothing.” to be commanded. What is the teaching of this proto-Rabbi? An- Kant, who put our modern moral sentiments tigonus’ saying does not deny that we are servants It is often pointed out that Antigonus is a Greek into words before we felt them, once said that and God is the master. This is, in fact, a metaphor name and the seize-the-day ethos of his latter-day “kneeling down or groveling on the ground, even that the rabbinic tradition, and perhaps all of an- students, at least according to their rabbinic oppo- to express your reverence for heavenly things, is cient Judaism, lives by. Nor would the plain sense nents, sounds like a caricature of Epicureanism (if contrary to human dignity.” Is this what Antigonus of Antigonus’ saying seem to be denying that there we drop the fear of heaven bit). But if this was a mis- requires of us? I would like to think not. might indeed be a peras, whatever sort of payment understanding, how should Antigonus have been or reward that is. But such remuneration is, or understood? ought to be, irrelevant to this service. On the other Moses Maimonides’ answer was that the peras Abraham Socher is the editor of the Jewish Review of hand, if carrots are irrelevant, perhaps sticks are that Antigonus says a good servant ought not pre- Books.

Summer 2012 • Jewish Review of BooKS 47 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS A Publication of Bee.Ideas, LLC. 745 Fifth Avenue, Suite 1400 New York, NY 10151

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