Walter Laqueur Did One Million Russians Change the Middle East? JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS Volume 4, Number 2 Summer 2013 $7.95

Benny Morris The Alarming Signif icance of a Trivial Book

SUMMER READING Adam Kirsch Proust & Bialik Alan Mintz A.B. Yehoshua at the Movies Jeffrey SaksS.Y. Agnon in Comics Daniel Johnson Francesca Segal's Brilliant First Novel Amy Newman Smith A Short, Strange, Heroic Life Editor Abraham Socher

Senior Contributing Editor Allan Arkush

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JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS www.jewishreviewofbooks.com JEWISH REVIEW Volume 4, Number 2 Summer 2013 OF BOOKS www.jewishreviewofbooks.com

LETTERS 4 Kosher Tin Foil, Greek Guilt, Chinese Jews, and More

FEATURE

5 Benny Morris Athens or Sparta? Patrick Tyler ran the Washington Post’s Middle East Bureau and was chief correspondent for The New York Times. His “inside story” of the Israeli military reveals more about the current prejudices of the chattering classes than it does about Israel and its neighbors. Reviews 11 John McWhorter Talking Like That Becoming Frum: How Newcomers Learn the Language and Culture of Orthodox Judaism by Sarah Bunin Benor

13 Daniel B. Schwartz Romancing the Haskalah Haskalah: The Romantic Movement in Judaism by Olga Litvak 16 Shlomo Avineri Emancipation and Its Discontents Rabbis and Revolution: The Jews of Moravia in the Age of Emancipation by Michael Laurence Miller 19 Len Lyons In and Out of Africa Chosen People: The Rise of American Black Israelite Religions by Jacob S. Dorman Black Jews in Africa and the Americas by Tudor Parfitt 23 Amy Newman Smith Cri de Coeur The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan: A Boy Avenger, a Nazi Diplomat, and a Murder in Paris by Jonathan Kirsch 26 Walter Laqueur From Russia with Complications Ha-milion she-shina et ha-mizrach ha-tikhon: ha-aliyah ha-sovietit le-Yisrael (The Million that Changed the Middle East: The SovietAliyah to Israel) by Lili Galili and Roman Bronfman 28 Jeffrey Saks The Man Who Thought in Pictures Shay Ve-Agnon: Shelosha Sipurim (Three Stories) by S. Y. Agnon, illustrated by Shay Charka

30 Alan Mintz Spanish Charity The Retrospective by A. B. Yehoshua, translated by Stuart Schoffman 33 Daniel Johnson More Important Things The Innocentsby Francesca Segal 34 Alan Mittleman Two or Three Concepts of Dignity Dignity: Its History and Meaning by Michael Rosen • Human Dignity by George Kateb

Readings 37 James A. Diamond The First Debate Over Religious Martydom Did Moses misquote God? On martyrdom and the meaning of Aaron’s silence. 40 Adam Kirsch Proust Between Halakha and Aggada Proust and Bialik were both great literary modernists but they aren’t usually thought of together. Reading In Search of Lost Time in light of “Halacha and Aggada.” Lost & Found 44 Hayim Greenberg Culture and Education in the Diaspora After 1948, Ben-Gurion strongly urged young American Jews to make aliyah. In 1951, Hayim Greenberg, head of the Jewish Agency’s Department of Education and Culture, came to Jerusalem to argue for the dignity of Jewish life in the diaspora—in Yiddish. Last word 47 Allan Arkush East and West

On the cover: Illustrations by Mark Anderson. LETTERS

Kosher Tin Foil mine whether the animal is kosher. However, his- at least partly driven by the institutional interests of Timothy Lytton, in his thought-provoking article torically, a few Ashkenazi Jews took on the added the kashrut agencies themselves. “Chopped Herring and the Making of the American stringency of refraining from eating that meat en- Rabbi Eliezer Finkelman Kosher Certification System” (Spring 2013), is surely tirely, even when investigation showed it to be ko- via jewishreviewofbooks.com correct when he says, “The U.S. kosher market gen- sher. This is the standard of keeping “glatt kosher.” erates more than $12 billion in annual retail sales, Modern kashrut agencies have promoted this ad- Timothy Lytton Responds: and more products are labeled kosher than are la- ditional stricture, in pursuit of higher standards, Rabbis Newfield and Finkelman suggest that kosher beled organic, natural, or premium.” However, the in accordance with the economics of the central- certification sometimes has more to do with mar- author neglects to mention that more and more of ized meat packing industry, and in their own best keting than with Jewish law. They allege that leading these kosher-labeled products do not need kosher interest. In consequence, merely kosher, “non- certifiers provide unnecessary certification to non- certification in the first place! Many are not even glatt” meat has more or less disappeared from the food products. In defense of this practice, Rabbi foods. marketplace. Yaakov Luban, an executive rabbinic coordinator at Based on the Talmudic concepts of notein ta’am li- However, the agencies certify as glatt the meat the OU, explains that many companies believe that fgam (contributing a non-beneficial taste) and eino of cattle with some abnormalities. Thus someone kosher certification offers them a marketing advan- ra’oh le-akhilat kelev (not fit for a dog to eat), non- who wants to keep the old standard of plain kosher tage—a kind of rabbinic Good Housekeeping seal food items should not need kosher certification. But must accept the additional stricture of glatt, and of approval—and that the OU provides certification a quick glance at the current ShopRite Kosher Prod- even though the agency does not consider it neces- ucts Directory shows that this is not the case: The sary, provided that there is some halakhic basis for OU certifies as kosher aluminum foil, food storage doing so. In the case of aluminum foil, for example, bags, sandwich bags, foaming cleanser with chlorine the OU has posted on its website an article detail- bleach, antibacterial hand soap, laundry detergent, ing concerns about the use of non-kosher oils in the wool wash, sponges, heavy-duty scrubbers, hydro- production process. Ultimately, consumers must gen peroxide, and isopropyl rubbing alcohol. judge for themselves whether transparency about As competition increases, it becomes harder for the role that marketing plays in certification of non- the kashrut agencies to grow. Perhaps this is what food products legitimizes the practice and whether leads them to certify products that, according to the the use of non-kosher ingredients in products such strict letter of Jewish law, do not require certification as aluminum foil raises legitimate halakhic con- to begin with. This recent development is problem- cerns. Certification is, of course, harder to justify in atic for two reasons. Firstly, by adding kosher cer- the case of products that never come into contact tification to products that don’t need it, the kosher with food, such as bleach and floor cleaner. consumer is forced to pay more when they could Rabbi Finkelman additionally alleges that agen- pay less without certification. Secondly, the agencies cies promote excessively stringent standards in seem to be overstepping the biblical injunction of order to gain competitive advantage over other “thou shalt not add thereto,” (Deut. 12:32). agencies by appealing to a broader range of kosher Rabbi Yossi Newfield consumers. He suggests that this practice is driven Brooklyn, NY by agency self-interest. The agencies respond that someone who wants to keep the old stricture of glatt it demonstrates their responsiveness to consum- Timothy Lytton’s “Chopped Herring and the Mak- must accept new leniencies pioneered by the agen- ers’ religious preferences. The two views are not ing of the American Kosher Certification System” cies. Furthermore, some poultry now appears with incompatible. As I argue at greater length in my records, with admirable flair, the triumphs of the agency certification, along with the legend “glatt,” book, kosher certification is both a business and a kashrut agencies. Indeed, the agencies have cre- even though the term is meaningless when applied sacred trust. Indeed, it is precisely the combination ated an unprecedented mechanism, a kind of in- to poultry, lamb, or veal. of profit motive and moral commitment that makes terlocking cartel of expert organizations that makes In other cases, Jewish law clearly permits prod- kashrut a model for reliable private certification— kosher-certified foodstuffs widely available to inter- ucts that the kashrut agencies nonetheless prohibit. albeit an imperfect one, as Rabbis Newfield and Fin- ested consumers. Perhaps this structure will serve For instance, a bedrock principle of kashrut, en- kelman rightly point out. as a model for other kinds of certification, such as shrined in all the codes, holds that minor amounts food safety. of forbidden substances do not render the entire As Kohelet observes, though, “no human be- food forbidden. If the prohibited substance appears Greek Guilt ing is so righteous that he does only good,” (7:20). in a negligible amount, or if only a small possibility Thank you for publishing Prof. Devin Naar’s arti- So too, human institutions, which have their own exists that the forbidden substance actually is pres- cle on Salonica (“Jerusalem of the Balkans,” Spring imperatives. Each kashrut agency exists to further ent, the food remains permitted. This is the prin- 2013). Naar’s mention of the religious aspect of fidelity to halakha, but what turns out to benefit the ciple of bitul, or nullification. While no one con- Salonica Jewry was particularly welcome. The im- agency may not always coincide with halakha. The tests its validity, agencies typically refuse to apply it. portance of Salonica as a religious center is often Orthodox Union, for instance, certifies glass clean- Thus, in an article titled “When It’s Null and Void,” ignored. er, which benefits no one but the OU. To the extent Rabbi Dovid Heber of the Star-K agency reports While Naar makes interesting observations that this certification gives the impression that glass that “most kashrus agencies do not rely on bitul. about changing attitudes to Salonica’s history, he cleaner requires inspection for kashrut (let alone This means that Star-K policy is that products must overlooked the similarly changed understanding that it is a beverage), the agency misleads the public. be 100% kosher to be granted certification. Star-K of Greek Christian collaboration during the Holo- The approach of kashrut agencies to genuine does not allow companies to add non-kosher in- caust. Although long denied, the question of local halakhic stringencies creates a more subtle prob- gredients.” Since Jewish law permits these prod- collaboration is now prominent in Holocaust his- lem. Faced with a stricture practiced by a small ucts, the agencies clearly have other goals beyond tory as a whole, including that of Greece in particu- percentage of kosher consumers, there is a natural enforcing Jewish law. lar. It is well known that officials of the Greek col- tendency to enforce that stricture on all consumers, In showing preference for stricter rulings, the laborationist administration helped the Germans to avoid losing the business of the strictest consum- kashrut agencies are, of course, part of a larger hal- on numerous occasions to target Salonica’s Jews. In ers. Moreover, the agency benefits as more consum- akhic trend to rule strictly and even to issue rul- July 1942, Vassilis Simonides, the governor-general ers take on the stricture and so become dependent ings based on contradictory theories, in order to be of Macedonia whose administrative headquarters upon the agency. yotzei le-khol ha-deot (in conformity with all opin- were in Salonica, complied with a German military For example, when a kosher slaughterer detects ions). Many factors drive this general preference for decree conscripting thousands of Jewish men for certain abnormalities in the lungs of slaughtered stringency, including piety, fear of sin, and some forced labor and helped the Germans enforce the cattle, further investigation is required to deter- less-wholesome motives. In the case of kashrut, it is (continued on page 46)

4 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2013 FEATURE Athens or Sparta?

BY Benny Morris

the chattering classes. For Patrick Tyler is the for- was declining … It was Israel—Sparta—whose Fortress Israel: The Inside Story of the Military mer chief correspondent of The New York Times and power had grown . . . Elite Who Run the Country­—and Why They the former Middle East bureau chief of The Wash- Can’t Make Peace ington Post, and his book comes festooned with I will return to Tyler’s perverse and implausible ac- by Patrick Tyler blurbs from former Times executive editor Howell count of the lead-up to the Six-Day War. For now, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 576 pp., $35 Raines, CNN’s national security analyst Peter L. let us ask: Is Israel Sparta? Well, let’s see. It is true Bergen, and others lauding its scholarship as “me- that Israel has a powerful army and spends a large ticulous” and describing it as “the definitive histori- part of its annual budget (say twenty to twenty-five Tyler’s book is a gossipy overlong pseudo-history of Israel, ack in 1988, I refused to do a stint of re- serve duty in the Israel Defense Forces which is noteworthy mainly for what it indicates about the and was sentenced to a twenty-one-day prison term. It was at the height of the standing of Israel among the chattering classes. FirstB Intifada and my unit was to serve thirty-five days in the casbah—the old town—of Nablus, in the cal and analytical account” of the role of the military percent) on defense; true, too, that generals and se- heart of Samaria. I refused because I thought that Is- in Israel. Incidentally, Tyler does not know Hebrew curity chiefs, past and present, have a major say in raeli rule in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip or Arabic, and the only archive he appears to have shaping defense and foreign policy and have had was oppressive and that Israel should make peace visited is the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in his substantial representation in successive cabinets, with the Palestinians based on a two-states-for-two- home state of Texas. though only three—Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, peoples solution. The First Intifada, from 1987 until and Ariel Sharon—out of Israel’s twelve prime min- 1991, was a popular uprising, largely consisting of or decades Zionists and their supporters have isters were former generals. All the others, David strikes, boycotts, street demonstrations, and riots, in Fdescribed Israel as a latter-day Athens, and Ty- Ben-Gurion, Moshe Sharett, Levi Eshkol, Golda which the rioters almost invariably employed non- ler seems to take it personally, insisting instead on Meir, Menachem Begin, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak lethal means. (By contrast, in the Second Intifada, describing Israel as “a modern Sparta in a region Shamir, Binyamin Netanyahu, and Ehud Olmert, from 2000 to 2004, the Palestinians employed high- of weak states.” Indeed, at one point Tyler seems were civilians. It could be argued that Begin and ly lethal means—suicide bombings in buses and res- preposterously to liken Nasser’s Egypt to Athens: Shamir, as former commanders of guerrilla organi- taurants—and their target, in my view, was not so zations in the pre-state period, also had “security” much the occupation as Israel itself.) Thucydides had written of the Peloponnesian backgrounds. (Shamir also served for a while in the The judge at my trial was our division’s deputy War: “What made war inevitable was the Mossad.) But then Israel has been under siege from commander, a lieutenant colonel who was obvious- growth of Athenian power and the fear which without and terrorist threat from within since its es- ly uncomfortable with the situation. He said some- this caused in Sparta.” But in this case there was tablishment. So security, personal as well as collec- thing like “not all of us in the military are happy no growth of Athenian power. Nasser’s strength tive, is understandably a paramount consideration with what’s happening” and coaxed me to relent. But the following Sunday I went off to Prison No. 4, in Sarafand, where I served out a relatively pleas- ant seventeen days (I arrived two days late, and two days were taken off for good behavior). A year or two later, I was again called up for reserve duty (not in the territories), and a while later I was honorably discharged from the IDF at the age of 44, in line with the custom at the time for combat soldiers. I was reminded of this personal episode while reading Patrick Tyler’s Fortress Israel: The Inside Story of the Military Elite Who Run the Country— and Why They Can’t Make Peace. As the title makes clear, Tyler charges Israel with being a modern “Sparta.” How were conscientious objectors pun- ished in Sparta? I don’t know if Leonidas suffered conscientious objectors before the Hot Gates, but I do know how they were treated in Wilhelmine Ger- many, the classic modern “militarist” society. And I know how they fared in the United States, France, and Great Britain when these countries were at war and had conscription and reserve duty. The norm in each case was either a few years behind bars or some form of internal exile. Tyler’s book is a gossipy overlong pseudo- history of Israel, which is noteworthy mainly for Young Palestinian demonstrators throw rocks and bottles at Israeli soldiers during the First Intifada, what it indicates about the standing of Israel among December 1987. (Photo by Esaias Baitel/AFP/Getty Images.)

Summer 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 5 in the minds of Israelis. This is hardly surprising. The opening of the relevant American ex-generals have often risen to political Israeli military and cabinet prominence during or after wars: Washington in the papers—closed for another 18th century, Jackson and Grant in the 19th, Eisen- four years by Israel’s fifty- hower, George C. Marshall, and Colin Powell in the year rule—is unlikely to offer 20th, to name just a few. much added enlightenment. In his Prologue, Tyler asserts that “militarism” is And the Arab archives, the ruling spirit in Israeli society: which might shed new light, remain closed, as they are for Once in the military system, Israelis never every period of the Israeli- fully exit. They carry the military identity for Arab conflict (dictatorships life . . . through lifelong expectations of loyalty do not open state archives). and secrecy. Many Israeli officers carry their “top The slide to war began with secret” clearances after retirement, reporting Syria’s sponsorship of Pales- back to superiors or intelligence officers items tinian operations against Is- of interest gleaned from their involvement in rael across the Lebanese and business, finance, and interactions with foreigners. Jordanian borders and Syr- ia’s own efforts at diverting On the next page, he writes, “the specter of the the headwaters of the Jordan security state remains a dominant aspect of life,” and River. Syria’s leaders spoke Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin, center, with Haim Bar-Lev, left, and Ezer a little later, “The military is the country to a great frequently and publicly of a Weizman at the General Headquarters in Tel Aviv during the Six-Day War, extent.” This is all nonsense. Had Tyler been writing coming “war of liberation” June 1967. (Photo courtesy of Government Press Office, Israel.) about Israel during the late 1940s and 1950s, perhaps for Palestine. Israel warned he would have had a point. Perhaps. But the Israel of Syria that it was playing with the past several decades, Israel today, is another ani- fire and might even provoke mal altogether. For most Israelis, individual achieve- an Israeli assault. ment and interests trump the old collectivist Zionist In early May 1967 Da- ethic. Indeed, fewer and fewer Israelis actually serve mascus and Moscow, Syria’s in the army or do reserve duty (as the few who carry chief international backer, the burden are constantly complaining). It is true passed on intelligence to that among eleventh and twelfth graders, there is still Egypt that Israel was massing great competitiveness to get a slot, once inducted, in troops on the Syrian fron- one of the IDF’s elite units or in pilot training, but this tier. The implication was that has more to do with adolescent competition and ma- Israel was about to launch chismo than militaristic ideology. Indeed, a good ar- a massive attack and that gument can be made for depicting the Israeli army as Egypt, with whom Syria had one of the world’s least “military.” Since its inception in a defense pact, would have to 1948, the IDF has abjured saluting (the practice exists come to Syria’s aid. Moscow only in formal parades), and the men, after complet- spoke of ten to twelve Israeli ing basic training, generally address their non-coms brigades and of May 17 as D- and officers on a first-name basis. The dress code in Day. This “intelligence” was the army ranges from informal to sloppy and always untrue. The UN armistice has (except in the Armored Corps), and breaches of supervision organization, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and Israel Navy Commander Shlomo Harel on discipline tend to be punished lightly. While females UNTSO, checked the bor- patrol in the Straits of Tiran during the Six-Day War, June 1967. (Photo by are still kept out of combat units, women non-coms der areas and dismissed the Ilan Bruner, courtesy of Government Press Office, Israel.) and officers are playing a major role in training com- reports. Indeed, Nasser sent bat troops (in armor and artillery, for example), and his army chief, Muhammad there are growing numbers of women pilots and nav- Fawzi, to Damascus to find out what was happen- So, on May 13 he ordered his armored divisions igators, also flying combat aircraft. All of this points ing. In his memoirs, Fawzi later wrote, “I did not find to cross the Suez Canal into Sinai, which had been to a liberal rather than “militarist” military. any concrete evidence to support the information re- demilitarized after the 1956 War, threatening south- As with poker players, books have tells. At one ceived. On the contrary, aerial photographs taken by ern Israel. Nasser then compounded this with two point in Fortress Israel Tyler writes that Israel’s para- Syrian reconnaissance on May 12 and 13 showed no steps that, in the absence of international interven- troops wear black berets. Had he interviewed any change in normal [Israeli] military positions.” tion, made war inevitable. On May 16, he ordered Israeli, even a child (even an Israeli Arab child), he Tyler fails to tell his readers any of this. Instead, the UN peacekeeping force in Sinai (UNEF), which would have known that, as in Britain and France, para- he slyly implies that there was something to the Syr- physically separated the Egyptians and Israelis, to troopers wear red berets. Sadly, Tyler knows nothing ian and Russian reports: “The Soviet information was leave, and on May 22 he announced the closure of about the nuts and bolts of Israel or its military. mostly disinformation”—note the carefully placed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and aircraft, Israel is, in sober fact, a small, flawed, and embat- modifier “mostly.” “It was clear,” Tyler goes on, “that blocking the port of Eilat, which was Israel’s port tled democracy, with a strong and unusually egali- the Israeli army was in a heightened state of alert of access to Africa and southern Asia, and its air- tarian military that has produced an extraordinary along the northern frontier.” Again, the implication is link to South Africa. All of this was in violation of stream of writers, academics, and artists, supported that an attack was being prepared. It wasn’t. international law. At the end of the month, Nasser by world-class academic and artistic institutions. In Tyler then proceeds to justify Nasser’s subsequent signed a defense pact with his old enemy King Hus- short, it is more Athenian than Spartan. actions, which directly provoked the Six-Day War: sein, and battalions of Egyptian troops were flown to Jordan; Iraq made ready to send armored divi- yler is as weak on the history of Israel as he is Still, it was impossible for Nasser to ignore sions to bolster Hussein’s defenses. Israel felt a pan- Ton its sociology, though he is chock-full of opin- the [Soviet-Syrian] intelligence reports . . . For Arab noose tightening around its neck. ions and judgments, all of them anti-Zionist. Let’s Nasser, it didn’t matter whether the intelligence Tyler describes these Egyptian moves, each of return to the causes of the Six-Day War. The his- reports were false . . . What mattered was that which was a clear casus belli, but then blames Israel tory of the countdown to this conflagration is clear, Nasser was in an untenable spot as the putative for the war’s outbreak. He writes that Prime Minister generally agreed upon, and pretty well documented. leader of the Arab world. Levi Eshkol tried but failed “to restrain the generals

6 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2013 and quell the surge of enthusiasm for war that was aftermath is worth quoting because it is so blatantly Nasser, launched a “war of attrition” against Israel’s becoming more and more pronounced in the offi- untrue: “It seemed that with few exceptions, every- forces in the Sinai Peninsula, hoping to wear down cer corps.” Meanwhile, the Americans failed to put one in Israel had embraced a creed that envisioned Israeli resolve to remain in occupation of Egyp- together an international flotilla that would force a Greater Israel, from the Mediterranean to the Jor- tian territory. This consisted of artillery strikes open the straits—Tyler writes as if this idea was still dan. There were differences [only] about how to against the Israeli forts built along the Suez Canal’s in play when Israel struck on the morning of June 5, achieve it.” It is true that a semi-messianic eupho- eastern bank (the so-called Bar-Lev Line) and of but it wasn’t—or to send in their own ships, which ria took hold, but post-1967 Israel was nonetheless commando raids against the forts and the roads is why Washington in the end gave Israel a “yellow a deeply divided society and remains so down to through which they were supplied. The Egyptians light” (the phrase is William Quandt’s) to attack. the present. Many opposed, or were uncomfort- enjoyed overwhelming superiority in artillery, which caused serious Israeli casualties on an al- One other Six-Day War matter that Tyler elides and distorts most daily basis. (I was wounded by a shell splinter in one of the forts, codenamed Zahava Darom, on is the Israeli conquest of the West Bank, an area that Jordan the southern edge of Small Bitter Lake.) To offset this Egyptian advantage, in the summer of 1969 had ruled since conquering it in 1948. the Israelis sent in the Israel Air Force (IAF) to hit the Egyptian artillery and frontline trench system One other Six-Day War matter that Tyler elides able with, retention of the Palestinian-populated on the west bank of the Canal. By the end of the and distorts is the Israeli conquest of the West Bank, territories. Tyler forgets to tell his readers that Ben- year the Egyptian artillery had not been silenced, an area that Jordan had ruled since conquering it in Gurion, whom he repeatedly brands an arch- so in January 1970 the Israelis sent the IAF and 1948. Early on the morning of June 5, Israel told King expansionist and warmonger, immediately advised commandos to attack army bases and anti-aircraft Hussein—through the UN and U.S. channels—that Eshkol to withdraw from the whole of the West Bank missile emplacements deep inside Egypt. Thou- if Jordan held its fire, no harm would come to it. The except East Jerusalem, nor does he mention that La- sands of Egyptian soldiers and military construc- Jordanians nonetheless opened fire, including artil- bor Party minister Yigal Allon quickly formulated a tion workers were killed and injured during the lery fire, on Israeli West Jerusalem and the coastal plan which called for withdrawal from the bulk of half-year air campaign. On two occasions, bombs plain. Israel re-contacted the Jordanians, promising the West Bank in exchange for peace with Jordan. went astray or the targeting was mistaken and an not to open fire if they immediately ceased. But the The “Allon Plan” was never formally adopted as the Egyptian factory and an elementary school, which Jordanians continued firing, and around noon, Israeli Labor Party’s platform or Israeli government policy, was situated inside a military compound, were de- troops began to push into the West Bank and East but it guided Labor’s policies for a decade. (Settle- stroyed, causing dozens of civilian deaths. Tyler Jerusalem. Within three days, the territory down to ments were not established in the areas earmarked summarizes the Israeli air assault as follows: “The the Jordan River was in Israeli hands. for transfer to Arab sovereignty.) In the immediate air force . . . [dropped] an estimated eight thou- Tyler omits any mention of these June 5 warn- post-1967 years, Israel’s leaders, in secret meetings, sand tons of bombs on military and civilian tar- ings and assurances to Jordan, and instead writes: repeatedly proposed the plan to King Hussein as a gets over these months . . . U.S.-made F-4 Phan- basis for a bilateral peace settlement to no avail. toms terrorized Egyptian cities.” In effect, Tyler After Jordanian artillery batteries had opened Following the Six-Day War, Egypt’s president, tells his readers that Israel indiscriminately killed fire on Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem, Yigal Allon and Menachem Begin joined in proposing . . . that the shelling gave Israel the pretext it needed to liberate Arab East Jerusalem, including the Old City and the Western Wall.

One wonders if Tyler would describe the American response to a comparable attack (say the shelling of Washington, D.C. and New York) as a “pretext.” In the aftermath of the war, on June 19, the Israeli art cabinet resolved, in secret session, that Israel would photography agree to withdraw from all of the Sinai Peninsula in architecture exchange for peace with Egypt and the peninsula’s modernism demilitarization and from all of the Golan Heights judaica & bibles in exchange for peace with Syria and the Heights’ holocaust yiddish & hebrew demilitarization. (The cabinet could not agree on foreign language the fate of the West Bank, so nothing was offered olympic games to Jordan.) Tyler, as usual when trying to downplay appraisal services Israeli peace-mindedness, puts it vaguely: “Eshkol, The Sarajevo haggadah Meir, and Dayan convinced [the ministers] . . . that Finci, jakob; eugen verber; dragoljub Zamurovic. Sarajevo: rabic, 2010. they should at least offer to return some of the Arab octavo. New color facsimile of the celebrated 14th-century illuminated territories if they could do so on favorable terms.” manuscript from Spain, unique among Which is not quite the same thing. haggadahs for telling Torah stories prior to the Passover text. originally painted It is worth adding that there are historians who on goat-skin vellum, the first 69 pictures illustrate the creation (with the world are convinced that this cabinet decision never depicted as a sphere) through the exodus, reached Cairo and Damascus, though the truth, followed by 78 hebrew text pages handwritten in Sephardic style, with on this score, will only be definitively known if and lavishly decorated initials and painted figures, including a seder scene. In when the Egyptian and Syrian archives are opened. 1894 the medieval manuscript arrived in What is certain is that in September 1967, in re- Sarajevo, a city in which people of many faiths had been living peacefully for three sponse to the Israeli victory and perhaps to these centuries, where it was purchased by the Zemmaljski muzej (National Museum). peace proposals, the Arab governments unani- half leather over decorative paper- mously resolved never to negotiate with Israel, covered boards resting in decorative clamshell box. With booklet in english, a never to recognize it, and never to make peace—the short history of the work and analysis of each painting. New. (27807) $225. famous “three nos” of Khartoum. All who are hungry, let them enter and eat. One other point Tyler makes about the war’s

Summer 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 7 Egyptians, deliberately targeting civilians. In fact, the Israeli military “can’t during these months life went on as normal in make peace.” He seems not Egypt’s cities, since its government and citizenry to notice. knew full well that they were not being targeted. After the Sadat-Begin The War of Attrition came to an end after the treaty, the Israeli public, Soviets sent in thousands of their own personnel which according to Tyler to man anti-aircraft missile batteries and fighter had by then been tutored squadrons to counter the IAF. In one incident, Is- to “militarism” and expan- raeli Phantoms shot down five Soviet-piloted MiG- sionism by its leaders and 21s. At this point, both sides called it quits. The generals for decades, im- Egyptians were now thoroughly exhausted, and the mediately endorsed the Israelis feared an open-ended clash with the Rus- government’s conciliatory sians. Tyler, as usual, has the story all wrong. He tells posture, and some eighty us that Soviet pilots “shot down half a dozen Israeli percent of Israelis support- Phantoms.” This never happened. ed giving back all of Sinai Tyler replays the same atrocity card when de- to Egypt in exchange for scribing Israel’s First Lebanon War, against the PLO peace. How does Tyler ex- and Syrians in Lebanon in 1982, when he writes of plain this? It was, he writes, “the saturation bombing of the city [of Beirut].” Of “a strong affirmation that course, there was never any “saturation” bombing. the martial impulse could Tyler himself writes of six hundred civilians killed; be overpowered by a strat- An Israeli soldier looks across the Suez Canal during the War of Attrition, in Dresden on February 13-15, 1945 Allied bomb- egy based on accommoda- August 1970. (Photo by Moshe Milner, courtesy of Government Press Office, ers killed an estimated twenty-five thousand civil- tion with the Arabs.” What Israel.) ians—older estimates put the number at around one this fluff means is anyone’s hundred thousand or even higher. That’s saturation guess. But what a more bombing. In 1982, the IAF very carefully targeted honest and plain-spoken PLO buildings and camps in and around Beirut, and commentator would have while hundreds of civilians no doubt died collater- written would have been ally, some of them Lebanese rather than Palestinian, something like this: The Is- this was not the result of deliberation or intention. raeli public, when persuad- That’s what happens during wars in built-up areas— ed that there was a sincere, even when the more powerful side is careful. Tyler’s genuine Arab partner ready description is agitprop, not history. to make peace, would over- come its security-driven he subtitle of Tyler’s book carries a clear mes- hesitations and rush head- Tsage: Bloodthirsty Spartan generals “run” Is- long to sign on. rael and that is why it has not achieved peace with The basic problem with its neighbors. The actual history of the various post- Fortress Israel is that Ty- 1967 Israeli-Arab peace processes gives the lie to ler dismisses, or is simply this argument. IDF generals and ex-generals have unaware of, the pan-Arab actually loomed large in these peace processes, both desire to rid the Middle those which succeeded and those which didn’t. East of the Jewish state Israel so far has signed two peace treaties with and its periodic efforts to Arab states, with Egypt in 1979 and with Jordan in do so. According to Tyler, 1994, both of which are still in force (though how Israel alone is to blame for Prime Minister Golda Meir with Israeli troops in the Golan Heights during they will fare in the coming years, with fiercely anti- the wars, for the absence of the Yom Kippur War, November 1973. (Photo by Ron Frenkel, courtesy of Israeli and anti-Semitic Islamists on the ascent in peace, for the hopelessness. Government Press Office, Israel.) Arab politics, is anyone’s guess). Negotiations with Thus, he fails completely to Egypt were led by Menachem Begin, a civilian who deal with the 1948 War, about which all acknowl- so for more than two decades. A few years ago, the had headed the pre-state right-wing Irgun Zvai edge that the Arabs—first the Palestinians and then American intelligence community suggested that Leumi (IZL). But the two men who pressed and the neighboring Arab states—were the aggressors; the Iranians might have halted their nuclear weap- persuaded him to make the requisite concessions, thus, he fails to come to grips with the very real Arab ons program in 2003, but it has since concluded including handing over to Egypt the whole of Sinai, threats to Israel in 1956 and 1967 and, indeed, ever that Iran is still pursuing nuclear weapons. Israeli were his foreign minister Moshe Dayan and his de- since. He pooh-poohs Saddam Hussein’s effort to intelligence has never believed that there was a real fense minister Ezer Weizman, both of whom had achieve nuclear weaponry in the early 1980s and halt and continues to believe that Iran’s theocrat- spent most of their lifetimes in the IDF. Dayan was writes off Israel’s destruction of the Osirak nuclear ic, brutal government is bent on building nuclear a former chief of general staff, and Weizman was a reactor outside Baghdad in 1981 as merely “a new weapons as soon as possible. Israeli intelligence past commander of the Israel Air Force. The peace phase of [Israeli] militarism.” also takes the Iranian leaders at their public word treaty with Jordan, in which Israel ceded several Indeed, Tyler kicks off the book with a descrip- and believes that the Iranian regime seeks to de- hundred square kilometers of territory in the south, tion of how, in 2011-2012, Israeli agents “mur- stroy Israel. A division of opinion exists among the was negotiated and signed by Yitzhak Rabin, also a dered” two top Iranian nuclear scientists on the Israeli intelligence assessors about whether the Ira- former IDF chief of general staff. streets of Tehran. “The astonishing thing,” Tyler nians, once they build an arsenal of such weapons, In the late 1970s, the public drive to pressure Be- writes, “was that Iran might not have been engaged will unleash them on Israel or whether they will gin to make peace with Egypt was spearheaded by in clandestine nuclear weapons development at use them to strategically overawe and defeat Israel the Peace Now movement. Tyler says, almost cor- all.” Rather, Israel’s “highly provocative” killing of in some more subtle and staggered manner. In any rectly, that its importance “was that it arose in great the scientists pushed Iran into pursuing, or resum- event, returning to Tyler and his thesis, accord- measure from the military establishment.” Most of ing the pursuit of, nuclear weaponry. All of this ing to press reports, it is the IDF general staff and the original signatories of the letter that launched flies in the face of what almost all the world’s intel- the heads of the security services who held back the movement were, in fact, IDF reserve officers. ligence agencies believe, which is that Iran aims to and are currently holding back Netanyahu from But of course this contradicts Tyler’s own thesis that build nuclear weapons and has been trying to do launching a strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities,

8 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2013 which, once again, upends the author’s thesis. Along the way, Tyler also makes another argu- ment: that the warmongering generals have tradi- tionally controlled their peace-prone civilian supe- riors. But here, too, history ill-serves him. During JRB just got smarter! the 1948 War, which Tyler generally avoids, Ben- Gurion repeatedly overruled the army. In May 1948 he forced the generals repeatedly to launch assaults on the Latrun Police Fort, against their better judg- ment. Later in 1948 and again in March 1949 the Introducing our new tablet app army (meaning OC Southern Front, General Yigal Allon) pleaded with Ben-Gurion to order the con- and enhanced website! quest of the West Bank. Ben-Gurion turned Allon down flatly, though the IDF could easily have man- aged the conquest, militarily speaking. During the early and mid-1950s, some IDF gen- erals, including then-head of operations and, from 1953, chief of general staff Dayan pressed prime ministers Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett (1953- 1955) to launch a war against Jordan to conquer the West Bank in order to give Israel a more secure, nat- ural frontier or to launch wars of pre-emption and conquest against Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. Ben- Gurion occasionally toyed with these expansionist ideas, but he and Sharett always held back, checking Dayan’s annexationist proposals. Only in 1956, after Nasser acquired large amounts of advanced Soviet weaponry and launched massive fedayeen attacks on the Israeli heartland did Ben-Gurion agree to launch a pre-emptive war against Egypt. A decade later, in the summer of 1967, with Nasser provoking war, the IDF General Staff, to a man, pushed and pressed their civilian mas- ter, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, to launch a pre- emptive strike against Egypt. But it took him three Now FREE for all subscribers. long, nail-biting weeks to decide that international diplomacy had failed and would continue to fail. In other words, from May 15 until June 4 Eshkol Print + Web + App + Archive held off his generals and the dogs of war. If Tyler’s thesis were right, Eshkol would have crumpled before the military elite who have “always run the Visit us online to learn more. country” in mid-May. In the early 1970s then-Prime Minister Golda Meir scuppered peace or interim peace initiatives www.jewishreviewofbooks.com by Moshe Dayan, her defense minister, and Egyp- tian President Anwar Sadat that might well have resulted in averting the October War. Dayan at the time was supported by two of the IDF’s top gen- JEWISH REVIEW erals, Ariel Sharon and Israel Tal, but opposed by OF BOOKS chief of general staff Haim Bar-Lev. In 1981, when Begin pressed the motion for the IAF attack on the Osirak reactor, he was opposed by the head of IDF intelligence, the head of the Mossad, and the head yler’s purpose in writing this book was not to creation with no sufficient national basis either in of the opposition, Labor Party chief Shimon Peres, Toffer his readers an honest history, it was to geography or race.” By March 1938 The New States- who for years had headed the country’s defense blacken Israel’s image. Fortress Israel is just the lat- man, in the past a great friend to central Europe’s establishment (though he was no general). A de- est in a spate of venomous perversions of the re- only democracy, was writing: “We should urge the cade later, in 1991, when Iraq’s Saddam Hussein cord that have appeared in the past few years in the Czechs to cede the German-speaking part of their launched 39 Scud missiles against Israel’s cities, it United States and Britain, all clearly designed to territory to Hitler without more ado.” Of course, as was the hardline prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, subvert Israel’s standing in the world. Deliberately all understood, this meant leaving Czechoslovakia who faced down much of the defense establish- or not, such books and articles are paving the way defenseless. Hitler conquered the rump of the coun- ment and checked the IDF. for a future abandonment of the Jewish state. try a few months later without a shot. The appease- In other words, the picture that emerges from the I am reminded of the spate of books and ar- ment of the Arab-Islamist world at Israel’s expense actual history is clearly one in which there is complete ticles that appeared in Western Europe in 1936 is in the air and Tyler is one of its (very, very) minor subordination of the military to the Israeli civilian au- through1938 repudiating the legitimacy of the harbingers. thorities. Sometimes, the generals are the ones push- newly formed Czechoslovakia before its sacrifice to ing for action and war and the civilians are successfully the Nazi wolves. In 1934, the Conservative weekly putting on the brakes; at other times it is the civilians Truth hailed Czechoslovakia as “the sole successful Benny Morris is a professor of history in the Middle East who are gung ho, while the generals persuade their experiment in liberal democracy that has emerged Studies Department of Ben-Gurion University of the bosses to exercise restraint. At all times, it is the prime from the post-War settlement.” By the end of 1936, Negev. He is the author of 1948: A History of the First minister and the cabinet who have the final say. The Observer was writing it off as “a diplomatic Arab-Israeli War (Yale University Press).

Summer 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 9 “Extremely interesting, timely, well researched, and well argued . . . the book makes a major contribution to our understanding of a very important and deeply troubling issue.” —Maurice Samuels, Yale University “[An] illuminating collection of 24 academic essays...[and a] “A bright light within a dark, deeply valuable look back on Wiesel’s distressing time in history.” heroic authorial career.” —Kirkus Reviews —Publishers Weekly

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10 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2013 Reviews Talking Like That

BY John McWhorter

ter’s wedding either, and few would perceive any- (i.e., brought me into the halakhic fold), which the Becoming Frum: How Newcomers Learn the thing remarkable in this. FFB would correct to be, “He was mekarev me.” She Language and Culture of Orthodox Judaism Benor seeks to show just how a BT goes about also identifies the “hesitation click” often used by by Sarah Bunin Benor learning words such as tznius (modesty) and Orthodox speakers midsentence before revising a Rutgers University Press, 288 pp., $27.95 mamish (really), Yiddish-based expressions such as point or moving a conversation in a new direction, Benor’s work shows how far linguists have come since n Becoming Frum, linguist Sarah Bunin Benor 1933, when Leonard Bloomfield pronounced that language quotes a 9-year-old Orthodox child saying of ba’alei teshuvah (Jews who have adopted tradi- changes when the lower classes imitate the upper. tional halakhic observance as adults), “Their Ivoice sounds weird, like not a Jewish voice.” We as- “We’re staying by our grandmother,” and the Ash- by “touching the tongue to the roof of the mouth and sume that by“voice,” the child refers to language kenazic rather than Sephardic (today also Israeli) bringing air inward.” Overall, however, Benor’s study rather than vocal timbre, and Benor examines the pronunciation of Hebrew words, such as “SHAH- brings to mind a bracingly renegade statement from journey that “BTs” make from evoking judgments bus” rather than “sha-BOT.” BTs, it emerges, acquire career sociolinguist Ralph Fasold of Georgetown of that kind from Orthodox children to comfortably these words and expressions through questions, University on the state of the art (in a textbook, no using the words and expressions that constitute Or- less): “A hallmark of a really successful theory thodox Jewish English. is that it will propose convincing arguments The result is warmly enjoyable as an introduc- in favor of counterintuitive principles, as has tion to Orthodox Jewish culture, but as a treatment happened in particle physics in this century. of language, only faintly revelatory. Benor argues In other words, a really successful theory will that Jews are more likely to use Hebrew and Yiddish eventually lead to surprises, and I am not sure words the more observant they are and are more we have yet been really surprised.” likely to use them with one another than with out- siders. Well, yes—but one might be pardoned for f the findings of Becoming Frum are ulti- asking who would have expected otherwise. Imately unsurprising it is less the fault of Actually, before the 1960s it was unusual for a the author than the tradition in which she linguist to frame such an investigation. What led works. The idea that “multilayered selves” are some to do so, under the new rubric of sociolinguis- worthy of special note rather than unsurpris- tics, was the new interest in hyphenated identities ing norms is so entrenched in contemporary and history “from below.” Benor’s work certainly humanities and social sciences that, as a so- shows how far linguists have come since 1933, ciolinguist, one can barely avoid it. Yet while when leading linguist Leonard Bloomfield could the Western scholar of language treats multi- breezily pronounce that language changes when the lingualism as a special object of study, more lower classes imitate the upper. A moment’s thought properly it is monolingualism that ought about developments in modern American English be treated as intriguing. Going through life is enough to see how overhasty that conclusion was speaking only one language is unusual as hu- (or, if you prefer, what an epic fail, to employ a new mans go, in both the present and the past. locution hardly analyzable as a product of the “up- In that light, there is a more radical kind per crust”). Just how much insight sociolinguistic of mixture between English and Jewish lan- studies have provided is another question. guages that many find genuinely surpris- Upon reading that people “creatively use the re- ing, even bizarre—and sometimes even il- ligious and cultural resources available to them to legitimate. Yet this mixture, the “Yeshivish” construct their multilayered selves” in a “community spoken by Jewish men studying at yeshivas, of practices,” it is hard not to sense a certain over- is in the technical sense no more surprising analysis. Benor informs us, for example, that: Illustration by Arlen Schumer. than the way of speaking that BTs acquire. “Yeshivish” can, indeed, be quite the mixture, Two men learning Gemora [studying Talmud] sprinkled so thickly with Yiddish, Hebrew, together use many loanwords, and the same repetition, and errors, and often overuse the lexicon and Aramaic words that it is incomprehensible to men fixing a car use fewer. A mother uses at first to demonstrate commitment, later settling outsiders. Chaim Weiser’s seminal (and whimsical) several loanwords when talking to her daughter into a “native”-style moderation, which Benor titles Frumspeak: The First Dictionary of Yeshivish gives about the laws of taharas mishpacha (family “the bungee effect.” an example: “There are four ikar ta’amim why the purity), but she uses fewer when talking to But many of us would simply call this learning, Yeshivishe oilam speaks davka Yeshivish. The ershte her about potential shiduchim (matches). period, and as such, Benor’s study is more useful as ta’am in altz specificity. Lemushel . . . ”That is, if I When Orthodox Jews speak to outsiders or catalog than as argument or discovery. Orthodox may venture a translation, “There are four main rea- newcomers, they generally use fewer loanwords Jewish English is, to be sure, somewhat more than sons why the Yeshivishe crowd consciously chooses and often translate those they use. a mere collection of heimishe words. For instance, to speak Yeshivish. The first reason is for its specific- Benor shows that one way to tell an FFB (frum from ity. For example . . .” But a molecular biologist doesn’t toss off bio- birth) Jew from a BT is that BTs tend to use Hebrew- There is, it should be noted, a thin line be- chemical jargon while making a toast at his daugh- derived verbs in bare form, as in “He mekareved me” tween this language associated with the activity of

Summer 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 11 Talmudic study and the speech variety upon which dardized does this ceaseless blending come to seem mixture in the general sense, however, is not sur- Benor concentrates, in which it would hardly be un- peculiar and disruptive. That Americans for whom prising: Languages coming together is a default. usual to hear, as she quotes, “We should be mesa- Hebrew and Yiddish are keystones of identity would Yeshivish, along with the less-extreme renditions meach the chossen and kallah” for “We should en- develop an English interlaced with words and con- of the same phenomenon that Benor studies, is one tertain the groom and bride.” However, even the es- structions from those languages is no more surpris- more of the language varieties Jews have created pecially full-blown Yeshivish of a bokhur immersed ing than the phenomenon of “Spanglish.” based on the language of their nation of residence. in learning is a linguistically unsurprising phenom- Yiddish began as Jewish German, Ladino had its enon. It seems otherwise only because of our print- start as Jewish Spanish, and Bukharans speak a focused perspective, in which standardized, writ- Going through life speaking Jewish Persian. Among the most segregated Jewish ten language is processed as “the real language,” populations, then, there is also a Jewish English. in relation to which change and mixture qualify only one language is unusual It will remain common, nevertheless, for even as irregular and impure. Under this perception, a as humans go, in both the Orthodox Jews to refer to Yeshivish as a kind of language that accepts more than a few words from moderately off-putting stunt or oddity, a talking other languages sacrifices its “purity.” present and the past. “like that,” as I have often heard it described. Simi- Yet actually (or grahde, as I might say in Yeshi- larly, academic linguists will continue to treat it as a vish), as purity goes, all of the world’s six thousand It is hardly that intersections between lan- topic of interest that when humans join new social languages are shamelessly “fallen.” Languages shar- guage and culture are never surprising. In Belgium, groups, they take on that group’s ways of talking. ing the same mouths inevitably comingle their middle-aged and younger people often switch be- In the grand scheme of things, however, both per- words and even their grammars; there is no “pure” tween French and Flemish from sentence to sen- spectives marvel at the ordinary. There is an ironic language known. For example, in the sentence, tence, but older people often switch from one lan- lesson from Benor’s book, as well as the general “She proved she had a sense of humor at a time guage to the other within the very same sentence. discussion of varieties of Jewish American English: when the country is still debating whether to take This is a subconscious linguistic response to political Modern linguistic life, entrenched in standardiza- her seriously as a potential commander in chief, tensions. Those who grew up when those tensions tion and monolingualism, makes the ordinary hu- “proved, sense, humor, country, debating, serious- had yet to reach today’s boiling point are inclined to man activity of learning new ways of speaking and ly, commander,” and “chief” are all from French; blend the languages more intimately. It follows, then, the linguistic mixtures which result seem peculiar. “potential” is from Latin; and “take” is from Dan- that because of still-simmering cultural clashes be- ish. English is often praised as uniquely adaptive in tween Anglophones and Francophones in Québec, John McWhorter is an associate professor at Columbia having such a mixed vocabulary, but it is actually it is rare to hear even perfect bilinguals speaking in University where he teaches linguistics and Western quite ordinary. Over half of Japanese’s vocabulary English and French at the same time the way Lati- civilization. He is a contributing editor for The New is from Chinese; Albanian took about sixty percent nos commonly do with Spanish and English in the Republic and is the author of The Power of Babel: of its words from Greek, Latin, Romanian, Turkish, United States. A Natural History of Language (Harper Perennial) and, Serbian and Macedonian, and so on. These are counter-intuitive phenomena that a most recently, What Language Is (And What It Isn’t and Only after languages are written down and stan- layman would not be likely to predict. Language What It Could Be) (Gotham).

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12 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2013 Romancing the Haskalah by Daniel B. Schwartz

Litvak’s book is the third to appear in a new took the project. “[W]hen I started writing about Haskalah: The Romantic Movement in Rutgers University Press series (Key Words in Jew- the Haskalah,” she writes, “like everyone else, I as- Judaism ish Studies) that aims to explore how certain basic sumed that I was writing a book about the Enlight- by Olga Litvak terms in the lexicon of Jewish studies have changed; enment. By the time I had finished the first draft of Rutgers University Press, 246 pp., $27.95 how they have figured in both scholarly debates this study, I knew that I had written a book about and more general usage; and how they might be Romanticism.” differently construed in the future. Here, it is fair to say, the goal of revisiting a key word has led to its itvak’s case starts with the fact that, tem- thoroughgoing revision, though, if Litvak is to be Lporally and geographically, the Enlighten- hen I first began to study modern believed, this was not her intent when she under- ment and the Haskalah are not a good fit. The Jewish views of Spinoza, I noticed a basic contrast between his repu- tation in the European Enlight- Wenment and in the later era of Romanticism. The Enlightenment Spinoza was essentially a radical According to Litvak, the notion that the maskilim were late to the dance rests on a misunderstanding of both Romanticism and the Haskalah. atheist, materialist, and determinist, committed to reason alone and unbending in his rejection of religion. The Romantic Spinoza was a panthe- ist and quasi-mystical saint whose theory of the oneness of all being—Deus sive Natura, God-or- Nature—was championed as a model of holistic explanation. So I expected that the image of the Amsterdam heretic that I would encounter in the literature and propaganda of the Haskalah— which, after all, everyone agreed was the “Jewish Enlightenment”—would be the first Spinoza. I was wrong. The maskilim (devotees of Haskalah) did celebrate Spinoza as a rebel and iconoclast. Yet their view of Spinoza as a “God-intoxicated” heir to a secret history of Jewish monism was anything but secular. It seemed, to put it crudely, more “ro- mantic” than “enlightened.” Were there other cases where Romanticism similarly influenced the maskilim? This question has not received much discussion. Happily, the kind of book I sought in vain years ago now ex- ists, and one need look no further than its title, Haskalah: The Romantic Movement in Judaism, to appreciate the ambition of its author’s argument. Olga Litvak, a historian of modern Russian Jewry who has already written one book about the Has- kalah, opens this one boldly: “The historical treat- ment of the Haskalah is a case study in mistrans- lation.” The Haskalah was not the Jewish version of the Enlightenment, and the maskilim were not From an 1864 printing of Sefer Elim, by Yosef Shelomoh Delmedigo. Originally enlighteners. In fact, the Haskalah was a product of published in Amsterdam in 1629, it was popular with 18th- and 19th-century the movement often seen as the “rebellious child” maskilic readers for its presentation of early modern science and mathematics. of the Enlightenment, namely, Romanticism. (Courtesy of The Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary.)

Summer 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 13 Haskalah “developed into a literary and philosophi- disparaging of the growing number of “modern” to the perceived failure of the liberal politics of the cal movement between the 1780s and 1870s,” and was Jews who were eager to leave Judaism behind, ef- Haskalah. In fact, the Haskalah “was not a species therefore just getting started when the Enlighten- fectively surrendering their Jewish identities to the of liberalism” at all, but a movement for “Jewish re- ment, which “began with the Scientific Revolution melting-pot logic of Enlightenment universalism. newal,” one that contained many of the themes and in the 17th century and culminated in the French Like the Romantics, the maskilim were haunted by beliefs (for instance, a nascent Hebraist ideology) that would later be taken over and developed by the cultural Zionists. Litvak deserves credit for illuminating the Romantic Litvak likewise challenges the idea that Jewish modernity began in the “west” before journeying pathos that runs through much of Haskalah literature. “east.” In the case of the Haskalah, it has tradition- ally been reinforced by a tendency to focus on the Revolution in 1789,” was nearing its end. While the the fear of total rupture with tradition and commu- initial 18th-century “Berlin” stage of the movement, “epicenter” of the Enlightenment was the North At- nity, and their solution for repairing it—the pursuit in the belief that it was here, during the age of lantic world from 1650 to 1750, the Haskalah was of religious renewal through the medium of Jewish Mendelssohn, that all the major ideas and conflicts primarily concentrated in Central and Eastern Eu- cultural creativity—bore a similarity to what the of the Haskalah were introduced, before they ulti- rope. Litvak allows that a “Jewish Enlightenment” Romantics hoped to achieve through art, poetry, mately made their way to Eastern Europe. Litvak’s did indeed take place in the 17th and 18th centuries and the imagination. Indeed, the very profile of Romantic reading of the Haskalah turns this nar- among the mostly Sephardic elite in the port cit- the maskil that has come down to us in Haskalah rative on its head by placing the emphasis on the ies of the Atlantic, but it was not identical with the literature (especially autobiography) is Romantic. 19th century over the 18th and on “Eastern Europe” Haskalah. However stylized it may be, the vision of the maskil over “Berlin.” Not only was the “Eastern European” If the Enlightenment, as the title of Litvak’s as a solitary type, alienated from his surroundings phase of the movement longer than the “Berlin” opening chapter indicates, is the “Wrong Time, phase by at least some fifty years, but, Wrong Place” for the Haskalah, the opposite is true in reality, the “Berlin” phase might it- of the Romantic movement. According to Litvak, self be viewed as “Eastern European,” the “core ideas” of Romanticism “were developed since late-18th-century Prussia had far in the German-speaking world between 1750 and more in common, politically and eco- 1830” and over the next thirty years in “the im- nomically, with its Habsburg and Ro- perial borderlands of the Habsburg and Romanov manov neighbors to the east than with lands.” The Haskalah thus came into existence the emerging nation-states to its west. right on the heels of Romanticism, followed the same basic road map as Romanticism, and ulti- he great merit of Litvak’s book is mately petered out within years of Romanticism’s Tto defamiliarize the Haskalah by demise. Put simply, “[t]he history of Romanticism depriving us of a translation that has overlaps in time and space with the history of the acted as a crutch. For too long, the con- Haskalah.” ventional definition of Haskalah as the Litvak is hardly the first to notice this pattern. “Jewish Enlightenment” has been taken In the past, however, scholars tended to see it as as a statement of fact rather than inter- proof that the maskilim suffered from a collective pretation. There is much to be gained by “time lag,” clinging to Enlightenment long after examining the Haskalah afresh. Litvak everyone else had moved on to Romanticism. Ac- is right to insist that, as a movement cording to Litvak, the notion that the maskilim that mostly flourished in 19th-century were late to the dance rests on a misunderstand- Eastern Europe, the Haskalah should ing of both Romanticism and the Haskalah. Draw- be studied first and foremost in a 19th- ing on a revision to the historical understanding century Eastern European intellectual of Romanticism carried out by others, she claims context. This point may seem obvious, that, contrary to stereotype, “Romanticism was but the embryonic state of research on not dedicated to the denial of reason; it was no the influence of Romanticism on the ‘enemy of the Enlightenment.’” What the Roman- Haskalah indicates that its implications tics opposed was not reason per se, but the En- have yet to be fully assimilated. That lightenment’s excessive regard for reason, which there was such an influence, and that it threatened to deprive life of all color, feeling, and was in many cases formative, seems to “Goethe’s Faust,” a poster by Richard Roland Holst, 1917. mystery. The Romantics thus tended to place im- me irrefutable. Litvak deserves credit (N. V. Het Tooneel, Amsterdam.) mense value on individual subjectivity, cultural for illuminating the Romantic pathos diversity, and intuitive knowledge. Yet they did so that runs through much of Haskalah not with the aim of retreating to a self-conscious yet longing for fellowship, tormented by desire and literature and above all for being one of the first provincialism or irrationalism, but in search of a struggling to find a wholeness that eludes him, has to grapple with the Romantic legacy to which the higher unity. “For all the variety and multiplicity more in common with the exemplary Romantic maskilim were both heirs and contributors. of Romantic thought,” Litvak writes, “its style, its hero—think of Goethe’s Faust, famously torn be- But is the presence of Romantic themes in the aspirations, and its themes expressed a common tween “two souls” in his “breast”—than with the Haskalah enough to sustain her argument that yearning for reconciliation and synthesis, for the Enlightenment ideal of the “man of letters.” “Thus, the Haskalah should be rebranded the “Roman- transcendence of all particular finitudes.” when we talk about the Haskalah,” Litvak argues, tic movement in Judaism”? Litvak’s pursuit of this As Litvak sees it, this quintessentially Roman- “we are talking not so much about the absorption more far-reaching thesis seems to me to come up tic quest for a union of extremes was, at bottom, of Enlightenment ideas, but their critical reception considerably short. Leave aside the fact that there also the maskilic quest. Despite the caricature of and imaginative revision. Strictly speaking, the Has- is little evidence that the maskilim, at least the vast the maskilim as belated but ardent partisans of the kalah is the first post-Enlightenment movement in majority of them, saw themselves as Romantics. Enlightenment, they were in fact more ambivalent Jewish history.” Most cultural movements, including Romanticism, toward its legacy. Certainly, they often wielded rea- Out of this rebranding of the Haskalah as “Jewish acquire a sort of coherence only in retrospect, and son as a cudgel against what they saw as retrograde Romanticism” comes a new take on modern Jew- many of the thinkers commonly described as “Ro- and parochial social mores and religious practices ish history more generally. One casualty is the con- mantic” today would be surprised at the label. The in the Jewish community. Yet they were no less ventional wisdom that Zionism arose in response main problems with Litvak’s case lie elsewhere.

14 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2013 First, there is a fundamental mismatch between Autobiography, supposedly “the paradigmatic ac- the ambitions of this book and the way it is written. count of Jewish Enlightenment,” completely apart, Litvak wants to bring about a radical change in the portraying “Salomon Maimon” (né Shlomo ben Ye- new from the university definition of Haskalah; she also, in her Prologue, ex- hoshua) as a wholly fictitious persona invented by of nebraska press presses the hope that her work will “serve as a port the book’s true author—Shlomo ben Yehoshua—to “An extraordinary volume and a feat of of entry into the study of Haskalah.” But are these slyly debunk the pretensions of the Enlightenment. editorial ingenuity. . . . No matter what The overall effect is of a Purimesque, topsy- you know or think about contemporary turvy universe, where nothing is as it seems, Europe and the politics of Holocaust and a Shlomo ben Yehoshua can come out in memory, you will be enlightened and the end (as he does in Litvak’s closing line) surprised by this remarkable book.” as “the unacknowledged father of European —Doris L. Bergen, Chancellor Rose and Romanticism, a ferment that may well have Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies, begun with the Haskalah.” University of Toronto, and author of War and To be fair, Litvak’s interpretations are Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust not always so convoluted. If her fastidiously close style of reading can sometimes lead to forced interpretations, it can also yield pre- cious insight. Moreover, she has a lively and blunt style that cuts through the density of some of her prose with lines that provide the faithful reader with a welcome jolt. Still, it is reasonable to ask whether readings so intricate and esoteric that even advanced students may struggle at times to follow their logic (not to mention the novices to whom the book is ostensibly also directed) are enough to vitiate the conventional un- derstanding of the Haskalah. Should we re- ally need to peer so deeply into the sources to be convinced that they are products of “Jewish Romanticism” and not “Jewish Enlightenment”? In the end, Litvak’s effort to impose a Romantic label on the Haskalah is no less tendentious than the Enlightenment label- ing that she rejects. Litvak rightly combats the one-sided picture of Romanticism as In Racial Science in Hitler’s New Europe, Postcard depicting a multi-generational family on its way politically reactionary and obsessed with 1938–1945, international scholars to a synagogue, date unknown. (Courtesy of YIVO.) the irrational and occult. What she fails to examine the theories of race that acknowledge, at least directly, is that this informed the legal, political, and social side of the movement did exist and that it policies aimed against ethnic minorities two goals really compatible? It is exceedingly diffi- grew more prominent in late Romanticism—a in Nazi-dominated Europe. cult, if not impossible, to write a revisionist history convenient omission, since Romantic irrational- aimed at overthrowing a longstanding tradition ism was by no means characteristic of the Has- of interpretation while also meeting the needs of kalah. Meanwhile, her broad and sympathetic a beginning student who may be discovering that (if also selective) view of Romanticism stands in tradition for the first time. Still, the right course for stark contrast to her reading of the Enlightenment Litvak to have taken, in my view, would have been as hegemonic and hopelessly abstract, a reading to reduce the Romantic character of the Haskalah to that bears all the symptoms of postmodern—and a few key factors or rubrics and to devote a chapter Romantic—caricature. to each. There is, of course, a value in strong arguments, But that is not what she has done. Litvak devel- and perhaps an interpretation of the Haskalah as a ops her argument in the third and longest section hybrid movement that drew on both the Enlight- of the book, where she provides what amounts to enment and Romanticism, yet was reducible to nei- a new literary history of the Haskalah. The section ther, would not provoke the kind of debate I expect begins with readings of two foundational texts, that this book will. But it would also be closer to the Naphtali Herz Wessely’s Words of Peace and Truth truth. I cannot help but wonder if that first draft of and Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem; moves on to ana- her book she refers to, the one she wrote when she lyze a diverse range of 19th-century writings; and thought she was writing a book about the Enlight- then circles back to the late 18th century to close enment, staked out something nearer to this more with Salomon Maimon’s Autobiography, which she nuanced, even ambiguous position. If so, I would reads, counter-intuitively, as marking the “End of like to have read it. Enlightenment.” Drawing on her familiarity with For complete descriptions critical theory, Litvak works by scouring these texts and to order, visit us online! for signs of contradiction, which she then, predict- Daniel B. Schwartz teaches history and Judaic studies ably, pounces on to show that the work in ques- at The George Washington University and is the author tion has been misinterpreted and, deliberately or of The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of not, does not mean what it purports to mean. This an Image (Princeton University Press). He is currently nebraskapress.unl.edu • 800-848-6224 compulsive unmasking reaches a crescendo in the at work on a history of the word “ghetto” from the 16th concluding chapter. Litvak takes Salomon Maimon’s century to the present.

Summer 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 15 Emancipation and Its Discontents

BY SHLOMO AVINERI

marriage (and residence) to first-born sons only. that gave Jewish youngsters an enormous advantage Rabbis and Revolution: The Jews of Moravia Miller shows how this legislation was part of the in commercial life and furthered their Germaniza- in the Age of Emancipation general Habsburg Catholic Counter-Reformation; tion in a region that was seventy percent Czech- by Michael Laurence Miller the legislation against Protestants was in some cases speaking—with problematic future consequences. Stanford University Press, 480 pp., $60 much more drastic—they were not even allowed But it did not abolish the Familiants Laws, which The dispersed Jews of Moravia faced harsh limitations y great-grandfather Michael Wie- on their freedom, including laws restricting their rights ner was born in 1831 in Trebitsch (present-day Třebíč) in Moravia, of marriage and and residence. then one of the Crown Lands of the HabsburgM Empire, now part of the Czech Repub- places of worship. Because the local communities remained in force until the 1848 Revolution. lic. His surname did not derive from his move— had a role in granting “Familiant numbers,” this leg- Miller’s account of these historical developments after the 1848 Revolutions—to Vienna, but from islation gave rise to internal strife, ugly nepotism, is accompanied by detailed portraits of some of the an ancestor who was among the Jews expelled and corruption. It also led to “illegal” marriages and key Moravian chief rabbis at the end of the 18th and from that city in 1670 and who subsequently set- consequent claims against “Jewish immorality,” and beginning of the 19th centuries, including Mordecai tled in neighboring Moravia, where the moniker it pushed an unknown number of Jews toward con- Benet and Nehemias Trebitsch—names which are “Wiener” was attached to their names. This ances- version. This “Pharaonic yoke” fell on the shoulders today almost totally forgotten—and shows how the tor, identified as “Rabbi David me-Wien” in Pinkas of every family and individual and caused massive unusual circumstances of Moravia brought about Kehilat Trebitsch, had been a ritual slaughterer in emigration of younger sons to neighboring Hun- a moderate rabbinical Haskalah. While Jewish Vienna, but when he settled in Trebitsch he appar- gary, which did not have similar restrictions. boys received German-language education in the ently became the local rabbi. So I approached Mill- The Edict of Tolerance Toleranzpatent ( ) is- German-Jewish schools, rabbis like Trebitsch in- er’s book in a spirit of filial piety, with just a touch sued in 1782 by the enlightened Emperor Joseph sisted that prayer continue to be in Hebrew—a of historical interest. This interest grew, however, II famously sought to make the Jews “more useful combination that countered radical reform and as I made my way through his fascinating account and of greater service to the state.” It opened many created a linguistic pluralism somewhat akin to the of a small, marginal community of Jews grappling branches of commerce to the Jews, encouraged ideal of the maskilim. It is a fascinating story, told with the challenges modernization and seculariza- them to invest in manufacture and industry, and al- by Miller with great erudition and much sympathy tion brought to European Jewry. lowed them to lease agricultural land. In Moravia, it for the ability of Moravia’s rabbinical leaders to steer The twenty thousand to forty thousand Jews abolished rabbinical jurisdiction in civilian matters, their community through the shoals of moderniza- of Moravia have typically been treated as a mere making the Jews subject to the general court system. tion under conditions that combined great auton- appendage to the neighboring, more significant It also set up a network of German-Jewish schools omy with the continuing oppressive burden of the Prague-centered community in Bohemia. Miller, an American historian who teaches in the Jewish stud- ies program at the Central European University in Budapest, demonstrates how wrong it is to do so. Royal free town (no Jewish community since 14th–15th century) Jewish community While about half of Bohemia’s Jews lived in Prague, Hotzenplotz N Moravian Jews, despite their relatively small num- GERMAN EMPIRE bers, were spread among fifty-two communities based in market towns and villages. Barred from th residing in the Moravian Royal Cities from the 16 BOHEMIA S OLMÜTZ I th L century until the middle of the 19 , Moravian Jews E Aussee S found refuge in the smaller towns owned by the Mährisch-Neustadt I A nobility. Loschitz TROPPAU The lack of one hegemonic Jewish community Gewitsch Olmütz brought about a fierce feeling of local autonomy. Weisskirchen Leipnik While the rabbi of the major Jewish community in Boskowitz Prossnitz PRERAU Nikolsburg (Mikulov) was eventually recognized as Prerau Iglau Lomnitz Tobitschau Puklitz Gross-Meseritsch the chief rabbi of Moravia, there were yeshivot and Battelau Kojetein Holleschau Pirnitz Eiwanowitz Kremsier famous rabbis in other communities as well. The Triesch IGLAU BRÜNN Trebitsch 311 regulations (takanot) of the Council of Moravi- Teltsch Brünn Neu-Rausnitz an Jews (Va’ad medinat Mehrin) set up an extremely Austerlitz Butschowitz HRADISCH HUNGAR Y Wölking Datschitz Eibenschitz Koritschan Mährisch-Kromau Damboritz Ungarisch-Hradisch decentralized representative system. Under the cor- Kanitz Althart Jamnitz Kosteletz Ungarisch-Brod ZNAIM Gaya Pohrlitz porative regime of the Habsburgs, the council was Pullitz Ungarisch-Ostra Piesling Misslitz Bisenz Irritz Wessely elected by the communities but officially recognized Schaffa Göding Strassnitz by the imperial government, and its organs, includ- Znaim Eisgrub 0 10 20 30 mi Kostel ing the chief rabbi, were vested with judicial and tax Nikolsburg 010 20 30 40 50 km AUSTRIA Lundenburg authority by the Gubernium in Brünn (Brno). The dispersed Jews of Moravia faced harsh limi- tations on their freedom, including the 1726-1727 MapMoravia’s 2. Moravia’s fifty-two fifty-two Jewish communities, Jewish communities, 1798-1848. 1798–1848. (Adapted from Adapted Hugo from Gold, ed.,HugoDie JudenGold, unded.,Die Juden und Familiants Laws, which limited the Jewish rights of Judengemeinden MährensMährens inin VergangeheitVergangeheit undund GegenwartGegenwart (Brünn:(Brünn: JudischerJüdischer Buch-und Buch- und Kunstverlag, Kunstverlag, 1929.) 1929).

16 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2013 developments unfolding all over Europe. Hirsch urged his Christian audience to help pro- mote Jewish equal rights not on account of their past mistreatment, but because the universal values of the struggle for freedom and equality demanded it. But he also maintained that Jewish emancipation would help Christians to atone for generations of in- justice done to Jews, asserting that “a people that en- slaves the Jews is not ripe for freedom.” To his own flock he issued calls for prudence, circumspection, and patience. There are many pitfalls, he said, on the road to equal citizenship, and there would be oppo- sition on religious as well as social grounds. Even- tually the transformation from “Moravian Jews” to “Jewish Moravians” would take place, but one should tread carefully, he cautioned, find political allies both among the authorities and the populace, and not “push the end” (dekhikat ha-ketz). Given his basically conservative world view, Hirsch per- haps was able to discern these ambivalent aspects of the situation better than some of the more politi- cally and religiously radical members of the Jewish Nehemias Trebitsch, Moravian-Silesian chief rabbi, Samson Raphael Hirsch, Moravian-Silesian chief community. 1832-1842. (Courtesy of the Jewish Museum, rabbi, 1847-1851. (Courtesy of the Jewish Museum, In the convulsions of 1848-1849, the Imperial Prague.) Prague.) Court and all-Austrian Reichstag decamped from revolutionary Vienna to the safer Kremsier in Mora- Familiants Laws. While Miller wears his scholarship structure of the local Jewish institutions were per- via. Sensing a unique opportunity to act, Hirsch ap- lightly, his extended accounts of rabbinical policies ceived as authoritarian. He was no doubt insuffi- proached the authorities with detailed and learned and disputes may tax the patience of some readers. ciently attuned to the long traditions of pluralism memoranda regarding Jewish civil disabilities. He and local autonomy that characterized the fifty-two convened an ad hoc Jewish representative council to his is definitely not the case, however, with re- Moravian Jewish communities, and he perceived provide an institutional basis for Jewish claims and Tspect to the section about the Hamburg-born his role not just as a moreh halakha but also as the repeatedly insisted that Jewish rights should be dis- Samson Raphael Hirsch, one of the founders of sole political leader of the Moravian Jews. However, cussed not as a separate issue but under the overall German neo-Orthodoxy whose four years as chief the excitement following the outbreak of revolution rubric of civic rights. To that end, he asserted that rabbi in Nikolsburg (1847-1851) are usually por- in 1848 in Vienna gave him an opportunity to unite issues of residency requirements, special taxes, and trayed as a mere preface to his later, much more his disparate flock and show his extraordinary lead- occupational restrictions had to be addressed. central and illustrious career in Frankfurt. Because ership qualities. Hirsch issued two circulars, one to While the liberal all-Austrian Reichstag was Hirsch’s tenure in Moravia straddled the 1848 Rev- “our Christian brethren”, the other to our “Israelite abolished by the emperor before it could voice its olution, the account of his activities there brings co-religionists.” Together, they attest to his sophisti- support for Jewish emancipation, an imperial de- out both the promises and the frustrations of what cated and astute understanding of the momentous cree eventually granted equal rights for all, albeit emancipation meant for Moravian Jews—and for the Jews of the entire Austro-Hungarian realm. With a subdued sense of humor and empa- thy, Miller shows how the Moravian Jews greeted the celebrated Hirsch in almost messianic terms. His for- eign background also created hope that he would be able to overcome the petty local quarrels that had left the Moravian chief rabbinate unoc- cupied for several years. As Miller recounts it, Hirsch—traveling by train and stopping at some com- munities en route to Nikolsburg— was accompanied by “pomp and circumstances usually reserved for a royal dignitary or head of state.” Rabbis and congregations came to railway stations to greet him, and at one of his stops a torch-lit proces- sion escorted him from the train station to his overnight quarters. Initially, however, Hirsch’s ten- ure created considerable tension with the established rabbis of Mora- via and their communities. Young and ambitious, his well-intentioned attempts to put some order into the chaotic and sometime sclerotic “View of Jews’ Gate, Brünn,” by F. Richter, 1835. (Courtesy of Brno City Archive.)

Summer 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 17 in a rather general way, leaving unresolved many liberal constitution of 1849. Subsequent legislation matters pertaining to the status of the Jews. The reintroduced some marriage restrictions, limited lifting of occupational and residency limitations Jewish ownership of real estate, and made it clear led to massive Moravian Jewish emigration to cit- that equality before the law was far from being im- ies such as Brünn—and, even more so, to the impe- plemented. Most of these restrictions were finally rial capital, Vienna. Tax-paying Jews were granted lifted only after the Austro-Hungarian Compro- voting rights, and Hirsch himself was among the mise of 1867, which regulated relations between the three representatives from Nikolsburg elected to “Austrian” and “Hungarian” parts of the Habsburg the Moravian Diet. He prepared a draft “synagogue monarchy. constitution” to replace the ancient takanot, and The rules that were reimposed still left the Jews In 1848, Hirsch argued, “a people that enslaves the Jews is not ripe for freedom.” To his own flock he counseled prudence: Do not “push the end,” he said.

though it met with strong opposition among many of Moravia with rights they had not previously pos- Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of the Jewish communities and was not ultimately sessed. Many migrated from the smaller communi- of New York City approved by the authorities, it served as the impetus ties to the urban centers—including Brünn, Znaim to a vivid and fierce debate about the status and role (Znojmo), and Mährisch-Ostrau (Ostrova)—where jonathan soffer of the Jews and their communal institutions within Jews could not legally reside before 1848. Many “Jonathan Soffer’s is now the go-to book on a constitutional Habsburgian Moravia. more moved to the imperial capital of Vienna, in- Ed Koch and his mayoralty. Critical yet even- Moravian Jews also appeared in the forefront of cluding the ancestors of Sigmund Freud, Gustav handed, it is lucidly written, theoretically the revolutionary movement itself. A Jewish student Mahler, Stefan Zweig, Bruno Kreisky, and countless sophisticated, and solidly sourced in interviews from Moravia, Carl Heinrich Spitzer, became the other well-known figures. It was then, too, that my and archives. And it offers fresh perspectives “first revolutionary martyr” after he was killed on great-grandfather moved from Trebitsch, first to on many aspects of New York’s history in the March 13, 1848 by troops who opened fire on dem- Brünn and eventually—though with more modest 1960s-1990s, notably the neoliberal turn, the onstrators surging toward the Lower Austrian Diet success than those illustrious landsleute—to Vienna. fiscal crisis, racial and religious relations, and the interlinked trinity of gentrification, home- in Vienna. Spitzer was buried, together with Chris- tian demonstrators killed the same day, in a com- or all the benefits this migration brought to lessness, and redevelopment.” mon grave as a priest and a rabbi delivered funeral Vienna, and, for that matter, to Western civi- — Mike Wallace, coauthor of the Pulitzer- F orations, symbolizing the new spirit of equality and lization, it led to the transformation of the smaller Prize winning Gotham: A History of New brotherhood. Moravian communities from all-encompassing York City to 1898 On another level, the new freedom of the press structures into mere Kultusgemeinden, provid- marked the emergence for the first time of a num- ing only religious services and needs. One after ber of Jewish newspapers, while the prominence of the other, the Moravian yeshivot closed down. Jewish journalists in the liberal papers published in The rabbis’ authority shrank, and the unique and Brünn as well as Vienna—with many of these Jew- complex structure of Moravian Jewry, an unusual ish journalists originating from Moravia—was not- blend of autonomy, cohesion, and organizational ed by Jews and non-Jews alike. pluralism in the face of brutal restrictions, disap- But Miller also brings out the shadows. As the al- peared. Meanwhile, the rise of pan-Germanism most forgotten Israeli historian Jacob Toury showed, and Czech nationalism put Moravian Jews in the 1848 brought more than the heady promise of crossfire of two national movements. These devel- emancipation. From Alsace to Hungary, the “Spring opments would later convince Theodor Herzl that of Nations” was accompanied by popular anti- Jews in Central Eastern Europe were now facing Jewish outbursts. Following Toury, Miller shows an impossible situation, one that called for a new how in Moravia, Jewish emancipation gave rise to kind of thinking beyond emancipation—a quest fear and criticism coming mainly from burgher cir- for a place in the sun they could call home—the cles. The lifting of occupational restrictions on Jews Judenstaat. was presented as a threat to the livelihood of Chris- In both the opening and closing passages of this tian merchants. The end of residential restrictions, remarkable study, Miller refers to Stefan Zweig’s idyl- To Carl Schmitt said the Jews’ adversaries, would lead to Christians lic description of his ancestors’ supposedly bucolic Letters and Reflections being “thrown out” of their homes by Jews erupt- life in the Moravian countryside, in which Jews lived ing from the confines of the Jewish quarters. There on “friendly terms with the peasants and petty bour- jacob taubes were anti-Jewish speeches in the newly elected geoisie.” As Miller shows, it was far more complex Translated by Keith Tribe With an introduction by Mike Grimshaw Moravian Diet, and there was some violence as well. than Zweig’s evocation of the “the world of yesterday” Reconstructing the 1930s exchange between a The burghers’ most effective tool was simple non- suggested. Of course Zweig was not a historian, and Jewish scholar and Nazi supporter who worked compliance with the authorities’ attempt to join the painting this picture during the nastiness of Nazism together to define political thought. Jewish quarters to the adjacent Christian towns. Of in the 1930s was understandable. We are fortunate the fifty-two Jewish communities that functioned as now to have Miller’s enormously acute and percep- “[Schmitt’s] interchange with Jacob Taubes . . . separate townships, only twenty-seven were amal- tive account of “wie es eigentlich gewesen war,” how is remarkably clear and provides a window into gamated with their adjacent Christian towns, while things really were for the Jews of Moravia. their relationship and a framework for broader discussion.” — Stephen Eric Bronner, author of twenty-five retained their status as “Jewish Political Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics Communities,” i.e., separate municipal entities, well Shlomo Avineri teaches political science at the Hebrew of Radical Engagement into the 1920s. University of Jerusalem and is the author of Herzl: By the time things settled down, Hirsch’s initial An Intellectual Biography (Shazar; English version reaction to the revolution had proved prescient. The forthcoming). Recently he delivered the inaugural lecture www.cup.columbia.edu · cupblog.org so-called Sylvester Patent of December 31, 1851 for the newly founded Theodor Herzl Chair at Masaryk abolished most of the provisions of the relatively University in Brno.

18 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2013 In and Out of Africa

BY Len Lyons

of American Black Judaism, Israelite Christianity, The Bible then was largely responsible for giving Chosen People: The Rise of American Black and Rastafarianism in abundantly documented de- the Masai a new racial identity . . . He concluded Israelite Religions tail. In a thesis that parallels that of Parfitt, Dorman that the Masai and Hebrews once constituted a by Jacob S. Dorman says that these religions arose in late-19th-century single people. The Masai in fact were Israelites. Oxford University Press, 320 pp., $35 America “from ideational rather than genealogi- cal ancestry.” They are, to use Benedict Anderson’s Parfitt traces how European colonialists and Black Jews in Africa and the Americas famous phrase, “imagined communities,” and their missionaries imposed ideas of Israelite descent by Tudor Parfitt leaders “creatively repurposed” the Old Testament, upon the Ashanti, Yoruba, Zulu, Tutsi, Igbo, and Harvard University Press, 240 pp., $29.95 other peoples across sub-Saharan Africa, prompt- Some believe that the word ing a subset of each group to adopt the invented sto- ries of origin as historical truth. Igbo is derived from Ivri, the For Parfitt, even the Ethiopian Beta Israel, whose ver since the Sorbonne-educated scholar Jewish identity has been granted by the Jewish state, and Zionist activist Jacques Faitlovitch Hebrew word for “Hebrew.” root their Jewish origins in legendary, rather than traveled to Ethiopia to visit the Beta Israel historical material. The Ethiopians themselves, both in 1904, the blurred boundaries of the Jew- along with the ideas of the Pentecostal Church, Beta Israel and Orthodox Christian, shared a belief Eish people have been expanding. Increasingly over Freemasonry, and, eventually, an Afrocentric his- in descent from King Solomon and the Queen of the last century, Africans, Indians, South Ameri- torical perspective in a manner that spoke to black Sheba, based on their own Kebra Negast, a compi- cans, African Americans, and even New Zealand Americans. lation of ancient lore about the origins of Ethiopia tribespeople have asserted their Jewish identity. Of redacted about seven hundred years ago. In 1973, these, Ethiopian Jews are the best known because he first Europeans to explore Africa read the when Chief Sephardic Rabbi of Israel Ovadia Yosef their Jewish identity has been halakhically authen- TBible as universal history. Thus, they explained halakhically validated their Jewish identity, he based ticated by the Israeli rabbinate, and the struggling the existence of African peoples they encountered his opinion on the 16th-century responsum of Rabbi community of about one hundred and thirty thou- by conceiving them as one of the Lost Tribes of Is- David ben Solomon ibn Abi Zimra (known as the sand Ethiopian Israelis garners a great deal of sup- rael. The idea that blacks were Jews was persuasive Radbaz), who concluded they were descendants port in the United States. to them, because as Parfitt writes: of the tribe of Dan. The Radbaz inherited the idea Next in order of public awareness are the Abayu- of the Danite origins of daya (“People of Yehuda”) from Uganda. Other Af- the Ethiopian Jews from rican groups who claim Jewish identity include the the unverifiable writ- Lemba of South Africa and Zimbabwe, the Igbo of ing of Eldad Ha-Dani, a Nigeria, and numerous smaller groups in Mali, Tim- 9th-century traveler who buktu, Cape Verde, and Ghana. Taken all together, himself claimed to be these groups number in the tens of thousands. a Danite. Parfitt quotes Two new books set out to explain the origins of Henry Aaron Stern, a the many African and African American groups Jewish convert to Chris- who identify themselves as Jews or, at least, as de- tianity who visited the scendants of the ancient Israelites. Both books fo- Ethiopian Beta Israel cus primarily on the origins and evolution of these in the mid-1800s and Judaic and black Israelite identities, rather than the subsequently reported: practices, doctrines, and lifestyles that they have “There were some whose generated. Black Jews of Africa and the Americas, by Jewish features no one Tudor Parfitt, is based upon a series of lectures he could have mistaken who gave in 2011 at Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute. had ever seen the descen- Parfitt is famous for his many expeditions in Africa dants of Abraham either and the Middle East to uncover the lore surround- in London or Berlin.” ing the Lost Tribes of Israel. In economical and fast- paced prose, he argues that “Judaized” societies on he Israelite trope was the African continent are the product of “the Israel- Kadmiel Abhor, a 14-year-old Igbo Jew, prays at the Ghihon Synagogue in Abuja, Tuseful for Christian ite trope”—the belief, introduced into Africa by Eu- Nigeria. (Photo courtesy of Chika Oduah.) missionaries. If Africans ropean colonialists and Christian missionaries, that were the descendants of some Africans are descendants of the Lost Tribes. [B]oth Jews and blacks were pariahs and the Israelites who had accepted the original cov- Parfitt argues that Africans who identify themselves outsiders, and in the racialized mind of Europe enant between God and Israel, what could make as Jews or Israelites have adopted and internalized this shared status implied that Jews and blacks more sense than that they would now enter into the this trope as a narrative of their origins. had a shared “look” and a shared black color. New Covenant? Occasionally, however, the mis- In the United States, African American Jews— sionaries’ efforts took an unexpected turn, when as well as some black Christians and Rastafarians— Parfitt cites the research of a German army offi- some Africans were drawn towards the Jewish side also affirm their descent from ancient Israelites cer, Moritz Merker, who studied Masai customs and of their putative Judeo-Christian legacy. (although not specifically from the Lost Tribes). religious practices in the late 19th century. Merker The Igbo Jews of Nigeria are a case in point. In Chosen People: The Rise of American Black Is- observed “profound and numerous parallels be- An estimated thirty thousand Igbo practice some raelite Religions, Jacob Dorman, a young historian tween the Masai’s myths and customs, social struc- sort of Judaism, and there are nearly forty syna- from the University of Kansas, traces the threads ture, and religion and those of the biblical Hebrews.” gogues in Nigeria, which follow different Jewish or

Summer 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 19 quasi-Jewish practices. Although their opinions about their tribe of ancestry (Gad, Zevulun, or Menashe) vary, virtually all accept the general Lost Tribes the- ory and believe that customs of Israelite origin, like circumcision on the eighth day, methods of slaugh- tering of meat, and endogamy, predated colonialism. In 1789, Olaudah Equiano, a former American slave who purchased his freedom and moved to London, published a famous and widely read au- tobiography in which he described similarities in customs between Jews and his own Igbo tribe based on recollections from his childhood. A half-century later, the British Niger expedition of 1841 brought with it letters from London rabbis to the (lost) Jews they expected to find in Africa. By 1860, part of the Bible had been translated into the Igbo language. In 1868, Africanus Horton, an Igbo nationalist edu- cated in London, published a “vindication” of the African race by arguing that “the Igbo could trace their origins back to the Lost Tribes of Israel and that their language was heavily influenced by He- brew.” Some believe that the word Igbo is derived from Ivri, the Hebrew word for “Hebrew.” In the late 1960s, the Biafran War of Indepen- dence pitted some thirty million Igbo against the Women from the Abayudaya Jewish community of Uganda celebrate the first adult bat much larger Nigeria. The horror of more than a mil- mitzvah in the community, December 2012. With them is Rabbi Gershom Sizomu. lion deaths, most of them Igbo, propelled many more (Photo courtesy of Kulanu, Inc., New York.) Igbos to identify not only with Jews, but with Israel: Malaki). More descriptively, they were also known showed that “50 percent of the Lemba Y chromo- [T]he fact that they [Igbo] were scattered as “Christian Jews.” In 1913 Semei Kakungulu, a somes tested were Semitic in origin, 40 percent were throughout Nigeria as a minority in many cities Protestant convert and a prominent military advisor ‘Negroid,’ and the ancestry of the remainder could not created the sense of a Jewish-like diaspora, to the British in their battles with native Muslims, be resolved.” A set of six markers, the Cohen Modal and the “holocaust” of the Biafra genocide joined the sect. But the British treatment of Africans Haplotype (or CMH) was present in high frequency provided an even firmer ground for establishing angered Kakungulu and he declared himself a Jew, in both the priestly class of Jews and the Lemba. commonalities with Jews. The publicists of Parfitt suggests, as a protest against the British treat- In 1997 Parfitt conducted his own testing fo- the Republic of Biafra compare the Igbo to the ment of his troops. Kakungulu, Parfitt writes, “used cused around the deserted ancient town of Sena in “Jews of old” . . . they termed the anti-Igbo riots his self-identification as a Jew as a weapon.” Yemen. While it was clearly not the Sena of Lemba as anti-Semitic Cossack “pogroms.” Currently, there are about twelve hundred Aba- legends, Parfitt believed there was a connection be- yudaya, many of whom have been converted to tween this location and the Lemba “on the basis of As Parfitt aptly puts it, “Once a myth is estab- normative Judaism by visiting American rabbis. [unspecified] historical and anthropological data.” lished, it often acts as a magnet to the iron filings The group’s spiritual leader, Gershom Sizomu, was His study showed that the Buba clan (the “priests” of supporting evidence: points of comparison and ordained by a conservative beit din in 2008, after of the Lemba) had a high incidence of CMH as did further proofs accumulate and create a consistent, he graduated from the Ziegler School of Rabbinic the kohanim. The New York Times, the BBC, and a interlocking, convincing whole.” Studies in Los Angeles. NOVA television special announced Parfitt’s discov- It has convinced more than the Igbo. Kulanu The Lemba of South Africa and Zimbabwe, with ery of this “African Jewish tribe.” Parfitt, however, is (All of Us), an American nonprofit that supports whom Parfitt has been most closely associated, are a more circumspect and suggests that “the ‘Jewish- vulnerable Jewish communities, has published the complicated case. When he first encountered the Lem- ness’ of the Lemba may be seen as a twenty-first- writings of Remy Ilona, an Igbo Jew who retells as ba in 1985, they told him that they were “blood rela- century genetic construction.” historical the narrative Parfitt casts as mythic, and a tives” of the Falasha and that they came from a place How important is the genetic criterion in deter- recent documentary film, Re-emerging: The Jews of called Sena, to the north and across the sea. Parfitt mining inclusion in Jewish peoplehood? The Ethiopian Nigeria, has brought the Igbo’s story to several Jew- quotes several comments by early European travel- Jews, who have also undergone genetic testing, which ish film festivals. ers on “the lighter skin and Jewish appearance of the they decisively “failed,” are an instructive case. DNA Lemba” as well as the “Semitic features of the Lemba.” testing showed them to be similar to Ethiopian (Or- he Abayudaya of Uganda are unique in not In 1989, a Lemba woman in Soweto told Parfitt: thodox Christian) men rather than to Israeli Jewish Tclaiming descent from a Lost Tribe, but Parfitt men. Yet, they are almost universally regarded as part argues that they still owe their origins to imported I love my people . . . we came from the of the Jewish people, while the Lemba are not. Genetic biblical lore. Protestant missionaries from England, Israelites, we came from Sena, we crossed the links seem neither necessary nor sufficient for Jewish which ruled Uganda as a protectorate from 1894 un- sea. We were so beautiful with beautiful long, identity. Could it be that Israel and the Jewish Federa- til 1962, evangelized the native population by tell- Jewish noses . . . We no way wanted to spoil our tions of North America believe the Beta Israel are de- ing them that “the British themselves had learned structure by carelessness, eating pig or marrying scended “from the Tribe of Dan”? Is this the slender this [biblical] wisdom from Oriental foreigners—a non-Lemba gentiles! thread—one that can bear no historical weight—that people called the Jews. It followed then that if the authenticates their Jewish identity? Or is it rather their all-powerful British could accept religious truth Fascinated by the legends, Parfitt spent months consistent practice over the centuries? Parfitt’s concise- from foreigners, so too could Africans.” on an adventurous search for their Sena, which he ly crafted Black Jews in Africa and the Americas is an Accepting Christianity, together with the idea documented in Journey to the Vanished City (a best- invitation for us to reexamine the criteria we actually that Jesus was a Jew, unexpectedly prompted the seller that earned him the nickname “the British In- use to determine Jewishness. formation of the Society of the One Almighty God diana Jones” in the popular media). He didn’t turn in 1913, which attracted ninety thousand follow- up the ancient city, but an unexpected finding pub- n Chosen People, Jacob Dorman defines a “Black ers who kept the Saturday Sabbath and became lished in The American Journal of Human Genetics IIsraelite” religion as one whose core belief is known as Malakites (after their leader, Musajjakawa startled Parfitt into looking further. A DNA study that “the ancient Israelites of the Hebrew Bible

20 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2013 were Black and that contemporary Black people tive derives from the way he shows how these dispa- Crowdy was passionate and charismatic, but [in America] are their descendants.” Contempo- rate strands became interwoven. he also had bouts of erratic behavior that landed rary practitioners of one or another variety of this The two principal founders of Black Israelite re- him in jail. After moving to the all-black town of religion can be found in black congregations in ligions, William Christian (1856-1928) and William Langston, Oklahoma in 1891, he was tormented by Chicago, New York City, and Philadelphia. They Saunders Crowdy (1847-1908), were both born into hearing voices and, during one episode, fled into generally identify themselves as Jews and Israel- slavery. Both of them first became active Freema- a forest and experienced a vision compelling him sons, and Dorman sees this as one source of the new to create The Church of God and Saints of Christ. The impetus to identify American religion they would found. “It is likely,” he Influenced by the idea that the ancient Israelites writes, “that Masonic texts as well as Masonic inter- were black, he introduced Old Testament dietary with the ancient Israelites est in the Holy Land and in biblical history helped laws, the seventh-day Sabbath, and the observance both men to formulate their Israelite beliefs.” Wil- of biblical holidays. By 1900, Crowdy had opened was motivated, Dorman liam Christian preached that “Adam, King David, churches in the Midwest, New York, and Philadel- Job, Jeremiah, Moses’s wife, and Jesus Christ were all phia. These churches, as well as those founded by says, by a “search for roots ‘of the Black race,’” and emphasized racial equality William Christian, adhered to the Holiness (later, before God. Pentecostal) tradition. By 1926, Crowdy’s Church of among uprooted people.” God and Saints of Christ had thousands of follow- [Christian] referred to Christ as “colorless” ers, and there were more than two hundred branch- ites, unlike the Black Hebrews of Dimona, Israel because he had no human father . . . He was es of Christian’s Church of the Living God. (originally from Chicago), who identify themselves fond of St. Paul’s statement that Christianity In Harlem of the early 1900s, the serendipitous as Israelites but not as Jews. This, of course, does crossed all social divisions . . . proximity of black Americans and Eastern Europe- not include the small but an Jews gradually transformed Black Israelite Chris- significant number of Af- tianity. The new leaders of Black Israelism, Arnold rican Americans who have Josiah Ford, Samuel Valentine, Mordecai Herman, joined mainstream Jewish and Wentworth Arthur Matthew, were all recent congregations or who have Caribbean immigrants who believed that Sephardic converted formally. Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition had intermar- Like Parfitt, Dorman de- ried with West Indian blacks, passing on Jewish nies the historicity of the customs to their descendants. Not entirely unlike belief in Israelite descent. the painters, poets, and musicians of the Harlem The earliest impetus to iden- Renaissance, these men were artists of the religious tify with the ancient Israel- experience, creatively mixing an impressive array of ites was motivated, he says, ingredients that evolved into Black Judaism, Black by a “search for roots among Islam, Rastafarianism, and other religious orders: uprooted people.” Slavery had severed African Ameri- Black Israelism drew on Caribbean carnival cans from their history and traditions, Pentecostal [Holiness] Christianity, demeaned their social and Spiritualism, magic, Kabbalah, Freemasonry, economic status. As can be and Judaism, in a polycultural creation process heard in spirituals of the mid- dependent not on an imitation or inheritance 1800s, such as “Go Down, of Judaism as much as on innovation, social Moses,” blacks resonated networks, and imagination. with the biblical Israelites as oppressed slaves in need of Marcus Garvey’s elevation of Africa to a kind liberation, and some of them Members of Harlem’s Commandment Keepers Congregation of the Living God, of black American’s Zion became another corner- imagined an actual Israelite the Pillar and Ground of Truth, ca. 1940s. (Photo by Alexander Alland, stone of Black Israelite thought. Josiah Ford, the past for themselves. Christi- courtesy of the New-York Historical Society.) first Black Israelite to give himself the title “rabbi,” anity was the “white religion” was the music director of Garvey’s Universal Negro of the slave-owners, while for Improvement Association and even tried to convert some blacks, the Israelite reli- Garvey to Judaism. At Garvey’s headquarters in Lib- gion stood for freedom. erty Hall, Ford, Valentine, and Herman, who had In Chosen People, Dorman studied Hebrew with their Ashkenazi neighbors in rejects the idea that Black Is- Harlem, taught liturgical Hebrew to other Israelites. raelite religions flowed only Ford, along with Valentine, soon founded the Beth “vertically” from roots in the B’nai Abraham congregation, which was the earliest past. “People also pick up locus of Black Judaism. culture more obliquely or ‘horizontally,’” he writes. His Whereas the Holiness Black Israelite founders preferred metaphor is the had derived Judaic practices from Christian rhizome, a plant fed by “sub- and Masonic texts and practices, Ford and terranean, many-branching, his collaborators . . . rejected Christianity and hyper-connected networks.” practiced Jewish rituals with Jewish prayer books. Black Israelite religions, then, were created from a “host of In his re-creation of Harlem of the 1920s, Dor- ideational rhizomes”: biblical man demonstrates the symbolic importance to black interpretations, the Ameri- Americans of Ethiopia. Ethiopia enjoyed widespread can passion for Freemasonry, adulation as the African nation that had never been the Holiness church, Anglo- colonized. The country’s luster was further enhanced Israelism, and Garveyism. by the fact that it was mentioned frequently in the The power of Dorman’s Children of Commandment Keepers study Hebrew, ca. 1940s. (Photo by Bible (as the translation of the Hebrew Cush). Thus, sometimes sprawling narra- Alexander Alland, courtesy of the New-York Historical Society.) the exciting news of Jacques Faitlovitch’s recent

Summer 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 21 encounters with Ethiopian Jews was a windfall that provided Black Israelites with a missing link to both an apparently authentic African Judaism and an Af- rican Zion. Ford actually “made aliyah” to Ethiopia mo•sa•ic with a small cadre of Beth B’nai Abraham members, and Dorman recounts the expedition’s tragicomic /mo za’ ik/ misadventures in dramatic detail. With Ford gone, the mantle of leadership fell upon Wentworth Matthew. It was Matthew who 1. of or pertaining to Moses or the laws, faith, eventually stripped Christianity out of what had begun as a Holiness practice. In Harlem in 1919 he institutions, and writings attributed to him. founded the Commandment Keepers Congregation of the Living God, later renaming it the Command- ment Keepers Royal Order of Ethiopian Hebrews. 2. an artwork made of small pieces of inlaid He also established a school, which, as the Interna- stone, tile, marble, glass, etc., forming tional Israelite Rabbinical Academy, still ordains the rabbis of Black Judaism. a patterned whole. Matthew’s own certificate of ordination, or smi- cha, was mailed to him from Ethiopia by Ford, and is signed only by an official of Ethiopia’s Orthodox 3. a new web magazine advancing Christian Church. This curious detail is representa- ideas, argument, and reasoned tive of Dorman’s unsparing revelations concerning Rabbi Matthew, and they are sure to raise eyebrows judgment in all areas of and hackles among Black Jews who revere him to Jewish endeavor. this day as a founding figure. Dorman draws from a wide array of archival documents—he calls them Matthew’s “hidden transcripts”—to indicate a more gradual and ambiguous abdication of Christian and “magical” practices than is commonly believed, though he ultimately does describe Matthew as hav- ing “transitioned from ‘Bishop’ to ‘Rabbi’ and from Holiness Christianity to Judaism.” Chosen People is unique in placing Black Israelite religions in the complex context of American histo- ry and is the most comprehensive work of scholar- ship on this topic, but it is not always an easy read or straightforward. For example, Crowdy’s biography and role are introduced in a dozen pages in Chap- ter 1, but then much of this material is restated in a slightly different context in Chapter 3. Nevertheless, Dorman’s nuanced analysis of Israelite religion and the dramatic stories he tells along the way make it well worth the moments of déjà vu. No one attempt- ing to understand the rise of Black Israelite religions in America can afford to do withoutChosen People. Like Parfitt, Dorman concludes his book by rais- ing the question of religious identity. He argues that “‘Polyculturalism’ is a better term than ‘syncretism’ for describing the process by which African Ameri- cans have created new religions in the twentieth century.” Those who have worshipped at black con- gregations in the Rabbi Matthew tradition can at- test to the accuracy of Dorman’s terminology: The To read the inaugural edition, featuring a powerful new service, siddur, and the Torah reading are virtually interpretation of the Ten Commandments by Leon R. Kass, the same as those of mainstream synagogues, but the call-and-response preaching, the music, and the please visit us at: religious fervor are deeply African American. As Black Israelites, these faith practitioners be- www.mosaicmagazine.com lieve they are Jews by descent. Chosen People chal- lenges that historical premise. If, however, one were to ask Dorman whether they are Jewish, I suspect that his answer can be found in the final paragraph of the book, where he challenges the reader “to look at the world, its peoples, and cultures as riotously MOSAIC impure.” AdvAnCIng JewISh ThOughT Len Lyons is the author of The Ethiopian Jews of Israel: Personal Stories of Life in the Promised Land (Jewish Lights Publishing).

22 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2013 Cri de Coeur

BY Amy Newman Smith

war), he was interviewed time and again by every- vah boy, the Nazis had seized power in Germany, The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan: one from the French police to Adolf Eichmann. The and his life began to change. “The life opportuni- A Boy Avenger, a Nazi Diplomat, and a result is a detailed map of the emotional and physi- ties of the Jews have to be restricted,” as an internal Murder in Paris cal landscape of Grynszpan’s childhood and adoles- Nazi report put it. “To them, Germany must be- by Jonathan Kirsch Liveright Publishing, 352 pp., $27.95 It is not, after all, a crime to be Jewish. I am not a dog. I have the right to live. My people have a right to exist on this earth. And yet everywhere they are hunted down like animals. ust 17 years old in 1938, the year he became famous, Herschel Grynszpan was barely over cence; his every movement in the days leading up come a country without a future, in which the old five feet tall and weighed only one hundred to November 7, 1938, when he entered the German generation may die off with what still remains for Jpounds. He was, we learn from Jonathan embassy in Paris and fired five shots at diplomat it, but in which the young generation should find it Kirsch’s detailed biography, a “habitual nail biter” vom Rath, one of them fatal; and the aftermath of impossible to live, so that the incentive to emigrate who suffered from a lisp and a digestive problem is constantly in force.” Properly incentivized, that required a special diet. Perhaps because he was Herschel left in 1936 to live with his Uncle small and stood out in ways that would not have Abraham, a tailor in Paris. But he could not made him the most popular boy on the playground, do so easily or legally. he became a fighter who could hold his own, earn- He slipped across the Belgian border into ing the nickname Maccabee (hammer) from his France and moved in with his childless aunt Jewish classmates. and uncle. In Paris, he ran errands to earn It is natural that a scrawny, poverty-stricken pocket money, saw movies and hung out in Polish-Jewish boy living in the German city of cafés with other young Jewish refugees when Hanover as the Nazis began their campaign to his allowance held out or in the street when it make life unbearable for Jews would dream of do- did not, and religiously read newspapers that ing something to measure up to his nickname. He tracked the worsening situation in Europe. certainly believed that he was acting to defend the (One story that caught his attention was that of Jewish people when he walked into the German em- David Frankfurter, a Jewish medical student in bassy in France and fatally shot diplomat Ernst vom Switzerland who, on February 4, 1936, assassi- Rath. What is hard to believe, even after one has nated a Nazi representative in Switzerland, one read Kirsch’s engrossing book, is that such a young- Wilhelm Gustloff.) ster would spend his final days as Joseph Goebbels’s From time to time he acted on wild, im- poster boy for Jewish villainy, slated to be tried for probable ideas: writing directly to President his part in the Jewish conspiracy to embroil France Roosevelt to ask for an entry visa to the Unit- in a war with Germany. Even more difficult to -be ed States and staging an impromptu hunger lieve is the fact that this undersized adolescent was, strike until his uncle gave him the 200 francs long after his death, accused by Hannah Arendt of he needed for his utterly hopeless plan to join working for the Gestapo, tasked with “ridding Ger- the French Foreign Legion. When Herschel many of an anti-Nazi diplomat and, at the same was legally registered as a houseguest of Uncle time, providing the Nazi regime with a pretext for a Abraham with the Paris police, he applied for major escalation in the persecution of the Jews.” Ar- the papers he would need to stay in France: endt labeled him a “psychopath,” too, in Eichmann in an identity card and a permis de séjour. In July Jerusalem while, Kirsch reports, one of Grynszpan’s Herschel Grynszpan after his arrest on November 7, 1938. 1938, his application was turned down. defense attorneys when he was being held for trial in (Photo by Imagno/Getty Images.) This was a catastrophe. Kirsch spells it out France called him “that absurd little Jew.” Even the in painful detail: Jews on whose behalf he claimed to act failed to see that act, both for him personally and for the Jews of in him any sort of hero. The French-Jewish Alliance Germany. Through his retelling, Kirsch wants most [T]he decision produced a formal decree of Israélite Universelle issued a statement that read in of all to reframe Herschel Grynszpan, to restore him expulsion that was issued on August 11 and went part, “We condemn the act of homicide which re- to the historical record and place him beside Jewish into effect on August 15. The French Republic, sulted in the loss of a German official.” resistance heroes such as Abba Kovner and Tuvia in other words, afforded seventeen-year-old Vom Rath’s death served as the Nazis’ pretext for Bielski. It is an ambitious undertaking. Despite the Herschel Grynszpan exactly four days in which launching what they cynically called Kristallnacht, evidence that vom Rath’s killing was merely a pre- to leave France. After August 15, he was subject an atrocity planned months before that has all but text for long-planned violence, Grynszpan is forever to arrest and deportation if he remained in the eclipsed, but by no means buried, the memory of tied to the Kristallnacht pogrom that began Novem- country, but neither Germany, his country of Herschel Grynszpan. Luckily for his biographer, ber 9, hours after vom Rath’s death. birth, nor Poland, his country of citizenship, however, both the French and the Nazis combed would allow him to enter because his German through every aspect of the boy’s life, going so far as erschel Grynszpan was born in 1921 in Ha- visa and his Polish passport had both expired. to interview the director of his after-school daycare Hnover, ten years after his branch of a frac- center. During his long incarceration (from 1939 tious, argumentative family left the small town of His only choice was to hide. He found a ref- until, the evidence would suggest, very late in the Radomsk, Poland. Before he was even a bar mitz- uge in a garret in his uncle’s apartment building,

Summer 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 23 allowing his uncle to tell the police, when they came it to his stranded family. His uncle refused, and in of the 12,000 Jews. I have to protest in a way that looking, that “his nephew from Hanover had moved the fight that followed Herschel shifted between the whole world hears my protest, and this I intend out.” When his aunt and uncle moved to a new build- tears for his family and angry exchanges with his to do.” He never mailed it, nor did he remove the ing, he stayed behind. In a neighborhood stuffed with uncle before storming out. Although family and price tag from the small revolver he hastily bought refugees, Herschel was relatively free to resume his old friends searched for him that night and the next at a gun shop. Everything this purported agent of life, dining with his Uncle Abraham and Aunt Chava day, they would not see him again until he was in some vast Jewish conspiracy would know about and hanging out with his friends at their favorite café. police custody. using a gun he learned from a brief exchange with Back in Hanover, the rest of the family had it far After spending a restless night in a hotel, he the shop’s owner. When Herschel entered the Ger- worse. Even as they were subjected to more restric- penned a postcard to his family. Begging for for- man embassy, he walked past Count Johannes von tions by the Nazis, their native land sought to dis- giveness from God and from them, he wrote, “My Welczeck and talked his way into the office of the own them by stripping Poles who had lived outside heart bleeds when I think of our tragedy and that lowest-ranking legation official, Ernst vom Rath. the country for more than five years of their citizen- Herschel’s version of what hap- ship in October. A week after Herschel was ordered pened in the office changed often to leave France in August, the Germans announced in the years he was in custody. they would cancel all residence permits to foreign- What is known is that he fired five ers, issuing new ones only to people “considered shots from a few feet away, hit- worthy of the hospitality accorded them because ting vom Rath twice, then sat in of their personality and the reason for their stay.” an office chair without moving A family of Ostjuden who had been on the public as embassy staff rushed into the dole was unlikely to qualify for such “hospitality.” room. Within a few minutes, he And despite pressure from Germany to do so, the had been taken off the embassy Polish government insisted it would neither extend grounds and handed over to the nor suspend its October deadline. In the kind of French police. After yelling “sales telling detail Kirsch weaves into his often complex boches!” (dirty Krauts!) at the narrative, we learn that as the Nazis planned the Germans, Herschel freely admit- expulsion of Jews who had lived in the country for ted what he had done and why. “I decades, ordinary Germans were playing a game did it to avenge my parents who called Juden Raus! (Jews Out!). The winner of the are miserable in Germany.” game was the “first to round up six Jews and hasten them ‘Auf nach Palästina!’” The problem, of course, om Rath, a young man from was that in the real world, Palestine, like so many Van aristocratic family who other places, would not take them. had joined the Nazi party a year With an efficiency the French lacked, the Nazis before Hitler came to power, had drawn up a list of the 50,000 Polish Jews in Ger- could claim membership in the many. Just days before Poland would no longer take elite club of those known as the them back, they arrested thousands, including Her- Old Fighters, the Alter Kämpfer. schel’s parents, Zindel and Rivka, and his siblings, Performing one last service to his Mordecai and Esther. By their own ludicrously Caricature of Herschel Grynszpan, the “Jewish murderer,” on the front Führer, he lingered for two days mendacious account, the Nazis treated these peo- page of the Nazi publication Der Stürmer. (Courtesy of Virginius in a hospital bed before dying on ple humanely. They supplied all of the Jews “being Dabney, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.) November 9, the anniversary of made available to Poland” with alcohol, cigarettes, and food, including kosher meals for those who needed them. Solicitous SS men helped “as much as possible to carry their baggage, which was consid- erable.” The newspapers told a different story: The refugees were dumped off the trains without food or shelter in a no-man’s-land on the border and forced to march toward Poland by SS men shooting ma- chine guns over their heads, even as the Polish bor- der guards “brandished rifles with fixed bayonets” and fired warning shots of their own. One week to the day after the Grynszpan fam- ily was taken from its Hanover apartment, Herschel received a postcard from his sister:

We were not told what it was all about, but we saw that everything was finished for us. Each of us had an extradition order pressed into his hand, and one had to leave Germany before the 29th. They didn’t permit us to return home anymore. I asked to be allowed to go home to get at least a few things. I went, accompanied by a Sipo [security policeman], and packed the necessary clothes in a suitcase. And that is all I saved. We don’t have a Pfennig.

After reading even more distressing reports in the Paris papers, Herschel demanded that his Un- cle Abraham take the money that he believed his Mother and child pass by smashed shop windows the morning afterKristallnacht in Magdeburg. father had earlier sent for his benefit and forward (Courtesy of the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust & Genocide, London.)

24 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2013 the abortive Beer Hall Putsch, thereby providing or physically abused, if only because it would not everywhere they are hunted down like animals,” he the perfect festive occasion for the Nazis to perpe- look good if the defendant at the show trial the Na- told the judge. trate crimes that had evidently been planned well zis had planned was bruised and battered. A Ger- The Nazis did indeed hunt Herschel Grynszpan in advance of his shooting, right down to the list of man political prisoner held in the same prison re- down, but he made himself useless to them. Con- approved Kristallnacht graffiti. ports that the boy was fed meals from the guards’ jecture and conspiracy theories swirl around his ul- While the Nazis vilified him, Grynszpan’s Jew- canteen, rather than prisoners’ food, and worked as timate fate, some plausible (he was executed along ish brethren for the most part turned their backs an orderly, rather than at hard labor. with other high-value prisoners shortly before the on him. A leading Jewish newspaper in Paris even But no show trial ever materialized. As Kirsch war’s end), some fanciful (he returned to France “published an open letter to Rath’s mother in which reports, a year after the Germans found Grynsz- and worked as a mechanic, hiding from relatives in the editorialist ‘expressed great sorrow on the death pan he told a Gestapo agent a version of the story shame over his homosexuality). We know only that of her son’ and implored her that ‘it was unjust to Moro-Giafferi had concocted—that he and vom there is no sign of him after the war’s end. Kirsch blame all Jews for her son’s death.’” Rath had a homosexual affair and that he had gone puts it most succinctly: “No official document of the Grynszpan found himself supported publicly to his office to break it off. The details of his story Third Reich discloses his fate.” and financially by Dorothy Thompson, a leading would change under subsequent questioning, but Sizing up Grynszpan’s legacy, at the end of the American journalist who had been expelled from he would not back away from the central premise. book, Kirsch sees some significance in the fact that Germany in 1934 for her unflattering stories about This, in Kirsch’s eyes, was an act of courage, a move no street is named after him in Israel, where many the nascent Nazi Reich. Through radio broadcasts to deny the Nazis the trial they so desperately want- roads and avenues bear the names of Jewish resis- and writings, she told Grynszpan’s story, linking it ed. Any testimony that “Rath was a sexual predator tance fighters. He may be mistaken. A street named to the larger persecution of Jews in Germany. Her who preyed on Jewish boys” would constitute “not Grynszpan connects Yigal Allon and HaShomer in fundraising efforts made it possible to hire a high- only an embarrassment to the Third Reich but a Rishon LeTzion. Another runs parallel to Derech profile lawyer, Vincent de Moro-Giafferi, a French- crime twice over under the Nuremberg Laws.” Ze’ev Jabotinsky in Petah Tikva. But Kirsch is not Corsican who had seen only one of his death- Of course, what made Herschel Grynszpan wrong to point out that not only Grynszpan’s act but penalty clients executed. Subjected to ugly abuse change his story some three years after he com- all resistance to the Nazis led to harsh collective pun- and threats by the German press immediately after mitted the murder is a matter of conjecture, but if ishment of innocent people. And he makes a com- he took the case, Moro-Giafferi was unfazed. He this indeed was his intention it would fit well with pelling argument that to treat Herschel Grynszpan “officially warned the Germany embassy that, -un Kirsch’s overarching goal of finding the hero inside differently than other resistance figures, who knew fortunately, his people, not being as civilized as the the troubled young man. If perhaps Kirsch takes his that their actions would bring down retribution on Jews, believe in the blood feud, and that if anything case too far, one cannot dispute that at a time when others, is an injustice. Grynszpan may have been a happens to him he fears that there will not be one all too many sought coexistence with the Nazis, a flawed hero, but he fought back against the Nazis and person dead in the Germany Embassy but they will 17-year-old faced them head on and took action. died as a result. be lucky if there is one alive.” Speaking in a French court, he demanded dignity Moro-Giafferi also contrived a novel defense for his people. “It is not, after all, a crime to be Jew- strategy, one unsupported by the evidence but ish. I am not a dog. I have the right to live. My Amy Newman Smith is the assistant editor of the Jewish which he felt had a better chance of succeeding than people have a right to exist on this earth. And yet Review of Books. putting the Nazi party on trial. He concocted a story in which vom Rath had lured Herschel into a sexual

relationship, either with money or with the prom- ise of exit visas for his parents. Herschel wanted no part of this defense, and initially, it did not matter, as the French courts continued to push off a trial 500,000 Jewish school students date and Herschel whiled away his time writing in his prison-issued diary, penning letters to friends and world figures (including Hitler), and meeting 10,000 Jewish school teachers with lawyers and visitors. But outside, the world was changing. Germany and France were at war (if 2000 Jewish schools not yet fighting each other), and both the judge and some of Herschel’s lawyers went into army service. The process of forgetting Herschel Grynszpan that 100s of principals Kirsch seeks to undo had begun, as Grynszpan’s re- quests for a trial date were ignored by the courts and journalists turned to more compelling stories. His disappearance soon became both physical 1 Lookstein Center as well as metaphorical. In the chaos that resulted

from the Nazi invasion of France, Grynszpan’s jailer NETWORK * LEARN * GROW endeavored to evacuate him along with other pris- oners to the unoccupied southern part of the coun- Through its programs and professional resources, The Lookstein try and, in the process, lost track of him. They might Center nurtures and supports formal and informal Jewish educators have done so permanently had he taken advantage of repeated opportunities to elude them, but he ap- and educational leadership from the broad range of the Jewish parently found the prospect of being on his own community in North America and worldwide. worse than captivity. He was relieved to land in a prison in Toulouse, but not for long. If the rest of the world had forgotten him, the Nazis had not. Barely For more information, visit www.lookstein.org a month after the Germans entered Paris, Herschel was in a cell in Berlin. From here, the record becomes both sketchy and The Lookstein Center for Jewish Education untrustworthy. The Nazi mania for documentation Bar-Ilan University, School of Education was not matched by one for accuracy. We have it on Ramat Gan, Israel 52900 the authority of Eichmann (who personally interro- [email protected] gated Grynszpan) that Herschel was never tortured

Summer 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 25 From Russia with Complications

BY Walter Laqueur

Ha’aretz, and Bronfman, a Russian-born former there was a fork in the road that led to the United Ha-milion she-shina et ha-mizrach ha-tikhon: community activist and member of the Knesset, States, “was more than eighty-three percent, a pow- ha-aliyah ha-sovietit le-Yisrael have produced the first study of the latest and larg- erful contradiction of Israel’s Zionist-demographic (The Million that Changed the Middle East: est wave of migration out of the Soviet Union. With dream.” It was only after Prime Minister Yitzhak The Soviet Aliyah to Israel) what is probably only a slight exaggeration, they Shamir persuaded Washington to limit the entry of by Lili Galili and Roman Bronfman have titled it Ha-milion she-shina et ha-mizrach ha- Russian Jews into the United States that the flow of Matar, 282 pp., 98 NIS tikhon (The Million that Changed the Middle East). immigrants changed directions. As an Israeli minis- At first, the prospect of economic opportunity and security n the late 1950s, when I was in Israel for an ex- in the New World lured a majority of Soviet Jewish émigrés tended stay, a stranger showed up at my apart- ment on Gaza Road in Jerusalem. I was in bed away from the land of their fathers. running a high temperature, but that did not Iprevent him from firmly pushing my wife aside Israel’s leaders had high expectations with regard to ter put it at the time, “This was cruel Zionism, if one and barging into my room, where he pummeled this aliyah. Although they were eager at all times to can say such a thing.” Our authors prefer to call it me with questions. Introducing himself only as increase the state’s Jewish population by any means, “compulsory Zionism.” Shaul, he told me that his boss, David Ben-Gurion, they viewed the Soviet Union’s long-captive Jews had learned that I had made several research trips as particularly desirable “human material,” people he newcomers who arrived in Israel in the to Russia in the past few years, which was unusual who would not only help to offset the Arabs’ higher Tearly 1990s went through difficulties similar in those days. If a massive effort were undertaken birth rates but would add countless scientists and to those encountered by every wave of immigrants. to get the Jews out of Russia, Shaul had been com- engineers to Israel’s labor force. Fearful of this aug- Finding work wasn’t easy, especially for the inordi- missioned to ask me, how many would come? How mentation of Israel’s strength, the Palestinians and nately large number of physicians and musicians much would such an effort upset the Soviet lead- other Arabs brought pressure on Moscow to stop who turned up. The neurologist employed as a ers? And could I suggest a few people who might be the Jewish aliyah, but their efforts led nowhere. street cleaner was not merely a cliché but a reality. suited to help get the process started? Where they failed, however, America was un- Housing, too, was a severe problem, even for those My visitor, a blunt man, did not hide his doubts: intentionally, albeit briefly, successful. In the late who could afford it. And those who were too old or It was not quite clear to him what a Jew of German 1980s, when the mass migration was just begin- infirm to work—a relatively high number of peo- origin (he used the more pungent term yekke) could ning, the prospect of economic opportunity and ple—were a burden to the Israeli economy. Unique possibly have to say about the Soviet Union that security in the New World lured the large major- to this aliyah, or at least far more characteristic of it someone like him (he was born in what was then ity of Soviet Jewish émigrés away from the land of than its predecessors, were the problems resulting the Russian empire on the last day of the 19th cen- their fathers. “In 1989,” Galili and Bronfman tell us, from the fact that many of its members—perhaps tury) did not already know. Whether, in my feverish “when emigration in meaningful numbers first be- as many as thirty percent—were people who were state, I told him anything that dispelled his doubts, came possible, the drop-out rate in Vienna,” where eligible to enter Israel under the Law of Return but I do not exactly recall, nor is it of historical impor- tance whether anything I said played a role in the subsequent deliberations. I do know that some of the people I named became active in the clandes- tine campaign that was subsequently undertaken, including the British writer Emanuel Litvinoff, who died two years ago in London, at the age of 96. In the years that followed I occasionally encoun- tered the legendary Shaul Avigur and those work- ing for him, both in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, and I was impressed by their efforts against heavy odds. I couldn’t help thinking of them, and their great contributions to the awakening of Soviet Jew- ry in the 1950s and 1960s, as I read Lili Galili and Roman Bronfman’s path-breaking new book about the Russian aliyah of the last two decades. Avigur and his associates did their dangerous work long be- fore the events described in the third chapter of this book (“How It Began”), but they laid the indispens- able foundations for the post-Six-Day War aliyah, as well as the more massive exodus that commenced in the late 1980s after a regrettable hiatus. Had it not been for these cloak-and-dagger heroes, who knows whether there ever would have been a Sharansky or any refuseniks at all? Galili, a well-known journalist who for many Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin visits an ulpan for new Russian immigrants in Bat Yam, June 1995. years covered the Russian immigrant beat for (Photo by Avi Ohayon, courtesy of the Government Press Office, Israel.)

26 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2013 were not halakhically Jewish. The presence of hun- legitimate and on occasion touching, if sometimes dreds of thousands of part-Jews or relatives of Jews a little idealized. Visiting Russian language book- The Best of Berlin led to endless friction with the Orthodox rabbis in shops in Israel, I encountered more of the popular charge of marriage, burials, and many other issues. Soviet novelist Valentin Pikul than Boris Paster- Isaiah Berlin In the course of time, most of the immigrants nak, and more books by my late and rather dubious An Interpretation of were more or less successfully absorbed, though a friend, Julian Semyonov, a writer of spy fiction, than His Thought significant number of them, perhaps one hundred the great poet Osip Mandelstam. I did see Russian John Gray thousand, eventually left the country, returning, in translations of Leo Strauss and even of Emmanuel With a new introduction by the author The immigrants who came to Israel were the products “An acute and illuminating exposition of Berlin’s world view. . . . [Gray] probably gets closer to of the Soviet system, however much they disliked and Berlin than anyone else has done.” —Michael Walzer, New York Paper $22.95 Review of Books suffered from it. 978-0-691-15742-9 many cases, to their land of origin. But this was by Levinas, but also a great deal of rubbish. The Roots of no means a unique phenomenon or a sign of failure. Still, there is no denying that the new immi- Romanticism It had happened in all earlier immigration waves, grants are great readers and theatergoers, and they even the Second Aliyah (1904-1914), which largely have added much to the cultural standing of Israel, Second Edition Isaiah Berlin consisted of confirmed Zionists. It is, indeed, one of perhaps most visibly in the worlds of chess and mu- Edited by Henry Hardy the few shortcomings of this book that the authors sic. They have also established newspapers and tele- With a new foreword by John Gray rarely refer to the experiences of earlier immigrants vision channels of their own (Arutz 9), founded an “A fascinating intellectual history.” to Palestine and Israel, which were, in some re- outstanding theater (Gesher), and starred in sports —Douglas A. Sylva, New York spects, quite similar. They too initially encountered (especially track and field and gymnastics). They are Times Book Review overrepresented in the fighting Published in association with the National Paper $12.95 Gallery of Art, Washington units of the Israeli army and 978-0-691-15620-0 have played a very important role in the development of Is- raeli computer technology. It Against the Current is difficult to think of a single Essays in the History of Ideas field in which Russian immi- Second Edition grants have failed to make a Isaiah Berlin significant contribution. Edited by Henry Hardy This is one side of the coin, With a new foreword by Mark Lilla and it is one that really shines, “Berlin expounds the ideas of but there remain questions half-forgotten thinkers with to which we still do not have luminous clarity and imaginative empathy . . . exhilarating to read.” satisfactory answers. The im- Paper $24.95 —Keith Thomas, Observer migrants who came to Israel 978-0-691-15610-1 were the products of the Soviet system, however much they The Hedgehog disliked and suffered from it. The culture and way of life they and the Fox brought to Israel was the one An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History they had absorbed at home and Second Edition in school. In what ways is their Isaiah Berlin Alexander Rosenbaum, Russian singer and interpreter of the blatnaya Israel an extension of the old Edited by Henry Hardy pesnya (criminals’ songs) genre. and new Russia, and to the de- With a new foreword by gree that it is, does this consti- Michael Ignatieff opposition, tended to maintain a social distance tute a problem? There are, after all, countries rang- “Beautifully written and from other Israelis, complained about discrimina- ing from Canada to Switzerland in which different Paper $12.95 suggestive.” 978-0-691-15600-2 tion, and eventually established political parties to communities with different languages and cultures —W. H. Auden, New Yorker uphold their interests. coexist; indeed this was what Herzl imagined the fu- When I made the acquaintance of some of the ture Jewish state would look like. Nonetheless, some The Crooked Timber more recent immigrants, I was struck by the great common cultural ground seems to be necessary to of Humanity difference between them and the refusenikim “ ” keep a society together and provide a minimum of who had left the Soviet Union in earlier decades. national solidarity. Chapters in the History of Ideas Like many of those who had fought for their right Consider, for instance, the case of Alexander Second Edition to emigrate, I had not been fully aware of how far Rosenbaum, who does not appear in the book. He is Isaiah Berlin this generation had moved from Jewish (let alone unknown outside the community of Russian speak- Edited by Henry Hardy Zionist) traditions. This was in many ways a natural ers, but within it his name is one to conjure with. With a new foreword by process, one that was also occurring in Jewish com- He was born in Leningrad and became one of the John Banville munities in Western Europe and America. Thus it best-known and most popular bards. Now in his six- “A history of ideas that possesses Paper $24.95 all the drama of a novel, all the was not surprising that upon their arrival in Israel ties, he is still going strong. Many millions love his 978-0-691-15593-7 immediacy of headline news.” they would keep to themselves, remain aloof from “valse-Boston” and other songs, particularly those —New York Times an Israeli culture they considered to be provincial, devoted to the criminal underworld—blatnoi. In and continue to participate (through satellite TV, Israel, Rosenbaum is something like an honorary the Internet, and other means) in a Russian culture member of Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beytenu; in See our E-Books at they believed to be superior. the election campaign of 2009 he was invited to sing press.princeton.edu I thought this pride in their specific identity was the party’s theme song. His “Yerushalayim” (readily

Summer 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 27 accessible on YouTube) shows him walking the nar- row streets of the Old City, invoking all the classic Zionist associations and symbols, including Palmach and Entebbe. But Rosenbaum was also a member of the Rus- sian parliament (the Duma), representing Putin’s party, and served as deputy head of the Duma’s cultural committee. Two years ago, his “Romance Kolchak” became a best-seller. Admiral Kolchak was an Arctic explorer, but he is better known as one of the heads of the White counterrevolutionary movement of 1918-1919. Kolchak was killed by the Bolsheviks after their victory. The song is devoted to Kolchak’s thoughts and feelings in the last minutes before his execution. Jerusalem and Kolchak form a strange synthe- sis, if not exactly a shocking one: The admiral for all we know was no more of an anti-Semite than the current president of Russia, and it might even be possible, with a little effort, to find some common ground shared by Kolchak, Putin, and Lieberman. Galili and Bronfman do in fact devote a fair amount of time to drawing parallels between the latter two. Russian-speaking immigrants gather for a two-day Russian folk music festival in northern Israel, Russian and Israeli patriotism, Kolchak, Putin, and May 2012. (© AP Photo/Oded Balilty.) Lieberman—what a fascinating combination, but how will it all add up in the end? try, and it was this faulty perspective that probably not yet available. The importance of the Russian lan- ommentators often seek to explain the politics shaped their world view and their thoughts on Is- guage in Israel may well decline. The circulation of Cof the Russian community in Israel in the light raeli politics more than any other factor. Many of Vesti, the leading Russian-language daily, is now only of its origins, neither the Soviet Union nor its suc- them have never quite understood that small coun- a third of what it was in its not-very-distant heyday. cessor having been an ideal preparatory school for tries cannot behave like superpowers without put- But this is true for all the print media in Israel and, for a democracy. But there is another way in which the ting their survival at risk. that matter, in the world in general. The number of Russians’ past casts a shadow over them, as Shimon What is the future of this community? What will Russian-language bloggers in Israel is astronomical, Peres astutely observed in an interview with Galili be the profile of the next generation, born in Israel, but in many families the second generation knows and Bronfman. In an attempt to account for the educated in local schools, and trained in the army? hardly any Russian at all. In brief, the Russian-Jewish evolution of the immigrants’ politics in the 1990s, How will it impact Israeli society and culture and in- community, like much of Israel, is in flux. For now, he observed that “they did not have any idea of what teract with other groups of olim such as the Ethio- at least, one ought to be grateful for Galili and Bron- it was to be a small state. They thought that the Jor- pians? Things have worked out well, as the authors fman’s valuable report on the present state of affairs. dan was the Volga, not just a stream overrated for note, in a small town like Netivot, on what Israelis call the sake of public relations. They are convinced that the “periphery” of the country, between Be’er Sheva Walter Laqueur was for many years chairman of Israel acts out of weakness and not on the basis of and Gaza. But will the same happen elsewhere? They the International Research Council of the Center for a realistic understanding of its small dimensions.” will certainly master the difficult language spoken Strategic and International Studies in Washington, Russian Jews, like other denizens of the Soviet in Israel, but how deep will their attachment to the D.C. His most recent book, After the Fall: The End of Union, had been cut off from the outside world. country be? It would be interesting to learn more the European Dream and the Decline of a Continent Their knowledge was limited to their home coun- about “mixed marriages,” but such information is (Thomas Dunne Books), was published in 2012.

The Man Who Thought in Pictures

By Jeffrey Saks

You’d start to speak to Agnon conceptually, ed in the drawing of the demonic dog Balak. (The Shay Ve-Agnon: Shelosha Sipurim (Three and he’d immediately change the subject—‘Let Agnon House held an exhibit of these engravings, Stories) me tell you a story, let me tell you a maiyseh.’ sketches, and drawings in 2010, and a catalog was by S.Y. Agnon, illustrated by Shay Charka He thought in pictures. Agnon expressed published in conjunction with the Tel Aviv Mu- Schocken Publishing House (Israel), 48 pp., 69 NIS everything, completely legitimately, as one who seum of Art.) Theodor Herzl Rome, who was the thinks in pictures. son-in-law of Agnon’s patron and publisher Salman Schocken, produced a number of spare, stylized line This was a perceptive remark, so it is interesting drawings for certain publications, which have been n describing his friend S.Y. Agnon’s style of that so few of Agnon’s stories have been illustrated. recycled in various printings of assorted stories both thinking, Gershom Scholem emphasized the Perhaps the most significant illustrations have been in Hebrew and in translation. extent to which he was “unable and unwilling those of Avigdor Arikha, for the sections of Only But only now, forty-three years after the Nobel to have a conversation about abstract ideas— Yesterday published under the name Kelev Hutzot laureate’s death, have Agnon’s stories been rendered Irather only in stories or parables [meshalim].” (Stray Dog), in which author and artist collaborat- into a comic book. Israeli illustrator and cartoonist

28 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2013 Shay Charka has put pictures to words for three of sage between the diaspora and the Holy Land. In and the sturdy house built at story’s end is none Agnon’s stories that have special appeal for children. this way Charka preserves some of the dual valences other than Beit Agnon, though, somewhat oddly, One of Agnon’s best-known short stories, and of Agnon’s text, which simultaneously aims at chil- more as it looks today after its extensive renovation likely the first that many school children encoun- dren and their parents. It also shows how Charka’s in 2009. (There are also graphic references to Rav ter, is “Fable of the Goat,” the story of a magical drawings are a kind of midrash on Agnon’s stories, Kook and Bob Dylan.) which are of course themselves a modernist distil- It’s pleasing to think that the lation of the language and lore of the Mishnah, Tal- hile the first two stories are well known and mud, and midrashim, together with the medievalists Wregularly taught in the Israeli schools, the audience for this book will and Hasidic masters. third will be unfamiliar to all but the most diehard Agnon fans. In “The Architect and the Emperor,” read Agnon’s rabbinic Hebrew he other well-known story in the collection, Charka has taken one paragraph from Agnon’s late T“From Foe to Friend,” tells of its narrator’s at- novel To This Day and illustrated it as a stand-alone and not be put off. tempt to settle Jerusalem’s Talpiot suburb despite story, which tells of an old, distinguished architect the opposition of the “King of the Winds” to blow who is commanded by the king to construct a new cave tunnel between Exile and the Land of Israel, castle: “Years went by and nothing was done, for and a delightful but unfortunate goat who can lead the architect had lost all interest in working in the way through. Actually, this story was the first wood and stone.” Instead, he takes a gigantic can- of Agnon’s ever to be illustrated. When it was pub- vas and paints “a castle on it so skillfully that it lished in 1925, very shortly after Agnon’s own return looked real, and sent the emperor a message that from his twelve-year sojourn in Germany, the story the task was completed.” When the monarch dis- was simultaneously issued in two publications—for covers it’s nothing other than a two-dimensional adults in the literary journal Hedim, and as part of painting, he screams in his fury, “Not only have you a series of booklets for children illustrated by Bet- disobeyed my orders, you have deceived me into zalel artist Ze’ev Raban. The fact that the same story thinking that the mere appearance of a building is would be presented as both adult and children’s lit- a building.” At that moment the architect (who is erature highlights the rich midrashic or aggadic na- drawn to look like the elder Agnon, so familiar to ture of Agnon’s writing. us from the fifty shekel bill) knocks on the door of It’s precisely on this point—Agnon for chil- the painted palace, whereupon “the door opened dren?—that Charka’s edition is so interesting. A and the architect stepped through it and was never very fine graphic artist and illustrator, Charka is seen again.” best known for his series of “Baba” books illustrat- Agnon’s little aggada can be read on at least two ing talmudic aggadot and Biblical stories, as well as planes: We can understand the desire of any artist to his satiric political cartoons. In this book we witness escape into his own work. But artistic creation also the degree to which illustrators are inevitably com- becomes an actual embodiment of an abstract ideal. mentators. For example, Agnon doesn’t describe The architect’s palace, which exists only in blue- the cave passage between Galicia and the Galil print, has a Platonic existence of its own. The fusion through which the goat leads the boy, dispatching it of word and image in graphic novels may have a in a mere three short sentences of half-rhyme. Like special power to evoke this second meaning. Lewis Carroll’s rabbit hole, C.S. Lewis’ wardrobe, or J.K. Rowling’s Platform 9¾, it’s merely the mecha- ignificantly, Charka has resisted the temptation nism that transports the hero from our world into a Caricature of Agnon as a young man. Sto modernize Agnon’s poetic and sometimes ar- chaic Hebrew. Nor does he insert nekudim (Hebrew vowels) into the text, which is penned in his car- toonist’s hand. Although the characters are given occasional lines of dialogue in “thought balloons” which are original to Charka and not Agnon, the words and style are essentially Agnon’s. It’s pleasing to think that the audience for this book will read Agnon’s rabbinic Hebrew and not be put off. It also underlines the power of illustration: Readers will know that the archaic, mishnaic word meshicha means a rope because they’ll see the cord wrapped around the goat’s tail. One hopes that they will also catch the deliberate echo of the word mashiach (messiah) that Agnon intended. Since Charka does occasionally alter Agnon's texts, it would have been better had Schocken in- cluded the canonical versions of these stories in an appendix (without illustrations each is quite short, “The youth tied the cord to the goat’s tail and minded it carefully. When the goat set off, he held the cord in his two pages would have done it). This would have hand and did not let it slacken until the goat was well on her way and he was following her.” (Images courtesy made the volume an even more effective education- of Shay Charka and Schocken Publishing House, Israel.) al tool. Nonetheless, one hopes that this important and delightful partnership between author and il- more magical one. But Charka lavishes three pages his house down. Virtually every commentator on lustrator will introduce Israeli children (and their (out of twelve) on the passage. Along the way we see this story has pointed out that Agnon’s Talpiot parents), and Hebrew students in America, to the graphic hints to every ram or goat in Jewish history, rented home was plundered during the 1929 Arab magic cave of Agnon’s prose. from the “ram caught in a thicket” at the binding Uprising, leading to the eventual construction in of Isaac, to the Yom Kippur scapegoat, to the Chad 1931 of his house (now a museum and study center). Jeffrey Saks is the founding director of ATID and its Gadya of Seder night, and more. Following that interpretive line, Charka draws the WebYeshiva.org program. He also lectures regularly at In short, there’s a lot of Jewish history in the pas- narrator as a caricature of a young Agnon himslf, the Agnon House in Jerusalem.

Summer 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 29 Spanish Charity

BY Alan Mintz

screenwriter, but by the director, the cinematogra- by his student from following a conventional career The Retrospective pher, and even the actors. In this unapologetically as a professor and is given the chance to find his by A. B. Yehoshua, translated by Stuart Schoffman autobiographical novel, Yehoshua casts himself as calling as an artist. They go on to make six films Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 352 pp., $26 the director. The character, Yair Moses, hails from together before a bitter separation. Although un- How is it that a film school in a remote pilgrimage city in Spain should single out the obscure early works of

n Israel A. B. Yehoshua is considered a na- an Israeli filmmaker? tional asset, and each new novel provokes the kind of intense public debate that is usually the elite Ashkenazi neighborhood of Rehavia, but polished and made on a shoestring, those films pos- reserved for issues of national security. When the other members of his creative team are North sessed the severe beauty of artistic and existential IThe Retrospective first appeared in Hebrew in the African Jews who came to Israel as children and extremity. Moses goes on to become a successful winter of 2011, the veteran critic Avraham Balaban grew up in southern development towns. The “ret- mainstream director, while Trigano leaves movie gave it a stinging review in Ha’aretz. In character- rospective” of the novel’s English title is a screening, making for teaching. izing the novel as wooden, over-intellectualized, Moses, the Ashkenazi, represents ra- and self-indulgent, Balaban made it sound as if Ye- tionalism, education, the weight of the hoshua had let down the nation. By spring of that European cultural tradition, secularism, same year, the eminent literary scholar Dan Miron discipline, professional achievement, and had already written and published a book in defense the aspiration toward harmony and ar- of the novel. Comparing it to Federico Fellini’s film ticulation. Trigano, the Sephardi, is identi- 8 1/2, Miron argued that it represented a magisterial fied with the raw pain of deprivation and summing up of Yehoshua’s literary achievements. abasement. At the same time, there is a The recent appearance of the novel in Stuart greater openness to mystery and the kind Schoffman’s fluid English translation provides a of religiosity that comes from the soul in chance to consider it not only after the heat of the extremis; the power of the primitive en- initial debate has cooled, but also within a differ- ables an understanding of the human con- ent critical climate. Despite Yehoshua’s best efforts dition that penetrates social constructions. to provoke American Jews with dismissive remarks Trigano’s two friends from childhood add about the diaspora, his fiction is esteemed in the more traits to the Sephardi side of the led- United States. Precisely because the reception of Ye- ger. The cinematographer Toledano brings hoshua’s novels is not so fraught outside of Israel, a mystical strangeness to their shoots, there is a chance for more perspective. and the beautiful actress Ruth brings a re- The new novel completes what might be called sourceful expressiveness that can be mold- Yehoshua’s Sephardic trilogy, which began with ed into many shapes by the writer and di- Mr. Mani and continued with A Journey to the End A.B. Yehoshua. (Photo by Leonardo Céndamo.) rector. Admittedly, these are clichés from of the Millennium, each of which addresses the idea the culture wars that are wide open to the that the experience of Jews from Mediterranean charge of essentialism. But Yehoshua has lands whose ancestors were exiled from Spain pro- at a Spanish film festival, of a half-dozen films they always been unapologetic about trafficking in big vides a unique cultural contribution to Israeli soci- made together in the 1960s before a disagreement ideas, and he stakes his claim as a novelist on his ety. The centrality of the Sephardic theme is made between Moses and his screenwriter broke up the ability to press ideas into the service of fiction. explicit in the original Hebrew title of the new team. This is the stroke of genius: Yehoshua takes The conceit of The Retrospective is that these novel: Chesed sefaradi, Spanish or Sephardic char- the cultural antinomies of his own soul and exter- artists, with their distinct cultural formations, are ity. (Chesed as a concept is itself not easy to trans- nalizes them as separate characters in the novel, the joined in a genuine creative process for the dura- late.) Mr. Mani is, by all accounts, one of the great better to scrutinize them individually and under- tions of the six films that they make together. The achievements of Israeli literature, but so subtle and stand their interdependence. rupture between Moses and Trigano comes when, reversible are its cultural dialects that you can read in the final symbolic scene of their last project to- it over and over again without truly knowing what t the heart of these films is Moses’s partnership gether, the script calls for Ruth (who is Trigano’s Yehoshua means by Sephardic identity or culture. Awith his screenwriter, Shaul Trigano. As a boy, lover) to offer her bare breast to a beggar to nurse. Less ambitious and more narrowly focused, The Trigano received a scholarship that allowed him When she refuses and Moses comes to her defense Retrospective provides Yehoshua with a setting for to escape his backward desert town and enroll in to protect her from this grotesque abasement, a more coherent working out of his ideas on this the elite Ashkenazi high school in Jerusalem where Trigano is outraged that his creative vision has subject, ideas which, after all, may have shifted Moses teaches. Trigano becomes smitten with the been betrayed and cuts off all ties with both Moses since the appearance of his chef-d’oeuvre more power of the cinematic image while working as an and Ruth. than twenty years ago. usher to make ends meet in Jerusalem. The student It is not until decades later, during the present To approach the question of Sephardism from a succeeds in inspiring his teacher with his artistic time of the novel, that Moses finally owns up to the new angle, in The Retrospective Yehoshua exploits a enthusiasm, so much so that when Trigano finishes fact that it was in fact he who provoked the break- key difference between writing novels and making his army service and puts together a small film crew up to free himself from Trigano’s allegorical obses- movies: The authorship of a novel is vested in one from his hometown, Moses lets himself be talked sions and make movies that represent everyday person, whereas a movie is made not only by the into becoming the director. Thus Moses is rescued life and the material world. He went on to make

30 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2013 mainstream but critically well-received films and out the obscure early works of an Israeli filmmaker? re-experience the period of their tense but creative didn’t look back until forced to do so by the Span- Toward the end of the three-day festival Moses dis- partnership with the alienated cinematographer. ish retrospective. covers Trigano’s fingerprints behind the scenes. The The exposure to the painting works its own magic; Moses comes to acknowledge that the scene that broke up their collaboration, the one in which Ruth was called upon to offer her breast to a beg- gar, could well have expressed empathy rather than abasement. Moses’ complacency is breached, and he comes to terms with the fact that he is stuck in an artistic impasse from which he can emerge only if he can reconnect with the wild imagination of his former collaborator. In the second half of the novel, which begins when Moses returns to Israel from Spain, the director continues his spiritual retrospective by revisiting the sites where the early films were shot and by seeking out Trigano, who loathes him but also reluctantly realizes that his own fate as an artist has gravely suffered because of the severed relationship. The first half of the novel takes place entirely in Spain, and the choice proves fascinating on several counts. Spain is not only the land of the Inquisition, which remained virtually judenrein for six centu- ries, but also the land of the Judeo-Arabic Golden Age and the ur-Sepharad—the Hebrew name for Spain—that gave birth to the original mystique of Sephardism. Santiago de Compostela, moreover, bears an uncanny resemblance to Jerusalem, the city of Moses’s birth. Both cities are vaunted desti- nations for pilgrims; the parador in which Moses and Ruth stay is a former hospital for pilgrims. Both are modern cities that contain within them old cit- Santiago de Compostela. ies swarming with tourists who wander between stalls of trinkets and majestic houses of worship. sponsoring institution is not Moses experiences in Santiago precisely what he as only a film school but a film a liberal, secular Israeli cannot allow himself to ex- archive, and, in order to perience in his own land: the pull and the poetry make sure there is a perma- of religion. Moses is struck not only by the throngs nent record of his achieve- of the simple faithful but also by the way in which ment, Trigano had deposit- religion and modern art are wrapped around one ed the films there and come another. The head of the film school happens to to Santiago to oversee their be a priest whose mother is a famous actress. He dubbing into Spanish. has a warm affinity with Moses and Trigano’s early While in Santiago, Trigano films because their symbolic and surreal style, after came across a 17th-century the manner of Buñuel, touches on the mysteries of painting that depicts a existence. woman offering her breast At the climax of the Spanish half of the novel, to an older man. The scene, Moses enters a confession booth in the Santiago it turns out, is based on a cathedral and confesses his artistic sins. He has famous story recounted by prevailed upon the brother of the film school head, the Roman historian Vale- who is a Franciscan brother and also a cinephile, rius Maximus about a man to hear his confession, although he insists that he named Cimon who is con- does not want absolution. On one level, this is all demned to death by starva- jokey and provocative play-acting. Moses claims tion and his daughter Pero, he has always been curious about the mysteries of who, having recently given the confessional but had never entered one in Is- birth, relieves his suffering rael because all the priests are Arabs with mixed by offering him milk from motives. But on another level, he genuinely seeks her breast. The title of the the chance to articulate and take responsibility “Roman Charity,” ca. 1747, by Jean-Baptiste Greuze. painting—and the name of for his part in breaking with Trigano, driving him the motif, which was de- away and thereby losing a piece of the integrity of picted by dozens of Euro- his own artistic conscience. hen Moses arrives in the cathedral town of pean artists—is Caritas Romana (Roman Charity), The sight of a secular Israeli artist in a cathedral WSantiago de Compostela to receive his prize which Yehoshua adapted for the Hebrew title of the confessional in Spain is one of the more interesting and serve as the guest of honor at the film festival, novel: Chesed sefaradi. moments in recent Israeli fiction. An American he is surprised to discover that it is only his early Moses has brought Ruth to the festival as his Jewish reader with a modicum of Jewish knowl- surreal films, made with Trigano, that are sched- companion, and Trigano sees to it that a copy of edge might well be forgiven for looking up from uled to be screened; the rest of his career has been the painting is hung above their bed. During the the text and wondering aloud, “This is curious. ignored. How is it, after all, that a film school in three days of the festival, the film director and Don’t we have our own mechanism for confessing a remote pilgrimage city in Spain should single his leading actress are obliged to systematically and remitting sin?” The answer is yes, of course,

Summer 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 31 and it’s called teshuvah. The process of teshuvah, ness, it is without Yehoshua’s help. The inability to praise of normalcy,” a condition that he argues dias- which was given its classic formulation by the appreciate the resources of his own religious tradi- pora Jews are incapable of achieving. Moses in fact greatest Sephardi of all times, Moses Maimonides, tion has been an issue for Yehoshua throughout his sounds very much like Yehoshua the thinker-critic lays out a series of steps that move from regret to career. once he no longer has to restrain Trigano’s wildness acknowledgement of sin to confession (directly Still, Yehoshua is too astute a novelist to disre- and is free to express his “normalcy” in films that to God, unmediated by a priest) and to changed gard the religious dimension of human experience are this-worldly and realistic and take delight in the material world. The problem is that these films are also tinged with artistic mediocrity. Whereas the The sight of a secular Israeli artist in a cathedral novel presents detailed description of each of the early movies, we are told nothing about his later confessional in Spain is one of the more interesting endeavors, except, that is, for the title of one com- moments in recent Israeli fiction. mercial success tellingly titled Potatoes. The self-knowing strength of The Retrospective is that Moses is brought to the humbling recogni- behavior. Indeed, this is precisely the script Mo- even if he is allergic to the traditions of his own cul- tion that the way of normalcy is insufficient. Moses ses’ follows when he returns to Israel from Spain ture. What Trigano had brought to their partner- may resemble Yehoshua the essayist, but Yehoshua and conducts a “retrospective” of his life. He seeks ship was not religion in the formal sense but a kind the novelist is closer to the difficult but essential -ma out Trigano, tries to make things right, and even of penetrating longing for meaning that transcend- trix of Moses plus Trigano, Ashkenazi and Sephardi, accepts the perverse penance demanded of him, ed the here and now and verged on mania. It was normalcy and religious feeling. Longtime readers of which requires him to return to Spain to reenact Moses’ role to keep it in check, or as Ruth describes Yehoshua will surely recognize in this dialectic the the scene of Caritas Romana with he himself play- it to him: shape of the master’s career, which began with se- ing the role of the bound, nursing father. vere allegorical tales and moved toward the finely As a secular Ashkenazi, Moses is constitution- [Y]our creative partnership with him was observed psychological realism of A Late Divorce ally incapable of understanding his experience in thanks to your normalcy, your sense of and The Liberated Bride. Yet despite this move away terms of any Jewish spiritual concept because the proportion, on the assumption that you, from allegory, what strengthens the claim for A.B. fruits of religious culture have been thoroughly as director, would impose credibility and Yehoshua’s being the greatest Hebrew novelist is poisoned by a century of Zionist ideology and the restraint on his wild imagination, that you the rustle of higher meanings that attends his every moral dissipation of ultra-Orthodox. A confession would calm the disquiet ranging inside him, incarnation. booth in Catholic Spain turns out to be the only clarify the symbols that raced around in his way Moses is capable of having a religious experi- soul. Alan Mintz is the author of Sanctuary in the ence of contrition. The recognition of this sad state Wilderness: A Critical Introduction to American of affairs, one would like to be able to report, is one Now, normalcy is a freighted term in the world Hebrew Poetry (Stanford University Press). He was a of the achievements of this novel. But it is not the of Yehoshua’s discourse. As a Zionist thinker and Guggenheim Fellow in 2012 and is working on a book on case, alas, and if the reader comes to this aware- critic of the diaspora, he has often spoken out “in the later work of S. Y. Agnon.

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32 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2013 More Important Things

BY Daniel Johnson

circumcision; custom and ritual punctuate the cousin Rachel has become engaged to her teenage The Innocents novel. These festivities enable the author to sub- sweetheart Adam. The triangular relationship be- by Francesca Segal ject her living organism to merciless scrutiny, per- tween Adam, Rachel, and Ellie drives the narrative, Voice, 288 pp., $25.99 forming much the same function as Jane Austen’s but behind these twenty-somethings lies the ines- seasons and balls. Geography is also cunningly capable influence of their three fathers. Two of them If fathers in this novel are associated with a sense of the cannot recall a literary debutante making as self-assured an entrance as Francesca Segal tragic, the mothers are left to provide the comic relief. has made with The Innocents since Donna Tartt a generation ago. Yet The Innocents deployed. Francesca Segal’s North West London are absent: Boaz disappeared from Ellie’s life when (whichI recently won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jew- (not to be confused with its near-neighbor, the she was 16, while Adam lost his father Jacob to can- ish Literature) is a more intellectually ambitious North West London of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth cer at 8. Only Rachel’s father is very much around. enterprise than The Secret History. Tartt played in- and NW) is a microcosm of the Jewish world, from Lawrence Gilbert not only employs his prospective geniously with the conventions of the murder mys- Manhattan to Eilat. Beyond the bourgeois comfort son-in-law but loves him, too. Adam knows this. tery, but Segal masterfully combines two contrast- zone of Hampstead Garden Suburb are the older, Hence his sense of guilt and remorse at the idea of ing fictional traditions: the Anglo-Jewish novel, as it more religious denizens of Golders Green; other, betraying Rachel is heightened by his boundless re- has developed from George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda spect for Lawrence. Throughout, there is a tension to Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question; and the in Adam’s mind between the two fathers, the living Anglo-American novel, as it has developed from and the dead, the ersatz and the real. At the wed- Anthony Trollope and Henry James to Martin Amis ding, Adam can hardly bear his father’s absence, and Alison Lurie, in which the New World and the but later, at the circumcision, he realizes that only Old collide. The title and plot of The Innocents, in his own fatherhood can come close to healing that fact, pays homage to one of the finest examples of sense of loss. that genre, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. To add to the technical accomplishment, Se- His father should be here and was not; Adam gal sees the temptation and fall of her protagonist, had been angry for almost his whole life, he Adam, through his own eyes. This unfaltering as- realized, always doing the right thing and sumption of a masculine persona lends additional meanwhile raging and resentful that no one significance to her epigraph, from Wharton’s The saw the magnitude of that sadness . . . But Age of Innocence: “In the rotation of crops there was something within Adam had shifted in that a recognized season for wild oats; but they were not moment eight days ago when he had first held to be sown more than once.” Like Wharton’s New- his son. No one could make it better. It could land Archer, Segal’s Adam Newman is a magnificent not be made better. But it could be made— evocation of young manhood, with its yearning bearable. If not acceptable then accepted. both to belong and to break away. In moving on, he had then understood, in Segal, not unlike many other aspiring young letting go, he was taking nothing away from novelists, seems to have spent much of her twenties Jacob. reviewing other people’s novels but failing to write Francesca Segal. (Photo courtesy of ABC/ her own. She is also the daughter of Karen and Erich Yet it is not Jacob, the ghostly father, but Law- Donna Svennevik.) Segal, to whom The Innocents is dedicated, though rence the flesh and blood one, who has the last she has not allowed her U.S. publishers to make word. It is Lawrence who suddenly reveals his vul- much of this fact. Many readers—especially those more adventurous types have settled in the re- nerability when financial catastrophe strikes their of a certain age—will nonetheless recall Erich Segal cently regentrified Georgian terraces of Islington law firm, but who also takes the younger man into as the distinguished classicist and popular novelist or in the ethnic, religious, and sexual cauldron of his confidence and treats him as an equal. It is also who wrote the 1970s bestseller Love Story. the East End. Lawrence who senses the danger that threatens his She was raised in the North Western Reform Ziva Schneider, a Holocaust survivor who daughter’s happiness and moves to protect Adam Synagogue in the Temple Fortune district of Lon- made a new life in Israel only to end up in London, from his desire for the seductive but unattainable don, and an analogue to that congregation seems to eating lunch every day at the Jewish Care survi- Ellie. And, in the final scene, it is Lawrence who, figure prominently in The Innocents, though Segal vors’ group, is the uncrowned queen of the novel. as family photographer, preserves for posterity the has subtly disguised it. Women sit in a separate gal- The memory of Bergen-Belsen casts a long shadow blissful moment when “the community would come lery, holidays are observed with great ceremony, but over the novel’s rites of passage: “I did not think I to celebrate with them and to learn the name that there is also room for adaptation and assimilation: would or could ever again live in Europe and noth- they had chosen for their little boy, as he entered One scene, for instance, takes place at a “Christ- ing can ever be certain,” Ziva tells Adam, as if to into this covenant of Abraham.” makah party.” Such an eclectic approach has its reinforce the symbolism of the Temple Fortune If fathers in this novel are associated with a risks, but her anatomy of North West London Jew- community’s name. sense of the tragic, the mothers are left to provide ish life might not have been as richly authentic if it Ziva’s daughter-in-law has been killed by a Pal- the comic relief. And The Innocents is a very funny had been limited to any one community. estinian suicide bomber, leaving her son Boaz a book, even if the mockery of the community is gen- grief-stricken wreck and her granddaughter Ellie tle rather than cruel. The account of Adam’s mother he Innocents opens with a Kol Nidre service, Schneider a virtual orphan. When the novel opens, Michelle’s anxieties about the “bittersweet prospect” Trevolves around a wedding, and ends with a Ellie has just arrived from New York to find that her of her son’s marriage is a good example:

Summer 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 33 Somewhere out there is a shiksa with designs on citadel of convention. You don’t need to be very Francesca Segal’s generous, garrulous, and utter- her son. Jewish men make good husbands. It is romantic to see why the repressed, dutiful Adam ly genuine group portrait of Anglo-Jewry may not the Jewish woman’s blessing as a wife, and her is attracted to this dangerous, damaged drifter. have given the world a one-liner as memorable as curse as a mother . . . but a nice Jewish girl, if What is less obvious is why she falls for him, too. her father’s “Love means never having to say you’re she’s nice enough, holds deeper terrors. If she’s Ellie is touched by the fact that Adam is so ready sorry.” But, in The Innocents, she has done some- all that they dreamed of for their beloved boy, to sacrifice everything for her. But her tender con- thing harder: She has written a love story in which she might make the mother redundant . . . You science and her vulnerability, the qualities that realizing that there are more important things in never lost a daughter when she married. But make him so protective of her, also make it im- life than romantic love is sometimes the only action Adam was the only man in her life. possible for her to steal him and thereby destroy worthy of a man. the family’s happiness. By granting him a glimpse or all its multilayered wisdom and wit, its sat- of life outside the ghetto, by affirming him sexu- Daniel Johnson is the founding editor of Standpoint, a Fire and sense, The Innocents is at heart a love ally and emotionally, Ellie has given Adam’s life London-based magazine. He was formerly the literary story. The most haunting character of all is Ellie, a three-dimensionality that it previously lacked, editor of The Times of London and is the author of White the femme fatale who lives in New York, which here even if he may occasionally long for her and won- King and Red Queen: How the Cold War Was Fought on functions as the very opposite of Edith Wharton’s der what might have been. the Chessboard (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Two or Three Concepts of Dignity

BY Alan Mittleman

psychologist Steven Pinker writes of “the stupidity omy. Dignity seems captive to a conservative moral Dignity: Its History and Meaning of dignity.” Indeed, there are many contemporary agenda with restrictive designs on sexual, reproduc- by Michael Rosen philosophers and ethicists who find any assertion tive, and end-of-life choices. Harvard University Press, 200 pp., $21.95 of specifically human dignity downright pernicious. In two important new books, both Michael Human dignity is the mark of “speciesism.” To de- Rosen and George Kateb are fully aware of such Human Dignity fend human dignity is therefore to take an immoral, challenges, but nonetheless each seeks to defend by George Kateb self-regarding view of human worth vis-à-vis other strong versions of human dignity. Rosen does so Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 256 pp., $22.95 creatures—so say Peter Singer and some other ani- by tracing several distinct historical strands of the mal rights theorists. (Martha Nussbaum would res- concept in Western thought, eventually settling on cue dignity by broadening its range: “Equal cross- a version of Kant’s defense of dignity. Kateb also species dignity,” she says, “is an attractive idea.”) For draws on the rich legacy of Western literature and ignity is a key term in many constitu- others, talk of human dignity shuts down options philosophy to advance his argument, but he works tions and human rights documents, ev- that ought to flow from human freedom and auton- in a more purely constructive, less historical mode. idently providing some of the concep- tual architecture for claims about rights osen shows that dignity—from the Dand liberties. Thus, the Israeli Basic Laws chukei ( RLatin dignitas—had a double mean- ha-yesod), Israel’s incipient constitution, speak of ing. It was both a status term, indicating a the “dignity of man and his liberty” (kavod ha-adam rank (high-born, for example) or a manner ve-cheruto); the German Basic Law (Grundgesetz) of comportment (serious rather than fool- proclaims that “human dignity (die Würde des Men- ish), and a claim about a “transcendental schen) shall be inviolable.” But what does “dignity” kernel” of worth that sets humans apart mean? What kind of property does it denote? Is it from animals. Both of these strands can be something about us that anchors our rights and found in Cicero’s Stoic philosophy. Thus, our claim to respect, or is it simply a way of talk- dignity could be used to contrast some ing about what it is to be treated with respect? Does human beings with others, and it could dignity justify respectful treatment of others, or is it be used to signify the value of all human merely a linguistic afterthought, a rhetorical echo of beings as such. These two strands always such treatment? Does the term bear moral weight? stand in tension with one another. When Perhaps dignity means too many different and dignity indicates status, some human be- competing things to have a clear role. People who ings are dignified, while others are not. are in favor of euthanasia speak of death with digni- When it indicates something essential, all ty, while their traditionalist opponents argue that it human beings have it in some mysterious is precisely dignity that precludes the taking of one’s way. own life. Pope John Paul II taught that the embryo, These two meanings persisted in Chris- from the instant of conception, has dignity. Dignity tian usage where, according to Pope Gela- is a key concept in the moral discourse of the church sius, the Catholic Church has a higher dig- across a broad range of issues. Meanwhile, gay nity than the state; the pope has a higher Catholics in the United States have taken the term dignity than the emperor (in the sense of as the name for their organization (DignityUSA), a status); but all human beings, especially group that is fiercely opposed by the Church hierar- the poor and humble, have dignity (in the chy. One might be excused for thinking that dignity sense of transcendent worth). As Catholi- obscures more than it reveals. cism knit these strands together, in Rosen’s So it is no surprise when the philosopher Ruth telling, dignity did not imply equality. Dig- Macklin calls dignity a “useless concept” or the Saint Thomas Aquinas by Carlo Crivelli, 1476. nity was compatible with a hierarchical,

34 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2013 non-democratic ordering of society. Everyone had a dignity requisite to his role, the butcher no less than the king. But some humans were more noble than others and properly so. The Catholic Church did not bring the two strands into harmony until Vatican II in the mid-20th century. Its embrace of the When dignity indicates status, some human beings new! are dignified, while others are not. When it indicates something essential, all human beings have it in some mysterious way. equal dignity of all persons reflects an acceptance of democratic norms. A third strand entered the Western discourse with Thomas Aquinas, who wrote of dignity as the intrinsic goodness of a thing. Thus, all creatures, insofar as they reflect divine goodness, and some practices, such as piety or learning, insofar as they honor God, possess dignity. Dignity is thus broad- ened to include animals and activities in a vision that is still compatible with hierarchy. To say, for ex- ample, that animals have dignity is not to imply that they have equal dignity with human beings. These strands come together in Kant, for whom all rational beings have dignity (Würde, cognate to the English word “worth”) insofar as they are capa- ble of morality. Morality is a dignity-laden practice, fidelity to which allows us to appreciate our inner worth, our transcendent kernel of value. It levels status distinctions and puts to rest the age-old ten- sion between the two concepts of dignity. When we revere the moral law, we respect those beings—our- Commentary selves—who are capable of fulfilling it. In this we find our unconditional worth, our dignity. Rosen goes on to show how Kant’s morality- conservative. based idea of human dignity has served in tandem with Catholic conceptions as the basis of some im- informative. influential. portant European legislation, with predictable re- sults. Since Kant’s approach is allied with the ability of human beings to act autonomously, it entails be- ing rational and adult, while the Catholic approach everywhere. requires that non-rational humans (such as fetuses) and other creatures have dignity. Rosen concludes with an argument for respecting the dignity of the remains of deceased persons. Why, introducing commentary complete! after all, should such remains—which no longer con- stitute a person and can neither be harmed nor ben- It’s all of Commentary 24/7. Print, website and iPad.... efitted by our treatment of them—receive any special treatment? Rosen’s answer is reminiscent of Kant’s in- You’ll get 11 issues of the print edition, plus famous view that it is impermissible to tell a lie, even 24/7 access to the iPad edition, website, and archive. if it would save someone’s life. For Kant, one must fol- low the imperative of honesty, come what may. It is All for one low price of $19.95! one’s own dignity that one would damage by lying to SubScribe online at commentarymagazine.com a murderer about the location (when one knows it) of his intended victim. For Rosen, one would injure one’s own dignity by acting in ways that fail to express respect. The corpse as such no longer has dignity nor does it make a strong claim of respect; we, however, Commentary have a duty to act in ways that show respect. Our own dignity is on the line.

Summer 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 35 n contrast to Rosen’s Kantian account, George vis one another but one of superior status and hence ings need to take their place in the natural world as IKateb argues that morality cannot fully encom- stature vis-à-vis nature. Both of these normative di- its responsible and dignified servants. pass human dignity. Kateb distinguishes between mensions, the moral and the existential, are jointly Kateb’s proposal would seem deeply indebted to moral values and “existential values.” Morality, required to secure the full logic of dignity. Violating the biblical tradition. The existential value that sets in his view, is a matter of preventing harm and a person’s rights is immoral, but it is also evil. Evil us apart from nature recalls the imago dei, the image mitigating suffering or, to put it more positively, enters along the existential axis: To diminish human of God that links us to transcendence while root- of treating others as we would wish to be treated. status, to offend against human stature, goes beyond ing us in embodied mortality. The raison d’être of The writ of morality ends where harm is prevented human life as service to nature recalls the narrative and suffering, within reasonable limits, is lessened. of the primeval pair of humans who are placed in Kateb asks us to imagine a “brave new world” To offend against human a garden that they are to keep and tend. Yet Kateb’s where people are generally happy, unmolested, stature goes beyond morality book is marked by an overt hostility to the Bible content with their narrow, chemically enhanced and indeed to any religious vision. At first he argues lives. Such a world would not be immoral, in his into what, if Kateb were not that we must do without religious props for human terms. It would, however, be deeply flawed. Thus, dignity on tactical grounds, since many people are Aldous Huxley’s famous dystopia would offend militantly secular, he might no longer religious. But this soon gives way to the against “existential” values, not moral ones, and it argument that religion actually vitiates human re- is in terms of both that human dignity is properly call sin. sponsibility by undermining the wonder that we understood. should feel toward nature. Although Rosen tends to According to Kateb, the “existential” value of morality into what, if Kateb were not militantly sec- slight the biblical foundation of the Catholic view, human dignity marks a distinction between human ular, he might call sin. he at least acknowledges the contribution that West- beings and all other creatures. Humans are the only Kateb is concerned lest his claims on behalf of ern religion made (and makes) toward propound- species that is not wholly natural. Humans stand the more than natural status of humanity be taken ing and defending dignity. Kateb sees religion as, at partially above nature. This is evident in our abil- as a license for species-wide self-aggrandizement. best, a distraction. ity to communicate in complex ways through lan- His solution is to justify humanity’s superiority to Rosen’s book is lively, useful, but not, in the end, guage, our ability to think about the world and our animal nature in terms of the value of serving na- profound. Kateb’s book is provocative and deep, but it role in it, the inward dimension of our conscious- ture. Despite its appalling treatment of nature since will also be deeply unsatisfying for a committed Jew or ness, and our liberty to act apart from an instinc- the Industrial Revolution, humanity must now ex- Christian. A contemporary Jewish philosophy worthy tual script. We are, as it were, the organs through press its dignity in stewardship of the natural world. of the name ought to offer a counterargument. which nature, which has produced us through the We are not only—through our rational conscious- accidents of biological evolution, comes to know ness—a means whereby nature comes to know it- itself. self; we must also be agents who protect and pre- Alan Mittleman is a professor of Jewish thought at the Moral value reveals our fundamental equality serve nature. Thus, alongside the work of morality, Jewish Theological Seminary. He is the author ofA Short as rights-bearers. But existential value reveals our both private and public (as embodied in conduct History of Jewish Ethics: Conduct and Character in the stature. Our status is one of radical equality vis-à- and policies that respect human rights), human be- Context of Covenant (Wiley-Blackwell).

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36 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2013 Readings The First Debate Over Religious Martyrdom

By James A. Diamond

eligious martyrdom is a complex and through those near to me, and I am glorified intimate with God, and I believed it would painful subject in the history of Juda- before all the people.’ And Aaron was silent,” me or you, but now I see that they [Aaron’s ism, but the general thrust of both the (Lev.10:3). sons] are greater than both of us.” And Aaron Bible and classical rabbinic theology is was rewarded for his silence. What was the toR value living for God over dying for Him. The Rashi, the most renowned and popular of all reward he received? God addressed him rabbinic tradition understands the verse “You medieval (and subsequent) biblical commentators, confidentially. shall keep my laws and statutes, so that man may practice them and live by them” (Lev. 18:5) to Rashi’s comment is a reaction to the apparent baselessness restrict the formal obligation to die rather than transgress a commandment solely to the cases of of Moses’ claim to have been privy to God’s words—“Where,” idolatry, sexual immorality, and murder. At a his- torical moment in which dying “in the name of Rashi asks, “did He speak this?” God” (and not infrequently killing others in the process) has become all too commonplace, it is views this exchange as one in which Moses provides Thus, Rashi answers his question by locating the worthwhile to return to a short biblical narrative, theological consolation and Aaron’s silence express- source of Moses’ apparent quotation in the Book which, when read closely, seems to subtly antici- es resignation. of Exodus when, to all appearances, God merely pate the rabbinic rejection of martyrdom as a su- As with many of Rashi’s readings, there is a tex- assured Moses that He would sanctify the Tent of preme religious value. tual problem that stimulates his comment. In this Meeting with His glory or presence. In this interpre- Chapter 9 of Leviticus depicts a national celebra- case it is the apparent baselessness of Moses’ claim tation, however, what God said in Exodus was that tion of the first sacrifices in the desert Tabernacle, to have been privy to God’s words: “Where,” Rashi the Tent will eventually be sanctified by the death of which climaxes with a spectacular expression of asks, “did He speak this?” His ingenious answer is to martyrs. So Moses comforts Aaron with the assur- divine approval: “Fire came forth from before the point to an apparently unrelated verse. Rashi writes: ance that God values martyrdom above all else, and Lord and consumed the burnt offering . . . And all that Nadav and Avihu are “greater than you and I.” the people saw, and shouted, and fell on their faces,” “And there I will meet with the Israelites; and Aaron’s silence indicates his deference to what we (Lev. 9:24). Jubilation, however, immediately turns it [the Tent] shall be sanctified by My glory” might call Moses’ theology of martyrdom. into anguish when, in the next verse, Aaron’s sons initiate their own sacrifices:

Now Aaron’s sons Nadav and Avihu each took his fire pan, put fire in it, and laid incense upon it; and they offered before the Lord alien fire, which He had not enjoined upon them. And fire came forth from the Lord, and consumed them; thus they died before the Lord,” (Lev. 10:1-2).

What does this literary repetition of the phrase “there came forth fire from before the Lord, and con- sumed” mean? In the case of animal sacrifices, the phrase generally means that a divine need has been satiated. Does the repetition signal, then, that in both the cases a divine need was satiated? Are these deaths the spiritual equivalents of animal sacrifices that are totally dedicated to God—the culmination of lives lived wholly in the service of the Lord? The narrative attributes Nadav and Avihu’s deaths to their personal celebration of the Taber- nacle’s dedication with an “alien fire.” However, the many rabbinic suggestions as to the motivation and background of their mysterious crime—ranging from political rebellion to disrespect, drunkenness, and bachelorhood—simply accentuate the inscrut- able injustice of their deaths. To understand the full import of this biblical “Consecration of Aaron and His Sons,” from the Holman Bible, 1890. episode, I think that we must pay close attention to the interplay between Moses and Aaron, Nadav and Avihu’s uncle and father respectively: (Ex. 29:43). Do not read it “by My glory,” but Rashi underlines this approach in his interpreta- rather “by My glorified ones.” Thus Moses tion of the second half of Moses’ citation, “and I am Then Moses said to Aaron, “This is what said to Aaron, “Aaron, my brother, I knew glorified before all the people.” Rashi writes, “When God spoke of when He said ‘I sanctify Myself that the House would be sanctified by those God punishes the righteous He becomes feared,

Summer 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 37 exalted, and acclaimed.” Whereas the preceding divine source for Moses’ statement in another bib- that must have stemmed from a deeply felt empathy phrase of Moses’ apparent quotation speaks of the lical book. Moreover, unlike both Rashi and Rash- for the other: “When Moses had grown up, he went intrinsic value of martyrdom as a sanctification of bam, he reads the exchange between Moses and his out to his brothers and witnessed their suffering,” God, this second phrase supplements it by speaking brother as one of opposition, not agreement. (Ex. 2:11). That suffering is captured in the stark of the public effect of martyrdom. Dying for God is Ramban points out that the biblical phrase “God brutality of the description at the end of the verse also a public relations coup for the divine cause. For of “an Egyptian man beating a Hebrew man, one of Rashi, then, the death of Aaron’s sons advanced the his brothers.” At this stage of Moses’ career, there cause of God and religion, providing a paradigm of Ramban’s comment allows is an exquisite ambiguity in the term “his broth- both God’s need for martyrs and the human need ers” which can refer to the Hebrews, his biological for martyrdom. the poignancy of Aaron’s brothers, or the Egyptians, his socio-cultural broth- ers. The next verse discloses the moral breach that ashi’s interpretation, however, is both philo- silence to emerge. Moses must negotiate in its reiteration of the term Rlogically and contextually problematic. One “man,” this time without any ethnic association— can scour the entire Exodus narrative in vain for spoke” can bear a figurative sense in addition to its lit- “He turned this way and that, and seeing no man any hint of this sentiment, let alone a direct en- eral one. It can mean “His decrees, His thought, and about, he struck down the Egyptian and hid him in dorsement of martyrdom. The extent of Rashi’s the manner of His ways.” In other words, Moses did the sand.” midrashic contortions, wrenching its source out of not quote God’s words verbatim to Aaron, but rath- The biblical description here delicately points both its narrative and grammatical contexts, high- er offered his own understanding of the manner in to the precise nature of the dilemma Moses con- lights his frustration with the lack of any source which God governs the world. Just as Rashbam views fronted. The community into which Moses ventures for Moses’ bold assertion. Moreover, the root of the Moses in his capacity as a posek or halakhic decisor, is populated by human beings defined in terms of Hebrew word used to describe Aaron’s reaction, Ramban views him as a theologian. In both cases their ethnic or national identities rather than their which is commonly rendered as “silence,” often connotes a response that is silent but far from ac- quiescent or accommodating. For example, the word is used in the song at the splitting of the Red Sea to capture the overpower- ing dread that petrifies the Egyptians: “Terror and dread descend upon them, through the might of Your arm they are still as stone,” (Ex. 15:16). The prophet Amos employs it as a principled reaction to the moral chaos of a systemically corrupt soci- ety: “At such a time, the prudent man keeps silent, for it is an evil time” (Amos 5:13). The prudent observer described by the prophet is certainly not in agreement with what he witnesses. Read in this context, Aaron’s silence is more likely an expression of astonishment at his brother’s insipid attempt at comfort. This is, in fact, how the Septuagint under- stands the verse, translating it as “his heart was pricked” or “shocked.” Rashi’s view did not go unchallenged. His own grandson, Rashbam, notorious for disavowing his grandfather’s midrashic approach in favor of the peshat, or literal sense, categorically rejects this in- terpretation of Moses’ “comfort.” According to him, Moses’ response has nothing to do with the virtue of martyrdom. Rather, when Moses said, “This is what God spoke of when He said ‘I sanctify Myself “The Death of Nadav and Avihu” by James Tissot, ca. 1896. through those near to me, and I am glorified before all the people,’” he was alluding to the priestly laws of mourning, which call for the High Priest to refrain Moses does not cite but interprets. This, of course, shared humanity. Moses sees no one who is simply from overt expressions of bereavement because of radically changes the whole tenor of the exchange. a “man” who could resolve the crisis, and thus ex- his position as a representative of God. As in Rashi, Moses is still articulating a theology of presses his own humanity in a supreme act of resis- According to Rashbam, then, Moses was mak- martyrdom, but Ramban allows the poignancy of tance to suffering and injustice. Moses sacrifices his ing a halakhic statement about how Aaron should Aaron’s silence to emerge as an anguished dissent. promising future among the very upper echelons of behave, not a theological one about what Aaron Comfort is transformed into confrontation. the ruling class and risks death, not for the sake of should believe about the death of his sons: “Do not God or religion, but for the sake of another human mourn, do not cry and do not refrain from [priest- eading the Pentateuch as a coherent uni- being. ly] service.” The description of Aaron’s response, Rfied composition in its final redacted form, as Any sense that Moses’ act can be attributed to “and Aaron was silent,” then goes on to describe Rashi, Rashbam, and Ramban surely did, reveals tribal allegiance rather than moral outrage is quick- his priestly restraint from public grief in accord a complicated and very human portrait of Moses ly dispelled by his very next intervention: “When with Moses’ instruction. from his birth in Exodus to his death at the end he went out the next day, he found two Hebrews Another of the great medieval commentators, of Deuteronomy. Within this narrative, I would fighting, so he said to the offender, ‘Why do you the 13th-century kabbalist, Talmudist, and biblical argue, Moses’ self-assured advocacy of a theology strike your fellow?’” (Ex. 2:13) Finally, in a third commentator Moses ben Nachman, or Ramban, of martyrdom is a betrayal of his own beginnings, act against injustice that often goes unnoticed, who was Rashi’s equal in stature if not in popu- indeed everything that qualified him to be the pro- though it is described only a few verses later, Mo- larity, offers an entirely different perspective. As is phetic leader and liberator of his people. ses challenges male tyranny over women: “And the often the case in his commentary, Ramban offers a Moses’ career was launched by a willingness to shepherds came and drove them away; but Moses trenchant critique of Rashi’s interpretation. In par- die for others rather than God. His premiere act was stood up and helped them, and watered their flock,” ticular he targets Rashi’s implausible location of the a violent protest against suffering and oppression (Ex. 2:17). These three decisive, revolutionary acts

38 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2013 introduce us to an iconoclastic Moses who is will- theology would be “good in God’s eyes.” Aaron’s cri- righteous constitute a form of atonement. ing to sacrifice himself for other human beings. It tique finally silences Moses, jolting him out of his Unfortunately, the tragic course of Jewish his- is precisely this willingness, not his dedication to zealousness for the divine and returning him to his tory transformed the conception of martyrdom and God, that inspires God’s choice of him to be the original care for others: “Moses heard and it was elevated it to a positive religious value. Such was national liberator and recipient of revelation. God’s good in his eyes,” (Leviticus 10:20). The change in the case at the siege of Masada in ancient times and choice of Moses is a consequence, not a cause, of whose perspective “goodness” is determined cap- later, in the First Crusades, when fathers killed their these courageous acts. tures this return to Moses’ humanist beginnings. children rather than leaving them vulnerable to marauding crusaders and eventual baptism before killing themselves to “sanctify the Name.” (Rashi, Aaron’s critique finally silences Moses, jolting him out who lived through these events, may have had them in mind in his interpretation of Moses and Aaron’s of his zealousness for the divine and returning him to his exchange.) original care for others. However, this valorization of martyrdom was always inconsistent with mainstream Jewish theology, as is evident from the tortuous halakhic From that point forward, however, in the biblical The caustic rebuke to consider what is good “in rationalizations that followed, as historian Haym narrative, Moses’ increasing closeness to God often God’s eyes” causes Moses to turn to what is good Soloveitchik has shown. R. Naftali Tzvi Yehuda seems to threaten to displace his initial human (one “in his eyes,” that is what is humanly good. Ironic- Berlin, the dean of the famous yeshiva in Volozhin might even say humanist) ideals. This reaches its ally, Rashi’s comment to this verse actually captures and one of the most prominent rabbinic personal- nadir in the misguided “comfort” he offers to Aar- Moses’ reversal: “He confessed and was not embar- ities of the 19th century, once declared his prefer- on. At this stage of Moses’ religious development, rassed to say he did not hear.” The arrogance of his ence for “worshipping God by fulfilling the com- his sensitivity to others, even a person as close as initial claim of hearing God speak is transformed mandments while I am still alive,” over dying for a brother, is completely overwhelmed by religious into the humility of a public admission of not hear- God. The name of God is sanctified when life is zeal. Inspired by Ramban’s critique of Rashi, I in- ing. Aaron’s human “speaking” overcomes the div- preserved, not when it is proclaimed great an in- terpret Aaron’s silence as repudiation, not acqui- ine word that had so occluded Moses’ previous stant before life is obliterated. escence. The exchange described in Leviticus 10:3 sensitivity to human need. is really a struggle for the theological direction of Although in my reading this biblical debate is re- Judaism. Will it be animated by a spirit of compas- solved in favor of Aaron and against religious mar- James A. Diamond holds the Joseph & Wolf Lebovic sion for others so that life can endure or by a mar- tyrdom, the matter was by no means settled for all Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Waterloo tyrdom that upholds the honor of God? time. The two theological stances remain in tension. and is currently a fellow at the NYU Tikvah Center for The ancient philosopher Philo viewed Aaron’s sons’ Law & Jewish Civilization. He has authored a number of n the aftermath of their exchange, Moses in- deaths as “perfect burnt offerings,” while the medi- books on medieval Jewish thought. His forthcoming book Istructs Aaron and his remaining two sons, El- eval Zohar, the canonical text of Kabbalah, cites is From Maimonides to Kafka: Reshaping the Jewish eazar and Itamar, in the legal minutiae of sacrifi- them as endorsing the notion that the deaths of the Canon (Cambridge University Press). cial rites. No other ritual signifies pure devotion to God more than animal sacrifice. It appears that Moses’ passion for God has become so intense that it has overwhelmed his compassion for others. In the very shadow of Aaron’s inconsolable loss, he rages at their failure to comply with those regula- tions. The repeated biblical description of Eleazar Middle East Quarterly and Itamar as “Aaron’s remaining sons” here (Lev. 10:12, 16) seems to convey Moses’ intimation that these two might very well share the same fate as Edited by Efraim Karsh, their brothers. published by Daniel Pipes, Moses has become so preoccupied with ritual that he has lost touch with human relationships. the Middle East Quarterly $12 Aaron, pushed beyond the limits, finally breaks his takes an in-depth look at how silence with a rhetorical question that shocks Moses the U.S. government denies out of his religious stupor: SPRING 2013 V Islam’s role in terror. Denying Islam’s OLUME 20, NUMBER 2 Role in Terror Israel in the World Efraim Inbar And Aaron spoke to Moses “See, this day they Decreasing Isolation Daniel Pipes P.R. Kumaraswamy brought their sin offering and their burnt Warming Relations with India The MEQ brings you Why the Denial? offering before the Lord, and such things have groundbreaking studies, Riyadh’s Atomic Ambitions Teri Blumenfeld Naser al-Tamimi befallen me! Had I eaten sin offering today, Obstacles to Nuclearization Problems in the FBI Yoel Guzansky would it have been good in God’s eyes?” And exclusive interviews, Can It Buy the Bomb? when Moses heard this, it was good in his eyes, David J. Rusin insightful commentary, Eyal Zisser (Lev. 10:19-20). Problems in No End in Sight for Syria and hard-hitting reviews the U.S. Military Dawn Perlmutter The Politics of Muslim Magic on politics, economics, Hilal Khashan As Rashbam points out here, Aaron is appris- Hezbollah’s Goals Reviews by ing Moses of the impropriety of setting the prece- culture, and religion Alfoneh, Dann, Maddy-Weitzman, Phelps, and Schwartz dent for all future offerings with a celebration that across a region from has been hideously marred by tragedy. The future of Jewish worship and theology must be shaped by Morocco to Afghanistan. human needs and human responses, by care and compassion for others, not otherworldly devotion. Moses initially spoke in the name of God, cer- READ IT TODAY! tain that his theology of martyrdom was divinely Web: www.MEForum.org endorsed, so Aaron now pointedly asks whether his stubborn insistence on the implications of that

Summer 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 39 Proust Between Halakha and Aggada

BY Adam Kirsch

haim Nachman Bialik is often thought fact, is typically modernist: He is attempting to make realize his vocation—a vocation which he describes of as a celebrant of aggada. He was, after art a source of metaphysical value, in a way that reli- in religious terms, as an ethical and absolute duty. all, the editor of the influential anthology gion used to be. But it is by no means clear that art is Proust’s greatest statement of this theme comes Sefer Ha-Aggada, and in his poem “To powerful enough to compel either the adherence or in the famous passage in The Captive describing Cthe Aggada” he describes rabbinic lore and legend as a resource for the imaginative renewal of Jewish Each has achieved the kind of reward he hoped for: Bialik culture. It is noteworthy, then, that in his famous 1916 essay “Halakha and Aggada” Bialik mounts became the national poet of a Jewish state; Proust became an equally strong defense of halakha. This is not be- cause he finds halakha more appealing than aggada. the international novelist of the modern world. “Halakha wears a frown, aggada a smile,” the essay begins. “The one is pedantic, severe, unbending— the intellectual creativity characteristic of traditional the death of the writer Bergotte. Once a writer dies, all justice; the other is accommodating, lenient, pli- Judaism. Once you start to treat halakha as aggada, Proust wonders, what does it matter whether he able—all mercy.” law as literature, it loses the force that made it halakha wrote well or badly, since he will never know the Yet Bialik denies that law and literature can real- in the first place. fate of his works in this world? What he is grappling ly be separated in this way. They are, he writes, “two with is the disparity between the artist’s sense of his sides of a single shield.” Indeed, the essay goes on to here will never be more than a few people in commitment, which is absolute and infinite, and reconceive halakha itself as an art form whose mate- Teach generation for whom literature has the the finite, transitory nature of all human achieve- rial was the body, physical and social, of the Jewish force of law, for whom, as Bialik puts it, “real art” ment. In other words, Proust is asking a religious people. “Halakha is, no less than aggada, a creative is “like Torah.” In Bialik’s generation, one of those question, and he ends up giving what is essentially process,” Bialik insists. “It is the supreme form of few was surely Marcel Proust. The two writers are a religious answer: art—the art of life and of living. Its medium is the not often thought of together, but they were near- living man, with all his impulses; its instrument is contemporaries; Bialik was born in 1873, Proust in He was dead. Dead forever? Who can say? education, individual, social, and national; its prod- 1871. And Proust’s seven-volume novel, À la recher- Certainly, experiments in spiritualism offer uct is a continuous chain of goodly life and action.” che du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), is among us no more proof than the dogmas of religion Later in the essay, Bialik suggests that the en- many other things the story of an artist coming to that the soul survives death. All that we can ergies that other peoples devoted to the creation say is that everything is arranged in this life of concrete works of art—what he calls “works of as though we entered it carrying a burden of marble to delight men’s senses”—were devoted by obligations . . . which to have no sanction in our the Jews to the fashioning of the national charac- present life, seem to belong to a different world, ter. “I do not decide whose work is better,” Bialik a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, concludes, “but I think that both are works of cre- self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from ative art, forms made material, ideas raised from this one and which we leave in order to be born the potential to the actual by the creative spirit on this earth, before perhaps returning there of man.” Shabbat, he insists, is a greater artwork to live once again beneath the sway of those than the cathedral of Notre Dame, and Shabbat is unknown laws which we obeyed because we the product of halakha: bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there—those laws There are one hundred and fifty-seven double to which every profound work of the intellect pages in Tractate Shabbat, and one hundred brings us nearer and which are invisible only— and five in Eruvin, and in both there is next if then!—to fools. to no aggada; for the most part they consist of discussions of the minutiae of the thirty-nine Even as Proust explicitly rejects religion, kinds of work and their branches, and on the he invokes metaphysics: specifically, the Pla- limits within which it is permissible to carry tonic scheme of a life that preexists this one, on the Sabbath . . . What weariness of the flesh! which we spend in the company of pure Ideas What waste of good wits on every trifling point! and for which we long unceasingly in this fall- But when I turn over those pages and see the en world. The Idea serves Proust in the same way various groups of tannaim and amoraim at their that halakha serves Bialik: Both are attempts to work, I say to myself that these whom I see reconstitute the kind of absolute authority that are in very truth artists of life in the throes of is missing from the secular world. And both are creation . . . Every one of those men did his own invoked, as they have to be, only hypothetically. part of the task according to his own bent and For Bialik, we must live as if we believed halakha inclination, and all of them were bowed before were divine, in order to create a noble national life; an overmastering higher will. for Proust, we must live as if we believed in a world “entirely different from this one,” in order to create a There is, however, a dubious ambiguity in the noble work of art. phrase “higher will.” For observant Jews, that will is What separates the two, of course, is their choice God’s. For Bialik, it can be conceived only as a kind of metaphors. Bialik uses a Jewish metaphor, and of spirit of history, working through the individual what he looks for is a collective Jewish redemption; to create a collective idea. What Bialik is doing, in Marcel Proust. (Illustration by Mark Anderson.) Proust uses a Greek metaphor, and what he looks

40 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2013 for is the individual salvation of the artist. And it blanche, was largely produced by Jews, including the vices of the Jewish social climber, struggling to as- is hard not to suppose that this difference helps to the future Socialist prime minister Léon Blum. At similate to French society: He is pretentious, ill-bred, explain the difference in the reputations of these a time when, Tadié notes, the Jewish population of pushy, and insecure. The portrait of Bloch is so un- two writers. Each has achieved the kind of reward France was some eighty-six thousand, out of a total remittingly awful that it is never quite clear why the he hoped for: Bialik became the national poet of a of forty million, it is clear that Proust’s milieu was Narrator should want to be his friend in the first place. Jewish state; Proust became the international novel- highly unrepresentative of France, but absolutely It is tempting to read Bloch as Proust’s projection ist of the modern world. typical of an assimilated Jewish haute bourgeoisie. and exorcism of all the negative traits with which The significance of these facts is more than bio- his own Jewishness seemed to threaten him. Yet any et it is possible to see Proust’s life, too, as an such assessment is complicated by the cunning and Yarchetypal Jewish story. His father, Adrien teasing self-awareness of Proust the novelist. For if Proust, was a French Catholic. Proust was baptized we are about to claim with triumph, or even indig- and raised a Catholic and always considered him- nation, that Proust has concealed his fears about his self one. But his mother, Jeanne Weil, was the de- own Jewishness by transferring them to Bloch, we scendant of German Jews, originally from Wurt- are faced with the fact that the chief item in the nov- temberg. It was Proust’s great-grandfather, Baruch el’s indictment of Bloch is precisely his concealment Weil, who first moved the family to France, during of his Jewishness. the Napoleonic period, when he came to Paris to This is demonstrated in a painful scene in The become a successful manufacturer of porcelain. As Guermantes Way. We are in the drawing room of any reader of Proust knows, it was his mother who Madame de Villeparisis, where Bloch has been was his closest companion throughout his life and tempting fate by constantly bringing up the Dreyfus the deepest emotional and intellectual influence Affair. Finally, a nobleman puts him in his place: on him. He also resembled her physically, which explains why his friends often referred to his “Per- “Forgive me, Monsieur, if I don’t discuss the sian” or “Assyrian” looks, both of which were eu- Dreyfus case with you; it is a subject which, phemisms for Jewish. on principle, I never mention except among And the more you examine Proust’s social back- Japhetics [i.e., Christians].” Everyone smiled, ground and friendships, the clearer it becomes that except Bloch, not that he was not himself in he moved in a milieu that was extensively Jewish. the habit of making sarcastic references to his This fact is reflected inSwann’s Way: Jewish origin, to that side of his ancestry which came from somewhere near Sinai. But instead It is true that my grandfather made out that, of one of these remarks (doubtless because he whenever I formed a strong attachment to any did not have one ready) the trigger of his inner one of my friends and brought him home with mechanism brought to Bloch’s lips something me, that friend was invariably a Jew; to which quite different. And all one heard was: “But he would not have objected on principle— how on earth did you know? Who told you?” indeed his own friend Swann was of Jewish as though he had been the son of a convict. extraction—had he not found that the Jews Whereas, given his name, which had not exactly whom I chose as friends were not usually of a Christian sound, and his face, his surprise the best type. And so whenever I brought a argued a certain naïvety. new friend home my grandfather seldom failed to start humming the “O, God of our fathers” This is the ultimate humiliation for Bloch, but from La Juive, or else “Israel, break thy chains,” Chaim Nachman Bialik. (Illustration by Mark not for the reason he thinks. He is embarrassed be- singing the tune alone, of course, to an “um-ti- Anderson.) cause he is identified as a Jew; we are even more em- tum-ti-tum, tra-la”; but I used to be afraid that barrassed for him because he was deluded enough my friend would recognise it and be able to graphical. For Proust, Jews in the high society of the to think that he might pass for a Christian. All the reconstruct the words. Third Republic occupy a peculiar role: They are in it sacrifices of self-respect that he has made in pursuit but never truly of it, and the advent of the Dreyfus of assimilation have done nothing but strip him It is not especially clear why the Narrator of In Affair midway through the novel emphasizes how of his dignity. And it is Proust, who in the course Search of Lost Time, who famously both is and is not high the barriers to acceptance remain. The great ex- of this very novel so completely conceals his own Proust and who is never said to be Jewish, should ample of this is Charles Swann, whose Jewish ances- Jewish ancestry, who has created this unforgettable have so many Jewish friends. But it makes perfect try does not stop him from becoming a friend of the scene of false consciousness and self-delusion. sense that Proust, from an assimilated half-Jewish Prince of Wales and a member of the Jockey Club. Yet The novel, one might say, lays out two paths for family, should have had so many friends at lycée when the Dreyfus Affair divides France, Swann finds Jews seeking to assimilate to French society. One is who were from identical backgrounds—including himself driven to take Dreyfus’ side, thus putting the path of Swann and, implicitly, of the Narrator: to Jacques Bizet and Daniel Halévy, both of whom himself at odds with most of his friends and jeopar- be truly exceptional, so innately gracious (and, not were grandsons of the composer of the opera La dizing his unique place in society. incidentally, so rich) as to win a provisional accep- Juive, Fromental Halévy. It was Jacques Bizet’s Swann, we learn in passing late in the novel, had tance that is always capable of being revoked. The mother—born Geneviève Halévy, she would end one Jewish grandparent—enough to mark him out other is the path of Bloch, which is to say, of the Jew up as Mme. Emile Straus—who introduced Proust permanently from the aristocracy, but not enough who is not exceptional: This is the path of prolonged to the society and salon world. Mme. Straus was to shape his character in ways that would make him humiliation and submission, to the point of denying a partial model for the Duchesse de Guermantes, repellent to them. This is not the case with the other one’s own origins. the dazzling society hostess whose wit is her great- main Jewish character in In Search of Lost Time, the What is not canvassed in the novel, except per- est charm. Thus, as Proust’s biographer Jean-Yves Narrator’s lifelong friend, Bloch. The Narrator first haps inadvertently, is a third possibility. That possi- Tadié writes, the Guermantes wit was really “the meets Bloch when they are students, and he is im- bility can be glimpsed in the comic scenes in which Halévy wit, which Marcel had heard ever since he pressed by his friend’s ostentatiously sophisticated Bloch heavily drops the name of Sir Rufus Israels, a was an adolescent.” literary judgments. But Proust the writer never ceases Rothschild-like figure who represents an unimagi- Later in life, Proust’s great love, the composer to make clear what the Narrator doesn’t seem to re- nable peak of power and influence to the Blochs. Reynaldo Hahn, was also the son of mixed Jew- alize: that Bloch is a repulsive person and in ways, The joke, always at Bloch’s expense, is that the peo- ish and Catholic parents. And the magazine where moreover, that fit anti-Semitic caricatures like a glove. ple he is trying to impress with this half-invented he published some of his earliest stories, La revue The product of a close-knit Jewish family, he has all connection find Israels distinctly déclassé.

Summer 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 41 But could there be, the reader wonders, a Jew- ne response to this situation might be offered their addiction to music, for instance, and go to hear ish society in which the Israels would occupy a Oby Bialik’s message in “Halakha and Agga- the same piece performed eight times, precisely be- peak position, analogous to the one the Guerman- da.” Bialik, writing in Odessa for a Hebrew- and cause they do not have a true, vital experience of the tes occupy in French society? This is really a way of Yiddish-speaking audience, belonged to the very music they are hearing. asking whether there could be a way to express and kind of Jewish society that Benjamin and Proust The distinction comes to a point in a significant satisfy, without renouncing one’s Jewishness, the had anxiously left behind. In adjuring Jewish writ- scene late in the novel, in Time Regained, when the desires for status, prestige, and achievement that ers to make use of the Talmud, he was insisting Narrator encounters M. on the streets of Paris dur- drive all the characters in In Search of Lost Time. This question is closely connected to the question This is a strange and telling moment in Rose’s argument, about Proust as a Jewish writer. For the Narrator of In Search of Lost Time, literature and culture are for there is nothing degraded or parodic about Temple, inevitably and exclusively French and European literature and culture: His intellectual points of circumcision, or the Hebrew tongue. reference are Racine and Giotto, just as his social points of reference are the Guermantes. In such that a literature could have modern form and Jew- ing World War I. In the course of their conversation circumstances, there is no reason for a writer such ish content—a combination that for Proust would about the war and its effects, Charlus complains that as Proust to insist on, or even remember, the Jew- have seemed impossible or nonsensical and of the great French cathedrals—the very ones invoked ish half of his identity. Jewishness is a void, a past, a which Bialik himself seems less than certain. by Bialik as masterpieces of art—are threatened by condition, when the goal of life and art is to be un- One cannot imagine Proust paging through the fighting. He deplores the loss of “all that mixture conditioned and self-created. In just the same way, Tractate Shabbat in search of inspiration. Yet there of art and still-living history that was France,” and there is no benefit for Bloch in acknowledging his is a fundamental agreement between Proust and says that if the cathedral of Amiens is lost, with it Jewishness, when everything he wants in life—rec- Bialik about the ethics of art and its proper rela- will go “the loftiest affirmation of faith and energy ognition, honor, grace—is seen as the possession tion to life. Remember that Bialik, in affirming ever made.” of French aristocrats. the value of halakha, argued that the creation of a The Narrator has been fulsome in his praise This is a recurring issue for European Jewish goodly and Godly way of life was just as much an and description of several cathedrals over the long writers and artists. Walter Benjamin, who translated artistic task as the creation of Notre Dame. And he course of the novel, so it is rather surprising when some of À la recherche into German, was the author saw this elevation of life over art as a specifically he dissents from Charlus’ complaint:

“You mean its symbol, Monsieur,” I interrupted. “And I adore certain symbols no less than you do. But it would be absurd to sacrifice to the symbol the reality that it symbolises. Cathedrals are to be adored until the day when, to preserve them, it would be necessary to deny the truths that they teach . . . Do not sacrifice men to stones whose beauty comes precisely from their having for a moment given fixed form to human truths.”

Couldn’t this elevation of “human truths” above works of art be seen as Proust’s own decision for halakha over aggada—for life and experience over monument and symbol? Indeed, reading this pas- sage in conjunction with Bialik’s praise of Shab- bat, I’m reminded of the way the rabbis deduce the thirty-nine melakhot, the categories of labor for- bidden on Shabbat, from the activities of the Isra- elites when they built the mishkan, or Tabernacle, in the desert. The mishkan, of course, was a kind of building, a splendid and magnificent one, the Notre Some of Proust’s notes and doodles for Swann’s Way. (© Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Dist. Dame of the Israelites. After the Roman destruction RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.) of the Temple in Jerusalem, in the year 70 C.E., there could be no such building at the heart of Jewish life. Instead, just as Bialik says, the structure was made of one of the classic essays on the novelist, “The Jewish value. “Our concern is with halakha . . . as dynamic: It remained a work of art, only its medium Image of Proust.” In that essay, he praises Proust’s a concrete and definite form of actual life, of a life was no longer wood and cloth, but a set of practices, “intransigent French spirit” and says, “Since the which is not in the clouds, which does not depend a way of life. It went, Bialik might say, from aggada spiritual exercises of Loyola there has hardly been a on vague feeling and beautiful phrases alone, but to halakha. There is something about Proust that more radical attempt at self-absorption.” The terms, has physical reality and physical beauty,” he writes. suggests he would have understood and approved the coordinates of judgment and reference are once Just as aggada is for the sake of halakha, so art is this transformation. He, too, believed that what we again exclusively Christian and French. Nowhere in for the sake of life. do and feel is more important than what we build the essay does Benjamin acknowledge that he is a Proust is easy to think of as an aesthete. After and make—or, rather, that our creations are impor- Jewish critic writing about a part-Jewish writer—or all, so much of his novel is devoted to luxurious de- tant only to the extent that they memorialize and that both of them are only a few generations re- scriptions of seascapes and hawthorn bushes, and preserve our experience. moved from traditional German Jewish life. This of invented novels and violin sonatas. Yet he always might well account for some of their shared beliefs insists that for him, too, art is not a final value, but t’s no wonder that the question of Proust’s Jew- and attitudes, for instance, the metaphysical wor- a penultimate one; it is valuable to the extent that it Iishness, and Jewishness in Proust, still has the ship of art, which, for several generations of Euro- preserves and grants a richer form of experience. He power to excite strong feeling among Jews today, pean Jews, seemed to be the only realm in which reserves his greatest scorn for the kind of people he since it touches on the very questions of belonging they had been truly emancipated. calls “celibates of art”—those who loudly proclaim and identity, culture and heritage, which continue

42 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2013 to define Jewish life. The strength of these feel- his very debate has played out, fascinatingly ings can be seen in Jacqueline Rose’s recent book Tand a bit ominously, in the work of Alain Ba- Proust Among the Nations. Rose makes much of diou, who is often described as the greatest living the conversation between the Narrator and the French philosopher. Badiou presents in a formal, “Seriously funny, Baron Charlus, just after Bloch’s humiliation at the philosophical language the same idea that Rose Marquise de Villeparisis’ party. Charlus insists on advances through her reading of Proust: the idea humorously serious, referring to Bloch as a “foreigner,” despite the Nar- that the word “Jew” is only a predicate, or, better, rator’s insistence that he is French. He then goes that it should be only a predicate. In a series of ar- scholarly, witty on to apply this view of Jewish foreignness to the ticles collected in his recent book Polemics, Badiou Dreyfus Affair, holding that Dreyfus should in argues that there are two opposed meanings con- and wise.” fact be found innocent of the charge of treason: “I cealed in the word Jew. One is the Jew as defined by believe the newspapers say that Dreyfus has com- community, tradition, and politics, one might say, —Kirkus Reviews mitted a crime against his country . . . the crime is as defined by him or herself. To Badiou, as to Rose, non-existent. This compatriot of your friend would this is a corrupt and implicitly oppressive use of have committed a crime if he had betrayed Judaea, the word, because it allows Jewishness to be a posi- but what has he to do with France? . . . Your Drey- tive identity, and positive identity is the source of fus might rather be convicted of a breach of the ethnic violence and partition, notably, though not laws of hospitality.” only, in Israel and Palestine. For Rose, this demonstrates the logic of anti- Badiou describes this “bad” Jewishness, in a Semitism: Jews are irreducibly foreign, alien to the rather Charlusian spirit, as “bolstered by the tripod body of France, and therefore deserve elimination. of the Shoah, the State of Israel, and the Talmu- She shows that Charlus’ argument was stated al- dic Tradition—the SIT.” This is Charlusian in part most word for word by the leading anti-Semite because of its aggressive crankishness, but more Édouard Drumont during the Dreyfus Affair. The because Badiou assumes that these things, which logic of otherness is, for Rose, already the logic of indeed are at the core of Jewishness, are somehow expulsion and—to use a word loaded with contem- sinister and discreditable. His own mission, he porary political resonance—partition. That is why says, is “liberating the word Jew from the triplet the lesson she draws from the Dreyfus Affair is the SIT”: that is, of giving Jew a new definition which need to oppose any kind of national partition and has nothing to do with the ones Jews give it. In- separation, which she sees as strictly an artifact deed, for Badiou, a good Jew is precisely one who of language: “The Jew is only what he is—stands opposes all the other Jews, because he breaks with distinct from the rest of the culture and from ev- his own form of ethnic particularism in the name erybody else within it—because of the illusions of an absolute universalism. Or, as Badiou writes, we entertain about the permanence of words,” she “from the apostle Paul to Trotsky, including Spi- writes. noza, Marx and Freud, Jewish communitarianism The word makes the Jew. It is from this point has only underpinned creative universalism in so of view that Rose understands Charlus’ venomous far as there have been new points of rupture with reference to “some great festival in the Temple, a it.” He goes on to add that, “It is clear that today’s “One of the most interesting and insightful circumcision, or some Hebrew chants.” These are, equivalent of Paul’s religious rupture with estab- books about comedy I’ve ever read. I learned she writes, “epithets which hand over the Jew to lished Judaism . . . is a subjective rupture with the a lot, and I laughed a lot.” a degraded, parodic form of ancestral belonging: State of Israel.” —B. J. Novak, writer and actor, The Office Temple, circumcision, and the Hebrew tongue.” What goes unspoken, but not perhaps unin- “Barely concealed beneath these fantasies,” she tended, is the fact that Paul’s rupture with Judaism writes, “there is, of course, a logic of expulsion.” did not lead him to an absolute universalism; it led “Ruth Wisse’s electrifying undressing of This is a strange and telling moment in Rose’s ar- him to Christianity, that is, another particularism Jewish wit catapults us well past Freud’s far gument, for from another point of view—which is that was hostile to Jewish particularism. (The same more inhibited perceptions and into the the point of view I think most Jews would take— is true of Marx’s and Trotsky’s Communism.) The naked precincts of tragic insight. Riffing there is nothing degraded or parodic about Temple, lesson here for Jews is that there is no such thing as a through the laughter thrown up by the circumcision, or the Hebrew tongue. These are, in concrete universal. Or, perhaps, that every concrete interpenetrations of language, history, and fact, essential components of Jewishness. Charlus identity has an equal claim to participate in univer- the political culture of variegated societies, only has the power to turn them into “epithets” if sal human identity. Likewise, when Bloch sought to Wisse uncovers subversion, paradox, he is addressing someone—like Bloch, or the Nar- shed his Jewishness in the belief that French society fright, anger, grief, and the often defeated rator, or perhaps certain readers—for whom the was absolute society, or when a post-Jewish writer imagination of reversal. Tickle the funny words represent a parochial past that it is necessary like Proust paid no attention to Jewish culture on the bone long enough, she warns, and hilarity to flee in order to achieve full recognition and full grounds that French culture was absolute culture, will soon expose dread. This stirringly humanity. Otherwise, they would be no more in- they were only putting a greater distance between original study of Jewish joking reveals the sulting than if Bloch were to speak of Charlus, a pi- themselves and the goal they posited. darker irony that underlies the comedic ous Catholic, as having been baptized or knowing Where Bloch and Rose and Badiou meet is in ironies of the Jewish mind at play.” Latin chants. their belief that there is a key—assimilation, eman- —Cynthia Ozick What is at stake here is the difference between cipation, universalism—that will release the Jew Library of Jewish Ideas Jewishness as an identity and Jewishness as a mere from Jewishness. That there is no key does not Cosponsored by the Tikvah Fund Cloth $24.95 978-0-691-14946-2 predicate. If it is true that the word makes the Jew, mean that the Jew is locked in a prison. It means he then the power to define Jewishness will always is in a place that he can leave as often as he wants, be held by the anti-Semite, or at least by the non- but to which he always eventually returns—which Jewish world. If, on the other hand, the Jew is made is another definition of a home. by more than his name, if he is constituted by tra- dition, text, belief, nationhood, culture, any of the other components of identity, in short by halakha Adam Kirsch is a senior editor at The New Republic See our E-Books at and aggada broadly construed, then it is the Jew and a columnist for Tablet. His most recent book is Why press.princeton.edu who has the power to define and apply his name. Trilling Matters (Yale University Press).

Summer 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 43 Lost & Found Culture and Education in the Diaspora

BY Hayim Greenberg

n the years following the establishment of the The full transcript of Greenberg’s address originally their dispersion with a sort of “at-homeness” in an State of Israel, Prime Minister David Ben- appeared in Jewish Frontier (December 1951) XVIII: alien environment . . . Portugal and the Netherlands, Gurion repeatedly voiced his desire to see young 12. This excerpt is from a larger work in progressFree Spain and Turkey in the 15th and 16th centuries were American Jews immigrate to Israel. Ben-Gurion’s Associations: Selected Essays of Hayim Greenberg— all, in principle, exiles. Yet it was not mere accident remarksI led to a public dispute with Jacob Blaustein, A Critical Edition, edited by Mark A. Raider. Professor that refugees fled from the Iberian peninsula to the president of the American Jewish Committee, which Raider teaches modern Jewish history at the University Low Countries or to the Ottoman Empire. One ex- was eventually resolved through the “Blaustein- Ben-Gurion Agreement.” This agreement held that the option of aliyah “rests with the free discretion of If galut was a calamity (who can pretend it was not?), I am each American Jew himself; it is entirely a matter of his own volition.” Memory of these developments proud of what we were able to perform in that calamity. was still fresh in 1951 when Hayim Greenberg deliv- ered the address, from which the following excerpt is of Cincinnati and is the author of The Emergence of ile offered the Inquisition andautos-da-fé , the other, taken, to the Twenty-third World Zionist Congress in American Zionism (NYU Press). tolerance and relative hospitality . . . Even Israel it- Jerusalem. Greenberg publicly challenged the Zionist self was for many, many centuries, in essence, galut movement and American Jews to rethink the nature ver the two thousand years of our dis- (exile). Wherever Jews live as a minority, where they of the relationship between Israel and America, as persion, we have had varying types of are not politically or socially independent, where well as the place of the Jewish state in modern Jewish exile. Our sense of living in exile was they rely on the good graces of the non-Jewish ma- life. To drive home his point—and in an ironic twist not one and the same in all periods and jority and are subject to the everyday pressures of given his role as head of the Jewish Agency’s Depart- inO all countries. The acuteness and intensity of that its civilization and mode of life, such a place is galut. ment of Education and Culture—he deliberately ad- feeling depended upon the particular environments In this respect, the United States today, and let dressed the Zionist Congress in Yiddish. and civilizations in which we lived . . . There were us say, Iraq, are both “exiles” in the broad psycho- Greenberg (1889-1953) was no stranger to contro- exiles that were worse, and others that were “better,” historical sense. But the concrete difference be- versy. After fleeing the Soviet Union in 1921, he spent so to speak; exiles in which Jews sense their foreign- tween the two is unspeakably great. Jews are com- the early 1920s in Berlin, where he co-edited the Zi- ness, helplessness, and state of outlawry with every pelled to flee from Iraq; no one drives them out of onist periodicals Ha-olam (The World) andAtideinu fiber of their being, and other exiles in which they any part of America. If, in a general sense, exile may (Our Future) and came into close contact with Kurt felt themselves partially rooted, or at least enjoyed be conceived of symbolically as night, then there are Blumenfeld, Martin Buber, Chaim Arlosoroff, and the illusion of relative integration or adjustment. some exiles of pitch-black night, and some where other leading Jewish figures. By the time of his arrival the night is moonlit . . . in the United States in 1924, Greenberg had already A very substantial part of our people today re- established himself as an original thinker, a seasoned sides in western countries with traditions of liberty, orator, and a gifted polemicist who was eloquent in with a high order of civilization and technological four languages—Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Eng- development, with progressive economies creating lish. In New York, he assumed the editorship of Der sound opportunities for achieving in time modern yidisher kemfer (The Jewish Fighter), a high-minded standards of social justice. Those countries do not Yiddish-language newspaper sponsored by the Poalei constitute for Jews the best of all possible worlds. Zion party. But it would be wrong to say that Jews have not In 1932 he became founding editor of Jewish Fron- struck roots there, that they are totally unintegrat- tier, the Labor Zionist movement’s English-language ed, or that they are faced with immediate threats monthly. Greenberg’s broad interests and personal ac- to their existence. Jews have already attained there quaintance with many leading Jewish and non-Jew- a degree of relative well-being economically, and ish intellectuals in America, Europe, and Palestine though they are socially segregated to no small ex- made the journal a stimulating forum. It regularly tent, still they are not regarded by the majority as featured essays by the Yishuv’s leadership and took aliens in the sense they are so branded in backward special pride in presenting translations of modern He- countries or countries experiencing the convulsions brew poetry and prose. In the 1930s Greenberg also of a perverse nationalism . . . conducted a fascinating public correspondence with If the time ever comes, as I believe it will, when Gandhi about non-violence, Zionism, and the plight considerable numbers of American Jews will go to of Europe’s Jews. Under Greenberg, Jewish Frontier live in Israel, they will do so not because America was also the first Jewish journal to publish full ac- will have ejected them, but out of Israel’s attrac- counts of the Holocaust in the summer of 1942 in tion and inspiration, not in fear, but in love . . . English. Hayim Greenberg by Robert L. Sackstein. (© 1954 by The living Israel is, naturally, a far more effective During World War II, Greenberg chaired the David Bridger, courtesy of the American Jewish stimulus for diaspora Jews in strengthening the American Zionist Emergency Council executive com- Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio.) will to maintain and cultivate their Jewish identity mittee and became the first director of the Depart- than is Zionism as a doctrine or a Weltanschau- ment for Education and Culture in the Diaspora. He ung. But the influence of present-day Israel can played a key role in winning the Latin American del- Any country outside the dreamed-of Land of be a fertilizing factor for Jewish cultural life in egations’ crucial support for the United Nations reso- Israel was exile for the Jew, yet over a period of gen- the diaspora only on one condition: if the civiliza- lution establishing the State of Israel in 1948. erations Jews came to regard some of the lands of tion of Israel should lean on certain, so to speak,

44 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2013 extra-geographical elements in traditional Jewish I am far from being unappreciative of the im- fore be nourished from sources which are regarded, culture, elements that have demonstrated their ca- portance of diffusing in the diaspora, let alone Is- at least formally, as religious . . . pacity to survive without the support and nourish- rael itself, the knowledge of [modern] Hebrew . . . The Hebrew language must naturally occupy a ment of a national soil. But may I be permitted to say that a Jew who can central place in our whole folk pedagogy; there can I find it hard to express this point clearly, and name all the plants in Israel in Hebrew, or call all be no “Hebraism” without a sound background in I should like as far as possible to avoid using ab- the parts of a tractor or some other complicated ma- Hebrew. This does not mean, however, that in my stract or philosophical terms. In a sense one chine by their correct designations (in new Hebrew opinion we should use in our educational processes may say that the Jews have for many centuries— coinages) possesses one qualification for useful ser- Hebrew exclusively . . . Regardless of what fate may hold in store for us in the future, we shall have to use Yiddish . . . We shall also have to use non-Jewish Regardless of what fate may hold in store for us in languages, foreign to Jews as a collectivity, but native the future, we shall have to use Yiddish. to or fully acquired by millions of individual Jews who live and grow spiritually through them . . . Such earnest, deep-plowing, cultural work permeated throughout the so-called galut period—lived more vice in the State of Israel. And who among us could with Jewish individuality will in time, I am certain, in the sphere of time than in the sphere of space, or fail to see in this not merely a technical or utilitar- bring forth a profounder Zionism, an appreciation perhaps more in the sphere of music than in the ian but a cultural value as well? But if he does not of our historic drama, and an active will to play a sphere of the plastic. Plastic art is quite inconceiv- know to their deepest sounding and in their context role in it. It will lead even to halutzism which will able apart from space. A painting, a sculptural or of spiritual tensions such Hebrew expressions as draw its strength from the depths of Jewish being. architectural work, must occupy room or ground; mitzvah (divine commandment), aveira (transgres- Only such an organic and wide-ranging edu- a melody is spaceless . . . In a symbolic sense, Jew- sion), geulah (redemption), tikkun (repair), tumah cational program can create in the galut the inner ish culture was more of the historical and musical (filthiness), tahara (ritual purity), yira (fear), ahava resolution to identify oneself in full, in deed, with type than of the geographic and plastic type . . . (love), tzedaka (righteousness), chesed (loving- the grand process of Jewish revival . . . the galut was perhaps the only example in history kindness), mesirut nefesh (self-abnegation), kiddush In the final historical analysis, the State of Israel (at any rate, the most prominent example) of an Hashem (sanctification of the name), dvekut (cleav- should be interested in the spiritual growth of dias- ex-territorial civilization . . . Upon vast expanses ing to God), teshuvah (repentance), he cannot carry pora Jewry no less than the Jews of the galut them- of time and apparently out of nothing more than a part in that choir that gives voice, consciously or selves. All Jewish roads—sooner or later, directly or memories, strivings, and aspirations, our people not, to what I have called “the Jewish melody.” Even indirectly, with landmarks or without them—lead created such grand structures as the Babylonian so-called secular Jewish education in Israel and in to the same destination: to Eretz Israel. Talmud, the palaces of Kabbalah and Hasidism, the galut as well, if it is not to be drained of those the gardens of medieval [Jewish] philosophy and powers that build a Jewish personality, must there- poetry, the self-discipline and inspirational ritual- ism of the Shulchan Arukh, the color and aroma of Sabbaths and holidays . . . We were without terri- tory—yet possessed of clear and fixed boundaries that Jews devotedly guarded; without armies—and yet so much heroism; without a Temple—and yet so much sanctity; without a priesthood—and yet each Jew, in effect, a priest; without kingship—and yet with such unexcelled spiritual “sovereignty.” Should we be ashamed of the exile? I am proud of it, and if galut was a calamity (who can pretend it was not?), I am proud of what we were able to perform in that calamity. Let others be ashamed of what they did to us in exile. We have every reason to consider our exilic past with heads proudly lifted . . . There will be no culture of tomorrow without a culture of yesterday and of the remoter past, unless we want to reconcile ourselves to a shallow pseudo- cultural style attuned to the local ethnography and narrow horizons of a small, irritably nationalistic state . . . The fundamental objective of Jewish education in the diaspora is thus, in my view, not Zionism, in the specific or programmatic sense of the word, but Jewishness. Zionism should be the natural product of an organic education to Jewishness, the culmi- nation, not the point of departure. Without such education, Zionism may be a doctrine, a convinc- ing theory, a program, a plan, an undertaking of desperate urgency, an appeal to sentiment, a noble humanitarian enterprise, but not a profound cre- ative experience. Hebrew is naturally a very, very important element in this sort of education, but I should prefer to use the term “Hebraism” rather than “Hebrew.” I use the word “Hebraism” here not in that polemical sense which in our time signifies an extreme language preference, a purely linguistic shibboleth, but in the way that I should use such a term, for example, as Hellenism.

Summer 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 45 LETTERS (continued from page 4) mass call-up. Demobilized Greek military officers Naar’s omission is surprising, as Greek anti- Internet, and the number of Western Jews visiting oversaw the forced laborers, sometimes abusing Semitism during the Second World War was a Kaifeng, the Chinese-Jewish descendants are un- them, while Greek engineers supervised the proj- topic at the conference that took him to Salonica. dertaking a cultural revival. One young woman has ects. The conditions of forced labor were harsh, men Just three days before the conference, Greek na- built a Jewish museum in her ancestral home, there were beaten and worked to death. tional television broadcast a documentary, Ektos are plans to create a cultural center, and some young Greek officials participated in the German extor- Istorias (Outside of History), that examines Greek Kaifeng Jews are studying in Israel. Last but not tion of a massive ransom in October 1942 to free the Christian assistance to the Nazis during the depor- least, there are two competing Jewish schools and forced laborers. The ransom included the surrender tations of the Jews. The documentary undermined kehillot—does anyone need further proof of their of the historic Jewish cemetery of Salonica. Naar the officially propagated myth that Greek Christians Jewishness than this? Readers interested in learn- claims, “The story of the destruction of the Jew- overwhelmingly rejected Nazi racism and sought to ing more about the Kaifeng Jews, and about Jewish ish cemetery—once the largest in Europe—remains assist the Jews. None of this is “shrouded in silence.” life in Shanghai and elsewhere in the modern era, largely shrouded in silence.” It isn’t. Joseph Nehama Historians have chosen to avoid these issues. should visit the website of The Sino-Judaic Institute, and Rabbi Michael Molho, whose book Naar men- Andrew Apostolou www.sino-judaic.org. tions, stated explicitly in 1953 that the municipality Washington, D.C. Rabbi Anson Laytner of Salonica was involved in destroying the Jewish Past President, The Sino-Judaic Institute cemetery. Documents relating to the demolition of Seattle, WA the cemetery, carried out by Greek Christians, have Chinese Jews long been available in German archives. In his review of The Haggadah of the Kaifeng Jews The extent of Greek official accommodation to of China (“Why Is This Haggadah Different?” in Unto the Third Generation? the Nazi persecution of the Jews was such that in the Spring 2013 issue), David Stern alludes to the My grandfather was born in Sokoly, Poland, in January 1943 the Germans gave the collaboration- all-too-common moralizing that is done regard- 1900 and was ordained by the Jewish Theological ist government close to two months’ warning of the ing the fate of the Jewish community of Kaifeng, Seminary in 1926. I grew up in the Conservative deportations. The Greek collaborationist adminis- China. True, the Jews of Kaifeng never experienced movement, not only under my grandfather’s influ- tration used this time to communicate and enforce persecution and, equally true, the community has ence but also influenced by our synagogue’s servic- German anti-Semitic orders, such as expelling Jews very nearly disappeared, but the reason has less to es, Hebrew School, USY youth activities, and other from civic associations, forcing Jews to wear the do with “intermarrying with native Chinese” or programming. Therefore, I read David Starr’s re- yellow star, banning Jews from public transport, “their astounding success in assimilating to Chinese view of Michael Cohen’s The Birth of Conserva- and putting Jews into ghettos. The Greek police culture” or “their gradual loss over the centuries of tive Judaism: Solomon Schechter’s Disciples and the guarded the ghettos and then took the Jews to the Hebraic and Judaic literacy” than, as he more cor- Creation of an American Religious Movement with railway station as of March 15, 1943 for the journey rectly notes, “their near-complete isolation from great interest. to supposed resettlement in Poland. When Italian Jews elsewhere in the world.” That a group of Jews Starr laments the Conservative movement’s consular officials sought to provide certificates to who only numbered about six thousand in its hey- failure to thrive and wonders: “Is it because of its seventy-five Jews claiming Italian protection, the day managed to survive at least one thousand years, ideological incoherence? . . . the lack of true conver- Greek state’s Aliens Bureau confiscated the docu- even to the present day, is a tribute to their perse- sation between rabbis who lived inside of one intel- ments. The Germans deported many of these Jews verance and endurance, rather than attributable to lectual realm and lay people who lived somewhere to Auschwitz. The government in Athens and the their assimilationist tendencies. very different? Was it the mediocrity of the rabbis, local administration in Salonica oversaw the mas- Furthermore, as Dr. Jordan Paper writes in The who aspired to lead flocks that in large measure sive theft of Jewish property. Theology of the Chinese Jews, 1000-1850 (Wilfrid consisted of congregants who surpassed them in Laurier University Press, 2012), his groundbreaking their intellectual sophistication [. . .]?” study of the beliefs of the Kaifeng community, there These are important questions, especially since it is hardly any difference between what the Kaifeng seems almost impossible to find a third-generation Jews did vis-à-vis the Chinese people and culture Conservative Jew. Among my grandfather’s four and what Jewish communities around the world surviving grandchildren, I am the only one with did in their encounters with their host cultures and a kosher home and children who attended day Get the wit and erudition of peoples: They acculturated and they interbred. Why school. As I look back on my formative years in the JRB—wherever you are . . . else do European Jews look like Europeans and Conservative movement from my vantage point as Ethiopian Jews look like Ethiopians? Why else do a Torah-observant woman, I am astonished at the Introducing JRB for the tablet. we have European-influenced (i.e., Christian-influ- total lack of any meaningful discussion or teach- Now FREE for all subscribers. enced) Jewish philosophy and Islamic-influenced ing about God as our creator, the One who directs Jewish philosophy? Jewish history. I am astonished at the shallowness The prospects for the long-term survival of the of the education I received. When, in my early 20s, Kaifeng Jewish community were from the very out- I attended my first Torah class taught by an Ortho- set endangered by its small numbers. For several dox rabbi, I was shocked to discover that our matri- hundred years, the international trade that flowed archs and patriarchs were real people who lived real to and fro along the Silk Road and the sea lanes lives that held lessons and inspiration for me, living provided them with information and materials that thousands of years later. enabled them to reinforce their Jewish identity and If my experience is in any way typical, I would practice. But around the year 1500, the Ming rul- say that the Conservative movement failed because ers issued a series of decrees prohibiting travel be- while it may have offered warmth and camaraderie, tween their domains and foreign lands. Meanwhile, it offered almost no substance spiritually. In fact, the various Jewish communities in other Chinese the concepts of spiritual growth, God as our creator cities disappeared or relocated, leaving the Kaifeng and guide of our destiny, and the depth and profun- Jews utterly alone. To this was added the series of dity of the Torah were nowhere to be found. Pulpit floods and wars which repeatedly destroyed the sermons were increasingly stoked with politically synagogue, Torah scrolls, and texts. And lastly, the correct messages, bare of any spiritual substance. economic decline of the Jewish community mir- This may explain why the kids I grew up with in rored that of China as a whole beginning in the late our synagogue are now either Orthodox or barely Visit us online to learn more. 19th century. It is a wonder that they survived at all! affiliated at all. www.jewishreviewofbooks.com What is truly miraculous is that, today, thanks Judy Gruen to China’s relative openness, the wonders of the via jewishreviewofbooks.com

46 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2013 last word East and West

BY Allan Arkush

n Theodor Herzl’s utopian novel Old-New viable alternatives to liberal democracy, and she sees sentative system” of government, which she know- Land, the successful pioneer Joe Levy recol- many indications that Israel is tending toward the ingly but unwarrantedly describes as “a last poisoned lects the visit to Palestine’s shores of a vessel adoption of one of them. Foremost among them, it gift of Poland’s interwar heritage,” is in danger of be- named Futuro, packed with outstanding lumi- seems, is the resurgence of religion within the coun- ing undermined by undemocratic forces. nariesI who sized up the new society in the making. try. On this subject, however, she has not done her He also expresses the hope that another ship will homework or, rather, has done it badly. She is trou- tuart Eizenstat is someone whom one could al- show up twenty-five years down the line, similarly bled by both what she calls ultranationalist religious Smost as easily imagine as part of the Futuro’s stocked with members of “the intellectual aristocra- and ultraorthodox Jews but can’t quite distinguish welcoming party as one of its passengers. Once cy of the whole civilized world” before whose judg- between them, not even with the help of the distin- Jimmy Carter’s chief domestic policy adviser, ment the country’s Jews would be prepared to bow. guished Israeli scholar upon whose work she slop- he has held a number of other high posts in the That ship never came in, but representatives of pily relies. One sentence begins: “Rav Kook’s follow- American government, but he also serves as co- the aristocracy of the mind have for a long time been ers, namely the Hazon Ish, according to Ravitsky…” chairman of the Jewish People Policy Institute, has showing up on their own to take the moral tempera- This startling misidentification of the ardently long been involved in Jewish public affairs, and is ture of the Jewish state. Of those who have visited deeply familiar with Israel. His re- Israel recently, Diana Pinto, an intellectual historian cent book The Future of the Jews and policy analyst based in Paris, is among the bet- is not an impressionistic and ru- ter disposed. Unlike many of her peers, she views minative travelogue and does not the country with genuine benevolence, rooted in a beg to be compared with Israel deep sense of affiliation. “I could not conceive of a Has Moved, but it does resemble world without Israel,” she writes. But she worries in it insofar as it considers the place her new book, Israel Has Moved, that Israel is head- of Israel in a world changing all ing in the wrong direction—toward the East. around it, one in which the na- The orientation of the Jewish state was always tions of the Far East, particularly one of its founders’ concerns. Theodor Herzl wasn’t China, loom larger and larger. dead-set on establishing it in Palestine, but he did The very first chapter of - Ei argue that there would be certain advantages in do- zenstat’s book, “The Historic ing so, and not only for the Jews. “We should there Shift of Power from the West to form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia,” the Emerging Nations of the East he wrote, “an outpost of civilization as opposed to and the South: A New Multipo- barbarism.” Twenty years later, Chaim Weizmann lar World,” devotes as much at- spoke in a more multicultural voice. England, he tention to China as to the rest of said, “would have in the Jews,” among other things, these nations combined. But even “the best possible friends, who would be the best na- Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in China, May 2013. (Photo by after he has underscored the rapid tional interpreters of ideas in the eastern countries Avi Ohayon, courtesy of Government Press Office, Israel.) rise of China as “the most impor- and would serve as a bridge between the two civili- tant story of the early years of the zations.” Martin Buber, for his part, visualized Zion- anti-Zionist Rabbi Avraham Karelitz (known as twenty-first century,” and focused directly on the ism not as a barrier against the East or as a bridge to the Hazon Ish) as a disciple of the very differently great significance of this story for Israel, Eizenstat it but as a vehicle for restoring the Jews—who were minded Kook is embedded in a thumbnail account sees no need for any reorientation. “When all is said true Orientals—to their spiritual home. of the history of Israel’s theological-political prob- and done,” he writes at the end of the chapter, “it is Diana Pinto, too, has mused about the location lem that culminates in even more startling ques- to the United States that Israel and the Jewish people of Israel between West and East and the implications tions. After taking note of the recent (and in fact worldwide must continue to look for support in cre- of its borderline existence. From her description of rather slight) increase in the numbers of haredim in ating a world order based on the rule of law, toler- the country’s internal culture wars, it is clear that the military, she asks: ance, democracy and global prosperity.” she, like Herzl, belongs to the camp that upholds Eizenstat sees threats arising within Israel to these Western values, even if she refrains from labeling Will these ultraorthodox artillery soldiers and universal values of the Enlightenment, but unlike its adversaries barbaric. But this does not prevent officers . . . who wear theirTallit prayer shawls Pinto, he sees them in realistic proportion. He doesn’t her from fearing that the wrong side is winning. over their uniforms . . . and who live in their like Avigdor Lieberman any more than she does, but It is a worrisome sign to her that in today’s Israel, all-male units, use a closed Internet, and he doubts that he is a representative figure and is in “Visiting Chinese plenipotentiaries are applauded fervently believe in the religious sanctity of their any case confident that the latest wave of Russian im- and looked up to with respect while messengers greater Israel, still be Western? Or will they migrants will eventually “adopt Israel’s democratic bearing President Obama’s good tidings are greeted increasingly resemble Chinese troops? norms,” just as the other immigrant groups who with icy silence.” Israel is drawing closer, she says, came before them from countries with no democrat- “to those great Asian countries that also oscillate be- Developments on the political plane also concern ic tradition did. Eizenstat does in the end acknowl- tween pragmatic technological progress and meta- her, although she does not dwell on them at length. edge that Israel has moved over the years, for better historical ancestral readings of their own identity.” On one occasion she refers to the “authoritarian cur- or for worse, from a center-left country to a center- It is moving further and further away from “the old rents” represented by the man who was foreign min- right one, but he understands the place far too well to universal values of the Enlightenment” and seek- ister during her last visit to Israel, Avigdor Lieber- fancy that it is on its way from the West to the East. ing its place in “an expanding world where Western man. She devotes more attention to an “idiotically If the Futuro sets sail again soon, he would be a very democracy risks becoming just one political option obscurantist” speech by the Shas leader Eli Yshai, useful man to have on board. among others.” who was the interior minister at the same time. All in Pinto doesn’t live in Francis Fukuyama’s post- all, however, she doesn’t make anything like a serious Allan Arkush is the senior contributing editor of the historical world, but in one in which there are still case that Israel’s “full-fledged proportionally repre- Jewish Review of Books.

Summer 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 47 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS A Publication of Bee.Ideas, LLC. 165 East 56th Street, 4th Floor New York, NY 10022

The Brandeis Library of Modern Jewish Thought

ModernLM Middle JEasternT Jewish Thought Writings on Identity, Politics, and Culture, 1893–1958 Edited by Moshe Behar and Zvi Ben-Dor Benite

The first anthology of writings from Jews in the Middle East, from the late 19th century to the mid 20th century

“Moshe Behar and Zvi Ben-Dor Benite have done a great service to scholarship by bringing together sources that reflect the robust discourse among Jewish intellectuals of Middle Eastern origin. They are to be heartily commended for this important act of historical reclamation.” — David N. Myers, UCLA

The Brandeis Library of Modern Jewish Thought aims to redefine the canon, publishing primary source readings from individual Jewish thinkers or groups of thinkers in reliable English translations. Designed for courses in modern Jewish philosophy, thought, and intellectual history, each volume features a general introduction and annotations to each source with the instructor and student in mind. For more information, please visit us at www.upne.com/brandeis or call 800-421-1561 Brandeis University Press Compelling and innovative scholarly studies of the Jewish experience