On Robert Alter's Bible

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Barbara S. Burstin Pittsburgh's Jews and the Tree of Life JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS Volume 9, Number 4 Winter 2019 $10.45

On Robert Alter’s Bible Adele Berlin David Bentley Hart Shai Held Ronald Hendel Adam Kirsch Aviya Kushner Editor Abraham Socher BRANDEIS Senior Contributing Editor Allan Arkush UNIVERSITY PRESS Art Director Spinoza’s Challenge to Jewish Thought Betsy Klarfeld Writings on His Life, Philosophy, and Legacy Managing Editor Edited by Daniel B. Schwartz Amy Newman Smith “This collection of Jewish views on, and responses to, Spinoza over Web Editor the centuries is an extremely useful addition to the literature. That Rachel Scheinerman it has been edited by an expert on Spinoza’s legacy in the Jewish Editorial Assistant world only adds to its value.” Kate Elinsky Steven Nadler, University of Wisconsin March 2019 Editorial Board Robert Alter Shlomo Avineri Leora Batnitzky Ruth Gavison Moshe Halbertal Hillel Halkin Jon D. Levenson Anita Shapira Michael Walzer J. H.H. Weiler Ruth R. Wisse Steven J. Zipperstein

Executive Director Eric Cohen Publisher Gil Press

Chairman’s Council Blavatnik Family Foundation

Publication Committee The Donigers of Not Bad for The Soul of the Stranger Marilyn and Michael Fedak Great Neck Delancey Street Reading God and Torah from A Mythologized Memoir The Rise of Billy Rose a Transgender Perspective Ahuva and Martin J. Gross Wendy Doniger Mark Cohen Joy Ladin Susan and Roger Hertog Roy J. Katzovicz “Walking through the snow to see “Comprehensive biography . . . “This heartfelt, difficult work will Wendy at the stately, gracious compelling story. . . . Highly introduce Jews and other readers The Lauder Foundation– home of Rita and Lester Doniger recommended.” of the Torah to fresh, sensitive Leonard and Judy Lauder will forever remain in my memory.” Library Journal (starred review) approaches with room for broader Sandra Earl Mintz Francis Ford Coppola human dignity.” Tina and Steven Price Charitable Foundation Publishers Weekly (starred review) March 2019 Pamela and George Rohr Daniel Senor The Lost Library Jewish Legal Paul E. Singer The Legacy of Theories Vilna’s Strashun Writings on Library in the State, Religion, The Jewish Review of Books (Print ISSN 2153-1978, Online Aftermath of the and Morality ISSN 2153-1994) is a quarterly publication of ideas and Holocaust Edited by Leora criticism published in Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter, by Bee.Ideas, LLC., 165 East 56th Street, New York, NY 10022. Dan Rabinowitz Batnitzky and Yonatan Brafman For all subscriptions, please visit www.jewishreviewofbooks. com or send $39.95 ($49.95 outside of the U.S.; digital subscriptions: $19.99) to Jewish Review of Books, PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834. Digital subscription orders must include an email address. Please send notifications of address changes to the same address or to [email protected]. For customer service and subscription-related issues, please call (877) 753-0337 or write to [email protected].

“Rabinowitz detects a breathtaking history . . . that “This rich, fascinating volume shows Jewish legal Letters to the Editor should be emailed to [email protected] or to our editorial office, expresses the rupture of the Holocaust and the thought in dialogue with modernity, from the nation- 3091 Mayfield Road, Suite 412, Cleveland Heights, OH 44118. contested visions of Jewish life after catastrophe.” state to reproductive technology, feminism, and Please send all unsolicited manuscripts to the attention of the Elisabeth Gallas, Leibniz Institute beyond.” editors at [email protected] or to our edi- Noah Feldman, Harvard Law School torial office. Review copies should be sent to our editorial office. Advertising inquiries should be sent to [email protected]. www.brandeis.edu/library/bup.html | 800-621-2736 JEWISH REVIEW Volume 9, Number 4 Winter 2019 OF BOOKS www.jewishreviewofbooks.com LETTERS 4 Was Newton a Magician?, Don't Forget Pumbedita!, and Was Herzog Crazy? FEATURES 5 Ronald Hendel, Robert Alter's Bible: A Symposium In the 14 years since he published The Five Books of Moses, Alter has Aviya Kushner, Shai steadily progressed through the Tanakh, producing translations that aim at something like a 21st-century American Held, David Bentley equivalent of what he has called the “simple yet grand” English of the King James Version, while attending closely to the literary techniques of the Hebrew text. We asked a learned, eclectic group of six critics to discuss the results. Hart, Adele Berlin, Adam Kirsch

13 Barbara S. Burstin Pittsburgh Jews, Squirrel Hill, and the Tree of Life In the wake of the recent massacre, a local historian tells the story of the Pittsburgh Jewish community and the 154-year-old Tree of Life synagogue.

16 Gavriel D. Rosenfeld Digital Anti-Semitism: From Irony to Ideology From tweeting trolls to digital incitement, a contemporary history.

REVIEWS

18 Ezra Blaustein Historical Agency Maimonides and the Merchants: Jewish Law and Society in the Medieval Islamic World by Mark R. Cohen

20 Jonathan Karp Workday Jews Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought by Chad Alan Goldberg • Jewish Materialism: The Intellectual Revolution of the 1870s by Eliyahu Stern 23 Allan Arkush Counting Jews A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War by Tim Grady 25 Tuvia Friling Confusions and Illusions: 1939 The Road to September 1939: Polish Jews, Zionists, and the Yishuv on the Eve of World War II by Jehuda Reinharz and Yaacov Shavit 27 Robert Nason The Homecoming Our Israel Diary: Of That Time, Of That Place by Antonia Fraser 31 Gary Saul Morson Lenin and Maimonides A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism by Paul Hanebrink

34 Annika Freethinker Guardian Angel: My Journey from Leftism to Sanity by Melanie Phillips Hernroth-Rothstein

36 Liam Hoare Doron Rabinovici and the Crisis of European Jewish Identity The Search for M by Doron Rabinovici, translated by Francis M. Sharp • Elsewhere by Doron Rabinovici, translated by Tess Lewis READINGS 38 Steven Nadler Who Tried to Kill Spinoza? According to early biographers, somebody tried to kill Spinoza on the streets of Amsterdam. Is the story true, and, if so, who were his attackers?

41 Rick Richman Chaim of Arabia: The First Arab-Zionist Alliance Chaim Weizmann regarded his 1919 agreement with Emir Faisal as an epoch-making treaty. That didn’t turn out to be the case, but a century later an Arab-Zionist alliance may be reemerging. THE ARTS 44 Dara Horn Yiddish Heroism, Hebrew Tears Black Honey, The Life and Poetry of Avraham Sutzkever directed by Uri Barbash, produced by Yair Qedar LAST WORD 47 Abraham Socher Books vs. Children

On the cover: Tree of Life by Mark Anderson. LETTERS

Was Newton a Magician? Matt Goldish Responds: ernments, the pull of democracy was strong. It is Professor Goldish’s insightful essay on Isaac New- I am not entirely clear what I said in my review of also true that the dominant ideology of the Yishuv ton (“Maimonides, Stonehenge, and Newton’s Ob- Rob Illiffe’s excellent book which inspired this re- was the new ideology of the 19th century: democ- sessions,” Summer 2018), based on Rob Iliffe’s book sponse from Professor Smith. I take Newton’s mind racy in politics, socialism in economics. Priest of Nature, unfortunately overlooks what to and his context extremely seriously. I am an histo- In post-1948 Israel, the economics of social- me is the most important takeaway for us as mod- rian and I never for a second thought of Newton as ism has proven to be unable to adapt to the 21st- ern citizens of the world, namely, how we should an “eccentric nut” during the years I spent reading century reality, and Israel now has a strong and think about science and religion. He seems to adopt his manuscripts. I would, in fact, question Profes- vibrant capitalist economy. The political com- the same attitude toward Newton first expressed by sor Smith’s assumption that there is a “takeaway” ponent, democracy, is alive and well in modern Keynes—that he was “the last of the magicians,” who for the modern reader in the study of Newton’s reli- Israel. But the freewheeling democracy practiced believed that there were “certain mystic clues which gious thought. Newton was a man of his times and a in Israel reminds me too much of the Weimar God had laid about the world” in both nature and dedicated Arian Christian, as well as a millenarian. Republic in pre-WWII Germany and the Fourth scripture. Today this label carries rather demeaning He believed that God was revealing natural and bib- Republic in France. Both of them came to ends connotations and implies that, despite a lifetime of lical knowledge to him in preparation for the End of that were not good. I hope that does not happen brilliant physical and mathematical insights, his re- Days. Is that part of the “takeaway”? Newton’s con- in Israel. ligious beliefs and studies of the Hebrew Bible and clusions about the relationship between science and Jay Stonehill mystical texts (including the Zohar) mark him as an religion were completely informed by his Christian- Chicago, IL eccentric nut preoccupied with superstitious medi- ity, his milieu, his eclectic reading, and his idiosyn- eval notions (ha-ha, but today we know better). cratic theology. Perhaps Professor Smith would do I suggest this view of Newton is condescending me the favor of reading what I have written about Was Herzog Crazy? and unfair. Speaking as a practicing scientist, New- Newton elsewhere before making baseless assump- I think Rich Cohen has gotten much of Herzog ton’s genius was in part to recognize that there are tions about my views. wrong (“Tweets and Bellows,” Fall 2018), though I’m puzzling features of the physical world unaccounted always glad to read about this important and mas- for even by his novel physical insights, and to seek terful novel. The main thing Cohen gets wrong is his answers broadly. People in 2018 might say that Don't Forget Pumbedita! assertion that Herzog has “gone insane,” something the reductionist approach of science has by now Shlomo Avineri, in “A Normal Israel?” (Fall 2018), Cohen repeats throughout his essay. The opening sorted all those puzzles out; perhaps in 1946 when asserts that the tradition of self-governance that line of the novel, which Cohen quotes, is more a Keynes made the remark he thought so, too. But in impacted Israel’s current democracy stemmed sign that Herzog is not insane and not crazy but has fact they are mistaken. About 95 percent of what from the voluntaristic kehilot system that was a rather healthy sense of self-deprecation. I believe makes the cosmos go is a total mystery to us (that prevalent in Poland in the Middle Ages. It should Bellow describes Herzog’s letters as a means of “hav- is, dark matter and dark energy). Quantum me- be pointed out that this kehila tradition goes back ing it out,” but, in reading the novel many times, I chanics, despite its power and ubiquitous practical much further, to the Jewish civilization in Babylon never got the impression that Herzog was “crazy” applications, remains thoroughly mysterious and (present-day Iraq). From the 5th to the 10th cen- or “insane” or that Bellow intended Herzog to be paradoxical, and is unexplained at the most funda- tury, Jewish communal organization and reli- seen as such. He of course is a man with profound mental levels of reality. (Einstein, for example, who gious thought were grounded in a unique system inner conflicts, but that is far from being insane. I modernized Newton’s laws with his Relativity, never of separation of powers. The two main compet- also cannot credit Cohen’s view that Herzog would believed the conventional interpretation of quan- ing institutions were the Exilarchate, headed by a be a Twitter user or social-media junkie. Herzog is tum mechanics.) As for the forces of nature and government-approved resh galuta, who repre- portrayed as a man not really of his own time even subatomic physics, the “Standard Model” in physics sented the Jewish community before the ruling in the novel; he is in many ways a relic of a more dis- is a remarkable achievement, but one that, despite authorities, and the gaonate, located in the two tant age. So, no, Herzog was not intended to be seen decades of labor by tens of thousands of scientists Jewish religious centers of Sura and Pumbedita, as “half-deranged,” “insane,” or “crazy.” Had Bellow and billions of dollars in complex facilities, still and headed by two geonim. Decisions on social made him so, Herzog would not have been nearly as fails to incorporate gravity—and fails even to offer and religious matters were debated (sometimes powerful or sympathetic or moving a creation. a fully consistent picture. Meanwhile, the promised bitterly) and adjudicated between these three Alan Gandelman hints of new (supersymmetric) particles to resolve semiautonomous centers, and these decisions were via jewishreviewofbooks.com the problems have not yet materialized, and it’s not accepted by Jewish communities across the Middle looking hopeful. These are all well-known, accepted East and into Europe. The 500-year existence of Recently, I began deleting all of my social-media ac- issues among physicists. For now, the way forward this “balance of power” system must surely have counts; the last to go will be Facebook because that is murky, but eventually the answers to these ques- had an impact a few hundred years later in the deletion will be met with some resistance and puz- tions will be sorted out. Then, we expect that even creation of the Council of Four Lands that existed zlement on the part of family and friends. Oh well. deeper mysteries will rise to the fore. in Eastern Europe for several hundred years and It must be done. My brain is mush and my writing I suggest these signals from nature and science which Avineri considers the source of an age-long is only getting worse, not to mention the deleterious all point to the same thing that Newton recognized Jewish self-rule democratic tradition. attention span on account of social-media nausea. in his time: Something more complicated is going Dr. Mordecai Paldiel Thank you Mr. Cohen for this piece, which further on. It seems to me that Newton was trying to fig- New York, NY helps me along my way to a quiet room of my own, ure out truth in a puzzling world that he observed where the light will burn, the pen will travel, and both carefully and objectively. Moreover, he was In his review of In Search of Israel: The History of you’re always welcome to come over for a cup of not afraid to work hard, to commit totally, and to an Idea by Michael Brenner, Shlomo Avineri does coffee and conversation. look into other sources of wisdom for possible in- not mention that the British Mandate allowed both Anthony Connolly sights. Newton was both a scientist and a religious the Arab and Jewish communities to run their own via jewishreviewofbooks.com believer, and was honest enough to struggle with internal affairs. Yet it was only the Jewish commu- the issues raised by his “modernity.” This makes him nity, the Yishuv, that set up a democratic system of a particularly relevant personality for us, one whose government. Why is that? My own feelings is that example is worth emulating. the Haskalah movement encouraged the Jews of Editorial Note: We invite readers who have not de- Dr. Howard Smith Europe and the Western Hemisphere to integrate leted Facebook to “like” our Facebook page and join in Cambridge, MA into the general society, and with the American and discussions of our content—including pieces that are (Howard Smith is a senior astrophysicist in the Har- French revolutions, the ideals of democracy were published only on the web. Letters can also be emailed vard Astronomy Department and the author of Let the goals of the general population in those areas. to [email protected]. There Be Light: Modern Cosmology and Kabbalah, For Europeans, even Eastern Europeans who New World Library). were not exposed to living under democratic gov-

4 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2019 FEATURES Robert Alter's Bible: A Symposium

n the mid-1970s, scholar and critic Robert Alter began writing about the literary techniques of the Bible. In the mid-1990s, he began to translate it, beginning with Genesis, then moving forward to the story of King David in the two books of Samuel and the beginning of Kings, before turning back to translate the other four books of Moses. IThese translations were accompanied by a lucid commentary, which was animated by Alter’s characteristic concerns with the techniques of ancient Hebrew prose and poetry. The commentary, as much by its unapologetic presence as by its frequent recourse to Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and others, marked the distinctively Jewish nature of Alter’s project. This was inadvertently pointed out by John Updike’s somewhat peevish and very Protestant complaint in the New Yorker that Alter spent too much time luxuriating “in the forked possibilities of the Hebrew text.” After all, the company of translators who had produced the King James Version had worked “to supply readers with a self-explanatory text.” It has, of course, been the central claim of the Jewish traditions of reading scripture, to which Alter is heir, that it can’t be read alone. In the 14 years since he published The Five Books of Moses, Alter has steadily progressed through the Tanakh, continuing to produce translations that aim at something like a 21st-century American equivalent of what he has called the “simple yet grand” English of the King James Version, while relentlessly attending to the literary techniques and “forked possibilities of the Hebrew text.” Although the sheer scale of Alter’s achievement in translating the entire Hebrew Bible has been widely remarked upon, it is worth noting just how unprecedented it is. Every major, complete translation of the Hebrew Bible into English over the last half-millennium has been, like the King James Version and the two Jewish Publication Society translations, a group project. (Of the great early modern solo translators, William Tyndale did not translate the entire Hebrew Bible and Miles Coverdale did not really know Hebrew; of the most prominent 19th- and 20th-century Jewish translators, Isaac Leeser and Harold Fisch, both would be perhaps better described as revisers of earlier translations.) Perhaps more importantly, Alter’s Hebrew Bible is the only single-author translation by someone who has spent a lifetime studying literary artistry in both Hebrew and English. This is not to say that it is, or could be, beyond criticism. In the following symposium, we have asked six critics, each with his or her own disciplinary specialty and literary ear, to respond to a key passage or more from Alter’s commentary. —The Editors

then each word matters, as does its position in the translation a strange creole that points toward the “ verse. Thus, Aquila translates the first Hebrew word, original Hebrew, which lies just behind the curtain By Babylon's bereishit, as “in head” in order to represent its lexi- of the translation. As with Aquila, the theory of cal root, reish-aleph-shin, which as a common noun translation in these cases is more compelling than Streams” means “head.” And he translates the direct object the translation itself. But there is also an important marker ’et twice as “with,” since this form can, in other difference between Aquila’s Akivaesque translation and that of his word-by-word successors in the 20th BY RONALD HENDEL century. Aquila struggled to represent the Bible’s grammar because it was literally God’s grammar. Bu- obert Alter’s translation of the Hebrew ber, Rosenzweig, and Fox worked to emphasize the Bible is the best—and arguably the first— Bible’s uncanniness in order to awaken their readers literary translation of the world’s bestseller. from their modern complacency. The holy tongue InR the long history of Bible translations there have (lashon ha-kodesh) became a dialogical other. been two standard approaches: translating word Most modern translations take the opposite by word or sense by sense. The first prioritizes tack: They attempt to familiarize the Bible by re- the lexicon and grammar of the source language formulating its ideas into clear, often vernacular, (Hebrew, with a smattering of Aramaic), while the English. In doing so, they privilege the target lan- second privileges the intelligibility of the target guage, in this case English, over the source, biblical language (in this case, English). Alter has moved Hebrew. For instance, the New Jewish Publica- beyond these approaches. He aims to represent the tion Society translation (NJPS) describes the pro- artistry of the Hebrew, using the full resources of tagonists of Genesis 6:1–4, the benei ha-elohim, as literary English. This is a new and different kind of “divine beings” rather than “the sons of God,” as strategy, and it has yielded significantly different in other translations (including Alter). The NJPS results. explains the unusual Hebrew phrase, rather than pre- The most exacting case of word-by-word trans- Robert Alter. serving its strangeness. This is justifiable, but it loses lation is Aquila of Sinope’s translation of the Bible the texture of the phrase and its literary parallelism into Greek. Aquila, known as “the convert” (ger), contexts, mean “with.” Aquila translates word by word with benot ha-adam, “the daughters of man” (to use seems to have applied the convert’s zeal to trans- in order to fully represent the Hebrew, including root Alter’s translation), with whom the sons of God lation. Famously, he even translated untranslat- meanings and grammatical features. It is a triumph of have sex and beget mighty offspring. Moreover, it able words, like the direct-object marker ’et, which fidelity to the original over making sense. loses the sense that the boundary between ha-elohim indicates the grammatical case of the next word. In modern times, Martin Buber and Franz and ha-adam, gods and humans, has been danger- Rabbi Akiva is said to have interpreted each ’et with Rosenzweig attempted (in German) a slightly less ously violated when sons and daughters of these a distinctive meaning, and Aquila may have been frenzied version of the word-by-word strategy. They opposite domains become one flesh. his disciple, carrying this interpretive strategy into aimed to represent the linguistic texture of the He- translation. brew in order to defamiliarize the Bible, to make it he key to Alter’s translation is his sophisticat- So, for example, Aquila translates the first verse strange and thus new, both aesthetically and reli- Ted understanding of the artistic conventions of Genesis with an eye to each Hebrew word: en giously. Their unfinished translation succeeded in its and style of biblical prose and poetry, as codified in kephalaiō ektisen theos sun ton ouranon kai sun tēn gēn aims, but it was a very odd German text. Everett Fox his now-classic books The Art of Biblical Narrative (“In head, God created with the heaven and with the adopted the same strategy in his English translation and The Art of Biblical Poetry. He privileges not the earth”). It doesn’t make much sense in Greek either, of the Torah and early prophets. Fox foregrounded words, syntax, or semantics of the Hebrew but its but it isn’t arbitrary. If the Bible is the word of God, the words and syntax of the Hebrew, making the style and literary resonance, which can be—albeit

Winter 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 5 partially and imperfectly—represented in Eng- set, using English resources to mimic the Hebrew reproduce the literary quality of the Hebrew and lish. We can see what Alter is after by comparing alliterative style. Similarly, he represents the internal fails, and sometimes it is impossible even to try his translation of the beginning of Psalm 137, the parallelism of the second verset with rhythmic par- (Frost was at least partly right when he defined famous lament “by the rivers of Babylon,” to the allelism in English: “there we sat, oh we wept.” The poetry as what is lost in translation). The virtue of word-by-word translation of the King James Ver- Alter’s version is that he tries to represent the ca- sion (KJV) and the intermittently sense-by-sense The key to Alter’s translation dence, parallelisms, repetitions, terseness, and translation of the NJPS. In chronological order: sometimes sheer difficulty of the Hebrew in a sup- is his sophisticated ple, refined literary English. This is a marvelous By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, goal, which no one has attempted at this level of we wept, when we remembered Zion. (KJV) understanding of the artistic precision and expertise. It is a magnificent achievement, a simulacrum of the greatness of the original. the rivers of Babylon, conventions and style of there we sat, sat and wept, biblical prose and poetry. Ronald Hendel is the Norma and Sam Dabby Professor as we thought of Zion. (NJPS) of Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies at the University of extra words in the KJV (“down”) and NJPS (the sec- California, Berkeley. His new book is How Old Is the By Babylon’s streams, ond “sat,” which is not in the Hebrew) obscure the Hebrew Bible? A Linguistic, Textual, and Historical there we sat, oh we wept, rhythm and parallelism of these two verbs. Alter’s Study (Yale University Press), which he coauthored with when we recalled Zion. (Alter) interjection “oh” (for Hebrew gam) nicely intensifies Jan Joosten.

“And It Shall Happen in Future Days”

BY AVIYA KUSHNER

obert Alter’s historic one-man translation of the entire Hebrew Bible is like two worlds at once, the heavens and the earth, with the translationR above and the commentary below. One can spend a lifetime in either of these worlds. The largeness of the task of the Torah translator is reflected in the committee effort of the Jewish Publication Society (JPS) and the team approach of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig (with At the Waters of Babylon by Gebhard Fugel, ca. 1920. (Diocesan Museum, Freising.) Buber eventually completing the translation alone in 1961). But Alter also offers a translator’s commentary, explaining numerous aspects of biblical The Hebrew original is a terse, 10-word verse: the movement from “sat” to “wept,” framing it as a Hebrew to the English reader and illuminating his ‘al naharot bavel sham yashavnu gam bakhinu bezo- kind of second thought, a confession of deep emo- own translation decisions. In this, he stands alone. khreinu ’et tziyon. The KJV accurately reproduces tion. None of these literary effects is even ventured Commentators often begin with an introduction the form of the Hebrew as prose. This suits a word- in the other translations. to their way of reading. Sometimes, as in the case of by-word translation that privileges the original Alter also sharpens the style of the canonical the great medieval commentator Abraham ibn Ezra, Hebrew. The NJPS and Alter represent the verse KJV rendering of “rivers” and “remembered” by upon whom Alter himself often draws, they also use as poetry, which correctly exemplifies the modern using short words, “streams” and “recalled.” We are it as an opportunity to explain the shortcomings of understanding of the psalm’s literary form. Alter so used to the KJV language here that these choices other commentators. In Alter’s extensive introduc- meticulously presents the verse as a tricolon, with may sound strange, but the short words mimic the tions, both to the entire translation and to each indi- internal parallelism in the second verset (a kind of terseness of the Hebrew, drawing on the Anglo- vidual book, he explains his mode of translating and subverse within a line of biblical poetry), which the Saxon substrate of English rather than the French, often shares what he judges to be the flaws of other NJPS incorrectly divides into two versets. Alter’s hewing closer to the clipped Hebrew of the origi- translations. “[T]he characteristic biblical syntax is division of this verse into three parts is confirmed nal. The verb “recall” is also close to the sounds of additive,” he writes. The simple “and” (the vav prefix), by its accentual rhythm of 3:3:2. the Hebrew word zakhar, with its r and k sounds. Alter writes, is “the way the ancient Hebrew writers The classic KJV translation “By the rivers of Bab- (Compare the NJPS “thought,” a flat colloquial ren- saw the world, linked events in it,” yet previous trans- ylon” is followed by the NJPS. Alter shortens this dering, which loses the resonance of the Hebrew.) lators have routinely elided the biblical “and”s. Thus, five-word English sequence into three words, mim- By using a different English vocabulary than that of he notes, his translation of the four and a half verses icking the three-word Hebrew. In doing so, he cre- the KJV, Alter approximates the effects of the He- in which Rebekah waters Abraham’s servant’s camels ates an alliterative sequence, “By Babylon’s.” The He- brew. His translation also recalls us to the fact that— has 15 “and”s; the Revised English Bible has just five. brew (al naharot bavel) doesn’t have sound play here, its familiarity and resonance notwithstanding—the It is impossible to miss the effect. but it does in the second verset, sham yashavnu gam KJV is not the original. The Hebrew has a life of its Older translations suffer from a lack of famil- bakhinu, with sha–sha and sham–gam and, spilling own, which Alter tries to capture in crisp English. iarity with Hebrew, Alter writes, while more recent over into the third verset, the thrice-repeated -nu. Of course, not all of Alter’s translations are as translations suffer from the opposite malady: flawed So Alter transposes the alliteration to the first ver- brilliantly effective as this. Sometimes he tries to or pedestrian English. While this is largely true,

6 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2019 every serious translation brings something to the nine syllables long. Usually, Hebrew is more concise “That the mount of the Lord’s house shall be firm- table, even if it is as small as one sublimely translated than English. Here, Ginsberg makes English more founded / at the top of the mountains and lifted over verse. Perhaps this reflects the largeness of the task. concise than Hebrew. Alter, to his credit, tries to re- the hills.” The italicized phrase is an invented con- The ideal way to read the Hebrew Bible in transla- produce the rhythm of Hebrew by reproducing the struction, and, to my ear, not entirely felicitous either. tion may be to read several translations at once. syllable count; “and it shall happen in future days” As the reader will have noticed, Alter and Gins- is exactly nine syllables long. And yet I am not sure berg also disagree on what the nations are doing at or all of the King James Version’s flaws, it is dif- the end of the verse. Alter takes the more straight- Fficult to surpass its poetry. In his translation of forward position that naharu is a denominative of Isaiah, Alter wisely preserves some of its magnifi- the noun nahar, meaning “stream” or “river”; hence cent contributions, including the beginning of the the nations flow toward Jerusalem as the capital of opening chapter’s second verse—“Hear, O heavens, divine justice. Ginsberg follows the medieval gram- and give ear, O earth.” marian Ibn Janah and Ginsberg’s academic col- As Alter notes, Isaiah likely presents “the great- league Baruch Schwartz in deriving it from the term est challenge that modern readers will find in the for “light” in biblical Aramaic, and thus he has the biblical corpus to their notions of what constitutes nations gazing toward Jerusalem. a book.” This makes it an ideal setting for Alter’s I wonder how Ginsberg (who passed away in 1990) translation-plus-commentary approach, simply be- would have responded to Alter’s Isaiah, both in its cause there is so much to explain—from why other grand poetic flow and with regard to the many min- translators veered from the rhythm of verse to how ute philological and stylistic decisions that a translator the book coheres (or doesn’t). But there are also must make in the course of translating even a verse. moments in Alter’s Isaiah that showcase the risks of Of course, Alter cannot raise the dead, but he is a literary translation that has the twin goals of being able—through his commentary—to give the reader faithful to what the Hebrew is saying and saying it in Medieval commentator Abraham ibn Ezra, on whom of English a seat at the table with translators and expressive, stylish English. Alter draws. commentators, living and long gone. His commen- Consider the famous prophecy of Isaiah 2:2, tary shows the English reader what is an issue of which begins with the iconic Hebrew phrase ve- that “and it shall happen in future days” is a decisive biblical Hebrew and what is a question of English haya be-achrit ha-yamim. Here is Alter’s translation: improvement over “in the days to come.” style; this is a gift that will remain ours, both “in Both Ginsberg and Alter seem to make Eng- future days” and “in the days to come.” And it shall happen in future days lish stretch with this verse. Ginsberg translates: that the mount of the Lord’s house shall be “The Mount of the Lord’s House / Shall stand firm-founded firm above the mountains / And tower above the Aviya Kushner is the author of The Grammar of at the top of the mountains and lifted over hills;” using the word “above” twice. But it’s clearly God (Spiegel & Grau). She is the Forward’s language the hills. a hard line, and Alter, too, finds it difficult to re- columnist and an associate professor at Columbia And all the nations shall flow to it . . . produce the prophet’s placement of the Temple: College Chicago.

Alter’s commentary notes that “in the end of days,” found in many older translations, gives the phrase an “emphatically eschatological meaning it does not have.” (The King James has, “And it shall come to pass in the last days.”) “The Hebrew ’aharit,” he writes, “derived from the word that means ‘after,’ refers to an indefinite time after the present.” The great biblical scholar H. L. Ginsberg, with whom Alter studied in the 1950s, had the same view of the meaning of be-achrit ha-yamim, but his art wonderful 1973 translation for JPS renders the verse photogr aphy quite differently. As I read Alter’s Isaiah, I imagined architecture modernism these two towering, and very different, scholars in judaica & bibles dialogue. Ginsberg’s knowledge of biblical Hebrew holocaust and cognate languages was unexcelled, but Alter is yiddish & hebrew a master of both biblical literary technique and the foreign language English and European literary tradition. olympic games Ginsberg translates the first part of Isaiah 2:2 appraisal services with four short lines, compared to Alter’s three long BULLETIN DES LOIS DE L’EMPIRE FRANçAIS:4EME SéRIE lines. In all, Ginsberg’s translation is shorter—and 1806–1814, Paris: Imprimerie Impériale. his first line renders ve-haya be-achrit ha-yamim in First edition. 7 volumes. (37886) $3,500 Napoleon Bonaparte’s legal decrees, just five English words: including the laws that granted Jews civil rights throughout the Empire, expanding the Jewish Emancipation that began with In the days to come, limited rights after the French Revolution.

The Mount of the Lord’s House DECRETO DE NAPOLEON...LOS JUDIOS... López Cancelada, Juan (editor). 1807, Shall stand firm above the mountains México: ...Don Mariano de Zúñiga y And tower above the hills; Ontiveros. First edition. (43983) $6,500 Bonaparte’s laws regarding Jews, activity And all the nations of the Assembly of Jewish Notables and the Paris Sanhedrin, including responses to Shall gaze on it with joy. Napoleon’s 12 key religious-vs-state-law questions. With Sephardic history, customs and ceremonies. Illustrated with 8 plates. In fact, Ginsberg’s first two and a half lines are mono- TRANSACTIONS OF THE PARISIAN syllabic, which gives the beginning of the prophecy a SANHEDRIN...DATED MAY 30, 1806 grand, breath-filled rhythm; the reader has no choice 1956, Hebrew Union College. (17986) $45 but to breathe in that line, probably between “days” Partial view of the Great Sanhedrin. (43983) and “to.” Yet ve-haya be-achrit ha-yamim is actually

Winter 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 7 In a magnificent bit of wordplay, Exodus 1 has The association of Pharaoh with the forces of presented Pharaoh as working to prevent Israel chaos is made explicit elsewhere in the Bible. In what “Let Me Sing unto from proliferating (“lest they multiply”—in He- is arguably the most crucial example, the prophet brew, pen yirbeh); yet, the Bible reports, “[A]s they Ezekiel calls the Egyptian king ha-tanim ha-gadol, abused them, so did they multiply [ken yirbeh] and which the NJPS translation renders as “mighty mon- the Lord for He so did they spread” (1:10, 12). Following Rashi, ster” and the New International Version as “great Alter notes the play on words—pen yirbeh versus ken yirbeh—but, again, does not underscore the For the theologically minded Surged, O Surged” broader significance for his readers: In the book of Exodus, the forces of life, aligned with God, are reader, Alter opens many engaged in a massive struggle with the forces of BY SHAI HELD death, aligned with Pharaoh. The forces of ken doors, even if he himself does yirbeh are at war with the forces of pen yirbeh. hen Pharaoh and the Egyptians real- Accordingly, when Exodus 14 invokes “sea” and not always walk through ize that the Israelites have fled Egypt, “dry land,” the point is not only that God retains they have a change of heart and ask, in control over the physical world but that the lib- them. RobertW Alter’s meticulous translation, “What is eration of these slaves and the defeat of this tyrant this we have done [mah zot asinu], that we sent off represent a cosmic victory for creation over chaos monster.” Pharaoh is thus associated with the pri- Israel from our service?” (Ex. 14:5); just six verses and for life over death. As the Bible scholar Terence meval sea monster whom God defeats in establish- later, as the Israelites approach the sea, they panic Fretheim has noted, in separating the waters, God ing order and creating the world, according to Psalm and demand of Moses, mah zot asita? Aiming for 74:13–14 (and some other biblical the idiomatic, the NJPS translation renders this texts). as, “What have you done?” and misses what Alter Reading Exodus in light of calls its “pointed echo” of verse 5; he translates the Ezekiel, we see that God’s van- later verse as, “What is this you have done [mah zot quishing of Pharaoh reenacts the asita] to us to bring us out of Egypt?” (14:11). primordial victory over the sea When a significant word or phrase is repeated monster. Some scholars suggest in a given text, Alter works hard to capture the rep- that since Ezekiel’s prophecy deals etition, but of course he is attentive to more subtle with Pharaoh and his relationship literary features of the text as well. Thus, in the tri- with the Nile, tanim should here umphant Song of the Sea that follows upon God’s be rendered as “crocodile” rather miraculous salvation of the people, Alter displays than “monster.” But they general- his ingenuity as both translator and commentator. ly note that even if crocodile is the Exulting in God’s decisive defeat of Pharaoh and primary meaning of the word, its the Egyptians, the Israelites declare that they will mythological overtones remain. sing to the Lord ki ga’oh ga’ah, ordinarily rendered Alter translates ha-tanim haas “for he has triumphed gloriously” (15:1). Noting gadol as “great crocodile,” ex- in his commentary that the Hebrew word ga’ah is plaining that “although this same also the verb used to describe the sea’s rising tide, “a Hebrew word in Genesis and concrete image that is especially apt for representing Psalms refers to a mythological God’s overwhelming the Egyptians with the waters sea beast, here it is the croco- of the Sea of Reeds,” Alter beautifully captures the dile, whose habitat is the Nile, Bible’s “vivid pun”: “Let me sing unto the Lord for and who also is an emblem for He surged, O surged.” Pharaoh.” But it seems to me un- As Alter has repeatedly argued over the years, likely that tanim means crocodile understanding the literary techniques of the Bible is rather than monster; if anything, indispensable for understanding “what the biblical it suggests both: Calling Pha- writers meant to say about God, creation, history, hu- raoh a crocodile conjures up the man nature, morality, and the destiny of the people monster for the biblical reader. of Israel.” And yet in his commentary to this passage In Ezekiel as in Exodus, Alter and others, one wishes that he were more attuned to slights the mythological drama the deeply theological story the Bible is telling about of God’s confrontation with God and Israel. The story of the Exodus is not just Pharaoh. about a national god who liberates his people from “The Sea of Reeds” (Lodz, 1934) from The Szyk Haggadah. (Courtesy Robert Alter is captivated by brutal enslavement. It is, crucially, the story of the of Historicana, Burlingame, CA.) the Bible’s literary genius, and he Creator God scoring a momentous triumph in His has done more than anyone in battle with the cosmic forces of evil and chaos. recapitulates the creation of the world. The defeat of our time to reveal its intricate workings and ren- As the Egyptians approach, God uses the wind Pharaoh is a victory for creation. Not surprisingly, der its results in limpid English prose, but he is less to turn the sea into dry ground, enabling the in the Song of the Sea the Israelites are described absorbed by, and therefore less attentive to, its reli- Israelites to “c[o]me into the sea [yam] on dry land as am zu kanita (15:16), which Alter renders as gious pathos. His translation has a rare grace, and [yabashah], the waters a wall to them on their right “the people You made Yours.” He observes that the his commentary is studded with arresting insights. and on their left” (14:21–22). In his commentary, Hebrew word kanita “means ‘to acquire,’ ‘to pur- For the theologically minded reader, Alter opens Alter rightly notes that “[t]he key terms here hark chase,’ and occasionally ‘to create’” and adds that many doors, even if he himself does not always walk back to the first creation (God’s breath-spirit-wind, “[t]he liberation from Egyptian slavery is taken [by through them. ruah; the dividing between sea and dry land)” and the song] as the great historical demonstration that then observes that “[God’s] power over the physi- God has adopted Israel as His special people.” What cal elements of the world He created is again mani- this misses is what we might call the creational Shai Held is the president, dean, and chair in Jewish fested, this time in a defining event in the theater of sense of kanita—in splitting the waters of the sea, thought at Hadar and the author, most recently, of a history.” This is true as far as it goes, but it ignores God is recreating the world: Now, as then, chaos is two-volume collection of essays, The Heart of Torah the unfolding theological drama. defeated, and life emerges triumphant. (Jewish Publication Society).

8 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2019 magical ability to achieve a continuous equilibrium room for merely adequate achievement. Happily, he between them. acquits himself more than honorably. “You Who Dwell By those standards, no one could hope to suc- Then again, I share many of Alter’s prejudices re- ceed entirely. A translator with ambitions of that sort garding the proper approach to scriptural translation. in the Garden, has to enter the ring not only with the King James I approve especially of his desire to retain concrete Version but with Tyndale’s Bible, and Coverdale’s, images, rather than treating them as simple meta- and the Bishops’ Bible—each of which abounds in phors and transposing them into an abstract key. Friends Listen for strange beauties, limpid sonorities, and glittering His decision to render hevel as “mere breath,” for in- rhetorical figures, mesmerizing in their plain sub- stance, and havel havelim as “merest breath” seems Your Voice” limity, opulent archaism, or gorgeous obscurity. right to me, even if one laments all the connotations The Coverdale Psalter alone, whose shimmering, it fails to make perfectly explicit. Surely, it is closer solemn cadences grace the old Anglican Book of to the vividness of the Hebrew than the traditional BY DAVID BENTLEY HART Alter aspires to be at once as literal as possible in his o translate scripture is to risk a chorus of complaint, censure, vituperation, or (worst rendering of the Masoretic text and also as faithful as of all) helpful suggestions. Biblical schol- Tars, even if well disposed to the project, will take possible to its extraordinary literary range and power. exception to the ways the final product fails to reflect their own published views of the sources. Common Prayer, should strike fear in any transla- “vanity” and “vanity of vanities” of older translations. Literary critics will draw unflattering comparisons tor’s heart. The language of the King James, which More broadly, it seems to me a healthy impulse to the King James Version and will object to every is somehow at once both transparent and concrete, on Alter’s part to eschew paraphrase and to resist infelicity (no matter how unavoidable) produced captures in almost ideal form a moment in the his- the temptation to supply explanatory substitutes for by a more accurate rendering of the text’s meaning. tory of the English tongue when it had achieved its difficult usages. It is a vulgar assumption that the Theologians will expect and even demand a text greatest purity and eloquence. difference between ancient and modern idioms is conformable to the later doctrinal idioms and her- simply a difference between distinct meneutical habits of their traditions and will try to ways of saying the same things, rather marshal the few stray atoms of linguistic training than between distinct ways of seeing they got in seminary to “correct” the new version’s reality. One should never transform deviations from orthodoxy. Other biblical transla- an apparently obsolete metaphor or tors will feel the need to justify their renderings of baffling image into what one imag- the same materials at the expense of this new rival. ines to be its functional equivalent And, of course, there are the legions of the faithful among the conventional expressions who, on the basis of dogmatic formation, religious of the present. It is far better to try schooling, profound conversion experiences, or to render a strange and remote lan- private inspiration, will feel themselves competent guage as strange and remote, and to pronounce upon the translator’s work with an hope thereby to conjure up some- authority only slightly less magnificent than God’s. thing of the world it once expressed. Admittedly, I am generalizing here from—and (Actually, I would often prefer an slightly exaggerating—the reactions to my recent even more radical approach than translation of the New Testament. I probably should Alter’s. I have a higher opinion than not presume that Robert Alter has endured any- he does of the Buber-Rosenzweig thing of the sort. Renderings of Christian scripture German translation, for instance, as involve a different set of religious and ideological is- well as of Everett Fox’s renderings of sues than do those of Hebrew scripture. The Tanakh the Torah and early prophets.) is less fraught with the ambiguities of doctrinal In the case of Job, at least, terminology and less haunted by a long history of Alter’s approach allows him at times debates in systematic or dogmatic theology. Hence, to achieve a kind of rough grandeur there is less need to rescue the text from its millen- that conveys a sense of the elemental nial accretions of doctrinally determined interpre- power of the Hebrew. His version is tations. Moreover, the canon of Hebrew scripture is full of pointedly concise phrasings, far richer, far more beautiful, far more varied, and especially effective where the mat- far less definably “sectarian” than the often drab ter is bleakest. “My flesh was clothed miscellany of documents that Christian tradition with worms and earth-clods, / my impudently appended to it. skin rippled with running sores. / So I regard Alter’s work with genuine admira- Song of Songs by Marc Chagall, 1960. Musée National Marc My days are swifter than the weaver’s tion but also with a keen sense of the dilemma at Chagall, Nice, France. (©RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY; shuttle. / They snap off without any its heart. On the whole, with a few notable excep- © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.) hope” (7:5–6). This plain, condensed tions, the literary quality of the New Testament is diction achieves some stirring effects unexceptional and in some cases quite poor, and What one should ask of a project like Alter’s, in expressing despair: “Look, He passes over me and so any ungainliness that resulted from my labors then, is how successful a balance it strikes between I do not see, / slips by me and I cannot grasp Him” was as likely as not an advance in fidelity as com- the scholarly and the literary. And the answer will (9:11). But it is at its most effective in expressing pared to the original. Alter’s aims are higher and almost certainly vary according to whichever pe- raw rage (as the furious peroration of chapters 29 perhaps also in some sense incompatible with one riod of Hebrew scripture is at issue. I found my to 31 amply demonstrates): “In gloom did I walk, another; he aspires to be at once as literal as pos- gaze irresistibly gravitating toward the loveliest with no sun, / I rose in assembly and I screamed. sible in his rendering of the Masoretic text and also of the post-exilic books—Job, the Song of Songs, / Brother I was to the jackals, / companion to os- as faithful as possible to its extraordinary literary Ecclesiastes. Certainly, the King James versions of triches. / My skin turned black upon me, / my limbs range and power. This requires the skills both of a these texts are among the greatest glories of English were scorched by drought” (30:28–30). meticulous scholar and of a gifted poet, which is a literature. Here Alter’s project could either succeed As for the great theophany of chapters 38 to rare enough combination; it also requires an almost admirably or fail miserably, but there would be no 41—well, the voice of God, even when He is in

Winter 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 9 something of a huff, is hard to capture. For the most but also “herding the wind,” which is a particularly part, Alter’s version thunders away quite convinc- inspired reading of the Hebrew. To anyone who "And She Went and ingly and with genuinely captivating power. Levia- knows the version in the King James, of course, than and behemoth are both limned with impres- no other translation could rival its nobility, gran- sive flourishes. But there are times when one wishes deur, or crepuscular plangency. Where Alter’s Came and Gleaned for something a little more exalted, terrible, and remote. “Do you know the mountain goats’ birth time . . . ?” (39:1), for instance, starts out in the wil- Alter’s version is full of in the Field Behind derness but ends in an obstetrics clinic. And on a pointedly concise phrasings, few occasions the phrasing is awkward in ways that the Reapers" detract from the splendor of the scene: “Where were especially effective where the you when I founded earth? / Tell, if you know un- BY ADELE BERLIN derstanding” (38:4). Unless we are meant to think matter is bleakest. that God is explicitly speaking of the planet named “Earth,” the absence of the definite article has the version excels, however, is in capturing something obert Alter’s articles in Commentary, feel of a jarring anachronism. else about the voice of Kohelet: an oddly hectic followed by his books The Art of Biblical There are few, if any, such lapses in Alter’s Song quality, a sort of morose peevishness, at once rest- Narrative (1981) and The Art of Biblical Po- of Songs, however. In part—not to diminish Alter’s less and fatigued. And this serves especially well in etryR (1985), opened our eyes to the artistry of the achievement—this is because the text lends itself the last chapter’s incantatory, twilight descent into Bible’s narrative prose and poetry. In those early more readily to transposition into another tongue. darkness and silence. “And the almond blossoms, / books and essays, Alter told us about the Bible’s lit- Principally, it demands of its translator that he or she and the locust tree is laden, / and the caper fruit falls erary features, but in his now-complete translation render its imagery as gracefully as possible and then apart. / For man is going to his everlasting house, / of the entire Hebrew Bible, he shows them to us. retreat to the wings to let the two young lovers per- and the mourners turn round in the market. / Un- Alter’s stated goal is to translate the Bible’s liter- form their play for themselves. Even so, it is genuinely til the silver cord is snapped, / and the golden bowl ary style and diction into fluent English, to capture the syntax, the parataxis, the rhythms, and the con- creteness and repetition of the vocabulary that char- acterize biblical style. He does so masterfully, especially in his translations of narrative prose, which are his forte. His sensitivity to language and his ability to turn a phrase are displayed in his rendering of a passage in the book of Ruth (2:3–7), in comparison to the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV). I have italicized the more striking differences in wording, but the reader should also attend to the overall flow of the narrative, as well as Alter’s determined avoid- ance of contemporary stock phrases.

And she went and came and gleaned in the field behind the reapers, and it chanced that she came upon the plot of Boaz, who was from the clan of Elimelech. And look, Boaz was coming from Bethlehem, and he said to the reapers, “May the Lord be with you!” and they said, “May the Lord bless you!” And Boaz said to his lad who was stationed over the reapers, “Whose is this young woman?” And the lad stationed over the reapers answered and said, “She is a young Moabite woman who has come back with Naomi from the plain of Moab. And she said, ‘Let me glean, pray, and gather from among the Esther, Ahasuerus, and Haman by Jan Steen, ca. 1668. (Courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art.) sheaves behind the reapers.’ And she has come and stood since the morning till now. She has impressive how well Alter makes the transition to is smashed, / and the pitcher is broken against the barely stayed in the house.” (Alter) smoother cadences and a more transparent simplic- well, / and the jug smashed at the pit. / And dust ity of phrasing. “My lover is mine and I am his, / returns to the earth as it was, / and the life-breath So she went. She came and gleaned in the field who grazes among the lilies. / Until morning’s breeze returns to God Who gave it. / Merest breath, said behind the reapers. As it happened, she came to blows / and the shadows flee, / turn round, be like a Qohelet. All is mere breath” (12:5–8). the part of the field belonging to Boaz, who was deer, my love, / or like a gazelle / on the cloven moun- It is worth pausing simply to appreciate what of the family of Elimelech. Just then Boaz came tains” (2:16–17). And here his manifest fondness for a monumental achievement this translation truly from Bethlehem. He said to the reapers, “The poetic brevity is especially effective: “You who dwell is. In the three books that I have considered here, Lord be with you.” They answered, “The Lord in the garden, / friends listen for your voice. / Let me three powerful voices in three vastly different regis- bless you.” Then Boaz said to his servant who hear it. / —Flee my lover and be like a deer / or like ters have been rendered not only distinctly but each was in charge of the reapers, “To whom does a gazelle / on the spice mountains” (8:13–14). The with genuine imagination, force, and élan. And so this young woman belong?” The servant who crystalline terseness has an exquisite quality about it, it is of the whole. Few scholars would have had the was in charge of the reapers answered, “She is quite different from more familiar translations. audacity even to contemplate so immense a labor. the Moabite who came back with Naomi from Of the three books treated here, Ecclesiastes the country of Moab. She said, ‘Please, let me is probably Alter’s most fascinating achievement. glean and gather among the sheaves behind the It conveys the hypnotic rhythm of the text’s rep- David Bentley Hart is a philosopher, theologian, writer, reapers.’ So she came, and she has been on her etitions and renders them in delightfully poignant classicist, and a few other things at the Notre Dame feet from early this morning until now, without form: “merest breath,” as I have already mentioned, Institute for Advanced Study. resting even for a moment.” (NRSV)

10 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2019 Notice how much smoother Alter’s rendering is. translators to maintain the lines of the poems and of Songs. Thus, to take a half-dozen examples, we His sentences are longer, but his phrases are shorter, to balance the number of words in each, as the He- have “cushion me with quinces” (2:5); “peering . . . reproducing the biblical cadence. Alter routinely brew does, as well as to retain the word order in peeping” (2:9); “[i]ts posts . . . its padding . . . its cur- translates the Hebrew vav (“and”) that often begins most cases. His translations of biblical poetry are tains crimson” (3:9); “watchmen of the walls” (5:7); a verse or clause, rather than variously adapting or therefore at times starker and more dramatic than “[l]ike Lebanon his look” (5:15); and “a fearsome even omitting it to fit the context as the NRSV does here (“so,” “as,” “just,” “then”). This may not always Alter is more careful than previous translators to maintain the be elegant in English, but it retains the directness and the simplicity of the Hebrew as it keeps the nar- lines of the poems and to balance the number of words in each, as rative moving forward. While there is much to admire in Alter’s trans- the Hebrew does, as well as to retain the word order in most cases. lation, there are, inevitably in an undertaking so massive, occasional infelicities. To consider them previous translations, as in Song of Songs 4:3, for flame” (8:6). In none of these phrases does the He- is to appreciate what choices have been, or might instance: Alter’s translation reads, “Like a scar- brew have alliteration, nor do previous English trans- have been, made. Let us take two examples from let thread, your lips, / and your tongue—desire”; lations. Actually, alliteration is not a significant device the book of Esther. King Ahasuerus and Vashti both whereas the NRSV has, “Your lips are like a crim- in biblical poetry, although it is in English poetry. Al- make banquets in chapter 1, and, later, in chapter 5, son thread, / and your mouth is lovely.” ter makes these verses in Song of Songs work as Eng- Esther prepares a banquet. The Hebrew verb is the I’ll close with one final example, Song of Songs lish poetry by departing from the Bible’s poetic style. same in all instances. According to Alter’s stated cri- 1:5: No translation is created ex nihilo; each transla- teria, the English should reflect this, but he follows tor is in dialogue with previous translations as well as previous English translations—King James Version, shechorah ani ve-na’vah with the text itself. In his earliest work on the Bible, NRSV, New International Version, and New Jew- “I am dark but desirable” Robert Alter showed biblical scholars, myself in- ish Publication Society (NJPS)—in using one verb cluded, how the Hebrew Bible works as literature and in chapter 1 (in Alter’s case, “made”) and a different “Dark” is certainly a better choice for American how its literary structures and techniques shape its one in chapter 5 (“prepare”). readers than “black,” because the reference is to sun- meaning. Now he has given us an English Bible that In Esther 6:8, my disagreement with Alter’s darkened skin, not to African ancestry. Surprisingly, is faithful to the Hebrew Bible’s own literary values. translation is more substantive; I believe he has Alter does not follow the Hebrew word order, which mistranslated a phrase. In that verse, Haman sug- would render the line “Dark am I but desirable,” gests to Ahasuerus that if the king wishes to have a putting the emphasis on “dark,” a word that recurs Adele Berlin is professor emerita at the University of man honored, he should, in Alter’s words, “let them in a slightly different form in the next verse. Most Maryland, where she held the Robert H. Smith Chair bring royal raiment that the king has worn and a translations render na’vah as “lovely” or “beautiful.” in Biblical Studies. Her books include The Dynamics horse on which the king has ridden, and set a royal In his commentary, Alter justifies “desirable” and of Biblical Parallelism (Indiana University Press) crown on his head.” As his commentary notes, Al- uses it elsewhere (but not at Song of Songs 1:10 and and Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative ter follows a midrash here in understanding Haman 6:4, where he has “lovely”); but one wonders wheth- (Eisenbrauns). She was the coeditor with Marc Brettler as wanting “raiment, horse, and crown that are not er in this case he is also aiming for the alliteration in of The Jewish Study Bible (Oxford University Press) and merely regal but that the king has actually used, “dark” and “desirable.” served as editor in chief of The Oxford Dictionary of the thus putting himself in metonymic contact with the In fact, he employs alliteration throughout Song Jewish Religion, second edition (Oxford University Press). body of the king—in a way, becoming the king.” I agree that Haman is represented here as really desir- ing the kingship itself, but the Hebrew of the verse is not as straightforward with regard to the crown as Alter suggests. The NJPS translation reflects the now widely accepted understanding that the crown JEWISH REVIEW BOOKS was on the head of the horse, not on Mordechai’s head: “Let royal garb which the king has worn be th brought, and a horse on which the king has ridden 4 Annual All-Day Conference and on whose head a royal diadem has been set. . . ” (Michael V. Fox has noted that Assyrian reliefs show royal horses wearing tall head ornaments.) As I note in The JPS Bible Commentary: Esther, the crown on Save the Date! the horse indicates that this is the king’s own horse, and whoever is mounted on it will appear to be the Sunday, May 19, 2019 king. This is why, when the king orders Haman to carry out these instructions, Mordechai is to be Speakers will include given only the raiment and the horse. Ahasuerus says (in Alter’s translation), “Hurry, take the rai- Robert Alter • Danny Danon ment and the horse as you have spoken, and do this Micah Goodman • Dara Horn for Mordecai the Jew.” The king doesn’t mention the crown because it is not for Mordechai but for the Jack Wertheimer • Ruth R. Wisse horse. Later, when he actually carries out the order, the text says nothing about Haman having to crown Museum of Jewish Heritage Mordechai. 36 Battery Place, New York City

s Alter has helped to show us, parallelism and For further information, please contact Kylie Unell: terseness are the outstanding features of bibli- A [email protected] cal poetry. Although English is not as terse a language as Hebrew, these features are readily trans- 646-218-9034 latable. In contrast, wordplay and especially sound- play are harder, and often impossible, to convey in translation. Alter is more careful than previous

Winter 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 11 translator’s study, explaining the problems of the Alter’s version sets out to dispel this notion: “In text and weighing the considerations of sound and grass meadows He makes me lie down, / by quiet "For Many Long sense that dictate his choices. waters guides me. / My life He brings back.” “The He- Alter’s Psalms show how illuminating this ap- brew nefesh does not mean ‘soul’ but ‘life-breath’ or Days" proach can be. Sometimes, he explains, weighty theo- ‘life,’” his note explains. “The image is of someone who logical issues can hang on a single word choice. In has almost stopped breathing and is revived, brought back to life.” This relocates the idea BY ADAM KIRSCH of salvation to this world, rather than the world to come. Likewise, istory offers two models for creating an Alter’s version ends, “And I shall authoritative Bible translation. One is a dwell in the house of the Lord / for committee of scholars with government many long days”—an exact transla- sponsorship—suchH as the 72 Jewish translators who tion of the Hebrew is orekh yamim. produced the Greek Septuagint for Ptolemy II in The psalmist is talking about long 3rd-century B.C.E. Egypt or the 47 Anglican divines life, not eternal life, Alter insists: “the who issued the King James Version in 1611. On the viewpoint of the poem is in and of other hand, some translations have become stan- the here and now.” dard even though they were the work of a single, self- There are many such examples appointed individual. In the 4th century C.E., Jerome of revised diction in Alter’s Bible. produced the Latin Vulgate that would be adopted But his poetry also consistently by the Catholic Church; in the 16th century, Martin challenges the familiar rhythm of Luther’s German version became the standard Prot- the psalms as we know them from estant translation in German-speaking lands. the King James Version—the spa- With Robert Alter’s complete Bible, we are deal- cious, balanced lines whose rhythm The Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. ing with a new, third kind of translation. It is the is that of breath being drawn in work of a single person, but it was not produced as and released. This almost physi- part of a religious mission; it has the authority of Psalm 23, for instance, the King James Version reads: ological reaction to the psalms is part of their reas- scholarship, but it is not intended to serve as an au- “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he lead- suring power in English, as in the KJV’s Psalm 91: thorized version. In fact, while it is certainly a mag- eth me beside the still waters. / He restoreth my “soul.” nificent creative achievement, Alter’s Bible is best By translating the Hebrew word nefesh as “soul,” the Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my understood as a critical work—not just a version of KJV turns the psalmist’s image of a sheep and shep- refuge, even the most High, thy habitation; the Bible but an intervention into a long-standing herd into an implicit metaphor for Heaven. This sense There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any debate about what the Hebrew Bible is and how we is heightened by the psalm’s last line: “I will dwell in plague come nigh thy dwelling. should read it. That is why Alter’s notes are such an the house of the Lord for ever.” Clearly, we are dealing For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to integral part of his translation: He invites us into the with a poem about resurrection and eternity. keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone. BY THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES For Alter, however, this systole and diastole is un- true to the rhythm of Hebrew, which is considerably BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF quicker and more compact. One of his stated goals in translating biblical poetry is to approximate the WINTER’S TALE syllable count of the original. For you—the Lord is your refuge, the Most High you have made your abode. “This passionate and uplifting No harm will befall you, book produces a kind of music nor affliction draw near to your tent. For His messengers He charges for you that few living writers know to guard you on all your ways. how to create.” On their palms they lift you up lest your foot be bruised by a stone. —SAM SACKS, WALL STREET JOURNAL For the KJV’s prose rhythm, Alter substitutes iambic and dactylic patterns, divided into short verse lines “ Paris in the Present Tense is a on the page. His diction is more contemporary, of course—“draw near” rather than “come nigh”—but novel about love, and therefore it is also more physical and concrete: “palms” rather about loss . . . intensely lyrical.” than “hands,” “bruise” instead of “dash thy foot.” —THE NEW YORK TIMES And here, too, his language works against super- natural interpretations: His God sends messengers BOOK REVIEW NOW IN rather than angels. On every page, Alter’s master- PAPERBACK ful translation not only revises our theological, lin- Available Wherever Books are Sold guistic, and literary expectations of the Bible but explains why those revisions are justified.

THE OVERLOOK PRESS ISBN 978-1-4683-1668-1 • $17.95 Adam Kirsch is the author of The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature (W. W. Norton), among other books.

12 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2019 Pittsburgh Jews, Squirrel Hill, and the Tree of Life

BY BARBARA S. BURSTIN

or weeks after October 27, 2018, the messianic language and the hopes of a restored of Life had established itself as the spiritual home of spotlight was on Pittsburgh and its Jew- Temple in Jerusalem. That was the last straw for the moderate traditionalists. When the Jewish Theologi- ish community. The murder of Joyce traditionalists. In 1864, Gustav Grafner led 15 men to cal Seminary was established shortly thereafter, Tree Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Rose establish a new synagogue they called Ez Hayim, of Life affiliated with it immediately. Mallinger,F Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil Rosenthal, David Rosenthal, Bernice Simon, Sylvan Simon, Daniel Tree of Life’s first High Holiday service was held in Lafayette Hall Stein, Melvin Wax, and Irving Younger during Shab- bat morning services at the Tree of Life synagogue at the corner of Fourth and Wood Street, in the same building in by a deranged anti-Semitic gunman was described in horrific detail, and the outpouring of sympathy which the National Republican Party had first been organized. and solidarity was widely recorded. For many of us who live in Squirrel Hill, have connections to Tree Tree of Life. The name emphasized their com- he Civil War had an enormous impact on Pitts- of Life, or know either a victim or their family, our mitment to the Torah, to which tradition applies Tburgh. Among the thousands who signed up shock and grief in the midst of this frenzy of me- the verse, “It is a tree of life to those who grasp it” from Allegheny County, the tiny Pittsburgh Jew- dia attention has been all but overwhelming. But (Proverbs 3:18). That fall they hired Isaac Wolf to ish community sent at least 10 young men. When the fact that the deadliest anti-Semitic massacre in Captain Jacob Brunn was killed at the battle of American history took place in our city, often rated Williamsburg in 1862, his coffin was draped in an the “most livable” in the United States, in the heart American flag and taken from his father-in-law’s of its friendliest neighborhood, and in a synagogue home on Third Avenue to the Jewish cemetery on historically committed to Christian-Jewish under- Troy Hill by a cortege of the city’s “leading citizens standing, has made it even harder to absorb the without regard to creed or nationality” together bitter reality. From the impromptu mass vigil or- with a military escort. The eulogy was described as ganized by local high school students that Saturday “at once tender, eloquent, patriotic and just.” night in the heart of Squirrel Hill, at the corner of The Civil War also changed Pittsburgh’s economy. Forbes and Murray, through the many funerals and Suddenly uniforms, ammunition, cannons, rails, lo- memorial services, we have been trying to come to comotives, and all manner of heavy machinery were terms with what has happened. One way—perhaps a needed. Two Jewish firms were tapped by the federal distinctively Jewish way—of doing so is to tell the government to help clothe the Union army. By the end thoroughly American story of Jewish Pittsburgh of the war, Pittsburgh’s blast furnaces were producing and the Tree of Life to which my friend Joyce two-fifths of the nation’s iron, and Andrew Carnegie’s Fienberg and the others were so attached. name was synonymous with the city’s reputation as The first Jews to settle in Pittsburgh came in an industrial powerhouse. Jews were not a part of the 1840s. Most, like William Frank, were itinerant Carnegie or anyone else’s industrial conglomerate, peddlers who had come to America from southern nor were they involved with Thomas Mellon’s newly Germany and eventually ended up in Pittsburgh sell- established banking empire. However, by the end of ing dry goods. In 1848, they established the first lo- the century almost 90 percent of the clothing manu- cal synagogue, Shaare Shamayim (Gates of Heaven). facturing industry in town was owned by Jews, and, Within just a few years, however, there were schisms Bust of Captain Jacob Brunn. Brunn was one of just a few years later, four out of the five department between the reformers, most of whom were German 10 young Jewish men from Pittsburgh to sign up stores in downtown Pittsburgh were Jewish owned. Jews, and the traditionalists, most of whom were for the Union cause. (Photo by Michael Kraus, By the turn of the century, the story of Pitts- “Polanders.” What had been one synagogue soon courtesy of Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall & burgh Jewry was a tale of two cities. The German became three: a languishing Shaare Shamayim, the Museum Trust, Inc.) Jewish elite—the merchants, liquor dealers, and Orthodox Beth Israel, and the newly chartered Ro- professionals—lived in Allegheny City, which was def Shalom (Pursuer of Peace), named, Frank wrote, be the shul’s one all-purpose employee: chazzan, soon to be incorporated into Pittsburgh as its north because they wanted to have peace, which didn’t hap- ba’al koreh, shochet, and shamas. In addition to list- shore. Meanwhile, Eastern European Jews from the pen. (As Jonathan Sarna has noted, the proliferation ing leading services, slaughtering animals, collect- Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, of synagogues putting “Shalom” in their names during money, stoking fires in the stove, and delivering and Romania were pouring into an area known as ing this period may have been precisely because there invitations to meetings, the contract stipulated that the Hill, along with communities of Irish, German, was so little peace within their walls.) Wolf was responsible for conducting weddings, ar- Scotch, Italian, Greek, Armenian, Syrian, Lebanese, When the leading American Reform rabbi ranging for burials, and organizing for the baking and Chinese immigrants, and African Americans. It Isaac Mayer Wise visited the community in 1857, and distribution of Passover matza. (Not surpris- was a veritable “human cauldron,” a crowded ghetto he wrote, “As much praise as can be spoken of the ingly, he left within six months.) of dilapidated buildings adjacent to downtown. social position of our brethren of Pittsburgh, as little Tree of Life’s first High Holiday service was held The two Jewish communities were separated not can be said of their congregational affairs. . . . The in Lafayette Hall at the corner of Fourth and Wood just by distance but by culture, class, and religious Germans and Poles cannot agree. . . . They meet Street, in the same building in which the National and social ideologies. However, despite—or because every Sabbath to read a set of prayers, eat kosher Republican Party had first been organized. By the of—the chasm between them, established German meat and quarrel. That’s all.” Shortly after he returned time Rodef Shalom hosted the “Pittsburgh Platform” Jews, especially the women, were engaged in efforts to Pittsburgh six years later, the majority of Ger- meetings of the Reform movement two decades to better the lives of the poor immigrants. The Irene man members at Rodef Shalom voted to change the later, declaring that that Jewish laws regulating “diet, Kaufmann Settlement House, heavily financed by prayer book to his controversial Minhag America, priestly purity and dress” were now “altogether for- Henry Kaufmann, was founded to help the new which integrated English readings while eliminating eign to our present mental and spiritual state,” Tree immigrants. Kaufmann was one of the brothers

Winter 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 13 who built the famous Kaufmann’s department store move to Squirrel Hill in 1916, he tried to buy a vacant Bund actually lived in Squirrel Hill), but the Jewish in downtown Pittsburgh, which had a replica of the lot on Darlington near Murray Avenue, but when he community and its allies among local Christian lead- Statue of Liberty perched on top of it, with its torch approached the agent, he was told that Jews couldn’t ers fought back. In March 1933, Rabbi Dr. Herman visible throughout the city. buy property in that neighborhood. Kamin ignored Hailperin of Tree of Life, who had written his doctoral Frank & Seder, whose owners had come from Rus- the agent, bought the lot under a false name, built thesis on the use of Rashi’s commentary by medieval sia and who were also leading local philanthropists himself a house, and then began to buy more prop- Christian scholars, joined his Christian colleagues at and members of the Tree of Life congregation, was erty in the area to develop. Squirrel Hill soon became Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Music Hall to protest the book across the street. When Isaac Seder died in 1924, he left the center of Pittsburgh Jewish life, though Tree of burnings in Germany. The two thousand participants money to Tree of Life, several other Jewish institutions, Life would not move from its building in the more recited the names of authors whose books had been the Frank & Seder Employees Mutual Benefit Associa- modest Oakland neighborhood to its present loca- destroyed in Germany. At the end of the meeting, one tion, and the Home for Colored Children. tion in Squirrel Hill until after World War II. hundred local Jewish college students filed past a large In the 1930s, Pittsburgh, like many cities, had table on the platform, each placing on it an English he famous muckraker Lincoln Steffens wrote a chapter of the German American Bund spewing translation of a book destroyed in Hitler’s bonfires. Tof Pittsburgh in this period that it was not just its hate direct from Nazi Germany (the head of the Around the same time, Ziggy Kahn was organiz- “Hell with the lid off”—describing the city’s industrial smog and grit—but “Hell with the lid on” because of its graft and corruption. In 1907, the Russell Sage Foun- dation issued a blistering report, scolding the city’s steel barons for their ruthless business practices and the unconscionable living and working conditions of the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who poured into the city to work in the city’s mills and mines. Among the leading social reformers responding to these conditions were several Pitts- burgh Jews. A. Leo Weil, the head of the Voters League, attacked city corruption; Tree of Life’s Rabbi Rudolph Coffee was nomi- nated by the mayor of Pittsburgh to sit on the Morals Efficiency Commission to combat vice. He was known to go out into the Above: Confirmation class of Tree of Life synagogue, 1900. Right: Poster for the Irene Kaufmann Settlement House, which city with local crusader Adolph provided assistance for immigrant families, ca. late 1890s. (Images courtesy of the Rauh Jewish History Program & Archives.) Edlis and rabbinic colleagues to try to persuade prostitutes to get off the street, often threatening Jewish pimps with excommunication. Bertha Rauh, president of the Pittsburgh chapter of the Council of Jewish Women, served on dozens of boards devoted to improving social conditions. She later became director of public charities, one of the first women to hold office in a mayoral cabinet. Yet while Jewish leaders such as A. Leo Weil, Rabbi Coffee, Bertha Rauh, and others worked to make local government more responsive to the common ills of society, they remained aware of the anti-Semitism around them. Jews were excluded from the city’s leading social clubs and corpora- tions. And while the upwardly mobile German Jews faced this genteel bigotry, Eastern European Jews felt the more physical kind in their neighborhoods and schools. Ziggy Kahn, the popular ath- letic director of the Irene Kaufmann Settlement House said that, “The Italian kids were our friends, but the Irish kids on the Hill would accuse the Jews of putting blood in the matzos and we had to fight.” Nonetheless, in Pittsburgh as elsewhere in Amer- ica, Jews were integrating and succeeding. Begin- ning around 1910, Eastern European Jews began to join their more established German Jewish brethren in the nicer East End neighborhoods of Oakland, East Liberty, Bloomfield, and even Squirrel Hill, the most prestigious of them all, with its elegant houses and tree-lined streets. Not that it was easy—when Kaufmann’s department store, also known as “The Big Store,” under construction, July 19, 1913. A replica Herman Kamin, a real estate developer, decided to of the Statue of Liberty can be seen at top. (Courtesy of the Rauh Jewish History Program & Archives.)

14 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2019 ing an unsuccessful effort to have America boycott In 1948, Tree of Life broke ground for its current nity have flourished in recent decades, time has the 1936 Olympics games in Berlin. In these years, building in Squirrel Hill, but with the founding of the been somewhat less kind to Tree of Life. It has been Rabbi Solomon Freehof of Rodef Shalom, a distin- State of Israel, Rabbi Hailperin called for a stop to widely remarked that the victims of the shooting guished rabbinic scholar, was a prime mover in get- the fundraising so the congregation could focus on ranged in age from 54 to 97. Over the last genera- ting Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati to bring helping Jews in Israel. The cornerstone of the build- tion, the demographic of both the synagogue and over as many Jewish refugee scholars as possible, ing, which opened four years later, was hewn from the Conservative movement has aged and syna- among them the great Abraham Joshua Heschel. Jerusalem limestone. These were boom years for Tree gogue membership rolls have shrunk. In 2010, Tree of Life merged with Congregation Or L’Simcha. Shortly thereafter Dor Hadash, a Reconstructionist synagogue, began renting space in the building. In 2017, New Light, another Conservative synagogue, sold its building and also began renting space from Tree of Life. Of course, one worries for the continued health of these congregations. On the other hand, their peaceful coexistence is precisely what William Frank and his fellow Pittsburgh Jewish pioneers were aiming for when they named the city’s second synagogue Rodef Shalom.

nlike Jews of other cities that are, in one way Uor another, comparable (say, Philadelphia, Chi- cago, or Cleveland), Pittsburgh’s Jews never moved en masse to the suburbs, and the fact that the community remains centered in Squirrel Hill may have helped with their complete integration into the city’s life. That sense of belonging was clearly in evidence in the hard days that followed. “Stronger Than Hate” signs went up all over town; millions of dollars poured in from young and old, from Chris- Murray Avenue in Squirrel Hill, 1965. (Courtesy of the Rauh Jewish History Program & Archives.) tians and Muslims, as well as Jews. The Pittsburgh Steelers came to the funeral of the brothers Cecil and of Life. In 1959, the synagogue broke ground again David Rosenthal, who were two of the 11 victims. to build a new, 1,400-seat sanctuary. A local artist, At their game against the Cleveland Browns, they Nicholas Parrendo, was commissioned to create the unveiled a version of the iconic “steelmark” helmet massive modernist stained-glass windows which logo of three diamond-shaped stars, replacing the flank its bimah and pews, depicting creation, the top one with a six-pointed Jewish star. It had been acceptance of the Torah, and the Jewish ethos. created by local designer Tom Hindes, who lives near Both Tree of Life and the Squirrel Hill communi- the synagogue, on the day of the shooting. ty continued to thrive through the 1960s and 1970s. On Tuesday night, November 27, a month after With the collapse of the steel industry in the 1980s, the massacre, I attended the Pittsburgh Symphony Pittsburgh’s population shrank drastically, with sev- Orchestra’s “Concert for Peace and Unity,” which eral hundred thousand people leaving town to find was organized to honor the Tree of Life synagogue work elsewhere. In the process, Pittsburgh became victims and raise money for the six injured Pitts- a smaller city, but over time, perhaps, a kinder, burgh police officers. The incomparable violinist gentler one, as well. Industrial jobs had gone, but Itzhak Perlman was there, playing themes from so too had some of the radical disparities between Schindler’s List. My husband and I sat next to Of- the haves and have-nots and the mammoth battles ficer Dan Mead, who was one of the first respond- between management and workers that punctuated ers to arrive on the scene from the local police sta- Pittsburgh history. The newer, smaller Pittsburgh tion. He told us that he had joined the police force was more cohesive, and the Jewish community was in midlife after working as a carpenter (his father a fully integrated part of that new social cohesion. had been a policeman), and he insisted he was not In 1988, when Mayor Richard Caliguiri suddenly a hero; he had been shot while doing his job. When died, City Council President Sophie Masloff became Jeffrey Myers, the dynamic rabbi-cantor of Tree of mayor. One year later she ran and won on her own, Life, came up to speak, he showed his civic pride, Stars of David hang everywhere in Squirrel Hill, becoming both the first woman and the first Jew to be wearing a Pittsburgh Pirates kippa. November 2018. (Photo by Amy Newman Smith.) elected mayor of Pittsburgh. As the daughter of poor The concert ended with the ringing of 11 mourn- Romanian immigrants who grew up on the Hill, her ful notes, one for each victim. Our great conductor abbi Hailperin, who led Tree of Life from 1922 career and victory marked the acceptance of Jews at all Manfred Honeck held the silence, his hands raised Runtil 1968, was part of the more liberal wing levels of society. One could make a similar claim about in the hushed quiet of a packed Heinz Hall. of the Conservative rabbinate. Among the changes Masloff’s contemporary, Myron Cope (Kopelman), he made was to introduce organ music into services who was the color commentator for the Pittsburgh (for many years the organist was Ilse Karp, who had Steelers for 35 years. Both of them had distinctively Barbara S. Burstin teaches courses on American arrived from Germany with her husband Richard, local, instantly recognizable voices. Cope created the Jewish history at the University of Pittsburgh and a violinist in the Pittsburgh Symphony and later the “terrible towel” that continues to be waved enthusi- Carnegie Mellon University, and was chair of the Jewish director of the Pittsburgh Opera). This, together astically by Pittsburgh fans not only for the Steelers Federation of Greater Pittsburgh. She is the author of a with the elimination of the observance of the sec- games but at Pirates and Penguins games, as well. two-volume history of the Pittsburgh Jewish community, ond days of Jewish holidays, brought Tree of Life The extraordinary devotion of Pittsburgh fans to its Steel City Jews, as well as Jewish Pittsburgh (Arcadia somewhat closer to its erstwhile rival Rodef Sha- sports teams is part of the unifying glue of our civic Publishing) and After the Holocaust: The Migration of lom, both of which, like American Jewry more gen- culture. Polish Jews and Christians to Pittsburgh (University of erally, thrived in the postwar era. Although Pittsburgh and its Jewish commu- Pittsburgh Press).

Winter 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 15 Digital Anti-Semitism: From Irony to Ideology

BY GAVRIEL D. ROSENFELD

ver since Robert Bowers murdered 11 populists, ardent racists, and outright neo-Nazis. In the elite gatekeepers who once patrolled the bound- congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life their endless online discussions of the “JQ,” or “Jewish aries of old media. It isn’t just that anyone can vent synagogue on October 27, 2018, American Question,” one faction, made up of hard-core Nazis an opinion and make it heard by anyone who hap- Jews have been trying to make sense of the and white nationalists, such as Daily Stormer editor pens to be online. The selective anonymity and role- deadliestE act of anti-Jewish violence in American Andrew Anglin, emeritus academic Kevin MacDon- playing that social media enable embolden people to air history. Historian Lila Corwin Berman sorrowfully ald, and computer hacker Andrew Auernheimer, extreme ideas without fear of repercussions. wrote in the Washington Post that American Jews could no longer view their country as an “excep- While early 20th-century anti-Semites adeptly exploited tional place . . . of progress” where they were “steadily inching past old dangers to success.” Yet, as her the then-new media of film and radio, present-day Jew- colleague Jonathan Sarna pointed out in Tablet, the fact that “previous generations of young American haters have more powerful weapons at their disposal. Jews . . . [had] . . . experienced the same ‘loss of in- nocence’ now being witnessed in the wake of Pitts- regards Jews as an alien group that threatens the The Internet has given rise to two new unique burgh” should reassure us that America’s unique white race by facilitating the spread of immigration, forms of expression: memes and trolling. Memes are political and religious culture still makes it an cosmopolitanism, and multiculturalism. A second videos, catchphrases, and images that spread and exceptionally safe place for Jews. faction, led by self-proclaimed “Western chauvin- mutate from user to user through social network- Now-forgotten synagogue bombings and other ists,” such as Richard Spencer, Milo Yiannapoulos, ing sites. Trolling, by contrast, is a method of on- terrible incidents notwithstanding, it is certainly the and Jared Taylor, claims to admire Jews for their line intimidation and harassment, often employing case that Jew-hatred in the United States has always tasteless, hateful, and threatening memes in what been drastically milder than its European coun- amounts to digital assault. Both memes and trolling terparts. For centuries, the latter was expressed in were pioneered by what writer Angela Nagle has de- instances of collective violence—often state-led— scribed as a reactionary counterculture of disaffect- against Jews by English, French, and Spanish mon- ed young men who mocked various targets: women, archs; medieval Crusaders; and mobs of indebted “social justice warriors,” and mainstream “normies.” townspeople and peasants. The death tolls from these The memes they employed in this effort, while often paroxysms routinely ran into the thousands and, by distasteful, were initially characterized by a wink- the 20th century, the millions. By contrast, violent ing sense of irony and mostly done for laughs (or acts of Jew-hatred in America have generally been “lulz”). Before long, however, the medium and the perpetrated by individuals who, while often affiliated memes lent themselves to escalation. In the process, with fringe groups, have committed acts of violence irony gave way to ideology. without the safety of numbers. Although we don’t yet Perhaps the most horrifying example of this know much about Bowers, he too fits this pattern— process—and one that is directly relevant to Robert albeit with a postmodern or, at any rate, 21st-century Bowers, who proclaimed that “all Jews must die” as he difference that is worth understanding. began shooting—is the way Nazism has been repre- Whatever his mental state, Bowers was acting sented online over the last decade or so. As irony be- on a specific set of anti-Semitic ideas. As has been came a dominant form of online discourse, as trans- widely reported, he was furious at the Tree of Life gressive, attention-grabbing clickbait became an easy synagogue for allegedly conspiring with the Hebrew method of attracting eyeballs, a new phenomenon Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) to bring foreign refu- arose: The more popular the web image, the greater gees (especially Muslims) to the United States in an its likelihood of being “Hitlerized”—from memes of effort to undermine the country’s white racial heri- Front page of Der Stürmer, a weekly Nazi German Teletubbies with Hitler mustaches to jokey depictions tage. In so doing, Bowers echoed the anti-Semitic newspaper pubished by Julius Streicher from 1923 of the führer himself. I have called this the “law of slogan chanted by right-wing activists in Charlot- until the end of the war. (Eddie Gerald/Alamy Photo.) of ironic Hitlerization,” and it is anything but funny. tesville, Virginia, during the summer of 2017—“Jews This smirking irony helped to normalize Hitler and will not replace us!”—and implicitly endorsed the alleged insularity and Zionist ethno-nationalism. Nazism in certain precincts of the Internet. “Great Replacement” theory of the far-right French (While writing this piece, I visited Gab to find the The insidiousness of this trend is epitomized by thinker Renaud Camus. We know this because Bow- third most popular post of the moment was, “All I the fate of Pepe the Frog. Created by the artist Matt ers said as much on Gab, a haven for “alt-right” users want for Christmas is for Jared Taylor to acknowl- Furie in 2005, the cartoon character was originally who have been kicked off of Twitter and other so- edge that Jews aren’t huwhite Merry CHRISTmas a likeable loser who did whatever he felt like (“Feels cial networks. Shortly before launching his attack, in GabFam”—“huwhite” being a characteristically alt- good, man!” was his slogan). Eventually Pepe be- fact, he publicly announced to the site’s then-800,000 right inside-jokey way of saying “the white nation” came Hitlerized, at first for laughs, then as a coded members, “I can’t sit by and watch my people get while making fun of Taylor’s speech pattern.) message or secret handshake, and eventually as slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.” As the the ubiquitous symbol of the alt-right. Among his Southern Poverty Law Center has reported, the ques- he alt-right’s ideas are old, but social media is new, more subtle uses was the mocking phrase, “Green tion of “optics,” meaning how honest members of the Tand while early 20th-century anti-Semites adept- lives matter.” Significantly, a green frog, known as alt-right should be, was frequently debated on Gab. ly exploited the then-new media of film and radio, “Gabby,” was the original symbol of Gab. The term “alt-right” was popularized by the right- present-day Jew-haters have more powerful weapons The transformation of Pepe the Frog from innoc- wing activist Richard Spencer. It encompasses a di- at their disposal. As everyone knows by now, the In- uous Internet icon to de facto swastika highlights the verse array of white nationalists, radical right-wing ternet and social media in particular have eliminated utility of memes for the alt-right. They are the visual

16 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2019 counterparts to the idiosyncratic vocabulary and nu- border. In passing, Farrell quickly sketched the merology used by the alt-right—for instance, “cucks” outlines of a version of the “the Great Replace- for mainstream conservatives and “1488” to signal ment” conspiracy theory: “A lot of these folks What’s the future of the the 14-word white power pledge together with the also have affiliates or are getting money from the salutation “Heil Hitler” (the 8th letter of the alphabet Soros-occupied State Department and that is a is h). The ostensible irony of these catchphrases pro- great, great concern.” As several commentators China–Israel relationship? vides extremists with plausible deniability. The Daily noted, the phrase “Soros-occupied State Depart- Stormer’s Andrew Anglin has made this clear: ment” sounded a lot like a variation of a favorite anti-Semitic term of art, the “Zionist-occupied Pepe became the mascot . . . because he embodies government,” often shortened to ZOG. How is Jewish cultural the goal of couching idealism within irony. A More than a few of those 160 million posts col- [neo-Nazi] movement . . . using a cartoon frog lected by Finkelstein and his colleagues were prob- to represent itself takes on a subversive power to ably from Robert Bowers himself, who spent an illiteracy changing the bypass historical stereotypes of such movements, enormous amount of time online. He wrote or re- and thus presents [its] . . . ideas . . . in a fun way posted 767 anti-Semitic messages, many of them High Holy Days? without the baggage of Schindler’s List. about Jews being responsible for the “invasion” of Why all the outrage over Israel’s nation-state law?

Left: A meme of Pepe the Frog as a Nazi officer. Right: The alt-right social-media site Gab used a frog as its logo.

Put differently, ironic memes are gateway drugs. immigrants and “white genocide,” in the nine or Various alt-right activists have reported that they so months leading up to the attack. He surely must were initially attracted to ironic memes as fun ways have read countless more. to troll liberals, and their prolonged exposure even- We still do not know, and we may never know, tually led them to become “red-pilled”—in their what moved Bowers from rabid hate speech to Critical questions parlance, “enlightened”—and embrace more overt- mass murder, but his behavior fits a familiar pat- ly anti-Semitic imagery. This explains why some tern that is by no means restricted to anti-Semites. are out there. members of the alt-right eventually migrated from Dylann Roof, for instance, frequently visited the Pepe the Frog to “Le Happy Merchant,” a hooked- Daily Stormer website before shooting nine African nosed Jew rubbing his hands together conspirato- American members at a church in Charleston, South rially. The image was seen on the 4chan website as Carolina, in 2015. The existence of many other docu- early as 2012 and is arguably the most widely used mented cases of violent extremists being radicalized anti-Semitic meme on the web today. online—from misogynistic “incels” to ISIS supporters—makes it clear that digital forms of hatred are an igital anti-Semitism is dangerous because of its increasing threat throughout Western society. Dapparent seductiveness and limitless reach. As As the American Jewish community mourns for with pornography, anyone with a smart phone is just the martyrs of the Tree of Life synagogue and as- a click away from an endless supply of Jew-hatred. sesses the historical significance of their murders, it The numbers are mind-boggling. A recent quanti- should be under no illusions about the dangers it tative study conducted by Joel Finkelstein, Savvas faces. The history of domestic lone wolf attacks, the Zannettou, Barry Bradlyn, and Jeremy Blackburn ease of online anti-Semitic self-radicalization, and examined more than 160 million anti-Semitic posts the ubiquity of firearms in the United States are a (including more than seven million memes, many toxic combination that must be monitored with un- of them variations on the “Happy Merchant”) and precedented vigilance. traced their trajectory from places like 4chan, Gab, and “The_Donald” subreddit out across the web. Equally worrisome is the fact that alt-right Gavriel D. Rosenfeld is a professor of history and memes have increasingly been making their way the director of the undergraduate program in Judaic into American politics and the traditional media. studies at Fairfield University. He is the author of Hi To take a recent and relevant example, on October Hitler!: How the Nazi Past Is Being Normalized in 27, 2018, Lou Dobbs had Judicial Watch’s Chris Contemporary Culture and What Ifs of Jewish History: Farrell on his Fox Business show to discuss the From Abraham to Zionism, both from Cambridge migrant caravan making its way toward the U.S. University Press.

Winter 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 17 REVIEWS Historical Agency

BY EZRA BLAUSTEIN

toms of the merchants” affected the composition previous halakha had treated agents and partners Maimonides and the Merchants: Jewish Law of a halakhic guidebook still widely consulted to this as entirely separate categories. Cohen persuasively and Society in the Medieval Islamic World day. In the process, he raises important questions argues that Maimonides yoked them together pre- by Mark R. Cohen both about the nature of change and adaptation in cisely because business arrangements like that of University of Pennsylvania Press, 248 pp., $65 the development of Jewish law and how to situate the Yeshua and Khalluf were so common in his world. Cohen’s study raises the deep question of how practices of a eshua ben Ismail, a young Jewish particular historical time and place make their way into the merchant in 11th-century Alexandria, had a reputation of being difficult and possi- pristine, universal presentation of a law code. bly unethical, but nobody could question hisY success. Consequently, he was able to secure work of Moses Maimonides in his historical context. ut this is a little problematic,” writes the 16th- a partnership with Khalluf ben Musa, a leading This form of business agency was still in wide “Bcentury scholar David ibn Abi Zimra (Rad- Jewish merchant in Qayrawan, in present-day use in the late 12th century, when Maimonides was baz) in his commentary to Maimonides’s ruling. Tunisia. In this arrangement, each man was em- compiling the Mishneh Torah in Cairo. In doing so, Swearing an oath in court was a grave undertak- powered to act as an agent for the other. Khalluf he aimed to reorganize the complete corpus of Jew- ing; Radbaz anxiously exclaims that “if this [rul- agreed to take charge of some of Yeshua’s cloves and ish law into a single systematic and comprehensive ing] is true, nobody will want to serve as an agent sell them on the latter’s behalf in Qayrawan, and, code so that, as he remarks in the introduction, a for his fellow because he will be obligated to swear in exchange, Yeshua would sell Khalluf’s goods in person could just read the Mishneh Torah and the afterward!” Indeed, the Talmud is generally quite Alexandria. Khalluf would come to regret ignor- Torah itself; no other book of law, including the reluctant to require an agent to swear an oath, and ing the warnings he received about working with Talmud, would be necessary to study. In “Laws of there is no clear precedent for it in earlier rabbinic Yeshua. Their correspondence, preserved in the sources. Consequently, many later hal- Cairo Geniza, shows increasing distrust and frus- akhic authorities either dispute Mai- tration on both sides. Khalluf tried to break off their monides’s judgement or severely qualify agreement, and they eventually ended up in court. it; Solomon ben Abraham ibn Adret Among the many papers discovered in the (Rashba), in 13th-century Catalonia, Cairo Geniza are documents, including the letters vehemently refutes it, and Radbaz him- between Khalluf and Yeshua, that reveal the ubiq- self writes that the agent can avoid this uity of this kind of partnership. Each partner would predicament by stipulating in advance act as an unpaid business agent for the other with- that he will be exempt from an oath. out a cut of the profits. Instead, there was an under- Cohen believes that the reality of standing, usually based upon verbal agreements or economic life in Maimonides’s time informal correspondence rather than written con- pushed him into this questionable de- tracts, that the partners would both benefit from cision. These partnerships of agency, this mutual agency. Such partnerships were valu- critical to commercial operations in able in the dynamic mercantile economy of the me- this period, would have been diffi- dieval Mediterranean world in which traders from cult to fit into existing halakha. The North Africa would frequent ports from India to Talmud simply does not hold an agent Western Europe. To succeed in this environment, to the same standards of accountability reliable agents were irreplaceable. A merchant as it does a partner. Previous Jewish law could not be everywhere at once, and if he was to would have regarded Yeshua and Khal- take advantage of rapid fluctuations in the market, luf as mere agents of each other, with- he needed to have his merchandise in the hands of out the kind of legal protections and reliable people in other locations who could sell it recourse necessary to make such an for him. As evidence from both Muslim and Jewish arrangement work, without the ability sources indicates, this quid pro quo arrangement to supply legal remedies when it didn’t. was central to the economic system of the medieval As a result, Jews would often turn to Islamic world. local Muslim judges to resolve disputes. Caravan of Arabic traders from the Maqamat Al-Hariri Mark Cohen is not the first historian to take manuscript, 13th century. (Courtesy of the DEA Picture Library.) Maimonides, as Cohen demonstrates, note of such partnerships; the case of Yeshua and was quite familiar with this type of part- Khalluf (which Cohen does not mention) comes nership, so he associated agents with from Jessica L. Goldberg’s excellent study, Trade Agents and Partners” (Hilkhot sheluchin ve-shutafin partners—note that he calls this entire section the and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean: The 9:5), he discusses the case of a person conducting “Laws of Agents and Partners,” despite there being Geniza Merchants and their Business World, where business through the use of an agent and allows that little direct connection between the two in the Tal- it is discussed at length. Unlike Goldberg and the person to demand that the agent swear an oath af- mud or later rabbinic literature. In transferring the other Geniza scholars who have studied this form firming that he did not steal any merchandise or oath of partners to a case of agency, Maimonides of partnership, including the pioneering S. D. Goit- embezzle any money while he was in control of it. provided Jewish courts with a means of enforce- ein, Cohen is not primarily interested in uncover- Maimonides portrays this ruling as growing organi- ment for this arrangement. ing the detailed workings of the economic practices cally from an established rabbinic law about partners, This resolution represents a model for Cohen’s of the past. Rather, he focuses on how such “cus- who may demand oaths from each other, but, in fact, broader historical argument. The Talmud assumed

18 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2019 an economy centered around agriculture or local Only someone with Cohen’s considerable facility ways such rulings were adopted in later halakha. trade. As such, Cohen explains, it could not respond with Jewish law and deep knowledge of the Cairo Cohen sometimes mentions the reception of Mai- to all the demands of the more dynamic, long- Geniza materials could undertake such a study, monides’s original rulings by later scholars, partic- distance mercantile system of the Islamic world in though this book is not without at least one error. In ularly when that reception is negative, and he often which Maimonides lived. This situation forced Jew- his discussion of the agent’s oath, Cohen mentions points out the ways Maimonides’s commentators ish traders into Islamic courts, which were equipped that the great 16th-century halakhic codifier Joseph try to read those rulings back into the Talmud. He to deal with such partnerships, a development that Karo cites Rashba’s objections in both his commen- generally does not, however, trace the effect such horrified Maimonides, who rails against visiting rulings had on halakha going forward when they non-Jewish courts in Mishneh Torah in language Previous Jewish law would were accepted by subsequent jurists. For instance, even more forceful than that used in the Talmud since both the Tur and the Shulchan Arukh include forbidding this practice. Maimonides, Cohen hy- have regarded Yeshua and Maimonides’s rule about the agent’s oath, the com- pothesizes, hoped “to bring the Jewish merchant mentators on those codes are left to sort out the back into the halls of Jewish justice rather than Khalluf as mere agents of repercussions for other laws. have him cross the line to plead his case in the Is- Reading Mishneh Torah in the context of the lamic courtroom,” by yoking the halakhic concepts each other, without the legal medieval Mediterranean Islamic world is not new, of partnership and agency to reflect the economic and Cohen himself has previously done so in his world in which he lived. protections to make the study of charity in Maimonidean law. Other schol- In his opening and closing chapters, Cohen ars have looked at Mishneh Torah in relation to briefly discusses the question of legal innovation in arrangement work. contemporaneous Islamic law with often fascinat- more theoretical terms. He notes that in “harmoniz- ing results. But, in focusing on the Geniza docu- ing Jewish law with contemporary business practic- tary to Mishneh Torah (Kesef Mishneh) and in his ments and their unique ability to tell us about the es, [Maimonides] was, in fact, doing what respon- commentary to the Tur (Beit Yosef). He then writes practical details of economic life in Maimonides’ sible halakhic authorities (and Islamic jurists) have that Karo “omits Maimonides’ ruling from his own time, Cohen takes a different approach. He moves always done: adapt the law to the needs of the time.” code, the Shulchan Arukh, altogether,” which, if it Maimonides’s Muslim counterparts in Islamic His treatment of Mishneh Torah, then, acts as an were true, would underline Cohen’s claim about jurisprudence to the background and focuses in- extended test-case for how such a medieval author- the unprecedented nature of Maimonides’s ruling. stead on the lived experience of the Jewish audience ity could adapt the law in contrast to other possible In truth, though, Karo quotes Maimonides’s ruling for whom the Mishneh Torah was written. models, such as the earlier work of the Babylonian almost verbatim in the Shulchan Arukh, and, though geonim, who Cohen cites throughout this book, he does mention that there exists a dissenting opin- or the legal commentaries of medieval Ashkenazi ion, his presentation implies that he would incline Ezra Blaustein is a doctoral candidate in the history of scholars such as Rashi and the tosafists, who Cohen to agree with Maimonides. Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School, briefly mentions in his conclusion. This is a minor point which does not in any where he is writing a dissertation on Maimonides’s Book Importantly, though, Mishneh Torah was a code way diminish the persuasiveness of Cohen’s ar- of the Commandments and its connections to Islamic of law, meant to succinctly present the law as it gument, but it does bring up the issue of the legal theory. should be in its universal form, as opposed to the case law established by a particular decision, or talmudic commentaries which address a particular rabbinic passage. This raised the stakes of innovation. Even if a responsum can be adduced as prec- How the rabbis of the Talmud edent for later cases, it can also be rejected as uncon- transformed everything into nected to the case at hand. The same cannot be done with a legal code. One can disagree with a ruling in a a legal question—and Jewish code, as Rashba does in the case of the agent’s oath, law into a way of thinking and but its contents cannot be set aside as being limited talking about everything to specific cases. Cohen’s study raises the deep question of how practices of a particular historical time “ Chaim Saiman has written a genuinely enthralling book about a concept and place make their way into the pristine, universal central to rabbinic Judaism: the study presentation of a law code, and what that means for of Jewish law, not only as a guide to its ongoing validity. life but as ongoing encounter with the Of course, accusations that Maimonides was divine. A superb, much-needed, and too creative were raised in his lifetime. Maimonides enlightening work.” responds in several of his writings, avowing that — Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks Mishneh Torah introduced nothing new into halakha and that his code simply serves as a handy “Halakhah not only succeeds wonderfully reference guide for established law. The evidence as an introductory text but brims with in Maimonides and the Merchants might imply ideas, formulations, interpretations, and that Maimonides was obfuscating a bit, but, in the perspectives that will stimulate, enrich, conclusion, Cohen wonders “whether Maimonides and catalyze scholars as well. Saiman’s smart, comprehensive, and regularly thought that he was advancing novel opinions or brilliant book will stand as a significant whether he believed that he was merely eliciting the contribution for some while to come.” intended meaning of the halakhot that he ‘updated’ — Yehudah Mirsky, Brandeis University or modified, following the time-honored method of rabbinic exegesis, expecting readers to trust his Cloth $29.95 pious aims.” Cohen cautiously avoids taking a defin- itive stand on this question, but he does suggest that, “Prima facie, we may hypothesize that, at least on a conscious level, Maimonides did not believe that he

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BY JONATHAN KARP

constructing a table situating his thinkers along a hor- less interested in condemning the backwardness of Modernity and the Jews in Western Social izontal axis of “advanced” and “backward” and a ver- his coreligionists than in approving their eventual Thought tical axis of “positive” versus “negative” constructions adaptation to the modern liberal order. by Chad Alan Goldberg of Jews. Thus, Simmel, Sombart, and the early Karl This was a similar move to the one made by the The University of Chicago Press, 256 pp., $35 Marx viewed Jews as ahead of their times, while Dur- young Marx, albeit in his case with far greater anti- kheim, Weber, and the later Marx saw them as back- Jewish animus. Goldberg, I am happy to report, is Jewish Materialism: The Intellectual ward. All of the above (though one might question not interested in rehearsing the familiar denuncia- Revolution of the 1870s by Eliyahu Stern “For unlike their coreligionists in Paris and Berlin, Jews Yale University Press, 320 pp., $45 residing in Russian lands in the second half of the nineteenth century remained landlocked, sidelocked, and locked out of ave the Jews been the quintessentially modern people? Or was modernity in- major labor markets and state offices.” stead something alien to them, a force that struck them with a violent shock? Simmel’s placement here) depicted Jews negatively, tions of Marx’s fascinatingly ugly essay “On the Jew- DidH their long experience as a highly commercial- regardless of whether they viewed them as ahead ish Question” but is preoccupied with a more inter- ized, mobile, and marginalized group prepare them or behind. Of the figures Goldberg considers, only esting problem. In that early (1843–1844) text, Marx to be the vanguard of a new world, or did they, like the American sociologist Robert Park and his cir- appears to identify Jews with the alienating spirit of uprooted peasants and colonial subjects, struggle to cle fall unambiguously into both the “positive” and modern bourgeois society, a realm of private proper- adjust to changes that initially overwhelmed them? “advanced” quadrant. ty, hucksterism, and the war of all against all—in oth- Should the Jews, in other words, be placed among er words, the new capitalist regime. Yet in Marx’s later the chickens that laid the modern world, or does it works, particularly Capital, his few scattered remarks make more sense to count them among the eggs? on Jews depict them as relics of a premodern form of Chad Alan Goldberg and Eliyahu Stern each ad- “merchant capitalism,” a type that Marx insists could dress one of these alternatives, while exhibiting little never on its own have birthed a new world. apparent awareness of the other. Goldberg’s Moder- Goldberg uses this tension in Marx’s writing to nity and the Jews in Western Social Thought is a brief, launch his general theory: namely, that the pecu- tightly wound, precisely conceptualized, and surgi- liar dualism casting Jews as either progressive or cally executed comparison of how sociologists in regressive ultimately derives from what he calls a France, Germany, and the United States conceived of secularized Protestant “habit of thought” of reckon- the causal relationship between modernity and the ing in metaphors derived from Christian theology. Jews, while Stern’s Jewish Materialism: The Intellectual In particular, social theorists unconsciously ad- Revolution of the 1870s provides an expansive rein- opted the replacement theology which posited that terpretation of Eastern European Jewish intellectual Christianity had superseded Judaism, the New history at the moment when Jews’ liberal moderniz- Testament and Covenant having decisively dis- ing ideologies became radical and revolutionary. placed the old ones. This helps explain Marx’s seem- Goldberg’s perspective is from the outside look- ingly grotesque description of commodities which ing in, drawing on non-Jewish social theorists such as function as money as “inwardly circumcised Jews.” Werner Sombart, Max Weber, and Robert Park and As Goldberg insightfully explains, this means that assimilated or converted Jews like Karl Marx, Émile modern capitalists have so absorbed and improved Durkheim, and Georg Simmel, all of whom debated upon medieval Jewish usury that they no longer need Émile Durkheim in an undated photo. (Wikimedia.) whether Jews were avatars of modernity or anach- any corresponding outward sign (Old Testament ronistic relics. Stern’s account, in contrast, is told al- physical circumcision) but instead exemplify Paul’s most entirely from the internal perspective of East- lthough Goldberg has a general theory about inward “circumcision of the heart.” ern European Jewish intellectuals writing in Yiddish Athe place of Jews in modern social thought, he According to Goldberg, nearly all of the classical and Hebrew. Figures like the mercurial Moses Leib is not indifferent to considerations of local context. sociologists he considers unconsciously appropri- Lilienblum, the spiritual nationalist Peretz Smo- Durkheim, for instance, though not an observant ated the supersessionist schema, albeit in different lenskin, and the socialist Aaron Lieberman tried to or even affiliated Jew, constructed a theory of Jewish ways. “[T]he relationship between Jews and Chris- understand and respond to what capitalism and na- backwardness that, whatever its validity, had the vir- tians,” he writes, “formed a code for signifying the tionalism were doing to the people of the Jewish Pale. tue of undermining the reactionary anti-Semitic idea relationship between premodernity and modernity.” Both books rely on a familiar cast of characters, yet that Jews were somehow responsible for the French Because Jews functioned as a seemingly inescapable they aim—each with a considerable degree of suc- Revolution. Himself a champion of the principles of trope for Jewish and non-Jewish theorists alike, they cess—to recast their protagonists’ ideas in new ways. 1789, Durkheim suggested that traditional Jewish could be invoked as powerful symbols in debates Goldberg’s study hinges on a puzzling fact: The life exemplified the principle of “mechanical solidar- about modernity with little consideration given to great modern sociologists tended to portray Jews ity,” an outmoded form of communalism that was at actual Jewish lives and communities. either as scarily protomodern or recalcitrantly back- odds with the revolution’s individualist spirit. This Werner Sombart, for instance, built on the basic ward. While Goldberg isn’t the first to notice this was a sly maneuver, since it meant that Jews typi- outlook of the early Marx, who seemed to identify startling dichotomy, he has analyzed it more thor- fied the same reactionary order that the anti-Semites capitalism with finance and finance with the Jewish oughly and systematically than anyone else, even now aimed to restore! Nevertheless, Durkheim was “spirit of hucksterism.” But Sombart discounted the

20 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2019 later Marx, who noted that Jews had little to do with fter one reads Goldberg’s account of modern unlike their coreligionists in Paris and Berlin, Jews re- the modern factory system of mass production, which Asociological theory as secularized superses- siding in Russian lands in the second half of the nine- he now identified as the hallmark of the exploitative sionism, it is startling that in Jewish Materialism teenth century remained landlocked, sidelocked, and capitalism. In contrast, Sombart’s contemporary Max Eliyahu Stern seeks to redeem the title phrase from locked out of major labor markets and state offices.” Weber sided with the later Marx’s focus on industrial its long history as a stock Christian anti-Semitic In truth, Stern tends to understate the impact of capitalism, although for Weber religious outlook was slur. The Church Fathers’ “carnal Judaism” became previous Western efforts to “productivize” the Jews, more important than class. Weber identified the Jews transposed in the 19th century into “conspiracy that is, to reconstitute their relationship with nature, with an earlier and limited form of economic life— theories that posited the existence of a small but land, and labor by channeling them into nonmer- “pariah capitalism”—that lacked Protestantism’s as- powerful [Jewish] cabal . . . that manipulated world cantile occupations, including crafts and farming. cetic drive toward salvation, which Weber famously markets.” But as Stern informs the reader, this is not Although he was hardly free of anti-Jewish preju- deemed necessary for the modern capitalist revolu- the Jewish materialism that he will explore in the dices, the great Prussian reformer Christian Wilhelm tion. As in the supersessionist schema, Weber’s “Prot- pages that follow. “In reality,” observes Stern, “Jew- von Dohm was acutely aware of widespread Jewish estant ethic” universalized an ethos—in this case, poverty when he penned his influential On the Civil worldly—that was implicit but never fully realizable Improvement of the Jews (1781). More to the point, in Judaism. In yet another variation, Georg Simmel’s the path-breaking Western maskil Naphtali Herz 1900 Philosophy of Money inverted Marx and Sombart Wessely (whom, like such later like-minded “enlight- by characterizing money as a supremely liberating eners” as Mendel Lefin and Joseph Perl, Stern oddly institution which, by reducing all commodities and does not mention) anticipated in 1782 some of the values to a cash nexus, set people free to reorganize core themes of a later Jewish materialism when he la- their relationships on the basis of choice rather than mented the overproduction of Talmud scholars and feudal compulsion. Simmel’s equation of money with the consequent shortage of Jews educated to be so- Jews was not wholly positive, yet, as Goldberg wittily cially useful, as well as the obliviousness of traditional remarks, if Simmel did not quite overturn Marx’s anti- Jews to the demands of physical, earthly reality. Jewish curse, “like that of Balaam at Mount Peor, he at Stern wishes to stress the opposition, even an- least made it appear as a mixed blessing.” tagonism, between Western liberal Jews who aimed Goldberg’s chapter on Park and the Chicago to free their coreligionists from the taint of mate- school of sociology he founded in the 1920s with rialism and the Ostjuden who came to embrace William Thomas is by far the book’s most innova- materialism not only as a means of physical salva- tive. But it also complicates his supersessionist hy- tion but—proudly—as a pillar of their own sense of pothesis. For what Goldberg finds here is a rich body self. Yet this opposition can easily be exaggerated, of sociological research that paints Jews in an almost and there was plenty of overlap between West and philo-Semitic glow. Park, who had studied under East and between idealistic enlighteners and hard- Simmel in Germany, transformed his teacher’s con- Portrait of Moses Leib Lilienblum. (Lebrecht nosed materialists. While Stern admonishes the Music & Arts / Alamy Stock Photo.) cept of “the stranger”—almost certainly modeled reader not to confuse the cohort whose history he on the image of the Jew—into the “marginal man.” traces here with adherents of the Haskalah, in truth This was a type who lived in the interstices of the ish materialism was an ideology developed in the the two groups overlapped. The core Enlightenment old world of tribal community (or ghetto) and the second half of the nineteenth century by Jews who demand for Jewish occupational productivization new world of urban coexistence. “The emancipated were socially oppressed and lived in dire poverty.” was echoed by virtually all of those whom Stern Jew was,” wrote Park, “historically and typically the Stern tells a new story about the beginnings of here labels materialists. marginal man, the first cosmopolite and citizen of a body of thought which turned out to be crucial Even in the earlier phase of the Haskalah, such the world.” With its focus on immigration, urban- for many of the mass movements of modern, 20th- demands entailed a revaluation of traditional ization, and the recasting of a melting pot America, century Jewry: emigration, Zionism, socialism, values. Hence, insofar as physical labor and liveli- Park’s Chicago school came to view Jewish immi- even the everyday nonaffiliated folk Judaism of hood (as opposed to Torah study) were typically grants as exemplary. It was not Jews’ assimilation post–World War II American Jews. Jewish Materi- seen as women’s work in Eastern European Jewish that so impressed Park but rather their capacity to alism is not so much an effort at uncovering fresh culture, the material realm of the body was construed develop institutions like the New York kehila and the source material but rather at recovering the real but as feminine. The pursuit of Jewish materialism now vibrant Yiddish press that served to facilitate immi- long misunderstood nature of Russian Jewry’s intel- necessitated a masculinizing of labor. For this reason, grant adaptation while also subtly transforming the lectual transformation in the second half of the 19th Moses Leib Lilienblum (who exemplifies in his biog- American scene. “In the case of the Jewish group,” century. I stress intellectual transformation because raphy the shift from maskil to materialist) called on he observed, “we find spontaneous, intelligent, and while the book seeks to grasp how Jews came to re- young Jewish men to take up the breadwinning roles highly organized experiments in democratic control focus their efforts on achieving material deliverance that had hitherto been relegated only to their moth- which may assume the character of permanent con- from poverty and hardship, Jewish materialism, as ers, wives, and daughters. The new Jewish man, he tributions to the organization of the American state.” Stern conceives it, is ironically about ideas. implied, must now become the old Jewish woman! It is hard to fit such an outlook into Goldberg’s Materialism, loosely defined as the notion that framework of transposed supersessionism. Ger- physical needs and drives, not ideas, determine owever, Stern is also right to see these earlier man sociologists like Sombart had regarded Jews history, has a long genealogy in Western thought Hfigures of the Jewish Enlightenment as mere as avatars of economic modernity and predicted dating back to the Greek Democritus. By a spe- influences on a movement that really gathered steam their transcendence through the advent of social- cifically “Jewish materialism,” Stern means Jews’ only when economic modernization began to pen- ism (once again conceptually paralleling Christian- realization that the “acquisition of the necessary etrate the Russian Pale, ironically sinking Jews ity overcoming Judaism). But for Park and co., the means of survival and their ability to appropriate deeper into poverty and creating problems that Tsar Jews themselves appear as the messiah. The eman- the physical world [was] essential to what it meant Alexander II’s reforms failed to address. As scholars cipated or deghettoized Jew is not, in the writings to be Jewish.” More pointedly, this was the effort to have long understood, a decisive shift in the con- of the Chicago school, even a deracinated Jew. In- define the material as comprising a distinctive, es- sciousness of the Jewish intelligentsia occurred in deed, Jews retain much of their distinctive identity sential, and—contra the anti-Semites—decidedly the decade and a half before the 1881 outbreak of within the new American ethnic mosaic. Park’s Jews positive foundation of Jewish identity. widespread anti-Jewish pogroms in the Pale. Disil- are the solvent of civilization, but there is no need Stern makes it clear that this new materialist lusionment with top-down solutions, dissipating for the Jews themselves to be solved. There is in fact outlook was not characteristic of Western Jews who faith in the harmonious intentions of the non-Jewish no Jewish question at all. Thus, if we are to apply lived as small minorities in liberal, free market so- masses, along with currents of Romanticism shift- Goldberg’s supersessionist categories consistently cieties but rather of their Eastern European breth- ing eastward had all prepared the way for new ap- we find that there is no place to park Park. ren, the Jewish masses of the Pale. As he puts it: “For proaches. But this turn has usually been understood

Winter 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 21 in terms of rising Jewish nationalism or even the odyssey, embraced a version of Judaism as a dat chom- by the giants of sociology, takes the gloves off at the beginnings of revolutionary fervor. Stern is the first rit, a material faith. Aaron Shmuel Lieberman, the end to knock their contemporary disciples down to to raise the banner of materialism as its overarching leading Jewish Marxist of the decade, sought to har- size. After all, he reasons, “the point of historical in- conceptual rubric. Thus, Stern’s account begins in ness the kabbalistic theories of Isaac Luria and Moshe quiry is not to discover forms of life different from our earnest in the 1860s and 1870s, a period of increasing Chaim Luzzatto to a theory of divine-human redemp- own . . . but to recover what has been forgotten in order radicalization of the broader Russian intelligentsia tion in which human labor rather than asceticism did to emancipate ourselves from it.” Quite so. The cur- whose Jewish counterparts would now begin trans- the work of redemptive tikkun. Stern even recasts rent manifestations of the earlier “habits of thought” lating materialist tracts like Friedrich Albert Lange’s Peretz Smolenskin, the renowned founder of Jewish he now seeks to indict include both orientalist cri- History of Materialism into Hebrew and Yiddish, spiritual nationalism, as ultimately a materialist. What tiques of Zionism that belittle modern Israel as the while also absorbing the influences of the positivists is clear at least from Stern’s account is that Smolen- expression of an anachronistic nationalism and, al- like Dmitry Pisarev, writers such as Turgenev and skin felt himself sufficiently engulfed by the growing ternatively, “occidentalist” identifications of Jews with Chernyshevsky, and eventually Karl Marx, too. materialist tide to acknowledge that while Jews were a soul-crushing neo-liberal order that undermines The goal for Jewish materialists like Lilienblum uniquely a nation defined by Geist (spirit), in order to communitarian and even national values (think wasn’t fitting into the non-Jewish occupational struc- realize their religious aspiration for redemption, Israel George Soros!). Disparaged as the ghosts of past gen- ture; it was bread. This shift away from liberal as- must manifest itself in a material form by acquiring erations or the phantoms of future shock, it appears similationism went hand in hand with a break from a land and spoken language of its own. When, in the that Jews remain maddeningly anomalous within the earlier efforts at religious reform. Lilienblum—who aftermath of the 1881 pogroms, the leading Russify- theoretical discourse of our own times as well. had once been active in such movements—presently ing Jewish liberal Dr. Leon Pinsker adopted as his key Perhaps the reason is that modern Jews them- professed little interest in the Jewish soul; it was the metaphor the image of a disembodied nation that selves have never been simply one thing but many Jewish body alone that mattered now. Stern is also on could be cured only by finding a material body to at one and the same time: Western and Eastern, rich target in showing that the growing Jewish attraction house its tormented soul, we are truly convinced: Jew- and poor, entrepreneur and luftmensch, capitalist to Marx in the 1870s was not a reflection of Marx’s ish materialism had clearly won the day! and socialist, backward and advanced. It is not— own confused and confusing statements about Jews. or not only—the supersessionist inheritance that Instead, he astutely remarks, “the Jewish materialists he authors of both of these excellent works re- makes Jews appear ripe for theorizing but the false teased out the messianic universal aspirations and Tserve their concluding remarks largely for score imperative of seeking to capture in a singular char- nationalist assumptions that they saw behind Marx’s settling. Stern takes the opportunity to strike out at acterization their frustrating diversity. theories of revolution.” If they had read Marx’s “On the antimaterialist agendas of liberal Western Jews the Jewish Question,” the only statement these Rus- and especially the American German Jewish estab- sian Jews would have identified with was his insis- lishment whose philanthropic largesse, Stern might Jonathan Karp is a professor of history and Judaic studies tence that we consider not the Sabbath Jew with his be forced to admit, probably did more to materially at Binghamton University, SUNY. He is the author of extra Sabbath soul but the actual “workday Jew.” benefit impoverished Jews than all of the theories The Politics of Jewish Commerce: Economic Thought Not all Jewish materialists disdained the religious hatched by the ideologues of the Russian Pale. For and Emancipation in Europe, 1638–1848 and coeditor dimensions of Jewishness. As Stern shows, some re- his part, Goldberg, who maintains a studious re- with Adam Sutcliffe of The Cambridge History of purposed religious tradition. The Hebrew science serve throughout his book’s four chapters detailing Judaism: Volume 7, The Early Modern Period, 1500–1815 writer Joseph Sossnitz, at the end of a long intellectual the prejudicial characterizations of Jews concocted (Cambridge University Press).

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22 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2019 Counting Jews

BY ALLAN ARKUSH

lesson.’ ‘Revenge for Kishinev,’ it cried.” not only run-of-the-mill Jewish leaders who fell A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great The Jewish-born but entirely deracinated Ernst short. Grady observes: War Lissauer (Stefan Zweig described him as “perhaps by Tim Grady the most Prussian or Prussian-assimilated Jew I If Belgian women were amusing themselves Yale University Press, 304 pp., $30 knew”) poured out his wrath in a different direc- by “poking the eyes out of wounded German tion shortly after the outbreak of war. His notori- soldiers,” as Martin Buber complained, then it ous “Hymn of Hate Against England” explicitly for- was surely the Belgians rather than the Germans swore hatred of Russia or France but—with a vehe- who were responsible for inhuman savagery. ore than 12,000 German Jews died The Jüdische Rundschau n 1915, Germany became the first country to use fighting for their country during Ichemical weapons in combat when it released World War I. It’s an astonishing declared, the Russians "will chlorine gas against the French line at Ypres, and figure given that there were only it made extensive use of such weapons in the fol- M550,000 German Jews at the time. (In Israel’s most be taught a lesson." "Revenge lowing years. Grady’s discussion of the Jewish role costly war, the War of Independence, it lost around in these atrocities focuses on one man, the brilliant 10,000 soldiers and civilians out of a population of for Kishinev," it cried. Jewish-born (but converted) chemist Fritz Haber. roughly 650,000.) Grady highlights both the importance of Haber’s Nonetheless, in late 1916, the German army un- mence at which Grady only hints—portrayed Eng- role and his zeal. dertook a Judenzählung (“Jew count”) of serving land as being “full of envy, of rage, of craft, of gall” soldiers to see if Jews were doing their part, yielding as Germany’s odious foe. This poem briefly became Throughout the development of this weapons to widespread suspicion that they weren’t. This was programme, it was Haber, rather than the a deep blow to German Jewish pride and is often de- military, who pushed the technology forward. scribed as a cultural turning point for German Jews. Haber arranged the experiments, won the Of course, more was to come. After Germany’s de- backing of the army and even went to the feat in 1918, Jews were accused of having “stabbed it battlefield to oversee the installation of the gas in the back,” along with antimonarchists, socialists, equipment. Such was his commitment to this and other radicals. new form of warfare that he put military success German Jews’ efforts to memorialize their fall- before his own family life. Soon after the first en soldiers were the subject of Tim Grady’s highly gas attack, Clara Immerwahr, Haber’s wife of informative first book. In his new and somewhat twelve years, shot herself with her husband’s troubling book, A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and service pistol. The reasons for her suicide the Great War, he moves beyond battlefields, war remain unclear. Nonetheless, looking back on memorials, and commemorative ceremonies to ex- events, it appears remarkable that the very next amine the role of all German Jews in the course of day Haber decided to travel to the Eastern Front World War I. Grady’s account overlaps with conven- to arrange further rounds of gas attacks. tional wisdom, but it has a much sharper edge. He highlights the ways in which “Jews and other Ger- Grady is careful to place all of this in perspec- mans” (a phrase that he uses frequently) started out tive, however. “Despite Haber’s belligerence, Ger- as war enthusiasts. Beyond that, he describes many man Jews were never the main cheerleaders of this ways in which Jews did their part to contribute to or aspect of total war.” On the other hand, he writes, support Germany’s worst excesses. And he doesn’t “like all other Germans, they gave their tacit back- see the “Jew count” as a major turning point. Above ing through either quiet acquiescence or, on rarer all, in contrast to most historians, he focuses on the occasions, direct support.” ways in which German Jews eventually became vic- When Reinhold Seeberg, a professor of Christian tims not just of vicious Nazi prejudice but of dan- theology in Berlin, published in June 1915 a peti- gerous tendencies that they themselves had earlier Fritz Haber in his lab, ca. 1915. (Courtesy of the tion calling “for both large-scale annexations and the aided and abetted. The way he makes this contro- Archive for the History of the Max Planck Society, Germanisation of land in the east,” several prominent versial case merits careful attention. Berlin-Dahlem, Germany.) German Jews signed it. The conservative publicist and Grady provides a vivid account of the “early academic Adolf Grabowska (Jewish-born but a con- months of the war when Jews and other Germans a sort of national anthem and even earned Lissauer vert to Protestantism) “was particularly vociferous in often let their patriotic spirit run wild.” If German the Order of the Red Eagle from the kaiser. (Grady his support of eastern expansion.” Davis Trietsch, a Jews had an additional, specifically Jewish reason for traces Lissauer’s hyperpatriotism, in part, to the fact prominent Zionist, called for expansion in the east, welcoming the outbreak of war, it was the fact that that the army rejected him on health grounds.) the west, and Africa, “while Max Warburg, Walther it pitted their country against the worst oppressor After describing the murderous conduct of the Rathenau and other prominent German-Jewish busi- of their fellow Jews: Russia. “‘We are fighting,’ stated Germans in neutral Belgium, which they overran nessmen advocated economic dominance.” one German-Jewish publication, ‘to protect our holy at the very beginning of the war, Grady notes dry- By the winter of 1915–1916, Germans, including fatherland, to rescue European culture and to liber- ly but pointedly that “[s]ynagogue sermons often German Jews, “started to look around for an expla- ate our brothers in the east.’” On this score, even the talked not of the sorrow of war but of its elemental nation for the military’s failure to end the war” and Zionists—a small minority of German Jewry—could power. Their focus was not on the destruction of increasingly tended to vilify and mistreat “the oth- eagerly join in: Their “main newspaper, the Jüdische Belgium but on the soldiers who had carried ‘the ers” whose conduct supplied one. Grady’s primary Rundschau, declared, the Russians ‘will be taught a German flag from victory to victory.’” And it was example of such deplorable behavior seems to be the

Winter 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 23 Germans’ illegal exploitation of foreign laborers: elements to the ‘stab in the back’ myth with their tism is Paul Nikolaus Cossmann, who was a convert, “Plans to force Belgians and Eastern Europeans to response to the strikes of January 1918 or to the ar- as Grady notes, to Catholicism. Later in the book, work for the German war effort suggested a cruel and mistice later that same year.” however, after noting how the “defining image of the uncaring stance towards other population groups.” Together with other Germans, then, Jews left a infamous ‘stab in the back’ myth” had first appeared The Jews who played a part in drawing up and im- number of “dangerous legacies” for their country. in 1924 on the cover of Cossmann’s journal, Grady plementing these plans included industrialists such In contributing to the “specifics of Germany’s First observes that a Munich Jewish lawyer “suggested as Walther Rathenau, legislators such as Georg Da- vidson and Max Cohen-Reuß, and the Zionist Franz Among the more than half a million Jews and converts from Oppenheimer. Grady sees further evidence of the wrong stance toward other population groups in the Judaism living in Germany during the war, there were certainly participation of German Jewish anthropologists in research projects “based on a distinct sense of national a significant number who placed their country “über alles” superiority” and focused on African, Asian, and East- ern European captives in German POW camps. and followed up on their convictions in deplorable ways.

rady’s succinct retelling of the story of the “Jew World War,” they unwittingly played a part in estab- that ‘the Jew’ Cossmann had invented the ‘stab in the Gcount” clearly shows how disturbed German lishing “the foundations for Hitler’s eventual path back’ myth.” Grady goes on to say that this lawyer Jews were by it. Among others, he cites the case of to power.” Ironically enough, they “were gradually was wrong to label him as a Jew since “Cossmann Ernst Simon, who had patriotically volunteered excluded from the legacies that they themselves had had converted to Christianity in his mid-thirties.” for duty and been wounded at Verdun but in the earlier helped to shape” and subsequently either But either Cossmann counts as a Jew or he doesn’t, aftermath of the count felt increasingly alienated forced into exile or killed. and if he doesn’t, why does the inventor of chemical from his country (and eventually migrated to Pal- weapons and Protestant convert Fritz Haber count? estine, where he became a prominent teacher and rady does not intend to say that the Jews reaped Actually, as Grady observes, even Cossmann did religious thinker). But Grady rejects the idea that Gwhat they sowed, only that they reaped what not specifically identify Jews as the people who had Simon was typical. stabbed Germany in the back; he accused socialists. While “[i]t has be- Toward the end of the book, Grady refers vaguely to come almost a given several Jews who propagated the “stab in the back” that the military’s myth, but earlier in the text, he names only two census permanently more: the parliamentarian Ludwig Haas and the altered German converted banker Georg Solmssen. His claim that Jews’ relationship three other Jews—Georg Bernhard, Walther Ra- to Germany,” he thenau, and Max Warburg—added elements to this writes, people like myth is not really substantiated. All he shows is that Simon were “the these men remained diehard supporters of the war exception rather effort to the bitter end and beyond. than the rule.” The Similarly, when Grady documents the partici- census and Ger- pation of Jews in anthropological studies tinged TheIsraelitisches Familienblatt published photos of “Jewish Knights of the Iron Cross man setbacks “may with racism, he speaks of “many German-Jewish 1st Class,” those soldiers who excelled in battle. (Courtesy of the Jüdisches Museum, Berlin.) have wiped some of academics” who showed remarkable enthusiasm for the lustre from the such work. After identifying an artist and a sculptor fight” for German Jews, “but their desire to see some or even most of them together with others on a racist project, he introduces, with the word “fi- Germany emerge victorious was undiminished.” helped to sow—which is still a grave enough judg- nally,” his third example, the photographer Adolph While this remained true of most German Jews, ment, if not exactly an accusation. One can’t say Goldschmidt. Three, one has to say, is not that many there were some who turned, in time, against the that it is utterly unwarranted, but it is overblown. (and there aren’t more lurking in the footnotes). war, such as Martin Buber, whose change of heart As Grady demonstrates, German Jews were surely Grady, it is clear, sometimes strains to make his does not seem to have registered much outside of caught up in the wave of war enthusiasm, persisted case. But that doesn’t mean that he has no case to the Jewish world. More significantly, there were for the most part in supporting the war effort to make. Among the more than half a million Jews and highly visible Social Democratic politicians, such the end, and by and large acquiesced to Germany’s converts from Judaism living in Germany during as Hugo Haase and Kurt Eisner, who supported most egregious misdeeds. And a number of indi- the war, there were certainly a significant number of and even led strikers calling for “‘more and better vidual Jews bore a considerably greater degree of individuals who, as he shows, placed their country food,’ peace and democratic reforms.” Unrepresen- culpability. Still, it is important not to lose sight of “über alles” and followed up on their convictions in tative as they were of German Jews in general, they the fact that some of the worst things that Grady deplorable ways. “seemed to provide further evidence for those who repeatedly attributes to “Jews and other Germans” Some of them later concluded that the things they believed that German Jews were somehow inextri- were really the work mostly of other Germans— did had helped lay the foundations for Hitler. In his cably linked to revolutionary, unpatriotic behavior.” and some Jews. Nor are the Jews in question always epilogue, Grady cites the ex-soldier and great medi- When Haase, Max Cohen-Reuß, and their colleague as representative or as numerous as his account, at eval historian Ernst Kantorowicz, who said that both Oskar Cohn spoke out in the Reichstag early in 1918 first glance, makes them appear to be. during World War I and afterwards, “fighting actively, against the annexationist Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, it One has to wonder, to begin with, about Grady’s with rifle and gun,” he had “prepared, if indirectly and “further provoked anti-Semites back to life.” regular identification of converts from Judaism as against my intention, the road leading to National- It is these developments that Grady seems to Jews. It is true, as he observes, that in imperial Ger- Socialism.” Kantorowicz had better reason than most have in mind, primarily, when he observes that the many Jews often became Christians not for spiritual other Jews to consider himself blameworthy: He had, postwar right-wing notion that Germany had been reasons but in order to become “more German” and as Grady observes, joined the violent right-wing para- stabbed in the back was “not simply plucked from that many of them “retained a deep connection to military Freikorps after the war. But we should be thin air, but rather stemmed from the actions of their Jewish identities long after they had been bap- wary of attributing a comparable measure of guilt to Jews and other Germans during the final months tised.” But can one on these grounds count any ex- too many of his German Jewish contemporaries. of the conflict.” But there is something else as well: Jew as a Jew, without further explanation, as Grady The myth “had actually first been propagated by a generally seems to do? I am not entirely sure that this broader spectrum of Germans, including several is how he is counting Jews, but if it is, he doesn’t do Allan Arkush is the senior contributing editor of the German Jews, during the war. Georg Bernhard, it with perfect consistency. One of the journalists he Jewish Review of Books and professor of Judaic studies Walther Rathenau, and Max Warburg had all added adduces as evidence of German Jewish hyperpatrio- and history at Binghamton University.

24 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2019 Confusions and Illusions: 1939

BY TUVIA FRILING

determine how to act was bleak. Any one of the they always had to the famous spas of Europe but The Road to September 1939: Polish Jews, challenges they faced would have been daunting then added international conferences where they Zionists, and the Yishuv on the Eve of World in and of itself: Hitler’s rise to power and his de- deliberated earnestly about the worsening situation War II structive policies; Poland’s decline after the death of across the continent to their itineraries. Palestin- by Jehuda Reinharz and Yaacov Shavit Brandeis University Press, 432 pp., $50 “Only the migrating birds could leave Europe as if there were no borders in the world as a war down on earth unfolded like none before it.” n March of 1936, not long after the Nuremberg Laws went into effect in the Third Reich, the Piłsudski in 1935 into “a kind of Polish Hitlerism,” ian Jews sought to escape the suffocating heat of Tel Yiddish writer Sholem Asch could still declare as contemporaries put it; the democracies’ retreat in Aviv by taking summer vacations in Poland—even that “the core of the Jewish situation is not in the face of Fascist pressure in Europe and its world- in 1939, despite the worrying signs of an impend- IGermany but in Poland,” and one cannot fault him wide reverberations; the Great Arab Rebellion in ing conflagration. Jewish and Zionist organizations’ for that. There were, after all, more than five times Palestine (1936–1939) that aroused fierce Muslim efforts to deal with a fluid and threatening situation as many Jews in Poland as in Germany, and their animosity toward Zionism from Morocco to India; yielded plans that proved in the course of time to be circumstances were both dire and deteriorating. A the ensuing British curtailment of immigration to devoid of any basis in reality and entirely illusory. million of them lived in desperate poverty, and all Palestine, the flood of Jewish refugees toward coun- Contemporary Jewish leaders could, of course, of them had to cope with mounting anti-Semitism. tries where they were unwelcome; the failure of the see their plight only in the light of past experience. Their own government made no secret of its desire international conference at Évian in July 1938 even The overall improvement in the status and circumstances of the Jews since the end of the 18th century had habituated them to the idea that Hitler represented only a bump in the road and that things would once again get better. Living through the “zigzags” of Nazi policy, they couldn’t see it, as we can, as a systematic escalation that would culminate in total warfare against the Jews. Even after fighting had broken out in 1939, there were still good and sensible people who did not grasp that the “phony war” would eventually turn into World War II, the most devastating war of all.

he Jewish leaders’ analyses of the general situ- Tation may have been inadequate, but they certainly knew that they faced severe problems and strove to solve them. Yet given the failures on the larger scene of world leaders, who had political experience, military intelligence, and eco- Heinrich Erlich, ca. 1893. nomic resources at their disposal that the Jews so woefully lacked, how indeed could one have expected to see them leave the country, but there was no- the Jews’ leaders to perform any better in the 1930s? where—not even Palestine, which could take only a Reinharz and Shavit show how a long list of them small proportion of them—for them to go. from a variety of camps and organizations analyzed In their wide-ranging, multilayered, and rivet- and evaluated the disconcerting developments in ing book The Road to September 1939: Polish Jews, Yitzhak Gruenbaum delivers a speech at a Zionist Europe. They let us hear Chaim Weizmann, for in- meeting during his visit to the Zeilsheim displaced Zionists, and the Yishuv on the Eve of World War II, stance, the head of the World Zionist Organization, persons camp, ca. 1945. (Courtesy of Alice Lev, Jehuda Reinharz and Yaacov Shavit focus on the ef- tell the Peel Commission investigating the troubles in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.) forts of the leaders of a diverse and disunited Jew- Palestine in 1936 of “millions of Jews in Europe who ish people in Europe, the United States, and Pales- were turning into ‘human manure’ and of the six tine to cope with this crisis in the years leading up to begin to address the refugee problem; America’s million Jews suffering distress in Eastern Europe.” to World War II. The authors clearly demonstrate isolationism; and, finally, the Molotov-Ribbentrop But they also show us how powerless he and other how difficult it was for these leaders to decipher the Pact on the eve of war. The combination of these Zionist leaders in Palestine and America were to overall geopolitical situation and its implications circumstances was insurmountable. help most of those people. for the Jews of Poland as well as the rest of Europe. Reinharz, professor emeritus of Jewish history Similarly unsuccessful were the forgotten lead- They also show how not only those who stood at the at Brandeis University and the former president ers of the Bund that was founded in Poland in 1920, head of institutional hierarchies but rank-and-file of that institution, and Shavit, professor emeritus like Heinrich Erlich, who never ceased to believe political activists, sharp-eyed writers, poets, and of Jewish history at Tel Aviv University, describe a that it was their duty to fight for equal civil rights journalists, as well as many other people clung to collective descent into unknown zones of confu- for Polish Jewry, something they didn’t really ex- what turned out to be illusions about their future. sion and uncertainty intertwined with a yearning pect to see without an alteration of the regime, even The backdrop against which the Jews had to to continue with life as usual. Leaders traveled as as they failed to discourage—and sometimes even

Winter 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 25 assisted—emigration from the country. Erlich sim- suance three months earlier of the White Paper that the story, for instance, of Sarah Reitberger (Blaustein) ply couldn’t forgive Yitzhak Gruenbaum, the Polish had severely curtailed Jewish immigration into Pal- and her mother, whose British Palestinian passports Zionist leader who had left for Palestine in 1933, for estine, David Ben-Gurion declared that the Jews of enabled them to obtain permits to exit Poland and saying that “it is better to get shot in the head in Pal- Europe had no choice but to break through Pales- railroad tickets to Trieste after the German invasion. estine than to get stabbed by a knife on the streets tine’s gates: “Only with warships and machine guns of Warsaw.” Last but not least, there were the heads can England . . . block the way to the homeland.” Two German soldiers sat in the train car with of the ultra-Orthodox Agudath Israel, who saw in And, indeed, Great Britain’s warships and sailors, them. They gave Sarah a picture: a bird that Poland a “home” that they had inhabited for hun- planes and pilots, and intelligence officials strove they cut out from the pack of the cigarettes they dreds of years and who regarded every Zionist ac- to stop illegal immigrants in their ports of depar- were smoking. The mother and daughter sailed tion as an impermissible defiance of God. ture or, failing that, to capture the boats that tried to Tel Aviv on the ship Galilea on November At the center of the “evacuation plan” proposed 5 with another 550 immigrants and returning by the Polish Revisionist leader Yochanan Bader in residents; the ship was torpedoed on its way 1938, under the direction and in the spirit of Jabo- back to Europe and all its crew drowned. When tinsky, stood the idea of the emigration of 750,000 they got to Tel Aviv there was a big crowd of Jews from Poland to Palestine over the course of 10 people at the port trying to attract the returnees’ years—something far short of an emergency pro- attention, waving photographs of family gram for the rescue of the many millions of Jews who members who had remained in Poland. stood in immediate danger. Bader was not alone in believing that the Jews still had time at their dis- Such stories, the authors well understand, require posal. Even Jabotinsky, today renowned for his dark no embellishment. prescience, could write in March 1939 that “[t]here Reinharz and Shavit’s powerful narrative re- will be no war; the German insolence will soon sub- volves between far-reaching reflections on the overall side; Italy will make friends with the British and the situation of the Jews on the eve of World War II and Arabs, together with their kings, will lose even the precise and illuminating investigations of local devel- little bit of market value they were supposed to have opments and individual histories. It rests on a broad possessed until now.” As late as August 1939, he was and variegated body of scholarly literature and on a still convinced that war was far off, and even on Sep- Rankean appreciation of the importance of archival tember 1, after Hitler’s troops had already crossed documents of all sorts. The authors have made exten- over onto Polish soil, he wrote that “it is still not pos- sive use of the records of governmental institutions sible to know whether there will be a general war.” in different countries, international committees deal- At the same moment, the delegates at the ing with Jewish matters and issues pertaining to Pal- 21st Zionist Congress who assembled in Geneva estine and other places, and Jewish organizations in from August 16 to 25, 1939, in the shadow of the Palestine and throughout the world, as well as letters, Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, thought that the great- personal diaries, memoirs, contemporary newspa- est menace wasn’t Hitler but Great Britain and the pers, poetry, and literature. All of these sources serve main task was fighting a policy that threatened to their goal of presenting, insofar as it is possible, a strangle the Yishuv. Responding to the British is- picture of “what actually happened.” Their book is a A poster of the ship Polonia, which transported Jews refreshing reminder of what can be achieved through from Poland and Vienna to Haifa, ca. late 1930s– the painstaking legwork that is now all too often dis- JEWISH REVIEW BOOKS early 1940s. (Courtesy of the Central Zionist Archives.) missed as “old-fashioned.” This book paints a picture of a world in which Our latest free ebook for to break through the blockade they had placed on politicians as well as cultural figures failed to figure Palestine. Reinharz and Shavit describe the travails out exactly what was happening all around them. JRB subscribers! of thousands of refugees who made their way out of Neither the former, whose attention was focused on Europe but found no ready haven elsewhere. Even the real world, whose task it is to choose the possible when they succeeded against all odds in landing in over the impossible, nor the latter, who dwelt in the NEW! Palestine, “the number of illegal immigrants who realm of the impossible, whose eyes are focused on were caught was deducted from the official quotas.” what is beyond reach, could succeed, despite their Reinharz and Shavit describe the confusion and best efforts, in reading the tea leaves and breaking illusions not only of statesmen and activists but of out of their powerless positions. writers and poets in Europe and beyond. They note Reinharz and Shavit open their book with a heart- what Nahum Sokolow regarded as “the delusional rending tale from the September 4, 1939, issue of a picture painted by the poet Uri Zvi Greenberg,” Hebrew children’s newspaper of some migratory birds who wrote that “Polish Jewry, sad and worried for that had had their wings plucked and were therefore its daily bread, is not marked by degeneration. It is unable to fly but were being lovingly and sensitively marked by the sign of royalty, if in Jewish cities and cared for by zookeepers in Tel Aviv. They conclude the towns can rise (today!) such a popular movement as book’s preface with the following sentence: “Only the ‘Brit Hahayal’ [an association of Jewish ex-soldiers migrating birds could leave Europe as if there were no JRBFiction in the Polish army], evoking a longing for hero- borders in the world as a war down on earth unfolded Containing 13 of our favorite pieces on fiction, ism like that of the ancient conquerors of Canaan.” like none before it.” Indeed, sadly enough, only birds this collection is more than a list of excellent Watching Betar members march through the streets could then fly across borders, not Jews. And even reading recommendations. These thoughtful of Warsaw, Greenberg could exclaim: “The Jordan those Jews who strove to obtain a bird’s-eye view of essays—on Bellow, Be’er, Shakespeare, Guard has risen on the banks of the Vistula; the what was taking place in Europe in 1939 could not Ozick, Appelfeld, and more—illuminate the world through art. Hebraic battalion which will grow from tens of really see where the continent was headed. thousands to hundreds of thousands strong.” Download your copy at Reinharz and Shavit have looked well beyond the www.jewishreviewofbooks.com/ebooks still famous as well as the half-forgotten political and Tuvia Friling is professor of history at Ben-Gurion cultural figures that populate their narrative to draw on University, Israel. His most recent book is A Jewish Kapo Jewish Culture. Cover to Cover. the recollections of a large number of rank-and-file Jews in Auschwitz: History, Memory, and the Politics of caught up in the unpredictable flow of events. They tell Survival (Brandeis University Press).

26 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2019 The Homecoming

BY ROBERT NASON

with no clear resolution just might be Pinter coun- visit to Israel in May 1978. Our Israeli Diary, unlike Our Israeli Diary: Of That Time, Of That Place try, Middle East style. the memoir she wrote from memory, is a day-by- by Antonia Fraser TheJerusalem Post article was enticing but short day account banged out on a portable typewriter Oneworld Publications, 176 pp., $16.99 on details. Pinter had just been to the Dead Sea every morning of their journey. It’s a vivid portrait of a famous couple in a place and time when every- Both Fraser and Pinter, thing seemed possible. The British upper classes have always been pink-skinned Brits, are duly diligent travelers and prolific travel writers, per- ’m categorically anti the Americans in haps the result of having once possessed an em- Vietnam,” British playwright Harold debilitated by the intense pire. Fraser prepared for the Israel trip by reading Pinter told the London Evening Stan- Saul Bellow’s To Jerusalem and Back, while Pinter dard in 1968. “And I feel strongly in fa- heat of the Israeli sun. bought large sunglasses and sturdy shoes. “I think vour“I of Israel.” we both believe we will tramp through a great deal Up to that point, the work of Pinter—arguably (“hot!”) and Mount Masada (“high!”) and was plan- of history,” Fraser writes, an enticing prospect for a the 20th century’s most important Jewish drama- ning to visit a cousin who lived on a kibbutz. And professional historian. At Heathrow Airport, Pint- tist—had not been concerned with politics, much that was about the last anyone heard of Pinter’s visit. er observes that the other countries have “shared less Israel or Jewish issues. But he grew up in East gateways” but Israel has only one, and the London during the 1930s and 1940s, when anti- suggestion of the world’s continued hostil- Semites and self-styled British fascists were a con- ity to the Jewish state is obvious. The flight’s stant threat to bookish Jewish youths like Pinter. two-hour delay doesn’t put Pinter in a good The experience left an indelible mark on him. He mood, and Fraser worries that the presence emerged in the late 1950s as part of the great wave of fellow passenger Joseph “Teddy” Sieff, a of new British playwrights from working-class or well-known British businessman and Zi- Jewish backgrounds, a generation that included onist, might provide a tempting target for John Osborne and Arnold Wesker. “Angry young terrorists seeking to blow up a plane carry- men” was the fashionable label the press gave them ing a prominent Jew; it doesn’t occur to her (though not all were angry, just irritable). Pinter’s that Pinter himself is the most prominent groundbreaking early plays such as The Birthday Jewish passenger. Fraser might have con- Party and The Caretaker were uncanny blends of sidered Sieff a good omen, since he was the postwar European absurdist theater and tradi- only person known to survive an assassina- tional English drama. Audiences throughout the tion attempt by Carlos the Jackal when the world were captivated by the bewitching rhythms famed terrorist shot Sieff in his bath on be- and tones of Pinter’s dialogue, the savage wit fol- half of the Popular Front for the Liberation lowed by suggestive pauses and silences, bursts of of Palestine; the bullet bounced off the ridge violence, and moments of melancholy lyricism. of Sieff’s nose, and Carlos fled. His black comedies, whether about working-class Ordinary tourists to Israel stay at ordi- eccentrics or upper-class mandarins, laced with nary hotels; Pinter and Fraser were guests menace and verbal fireworks, seemed to capture of Jerusalem. Upon awakening on her first the precarious nature of modern life. Pinter’s in- morning in the prestigious Jerusalem artists’ fluence can be seen in the plays of David Mamet and writers’ center Mishkenot Sha’ananim, and the films of Quentin Tarantino, wildly differ- Harold Pinter (left) with Amos Oz at a Friends of Israel Fraser’s impressions are aptly novelistic and ent as all three may be. In 1977, I saw an English- reception honoring Oz. (Jewish Chronicle/Heritage historical: language production of Pinter’s 1965 masterpiece Images/Getty Images.) The Homecoming at the Jerusalem Theatre, with Brilliant hard sunshine one senses from an early nearly the entire original cast reprising their roles. Michael Billington’s comprehensive 1996 biography hour outside the silvery white blind over the The production was played a bit broadly, perhaps a of Pinter doesn’t mention the trip—nor, it seems, arched windows, and the traffic roars on the big concession to the large hall and an audience filled has anyone else until now. road beneath Mishkenot. I peek up at a castle with many for whom English was likely a second The 47-year-old Pinter’s companion on the wall which I now realize is where the Jordanian language. The actors milked Pinter’s dark humor journey, 45-year-old Lady Antonia Fraser (Dame guns perched before ’67 threatening the poor for all it was worth, and the Israeli audience re- Antonia since 2011), kept a diary. Fraser, a Catho- (literally) Jews in the Mishkenot area. I visualize sponded enthusiastically. lic convert since her teens, along with her parents wretched black-clad figures scuttling about, Yet the playwright himself had never visited Is- and siblings (the publication of Brideshead Revis- reconciling themselves to the fact that every rael. Little wonder the excitement—at least among ited in 1945 had made Catholicism glamorous in now and then an arbitrary gun will blow them Pinter lovers—caused by an article in the Jerusalem England), grew up far from the mean streets of out of this world. But scuttling in the same place Post a few months later reporting that Harold Pinter Pinter’s Hackney. The author of novels, detective every day all the same. was visiting Israel to be present at the country’s 30th fiction, and bestselling biographies of historical anniversary. At first blush, it would seem that the figures like Mary, Queen of Scots and Marie An- In keeping with this ominous tone, the first playwright and the Jewish state were worlds apart— toinette, Fraser published a moving memoir of her thing they see in the Arab Quarter is a Star of Da- Pinter’s world so indoors, Israel so outdoors—yet it relationship with Pinter, Must You Go?, in 2010. vid over a prison and an Israeli soldier with a large was conceivable that a nation replete with territorial While cleaning out a cupboard in 2016, she came gun atop the roof of a building, prompting Pinter to disputes, languages used as weapons, and narratives across the journal she’d kept during their 15-day remark, “A family face in the crowd.” Fraser is more

Winter 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 27 sympathetic to Israel’s security concerns, noting is amazed that she can float on top of the salty, [W]e do see for ourselves for the first time that, “The world has decided that really unique mineral-rich water. But both she and Pinter, pink- exactly what the extraordinary achievement of among states, Israel must be a moral state . . . some- skinned Brits, are duly debilitated by the intense the mad, and I mean mad, Israelis has been. For thing no other state is expected to be!” She notes heat of the Israeli sun. Ultimately, Fraser admits it must have been madness to come as they have that Pinter is unmoved by the Western Wall: “He they can take “only so much” of Israel and often come to a country without water, shade or even definitely felt no atavistic twinge.” Not surprising, retreat into their rooms to read British novels or soil and there is this arid desert contained, don’t since two years after his bar mitzvah Pinter had forget, by hostile Arab mountains (from which shocked his parents by renouncing Judaism. After Fraser is clearly in a long line shells emerge in the air, terrorists by night) and his success, Pinter dutifully paid to send his deeply yet insist on growing the green vegetables and Zionist father and mother on trips to Israel twice of English Christian Zionists flowers of Hertfordshire and Worcestershire. before visiting the country himself. In fact, Pinter actually feared visiting Israel, and philo-Semites, going Fraser is clearly in a long line of English Christian though not because of terrorism. He confesses to Zionists and philo-Semites, going back at least to Fraser that he was afraid to go there simply because back at least to George Eliot. George Eliot. he might dislike both the nation and its people. The Still, nothing in England could prepare them for Israelis were not entirely sure what to make of Pinter share a copy of O Jerusalem!, a popular history of Masada, the ancient fortress atop a mountain pla- and Fraser, either. As she frequently does through- Israel’s War of Independence. Pinter also heart- teau where 960 Jewish men and women held off a out the diary, Fraser presents events as if they were ily partakes of Israel’s supply of beer, wine, and Roman legion of 9,000 for nearly two years before scenes in a play, as in this exchange after a concert at Scotch at the King David and American Colony committing mass suicide in 74 C.E. to avoid sub- the Jerusalem Theatre: hotels, each offering him much-prized quiet and jugation. Ascending the rocky mesa in a cable car, solitude in nondrinking 1978 Jerusalem. By Satur- they’re annoyed by tourists wearing, Fraser writes, A woman describing herself as the Mme. day, the evening before Independence Day, Fraser “tiny hats, too tiny for their big heads with ISRAEL Furtseveya of Israel, i.e. Arts Minister: “I know reports that, “H. says he is very happy to be in Is- on them . . . And [with] loud voices which make your name. Tell me why?” rael, adding, ‘What I mean is, I see no reason why Harold flinch.” But the historian in Fraser is moved Me, pausing and stumbling: “Well, I’m a writer, we shouldn’t come here again. Here to Israel.’” by “the sight of the Roman rampart which creeps sort of a biographer.” Both were enchanted by Israel’s people and up behind the rock . . . How ghastly to watch that She is not very satisfied. landscape, though, unsurprisingly, they see the thing inexorably creeping toward you.” Meanwhile, H., sotto voce: “You should have said, ‘Well, I left Holy Land through quintessentially British lenses. the man whose plays inspired anxiety in so many my husband for Harold Pinter and there was all The owner of the American Colony Hotel is “a real audiences is suffering from a serious fear of his this scandal in the newspapers.’” Graham Greene character,” and a church in the Old own—vertigo. It causes Pinter to “stagger slightly, City reminds her of Blackfriars at Oxford. While turn white and half fall, half sit down . . . It is a ter- here is naturally much sightseeing to attend driving to the northern Galilee, she is simultane- rible moment.” Fortunately, Lady Antonia takes Tto, including the obligatory trip to the Dead ously in awe of the country and reminded of her Pinter’s hand in a firm grip and gently walks him Sea, where Lady Antonia, like so many before her, native England: down to the cable car, whence they return to ground

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28 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2019 level safely. Once again, Fraser captures the quality From the modest environs of the kibbutz to the York Times columnist Anthony Lewis. Lewis frankly of their relationship in dialogue: exalted halls of the Knesset. Observing the proceed- loathes Begin and says, “The Israelis are so irritating! ings from a bulletproof glass partition above the They are so wonderful, but they’re so irritating that H. later: “You know I told you I didn’t know Israeli parliament floor, Fraser is astonished to see they can’t understand how others see them. They what the next stage of vertigo was. Well now I an Arab communist legislator, who, moreover, had won’t even listen.” By way of return, Pinter finds know. Coldness. Nausea.” congratulated Sadat during the Yom Kippur War. Lewis highly irritating, partly because of his insuffer- Me: “You were a hero—you got able pose as “an expert,” a pretension Pinter always down!” disliked and regularly mocked in his plays. H.: “With your hand.” But there is more to Israel than politics—more He gives me a copy of Yadin’s even than Jews and Arabs. Curious about everything, splendid Masada inscribed “To Fraser visits the Armenian Quarter of the Old City to Antonia, the girl who got me down view a collection of late medieval manuscripts. Her a l i v e .” driver offers her still another aspect of Israel:

Later that night they discuss the his- I was fetched in a large car with an Armenian tory of Masada with British playwright chauffeur—all the Armenians I have met have David Mercer, married to an Israeli and been large and handsome and almost brigand- living half of each year in Israel. Mer- like except for their civilized clothes. The cer disagrees with Eleazar’s speech to chauffeur was no exception. In the car a smaller the Jews about the virtues of a chosen dark man with a check shirt. death, saying, “With my ex-Communist background, I have a horror of people Me (the usual question): “Where were you born?” impelled to do things en masse by the Mr. Hintillian: “Here in Jerusalem.” power of rhetoric.” But Fraser suspects Me: “Then you have seen many changes in your that Pinter is “sympathetic to the Zealots, lifetime.” who preferred death at their own hands Mr. H: “In the Armenian Quarter we do not see to slavery and subjugation, and death changes.” at the hands of the Romans.” Even a casual reader of Pinter’s plays, which show On the penultimate day of the trip, Fraser suc- fierce commitment to freedom from cinctly notes: “Sunday. ‘Shabbat,’ murmurs H. coercion, would have to agree with somewhat inaccurately, and makes my breakfast Fraser’s assessment. as he does at home.” Pinter may not have been the The couple had access to some of the most devout Jew, but he was obviously a devoted best and brightest in Israel during their boyfriend. For her part, Fraser spends the day shop- trip, and the diary name-drops lumi- ping in Old City markets, having finally learned naries such as Jerusalem mayor Teddy how to successfully haggle. She buys an ashtray for Kollek, former (and future) prime min- Pinter’s mother, “hoping vaguely that the design is Aerial view of Masada in the Judaean desert with the Dead Sea ister Shimon Peres, a host of Israeli ac- neither Islamic nor Catholic.” They conclude their in the distance. (Courtesy of Andrew Shiva/Wikipedia.) tors, directors, and writers, and even a whirlwind journey on the Mishkenot patio, gazing visiting Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. But at the walls of the Old City: an encounter with more personal significance for She approvingly notes Paul Johnson’s observation Pinter is when he and Fraser arrive, unannounced, that Israel is the only democratic assembly in the [W]e sit outside on a perfect evening as a full like Teddy and his (non-Jewish) wife, Ruth, in The Middle East. Did Pinter agree? The diary forthright- moon is gradually defined in the sky, and the Homecoming, to visit his older cousin at Kibbutz ly wrestles with the political issues that invariably shimmering sea-like effect of the desert beyond Kfar Hanassi. Moshe Ben Haim, born Morrie To- crop up in every conversation about Israel, a coun- is lost. In the end the moon is very strong ber, grew up with Pinter in Hackney; Moshe came try where, as Jerusalem Post military correspondent indeed. But the walls do not lose their own to Israel after fighting in the British Army in the Hirsh Goodman tells Fraser, “you imbibe argument strength . . . For I do feel that these clean bright Second World War and helped found the kibbutz and even decisions of conscience every day just as old walls are looking at me and have done so for in 1948. The cousins hadn’t seen one another in 30 you clean your teeth.” two weeks. years. Now a gray-haired patriarch, Moshe regrets Before coming to Israel, Fraser reports, Pinter that Pinter has come to Israel “now when we have was “obsessed with Begin” and “read out his speeches In the end, Pinter decides that, despite his earli- a Fascist government” and proceeds to set forth the from time to time in tones of angry horror.” (Read- er fears, he likes Israel—the nation and the people. kibbutz principle to his famous cousin: “The man ers familiar with Pinter’s deep, theater-trained voice No doubt the sunny and outgoing Lady Antonia who negotiates a million pound deal for a kibbutz can easily imagine the effect.) The playwright wor- helped draw out the deeply private, often moody factory and the man who cleans the basin earn ried about the new prime minister’s impact on Israel’s Pinter. Like her, he was impressed by the serious the same amount,” adding, “And they are content image among a rising generation that saw Palestin- level of Israeli conversation (though admittedly he to do so.” This lesson in equality is interrupted by ian refugees—not Jewish survivors of the Holo- tended to socialize with secular, liberal Jews like Sophie, Moshe’s sister-in-law, herself visiting from caust—as the true victims. Yet Fraser remains more himself). He confesses to Fraser that for the first the Bronx, where she asserts that, “Everything the sympathetic to the security concerns of Israelis. She time he really did feel Jewish—and that having her kibbutz has, the Bronx has and better.” The dialogue has doubts about a Palestine set up so close to “the with him in Israel meant a great deal to him. At threatens to become a scene from a Neil Simon play busy burgeoning Jerusalem” and wonders, “How the airport, during the obligatory interrogation, until Moshe points out that the kibbutz was con- can anyone expect the Israelis to welcome a state the Israeli security officer asks them about their tinually shelled from Syria during its first 19 years, set up by Arafat and his murderous boys here?” She relationship to one another. “We’re lovers!” Pinter and again we are in Pinter’s domain, where danger quotes Begin: “Why do they call me a terrorist . . . exclaims. is never far away. Yet the photograph of Moshe and and Arafat a guerrilla?” and adds that Begin’s re- his son with Pinter, one of many color snapshots in mark “strikes home.” the book, suggests an ease and happiness not of- During a dinner hosted by an American couple Robert Nason is a freelance writer based in New York ten found in Pinter’s plays. With his open-necked who, Fraser suspects, will not settle permanently whose work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, shirt and tousled hair, Pinter looks like a kibbutznik in Israel (“They’re such a Cambridge, Mass., young Commentary, the Weekly Standard, City Journal, and himself. couple!”), Pinter and Fraser encounter longtime New the Mailer Review.

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BY GARY SAUL MORSON

vate individuals were killed, as well as others being Jews when they threw bombs at patriotic or religious A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of wounded. Between January 1908 and May 1910, gatherings, injuring children and the elderly, as well Judeo-Bolshevism authorities recorded just fewer than 20,000 terrorist as when they used synagogues as strategic sites for by Paul Hanebrink acts (and they must have missed ones in remote ar- gun battles. Traditional Jews, of course, regarded Harvard University Press, 368 pp., $29.95 eas). According to Geifman, murder became more such actions as both sacrilegious and dangerous. common than traffic accidents. “They shoot, we are beaten” was the sentiment. She notes that among the Russian Empire’s 136 The traditional explanation of Jewish revolu- million people, only 5 percent were Jews, but Jews tionary terrorism was economic and other types of saac Babel’s Red Cavalry stories, a fictionalized constituted about 50 percent of the membership of oppression, but, as Babel’s story suggests, idealism account of his service with a Bolshevik army and messianism also played a role. unit invading Poland, originally concluded with a poignant story about Ilya, son of a Ha- Historian Anna Geifman famous story concerning Yaakov Mazeh, the Isidic rebbe and “the last of the Princes” of that line. quotes the widely circulated Agovernment-appointed chief rabbi of Mos- We have met Ilya in an earlier story, so we are espe- cow, has him telling Trotsky (nom de guerre of Lev cially moved that the narrator encounters him on witticism about the execution Davidovich Bronstein) that the Trotskys conduct the verge of death. Among Ilya’s things he discovers the uprisings but the Bronsteins pay the price. In symbols of his two loves, Judaism and Bolshevism: of 11 anarchists, 15 of whom fact, the Jews were to suffer a great deal because of what Paul Hanebrink calls, in the subtitle of His things were strewn about pell-mell— were Jews. his book A Specter Haunting Europe, “the myth of mandates of the propagandist and notebooks Judeo-Bolshevism.” Blaming the Jewish commu- of the Jewish poet, the portraits of Lenin and revolutionary parties. In 1903, Chaim Weizmann nity for Bolshevik crimes led to enormous violence Maimonides lay side by side, the knotted iron of explained to Theodor Herzl: “It is a fearful spectacle against Jews during the Russian civil war and in Lenin’s skull beside the dull silk of the portraits . . . to observe the major part of our youth—and no the interwar period throughout Europe. Except for of Maimonides. A lock of woman’s hair lay one would describe them as the worst part—offering during the two-year Nazi-Soviet alliance, the myth in a book, the Resolutions of the Party’s Sixth themselves for sacrifice as though seized by a fever.” was central to Nazi propaganda. Congress, and the margins of Communist leaflets To avoid inflaming anti-Semitism, many revolu- Hanebrink offers impressive examples of such were crowded with crooked lines of ancient tionary leaders tried not to use Jews to execute terror- propaganda, sometimes believed by people who Hebrew verse. They fell upon me in a mean and ist acts, but some of the most violent groups (so-called should have known better. He comments shrewdly depressing rain—pages of the Song of Songs and on how lies came to revolver cartridges. seem true: “Examples of Judeo-Bolshevik Lenin and Maimonides, Communist leaflets and He- power were end- brew verse: What could be more different, in language, lessly cross-referential: in sensibility, in world view? The narrator remembers the ‘unmasking’ of meeting Ilya at his father’s when, it turns out, Ilya was Jewish revolutionaries already a party member but concealing it for the sake in one place gave cred- of his mother. The earlier story about Ilya begins with ibility to accusations a mystical incantation to the mother as the symbol of of Jewish subversion Hasidic tradition, and so when Ilya leaves home to in another. This cir- command a Bolshevik regiment, we grasp which of culation and mimetic the two contradictory loyalties has won. reproduction had a How could one maintain allegiance to both? ‘reality effect.’” The The name “Ilya”—Elijah—suggests an answer, since myth persisted, often Elijah is, of course, associated with the coming of the in disguised form, af- messiah. The Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdy- ter World War II and, aev regarded messianism as deeply characteristic of in Hanebrink’s view, both Russians and Jews—of Ilyas and Elijahs—both has recently metasta- of whom readily translated religious longings into sized yet again. revolutionary politics. The great scholar Before encountering Ilya, the narrator has been Jacob Talmon, com- A Russian Soviet poster, 1919, by an unknown artist, reads in part, “Sign up now for tossing Trotsky’s pamphlets to peasants, and both menting on the as- the Red Cavalry!” (Courtesy of Granger Historical Picture Archive. ) Trotsky the Jew and Lenin the Russian figured as sociation of Jews with symbols of Bolshevism. In fact, three of the seven revolution, called the original members of the Bolshevik politburo were Maximalists and anarchists) had no choice because problem a “foundling, a waif, an abandoned Jews, not counting Lenin himself, who was one- they were almost entirely Jewish. Geifman quotes child” claimed by no one. Jews knew they quarter Jewish. Jews played a disproportionately the widely circulated witticism about the execution couldn’t ignore it but still wished “they had nev- large role not only in Bolshevism but in the whole of 11 anarchists, 15 of whom were Jews. er heard of it.” Hanebrink boldly directs our Russian revolutionary/terrorist movement. The fore- For traditional Jews, such actions were repellent. attention to it and the troubling questions it raises. most historian of Russian terrorism, Anna Geifman, As early as the 1870s, Jewish families sat shiva when a In what sense is Judeo-Bolshevism a myth? notes that early in the 20th century, the entire so- child joined the revolutionaries. Jewish revolutionar- Judeo-Bolshevism is actually a bundle of ideas, in- ciety was convulsed with terrorism. Between 1905 ies, in turn, did not regard themselves as representing cluding beliefs that: (1) Jews were disproportion- and 1907, 4,500 government officials and 2,180 pri- Judaism. They deliberately provoked reprisals against ately represented among Communists and revolu-

Winter 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 31 tionaries, (2) Communists, like Nazis, committed liefs.” But their sincerity is not at issue. It is entirely toppled the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Polish unspeakable crimes, and (3) Jews should be held possible that Jewish Bolsheviks, like their comrades, founder of the Soviet secret police. That was a mis- accountable for these crimes, because there was committed horrendous acts for idealistic reasons. take, the joke goes, because Poles should have hon- something Jewish per se about Communism. Hanebrink at last concludes that the truth is beside ored Dzerzhinsky as the Pole who killed the most Across Eastern Europe, the myth led to pogroms the point. “[A]ssessing the idea of Judeo-Bolshevism Russians! The humor derives from the fact that Dz- and arrests of Jews, who were blamed for national as a matter to be verified or falsified is profoundly erzhinsky killed Russians neither because they were setbacks. So historically dangerous has it proved that misleading,” he explains. “[T]he purpose of study- Russians nor because he was a Pole. By the same to- some have denied all three premises out of hand. ing the Judeo-Bolshevik myth must be not to de- ken, however many Gentiles Trotsky may have mur- They have added that those who accept any part of termine how true it is, but to understand why it has dered, he did so neither because they were Gentiles the myth fear nonexistent or grossly exaggerated been and remains so powerful.” But myths respond nor because he was a Jew. dangers. This is more or less the tack that Hanebrink to some real experience, and so surely ascertaining Understandably appalled by the harm caused by takes. He traces how the “reality effect” fed on itself what is true would help us understand their power the Judeo-Bolshevik myth, Hanebrink strays into and shows how the myth adapted itself to changing and appeal. In any case, if truth is irrelevant, how denying its second premise: He presents Bolsheviks circumstances and different countries. As he puts the can we call something a myth? as not all that bad and treats fears of them as “para- point, “the meaning of ‘Jewish Bolshevik’ changed in noid.” For instance, he faults an anti-Bolshevik Brit- translation . . . [The myth] was used to delegitimize n my view, the part of the myth that matters is ish journalist in Russia in 1917 who “tried to under- political alternatives. But the enemies were very dif- Iwhat I have called it the third premise. Even if stand the causes of the revolution and why the Bol- ferent.” The most fascinating parts of this study trace Jews are disproportionately represented among shevik Party had taken it in such a radical and (to his unexpected permutations. Refute one version of this Communists and Communists committed un- mind) disastrous direction” (italics mine). He dis- Hydra myth, and two more arise in its place. speakable crimes, can Jews as a community be parages opponents of Bolshevism as “counterrevo- held morally responsible? If that is the question, it lutionary” even though liberals, socialists, and other utside the Soviet Union, how Jewish were Marxists regarded the Bolshevik coup OCommunist movements? The answer var- itself as a betrayal of the revolution. At ies country by country and decade by decade, of the same time, Hanebrink treats Euro- course, but sometimes the Russian pattern was re- pean fears of Bolshevism as irrational. peated. When, in 1919, Communists proclaimed a “For many, the triumph, however short- Soviet republic in Hungary, Hanebrink notes, 30 lived, of Bolshevik regimes in the heart of the 48 people’s commissars were Jews, includ- of Central Europe and the newfound ing the regime’s head and its secret police direc- militancy of the workers’ movement . . tor. By the time Communists took over Poland in . gave rise to the nightmarish thought the late 1940s, there were too few Polish Jews left that revolutionary unrest was like a dis- to constitute much of the party, but 30 percent of ease that respected no borders.” the secret police leadership were Jewish, including But the Bolsheviks indeed believed not only secret police chief Jakub Berman but also in world revolution and said as much. the person running the department charged with They did everything possible to spread penetrating the Catholic Church and the person it. Applebaum cites a note to Stalin that Anne Applebaum has described as “the chief secret Lenin wrote in 1920: “Zinoviev, Bukha- police interrogator” in Iron Curtain: The Crushing rin and I, too, think that revolution . . . of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956, a work that contrasts should be spurred on immediately. My instructively with Hanebrink’s. In Hungary, Ap- Josef Stalin and Vladimir Lenin at the 8th Congress of the Russian personal opinion is that to this end, plebaum notes, “all of the leading Hungarian com- Communist Party, March 1919. (State Central Museum of Hungary should be Sovietized, and per- munists . . . were of Jewish origin, as were many of Contemporary History of Russia, Moscow.) haps Czechia and Romania.” He referred the founders of the political police and the Interior to the “worldwide collapse of bourgeois Ministry.” One may surmise that this was Stalin’s is crucial that, so far as I know, none of the Jew- democracy” as imminent. Two veterans of the Rus- way of directing hatred away from the Soviet Union, ish Communists were acting as Jews. One reason sian Revolution helped lead the Munich rebellion an age-old policy of using Jews as a lightning rod. this fact is so important is that the idea of Judeo- that proclaimed a Bavarian Soviet republic, and the Whatever the reason, it meant that Communist ter- Bolshevism rested upon the lie propounded in the Romanian regime also had important Soviet con- ror often showed a Jewish face in Hungary. forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion—the most nections. The invasion of Poland described in Babel’s There are many ways of coming to terms with widely circulated anti-Semitic tract in history— Red Cavalry was undertaken to spread the revolution these unwelcome facts. Hanebrink correctly points that world leaders are actually fronts for the hid- westward. That indeed was the whole purpose of the out that even though Jews were disproportionately den elders and knowingly act to ensure their domi- Comintern, established in 1919. It was, as historian represented among Communists, most Jews were nation of the world. Since Bolsheviks themselves Richard Pipes noted, “a declaration of war against all not Communists. True enough, but this answer does proclaimed their aim was world revolution, all the existing governments.” not entirely dispose of the matter. When growing up, that was needed was to describe the Bolsheviks as When the Soviets occupied Eastern Europe after I remember being given books with capsule biogra- working for the elders. World War II, Hanebrink reminds us, they liberated phies of great Jews of history. I distinctly remember That is entirely false, and not only because there camps, while Communists, working with other left- one that began with Abraham and ended with Mel were no such elders. Bolshevik Jews—not just Trotsky ists, “openly contemplated measures, such as land re- Allen (really Melvin Allen Israel, the book instruct- and Comintern leader Zinoviev—did not consider form, that had been nonstarters before the war and ed), the longtime sportscaster for the New York Yan- themselves to be acting as Jews or for the Jews. Hun- that promised to dramatically change the lives of the kees. I cannot count the number of times I heard garian Communist leader Mátyás Rákosi, one of the poorest people in the region.” Enemies of these re- that of the four greatest thinkers shaping the modern “little Stalins” ruling Eastern Europe after World War forms fought back with charges of Judeo-Bolshevism, world—Marx, Darwin, Freud, and Einstein—three II, was, although Jewish, given to anti-Semitic remarks. descriptions of Soviet soldiers as displaying “Asiatic” were Jews. If Jews claim honor, and honor them- On one occasion, Applebaum notes, the speaker of features, and exaggerated tales of Soviet atrocities. To selves, for Marx, Freud, and Einstein, how can they the parliament was provoked to snap: “your mother be sure, he concedes, “[l]ooting and rape were com- entirely avoid responsibility for Trotsky? was a Jew and do not deny your mother.” The Judeo- monplace in Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe, espe- As extenuation, Hanebrink proposes that many Bolshevik myth notwithstanding, it was precisely by cially in areas where the fighting had been fiercest Communist Jewish men and women were idealists: repudiating their Jewishness that these Jews became and where military discipline was lax.” Rákosi and “All believed in the power of ideas to transform the Communists. others did their best to counter the bad behavior. world; all saw a future filled with limitless possibil- I can illustrate this with a dark Eastern European This description makes it seem that, against orders, ity; all were convinced in the rightness of their be- joke. In 1989, as Communism fell in Poland, rebels some rowdy soldiers got carried away. But rapes and

32 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2019 looting were not against Soviet policy. In his celebrat- Christian conservatives . . . began to imagine Na- threat . . . the radical Islamic terrorist.” ed memoirs To Be Preserved Forever, Lev Kopelev, a zism and Communism as equivalent, and similar, The error in Hanebrink’s reasoning is, I think, a dedicated Communist, found himself in the Gulag for totalitarian systems.” But it wasn’t just Christian subtle one. It is entirely possible that the image of protesting against mass rape: “when our troops were conservatives who thought this way. the dangerous Muslim draws, at least in part, on a entering German territory,” he was charged, “you en- The Soviet Jewish novelist and journalist Vasily mythology already available and charged with emo- gaged in propaganda of bourgeois humanism, of pity Grossman is usually considered the first person to de- tion. The problem is that even if that is true, Islamist for the enemy . . . you engaged in agitation against scribe the Holocaust, which he witnessed taking place terrorism may be a real, not purely imagined, threat. vengeance and hatred—sacred hatred for the enemy.” in Nazi-occupied Soviet territory. With no illusions By Hanebrink’s reasoning, it wouldn’t matter if such Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, then a Soviet officer, de- about Nazism, he too equated the two regimes in terrorism should grow a hundredfold. It would still scribed the horrors of mass rape in his poem Prussian his famous novels Forever Flowing and Life and Fate. be a myth because reactions would still draw on the Nights. When Yugoslav Communist Milovan Djilas What particularly appalled him was the Soviet col- old tropes of Judeo-Bolshevism. complained about such behavior, Stalin asked how he lectivization of agriculture, which took the lives of at Here too I think Applebaum’s approach, in which could not “understand it if a soldier who has crossed least 10 million people, half of whom died in a delib- views are interpreted rather than pathologized and thousands of kilometers through blood and fire has erate campaign of forced starvation. Kopelev recalls in which historical crimes are not minimized, makes fun with a woman or takes a trifle?” As for the extent his own days as a dedicated Communist sent to the for an instructive contrast. Consider her account of of the rapes, in 1946 the Hungarian social welfare min- countryside to enforce the famine: “I took part in this the case of Salomon Morel, a Polish Jew and Com- ister issued a carefully worded decree: “As an effect of myself, scouring the countryside, searching for hid- munist partisan, from the perspective of opposing the front and the chaos following it there were a lot of den grain . . . stopping my ears to the children’s crying sides. In 1945, Morel was commandant of a labor children born whose families did not want to take care and the women’s wails . . . I saw women and children camp for Germans on the site of what was once an of them . . . I ask hereby the bureau of orphanages . . . with distended bellies, turning blue, still breath- auxiliary camp for Auschwitz. Then he became an to qualify all babies as abandoned whose date of birth employee of the Polish secret police, achieving high is from nine to eighteen months after the liberation.” rank and becoming commandant of a prison. After It is well known that the Soviet army liberated Nazi the fall of Communism, he emigrated to Israel. camps. Fewer are aware that shortly thereafter, the So- A Polish prosecutor discovered that Morel was viets reopened Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. The known for his cruelty to German prisoners, including former became Special Camp Number Two and the women and children: starving and torturing them, latter Special Camp Number Seven. Applebaum ex- beating some to death, and letting hygiene deterio- plains that these camps “were preventative rather than rate to the point where some eight hundred prison- punitive, designed primarily to quarantine people ers died in a typhus epidemic. The interior ministry, who might oppose the system, not to incarcerate peo- never famed for humanitarianism, held him respon- ple who had already done so.” Although these were sible and docked his pay. In view of these actions, the not extermination camps, “they were extraordinarily prosecutor accused Morel of war crimes and asked lethal nonetheless. Of some 150,000 people who were Israel to extradite him. The Israeli ministry of justice incarcerated in NKVD camps in eastern Germany replied furiously that Morel was not a war criminal between 1945 and 1953 . . . about a third died from but a victim who had witnessed a Polish officer mur- starvation and illness.” Ten such camps were built in der his family during the war. It rejected the descrip- Soviet-occupied Germany and were controlled direct- tion of conditions at the camp Morel ran and accused ly by the NKVD (interior ministry) in Moscow. the Polish prosecutor of anti-Semitism. “The Poles,” Hanebrink deserves praise for combatting the Applebaum writes, “felt that the Israelis were hiding ways in which the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism was Salomon Morel, commandant of the a typical Communist criminal. The Israelis felt that used to blame the Jews for Bolshevik crimes and the Zgoda Labor Camp, 1945. He emigrated the Poles were attacking a typical Jewish victim.” She danger of further Bolshevik conquests. Still, I wonder to Israel after the fall of communism. then works through the historical facts each side had whether his misleading descriptions of Soviet behav- in mind. By the end of her account we recognize that ior may backfire. Those who know about what hap- ing but with vacant, lifeless eyes. And corpses . . . whatever Morel was, he was not typical of anything: pened may reason: If a historian cannot be trusted on I saw all this and did not go out of my mind or com- matters that can be readily checked, why should he be mit suicide. . . . As before, I believed because I wanted He was a Holocaust victim, a communist criminal, trusted on other matters, like denying Jewish respon- to believe.” The first paragraph of Robert Conquest’s a man who lost his entire family to the Nazis, sibility? Quite rightly, Hanebrink faults the contro- 400-page classic account of this “war in the coun- and a man consumed by a sadistic fury against versial German historian Ernst Nolte for minimizing tryside,” The Harvest of Sorrow, explains: “We may Germans and Poles—a fury that may or may not Nazi guilt by focusing on Soviet atrocities. Does the perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by have originated from his victimhood, and may or same logic apply the other way? saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty may not have been connected to his communism. human lives were lost for, not every word, but every . . . In the end his life story . . . only proves how entral to Hanebrink’s argument is his rejection letter, in this book.” The late Michael André Bern- difficult it is to pass judgment on the people who Cof the “totalitarian paradigm” and any charac- stein, a brilliant scholar of the Holocaust, remarked lived in the most shattered part of Europe in the terization of Soviet and Nazi horrors as comparable. that he did not have a moral compass fine enough to worst decades of the twentieth century. Such Cold War liberalism, he explains, allowed Na- tell whether Bolshevism or Nazism was worse. zis to hide behind anti-Communism and forever Hanebrink concludes that Europe is again in the In his pamphlet Christianity and Anti-Semitism, tainted anti-Communism with its origins in the grip of the Judeo-Bolshevik myth, this time with Berdyaev confessed that “For us Christians the Jew- Judeo-Bolshevik myth. In his view, anti- Muslims playing the role of Jews and Islamism of ish problem does not consist in knowing whether Communism reflects not a rational fear of a dan- Bolshevism. “[E]erie similarities connect the two the Jews are good or bad, but whether we are good gerous enemy but another paranoid reworking of episodes, despite their significant differences,” he or bad.” Perhaps any examination of horrible ideas the myth. Since after the Holocaust it was no longer observes, and he cites some troubling parallels. In and deeds must always be a revelation of ourselves. possible to attack Jews directly, Judeo-Bolshevism both cases, nationalists and defenders of a commu- took a new form, this time without Jews. So far as nity of values “called Christian Europe, or Western I know, Hanebrink is quite original in identifying Christendom, or simply the Occident” mobilize Gary Saul Morson is the Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of this sort of Judeo-Bolshevism, which he discovers support by pointing to an enemy—an “ethno- the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University and hidden in the idea of “Judeo-Christian civilization.” ideological enemy who spread mayhem and terror. the author of Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of He writes of “the strange erasure of Judeo-Bolshe- Nearly a hundred years later, echoes of the fears that Time (Yale University Press), and, with Morton Schapiro, vism from the vocabulary of anti-Communist poli- crystallized around the Jewish Bolshevik . . . could of Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn tics after 1945 . . . [A] small but influential group of be heard . . . in debates about a new ethnoreligious from The Humanities (Princeton University Press).

Winter 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 33 Freethinker

BY ANNIKA HERNROTH-ROTHSTEIN

facility with words, and a compulsion to place Gradually I noticed that I was no longer invited Guardian Angel: My Journey from Leftism to myself at the center of the stage in order to validate to join colleagues for lunch, no longer receiving Sanity my existence by the approval of an audience. invitations for parties at their houses, no longer by Melanie Phillips getting the flow of gossipy messages and office Bombardier Books, 256 pp., $15.99 banter that had once made me feel as if I was Phillips had stumbled into the back in an Oxford junior common room. culture wars by, as she herself Now, at lunchtime, I found the office emptying around me. Few ever tried to engage me in elanie Phillips begins her memoir with describes it, “the staggering argument. I simply became more and more an almost poetic third-person nar- isolated. rative, describing a Jewish home in tactic of actually observing postwar Britain beset with sorrow and Perhaps most famously, Phillips was one of Msocioeconomic woes. With a shifting narrative voice what was going on.” the first prominent British intellectuals to publicly midchapter, the reader is thrown into what appears to tackle the issue of Muslim immigration and multi- be a dysfunctional family, with a young Melanie in the After the depiction of her childhood, the focus of culturalism, both through her daily writing and the center, trying to make sense of a grown-up world where the memoir shifts to Phillips’s career and stays there bestselling book Londonistan: How Britain Is Cre- far too much is left unspoken. Her mother is both frail for the remainder of the book, her private life, at ating a Terror State Within. It is easy to forget how and all-powerful, seemingly controlling the family least so far as the reader is concerned, taking a back explosive Londonistan was when it came out in 2006; through her moods, wants, and ailments, and, with his seat to the drama of political journalism. At first, it was one of those rare books that actually deserves mix of passivity and weakness, the father becomes a she was a perfect fit at the Guardian, rising through to be called a “bombshell.” She argued that Britain supporting actor in the drama of his very gifted child. the ranks and feeling loved and nurtured by the was turning a blind eye to the growing problem of Early on in the book, Phillips describes how her father Islamic extremism, thus creating “Londonistan,” a is torn between his mother and wife, rushing between dangerous hub of Islamic militancy. Phillips’s cri- both homes to care for the women who constantly tique of Islamism was daringly heterodox 10 years demand his attention. The grandmother, or Booba, as ago but has since to a large extent been proven right. she is called, was a source of contention between Phil- As a European, politically conservative Jew, I am lips’s parents, and Phillips recalls being forced to go one of the many writers who are thankful for her visit, every single week, sitting glued to the TV while having blazed the trail and widened the corridor of hearing her father being chastised in the other room. opinion. But the price of a trailblazer is steep, and, given how divisive a figure she has become over the My father might shout at Booba, but he always, years, I can’t help but wonder if the messaging has always gave in. How desperately I wanted him at times overpowered the message. A question that to stand his ground, give her an ultimatum, lingers is whether or not Phillips could have made turn his back upon such unnatural bullying and a greater impact had she used less inflammatory at last put his wife, my mother rather than his rhetoric. Her distinctive brand of take-no-prisoners own, first in his life. But he never did. writing has allowed some of her ideological oppo- Melanie Phillips. nents to simply write her off. As much as Phillips loved her father, and she Phillips herself spends no time in self-pity over clearly did, she was frustrated with and disappoint- adopted family with whom she would remain for 16 her exclusion for right- (or rather) left-thinking cir- ed in his weakness. “To my childish eyes,” Phillips years. But even early on, she showed signs of dan- cles. Nonetheless, between the lines, one can occa- writes, “fathers throughout my family just weren’t gerously independent thinking. This is the connect- sionally see a hint of something, a sense of betrayal there.” The weekly visits with Booba, during which ing thread of the whole book; Phillips seeing holes and heartbreak as she becomes persona non grata she saw her father lose every battle, seemed to ce- in the fabric of her ideological cosmos and then among many of her friends and former allies for her ment the image of weak-willed men who fail to show picking at it until the whole thing comes undone. uncompromising views on immigration, divorce, up when it matters and who, more importantly, fail Even after having been moved from the position and global warming. to protect their children from the responsibilities of of news editor to policy editor at the Guardian, she the adult world. Seeing her father’s inability to stand did not lower her profile in fear of another demo- he picture Phillips paints of herself is one of an up to bullying, she promised to be a person who tion. Instead, she made real waves with her columns. Tanxious child, an outsider born of outsiders, always dares to fight back. She took on the British school system, breaking po- struggling to be let in but too plagued by intellec- She found her refuge at school and, as she grew litical lines by supporting the Conservative govern- tual scruples and heretical doubts (not to speak of older, ended up finding a home in the left-wing ment’s proposed new national curriculum. In taking a scathing wit) to keep her place in the established circles of the academic world. It is a moving depic- a stand for structured teaching models and daring to intellectual aristocracy. Although Guardian Angel tion of a shy, almost introverted girl, fighting for suggest that a new curriculum might actually help covers her entire career and does so well, I was left acceptance by lending her considerable skills to a the poor and disadvantaged, she became a heretic in wanting to know more about the family with which movement where she could finally feel some self- the eyes of the Guardian’s readership and was called she begins her memoir. It is only in the initial chap- worth. She recalls being painfully shy yet viewed by out as a right-winger by her fellow journalists. She ters that the reader is given a glimpse of her mother’s her peers as having almost superhuman confidence. had stumbled into the culture wars by, as she herself mental and physical frailty, her father’s present ab- describes it, “the staggering tactic of actually observ- sence, and her own vulnerability as a child left to So how did I manage to give an impression that ing what was going on.” Continuing to cover social put out the constant fires of her early life. In these was so totally at odds with how I actually felt? I issues and the ways in which the Left had failed the years, she seems never to have been her own keeper, believe it was a combination of two things: my working class, Phillips found herself out in the cold. but always one to her loved ones: protecting them,

34 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2019 propping them up, accepting responsibility for their well-being. It is heartbreaking to read about her first, glorious step toward adulthood—acceptance at and departure to Oxford—being tainted by guilt and worry for how her mother would manage her absence.

I knew it was a crisis. I was leaving her bereft. I couldn’t do that. And so I slipped into a pattern of seeing her every two weeks. . . . Physically in Oxford, I mentally never left home.

In such passages, the formidable polemicist becomes truly relatable. Occasionally one wishes that she had turned her sharp analytical mind to those family relationships and explored the connections between her private experiences and political stances a bit more, but after closing the door on her family life, the book jumps head-first into her career. It’s a furious ride, in every sense of the word, following her journey from the warmth of the Guardian to the freez- ing cold of journalistic ostracism as she stubbornly describes the reality she sees outside her window.

There is also another side-effect of enduring so much abuse. Eventually, the insults start to lose their power. Once you have been called reactionary, right-wing, far-right, extreme-right, ultra-right, fascist, racist, Nazi, Holocaust- shroud-waver, warmonger, insane, and extreme right-wing insane racist warmongering Holocaust- shroud-waving Jew, what else can they throw at you?

It is as if she is back where she is most comfortable, after having been admitted to the rooms where her parents were never welcome, and then lost her privileges. As with the dissident prophet Jeremiah, her detractors may have broken the yoke of wood but forged a yoke of iron. This brings us to the matter of Phillips’s developing sense of her Jewishness. When she saw anti- Semitism creeping into the inner sanctums of the self-righteous political Left, she was drawn closer to both Israel and her own developing sense of Judaism and Jewish identity. The descriptions of her battles against the anti-Israel bias in the media are some of the best and most passionate pieces of writing in this book. At a time when anti-Semitism has become commonplace in the British Labour Party and, indeed, the country, these passages are both timely and frightening. In recounting her experiences of being accused of disloyalty, of being less than British and somehow foreign, Phillips exposes the eerily cyclical nature of anti-Semitism. As I finished reading about Phillips’s journey, I was left thinking that, had she stayed within the leftist safe-space, she would now be lauded as a feminist icon. In fact, since she was brave enough to venture out of that ideological comfort zone, she deserves that honor even more. Perhaps my slight frustration with the lack of personal detail is due to the author’s unwillingness to play into my expectations of what the autobiography of such a person should be. But, characteristically, she tells the story on her own terms.

Annika Hernroth-Rothstein is a freelance journalist based in Sweden. She is currently working on a travelogue of the Jewish diaspora.

Winter 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 35 Doron Rabinovici and the Crisis of European Jewish Identity

BY LIAM HOARE

tellectual, speaking and writing against the Far German nightly news program, we chatted as he The Search for M Right as well as xenophobic and anti-Semitic ten- enjoyed a bowl of beef soup with semolina dump- by Doron Rabinovici, translated by Francis M. Sharp dencies in Austrian society. lings, followed by a salad of halloumi and arugula Ariadne Press, 192 pp., $19.50 Following the election of 1999, after which the with balsamic vinaigrette. “We played our hand as far-right Freedom Party under the leadership of the well as we could and I knew how to give a speech. Elsewhere Today, I can say that some of those speeches were by Doron Rabinovici, translated by Tess Lewis In 1999, Rabinovici helped successful.” In spite of current political conditions Haus Publishing, 220 pp., $22.95 in Austria, he is not ready to jump back into the organize mass demonstrations fray in the same way, “not because I think [rallies] shouldn’t be done but because I think others can do against political extremism; them better. I’d deliver a speech if they wanted me to, but today I’m more interested in fiction as I think oron Rabinovici’s The Search for M the most famous brought it has a greater effect in the long run.” opens on an interior of a Viennese Rabinovici’s first collection of short stories, coffee house, where the chairs are cov- 250,000 people onto the Papirnik, was published in 1994, around the time he ered in green artificial leather and the streets in Vienna. became more involved in public debate. From those Dlampshades in perforated metal. “One of the glass earliest stories through to his novels such as The facades looked out onto a magnificent boulevard of outlandish provocateur Jörg Haider entered into Search for M and Elsewhere, Rabinovici has been the former royal capital,” the narrator notes. “The government with the center-right People’s Party, concerned with questions of identity that come with other faced a square and a monument to a world- Rabinovici helped organize mass demonstrations living as a Jew in postwar Vienna. In contrast to his famous anti-Semite.” Such is Vienna. against racism and political extremism. The most polemical writing, Rabinovici’s novels are riddled Rabinovici—novelist and essayist, playwright famous of these took place on February 19, 2000, with doubt and confusion, anxiety, uncertainty, and and activist—can sometimes be caught in a coffee and brought 250,000 opponents of the coalition contradiction, and speak in a multitude of voices as house not unlike the one he describes here—one onto the streets. In his speech that day, Rabinovici opposed to just one. where, if the linoleum floors and worn crimson seat warned that having the Far Right as a governing “If you live in Vienna as a Jew, you are confront- covers are anything to go by, time stopped, to bor- party represented an existential threat to Austrian ed” every day with these questions of identity, Rabi- row a line from Philip Larkin, “between the end of democracy and thus necessitated mass demonstra- novici told me. “The moment you say your name, the ‘Chatterley’ ban and the Beatles’ first LP.” More tions as a form of resistance. Doron Rabinovici”—pronounced as Rabinovitch— than something transactional, Viennese coffee “Eighteen years ago, I was against Haider. We “you immediately become an expert on Middle East houses are the city’s living rooms: places to, as the had great demonstrations and we really knew how politics, National Socialism, religion, anti-Semitism, great Austrian writer of the postwar period Thomas to organize them,” Rabinovici recounted to me. and racism.” To live in Vienna as a Jew is also to be Bernhard once said, take one’s mind off of things Relaxing outside, having just filmed a spot for a reminded that those who perpetrated the Shoah and soothe one’s nerves. At Rabinovici’s coffee house of choice, where we met one afternoon, sheltered beneath a canopy from the blazing summer sun, there is no statue of Karl Lueger—the former mayor of Vienna, whose anti- Semitism in part inspired Theodor Herzl to write The Jewish State—looming large. But those ghosts of Austria’s past and of Jewish history are central to his novels, as well as his essays and political commentaries, plays, and historical studies. Born in Tel Aviv in 1961, Rabinovici moved with his family to Vienna in 1964. He has come to occupy a position in Austria akin to that of Amos Oz and David Grossman in Israel, in the sense that he writes and acts with two pens. In 1986, he was involved in the protest movement against Kurt Waldheim. Then a presidential candidate, the former UN secretary-general was found to have lied about his military service during the Second World War. The election campaign called attention to Austria’s failure to come to terms with its Nazi past and reawakened latent anti- Semitic feelings in Austrian society. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Rabinovici became further engaged in the national debate as a public in- Survivors during a meal in a DP camp, Vienna, Austria, 1946. (Courtesy of Yad Vashem Photo Archives.)

36 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2019 were defeated yet, unlike the victims, were able to The fears and anxieties of the second genera- narrative fragments and glimpses into the lives of resume their lives afterwards. tion, inherited from the first, manifest themselves others, which feels more intelligent than the reader in Dani and Arieh to the point of exaggeration and and where one is constantly on the hunt for clues and n this Catholic country everyone owed each even caricature. Incapable of rebelling against his hidden meanings in order to navigate safe passage to “Iother absolution just as long as the other in the parents—“to protest against them meant to aban- the book’s conclusion. particular case didn’t confess anything,” Rabinovi- don them”—and consumed to such an extent by Elsewhere is an altogether different novel struc- ci writes in The Search for ,M a novel shaped by the the pains of the past that he breaks out in rashes turally, albeit one that plays with similar themes. conflicted and ambivalent feelings of the Holocaust and hives, Dani becomes someone who assumes (Its clear, smooth translation by Tess Lewis is good enough to make one wish she had been respon- To live in Vienna as a Jew is also to be reminded that those sible for the English edition of The Search for M, too.) Ethan Rosen is a citizen of nowhere, living who perpetrated the Shoah were defeated yet, unlike the the transient, shuffling life of a professor and re- searcher, whose demands often find him engaged in victims, were able to resume their lives afterwards. transcontinental travel to and from academic conferences. Reading the newspaper on a flight home survivors who returned to Vienna after the war and the guilt of others in order to relieve that bur- from Tel Aviv to Vienna (somewhat like Rabinovici, their children. The Search for M’s characters are den. Arieh seeks to avenge the past by joining the Ethan is born in Israel though now lives in Austria), defined by their insecure and unmoored identities, Israeli secret service in the role of an assassin. “Just he finds himself incensed by an op-ed written by his traumatized as much by the present as the past— like your father,” Arieh is warned, “you act as if you rival, Rudi Klausinger, and attacks him in his reply by that which is left unspoken; the “omissions, the were living underground and hiding from exter- as an anti-Semite. individual words, the shorthand code, the pauses, mination.” What unites both characters is a search This turns out to be a big mistake, one which and the grim silence.” This unexpressed, silent past for the guilty in, as Rabinovici writes, “the native precipitates identity crises for both Ethan and Rudi, is a specter, roaming the novel’s terrain. land of Lueger and Schönerer, Hitler and Eich- for Rudi had quoted extensively from an earlier In particular, The Search for M depicts the experi- mann.” They are, in a certain sense, looking for article written by Ethan himself, whose words he did ences of second-generation Holocaust survivors—a themselves in other people’s crimes. not recognize as his own. His father’s failing health grants Ethan an excuse to flee embarrassment and rancor in Vienna for Tel Aviv, but as someone who often finds himself neither here nor there and whose exact parentage later in the novel is called into question, Ethan finds that these questions of identity and home cannot be escaped so easily. Rosen is an exile everywhere, constantly longing for a home. “In Tel Aviv, you give talks on those Muslim ruins,” his mother chides, while “you lecture Austrians about anti-Semitism.” Ethan has a visceral reaction to religious Jews in Israel but would defend them wholeheartedly were he in Austria, one character observes. He is, at least in part, Israeli and drops everything to return to Israel upon news of his father’s ill health but soon finds that all the gripes and quibbles that persuaded him to live elsewhere in the first place resurface. There is in a sense not one but many Ethan Rosens. He (or they) experience(s) life as a mélange of languages and arguments, talking, thinking, and acting differently whether in Israel, Austria, or the United States, so when he reads his own words star- ing back at him in the pages of an Austrian newspaper while sitting on a flight from Tel Aviv, he doesn’t recognize them as his own. When Rudi proclaims Supporters of the Austrian Freedom Party cheer prior to a final campaign rally in Vienna, October 13, 2017. at novel’s end, over the grave of Ethan’s (supposed) (Photo by Matthias Schrader/AP.) father, that, “His Jerusalem was always elsewhere and everywhere at once. He was at home in inter- subject which, until the novel’s publication, had not The latter half of the novel is consumed by the tit- val spaces, where one human being meets another,” been widely discussed in Austria. The parents saw “the ular search for M: the phantom figure Mullemann— he might very well have been talking about Ethan return of their murdered relatives” in their children who, it transpires, is Dani. Bound up in bandages and himself. and though they wished for them to be unburdened rags, he walks the streets of Vienna at night, confess- When I spoke with Rabinovici, he told me, “You by the past, this was impossible. Dani Morgenthau is ing to offences he did not commit. Haunting the Jew- can live in Hebron and the majority of Jews would warned of “the need to always eat copious amounts ish community, Mullemann functions as a totem, an ask you, ‘You’re a lunatic, how can you live here?’ of food and to pay attention to outward appearance anti-talisman, both representing and taking on all You can live in Vienna and a majority of Jews would since it could come in useful in a time of need.” Arieh their anxieties. “We wanted to buy our freedom from ask, ‘How can you live here?’ You can live in New Arthur Bein is told that “nobody who hits you gets off our guilty feelings toward the victims and transfer all York and some Zionist will ask you, ‘How can you unpunished” but is never quite told why: the debts to your accounts,” Arieh is told during the live here?’ And you can live in Israel and someone search for Mullemann. “It may be that you’ve been will ask, ‘How can you stand this place?’” Behind this When Arieh said: “I don’t know anything about forced to live with the legacy of our burden of guilt.” question, Rabinovici sees another: “How can you live you, father, not who you are or who you were,” Mullemann, then, is a manifestation of the second on this Earth after what has happened to us?” Jakob Fandler laughed. generation—those born with numbers on their arms; “invisible, but it’s tattooed into us under our skin”— “Who I was will be on my gravestone. Have a but a product of the first. Mysterious and surreal, Liam Hoare is the Europe editor for Moment Magazine. little patience, son.” The Search for M is a novel pieced together out of He lives in Vienna.

Winter 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 37 READINGS Who Tried to Kill Spinoza?

BY STEVEN NADLER

n the pantheon of great dead philosophers, few Colerus lived in The Hague, and the landlord his account also has the attack occurring before the have been the subject of as much imaginative and his wife that he mentions were members of his herem, since he alleges that it was the attack that literary invention as Spinoza. Because so many church who had Spinoza as a tenant from 1670 un- convinced Spinoza to quit the Jewish community, biographical details are hidden, both his fans til his death in 1677. Although it was by now three which in turn led to his excommunication. This andI his critics have been willing to believe remark- decades after the philosopher’s death, Colerus took means that the attack, if it did happen, took place able stories about him, as either heretic or hero, that advantage of the opportunity to ask them about their before July 1656, when Spinoza was issued the most have only the flimsiest foundation in the historical rhetorically extreme herem ever pronounced by that record. Among the many tales that have come down So, we have an unnamed congregation. Whatever its reason, then, the assas- to us from the 17th century, one particularly dramatic sination attempt was not an act of retaliation for his episode stands out: an alleged attempt on Spinoza’s suspect, and we have a departure from the community. life, possibly by a member of the Portuguese Jew- ish community of Amsterdam, from which he was weapon. However, we do et us assume that there was such a knife at- excommunicated. But did such an attack take place? Ltack and that it was by an Amsterdam Jew. And if so, what might have been the motive for it? not yet have a motive. While we do not know Bayle’s source, Colerus im- The story first appears in 1697, 20 years after plies that he heard about the attack only once re- Spinoza’s death, in Pierre Bayle’s article on Spinoza famous lodger and, among other things, “correct” moved from Spinoza. His parishioner, the landlord, in his Dictionnaire historique et critique. After dis- Bayle’s account. Bayle and Colerus are our only two was a painter named Hendrik van der Spijk. It is cussing the young Spinoza’s growing doubts about sources for this alleged assassination attempt. We do certainly possible that Van der Spijk learned about Judaism as well as the congregation’s “offer to toler- not know to whom Spinoza may have mentioned it, the attack only from reading about it in Bayle’s ate him, provided he at least accommodate himself although perhaps it is in one of the personal letters dictionary, but that seems doubtful. Even though outwardly to their ceremonies,” Bayle writes: that his friends destroyed after his death. Van der Spijk was apparently something of an intellectual, I wonder Nonetheless, he distanced himself from their whether this multi- synagogue only little by little; and perhaps he volume French work would have maintained for a while longer some would have fallen into relationship with them, if he had not been his hands. More to treacherously attacked while exiting the theater the point, there seems by a Jew, who stabbed at him with a knife. The to be no reason not wound was slight, but he believed that the to think that Spinoza assassin’s intention was to kill him. It was then himself described the that he broke entirely from them, and this was event to Van der Spijk the cause of his excommunication. and his wife, with whom he was open This is melodramatic but plausible. Spinoza had and friendly. acquired a taste for the theater while studying with Possibly, the Jew- the former Jesuit Franciscus van den Enden, who ish assailant was one taught him Latin and classical literature and who of Amsterdam’s Sep- may also have encouraged his further study of the hardim, as opposed to philosophy of Descartes. being from the more Unfortunately, Bayle does not give his source for recently established this episode. However, the story is repeated only German and East- eight years later, with some differences, by the Lu- ern European Jew- theran minister Johannes Colerus in his Korte, dog ish community, and waaragtige Levens-Beschryving, Van Benedictus de possibly a member in Spinosa (Short but Truthful Account of the Life of good standing of the Benedictus de Spinoza): Interior of the Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam, 1675. Engraving by Hooglhe Talmud Torah con- Romeyn, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. (Prisma Archivo/Alamy Photo.) gregation (although Mr. Bayle writes, too, that on a certain occasion, we have no evidence when Spinoza was coming out of the theater, he Despite the differences—theater versus syna- for this latter assumption). The ethnicity of the assail- was attacked by a Jew, who gave him a slight cut gogue, a face wound versus a tear in his clothing— ant and the dating of the knife attack are important on his face with a knife, and that he suspected Bayle and Colerus agreed on something impor- for reasons that will become clear. So, we have an un- that it was an attempt on his life. However, tant: The attack took place while Spinoza was still a named suspect, and we have a weapon. However, we Spinoza’s landlord and his wife, both still alive, member of the Amsterdam Portuguese Jewish con- do not yet have a motive. Neither Bayle nor Colerus tell me that he had often told them about this gregation Talmud Torah. Colerus has Spinoza com- gives a reason for the assault. in a different way, namely, that on a certain ing out of the synagogue, which he would hardly After the reports by Bayle and Colerus, the as- evening when he was coming out of the old have been doing afterhis herem, or ban. Indeed, we sassination attempt, when it is mentioned at all, Portuguese synagogue he was assaulted with a know that in the months leading up to his excom- has usually appeared only briefly and in passing in dagger, seeing which, he turned around, and munication, Spinoza was still, at least nominally, a popular accounts of Spinoza’s life and thought. It is thus the thrust was received by his clothing, member in good standing of the community, since rarely alluded to in the scholarly literature. When of which he still kept a garment, as a lasting he continued to pledge (if not pay) his communal an explanation has been offered for the attack, it has reminder. taxes. Bayle does not mention the synagogue, but usually been that there was growing anger against,

38 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2019 and even fear of, Spinoza among the members of the city’s Portuguese Jewish community for propound- ing heretical ideas about God, Jewish law, and the soul. According to one early and colorful (but often unreliable) account, the anonymous Vie de Spinoza published in 1719, there was much talk in the congregation about Spinoza’s opinions in the period leading up to the herem; people, especially the rab- WHY LISTEN TO THE bis, were curious about what the young man was thinking. As the author of the Vie tells it—and this COMMENTARY anecdote is not confirmed by any other source— “among those most eager to associate with him there were two young men who, professing to be MAGAZINE PODCAST? his most intimate friends, begged him to tell them his real views. They promised him that whatever his opinions were, he had nothing to fear on their part,” and they even suggested that if one read Moses and BECAUSE OUR LISTENERS the prophets closely, then one would be led to the conclusion that the soul is not immortal and that God is material. “How does it appear to you?” they ARE RIGHT. asked Spinoza. “Does God have a body? Is the soul immortal?” After some hesitation, Spinoza report- edly took the bait.

I confess, said [Spinoza], that since nothing is ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ to be found in the Bible about the non-material “Podhoretz and company are or incorporeal, there is nothing objectionable in believing that God is a body. All the more so excellent. Come for the insight. since, as the Prophet says, God is great, and it is Stay for the excellent analysis impossible to comprehend greatness without extension and, therefore, without body. As for and the joke of the week.” spirits, it is certain that Scripture does not say that these are real and permanent substances, but mere phantoms, called angels because God ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ makes use of them to declare his will; they are “It’s free! They’re nice! of such kind that the angels and all other kinds of spirits are invisible only because their matter You’ll find out what the hell is very fine and diaphanous, so that it can only is going on!” be seen as one sees phantoms in a mirror, in a dream, or in the night. ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ With regard to the human soul, Spinoza is said to have replied, “whenever Scripture speaks of it, “A bit of solace and sanity in the midst the word ‘soul’ is used simply to express life, or anything that is living. It would be useless to search for of such political madness. any passage in support of its immortality. As for the Podhoretz and Rothman offer perceptive and contrary view, it may be seen in a hundred places, and nothing is so easy as to prove it.” sharp commentary on the day’s topics. At first Spinoza’s “friends” thought that he was A must-listen podcast for all conservatives.” merely trying to shock them. But when they saw that he was serious, they started talking about him to others. “They said that the people deceived themselves in believing that this young man might become one of the pillars of the synagogue; that it seemed more likely that he would be its destroyer, as he had nothing Commentary Magazine’s twice but hatred and contempt for the Law of Moses.” The Vie relates that when Spinoza was called before his weekly podcast is hosted by judges, these same individuals bore witness against him, alleging that he “scoffed at the Jews as supersti- John Podhoretz, Noah Rothman, tious people born and bred in ignorance, who do not know what God is, and who nevertheless have the Abe Greenwald and Sohrab Ahmari. audacity to speak of themselves as His People, to the disparagement of other nations.” TheVie does not mention a knife attack, but its often fanciful narrative has probably nourished much THE COMMENTARY MAGAZINE PODCAST of the speculation around the religious motives behind the assault. Spinoza’s views, on such accounts, were so threatening to the Amsterdam Sephardim, many of whom were the religiously anxious descendants of Iberian conversos, that perhaps one or two www.commentarymagazine.com/podcast

Winter 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 39 violent fanatics from within the community decided member of a prominent Jewish family. Duarte, who when he returned, Anthonij’s brother Gabriel was to do something about it. Here is a less well-known was also a jewel dealer, had signed the bill over to waiting for him: example of such speculation from Philip Krantz’s Spinoza, and it was now his to collect. (As A. M. Vaz Barukh Spinoza, zayn leben un zayn filozofye (1905), Dias has suggested, this may indicate that Spinoza Gabriel Alveres, also a brother of the said Anthonij a Yiddish book intended to introduce Spinoza to a had expanded the family business to the jewel trade, Alveres, was standing in front of the inn and hit wider audience: which was doing particularly well at this time.) the plaintiff on the head with his fist without any This Anthonij Alvares procrastinated about pay- cause, so that his hat fell off; and the said Gabriel The agitation among the Jews [against Spinoza] ing the bill for some time, always “saying he would Alveres took the requisitionist’s [Spinoza’s] hat and became even stronger, and there was a fanatic pay within two or three days or a week.” When Spi- threw it in the gutter and stepped on it. who decided simply to kill him, and to put noza finally pressed the issue, Anthonij offered a an end to the whole disturbance and to a partial payment by giving Spinoza a bill of exchange Nonetheless, with the innkeeper and every- dangerous heretic [apikores]. One night, when for two hundred guilders to be paid by his brother one else who saw the assault as witnesses, Spinoza Spinoza was coming out of the theater, someone Gabriel Alvares, with a promise that he would pay and Anthonij came to an agreement later that day. attacked him with a knife in hand. Fortunately, the remaining balance soon. Spinoza accepted this Anthonij would provide surety for the five hundred Spinoza noticed it in time, and managed to turn offer, but, not surprisingly, Gabriel Alvares refused guilders. Spinoza, for his part, was now no longer a little to the side, so that the knife only sliced to cooperate. So Spinoza returned to Anthonij, willing to pay for the expenses of the arrest, but— his coat. astoundingly—he did agree to loan Alvares Such accounts have drama on their side, but I have the money to cover the come to doubt that, if there was indeed an attempt costs. The third brother, on Spinoza’s life, it had anything to do with Spinoza’s Isaac Alvares, promised early ideas about God, scripture, or immortality. to repay the loan, along with “the damages and n the first edition of my biography of Spinoza, interests suffered by Iwhile I suspended judgment on whether such an [Spinoza] as a result of attack in fact occurred, I did point to a broader “cli- the default of the pay- mate of deep hostility in the Jewish community re- ment and his not having garding apostasy, of which Spinoza was around this the said money back.” time showing early but unmistakable signs.” I noted He also promised to re- that the rabbis and communal leaders were frustrat- imburse Spinoza for his ed by recent conversions to Christianity from with- hat. We do not know if in the community and that therefore some mem- Spinoza ever saw a cent. bers may have been “pushed to adopt a passionate All of this took place and murderous attitude” toward congregants who just a year before the defected or seemed likely to do so. When preparing herem and possibly close the second edition, published earlier this year, I saw to when the knife attack no reason to modify this version of the event. is supposed to have oc- However, upon further reflection I am skeptical curred. There was cer- that anger over Spinoza’s heretical ideas is likely to Excommunicated Spinoza by Samuel Hirszenberg, 1907. (Herbert D. Katz Center tainly bad blood between have been a motive for such a vicious attack. The at the University of Pennsylvania.) Spinoza and the Alvares Amsterdam Portuguese Jewish community was brothers, who appear to fairly cosmopolitan. To be sure, one was not free demanding full payment. Anthonij, despite “daily have had a tendency to physical violence. Not only to proclaim whatever one wanted; after all, this was promises to pay,” continued to delay. Spinoza began were they giving Spinoza the runaround, but they a 17th-century Jewish community, and there were to lose patience and demanded either full payment would have been angered by his resort to the legal au- clear limits not just to what one could do but also to or to be given jewelry as surety, all to no avail. thorities to have them arrested. It is a classic tale, from the ideas one could voice. But many members of the Anthonij had one more trick up his sleeve: He a competitive mercantile city in the Dutch golden age community, including its rabbis, engaged in wide- claimed that the original bill on him was payable where trade disputes were frequent and where it was ranging philosophical and theological discussions. only in Antwerp, where it would be covered by one essential to one’s business to maintain a good reputa- Even if Spinoza went too far—and he clearly did— Pedro de Palma Carillo. Tired of the game—this had tion for fair dealing. With the notarized complaints to see the attempted murder as a reaction to his he- been going on for several months now—Spinoza and arrests, Spinoza publicly put the Alvares broth- retical views and rejection of communal authority finally filed a complaint with the bailiff of Amster- ers under suspicion of being untrustworthy. It would now seems to me a little far-fetched. In fact, there is dam, Cornelis de Vlaming van Oudtshoorn, and not be surprising if one member of this shady trio a more readily available and plausible, if mundane, had Anthonij Alvares arrested in May 1655. Alvares responded with an attack on Spinoza’s life. explanation—an explanation whose elements were was taken to the inn De Vier Hollanders (the Four It seems quite possible, then, that the attempt right there in front of me all the time. Dutchmen) and held until he paid the full amount on Spinoza’s life described by Colerus, who puts it When Spinoza’s father, Miguel de Spinoza, died Spinoza was owed. The notary document itself best outside the synagogue and thus right in the heart of in 1654, Spinoza and his brother Gabriel took over tells the tale of the subsequent events: the Jewish neighborhood, was (if it happened) not a the family importing firm. Several notary records zealous attack on a dangerous heretic. More likely, from April and May 1655 provide an interesting Anthonij Alveres then asked the requisitionist it was a simple case of vengeance by unscrupulous, glimpse into Spinoza’s character and business acu- [Spinoza] to come to the inn to reach an thuggish businessmen. men. There were three Portuguese Jewish brothers, agreement with him. . . . When [Spinoza] Anthonij, Gabriel, and Isaac Alvares, who had come arrived there, the said Anthonij Alveres hit the to Amsterdam from Paris and were now living on requisitionist on the head with his fist without Steven Nadler is William H. Hay II Professor of Uylenburg in a house called De Vergulde Valck (the there having been spoken a word in return and Philosophy, Evjue-Bascom Professor in Humanities, and Gilded Falcon). They were jewel dealers and ap- without the requisitionist doing anything. Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies at the parently rather shady characters. Spinoza had a bill University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author or of exchange (wisselbrief)—basically an IOU—for Eventually, Spinoza and Alvares appear to have editor of more than 20 books, including most recently the amount of five hundred guilders to be paid by come to some kind of agreement, although it ap- Menasseh ben Israel: Rabbi of Amsterdam (Yale Anthonij Alvares. This bill went back to November parently included Spinoza paying the costs of the University Press). A second edition of his Spinoza: A Life 1654 and was originally owed to Manuel Duarte, a arrest. Spinoza left the inn to get the money, but was issued this year by Cambridge University Press.

40 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2019 Chaim of Arabia: The First Arab-Zionist Alliance

BY RICK RICHMAN

n January 3, 1919, a few weeks after was held at the London Opera House, drawing a had been alarmed by the growing Zionist presence World War I ended, the Zionist leader capacity crowd of more than 4,000, with thousands in the land, and the formal British endorsement of a Chaim Weizmann met with Emir Faisal, more turned away. Lord Robert Cecil, the British “national home for the Jewish people” there signifi- the commander-in-chief of the Arab undersecretary of state for foreign affairs, addressed cantly deepened their concerns. uprisingO against the Ottoman Empire, at a London the gathering and said British policy was “Arabian To counteract both old worries and new ru- hotel. Faisal’s father, King Hussein of Hedjaz, ruled countries should be for the Arabs, Armenia for the mors, the British arranged for Weizmann to ad- the two holiest sites of Islam—Mecca and Medina— dress Muslim and Christian leaders in Jerusalem at and the family traced its lineage to the prophet The Jews were not coming a dinner on April 27. Weizmann began by saying it Muhammad. Faisal was accompanied to the meet- was “with a sense of grave responsibility that I rise ing by his adviser, friend, and translator, T. E. Law- to Palestine, Weizmann to speak on this momentous occasion. Here my rence, who had helped him lead the Arab Revolt. forefathers stood 2,000 years ago.” The Jews were At the meeting, Weizmann and Faisal signed said, they were returning. not coming to Palestine, he said, they were return- an agreement, brokered over the preceding month ing. Moreover, he continued, there was room in by Lawrence, exchanging Arab acceptance of the Armenians, Judea for the Jews.” Arab and Arme- Palestine for many times the existing population. Balfour Declaration for Zionist support of an Arab nian representatives also attended the event and The Zionists endorsed the Arab Revolt against state in the rest of the Ottoman lands. In February, gave congratulatory speeches. the Ottomans and sought only “the opportunity they traveled to the Paris Peace Conference, where In the following months, Weizmann formed a of free national development in Palestine, and in the victorious Allies would remap Europe and the Zionist commission to travel to Palestine to bring justice it cannot be refused.” As to the question of Middle East, and made complementary presenta- relief to the war-torn Jewish community, plan for sovereignty in Palestine, Weizmann asserted that tions about the future of the region. new Jewish institutions (including the Hebrew it should be deferred while the country developed, In the famous 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia, University), and meet with Arab leaders. Upon ar- and it should be administered by a Great Power in Lawrence would be played by Peter O’Toole, and riving in April 1918, he learned that the anti-Semitic the meantime. Faisal by Alec Guinness. Weizmann was not portrayed at all, but perhaps he should have been. His arduous wartime trip, in June 1918, from Palestine to Faisal’s remote desert military camp—a five-day journey by train, boat, car, camel, and foot—led to their January agreement.

he Balfour Declaration, issued on Novem- Tber 2, 1917, had pledged support for a Jewish national home in Palestine, in part to generate support in America and Russia for Britain’s war effort. The British believed that both countries had influential Jewish populations and that the declaration would help keep Russia and America in the war against Germany and the Ottoman Turks. It was also, however, part of a broader British war strategy—one designed to bring the Jewish, Arab, and Armenian national movements into an informal alliance to defeat the Ottoman Empire. Two weeks after the declaration, Sir Mark Sykes—the British diplomat who had negotiated the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916 that divided the Middle East into British and French spheres of influence—outlined the British diplomatic strategy in a letter to the British War Cabinet secretary, Lt. Col. Sir Maurice Hankey: Peace map for the Middle East presented to the British cabinet by T. E. Lawrence, We are pledged to Zionism, Armenian liberation, November 1918. (Courtesy of the British National Archives.) and Arabian independence. Zionism is the key to the lock. . . . If once the Turks see the Zionists forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion had been Weizmann’s speech was consistent with the “or- are prepared to back the Entente and the two widely distributed among the Arabs, leading to ganic” Zionism he espoused, which aimed for more oppressed races [the Arabs and Armenians] … rampant speculation that—as he wrote caustically than a cultural home but less than an immediate [the Turks] will come to us to negotiate. to Balfour from Tel Aviv—the British were “going to state. He wanted the right of Jewish immigration and hand over the poor Arabs to the wealthy Jews, who the opportunity to build Jewish institutions in Pales- To encourage this alliance, Sykes wrote, “our im- are . . . ready to swoop down like vultures on an easy tine—which he believed would inevitably evolve into mediate policy should be by speech and open state- prey and to oust everybody from the land.” a democratic Jewish state. This was also consistent ment” to promote “Zionist, Armenian, and Arab Arab opposition, however, was not merely the with what Lord Balfour had said a Jewish “national common action and alliance.” A month after the result of propaganda or fear-mongering. Even prior home” meant at the October 31, 1917, British cabinet Balfour Declaration had been issued, a celebration to World War I, some Arab notables in Palestine meeting that approved the declaration. It would be

Winter 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 41 some form of British, American, or other mostly Jewish since the late 19th century. of the Semitic family, Arabs and Jews . . . understand protectorate, under which full facilities would Faisal and his father believed Zionism would one another, and I hope that as a result of interchange be given to the Jews to work out their own bring financial resources and technical expertise to of ideas at the Peace Conference . . . each nation will salvation and to build up, by means of education, Palestine, transforming the economic circumstanc- make definite progress towards the realization of its agriculture, and industry, a real centre of national es of the Arabs in both Palestine and beyond. In Jan- aspirations.” On December 27, he met with represen- culture and focus of national life. It did not uary 1918, D. G. Hogarth, director of Britain’s Arab tatives of the British Foreign Office and told them he necessarily involve the early establishment of an Bureau in Cairo, had traveled to Jedda to deliver to recognized the moral claims of the Zionists in Pales- independent Jewish State, which was a matter King Hussein a formal message regarding British tine. Two days later, at a banquet given in his honor for gradual development in accordance with the policy: The Arabs would be given “full opportunity by Lord Walter Rothschild, a prominent British ordinary laws of political evolution. of once again forming a nation,” and “no obstacle Zionist, Faisal gave a speech (with Lawrence translat- should be put in the way” of the return of the Jews ing), declaring, “No true Arab can be suspicious or Weizmann’s speech was well received that evening, afraid of Jewish nationalism. and the British then arranged for him to travel to . . . We are demanding Arab meet with Faisal next. freedom and we would show ourselves unworthy of it, if we urkish forces still occupied the Jordan Valley did not now, as I do, say to the Tin the spring of 1918, so Weizmann could not Jews—welcome back home.” travel directly from Jerusalem to Faisal’s camp on the Transjordanian plains. He had to travel to Tel he following month Aviv, take a train to Suez, circumnavigate the Si- TFaisal and Weizmann nai Peninsula in a dilapidated cargo boat, proceed met again at the Carlton north 75 miles from Aqaba by car (which broke Hotel and signed their for- down), continue by camel, and then complete the mal agreement, which ex- journey on foot. The weather, he wrote his wife plicitly recognized “the Vera, was “like standing near a red-hot oven.” national aspirations” of It took him five days to travel from Tel Aviv to both Jews and Arabs. The Faisal’s camp, where he watched Arab military agreement provided that movements through binoculars and then looked “all measures shall be ad- west across the Jordan River: opted” to implement the Balfour Declaration, includ- I looked down from Moab on the Jordan Valley ing “immigration of Jews and the Dead Sea and the Judean hills beyond. Chaim Weizmann, left, wearing Arab dress, with Emir Faisal, June 4, 1918. into Palestine on a large (Wikimedia.) . . . [A]s I stood there I suddenly had the feeling scale,” while protecting the that three thousand years had vanished. . . . Here civil and religious rights of I was, on the identical ground, on the identical to Palestine. All holy sites would be prot,ected and Arabs and providing for Muslim control of Mus- errand of my ancestors in the dawn of my people’s the religious and political rights of all residents lim holy sites. The Zionist movement promised to history . . . that they might return to their home. preserved. The message emphasized the importance support formation of an Arab state and provide of “the friendship of world Jewry” to the Arab cause. economic, technical, and other assistance to it. The next morning, Weizmann and Faisal met In an article published in March 1918 in Al-Qibla, The agreement was silent on the ultimate political for almost an hour, with a British military attaché, the daily newspaper in Mecca, the king wrote that sovereignty over Palestine. At that point, Faisal would Lt. Col. P. C. Joyce, acting as their as interpreter. Palestine was “a sacred and beloved homeland” not have endorsed a Jewish state, and Weizmann Weizmann explained Zionism’s goals in the same for “its original sons” [abna’ihi-l-asliyin], and the would not have sought one, since the Jews were not way he had in Jerusalem, and Joyce’s minutes state “return of these exiles [jaliya] to their homeland” yet a majority in Palestine. Weizmann envisioned a that Faisal repeatedly endorsed cooperation between would be beneficial to the region. slow process, perhaps spanning decades, involving Jews and Arabs. Faisal stipulated that only his father After World War I, Lawrence submitted a map to immigration and institution-building in preparation could make political commitments, but, according to the British cabinet outlining his vision of the postwar for a state. He viewed the Balfour Declaration not as Joyce’s minutes, he “personally accepted the possibil- Middle East. The map assigned a broad swath of land an announcement of a state in Palestine but rather as ity of future Jewish claims to territory in Palestine.” to Faisal; an additional area labelled “Irak” to Faisal’s a charter giving the Jews the right to build one there. Joyce sent his minutes to Balfour, who asked him to older brother, Prince Abdullah; a northern area to On the final page of the agreement, Faisal add- convey to Weizmann “my appreciation of the tact Faisal’s younger brother, Prince Zeid; an area in the ed a handwritten proviso, conditioning the en- and skill shown by him in arriving at a mutual un- northwest to the Armenians; and a small “Palestine” tire agreement on the achievement of Arab inde- derstanding with the Sheikh.” Following the meeting, comprised of the area west of the Jordan River and a pendence as set forth in a memorandum he had Faisal suggested that they take a photograph together. narrow strip of land on the eastern bank. At the time delivered that week to the British Foreign Office. After he returned to Tel Aviv, Weizmann wrote of the Balfour Declaration, “Palestine” was considered The proviso, written in Arabic, read: to Vera that he had found Faisal “quite intelligent,” a to comprise not only the area west of the Jordan but “very honest man,” interested in “Damascus and the an equally large area to the east, so Lawrence’s pro- Provided the Arabs obtain their independence whole of northern Syria” but—strikingly—“not in- posed delineation of “Palestine” effectively split it in as demanded in my memorandum [to the terested in Palestine.” Weizmann later told a Zionist half, assigning the Transjordanian portion to Faisal. British] . . . I shall concur in the above articles. group that he considered the meeting “momentous.” On December 10, 1918, Faisal arrived in London But if the slightest modification or departure Faisal and he had “fully understood each other.” with Lawrence, and they met with Weizmann at the were to be made, I shall not then be bound by a Faisal’s relative indifference to Palestine was Carlton Hotel the next day. Weizmann wrote a long single word of the present agreement. understandable given his larger goals. At the time memorandum summarizing their discussion, noting of the Balfour Declaration, Palestine was largely that Faisal had promised that at the Paris Peace Con- In his memorandum, Faisal wrote that the “aim of undeveloped and sparsely populated, with a total ference—scheduled to begin in January—he would the Arab nationalist movements” was to “unite the population of about 60,000 Jews and 600,000 Arabs, recognize the national and historical rights of Jews to Arabs eventually into one nation” but not to seek a approximately 5 percent of the Arabs then living Palestine and the appointment of Britain as trustee single state immediately, since—in Faisal’s words—it under Ottoman rule. Faisal was primarily interest- over it, with protection of the Muslim holy places and was “impossible to constrain” all the provinces into ed in Arab sovereignty in—and the eventual unity the economic interests of the Arabs there. “one frame of government,” given their economic and of—the key cities of Damascus, Baghdad, Mecca, The next day, the Times of London carried a state- social differences. He asserted that Syria was “suf- and Medina. In Jerusalem, the residents had been ment from Faisal, stating, “The two main branches ficiently advanced politically to manage her own

42 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2019 internal affairs” and was thus entitled to immediate Lawrence was also deeply disappointed. During Sykes and Colonel T. E. Lawrence—who were freedom, while Hedjaz would continue as an indepen- the Paris Peace Conference, he began draftingSeven among the foremost advocates of the Zionist dent kingdom and should be allowed to work out its Pillars of Wisdom, his famous account of the “pro- settlement in Palestine. King Faisal was agreeable relationship with neighboring Arab areas on its own. cession of Arab freedom from Mecca to Damas- to a Jewish Palestine because he realized that it Faisal dealt with Palestine in a separate para- cus.” Even in the extreme desert heat, he wrote, “the would promote the general progress of the Arab graph, which did not claim Arab sovereignty. The morning freshness of the world-to-be intoxicated world. I submit that the policy supported by these memorandum stated that “the Arabs cannot risk us.” But after the war, “the old men came out again three outstanding figures—of a Jewish Palestine assuming the responsibility of holding level the and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of within a revived Arab Middle East—is still scales in the clash of races and religions that have, the former world they knew. . . . we had worked for capable of successful implementation. in this one province, so often involved the world a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked in difficulties.” Faisal sought instead an “effective us kindly and made their peace.” Weizmann consid- On October 18, 1947, Weizmann addressed the super-position of a great trustee,” together with “a ered him a friend, with a sympathetic understand- United Nations as it approached a vote on a two- representative local administration” to promote ing of Jewish aspirations in Palestine. state resolution for Palestine. He noted the Arab “the material prosperity of the country.” This was Eventually, most of the Ottoman Empire was achievement of independent states in a wide area of consistent with Weizmann’s position. transformed into independent Arab states with a total the Middle East and then said: Subsequently, at the Paris Peace Conference, area of approximately 1,184,000 square miles. Britain Faisal excluded Palestine from his demand for Arab was given a United Nations mandate in 1922 to imple- There was a time when Arab statesmanship was ment the Balfour Declaration able to see this equity in its true proportions. in a Palestine covering less than That was when the eminent leader and liberator 11,000 square miles. Britain in- of the Arabs, the Emir Faisal, later King of Iraq, creasingly retreated from that made a treaty with me declaring that if the obligation until, with its 1939 rest of Arab Asia were free, the Arabs would White Paper, it reneged on it concede the Jewish right freely to settle and entirely and proceeded to block develop in Palestine, which would exist side by any further significant Jewish side with the Arab states. immigration to Palestine or further purchases of land. After Weizmann acknowledged that Faisal’s condition World War II, Britain returned had not been satisfied in 1919. But, he told the UN, its mandate to the United “[t]he condition which [Faisal] then stipulated, the Nations, unfulfilled. independence of all Arab territories outside Pales- The first and last pages of the Faisal-Weizmann agreement, January 3, tine, has now been fulfilled.” 1919. (Courtesy of the Central Zionist Archives.) aisal died in 1933 at the Two weeks before the United Nations voted on Fage of 50, having used his its resolution, Weizmann discussed the issue in independence, asking instead that, because of its diplomatic skills over more than a decade to build the UN Delegates Lounge with Eleanor Roosevelt, “universal character,” Palestine be “left on one side Iraq into a fully independent state. His biographer, FDR’s widow, who was a member of the U.S. delega- for the mutual consideration of all parties inter- the Iraqi scholar Ali A. Allawi, writes that “real- tion. The next day, he wrote her to say he was send- ested.” The Zionist submission to the conference istic, purposeful and constructive patriotism also ing documents, including “my treaty” with Faisal, specified boundaries for the Jewish national home died with Faisal, to be replaced with the far more Faisal’s letter to Frankfurter, and Faisal’s formal leaving almost all of Transjordan to the Arabs, con- strident, volatile and angry nationalism that swept statement to the Paris Peace Conference, in order to sistent with Lawrence’s November 1918 map. the Arab world after the end of the Second World “dispel the impression which is so assiduously cir- In March 1919, the New York Times, in a news War.” For Weizmann, his agreement with Faisal culated by the Arabs that it was all done without the story headlined “Prince of Hedjaz Welcomes Zion- (which he often called a treaty) was a landmark of consent of the Arabs at that time.” ists,” published the text of a letter Faisal delivered Arab-Jewish relations. In 1936, in testimony before On May 16, 1948, Weizmann—as of that day the to Felix Frankfurter designed to ensure continued the British Peel Commission on Palestine, he re- provisional government’s president—sent a message Zionist support for Arab nationalism after he had counted its origins: to a Madison Square Garden rally celebrating Israel’s given an interview to Le Matin, a Parisian daily, that May 14 declaration of independence—to which all five cast doubt on his acceptance of the Zionist goals. [I]n 1918 there was one distinguished Arab neighboring Arab states had responded by invading The letter stated that, “Our deputation here in Paris who was the Commander-in-Chief of the Arab Israel. He recalled, yet again, his “treaty” with Faisal and is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted by armies which were supporting the right flank of promised that the Arab nations would find “the Jewish the Zionist Organization to the Peace Conference, Allenby’s army, the then Emir [Prince] Faisal— State always ready and eager to enter into neighborly and we regard them as moderate and proper. . . . subsequently King Faisal—and on the suggestion relations and to join with them in a common effort to [Dr. Weizmann and I] are working together for a re- of General Allenby I went to his camp. I frankly increase the welfare and prosperity of the Near East.” formed and revived Near East.” put to him our aspirations, our hopes, our desires, The Weizmann-Faisal agreement marked a The conference, however, did not award Faisal our intentions, and I can only say—if any oath historic moment, a time when Arabs and Zion- the independent Syrian state he sought. Instead, it of mine could convince my Arab opponents— ists coordinated their diplomatic efforts to realize endorsed a mandate system giving France control we found ourselves in full agreement, and this their respective national goals. One hundred years of Syria, from which the French expelled Faisal by first meeting was the beginning of a lifelong later—with their states in existence but facing exis- force the following year. The conference endorsed friendship, and our relationship was expressed tential threats from Iran—another de facto alliance British mandates over Palestine and Iraq, and Britain subsequently in a treaty. between Arabs and Jews has emerged, composed of installed Faisal as king of Iraq and his brother Abdul- Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Arab Emir- lah as king of Transjordan. Hedjaz eventually became In 1946, when the British again considered the ates, and Egypt, to oppose the new would-be hege- part of Saudi Arabia. But Faisal’s handwritten condi- future of Palestine, Weizmann wrote to Prime Min- mon. Such an alliance is not quite the unprecedented tion in his agreement with Weizmann had not been ister Clement Attlee, arguing that Jewish and Arab event many believe it is. Indeed, it might be called the met by the Allies, and he departed the conference national aspirations were compatible: second Arab-Zionist alliance. with a sense of betrayal. In July 1919, the Syrian Con- gress, comprising representatives of prominent Arab The Balfour Declaration was part of a families in Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, adopted a general Middle Eastern settlement, offering a Rick Richman is the author of Racing Against History: resolution that rejected French rights to any part of subcontinent to the Arabs and a “small notch”—as The 1940 Campaign for a Jewish Army to Fight Hitler Syria, claimed Lebanon and Palestine as inseparable Lord Balfour put it—to the Jews. In 1917, it was (Encounter Books). He thanks the librarians of American parts of Syria, and opposed Jewish immigration. the protagonists of the Arab revival—Sir Mark Jewish University for facilitating his research.

Winter 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 43 THE ARTS Yiddish Heroism, Hebrew Tears

BY DARA HORN

ghetto hospital as Sutzkever watched. With horror lead lines engraved. / Thus did, in the Temple, our Black Honey, The Life and Poetry of Avraham compounding horror, Sutzkever obsessively wrote forefathers wield / The golden menorahs, poured Sutzkever poems that would become central to the Vilna in oil that was saved.” (I quote here from Benja- directed by Uri Barbash, produced by Yair Qedar Ghetto’s extraordinary culture. min Harshav’s translations, whose slight clunkiness Go2Films, 76 minutes results from trying to maintain the poems’ formal Each moment is a freeze- properties. The film’s English translations of Sutz- kever’s poetry ignore rhyme and meter completely, frame from the farthest while its Hebrew translations attempt to preserve them—a choice that suggests what’s really at stake can’t recall the last time I saw a documentary border of translation, a in this film, as we will soon explore.) with as many people crying onscreen as there In 1942, the Nazis drafted a squad of Jewish in- are in Black Honey, a new documentary on the border whose crossing is full tellectuals, including Sutzkever, to loot Vilna’s cul- life and work of the great Yiddish poet Avraham of unanticipated pain. tural treasures, including those housed at YIVO, Sutzkever.I I suppose this shouldn’t be surprising for the city’s renowned archive and research center for a film about a Holocaust survivor, except that none Yiddish culture, for a future Nazi institute for the of the crying is about the Holocaust. It’s about what These poems don’t merely collect and record study of “Judaism without Jews.” They were to select came after, the compromises and concessions that pain. They reveal irrepressible beauty and create important material so that the rest could be pulped. remain unspoken even in this wonderfully wordy an unbroken chain through past Jewish traumas. Dubbing themselves the “Paper Brigade,” Sutzkever film. And that’s what makes Black Honey so phe- and his fellow humanists outwitted the Nazis by us- nomenally powerful and, perhaps unintentionally, ing the opportunity (and risking their lives) to res- uncomfortable. cue and hide many of these treasures; a trove of ma- Sutzkever’s life was more action-packed than any terials that belonged to YIVO has been rediscovered Marvel superhero’s—and as stark, gory, and unsub- only in the last few years. tle as a comic book in its battle between good and Smuggling books led to smuggling weapons evil. That’s even before you get to the epic power of for Vilna’s partisans, providing Sutzkever with his work—and for Sutzkever, life and work were not links beyond the ghetto’s walls. In late 1943, the even slightly separate, since his was a life not merely Sutzkevers escaped the ghetto through the sew- shaped by poetry in a metaphorical sense but liter- ers, traveling hundreds of miles on foot through ally saved by it, when a poem of his produced an swamps. And then came the moment when poetry airplane. So it is surely too much to ask this film to saved their lives. The members of the Jewish Anti- be more open about the fact that it is really about fascist Committee in Moscow were astounded by something else, specifically the something that Sutzkever’s epic poem “Kol Nidre,” with its eyewit- its talking heads keep crying about. It’s too much ness evidence of the genocide in progress, and they because until now we didn’t even have the basic succeeded in getting the Kremlin to send a plane documentary narrative, the superhero recap of his to rescue the poet and his wife. The first plane they life’s work. But Black Honey is even more than an sent was shot down by the Germans and crashed account of the poet’s life, and anyone who cares on a frozen lake. To reach the second plane, Sutz- about literature or Jewish culture needs to see it. kever and Freydke had to walk through an area Avraham (“Avrom” in Yiddish; “Abrashe” to his full of landmines. They walked to the rhythm of family and friends) Sutzkever was born in Smor- his poems. “Sometimes I walked in anapests, and gon, Lithuania, in 1913. When he was two, his sometimes in antibrachs,” he told the Israeli schol- family was evacuated from the First World War’s Poster advertising Black Honey. (Courtesy of ar Dory Manor. Go2Films.) eastern front to the remote Siberian town of Omsk, After the war, Sutzkever was called to testify at where he lived until the age of seven and where his Nuremberg. Then he and his wife made their last father died early, at the age of 30. Sutzkever later Through partisan organizations, they were read and great escape, this time to prestate Israel—where published a mind-blowing cycle of poems titled recited as far away as Moscow. One unforgettable Sutzkever almost singlehandedly maintained the Siberia, in which he imagined his childhood land- poem, “Moses,” describes a woman abandoning a country’s Yiddish literary culture until his death in scape as a fantastical wonderland infused with his baby in Vilna’s icy river: 2010, at the age of 96. father’s memory; the poems gleam with an awe that’s only enhanced by grief. (The work was illus- How far is the Viliya [river] from the Nile? his is the story of an actual superhero, a living trated by Marc Chagall.) Sutzkever’s family moved Same water flows, other days beget. Tembodiment of every platitude about fight- from Omsk to Vilna, the “Jerusalem of Lithuania,” The horror of eternity makes it a habit: ing evil and never giving up. The platitude about where he met his wife Freydke when they were both Return again, so man should not forget. the transcendent power of poetic creativity is a 12, and where his poetry rocketed him to interna- slightly harder sell, even if it did actually save the tional fame in his twenties. In another, the poet warms his hands over fresh Sutzkevers’ lives. In 1941 the Nazis conquered Vilna. They mur- manure and notes, “The warm breath of a pile of The film’s literary scholars make much of this dered more than 75,000 Jews in a forest outside dung / May become a poem, a thing of beauty.” In idea of poetry saving Sutzkever’s life, as if it were the city and warehoused the remaining 20,000 in a “The Lead Plates of the Rom Printers,” Sutzkever inevitable, which, to be fair, is quite close to Sutz- ghetto of eight blocks. In the ghetto, the Nazis out- describes young fighters melting down the plates kever’s own understanding of his creativity. “It was lawed Jewish births; the Sutzkevers’ baby boy, born used to print Talmuds into bullets. A Hanukkah an- as clear as day to Sutzkever that he wasn’t going to after this Pharaonic edict, was murdered in the them, it announces: “We poured out the letters—in die,” Manor claims. “He was absolutely convinced

44 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2019 that unlike other people he wouldn’t die because he whose stage presence is palpable even in the film’s days before. It is at this point that Novershtern cries was gifted with something miraculous, prophetic, talking-head format. Sutzkever never returned onscreen. divine—his poetry.” The eminent Israeli literary to Germany after testifying at Nuremberg, refus- I don’t pretend to know exactly why this story was critic Dan Miron seems to understand Sutzkever as ing all invitations. Calderon, born into a different so resonant for Novershtern, though in a country a prophet for the god of art. In his onscreen analysis, world, received her grandfather’s permission in where nearly everyone’s children serve in the military, he describes him almost as an heir to the Hebrew 2010 to perform a piece about his life and work in one can guess. But there is a deeper emotional signifi- poet Shaul Tchernichovsky, who wrote a scandal- cance to this incident in Sutzkever’s life, and in the life ous ode to the Greek god Apollo out of his desire Sutzkever’s boy could only of the people of Israel, that is in perfect keeping with to give Jewish creativity the holy status that art had Novershtern’s emotions. At that moment Sutzkever in other languages. Miron sees evidence of this become a poem. His father and Sprinzak had something profound in common: attitude in Sutzkever’s heart-stopping ballad “Teach- They were both fathers of martyrs, both struggling er Mira,” about a ghetto teacher (based on an actual was fighting for that poem. to build something that could somehow redeem, person) whose total devotion to her young students however slightly, those horrific losses. Sprinzak’s never wavers, even as the number of her students Sprinzak said yes. boy died fighting to save Sutzkever’s daughters, and dwindles, in each of the ballad’s stanzas, from 130 he succeeded in that sense he was not merely a mar- to seven. Miron points to a line describing Teacher Heidelberg with an Israeli-German collaborative tyr but a superhero. Sutzkever’s boy could only be- Mira carrying “a child in her arms, a golden lyre.” theater group. “I had a very clear goal,” Calderon come a poem. His father was fighting for that poem. “He meant,” Miron declares, imagining Sutzkever’s explains: “to tell the story of my family.” The morn- Sprinzak said yes. thought process, “that ‘I am walking this death ing of the premiere, she learned of her grandfa- The third moment of tears in the film comes march with the golden lyre Apollo gave me’—the ther’s death. The performance went on as a kind of from the Harvard professor emerita Ruth R. Wisse, lyre of classical poetry, in every sense of the word.” living eulogy. At the curtain call, the lead German though hers are suppressed enough to be plausibly I understood that verse differently, connecting actor went out and stopped the audience’s applause deniable. She describes an encounter with Sutzkever it to Sutzkever’s poem “On at a conference when she was a young woman, hon- My Thirtieth Birthday,” ored to have the opportunity for casual conversation a lament after his baby’s with the literary giant. All went well, she recalls, until murder that recalls his fa- she asked him an innocent question about a detail in ther playing Hasidic melo- a story he was recounting from the war. Sutzkever dies on his violin before his roared at her, “Vos veystu fun di tsapeldike rukzek?” death at age 30. “And like “What do you know of the quivering knapsacks?” my father, / I have a red Wisse then explains what he meant: Jewish mothers violin,” Sutzkever wrote. in the ghetto, left with no options, smuggled their “See, I tear my veins / and living infants out of their homes in order to aban- play on them my melody!” don them to die. Barely suppressing her own tears, This poem is not quoted she describes how she instantly saw herself through in the film. But to me, the the poet-survivor’s eyes: “He totally lost confidence images of musical instru- in me. Suddenly he saw that this girl, she under- ments in these two poems, stands nothing . . . and indeed I did not know, and both about the murder of he was right.” To me, this moment haunts the entire children, evoke the limita- film and reveals its purpose. tions of art in the face of Avraham Sutzkever with his wife, Freydke, and daughter, Mira, in an undated What do we know, indeed, of the tsapeldike unimaginable grief. I don’t photo. (Courtesy of Go2Films.) rukzek? Thankfully, nothing—and one of the foun- insist upon this interpreta- dational purposes of the state of Israel is the assur- tion, but despite the scholars’ hard sell on the power to announce that Sutzkever had died. “He said this ance that this knowledge can be safely forgotten. of creativity, the Apollo-worship of art as sacred in German,” Calderon recalls. She had suppressed While watching this scene, I was reminded of a small doesn’t come off well in this film. her emotions during the performance, she says, moment in my own life. I was in Israel for a work There’s one other moment in Black Honey where “but when he said ‘Avraham Sutzkever died,’ in trip a few years after the Second Intifada, and at one a musical instrument comes up. In that memora- German, I fell to pieces. . . . and when the German point I passed through a checkpoint in a taxi. It was a ble scene, we learn about Bruno Kittel, an SS offi- audience applauded him, applauded Avraham nothing of a stop: Soldiers asked for ID, checked the cer who supervised the Vilna Ghetto’s liquidation. Sutzkever . . .” Here Calderon falls to pieces once trunk, and sent us on our way. But as these strangers Talented in both music and murder, Kittel set up a again, onscreen. It is hard to miss that she is not ac- checked each car, it occurred to me that this entire piano at Vilna’s deportation point, where he played tually crying over her grandfather’s death but over apparatus existed solely for the purpose of keeping concertos as Jews boarded trains to extermination something far more intense. me alive. Despite the soldiers’ youth, I felt weirdly camps. During one mass deportation, a teenage boy The more unexpected tears come from the Israeli mothered, as if I were a child and someone was approached Kittel as he played, begging for his life. Yiddish scholar Avraham Novershtern, the head of going to elaborate lengths and taking risks whose Kittel took out his pistol and shot the boy dead with Hebrew University’s Yiddish department, who has complexity I couldn’t begin to understand, just to his right hand, while continuing to play the piano been instrumental in the development of Yiddish protect me. I thought of my own country, where daily with his left. scholarship in Israel. Novershtern describes how life is well equipped with first responders but not es- Amazingly, moments like this—and there are Sutzkever established Di goldene keyt (the Golden pecially with first preventers, and where the fact that many—don’t cause anyone to cry in this film. That Chain, a phrase denoting the Yiddish literary tra- people like me have been consistent targets of per- fact alone reveals the deep resignation to mur- dition), the Yiddish literary journal whose endur- secution for several millennia is utterly irrelevant der and martyrdom buried in the heart of Jewish ance and high caliber made it the central address for to how anyone regards my safety. This situation can culture, even after 70 years of Israel’s indepen- Yiddish culture worldwide in the years after Israel’s only be considered a blessing. But in the taxi at that dence. The moments of tears are quite different and independence. In 1948, Sutzkever sought funding moment, I was struck by the sudden thought that for worthy of examination. Each is a freeze-frame from for the journal from the Histadrut, the central labor all its devotion to keeping me free, my native country the farthest border of translation, a border whose union that at the time held the country’s greatest po- does not place any particular priority on keeping me crossing is full of unanticipated pain. litical clout. Novershtern recounts how, in the midst alive. I could, of course, summon all kinds of argu- of Israel’s war for independence, Sutzkever came to ments against this feeling. But it was a feeling, not an he least surprising tears come from Sutzkev- petition Yosef Sprinzak, the head of the Histadrut, argument, and I found myself crying in the back of Ter’s Israeli granddaughter Hadas Calderon, a about supporting his Yiddish journal—without the cab, my tears as irrational and uncomfortable as professional actor (and one of the film’s producers) realizing that Sprinzak’s son had fallen in battle only those of all the teary people in this film.

Winter 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 45 hese tears returned to me as I watched Wisse same Hebrew verses were provided simultaneously The same cannot be said of the language that the Thold back hers, reaching the edge of what she onscreen, so a reading of the original Yiddish would poet came to see as a memorial. Sutzkever’s career and I are blessed not to know. One of Sutzkever’s not have obscured anyone’s understanding. A trans- once he arrived in Israel was a long one: He lived many masterpieces is a series of prose poems en- lation is of course necessary and in no way surpris- to 96 and continued publishing Yiddish poetry for titled “Green Aquarium,” in which the poet imag- ing. What’s surprising is a translation provided as most of those years. Miron makes an impassioned ines his murdered loved ones trapped inside an though it were the original. That overriding transla- plea for Sutzkever to be understood as an Israeli aquarium representing memory. He can see them tion into Hebrew is exactly what this film ultimately poet, pointing out that the greatest poem on Is- vividly right before his eyes, but if he smashes the achieves, and it is the film’s real subject and purpose. rael’s War for Independence is a Yiddish work by Sutzkever, Gaystike erd. None of this quite matters, At the Nuremberg trials, Sutzkever planned to give his though. The film describes his Israeli funeral in 2010, attended by only a few dozen people. Miron testimony in Yiddish: “I want to speak the language of the recalls conversations with Sutzkever during which the poet repeatedly asked, “Will people remember people the defendants tried with all their might to destroy.” me?” Miron promised him: “As long as someone remains in this world who can taste a Yiddish word, glass, those he loved would be lost forever; their Of course, this is exactly the opposite of what you will be remembered.” But this film, in its entire- memory can only endure if intimacy is impossi- Sutzkever himself saw as his own subject and pur- ty, is aiming for something different—and dare I say, ble. This experience of an inaccessible past, which pose. His devotion to the Yiddish language was to- something better. was entirely personal for survivors, extends in a tal; after the Holocaust he saw the language itself as The Zionist concept of shlilat hagalut (negation collective sense to everyone who reads and studies the most powerful memorial. When he was called of the exile), which steamrolled Jews from diverse Yiddish literature now. We can only look through to testify at the Nuremberg trials mere months af- communities into a uniform Israeli identity with a the glass. ter the war’s end, he planned to give his testimony single language, was a psychological necessity for a This uncomfortable reality is part of the struc- in Yiddish: “I want to speak the language of the young state. Today, Israeli society has the cultural ture of the film itself. Among the many people inter- people the defendants tried with all their might confidence to rediscover aspects of diaspora Jew- ish heritage that were previously taboo. The film dutifully reports on the Yishuv’s repression of Yiddish, but nearly all the people who fought that culture war are dead now, leaving room for their descendants to develop a different approach to the Yiddish literary legacy. (The fact that there are currently tens of thousands of native Yiddish speakers in Israel—a population that is young and growing—is ignored completely in this film, since they are haredi and therefore presumed to be allergic to non-haredi people and literature. I question that presumption, if only because no one seems willing or able to test it.) That legacy, as the film fails to actually state out loud, will endure in the future— in Hebrew. Jewish tradition has long sanctified the act of translation of Hebrew texts into other languages. To the mythologies about Targum Onkelos and the Septuagint, we might add a modern footnote that takes translation in the opposite direction. When future Nobel laureate Saul Bellow first met the future Hebrew Nobel laureate S. Y. Agnon in 1961, Agnon urged him to have his novels translated Hadas Calderon, the granddaughter of Avraham into Hebrew, because “they would only survive in Self-portrait of Avraham Sutzkever, 1986. (Courtesy Sutzkever, speaking on the 100th anniversary of his of Ruth R. Wisse.) birth. (Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum.) the holy tongue.” When Bellow offered the coun- terexample of the great 19th-century German Jew- ish poet Heinrich Heine, Agnon calmly replied, viewed in the film, only one—Yitskhok Niborski of to destroy. Thus, our language will be heard, until “We have him beautifully translated into Hebrew. Bibliothèque Medem, a Yiddish archive in Paris— [Nazi defendant] Alfred Rosenberg explodes.” His He is safe.” responds in Yiddish. With the exception of English Soviet rescuers had other ideas. It was more use- Agnon was making a point about non-Jewish spoken by Wisse, a few recordings of Sutzkever ful, they insisted, to have the Soviet people hear languages, but this film makes clear that the same reading his own work, and Niborski’s interviews his testimony in Russian. In one of the film’s many point might well apply to Yiddish literature too. and read-alouds, the bulk of the film, including all amazing moments, we get to see archival foot- Black Honey, in its grand Hebrew recitations of the other interviews and most of Sutzkever’s poetry, age of Sutzkever’s Russian-language testimony at Sutzkever’s Yiddish lyrics, as well as in its power- is in Hebrew. Nuremberg—and we see him refuse to sit down ful introduction to the poet for a mainly Hebrew- It is not at all surprising that people in the film before the Nazi henchmen, even when the presid- speaking audience, is itself an enactment of exactly chose to speak the language they use daily. In fact, ing judge asks him to take his seat. that process. By bringing this master’s work to it is a relief to observe scholars deeply devoted to The film presents Sutzkever’s Russian-language the wider world in Hebrew, it has reinvented and Yiddish literature dispensing with the desperate de- testimony as though it were a logistical snafu, rather revived Sutzkever as the Israeli poet he tragically nial of previous generations of passionate Yiddish- than part of the long Soviet erasure of Jewish culture never quite became in life. ists, who often insisted on using Yiddish at every that would continue for nearly 50 years. Just a few As a lover of Sutzkever’s work, I’m grateful, to opportunity. Yet it was also alarming to hear Sutz- years later, Stalin culminated his purge of Jewish cul- the point of tears, to know that he is safe. kever’s poetry not merely rendered into Hebrew but ture in the USSR with the executions of famed Yid- to hear those Hebrew lyrics read aloud by disem- dish writers and poets, whose ranks would surely have bodied voices as though they were the originals, the included Sutzkever himself had he not continued on Dara Horn is the author of five novels, most recently Yiddish abandoned entirely—especially when those to Tel Aviv. Sutzkever was an ace at dodging bullets. Eternal Life (W. W. Norton & Company).

46 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2019 LAST WORD Books vs. Children

BY ABRAHAM SOCHER

n the recently published second volume of Montaigne says a terrible thing that puts the risks a kind of idolatry. One ascribes infinite value his biography of Saul Bellow, Zachary Leader issue starkly. In his essay about the affection of fa- to a merely human thing and ends up sacrificing a quotes Bellow’s agent Harriet Wasserman’s thers for their children, he wonders whether a great human—who really does have infinite value—to description of an excruciating moment at author wouldn’t prefer to “bury his children . . . than that thing. Ia Nobel Prize after-party. At the end of the meal, In this case Moloch is the father’s book. Then Bellow’s Swedish publisher rose to toast him, then One ascribes infinite value again, maybe this is all a little overwrought. After Daniel, Bellow’s 12-year-old son, got up: “I’d just all, as Rivka Galchen implicitly points out, one can like to say my father has been so busy, but he still to a merely human thing and also harm or ignore one’s children in the pursuit of had time for me. Thanks, Pop.” Then his oldest son, less romantic professions. And how bad is a closed Gregory, rose to speak: ends up sacrificing a human— door anyway?

“My young brother has given me the courage who really does have infinite till, there is something troubling about writers to say something I’ve always wanted to say.” . . . Sand their children, and it probably won’t do to Greg was standing there, his walrus mustache value—to that thing. just point out that other occupations can also skew trembling slightly. “I never thought you loved one’s priorities. Nor is it sufficient to note that the me, and I never understood what the creative the fruits of his mind.” To be fair to Montaigne, this rivalry between books and children is a result of process was. You were behind a closed door all was probably a macabre and unconscious consola- the distorting ideology of the modern artist, which the time, writing, listening to Mozart.” He was tion for the fact that all but one of his children died began to hit its humanist stride in Montaigne’s looking straight at his father. “I was young. I in infancy. On the other hand, he did have a theory: time, though that is partly true. didn’t know what you were doing behind the In a comment on a verse in Proverbs, the Vilna closed door.” . . . All the European publishers, Gaon writes that a true hero is someone who studies all of them men, were sitting very stiff and Torah day and night, and when his family cries out upright. . . . Looks of total shock—horror “‘[b]ring us something to support and sustain us’... almost—on their faces. . . . “And then . . .” Greg he pays no attention at all to them nor heeds their was barely controlling himself. “. . . I witnessed voice . . . for he has denied all love except to that of the birth of my own child and I understood the Lord and His Torah.” Presumably, a closed study what the creative process was, and I understood door would come in handy here. The Gaon’s remark then that you really did love me.” is idiosyncratic and extreme, but one sees this set of priorities in less extreme form elsewhere in the A stunned silence followed; Bellow walked over to rabbinic tradition and in religions more generally. his middle child, Adam, shook his hand and said, All-consuming intellectual passions tend to “Thanks, kid, for not saying anything,” and left. come at the price of children, and artists and schol- Recently, Rivka Galchen, a novelist and new ars have too often reveled in their heroic choice to mother, has cast a skeptical eye on the trauma of the press on with the task. Yeats famously says that writer-parent’s closed door. The intellect of man is forced to choose There is a certain consistency of complaint . . . the Perfection of the life, or of the work child comes to show something to the writer- And if it take the second must refuse parent . . . during the daytime hours, and the A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark. writer-parent says to the child, I can’t right now, Since we love our children as second selves, lov- I’m working. There are also often descriptions ing them because we have produced them, we—or But neither lives nor works can be perfect, and the of the looming, hostile, uncompromising at least the writers and artists among us—should thought that they could be is at least part of the door of the home office. Apparently it is very remember that we also produce something else problem. troubling for children to see their parents from our selves, which are “products of a part more There is a nice story about the Vilna Gaon’s great working, at least doing the kind of work that noble than the body and . . . more purely our own.” Hasidic contemporary Rabbi Schneur Zalman of does not make itself visibly obvious. Liadi, his son, Rabbi Dov Ber, and his grandchild. In this act of generation we are both mother Rabbi Dov Ber and his family were living with his Her skepticism is twofold: First, she doubts that this and father; these “children” cost us dearer and, father on the first floor of a two-story house. One happens as often as it is described in the memoirs of if they are any good, bring us more honour. evening while Dov Ber was studying, one of his the children of authors, and, second, she wonders In the case of our other children their good children fell out of the crib. Oblivious, he con- what the big deal is. After all, most parents work, qualities belong much more to them than to us: tinued to study as his child cried. Rabbi Schneur and why should making up stories in the other we have only a very slight share in them; but Zalman was also studying, but he came down from room be any more mysterious or troubling than in the case of these, all their grace, worth and the second floor, calmed his grandchild, and then office work? beauty belong to us. went to speak with his son. He told him that one These are reasonable questions, but Galchen should never be so absorbed in thought that one knows that there is something deeper in the rivalry Montaigne’s mistake—and, to some extent, that cannot hear a child’s cry. In other words, next time between books and children, something that Greg- of the pained young Gregory Bellow trying to un- leave the door open. ory Bellow was getting at in the agitated talk of cre- derstand his father—is to equate artistic creation ativity, birth, and babies with which he toasted his with biological procreation, clever artifacts with father. In fact, it is one of the things that Galchen’s human beings. Sitting behind a closed door writ- Abraham Socher is the editor of the Jewish Review of book Little Labors is about. ing words is not really like giving birth; to think so Books.

Winter 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 47 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS A Publication of Bee.Ideas, LLC. 165 East 56th Street New York, NY 10022

Congratulations to the 2018 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award Winners Presented by the Association for Jewish Studies

WINNERS FINALISTS

Blood for Thought: The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity The Reinvention of Sacrifice in EVA MROCZEK, University of California, Davis Early Rabbinic Literature Oxford University Press

MIRA BALBERG, Honest Bodies: Revolutionary Modernism in the University of California, San Diego Dances of Anna Sokolow University of California Press HANNAH KOSSTRIN, The Ohio State University Oxford University Press

Jabotinsky’s Children: A Home for All Jews: Citizenship, Rights, and National Polish Jews and the Rise of Identity in the New Israeli State Right-Wing Zionism ORIT ROZIN, Tel Aviv University Brandeis University Press DANIEL KUPFERT HELLER, Monash University Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought Princeton University Press CHAD ALAN GOLDBERG, University of Wisconsin-Madison The University of Chicago Press The Jewish Bible: A Material History The Association for Jewish Studies is the largest DAVID STERN, learned society and professional organization Harvard University representing Jewish Studies scholars worldwide. University of Washington Press Visit associationforjewishstudies.org to learn more about our work and the upcoming 2019 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award competition. Email Amy Weiss at When the State Winks: [email protected] with questions. The Performance of Jewish Conversion in Israel This book award program has been made MICHAL KRAVEL-TOVI, possible by generous funding from Jordan Tel Aviv University Schnitzer and Arlene Schnitzer through the Columbia University Press Harold & Arlene Schnitzer Family Fund of the Oregon Jewish Community Foundation.