ANI MAAMIN Ruth R

Abraham Socher Exit, Loyalty . . . Crowdsource? (How Not to Save the Jewish People) JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS Volume 10, Number 4 Winter 2020 $10.45 Glikl Restored Chava Turniansky Matti Friedman How Israel Got a Navy Abigail Green On Almost Remembering in Berlin Allan Arkush Pancho Villa and the Star of David Men Elisheva Carlebach Why Texts Need Contexts

Plus: Steven J. Zipperstein Remembering James Atlas . . . Neil Arditi on Harold Bloom . . . Mark Twain in Jerusalem . . . The History of Mel Brooks Parts I & 2 . . . the NCAA Champs Who Lost Big Editor New from Maggid Books Abraham Socher Senior Contributing Editor Allan Arkush Art Director Betsy Klarfeld Managing Editor Amy Newman Smith Editorial Assistant Kate Elinsky

Editorial Board Robert Alter Shlomo Avineri Leora Batnitzky Ruth Gavison Moshe Halbertal Hillel Halkin Yitzchok Adlerstein Joshua Berman Dov Singer Jon D. Levenson Anita Shapira PREPARE My PRAyER Michael Walzer J. H.H. Weiler NEtIVot sHALoM ANI MAAMIN Ruth R. Wisse Steven J. Zipperstein INs I g H ts o N t HE Ho LIDAys AND BIBLIc AL c RIt I c I s M , REc IPEs to REAw AKEN AVo DA BAs ED o N t HE w RIt INgs HIstoRIc AL t RUt H , t HE soUL o F t HE s Lo NIMER REBBE AND t HE t HIRt EEN PRINc IPLEs o F FAIt H Executive Director Eric Cohen Associate Publisher Nadia Ai Kahn

Chairman’s Council A Sophisticated Approach to Tanakh Blavatnik Family Foundation Bernard Schwartz from the Maggid Studies in Tanakh series Publication Committee Marilyn and Michael Fedak Ahuva and Martin J. Gross Susan and Roger Hertog The Lauder Foundation– Leonard and Judy Lauder Sandra Earl Mintz Tina and Steven Price Charitable Foundation Pamela and George Rohr Daniel Senor Paul E. Singer

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LETTERS 4 Reimagination?; Romania, Romania; Shylock and Jonah

REVIEWS

5 Abraham Socher Exit, Loyality . . . Crowdsource? God Is in the Crowd: Twenty-First-Century Judaism by Tal Keinan

7 Noah Benjamin Overturned Tables When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation by Paula Fredriksen Bickart 10 Elisheva Carlebach Tradition and Invention The Jewish Political Tradition, Volume 3: Community edited by Michael Walzer, Menachem Lorberbaum, and Noam J. Zohar; coedited by Madeline Kochen

13 Allan Arkush Pancho Villa and the Star of David Men Making Judaism Safe for America: World War I and the Origins of Religious Pluralism by Jessica Cooperman 16 Lawrence Kaplan Law, Lore, and Theory Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law by Chaim N. Saiman

20 Matti Friedman Israel's Sea Change Zionism’s Maritime Revolution: The Yishuv’s Hold on the Land of Israel’s Sea and Shores, 1917 – 1948 by Kobi Cohen-Hattab 22 Shlomo Brody Wink-Wink, Win-Win? When the State Winks: The Performance of Jewish Conversion in Israel by Michal Kravel-Tovi

25 Yoav Schaefer A Life of Dialogue Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent by Paul Mendes-Flohr

29 Stephen J. Whitfield Nothing but Blue Skies Irving Berlin: New York Genius by James Kaplan

31 Rich Cohen The Fix Was In The City Game: Triumph, Scandal, and a Legendary Basketball Team by Matthew Goodman

33 Jesse Tisch History of Mel Brooks: Both Parts Funny Man: Mel Brooks by Patrick McGilligan

READINGS 36 Glikl bas Leyb The Warning Song and the Medlars: Two Stories Glikl’s account of her life as a wife, mother, and businesswoman was so different from anything known in her 17th-century Jewish world that there wasn’t even a word to describe what she was writing. Two stories from Chava Turniansky’s definitive new edition. 39 Neil Arditi Remembering Harold Bloom At some point in each semester, Neil Arditi impersonates Harold Bloom’s classroom mannerisms. It has been decades since Arditi was his student, and his professor’s impact lingers. Will there be another American critic who is treasured in 100 years? Perhaps not.

ARTS 41 Abigail Green Remembering the Plutocrat and the Diplomat James Simon Galerie • Paul Nathan: Publizist, Politiker und Philanthrop 1857–1927 by Christoph Jahr 45 Diane Cole Not So Innocent Abroad Mark Twain and the Holy Land curated by Michael Ryan and Cristian Petru Panaite LAST WORD 47 Steven J. Zipperstein "He Called Me Jim"

On the cover: Glikl bas Leyb and Child (after Leopold Pilichowski) by Mark Anderson. LETTERS

Reimagination? address such discrimination, but today’s rabbis lack But they missed that this was Judaism as pure Daniel Gordis’s insightful but somewhat simplistic ac- the imagination to do so. popular culture. Any mention of Zion in the liturgy count of recent developments in American Jewish life Gordis ignores trends in modern North Ameri- was omitted from the English, as was any reference to (“A Failure of Reimagination?” Fall 2019) draws too can Reform Judaism. The 1885 Pittsburgh Reform Jewish peoplehood. The content of the ceremony was sharp a distinction between Israel and the diaspora. platform is all but a dead letter. Services are now something a Protestant minister could have easily de- He does so, for example, in his contrast between a conducted mainly in Hebrew. Congregations sing livered. And that, I fear, is equally true of the Judaism culturally depleted American Jewish community nar- prayers. Support for Israel has become a key tenet as politics that has begun to emerge in America. rowly focused on nothing more substantial than Jew- of Reform and progressive Jews. Travel to Israel has Jewish religiosity in America once evoked rever- ish politics and a religiously and culturally dynamic become much more the norm. Ties to the small but ence, a sense of subservience to a particularist tradi- Israeli Jewish population. I take Gordis’s concerns se- increasingly vibrant Reform movement in Israel tion that has a genuine capacity to make demands of riously, but I am less pessimistic about our situation. continue to intensify. Rabbis do comment on Torah us, fealty to an intellectual and textual tradition that Many American Jews agree that Judaism must be teth- portions, and no, they are rarely if ever fired due to gets us to think differently than we would have had ered to content—religion, way of life, identity. They politics. On these bases alone, no one would mis- we not studied it, and loyalty to a tradition that can understand that progressive politics cannot replace take us for plain old liberals. lead us to question our instincts and to wrestle with Jewish knowledge, Torah, Jewish culture, and tradi- those doubts in the context of community and teach- tions—what my colleague Zvi Gitelman calls “thick ers to whom we cede authority simply by virtue of culture.” Jews yearn for authentic experiences and their knowledge and wisdom. Did all Jews, or even are awakening to the realization that Judaism means most, participate in these discussions? Of course not. commitment, learning, and community. Among But their rabbinical schools and their communities’ those renewing American Judaism are different peo- thought leaders were consumed by them, and that ple than you might expect. Their numbers may be helped shape the discourse of American Jewish life. limited, but I see new people coming to my Modern I do not believe that all changes liberal Ameri- Orthodox synagogue and young people flooding our can Judaism has wrought have been “politics,” as Jewish studies courses at Tulane, engaged in commu- some thought I claimed in my article. I was clearly nity building and Jewish thought. This is not taking insufficiently precise. As a student, I was actively place on the scale that it is in Israel, but it is a sign that involved in the drive to get the Jewish Theological the “ever-dying” nation once again refuses to die. It is Seminary to admit women to the rabbinical school a sign that in the American Jewish world outside the 35 years ago, and we saw that drive as a religious politically leftist hubs, the battle is far from lost. requirement. It is quite possible—and I should have Brian Horowitz noted this—that what strikes me as political today Tulane University may strike others as deeply religious. That’s a fair and important critique. Rabbi Gordis calls for a reimagined form of Ameri- Brian Horowitz is quite correct that there are can Judaism, unshackled from myopic political im- pockets of great Jewish learning and vibrancy in peratives and informed by ancient religious roots. With his brilliance, Gordis could lead the American Jewish life. I noted that in my essay and Such a revitalization must entail a dialectic melding reimagining of Judaism that he seeks with all the gave examples. The abiding question is whether of the moral foundations of the American enter- Jewish communities in the United States. He should they are sufficiently numerous and sizable to sustain prise and the ethical wellsprings of Jewish tradition. not treat Reform as lost to secular politics. the American Jewish project as we know it. I sus- In the first instance, one might initiate that synergy Peter Buchsbaum pect that they are not, that communities investing by seeking hermeneutic correspondences between West Amwell Township, NJ in Judaism’s “thick culture” (a phrase more correctly the Bill of Rights and those mitzvot governing rela- credited to Clifford Geertz almost half a century tions among human beings. At a deeper level, one Daniel Gordis appears to imagine (incorrectly, I be- ago) are rather the exception that proves the rule. might attempt to replace the entire notion of legal- lieve) some American Jewish past in which the Jew- The Judaisms emerging in both Israel and Ameri- istic commandments with the democratizing idea ish community writ large participated in a feast of ca, in which most Jews now live, are radical departures of a compact—on the one hand, the US Constitu- communal learning, Jewishly considering ideas and from what came before. In Israel, where a national tion, and on the other hand, a covenant with God impressing them into service. Those days, he seems sense of purpose (and danger) and a population that rather than a directive from some deity. What could to be saying, are gone, to be replaced by political is 80 percent Jewish shape the conversation, some- be more eternally Judaic yet more emblematic of discussions about this and that (but mostly about thing new and fascinating is emerging. Is it sustain- America’s Enlightenment origins than that? Israel) without basis in Jewish ideas. able? Only time will tell, but there are reasons to be Donald Mender He may well be correct about this assessment of bullish. In America, where Jews account for 2 percent Rhinebeck, NY the Jewish present in the United States, but the uni- of the population and the pressure to conform has al- verse in which I was raised and think I understand ways shaped Jewish life, the challenge is much greater. Daniel Gordis is a scholar of unusual breadth and was never filled with Jewish laypeople engaging in My hope was that pointing to a new trend of leaving love for the Jewish people. But his recent article is the study of Jewish ideas. behind both peoplehood as a value and the reverence out of touch with progressive Judaism in the United I suspect that the Jewish present has many more and even surrender that are components of rich re- States. Despite his monthly visits, he has not ob- folks engaged in various sorts of study than anything ligious life might enable us to ask ourselves whether served what is going on with liberal Judaism. in the American Jewish past. This doesn’t obviate Gor- we ought to be equally bullish about American Jew- To discount the progressive acceptance of women dis’s thesis, for these constitute a small minority of the ish life writ large, and, if not, how we might engender clergy and gay marriage as “politics” is both insulting community. His fear of American Jews failing to rein- a conversation, perhaps like the one Donald Mender and wrong. It is a moral stance. The discrimination terpret the meaning of our existence may be correct. suggests, that can help chart our path forward. sanctioned by halakha makes about as much moral Phil Cohen sense as the doctrines around agunot and mamzerim, via jewishreviewofbooks.com Romania, Romania . . . which also ought to be discarded. A people that arose Dara Horn’s “Romania!” (Fall 2019) resonates with to be a light unto the nations cannot be so regressive. Daniel Gordis Responds: me. I was long perplexed by the fact that the Congress Deborah could be a judge in ancient Israel but could I recently attended an intermarriage in New York of Berlin in 1878 made such an issue of the treatment not be a rabbi today. Why not? We no longer have the that was performed by a Reform rabbi. The ceremo- of Jews by Romania. How did we Jews manage to cap- wise scholars like Rabbeinu Gershom, who ruled that ny was lovely. There was a chuppah, a calligraphed ture the attention of Western European governments polygamy is forbidden even though it clearly is ap- ketuba, sheva brakhot, and a glass broken. I heard and the great and powerful Bismarck and focus them proved in Torah. The ameliorative doctrines ofdarkei many people remark positively on how Jewish the all on the treatment of Jews by Romania? Part of the noam and others could have been used creatively to entire affair was, and they were right. (continued on page 24)

4 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2020 REVIEWS Exit, Loyalty … Crowdsource?

BY ABRAHAM SOCHER

between the two. He describes himself as “an insider which is the same rate for Americans as a whole. God Is in the Crowd: Twenty-First-Century in two worlds who had achieved escape velocity from If this trend continues, and there is every reason Judaism both,” and, though he is not unique in this respect, to think that it will, “the size of the next generation by Tal Keinan it does give him, as he says, “an uncommon vantage of American Jews who have two Jewish parents will Spiegel and Grau, 352 pp., $28 point.” Keinan goes on to say that history has proved be only 36 percent the size of today’s.” The following “that there was one identity I could not escape. I was generation, Keinan writes, “will be 13 percent the size a Jew,” but of course he knows that even if this proved of today’s—almost complete collapse.” This may un- to be true for him, it is very far from true of Ameri- fairly discount the Jewish lives and identities of the can Jewry. As the economist Albert O. Hirschman children of intermarriage, but there are numbers on elegantly showed, there is always the possibility of that too, and they aren’t encouraging. In short, the al Keinan’s God Is in the Crowd leads with leaving any organization that demands loyalty. For grand story of American Jewry, which now accounts a strong hook: 21st-century American Jews, the exit door is always for almost half of world Jewry, will be effectively over T accessible. As an alternative to exiting an organiza- within the space of a lifetime, save for a few small en- I awoke to the smell of ammonia. I was on my tion, Hirschman pointed out another option, “voice”: claves of committed Jews, the majority of them Or- feet, but couldn’t remember where. . . . I exhaled A citizen or customer can point out flaws, protest, thodox, and most of those haredi. One is reminded of instinctively . . . and held my breath for as long the economist Herbert Stein’s famous law: “If some- as I could. When the air rushed back in, the wet thing cannot go on forever, then it will stop.” burlap hood fastened around my neck pressed against my cracked lips. I tasted urine, and the hat of Israel, where the other half of world reality began flooding back. I was hunched low, WJewry lives? Simplifying for an American in an underground cell, my shaved head scraping popular audience, Keinan divides Israeli Jewry through the burlap against a jagged stone ceiling. into three ideological camps: Secularists, Terri- torialists, and Theocrats. In the Secularist group, Orientation: I remembered that my dungeon he includes not only the heirs of Herzl and Ben- cell was four stories underground. I had counted Gurion but all those Israeli Jews, including Modern my steps over the days. I could faintly hear the Orthodox ones, who believe in a fairly strict separa- echoes of angry curses issued in Arabic, iron tion between religion and state. Territorialists are doors slamming, beatings, and cries. They were those Religious Zionists who insist that Judea and likely coming from minus two, where I believed Samaria should be wholly annexed on theological my teammates were being held. grounds regardless of the consequences. The Theo- crats represent the rapidly growing haredi popula- Not a single member of the community that had tion, whose primary allegiance is to their own com- Tal Keinan. raised me to adulthood knew where I was. I was munity and their conception of Torah. more alone than I had ever been, but driven by suggest a solution. It is to Keinan’s great credit that he Keinan is a frank secularist, but his definition of a conviction that eclipsed my solitude. . . . This sees the Jewish people as a whole and voices his con- secularism is overbroad, since it includes all Israelis was the right place for me. . . . I took a moment cerns on both the Israeli and the American fronts. who accept a (mostly) secular state, religious plural- to recognize the absurdity of my gratitude at Keinan describes his own father’s mute fury when ism, and the possibility of territorial compromise. the threshold of the interrogation chamber, and his older brother announced his engagement to his While he describes the selfless idealism of some of caught myself smiling softly under the hood. non-Jewish girlfriend. Eventually, he took Tal and his his Religious Zionist fellow soldiers with real admi- That conviction was born at . . . Phillips Exeter three brothers out for dinner to finally, incoherently, ration, he argues that annexing the territories would Academy in 1986. tell them how important being Jewish was to him. quickly lead to a non-Jewish majority in Israel. He evinces no understanding of, or sympathy for, the It is a bit of a surprise to open a big-think policy book It was Passover, and we were eating pizza as Theocrats, who are, on Keinan’s account, haredi on the fate of the Jewish people and read a Jason we debated the value of Jewish tradition. The free-riders who take a disproportionate amount of Bourne scene with a prep-school payoff, but Keinan unintended irony was completely consistent government services while refusing to serve in the is entitled to it. It was a training exercise in the Israeli with our upbringing . . . Where was the line army and failing to adequately contribute to the Air Force, which he joined after moving to Israel in between observing a kosher Passover and economy. Moreover, in addition to what economists college, a process that began when, as a junior at Phil- marrying out of the tribe? We were Jewish, but call rent-seeking, their political activity is primarily lips Exeter named Tal Weiner, he began to think seri- were we not American as well? aimed at coercing their fellow citizens to conform to ously about what it meant to be Jewish. Keinan tacks their strict construals of Jewish law concerning mat- between autobiography and policy throughout God Keinan is clear that he does not fault those Jews ters of personal status, such as marriage, divorce, Is in the Crowd. Despite his extraordinary achieve- who find love outside the faith, as, eventually, each and conversion. (Keinan and his wife avoided an of- ments—he became an F-16 fighter pilot before get- of his three brothers did. However, he correctly in- ficial rabbinate marriage by having a civil marriage ting a Harvard MBA and cofounding the investment sists, the implications for American Jewry as a whole in New York before their non-state-recognized Re- firm Clarity Capital—he does so with modesty (the are stark. According to the 2013 Pew Center study of form marriage in Israel.) only combat mission he describes is one in which he American Jewry, 58 percent of American Jews who Even though the Secularists bear “the bulk of bombed the wrong target). get married marry non-Jews (subtract Orthodox Jews both the defense burden and the economic burdens The Jewish issues Keinan addresses could not be from the equation and the number skyrockets to over that underpin Israel’s survival,” they are losing, de- larger: the accelerating demographic decline of Amer- 70 percent). Among the 42 percent of American Jews mographically and politically, and this very loss fur- ican Jewry, the dangerous sociopolitical stalemate in who do marry other Jews (and this includes converts ther undermines their commitment to the Zionist which Israeli Jews find themselves, and the relation to Judaism), the average number of children is 1.9, project. He points out that half of all first graders in Is-

Winter 2020 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 5 rael are now either haredim or Arab Israelis, meaning ideal system of governance could be called a rep- he climax of the book is Keinan’s description that absent a huge cultural shift, they won’t be receiv- resentative meritocracy, run by jurists who valued Tof a closed-door Israeli Air Force meeting after ing a draft notice in 10 years. “In light of the looming precedent highly even when they departed from it. a 2002 attack on a Hamas terrorist in Gaza whose defeat of their vision,” Keinan writes, “it is becoming To the extent that it was a democracy, it was, to em- operations had killed hundreds of Israelis. The ter- difficult for Israel’s Secularists to justify shouldering ploy Chesterton’s famous phrase, “a democracy of rorist, Salah Shehade, was killed, but so were civil- this growing burden.” After all, why not just leave for the dead.” ians. Israeli Air Force commander Dan Halutz led America? (This won’t strengthen American Jewry, by the meeting, which Keinan describes as turning the way. As Keinan notes, expatriate Israelis are even If American Jewry is on the quickly from a tactical debriefing to an impassioned more likely to intermarry than American Jews.) moral discussion. It ended without consensus (27 pi- Keinan’s analysis alternates between the anec- verge of evaporating while lots later publicly resigned), but all voices were heard. dotal and the schematic, and his broad character- “We knew,” he writes, “we would never have perfect izations obscure a great deal. It is true, for instance, Israel is about to implode, answers, but through some invisible cognition, the that the secular ideology of the Zionist founders community’s combined struggle for an answer had is no longer ascendant, but that doesn’t mean that what is Tal Keinan’s solution? come close . . . This is how Diaspora had worked.” a majority of the country now rejects the idea of This may, or may not, have much to do with how a modern pragmatic state. There are also relevant Nonetheless, Keinan finds it “difficult to ignore the diaspora worked, but it has nothing to do with developments that he does not discuss, including the neatness of the theory that Crowd Wisdom strangers counting gumballs or a market achieving the rise of the new “Jewsraeli” identity described by served as Diaspora Jewry’s method of governance,” equilibrium. A town-hall meeting like this might be Shmuel Rosner and Camil Fuchs, which combines a and thinks he sees Surowiecki’s three criteria for better described in Hirschman’s terms: Keinan and soft traditionalism with unwavering patriotism, and wise crowds working through Jewish history. his fellow fighter pilots had (like American Jews) some encouraging signs of haredi integration into three options: loyalty, exit, or voice. general society. He also ignores recent strategic de- Dispersion created . . . independence. Communities Unfortunately, Keinan’s proposal for the revital- velopments in the Middle East, especially the Sunni in the Russian Pale, for example, were cut off ization of Jewish life is high-tech gumball counting: states’ new posture toward Israel and the chaotic from the ghettoes of Western Europe . . . Each state of Palestinian politics, which impact when and interpreted its Talmud independently. . . . Jewish Imagine a machine designed . . . for applying the how to negotiate over the territories regardless of communities in the Diaspora were culturally wisdom of a large crowd . . . This machine’s inputs whether the Territorialists are right in their escha- diverse. Bankers in the Venetian ghetto would consist of the textual opinions, insights, tological interpretation of history. But he’s also not were affected by their interactions with the predictions, and prescriptions of the subject wrong about the danger of the cultural and political Venetian business community . . . making their community. The machine would rank the input divides by which Israel is riven. The Jewish state is experiences distinct from Ottoman Jews ...... by means of an objective logic . . . It would lurching toward what, as I write in early December [they] formed a mosaic of diversity. Periodic continually aggregate and reconcile these inputs 2019, looks like one of three bad options: an unsta- migrations and expulsions over the centuries into a constantly evolving Crowd Wisdom. ble “unity government” of fierce opponents, a nar- forced the aggregation and reconciliation of row government that isn’t much more stable, or a ideas that had diverged in isolation. The simple The problem with this is not the sci-fi conceit or even third election in 11 months. average that we used to aggregate guesses its sheer incoherence—how exactly does one teach If American Jewry is on the verge of evaporating at the number of gumballs in a jar was an one’s children “constantly evolving Crowd Wisdom,” while Israel is about to implode, what is Tal Keinan’s unsophisticated operation. This qualitative and why?—but rather the premise that if we just had solution? Jewish reconciliation would have been far more good enough data on what most Jews think Judaism complicated, but it served the same function. should be, to the extent that they have thought about n 1906, the British statistician Francis Galton it at all, then that’s what it should be. Iwent to a county fair where some 800 people Real history is not so neat. The ghettoes of Western In the absence of a “wisdom machine,” Keinan were placing bets on the weight of a fat ox. Some Europe were largely gone by the time of the Russian ran a poll of varied Jewish acquaintances asking of the contestants were farmers and butchers, but Pale (that’s the beginning of the story of Emancipa- them to list 10 identifiers that “form the de facto pil- nonexperts who just liked a good bet also com- tion and assimilation, and Keinan is grappling with lars of contemporary Jewish identity.” The top five peted. No one correctly guessed the weight of their effects); Shylock certainly had distinct experi- results were justice, education, challenge and dis- the ox, but when Galton averaged all the guesses, ences from Rabbi Joseph Karo, but what of it? And sent, ritual and tradition, and community (neither he found that their collective wisdom was that though migrations and expulsions do mark the me- God nor Torah made the list). On this basis, he pro- the ox was 1,197 pounds. It weighed 1,198. As dieval and early modern Jewish experience, a strong poses a world Jewish tax that would fund summer James Surowiecki wrote in his bestselling book, web of scholarly, business, and personal ties con- camps, a high-school tikkun olam project, and col- The Wisdom of Crowds, Galton had stumbled on nected Jewish communities. When Maimonides an- lege tuition for all participating Jews (has he heard “the simple but powerful truth that . . . under the swered the questions of the Jews of Southern France about Jewish life on American college campuses?). right circumstances, groups are remarkably intel- from his home in Cairo, their exchange was certainly In other words, more of the same at the cost of, he ligent, and are often smarter than the smartest “far more complex” than counting gumballs, but it estimates, $13.75 billion. people in them.” This turns out to work for guess- did not, even remotely, “serve the same function.” In It’s a shame, really, because there are parts of a ing gumballs and finding the coordinates of lost his zeal, Keinan seems to have forgotten that both the better, more thoughtful book lurking in this sleek submarines, as well as determining the weight of miracle and the limitation of crowd wisdom is that bestseller festooned with celebratory blurbs by stel- butchered oxen. As Surowiecki went on to detail, there is spontaneous coordination without conver- lar Jewish writers, academics, pundits, and rab- drawing on the work of cognitive scientists, econ- sation. It works for markets, but tradition and the bis. They can be found in the passages in which he omists, and others, there are more such circum- scholarship that sustains it are not a market function. charts his own fascinating Jewish journey and takes stances than one would have imagined. And that’s Nonetheless, Keinan suggests that the “evolving with ultimate seriousness the idea that both Israeli Keinan’s solution. Jewish moral code” is like a “moving stock average and American Jewry need a fundamental reorienta- He read Surowiecki at the Harvard Business of more than three thousand years of religious, cul- tion. As he writes in the final sentence of the book, School and theorized that we must tap into the tural, and moral data points.” But charting a moving “If Rabbi Yehuda, and all the successive generations wisdom of the Jewish crowd to provide “a model average to eliminate “noise” and smooth the trend that preserved our fragile legacy for so long, could of Judaism compelling enough that the vast major- line presupposes that the data points are just that: ask us one question, perhaps it should be: Who are ity of Jews, in America and Israel, will embrace it points on an x/y graph. But how does one graph, to you to end it?” willingly.” This, oddly, is more or less what he thinks take a simple case, a biblical verse through its vari- Rabbi Yehuda ha-Nasi was doing in the 3rd century ous commentaries and literary uses? The ungraph- when he codified the Mishnah. But the Rabbis were able details matter; one might even say that God is Abraham Socher is the editor of the Jewish Review of intellectual elitists who disdained the crowd. Their in them (and not in the graphable crowd). Books.

6 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2020 Overturned Tables

BY NOAH BENJAMIN BICKART

Paula Fredriksen has been at the forefront of a group that is at first devastated by the apparent When Christians Were Jews: The First the study of early Christianity since the late 1980s. failure of their eschatological hopes but then reen- Generation Her books on Jesus, Paul, and even Augustine are ergized by their collective experience of the risen by Paula Fredriksen all attempts to situate these figures in their relevant Jesus. This only confirms their belief that the world Yale University Press, 272 pp., $27.50 was indeed about to end—now. Or at least momen- It was only in the second tarily, after their leader returned. When this immediate arrival also failed to ma- generation of "Christianity" terialize, the community adapted. They changed their expectations from “now” to “soon” and, t is as true as it is banal to state that Jesus of that Jesus became Christ. through midrashic readings, transformed their Nazareth and his first followers were “Jewish.” crucified Jesus into the messiah, son of David. As As 1st-century residents of Roman Galilee, Jewish contexts. When Christians Were Jews is a the movement expanded beyond Judea, flourishing they surely saw themselves as ethnic descen- crisp, accessible synthesis of her views on the Jew- in the synagogues of Syria and Asia Minor, it en- Idants of biblical Israel, worshipped and brought ishness of Christian origins, not only during the life- countered ethnic Judeans along with “god-fearing” sacrifices in the Temple in Jerusalem, and observed, time of Jesus but throughout the early history of the Gentiles, who had long been a part of Jewish life in in some fashion, the laws of the Torah. But Judaism community that, in retrospect, is called the church. the Roman east and were open to their message. didn’t always mean what it does now; both the term When, in Fredriksen’s estimation, were “Christians” and the cluster of ideas, practices, and texts it points still “Jews”? She focuses on the four decades between t is at this earliest stage of Christian history that to have a history. Thus, despite his incontestable Jesus of Nazareth’s execution, sometime in the early IFredriksen is most radically revisionist, for her Jewishness, Jesus never participated in a Seder as the Mishnah describes it any more than he intended for Judeans to abandon biblical law for the worship of God’s only begotten son. The study of the Jewishness of Jesus has a history as well. In the beginning, there was superses- sionism, or rather an updated scholarly version of the old doctrine. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Euro- pean scholars, most of them Protestants, understood Jesus’s mission as the replacing of “Judaism” with a new religion, “Christianity,” which was definitionally opposed to the Judaism it replaced. One consequence of this was the historical casting of rabbinic Judaism as the stagnant, ossified, legally obsessed biblical religion, in dire need of a Christian update. In the wake of the Holocaust, continental scholars were forced to grapple with the history and legacy of Christian antisemitism, which is deeply entwined with this supersessionist model. They gravitated to and updated the theory first articulat- ed by the Anglican priest James Parkes, who coined the phrase “the parting of the ways” in his influential books on antisemitism in the 1930s. According to this model, Jews and Christians reached an im- passe in the wake of the destruction of the Temple and agreed, one might almost say amicably, to go their separate ways by the end of the 1st century. This model allowed Christian scholars to explore the Jewishness of Jesus (and Paul) and to situate the Destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem by Francesco Hayez, 1867. (Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.) founders of what would eventually become Christi- anity in their mid-1st-century Judean context. As helpful as the “parting of the ways” model 30s C.E., and the production of the canonical gos- reconstruction of the Jesus movement is primar- was, it has received significant challenges of late. pels in the wake of the destruction of Jerusalem. ily based on an unconventional reading of the Indeed, many scholars of rabbinics, patristics, and To show this, Fredriksen peels back the layers gospels. Among the four canonical gospels, the late antiquity are coming to see these traditions as, of retrojection found in the book of Acts—the sec- so-called synoptic gospels of Mark, Matthew, and to quote the title of an important anthology edited ond act of the author of Luke. She compares this Luke are interconnected. Fredriksen follows the by Adam Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, “ways reconstructed version of the history of these Jesus scholarly consensus that posits that both Luke and that never parted.” On this understanding, Judaism followers with Paul’s letters, along with some choice Matthew relied on Mark for the basic structure and Christianity were intertwined in significant readings of texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls. She be- and content of their own presentations of Jesus’s ways until 4th-century notions of orthodoxy and gins with the Jesus movement’s migration from the life, mission, and death, adding to it from time to heresy finally took hold. Galilee to Jerusalem and reconstructs the story of time from other traditions of what their teacher

Winter 2020 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 7 had said. On the other hand, the gospel of John is hen its Jewish leader died on the Roman as such was an ingenious mode of processing their strikingly different. Gone are the exorcisms and Wcross, the Jesus movement faced a crisis. leader’s death, as it allowed for the continuation of parables from the synoptics, and in their place are If their leader was dead, his prophecy of the end the movement. Resurrection, as Jon Levenson has found long discourses and meetings with charac- of the world must not have been true. Unlike a famously shown, is a core biblical notion, which was ters unknown in the first three gospels, such as slew of other messianic movements in this pe- understood by the 1st century as one of the harbin- Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman. Fredriksen riod (including the figure Fredriksen calls “John gers of the end times. Jesus was dead, but not gone. writes: Paul’s insistence that Gentiles need not undergo circumcision or The Jesus of the synoptic tradition is a charismatic healer, a holy man, and an follow the law was neither a rejection of the law for ethnic Judeans exorcist. . . . As a character in the gospel story, by comparison, the Jesus of the fourth nor a radical shift in the audience of the Christian message. gospel is an eerie loner, a stranger for heaven. Supremely and serenely in charge of his own the Baptizer”) that did not outlast the life of their His imminent second coming would usher in the circumstances, he moves untroubled through leader, the Jesus movement found an explana- fulfillment of his eschatological prophecy—now. an atmosphere charged with hostility. tion for why Jesus’s death did not invalidate his Yet their hopes were dashed once again. As the prophecy: His death was temporary. years dragged on and history progressed as usual, The scholarly consensus has long been to rely the movement need- on the synoptics for the “historical Jesus.” Fredrik- ed yet another adap- sen dissents by distinguishing between the histor- tation of Jewish ide- ical Jesus’s character and his itinerary. According ology to explain their to Mark, Matthew, and Luke, Jesus’s public activ- situation. They set- ity was limited to a Galilean “ministry”; he ap- tled on messianism, pears only once in Jerusalem, at the very end of which was not part of his life. As Fredriksen points out, historically, this Jesus’s original teach- is absurd. Why would the arrival of a charismatic ing. “None of the Galilean preacher and his small group of disciples gospels,” Fredriksen in Jerusalem for Passover among millions of other points out, “depicts pilgrims be met with any resistance, Roman or Jesus as forthrightly Judean? And more importantly, why would this teaching that he is Galilean group have later settled in the very city the Messiah. . . . Had that had so violently rejected their teacher? To Jesus of Nazareth ac- solve this puzzle, Fredriksen turns to John’s itin- tually and forthright- erary, in which the group is shown making sev- ly claimed the role for eral visits to Jerusalem, including one particularly himself—a teaching important one, during which Jesus “symbolically that the later gospel enacted the current Temple’s coming apocalyptic writers would have destruction.” St. Paul Disputing with the Greeks and Jews, copper plaque, ca. 1170–1180. happily used, had it Though the gospel writers later present Jesus’s (Victoria and Albert Museum, London.) existed—the evangel- famous overturning of the moneychangers’ tables ical depictions would as a radical rejection of the Temple, Fredriksen The four gospel accounts and Paul provide con- be more uniform.” And yet the gospel writers and shows that criticizing Temple practices and predict- tradictory retellings of Jesus’s appearances after his Paul, each in his own way, make an argument that ing the end of the world were entirely compatible resurrection. Fredriksen makes two claims here: Jesus is the messiah. with a continued focus on the Temple and an ongo- The first is that the group indeed experienced some- Thus, it was only in the second generation of ing commitment to Jewish law. Jesus’s preaching of thing; the second is that the notion of resurrection the movement that Jesus became Christ. “[F]rom a nonviolent embrace of the end of the world was totally normal in 1st-century Judean terms. Drawing on passages from the Essene library of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Fredriksen shows that criticism of how the Temple was run implies no rejection of the institution as such. As she writes:

Overturned tables . . . simply and visually reinforced Jesus’ prophetic message. . . . At or as the End of the Age, God would demolish . . . Herod’s Temple, in order to replace it with the final, glorious eschatological Temple of the Kingdom, one “not made by the hand of man.”

This reconciles the repeated positive statements about the Temple in Paul and the gospels with the repeated predictions of the Temple’s impend- ing destruction (“Destroy this house,” John’s Jesus demands, “and in three days I will raise it up”). It also answers the question of why members of the early church remained in Jerusalem and, according to Acts, continued to sacrifice and worship at the Stained glass window depicting the Four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Cologne Temple after the death of their leader. Cathedral, Germany. (Courtesy of Dave Dwyer, Busted Halo.)

8 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2020 this time onward,” she writes, “scripture increasingly provided a matrix of meanings available to those who sought to make sense of their new circumstances.” Learned men who knew Jewish techniques of reading into and out of scripture developed the messianic ideology that was then retrojected onto the past through the creation of the gospels. Fredriksen has another novel claim. Most scholars see a dichotomy between Paul’s letters on the one hand and Matthew’s gospel on the other. The former are usually understood as products of a thoroughly Gentile church, whereas the latter seems to speak to Many Romans who were not ethnic Judeans were attracted “Essential reading on the development of American “A remarkably readable, first-of-its-kind synthesis of the to Jewish practices. Buddhism and a fascinating exploration of why reception and impact of Josephus’s book on Jewish and Buddhism is so popular among American Jews.” Christian culture over a span of almost two millennia.” —Erik Braun, author of The Birth of Insight —Honora Howell Chapman, a decidedly Jewish, albeit Jesus-worshipping, group. Cloth $29.95 coeditor of A Companion to Josephus Minimally, scholars have tended to see these two Cloth $24.95 as separate streams of early Christianity and maxi- mally as overtly antagonistic toward one another. But Fredriksen argues that there was no daylight between Paul and the early Jerusalem church. It was just the difference between those who lived in the diaspora and those who lived in Judea—all these early Christians regarded themselves as Jews. Jews, especially those outside of Judea, had long had to negotiate their status as members of the broader Roman world while standing apart from it. They accommodated the public life of the Roman city, with its polytheism, refraining only from active participation in cultic practices. Like- wise, many Romans who were not ethnic Judeans were attracted to Jewish practices. Synagogues in Syria, Asia Minor, and elsewhere already had a class of adherents who worshipped the God of Is- rael without having been circumcised or obligated to observe the Sabbath. Paul’s insistence that these “A brilliant and marvelously readable “An illuminating and accessible new Gentiles need not undergo circumcision or follow celebration of the Song of Songs.” interpretation of modern Jewish history.” —Elaine Pagels, author of Why Religion? A Personal Story —Elisheva Carlebach, Columbia University the law was neither a rejection of the law for ethnic Cloth $24.95 Cloth $35.00 Judeans nor a radical shift in the audience of the Christian message. As with other competing forms of 1st-century Judaism, the Temple’s destruction in 70 C.E. changed everything for early Christianity. The Jerusalem church, comprised of many of Jesus’s earliest followers, went up in the same smoke as the Temple. In the ensuing centuries, the vast majority of Christians were Gentiles who imposed an anti-Jewish agenda on the events and texts of their past. Fredriksen peels away these later theological layers to present an early Christian community that was decidedly Jewish. If anything is missing in her excellent book, it is a more robust engagement with rabbinic texts. Though redacted and published (orally) later than the Greek and Qumran texts she uses, the Mishnah and Tosefta contain 1st- and 2nd-century material that buttresses her claims about what 1st-century Judaism looked like and how early Christians fit in. “This rigorous, engaging book shows how parents “For Goodman . . . the Jewish story has much But those are Jewish texts, and this is really a book think about their children’s religious upbringing” more to do with shared ideas and beliefs. about Christian ones. The ways did part eventually. —Robert Wuthnow, author of The Left Behind He is interested in what made Jews Jews, rather Cloth $35.00 than in what made them simply human.” —Adam Kirsch, The New Yorker

Paper $24.95 Noah Benjamin Bickart is a visiting assistant professor of Jewish and interreligious studies at John Carroll University. He is working on a book on the scholastic culture of the Babylonian Talmud.

Winter 2020 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 9 Tradition and Invention

BY ELISHEVA CARLEBACH

Jews and a non-Jewish political entity and only rarely In his introduction to the first volume, Walzer The Jewish Political Tradition, Volume 3: something that Jews practiced themselves. wrote that “the tradition as a whole is our subject in Community If Jews were included in early 20th-century dis- these volumes” (my emphasis) and described their edited by Michael Walzer, Menachem Lorberbaum, and cussions of political communities, it was generally project as threefold: an act of retrieval, integration, Noam J. Zohar; coedited by Madeline Kochen concerning their right to preserve their language and criticism. That is, it would retrieve “central texts Yale University Press, 696 pp., $65 and culture, along with other minorities, at a time and arguments” of Jewish political thought and when empires were being dismantled. The neglect make them available to new generations of read- of the idea of Jewish political life largely persisted ers. “Never before,” Walzer wrote, “has the tradition The imposing volumes of The Jewish Political Tradition he idea that Jews had a tradition of political thought, as well as an active political confront the reader with an almost seamless new scripture life that continued in various shapes and forms over the vast expanse of their dias- on Jewish politics. poraT existence, is a new one. It is difficult for most people living today to imagine a time when the until the rise of Zionism and the subsequent estab- been looked at . . . with our specific set of questions notion of Jews as a people who had lived without a lishment of the State of Israel. In short, the idea that about political agency and authority in mind.” But continuous political life for two thousand years was the Jews possessed a distinctive political tradition it would also “take . . . Jewish thought out of its virtually a matter of common consensus. Christians during the two millennia of diaspora only arose intellectual ghetto,” by integrating it with “Greek, conceived of Jews as having exhausted their right around the emergence of a modern sovereign Jewish Arabic, Christian, and secularist modes of thought.” to a political existence following their rejection of state. All of which is to say that The Jewish Political Finally, their project would not simply accept the Jesus as their savior. The figure of Synagoga adorn- ing so many medieval cathedrals always appears bereft of her crown and holding a broken staff or lance to symbolize this loss of sovereignty. Jews were entitled to practice their religion but were politically subordinate within the orbit of Islam as well. Any overt expressions of political ambition, such as messianic movements, were brutally sup- pressed. The most notable of these movements was that of Shabbtai Zevi in the 17th century. Wheth- er this upsurge represented the culmination of medieval messianic dreams or the inauguration of a modern revolt against a powerless life in the diaspora is still a matter of scholarly debate. But however one characterizes the Sabbatean movement, it barely altered the perception that Jews were a people without politics. In the modern era of civic and legal emancipation, the Jews often acquired equal rights as citizens of the nation-state under the explicit condition that Michael Walzer. (Photo by Cliff Moore, courtesy they surrender all vestiges of autonomous political of the Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives life. As the Count of Clermont-Tonnerre famously Center, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.) declared in 1789 during the debate over Jewish citizenship in the French Assembly: “The Jews Tradition, a projected four-volume anthol- should be denied everything as a nation, but grant- ogy reaching back to the Bible, the Talmud, ed everything as individuals,” a bargain that French medieval philosophers, and halakhic authori- Jews tried hard to accept. Nevertheless, antisemitic ties and culminating in our own times, the third classics produced in this period, such as Protocols of volume of which has recently appeared, would the Elders of Zion and Jacob Brafman’s Book of the have been almost inconceivable not long ago. Kahal, depicted a unified Jewish people as politically vibrant, xenophobically separatist, and glob- he project is animated by the presiding Synagoga depicted on the façade of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. (Wikimedia Commons.) ally ambitious. These works inverted the picture of Tintellectual spirit of Michael Walzer, the political quietism and harmlessness projected by eminent political theorist and moral philoso- Jewish leaders. Even (or particularly) within the pher, who has coedited each of the volumes along arguments and doctrines of this tradition but rath- 19th-century movement to develop and promote with the scholars of Jewish thought Menachem er “argue and . . . encourage others to argue about the academic study of Jewish culture, history, and Lorberbaum and Noam Zohar. Each volume col- which of them can usefully be carried forward un- religion, known in German as Wissenschaft des lects texts around a central theme: the first, au- der the modern conditions of emancipation and Judentums, Jewish political life barely registered as a thority; the second, membership; and the present sovereignty.” subject. If the term “politics” entered into discussion, volume (for which coeditor Madeline Kochen To that end, each of the volumes seeks to trace it almost always meant the negotiations between joined the three founding editors), community. the development of Jewish political ideas through

10 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2020 a rich range of beautifully translated texts, culled The imposing volumes of The Jewish Political and new kinds of relationships with governing au- with evident care and discernment. These sources Tradition confront the reader with an almost seam- thorities in Abbasid Babylonia, in Umayyad Spain, are accompanied by brief reflective essays from less new scripture on Jewish politics. Texts that were and in the newly settled Rhineland communities leading American and Israeli jurists, philosophers, originally contingent, dialectical, interpretive, or in the 10th century inherited no usable template and political thinkers. Thus, in the new volume on narrative appear alongside apodictic and authori- from antiquity. The achievement of the Babylonian community, Judge Jed Rakoff writes on the courage tative pronouncements, joined together in one exilarchs and geonim and of Rabbeinu Gershom and his contemporaries and successors was a grand The achievement of the Babylonian exilarchs and geonim and rethinking of what it would take to establish Jewish collective life in new and unfamiliar circumstanc- of Rabbeinu Gershom and his contemporaries and successors es. In each case, there was a complete reconception of the very basis of power, polity, community, and was a grand rethinking of what it would take to establish kinship in Jewish life. The introduction to this third volume describes Jewish collective life in new and unfamiliar circumstances. the kahal, which was the elected governing body over the Jewish community (kehilla), as its em- and responsibilities of judges; the noted Harvard po- comprehensive tradition. Yet such a presentation in- bodiment. It speaks of “the days of the kahal” as a litical theorist Michael Sandel discusses the parallels evitably violates the true meaning of the texts, which discrete period, yet with a few exceptions, this (or lack thereof) between community and nation- were written in wholly different historical contexts volume scants the period of greatest actualization of state bonds; and Fania Oz-Salzberger contributes a and distinct literary genres. Rather than being pre- the power of the kahal. Jews of the early modern pe- sented as part of conver- riod who resettled in Europe have left us a veritable sations that took place in treasure trove, thousands of records of their bylaws response to specific chal- and institutions, a literature collectively dubbed lenges in other times, pinkasim that has just begun to draw the schol- places, and political config- arly attention it deserves. This profusion of regula- urations, they appear here tions and documents from the 16th through the 18th only as snippets in inter- centuries, which parallels the growth of bureau- textual dialogue with one cratic culture in Europe, provides the clearest pic- another. ture of the actual workings of Jewish political life as Moreover, no attempt opposed to its idealized representation. It receives is made to differentiate very short shrift in The Jewish Political Tradi - between ideas expressed tion, whose editors thus missed an opportunity. They in biblical and Second explain this omission on the grounds that “most Temple texts when Jews of the texts come from rabbis.” While this is true had at least some measure regarding contested matters that required halakhic of sovereignty and those that developed during a period of extensive communal autonomy within another state such as the A page from the Zülz Pinkas, 1796 to 1805. (Courtesy of the Central Archives geonic period or, finally, for the History of the Jewish People, National Library of Israel.) those that arose in vulner- The Taub Center for Israel Studies was established able Jewish communities, in 2003 with the support of the Henry and Marilyn commentary titled “Tzedakah, Zionism, and the some of them living on the verge of expulsion. It is Taub Foundation, to advance the study of Modern Modern Jewish Citizen.” hard to see how a usable tradition can be retrieved Israel: its recent history, society and politics, However, the problem with the project is more with such methods. It is here that the perspective of together with the history of the Zionist movement fundamental than its gathering of experts in other historians could have come in handy, but no histori- and the Yishuv. The Taub Center welcomes the fields (after all, outsiders sometimes see things that ans of the Jewish political experience itself appear in public to over 20 events a year. NYU's pre- the experts have missed). In his foreword to the first the pages of this volume. eminent position as a center of instruction and volume, the late David Hartman, founding director In a project whose stated goal is to provide scholarship in Jewish history and thought, Hebrew of the Shalom Hartman Institute, writes: inspiration and guidelines for a thriving state, the language and literature, and Middle East Studies absence of lived historical context is particularly provides a natural setting for the development of Israel’s loss of sovereignty and its exile from the puzzling. The book contains, for instance, no echo Israel Studies. The Center is a part of the Skirball land did not mean the end of this community. of the world documented by the Cairo Geniza, Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at Rabbinic Judaism developed a comprehensive with its multiple competing Jewish communities NYU’s Faculty of Arts and Science, which offers a way of life mediated by explicit and precise (rabbinic-Babylonian, rabbinic-Palestinian, and range of undergraduate and graduate courses on legal norms that sustained the collective Karaite) and its (sometimes polygamous) fam- Israeli history and society. thrust of Judaic spirituality. . . . But with the ily structures, deeply embedded in the caliphal establishment of the state of Israel—the third framework. The emphasis on text over experience Jewish commonwealth—Jewish thinkers have produces a far more idyllic image of Jewish politics to address again the central issues of collective past than history itself actually reflects. existence. he illusion of continuity of a tradition over It is undoubtedly true that the loss of sovereignty Ttime and the presentation of texts without a did not spell the end of organized community life. sense of the historical context in which they were As Walzer writes, “[P]olitics is pervasive, with or produced (or even the approximate dates when they without state sovereignty.” Rather, the issue is that were written) deprives the reader of insight into one trying to retrieve models from the past with a de- of the most remarkable aspects of exilic Jewish life cidedly contemporary political purpose makes it over the past two millennia: the repeated inven- difficult to see what those past models were, how to tion and reinvention of Jewish political life. The taub.as.nyu.edu interpret them, and even where to look for them. Jews who fashioned new organizational structures

Winter 2020 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 11 decisions, the majority of texts issuing from a Instead of instances of kahal governance and intercessors for Jews. They had no real author- kahal were written by scribes at the behest of lay legislation, we get an encomium to the Council of ity over Jewish communities, and their resolu- leaders. Voluntary societies, chevrot, we are told, Four Lands (Va’ad Arba Aratzot) that misunder- tions were not binding. None of the councils ever were “governed by a book of rules drawn up . . . by stands its function and role. The councils instituted presented themselves, nor were they ever conceived the founders—a kind of constitution (which the in their own time as a representative body of all Pol- kahal never had).” But many kehillot, such as ish Jews. When they address questions of “percent- Krakow, for example, did draw up founding docu- age of suffrage”—how many Jews participated in the ments, takkanot, with preambles and governing vote or its decision procedures—the editors demon- principles that resemble constitutions in this period. strate that they subscribe to an even more idealized Such blind spots lead to significant errors of picture of the council than the 17th-century chroni- generalization. Thus, the third volume’s introduc- cler Nathan ben Moses Hannover, who is criticized tion claims that “the family generally is shielded by the editors for romanticizing the institution. The from communal interference and regulation.” In moment the Polish government decided to disband fact, documents from the archives of hundreds of the council, it disappeared. No effort was made by kehillot demonstrate the opposite. No marriage Jews to continue its other functions privately. could proceed, no family could be formed, without The retrojection of notions of “suffrage” into the consent of the kahal. It extended its protection the discussion of the Council of Four Lands to certain families but not to others, and acted in the exemplifies the teleological cast of the entire proj- place of families when they could not care for their ect. An underarticulated argument inspires the dependents. compendium: From its inception as theocracy, The absence of kehilla-generated material is par- Jewish political life has always been advancing ticularly glaring in the final chapter of the book, toward democracy. The idea of a continuous politi- devoted to “the courts.” We now know a great deal cal arc diminishes the value we can attribute to the about the procedures of Jewish courts in early mod- creation of new forms of Jewish political organi- ern Europe, the ways they adapted to the broader zation, from the exilarchate and kahal councils to legal environment, and how they dispensed justice, what historian Yosef Yerushalmi has called “Israel, but no hint of what Simha Assaf described decades the unexpected state.” Engraving of Nathan ben Moses Hannover, Jewish ago or what Jay Berkovitz and Edward Fram have Despite often extremely harsh conditions, chronicler, talmudist, and kabbalist by Christoph written more recently intrudes here. Drawing a ranging from outright physical violence to Weigel the Elder. (Wikimedia.) direct line from antiquity to the 20th century with- existential negation of all their claims to a place out elucidating the shifting contextual frameworks in history, Jews fashioned means to persevere, to ignores the genius and persistent innovation of Jew- by the Polish government in the 16th century to organize social structures, to elaborate their tra- ish community life when it arguably reached its collect taxes more efficiently from Jews ultimate- ditions, and even to create monumental works of apogee in “the days of the kahal.” ly served other purposes as representatives and jurisprudence, liturgy, art, and philosophy. The materials in these volumes have to be understood as much more than the unwitting foundations for a modern Jewish state. They are—despite having emerged mainly outside the context of a state, or perhaps because of it—independent achievements that stand as remarkable in their own right and in the absence of any subsequent vindication by the Jews’ ultimate acquisition of a more conventional sort of political power. Sit in on a meeting of the board of any Jewish art organization or watch the Knesset Channel for an photogr aphy hour, and you will find ample confirmation that architecture Jewish politics—voluntary and local or governmen- modernism tal and national—is messy. This is not necessarily judaica & bibles holocaust a bad thing. It is, in fact, the hallmark of democ- yiddish & hebrew racies and a point of pride for many Jews. (Amy foreign language Gutmann’s essay in this volume, “Meaning and olympic games Value of Deliberation,” provides an eloquent appraisal services reminder of why this must be so.) The decorous FLAVII IOSEPHI OPERA tone of the sources and essays that have appeared Josephus Flavius; Arnoldus Arlenius (ed.) Basel, Froben & Episcopius, 1544. in the first three volumes ofThe Jewish Political First printing in Greek of the collected works of Josephus: Jewish War, Jewish Tradition dulls some of this vibrancy. Reading Antiquities, Life, Against Apion. He was a them, one can forget about the unexpected twists pivotal but problematic historian who, after reneging on a suicide pact implemented to and turns of history and the spirited inventive- prevent Jewish soldiers under his command from being captured, later wrote under the ness at the heart of Jewish political life. It might patronage of those captors, the Romans. have been different if a historian or two had been Though literary in style, his work is further marred by inconsistencies and self interest. invited to participate in the project. Despite their unreliability, the works are profoundly important to our understanding of antiquity since they are early accounts of Jewish life and quote documents on the Hasmoneans, Herodians and Jewish rights Elisheva Carlebach is the Salo Wittmayer Baron under Roman rule. Josephus gives us an Professor of Jewish History, Culture, and Society invaluable contemporaneous telling of the causes and events of the 66ce revolt and and the director of the Institute for Israel and Jewish the first Jewish–Roman War, which ended with the destruction of the Second Temple, Studies at Columbia. Her books include Palaces of and led to the rise of the rabbinic period. Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern (43839) $5,750 Title page. (Colophon matches Adams J351) Europe (Harvard University Press), which received the Association for Jewish Studies Schnitzer Prize.

12 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2020 Pancho Villa and the Star of David Men

BY ALLAN ARKUSH

during World War I to surround soldiers with “clean third of the American Expeditionary Forces, had Making Judaism Safe for America: World and wholesome influences.” In 1917, this became demographics on their side. Their demands for a War I and the Origins of Religious Pluralism the task of a new government agency: the Commis- representative on the commission could “not be by Jessica Cooperman sion on Training Camp Activities (CTCA). ignored without jeopardizing their support for the New York University Press, 224 pp., $39 American Jews were eager to do their part for the troops, but they had to work hard to persuade the authorities that

n March of 1916, the still slightly infamous they could or should. revolutionary general and politico Francisco “Pancho” Villa, angry at the United States for American Jews were eager to do their part for draft and the war.” American Jews didn’t have that supporting his rival for the Mexican presi- the troops, but they had to work hard to persuade kind of leverage. dency, led an assault on Columbus, New Mexico, the authorities that they could or should. “[W]ithin Shortly after the United States entered the war, I th killing 23 Americans, including soldiers of the 13 days of the United States’ declaration of war, the a small group of prominent Jews led by Cyrus US Calvary. Properly outraged, President Woodrow Adler, the acting president of the Jewish Theo- Wilson ordered General John J. Pershing to Mexi- logical Seminary, formed a broad-based orga- co to capture or kill Villa, but he never did. Jessica nization to unify “Jewish efforts in connection Cooperman’s fine new book about World War I with welfare work among military personnel” and American Jewry begins with Pershing’s unsuc- called the Jewish Welfare Board (JWB). They cessful Mexican campaign because it set the stage were largely ignored by the commission until for the larger story she has to tell. Among the ten they were able to call attention to the emer- thousand Regular Army troops and the hundred gence of a socialist rival, the People’s League thousand National Guardsmen who participated in for Jewish Soldiers of America. This seems to the “Punitive Expedition,” there were approximate- have convinced the government that the JWB ly 3,500 Jews. The American Jewish community’s was its necessary partner (but not, however, efforts to look after them established a precedent to give it a seat on the CTCA). Including “the for the much larger project of supporting American JWB alongside the YMCA and the Knights of Jewish soldiers during World War I. Columbus in the War Department’s program Encouraged by the War Department, the Young for soldiers’ welfare work” and thereby “grant- Men’s Christian Association had stepped in to pro- ing nonsectarian status to Jews and Catho- tect Pershing’s men from what many perceived to lics represented,” in Cooperman’s opinion, “a be a greater menace than Pancho Villa: red-light significant shift in the structure of American districts in the border towns. The Knights of Co- definitions of religion.” lumbus promptly sent men to the scene to provide But that did not necessarily mean a shift Catholic soldiers with more congenial assistance toward defining religion the same way the than they were likely to receive from a Protestant Jews did. Consider the question of kashrut, organization. So did the Young Men’s Hebrew which was a major issue at a time when con- Association, which established a branch near the siderable numbers of Orthodox Jews were be- Mexican border where Jewish soldiers could seek ing conscripted. Should the JWB be lobbying “recreation without temptation.” Jewish leaders for the supply of kosher food at army bases? (like the Catholics) were almost as fearful of young The Orthodox representatives on the JWB recruits being lured to join the Protestant major- thought so. At a JWB Executive Committee ity as they were of them succumbing to the bad meeting a few weeks into the war, Rabbi Ber- influence of bars and bordellos. But more plan- Poster by Ernest Hamlin Baker illustrating the United nard Drachman argued that the government ning would be needed to provide Jews with the War Work Campaign, which brought together seven should “supply kosher food to Jewish soldiers, same level of services as the Young Men’s Chris- organizations into one large funding drive, November as is being done in Austria.” Dr. Adler was, tian Association was already making available for 1918. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and of course, more moderate, suggesting “that if Protestants. Photographs Division.) the government could not do so, this Board The (Reform) Central Conference of American could undertake the matter of supplying ko- Rabbis took responsibility for High Holiday servic- sher food wherever it was requested at its own es (attended, on occasion, by more curious or idle War Department recognized the YMCA as a part- expense, provided that a specific fund was raised Gentiles than Jews), but the YMHA had only “limit- ner to the CTCA,” assuming that it “would be the for this purpose.” Reform members of the board ed success in instituting morally uplifting programs only civilian agency necessary to the CTCA’s pro- objected to the idea of catering to mainly Ortho- for Jewish soldiers on the Mexican border.” The gram for building military morals and morale.” dox concerns “‘and goluth [diaspora] sentiments,’ Gentiles, in the opinion of the War Department, In effect, Protestant Christianity was to be the de rather than the actual needs of American Jewish didn’t in the end do much better, but this didn’t lead facto religion of the American serviceman. Both servicemen.” to the conclusion that pastoral work wasn’t worth- Catholics and Jews were outraged, but Catholics, Knowing that kosher food was a lot to ask for, while. The lesson learned from the Mexican experi- who constituted 17 percent of the American popu- the board raised the issue with the government ence was that a greater effort would have to be made lation and were expected to furnish as much as a gingerly, prefacing its request with the statement

Winter 2020 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 13 that Jewish legal authorities had long ago made it Since a couple of dozen chaplains obviously One man who took this sort of thing very seri- clear that “religious laws may be set aside in the couldn’t handle the job of providing religious ser- ously without substituting America for God was a defense of one’s country.” This was too meek for vices for tens of thousands of soldiers, the board young Reform rabbi named Elkan Voorsanger. The many in the Orthodox community, but too much hired an additional 30 or so “camp rabbis”—usually son of a prominent San Francisco rabbi, Voorsanger for soldiers like a certain Captain Horowitz, who rabbis from communities near military bases—as was serving as an assistant rabbi in St. Louis when argued, among other things, that “[t]he prescribed well as hundreds of more- or less-qualified field the United States entered the war. He immediately ration is wholesome as well as sufficient; the pre- workers, who became known as “Star of David gave up his clergy deferment to fight in a war that scribed components have been determined with scientific accuracy to balance the whole; we cannot Even if the Jewish Welfare Board couldn’t help Jewish in reason insist on the ‘kashrith.’” This was also the opinion of the higher-ups in the War Department, soldiers keep kosher, it could provide the kind of activities who had the decisive say in the matter. that the YMCA provided. ven if the JWB couldn’t help Jewish soldiers Ekeep kosher, it could provide the kind of ac- men.” Together, they “led the majority of religious he didn’t support and went to France as an enlist- tivities that the YMCA provided: lectures, movies, and social services provided by the JWB.” ed man. Voorsanger did so out of solidarity with and dances (with the right sort of women). And As part of its effort to direct the work of its his peers, and because he had “a country and that it could reinforce the patriotic message by stress- cadres, the board produced a magazine, the country is the United States,” which was engaged, ing “that through engaged adherence to the tenets Welfare Board Sentinel, for distribution in mili- he could at least hope, in a struggle “for democra- of Judaism, Jews could become better citizens and tary camps. Its very first issue contained a “Deca- cy and against autocracy” that would end all war. better Americans.” One of the most important ac- logue for Jewish Soldiers,” written by Rabbi Wil- After Congress authorized the appointment of Jew- tions it took to foster such adherence was to lobby liam Rosenau. The first commandment read “I am ish chaplains, he became the first to receive a com- successfully for the appointment (for the first time America, thy country, which brought thee out of mission, but that didn’t take him away from the since the Civil War) of Jewish military chaplains bondage to liberty”; its fourth prohibited taking front lines. The man who became known as the to serve in the US Army. the name of America in vain; and its fifth was to “Fighting Rabbi” was described in an article pub- Once the necessary legislation had been passed, honor “thy Superior Officers.” Cooperman may lished after the war as the JWB assumed responsibility for selecting the go too far when she maintains that this strange men who would fill the limited number of positions piece of overzealous rhetoric actually displaced a figure of powerful physique, forceful that had been created. The board made reasonable “God and sacred texts,” in Rabbi Rosenau’s eyes, personality, military bearing and yet, in his intercourse with the men, one of a dominant spirituality, calling forth an evident response wherever a kindred feeling was innermost hidden—that was the figure, in the sand- colored Ford, which rode up the lines where shells whizzed most often and made its owner known and loved by every doughboy in the vicinity.

Voorsanger won a French Croix de Guerre and a Purple Heart and became the JWB’s poster boy, but he wasn’t by any means typical. What was the impact of the JWB’s work on more ordinary Jewish soldiers? Cooperman gives us a chapter full of complaints. Orthodox soldiers, their parents, and their rabbis grumbled “that JWB workers lacked the experience to lead even Reform services and had ‘insufficient knowledge of Hebrew to conduct orthodox service.’” Reform Jews, including a young recruit named Jacob Rader Marcus, who ultimately became the leading American Jew- ish historian of his day, complained that the prayer book patched together by the JWB was incoherent, and that the JWB’s attempt to “legislate Judaism” left everyone dissatisfied. Zionists complained that the assimilationist JWB “cancelled everything that was genuinely Jewish from its program,” and the socialist-leaning Forverts complained that the soldiers had “no Yiddish books to read . . . no Yiddish Jewish men in the American Expeditionary Forces celebrate the first Passover Seder, sponsored by the entertainments, theatrical performances, concerts Jewish Welfare Board, April 1919, Paris, France. (Courtesy of the U.S. National Archives.) and the like.” Eastern European Jews, in general, as Cooperman puts it, “feared that the JWB was working against the real interests and needs of Jew- efforts to select a denominationally diverse crew of “as the ultimate source of freedom and righteous ish soldiers, which they understood as based on rabbis, but the criteria imposed by the government behavior,” but it certainly placed patriotism on a cultural distinctiveness rather than shared Ameri- and endorsed by the board itself effectively ruled dangerously high pedestal. She doesn’t go too far, can identity.” out anyone who lacked a good secular education, though, when she observes that the “first com- Nothing would substantiate their fears as much and thereby excluded practically all of the available mandments surely spoke to concerns about the as the JWB’s position with regard to the “welfare Orthodox rabbis. The vast majority of the 25 candi- 18 percent of all American soldiers—and possibly huts,” which were supposed to serve as the head- dates who were eventually approved were graduates as many as one-third of all Jewish soldiers—born quarters for its workers’ activities, as well as their of the Reform Hebrew Union College. in other countries.” homes. Partly for the sake of convenience, but more

14 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2020 for ideological reasons, the JWB preferred sharing space with the YMCA to having huts of its own. Re- ligious distinctiveness was fine, but “the prospect of separate Jewish soldiers’ welfare huts threatened to cross the line from drawing strength and pride from one’s tradition to outright advocacy of segregation.” The JWB was strenuously opposed to what some of its leaders decried as “Yiddishisation” and a return WHY LISTEN TO THE to the “ghetto.” However, sharing space with the YMCA had its problems. There were many complaints that “the COMMENTARY YMCA used its huts not in the interest of religious pluralism but in order to pursue its evangelical MAGAZINE PODCAST? work.” And this may have been the least of it. Here’s the not untypical complaint of a soldier at Camp Devens in Ayer, Massachusetts: BECAUSE OUR LISTENERS At one of the large YMCA hall[s] there are seated about 100 Jewish soldiers with prayer books in their hands. Along the sides of the ARE RIGHT. room, Gentile soldiers are writing letters, smoking, chewing and conversing among themselves. Behind the Jews there are seated or standing several hundred other Gentile soldiers ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ who are either exchanging stories, smoking or staring in wild-eyed wonder at the strange “Podhoretz and company are sight of a Jew leading the prayer as he stands excellent. Come for the insight. with a shawl thrown over his shoulders. Many snicker and grin, as they hear a Hebrew word, Stay for the excellent analysis or as they see the Jews rise and sit again and and the joke of the week.” again. In this environment a Jewish soldier is expected to say Kaddish!!! And to crown all of this, a moving picture show is always scheduled ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ to take place in the same hall just as soon as the Jewish services are ended. “It’s free! They’re nice! You’ll find out what the hell Young Jacob Marcus, who knew the overall situation quite well, proclaimed in print, “You must is going on!” build Jewish shacks because the men in the ranks want them.” The JWB leadership eventually bowed to this ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ pressure. It sought and received government per- “A bit of solace and sanity in the midst mission to erect 51 buildings in training camps across the country. Happily, the government of such political madness. agreed to pay for light and heat in these structures, Podhoretz and Rothman offer perceptive and just as it did for the YMCA. To advertise its success to the Jewish public, the JWB produced a poster sharp commentary on the day’s topics. displaying a “homey JWB building filled with sol- A must-listen podcast for all conservatives.” diers in uniform,” some listening to a piano played by a young woman and others studying a text. The poster “announced in Yiddish, ‘Mir haben fur ze a heim geboit’ (We have built them a home).” This was clearly a deviation from the board’s previous policy, but it wasn’t really self-ghettoization. It just Commentary Magazine’s twice added a splash of ethnicity to the religious pluralism that the JWB had sought to foster from the weekly podcast is hosted by beginning. The idea of a “tri-faith” America did not become John Podhoretz, Noah Rothman, part of the American civic consensus until after World War II, when it was popularized by the Jew- Abe Greenwald and Sohrab Ahmari. ish thinker Will Herberg, but, as Cooperman shows, it began much earlier. The “battle for American religious pluralism was waged by the Jewish Welfare THE COMMENTARY MAGAZINE PODCAST Board during World War I,” she writes, “and against unlikely odds, the JWB won.”

Allan Arkush is the senior contributing editor of the www.commentarymagazine.com/podcast Jewish Review of Books and professor of Judaic studies and history at Binghamton University.

Winter 2020 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 15 Law, Lore, and Theory

BY LAWRENCE KAPLAN

general biblical injunctions as procreation or the nonlegal parts of rabbinic literature including alle- Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law prohibition of work on the Sabbath with “exacting gory, stories both playful and didactic, and narrative by Chaim N. Saiman precision. . . . Early halakhic texts establish the basic theology), midrash, and the mystical tradition. While Princeton University Press, 320 pp., $29.95 framework, while subsequent layers analyze, debate, granting that this response possesses “much truth,” and expand its details and applications.” To focus on Saiman astutely notes that it “concedes the central Sabbath law: The rabbis in the Mishnah break down claim: insofar as the subject is the corpus of halakhah, the general biblical prohibition of work into 39 dis- Jesus was correct.” Saiman takes the opposite tack: tinct categories, one of which is writing, defined as haim Saiman’s lucid and learned new writing two letters (the minimum number of letters Precisely because halakhah loomed so large in the book offers a conceptual introduction to necessary to form a word in Hebrew) using per- rabbinic consciousness, it became the medium the halakhah, Jewish law. Its “core argu- manent liquid. Later rabbinic texts take all sorts of through which the rabbis did in fact engage the ment” is this: unusual cases into consideration, a process continu- weightier matters of the law. This is true not only C ing down to today. As Saiman notes, “In the modern of halakhah—law in the narrowest sense of the Halakhah exists on a spectrum or continuum. era, halakhists discussed whether it is permitted . . . to term—but also the way the rabbis’ project merges At one pole, it functions . . . [as] a system of rules halakhic dialogue with storytelling, biblical designed to govern human behavior. . . . But the exegesis, and theological reflection. book’s central concern is with the opposing pole, which is far more challenging to describe. Here, Halakhah is not only regulation; it is Torah in the halakhah functions as Torah, as an object of broadest sense. That is to say, Torah is also storytell- Torah study, and even as literature. . . . In a ing, biblical exegesis, theological reflection, moral sense, we can think of the two poles as instruction, education, and more. It is not, as the establishing the goalposts, while the “game” of traditional response to Jesus’s critique would have it, halakhah, and indeed its lived history, plays out a group of separate, secondary religious disciplines, on the field between them. but arises out of the halakhic discussions themselves.

As opposed to the more mundane function of the he first two parts of Saiman’s book are devoted first, regulatory pole, the second pole accords tran- Tto a series of illuminating readings of rabbinic scendent significance to the halakhah—indeed, texts where we can see this integral connection be- makes it more than just Jewish law in the narrow tween technical halakhic discussion and what has sense. As Saiman explains: sometimes been called “meta-halakhic” thought. These parts contain such chapter titles as “Halakhah the study of Torah . . . competes not only with as Torah,” “Halakhah as Theology,” “Halakhah as other spiritual pursuits such as prayer and good Education,” and “Halakhah as Aggadah.” Given the works, and not only with other intellectual Chaim N. Saiman. (Courtesy of the author.) fluid nature of the talmudic discussions, the distinc- interests like studying philosophy, art, or tions between the materials treated in these chapters science, but with virtually every other human play Scrabble (generally okay, but in the Deluxe Edi- are often not very clear. The epigraph to the chap- activity—up to and including the basic human tion, the board’s grooves hold the letters in place more ter “Halakhah as Aggadah” is a quote from Bialik’s need of earning a living! permanently and may thereby produce a ‘writing’).” classic essay about those two rabbinic categories of Saiman points out that this “exclusive focus on the discourse, in which Bialik writes that a “living and Saiman begins his discussion by analyzing the idea precise details of religious practice” left the Pharisees, vital halakhah is an aggadah that was or that will of halakhah as found in rabbinic literature. He the forebears of rabbinic Judaism, open to Jesus’s cri- be. And the same is true in reverse.” One might contrasts the halakhic consciousness of the rabbis tique that they mistook “the legal trees for the spiritual say that Saiman aims to demonstrate the truth of to the religious consciousness of the Bible, which forest.” Although he himself is thoroughly committed Bialik’s poetic conceit in concrete rabbinic detail. focuses on a few central themes: worshipping one to rabbinic Judaism, Saiman does not casually dismiss One fine example of this interplay between tech- God, avoiding idolatry, honoring Shabbat, preserv- Jesus’s critique. “A quick glance at the Mishnah,” he nical, even arcane, halakhic analysis and broad re- ing sexual morality, and taking care of the less fortu- writes, “reveals that Jesus was not wholly off base”: ligious reflection can be found in the chapter “Hal- nate. For the rabbis, “living God’s will requires con- akhah as Torah.” Deuteronomy 21 mandates that if a siderably more detailed knowledge of what the law He chastises the Pharisees for fussing over murder victim is found outside a town and the killer mandates than a plain reading of the Bible lets on”: questions like the tithing of herbs—and it is is unknown, the elders of the nearest town must true, the Mishnah does not find these questions assemble in a dry riverbed, ceremonially hack a The talmudic sages held that the laws of the least bit trivial. As Mishnah Ma’aserot (3:9) calf’s neck, and then wash their hands as a symbolic the Bible cannot be practiced until they are explains, if “savory, hyssop, and thyme” are gesture of atonement. The Mishnah (Sota 9:4) raises translated into more particular and detailed deemed foods, they require tithing; if they are a question about this practice that, as Saiman notes, categories. . . . The rabbis held that the Torah merely plants, they will be exempt. seems like “a parody halakhic legalism”: is comprised of 613 individual mitzvot, each a foundational source of law. The Mishnah’s goal Saiman notes that the traditional rabbinic response From which part of the corpse do they measure? is to articulate the scope of the mitzvot along to Jesus’s critique is to argue that “law is not every- Rabbi Eliezer says: from his navel. with rabbinic laws and enactments designed to thing” in Judaism. This response contends that “Jesus Rabbi Akiva says: from his nostrils. expand and fortify them. and his latter followers failed to appreciate the different elements of the Jewish tradition that complement That is, in the—to say the very least—unlikely event Thus, for example, the rabbis tried to define such the law,” including the biblical narrative, aggadah (the that the corpse was exactly equidistant between two

16 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2020 towns, save for the trifling distance between the texts Saiman cites will benefit from his skillful orga- While Rif [Alfasi] reduced the Talmud to legal navel and the nose, from which of the two does one nization of material and his incisive analyses. rules, Tosafot performed “Talmud” to the measure to determine which town is closer? Talmud. In the same way that the Talmud worked What is going on here? Saiman points to the aiman’s discussion of halakhah in the post- to resolve contradictions among its various explanation of this debate offered by the Babylonian Stalmudic period is a genuine tour de force. Here sources of authority, Tosafot sought to reconcile Talmud (Sota 45b): he uses his description of the two poles of halakhah contradictions among talmudic passages. . . . Rif as regulatory law and halakhah as Torah as an focuses on . . . the practiced law in the present . . . One master [Rabbi Akiva] holds: organizing framework to characterize much of while Tosafot’s interest spans the entire Talmud, the primary element of life is in his nostrils. this literature down to the present day. He notes practiced or otherwise. . . . Unlike Rif, Tosafot And one master [Rabbi Eliezer] holds: that among the rishonim, the early medieval approaches the Talmud as a seamless web of rules the primary element of life is in his navel. rabbinic scholars (10th–13th centuries), none quite and concepts to be explored through the varied maintained the balance found in the Talmud dialectics of talmud Torah. As Saiman eloquently explains, “[T]he issue is not how we measure a man’s corpse but how we mea- In contrast to Alfasi’s practical approach to the study sure the human essence.” Later rabbinic texts take all of Torah, the tosafists adopted a devotional view. Tosafot, however, like Alfasi, “rarely addresses the [The Talmud] turn[s] a superficially trifling sorts of unusual cases into Talmud’s aggadah, nor does the commentary discuss legal question into a broadly philosophical biblical narrative, spin aphorisms to encourage reli- one: Is man a primarily physical being— consideration, a process gious devotion, or contemplate theology or religious created from the navel on out? Or is man philosophy.” Thus, while the tosafists developed and fundamentally a spiritual being—measured continuing down to today. expanded halakhic argument, so as to transform the from the breathing passages? Talmud—as one 16th-century authority colorfully put between applied and nonapplied halakhah, hal- it—into a globe, it was a legalistic globe. And he points out, this “broadly philosophical” debate akhah and aggadah, the dialectical give and take In his great code of law, the Mishneh Torah, Mai- fits nicely into its halakhic context, “as the ceremony of discussion and firm legal conclusions, though monides (1138–1204) sought to codify the entirety of the hacked calf is specifically designed to draw at- some came closer to that balance than others. of halakhah, both practical and nonpractical, in this tention to the uniqueness of the human being.” Rabbi Isaac Alfasi of Fez and Lucena (1013– respect following the lead of the Talmud itself. But As Saiman notes, in Christianity such ques- 1103) stood at the first, regulatory pole. He was the his aim was to produce a well-ordered code out of tions were addressed in theological discussions, author of the first great “summarizing commentary, the literary riot of the Talmud: and in our modern world they are addressed “in the Sefer ha-Halakhot . . . [which] skips over the aggadic humanities, the social sciences, biology, or neuro- portions of the Talmud . . . and deals only with the Maimonides starts from Rif’s assumption that psychology. [But for] the rabbis the relevant context legal sections deemed then-currently applicable . . . the Talmud needs to be pared down to legal is halakhah.” This is very well said. He might have offering a synopsis of [these sections’] central argu- rules, but then invents his own method for further underscored the point if he had examined ments.” At the other pole are the tosafists (literally, recording and classifying them. Whereas Rif the parallel passage in the Jerusalem Talmud (Sota glossators), the 12th- and 13th-century Ashkenazic excerpts Talmudic deliberations, Maimonides 9:3), which he quotes, as more than a mere variant commentators on the Talmud. eliminates them entirely. Further, though of the discussion in the Babylonian Talmud:

Rabbi Eliezer says: from his navel— from the place that the fetus is created. JEWISH REVIEW BOOKS Rabbi Akiva says: from his nostrils— the place where the face is recognized. Annual All-Day Conference th Following Saiman’s philosophical lead, we might con- and 10 Anniversary Celebration strue the Jerusalem Talmud’s version of the debate as follows: What is it that is so morally abhorrent about the crime of murder? Is it that the murderer destroyed a human life—the biological life that develops out Save the Date! of the navel? Or is it that the murderer destroyed this unique human life—that is, this person who is Sunday, April 26, 2020 uniquely identified by his face? As the Talmud states elsewhere, everyone’s face is different. In short, what Museum of Jewish Heritage 36 Battery Place, New York City we have here is an implicit disagreement between the , Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds as to the philosophical significance of the seemingly trivial halakhic For further information: [email protected] or 646-218-9045 debate between Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Akiva. As Saiman demonstrates again and again, halakhic discussion ranges far beyond narrow legal issues. Thus, he shows that a debate regarding a small detail of Sabbath law “initiates a discussion over the ideals of manhood; intellectual versus physical prowess; the relationship between poverty and politics; the possibilities of human perfection; and the true end of human history.” While Saiman writes that his book is aimed “at readers who might not know much about either Jewish law or the state of academic scholarship on the subject,” even www.jewishreviewofbooks.com/events accomplished talmudists who are familiar with the

Winter 2020 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 17 Mishneh Torah issues thousands of declarative supplemented by the glosses of his Polish contem- rules . . . it offers no halakhic defense of its porary Rabbi Moses Isserles, took center stage. conclusions. . . . The treatise [unlike Alfasi] These codes, Saiman observes, “offer the stark- Will the Catholic also departs radically from the Talmud’s more est contrast to the idea of halakhah-as-Torah. . . . haphazard organization . . . presenting halakhah For [their] express interest is to frame halakhah Church embrace in a conceptualized framework, marked by as black-letter directives that govern Jewish life of principles, corollaries, and exceptions. the exilic present.” Saiman, however, argues that the broader conception of halakhah had become Zionism? Although Maimonides departs from the Talmud so dominant that even legal codes like these nev- in both its organization and form of discourse, not er quite realized their purely regulatory goal. For only does he follow the Talmud’s lead in addressing example: the entirety of halakhah, both practical and non- When will the next practical, but he also skillfully interweaves a great In several instances, a section of Tur begins by deal of what Saiman has referred to as “halakhah as stating a broad rule derived from the Mishnah Torah” together with his strictly halakhic presenta- that sounds as if it will apply in many cases but black swan appear in tion. Perhaps because in the Mishneh Torah such is then significantly narrowed as the paragraphs discussions are far more philosophical and less fan- proceed. In several laws relating to relationships the Middle East? ciful than those found in the Talmud, this point of between Jews and non-Jews, this proclivity is contact between the Mishneh Torah and talmudic taken to an extreme. Not only is the scope of the literature goes unnoted by Saiman. halakhah cut back, but Tur concludes that in the Saiman uses the medieval halakhic continuum present era the laws do not even apply. What made Saul he has drawn between Alfalsi and Maimonides on the one hand and the Tosafot on the other to What is striking and revealing, Saiman points out, locate a wide variety of other key commentators is that the Tur accords the same importance to these Bellow a great and codifiers. Here, as elsewhere, his discussions now moot talmudic laws as it does to the regulatory are truly illuminating, but even a reader only curso- rules concerning these matters currently in force. Pre- Jewish writer? rily acquainted with post-talmudic rabbinic litera- cisely because these talmudic laws are still Torah, the ture might wonder at the lack of any discussion of obligation to study them leads the Tur to grant them Rashi’s commentary on the Talmud. This commen- a prominent place, and its commentators follow suit. tary is, along with Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah, As Saiman shows, the same process is at work in universally acknowledged as one of the two most the Shulchan Arukh and its commentaries. While the significant works of Jewish law written by a single Shulchan Arukh itself, Saiman notes, is “considerably individual. Saiman justifies this gap by his need to more code-like than the Tur,” and the primary inter- focus on the book’s primary task of showing how est of some of its commentaries is “applied halakhah the concepts of halakhah as Torah and halakhah as in its most straightforward sense,” most commenta- regulation “played out at critical junctures in the de- tors vacillate “between citing responsa addressing velopment of halakhic thought.” practical issues and extended elaboration of talmu- I would claim, however, that, to the contrary, dic concepts.” Such theoretical commentary reached Saiman’s framework deepens our appreciation of the its apogee in the Ketzot ha-choshen, by the brilliant significance of Rashi’s commentary. For if, as Saiman 18th-century talmudist Rabbi Aryeh Leib Heller. rightly claims, none of the monumental works of the While formally a commentary on the Shulchan rishonim that he surveys maintain the Talmud’s fine Arukh, it was, as Saiman notes, focused on “using literary balance, Rashi’s commentary does just that. legal rules to discuss foundational questions of hal- Like the Tosafot, and unlike Alfasi, Rashi covers not akhic jurisprudence.” only the tractates dealing with applied practical law Note, however, what has happened in the course Critical questions but also those dealing with laws that are no longer of Saiman’s survey of post-talmudic literature. His applicable, such as those of the Temple service. But survey’s goal is to show that while halakhah in this are out there. unlike the Tosafot, Rashi’s unrivaled line-by-line period “began to journey away from the give-and- commentary covers the totality of the text, skipping take of the Talmudic sugya toward codification and nothing and explaining whatever requires explana- standardization . . . the idea of halakhah as Torah tion, aggadah as well as halakhah. Finally, in contrast continues to present itself at critical junctures.” to Alfasi, who radically abridges the talmudic dialec- However, while in his readings of rabbinic texts in tic, Maimonides, who goes further and eliminates it the earlier part of the book, “halakhah as Torah” entirely, and the tosafists, who radically expand the referred to rabbinic storytelling, biblical exegesis, Talmud’s dialectic (performing “Talmud” on the Tal- theological reflection, moral instruction, educa- mud), Rashi focuses on the sugya, the discussion at tion, and the like, in his survey of post-talmudic hand, guiding the student through the winding path- literature, “halakhah as Torah” becomes research ways of its give and take. It is thanks to Rashi’s com- into “foundational questions of halakhic jurispru- mentary that the Talmud, despite historical ups and dence.” But jurisprudential theory and conceptual downs in popularity, remains the central text of hal- insights are not edifying stories, daring literary akhic study, always standing as a bulwark against the interpretations, or deep theological reflections. reduction of halakhah to regulatory law. In a chapter called “Halakhah’s Empire,” Saiman discusses the method of talmudic analysis whose erhaps the closest the Talmud ever came to leading practitioner was Rabbi Chaim Soloveitchik of Pbeing displaced in Jewish history was in the Brest-Litovsk, or Brisk, who lived in the late 19th and late Middle Ages when two principal halakhic early 20th centuries. In this method, Saiman notes, codes, Rabbi Jacob ben Asher’s Arba’a Turim (Four the idea of halakhah as a rigorous theoretical system Rows), known as the Tur, written in Spain in the “reaches its fullest articulation.” “Briskers” systemati- 1300s, and Rabbi Joseph Karo’s Shulchan Arukh cally probe all halakhic rules to reveal their conceptual, (Set Table), written in Safed in the 1500s and then jurisprudential underpinnings. This method of study

18 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2020 presupposes halakhah as a regulatory system but dis- enable it to “play a decisive role in the governance But, to return to the book’s beginning, while hal- plays a singular lack of interest in it. As Saiman states: of the Jewish State.” But, Saiman queries, given the akhah as Torah in the aggadic moral sense may re- broad, even extralegal nature of halakhah as he has spond to Jesus’s critique of the law as unspiritual, can The Briskers . . . adopted the Talmud’s practice described it, can it “become, or merge with, modern the same be said of halakhah as Torah in its rigorous, of writing on non-practiced halakhah, melding state law?” Saiman reminds the reader of the moraliz- abstract, theoretical sense? How can it be considered various halakhic disciplines into a single ing language halakhah uses, the role it assigns rabbis spiritual? Perhaps to extricate himself from these dif- framework and investigating long-rejected as “teachers, scholars, spiritual guides, and theolo- ficulties, late in the book Saiman suddenly affirms that views alongside views codified in the Shulhan gians,” and the Talmud’s favoring of “legal argument, “even the Brisker’s rigid categories can be shown to ad- Arukh . . . [saying] little about which view is literary nuance, and cultural exploration over black- dress a range of spiritual and social considerations both correct. And while Briskers surely assumed letter rules . . . [a] structure [that] can effectively foster precluded and preluded by the method’s founders; of their readers were fully committed to halakhic moral development and impart religious meaning.” late, there has been a move to steer a renewed form of practice, the paradigmatic encounter with How, for instance, could a state adopt the Mish- Brisker analysis farther in this direction.” In support halakhah was as a medium of Torah study. nah’s two-tiered approach to an employer’s obliga- of this contention, he refers the reader in a footnote tion to feed his employees? On the “hard” legal level, to several recent studies. Indeed, there has been an But the Briskers’ idea of halakhah as Torah is op- the master owes his worker no more than a basic ongoing effort over the past few decades by talmudic posed not only to halakhah as a regulatory system meal, but on the “soft” educational level, the Mish- scholars from differing camps and ideological orien- but also to Saiman’s first idea of halakhah as Torah, nah urges employers to remember that workers de- tations to analyze talmudic and medieval halakhic the kind of broad, free-ranging, playful, poetic re- serve more than the minimum obligatory amount. texts using some form of Brisker legal categories, and flection found in the Talmud. The Brisker method is Incorporating such an approach, Saiman argues, then to move from and through these “hardened le- exceptionally formal and severely self-contained, re- “would lead to uncertainty over what the law is.” gal constructs” to values and “soft norms.” But Saiman jecting any historical, contextual, or realist approach But just sticking with the “hard” legal level “would never really discusses or engages in such an analysis. to the halakhah. Indeed this method views any at- decouple the halakhically inspired statute from the Indeed, his description of Brisk as a rigid self-con- tempt to psychologize or sociologize the halakhah moral and spiritual teachings of the Mishnah.” tained method of legal analysis tends to undercut it. as—to cite Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik (1903–1993), Do such moral and spiritual teachings have Nonetheless, Saiman’s conceptual overview of the grandson of Rabbi Chaim Soloveitchik and one much to do with the Brisker method, which trans- halakhah is illuminating, and his discussions of of 20th-century America’s most influential halakhists forms “the Talmud’s oftentime fuzzy categories specific texts are not only uncommonly lucid but and theologians—“strangling its very soul.” into hardened legal constructs”? Saiman began by studded with insights. It is not too much to say that describing the conceptions of “halakhah as regula- upon concluding the book, we realize that all along t is only in the last chapter of the book that Saiman tory system” and “halakhah as Torah” as the two we have been engaged in fulfilling the command- Inotes that he has, in fact, been operating with two opposing goalposts between which the game of ment of talmud Torah. different concepts of “halakhah as Torah” and seeks halakhah and traditional Jewish life are played, but to reconcile them. In this chapter, Saiman discusses now there appear to be three goalposts: a regulato- the attempt on the part of some Religious Zionist jury one and opposed to it two others, a moralizing Lawrence Kaplan is a professor of Jewish studies at rists and halakhists to update the halakhah so as to aggadic one and a rigorous theoretical one. McGill University.

Winter 2020 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 19 Israel's Sea Change

BY MATTI FRIEDMAN

he story of how this unfolded in the 30 years their trade in the Land of Israel—one group from Zionism’s Maritime Revolution: The Yishuv’s Tbefore Israel’s birth in 1948 is the subject of the Caspian and one from the Volga—had given Hold on the Land of Israel’s Sea and Shores, Zionism’s Maritime Revolution: The Yishuv’s Hold up. Lacking boats, nets, and help from the Zionist 1917 – 1948 on the Land of Israel’s Sea and Shores, 1917 – 1948. establishment, they’d gone back home. by Kobi Cohen-Hattab De Gruyter, 336 pp., $114.99 For early Zionists, the sea was a way to get to Israel from Europe, but once you arrived, there wasn’t much point in

ne summer day in 1947, a ship about thinking about it further. to sail from the London docks made history when it raised a new flag: the While the early years of Zionist settlement on land At the time, the land’s main port, Jaffa, was con- blue-and-white pennant of the Jewish have been exhaustively documented, it’s surprising trolled by Arab porters and sailors. Few Jews had nationalO movement. There was a commotion on the to learn here from Cohen-Hattab, a professor of his- anything to do with the water at all. The early Zionists riverside. “Thousands crowded onto the shores of tory at Bar-Ilan University, that so far there hasn’t were focused on redeeming the soil, and their ideal the Thames,” an observer recorded: been a comprehensive account of what happened on was the farmer. The sea was a way to get here from the water, no book that “has used a critical approach Europe, but once you were here—lifted physically This was the first time in history that seamen’s and the totality of existing sources to relate the story and humiliatingly from your ship and into a small orders were given in Hebrew at the Thames dock. of the sea and its professions within the chronicles boat at Jaffa by Arab porters—there wasn’t much point The appearance of the lovely Jewish ship with of the Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel in the in thinking about it further. The future lay inland. the Jewish crew on the Thames made a strong modern age in the years prior to the establishment of The slow change in this attitude can be credited, impression not only on the Jewish groups but the state.” The author has set out to fill the hole in the as in many other aspects of the Zionist enterprise, to also on the British trade and shipping classes. record, explaining how modern Jewish seamanship individual enthusiasts. A key character in this case grew from a few failed fishing communes and hand- was Meir Gurvitz, a math teacher in Tel Aviv in the The ship, SS Kedmah, was the very first vessel made boats to the beginning of real naval power. 1910s and 1920s who was described by contempo- belonging to the Zionist movement’s new shipping “Can it be imagined that, in a beautiful land raries as an affable maritime fanatic: “Indeed, the company, ZIM. It was sailing for the Land of Israel, such as ours,” bemoaned the Hebrew journalist man was wild for one thing, the sea, and he wished still under British control, where its arrival was oc- Itamar Ben-Avi in 1912, “a land of abundant riv- to infect others with his madness.” Born in Esto- casion for a national celebration in the Jewish home. ers, lakes, and seas, there is no water work, there nia, trained in Paris and Geneva, with a doctorate Crowds came to the Tel Aviv beach to see the ship are no seamen?” Ben-Avi, the son of Eliezer Ben- in marine studies from Seattle, he was described by steam in, and five Piper Cubs flew an honor guard Yehuda, father of modern Hebrew, was famously the one of his students as “an unusual man, wearing, overhead (one carried Golda Meir). Children waved first child in modern times to speak Hebrew as his always, a black suit, with a jacket zipped to his neck” flags, and Zionist leaders delivered speeches praising mother tongue. He knew something about national who would “would walk alone back and forth in the what was then called the “conquest of the sea.” rebirth and was upset to see this particular part of yard, and appeared to be murmuring in an eternal As usual, the story—as told in Kobi Cohen- the process neglected: He wrote those lines after two mysterious monologue.” Hattab’s excellent new history, Zionism’s Maritime groups of Jewish fishermen who’d come to practice It was in large part thanks to Gurvitz’s efforts Revolution—wasn’t that simple. The new Zionist ship was, in fact, a refurbished English vessel with 20 years of rough service behind her, including the wartime evacuation of Singapore in 1941. She nearly broke down in the Mediterranean en route to the Yishuv. Saltwater got into the internal systems, the refrigerators didn’t refrigerate, the ovens didn’t cook, and the lights went out. The crewmen, who were Jewish, couldn’t stand the officers, who were British. The feeling was mutual, and eventually there was— inevitably, in those times of proletarian consciousness—a strike. And yet the moment truly was historic, mark- ing the launch not only of the national shipping company but of a significant Jewish presence in the Mediterranean. Within a year of Kedmah’s arrival, there would be a state called Israel with a navy, commercial vessels, a fishing industry, and ports— all of which would have seemed like a farfetched dream just two or three decades before, when a few Zionist enthusiasts and cranks under Turkish and British rule began promoting improbable visions of sovereign Jewish seamen sailing Jewish boats on what David Ben-Gurion once imagined as a “Jewish sea.” The SS Kedmah moves out to Haifa Bay, July 5, 1950. (Photo by Teddy Brauner, National Photo Collection, Israel.)

20 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2020 that the Pioneer Motor Boat Co. was established The same Ben-Avi who’d bemoaned the lack of only slightly less bitter, was between the dominant in 1919, with one ship: Hehalutz (The Pioneer), a Jewish sailors 20 years before was inspired, once Labor Zionists, led by Ben-Gurion, and their rivals, converted sailboat that had been rigged with a 30- again, to pick up his pen. He was in a better mood the Revisionists of Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky. In horsepower engine originally built for a truck. (One this time. “The west is our foundation, it is our win- the 1920s and 1930s, the Revisionists took the lead of the crewmen was another exceptional character, dow to the expanses of the entire world and our in maritime activities and accused the socialists of Arie Bayevsky of Helsinki, a former Russian navy gateway to the very land we yearn for,” he wrote. shamefully neglecting the sea. One of the most vocal captain who’d converted to Judaism and embraced “What Venice and Genoa did for Italy, and Ham- Revisionists, Capt. Jeremiah Helpern, linked this to Zionism, and was “part of nearly every idea in the burg and Bremen for Germany, Copenhagen for ideology: The socialists, he thought, were discourag- maritime enterprise in the Land of Israel in the Denmark, New York for the United States—Tel Aviv ing fishing as too individualistic and too distant from twenties and thirties.”) Hehalutz made runs around will do with its perfect port for renewing Judah.” the communal lifestyle of the kibbutz. The Revision- the eastern Mediterranean, even helping evacuate Like many of the Zionists’ maritime fantasies, ists set up a sea training school at Civitavecchia, Ita- Christian victims of a Muslim mob attack in Sidon that one, too, didn’t quite materialize: The Tel Aviv ly, where cadets practiced on a boat called Theodor and Tyre. But it wasn’t much of a ship, and it sunk port was active for a few years until World War II Herzl under the tutelage of an Italian captain until the operation was shut down by Mussolini in 1938. When, in 1937, a group of the school’s 45 graduates sailed to Palestine aboard the Sara A in a dem- onstration of their nautical prowess and triumphantly arrived at Haifa, only Revisionist representatives came to greet them. The mainstream leadership and press ignored their rivals’ event, an insult that cut the Revi- sionists deeply. The same pettiness was visible in the ongoing argument over which movement was the first to land a ship of illegal immigrants. (According to the author, it appears to have been the Revisionists with their ship Kawkab in January 1934.) The Labor Zionists, for their part, established fishing collectives like Ein Gev on the Kinneret, Sdot Yam on the Mediterranean, and Hulata on Lake Hula. When war with the Arab world began to loom in the 1940s, young members of those communities would go on to play key roles in the naval arms of the military TheS.S. Kedmah moves out to Haifa Bay, July, 1950. (Photo by Teddy Brauner, National Photo Collection, Israel.) underground, like the Palyam, which would evolve after 1948 into the Israeli navy. Cohen-Hattab describes these and other strands in the story of Zionism at sea— the advent of a holiday called “Sea Day,” for example, Port workers unloading sacks of cement near the breakwater at the Tel Aviv port, August 1, 1936. and the construction of a club for Jewish seamen at the (Photo by Zoltan Kluger, National Photo Collection, Israel.) Haifa port, complete with what every sailor hopes for on shore: wholesome cultural activities and a library. at Jaffa in 1921 after just two years at sea. Many of He recounts the arrival of a crucial group of re- the early maritime enterprises had that kind of end. cruits to the national effort: experienced longshoremen from the great port of Salonica, Greece, which f Jewish maritime efforts ended up succeeding, had once been so dominated by Jews that it closed ICohen-Hattab tells us, it was thanks in part to on the Sabbath. We see how, in fits and starts over two important competitions. The first rivalry was the three decades of British rule, the Zionist move- with the Arab sailors, workers, and unions who ment grasped the importance of raising Jews with controlled the sea and the Jaffa port, and who sea legs. Maritime enterprise, Cohen-Hattab writes, became more hostile as Jewish immigration in- had gone from utterly neglected to no less than a creased. When Arab workers wouldn’t repair Jew- “deciding factor” in Israel’s creation. “[A]t its birth,” ish ships, the Jews built their own shipyard in Haifa he writes, “it already had a national shipping com- in 1933. When the Jaffa port became less accessible pany, control over the land’s three active ports, a to Jews and was eventually closed to them alto- flourishing fish-farming industry, a nautical train- gether amid the anti-Jewish and anti-British riots ing school—and a maritime sensibility that would of 1936, the Zionists opened their port in the city serve it well in the years to come.” they’d just raised from the sand, Tel Aviv. As Zionism’s Maritime Revolution demonstrates, The first captain in charge of the port was an- none of this was inevitable. And, as in the story of other of Zionism’s great nautical pioneers: Volodia the Kedmah’s malfunctioning refrigerators and un- Itzkovitz, who’d been the only Jewish cadet at the ruly crew, none of it was smooth. But it happened. Odessa naval academy and was by then going by the Only 38 years went by between Ben-Avi’s lament name Ze’ev Hayam, literally, “Wolf of the Sea.” The about the failed Zionist fishermen of 1912 to the day docks were inaugurated with ecstatic parades and in 1950 when President Chaim Weizmann, en route Advertising poster designed by Otte Wallisch and issued speeches, and this, Cohen-Hattab believes, was the by the shipping company ZIM, Tel Aviv, ca. 1956. to a vacation in Europe, drove to an Israeli port, true moment of revolution: walked up the Kedmah’s gangplank, and was greet- ed by a Hebrew-speaking crew. “It is a pleasure,” The establishment of the Tel Aviv port facilitated— and again after the war until 1965, when its activities Weizmann declared: “a Jewish ship.” for the first time—a vision of the Mediterranean moved to better facilities down the coast at Ashdod. Sea as the continuation of the land. It could now The Tel Aviv “port” is now free of unseemly cranes be seen not only as a natural boundary but rather or longshoremen, and instead has cafes and a nice Matti Friedman, a journalist in Jerusalem, is the author as a space connecting the Land of Israel to the boardwalk frequented by hipsters; the only detail that of three nonfiction books: Spies of No Country, The world, linking the Yishuv in the Land of Israel to an old sailor might find familiar are all the tattoos. Aleppo Codex, and Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story Diaspora Jewry across the sea. The second maritime competition of those years, of a Forgotten War (all from Algonquin Books).

Winter 2020 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 21 Wink-Wink, Win-Win?

BY SHLOMO BRODY

Ben-Gurion himself had a solution for this their status only through religious conversion. When the State Winks: The Performance of problem: Anyone who lives in Israel and ties their Yet today, the majority of Israelis who require Jewish Conversion in Israel personal fate to the national destiny of the Jewish conversion under Orthodox standards have no in- by Michal Kravel-Tovi terest in observing the commandments, strictly Columbia University Press, 320 pp., $65 Rabbi Prinz later wrote that or otherwise, as confirmed by the extensive interviews done for Kravel-Tovi’s book. State officials, as his conversion of Ben-Gurion's she documents, may deem conversion as a “national mission,” but as any good liberal will tell you, the daughter-in-law violated "every state cannot compel worship of the heart. This is the ust how great is the conversion crisis in the difficult paradox of Israel’s state-sponsored Conver- State of Israel? Consider, for example, the possible ruling," yet it worked sion Administration, which is depicted at length by remarks of a well-known conversion court Kravel-Tovi as a form of “biopolitics,” a term popu- judge in Israel quoted in Michal Kravel-Tovi’s out. She remained loyal. larized by the French theorist Michel Foucault. In admirableJ anthropological study of state-sponsored this system, conversion is no longer a matter of religious conversions in the State of Israel: people is a Jew. He saw this nationalistic paradigm individual conscience. Instead, as the biblical model, exemplified by Moses’s wife, Conversion is not only a human need for many a Midianite, and Ruth the Moabite, ancestor of [I]t constitutes a domain of practice through of the new immigrants, it is a need of our times, King David, who never immersed in any mikvah. which the state engages with questions, a national, existential matter of the highest level. Yet this model was rejected by Orthodox scholars, anxieties, and ideals concerning its population. Zionist and non-Zionist alike, who affirmed the . . . Through the cumulative demographic The question of conversion has plagued Israeli pub- talmudic model of conversion that required ac- effects of the conversion of individual citizens, lic discourse since at least 1957, when the National ceptance of the commandments. Ben-Gurion felt ideally as many as possible, the Israeli state Religious Party protested that roughly 10 percent the rejection of his approach within his own fam- hopes to shape the composition, size, and of immigrants from Russia and Poland were not ily. His granddaughter Galia Ben-Gurion, the child boundaries of the national population. Jewish under strict halakhic standards. This led to a major coalition crisis and Prime Minister Ben- How do the rabbis Gurion’s famous inquiry to 51 scholars, from Rabbi of the Conversion Ad- Aharon Kotler to Isaiah Berlin, asking them to define ministration achieve “who is a Jew.” Ben-Gurion underlined the national this goal given the importance of his query, writing, “In Israel efforts actual motives and must be made to increase shared and unifying prop- expectations of indi- erties and eliminate as far as possible those that sepa- vidual converts? Us- rate and divide.” But Israel has never fully resolved ing a term deployed this issue, leaving marriage and divorce in the hands by a prominent Reli- of the Orthodox Chief Rabbinate while using much gious Zionist educator, looser standards of Jewish heritage to grant automat- Kravel-Tovi calls the ic citizenship under the Law of Return. system a “wink-wink” As Kravel-Tovi notes, the problem has become form of conversion. more acute in the wake of mass immigration from In her depiction, the the former Soviet Union over the last generation. well-rehearsed conver- These immigrants and their descendants, wel- sion candidates learn comed after years of Communist oppression, now to dress and speak in include roughly 350,000–400,000 Israelis who are a way that will allow Chief Rabbis Yitzhak Herzog and Yitzhak Nissim chair the Chief Rabbinical fully integrated socially into Israeli society but can- the rabbinic judges Council Session, Jerusalem, July 3, 1959. (Photo by Moshe Pridan, National Photo not marry Jews in the State of Israel because they to ignore the fact that Collection, Israel.) are not Jewish by Orthodox standards. It is esti- these are generally mated that this number of “non-Jewish Jews,” to use Israelis who are seek- sociologist Asher Cohen’s apt term, grows every of Mary Callow, a Gentile British nurse who mar- ing the social benefits of recognized Jewish identity year by ten thousand, many through immigration ried Ben-Gurion’s son, Amos, in 1946 in Liver- without undergoing any major internal transforma- and others by virtue of birth to non-Jewish mothers. pool, had trouble getting married in Haifa in 1968 tion. “Both sides,” she writes of the convert and the At this stage, legislative proposals to enact stricter until she and her mother were converted under court, “shoulder the burden of constructing believable immigration standards under the Law of Return Orthodox auspices. Callow herself had undergone performances.” (proposed by the chief rabbis) or to create civil mar- a speedy conversion by the visiting American Re- riage options (proposed by liberal democrats) won’t form rabbi Joachim Prinz in 1946 in response to ot all of the rabbis who cooperated with solve the underlying social chasm created by the fact the future prime minister’s pleas. (Prinz would later NKravel-Tovi’s research were pleased to read that halakhically traditional Israelis will not marry write in his memoirs that this conversion violated descriptions of the “passwords” and “biographi- these immigrants or their children unless they con- “every possible ruling” yet worked out as Callow cal scripts” used by aspiring converts to convince vert. In fact, surveys show that Israelis, religious and remained loyal to Israel and the Jewish people.) One their rabbinic “audiences” that they were “genuine- nonreligious alike, believe in religious endogamy might see this as a symbolic sign that Ben-Gurion’s enough.” Kravel-Tovi insists, however, that she is to preserve both the Jewish family and the national model lost, for in this very period the Law of Return not depicting either converts or rabbis as sophis- social framework. was amended to clarify that a non-Jew could change ticated deceivers. Instead, each side is balancing a

22 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2020 complex set of desires while aiming for a win-win surprising, since most of these opinions were framed Do we expect all of these sheep to have remained resolution. While primarily seeking acceptance in response to modern intermarriage in the dias- entirely separate in their own herds, like in Teaneck and a greater sense of belonging, the candidates pora. They were aimed at bringing Gentile spouses and Golders Green? Or is it more likely that they have who successfully completed the process often did into (and keeping their Jewish spouses within) the blended in among the high grass of pastures in cities deepen their appreciation of Jewish culture, his- Jewish fold while maintaining social taboos that like Leningrad and Odessa? If the latter, then it’s likely tory, and even ritual. The rabbis, in turn, could jus- spurned intermarriage. No definitive consensus that their redemption will bring along other people tify their lower conversion standards by citing legal emerged within this group about the minimum re- with them, a point that had already become accepted loopholes while taking comfort in the fact that they quirements, as each rabbinic authority decided for by 1957. Religious Zionists speak of the return to had strengthened the Jewish identities of Israelis himself what level of commitment was sufficient. Zion as the fulfillment of these biblical prophecies, who do not regularly interact with religious soci- Needless to say, not every conversion done yet, on this argument, they may not have fully inter- ety. As she notes, some rabbinic defenders of the under these circumstances inspired lasting commit- nalized the complex historical implications of kibutz system have argued that it is no different than other ment, causing angst in their converting rabbis along galuyot (the ingathering of the exiles). halakhic legal fictions like selling chametz before with further opprobrium from the more conserva- Two other chief rabbis who followed this Passover. In a world of biopolitics, “winking” is tive legal camp. Many of the leaders of Israel’s Con- general line of argument were Rabbis Isser Unter- the way the state, its civil servants (rabbis), and its version Authority have placed themselves within man and Shlomo Goren. Unterman had been the citizens (the converts) maneuver in order to meet this pragmatic school of thought. It’s therefore not chief rabbi in Liverpool for 23 years before emi- formal rules while pragmatically seeking to shocking that Kravel-Tovi found them ambivalent grating to Palestine in 1946. In England, Unterman address complex social dynamics. about the goals and success of their program, espe- took a strict stand regarding converting children of A weakness in Kravel-Tovi’s study is that it cially since her interviews showed that the converts Jewish men and Gentile women, as he thought it adopts an entirely external perspective on the usually returned to their secular lifestyles once they would encourage intermarriage. As Tom Segev has Conversion Authority without paying sufficient had completed the conversion process. recently documented, when Ben-Gurion asked Un- attention to the ideological battle over the impact of terman to convert Callow in 1946, he refused and nationalism on Jewish law in general and conversion told Ben-Gurion that she had a great deal to learn standards in particular. To understand this debate, before she could be eligible to convert. Yet when the we should first note an important insight of Israel’s first immigrant waves from the Soviet Union began first Ashkenazi chief rabbi, Yitzhak Herzog: Jew- to arrive in the early 1970s, Unterman argued for ish law has no mechanism for legal naturalization absorbing those of Jewish lineage, particularly when except the acceptance of the yoke of the command- dealing with minors whose conversion is imple- ments. In short, if you want to be a member of the mented through a rabbinic court order, since they tribe, you need to pledge allegiance to the Constitu- are too young to accept upon themselves the com- tion, namely, the Torah and its 613 commandments. mandments. He justified this by invoking a notion (There is a talmudic precedent for a non-Jew to of preserving zera Yisra’el (Jewish seed), an ethnic become a ger toshav, a resident alien, by accepting term first used by the 19th-century proto-Zionist the seven Noahide laws, but this model was not his- Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Kalischer. torically developed, and, in any case, a ger toshav Yet this lenient approach was only really imple- would still not be permitted to marry a Jew.) mented by Unterman’s successor, Rabbi Shlomo Herzog’s premise helps explain the position of Goren, who established the state conversion cen- many Orthodox authorities, haredi and Religious Zi- ters to teach prospective converts. (It was also onist alike, that there can be no conversion without Goren who would officiate at Callow’s daughter’s a full-fledged intent to observe Jewish law. Just as a wedding in 1968, drawing fierce criticism from his country wouldn’t give citizenship to an immigrant colleagues.) Goren argued that the Babylonian Tal- who intends to flaunt some of the nation’s laws, so mud’s more stringent attitude toward conversion too Judaism does not accept a potential convert who reflected the fact that it was composed in exile. In does not pledge total commitment to the norms. contrast, the Jerusalem Talmud set a more lenient th Moreover, in religious terms, converting those who Russian olim celebrate the 25 anniversary of precedent, since it presupposed that converts there are not sincere does no favor to the potential convert, immigrating to Israel, December 24, 2015. (Photo by were more easily integrated into Jewish culture. who would immediately be considered a willful sin- Hadas Parush/Flash90.) Incredibly, he even cited the Hasmonean forced ner upon the completion of this process. conversion of the Idumeans, documented by Jose- What about the crisis facing the State of Israel, with Yet if the conservative position pulls these offi- phus, as a historical example of religious integra- its hundreds of thousands of “non-Jewish Jews”? Per- cials in one direction, a third, smaller and more rad- tion through national absorption. The most radi- haps, some Orthodox authorities speculate, there will ical school of thought pulls them in another. This cal aspect of these claims was his search for guid- eventually be a massive movement of repentance to is a nationalist position that has been adopted by a ing legal precedents coming from cases or sources complete Jewish observance. Alternatively, a few in this few previous chief rabbis but never embraced by the when Jews had national sovereignty, as opposed to camp have even whispered that such Israeli citizens will rabbinic mainstream. Instead of arguing for legal those recorded by the canonical Babylonian Tal- never feel at home and eventually will move elsewhere. fictions or looser conversion standards to meet the mud and its commentaries. In the interim, those who care about this problem will “needs of the hour” like their diaspora predecessors What ultimately unites these Zionist lines of hal- try to make sure their children do not marry Israelis did, this group postulates a revised halakhic defini- akhic reasoning is the belief that the responsibility of questionable halakhic status. It’s an unfortunate tion of Jewish peoplehood that reflects the new real- for running a sovereign Jewish nation must make a situation, but, these rabbis argue, there’s no existential ity of the State of Israel. difference in the way that Jewish law functions. This threat. In any case, the bigger danger is the watering Rabbi Ben-Zion Uziel, Israel’s first Sephardi has always been a sensitive question for Religious down of Judaism and what it means to be a Jew. chief rabbi, took a prophetic approach, following Zionists as they addressed issues of building a mod- A second group of Orthodox leaders agrees the prophet Ezekiel, who famously declared: ern state. Must the lands truly remain fallow during that a convert must accept the commandments but the sabbatical year? Can electricity plants or dairy asserts that we do not need to deeply scrutinize My flock is scattered all over the face of the farms remain unstaffed over the Sabbath? Israeli their religious commitment. They may be accepted earth. . . . My flock has been a prey for all the government coalitions have fractured over such dis- as long as they generally intend to observe the basic wild beasts. . . . As a shepherd seeks out his flock putes. Yet no question is as sensitive as laws relating facets of Jewish law, even if their observance may when some in his flock have gotten separated, to personal status. If your neighbor eats a prohibited be lackluster in certain areas. There is, however, so I will seek out My flock. I will rescue them cucumber during the sabbatical year, that’s a shame. significant disagreement within this group as to from all the places to which they were scattered If your son marries a woman whose conversion isn’t what fraction of observance is sufficient. This is not on a day of cloud and gloom. (Ez. 34:6, 8, 12) legitimate, that’s a tragedy for generations.

Winter 2020 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 23 Yet the nationalist line of halakhic thinking Zionist religious establishment have never felt LETTERS asserts that even in this most sensitive area of per- entirely comfortable with allowing national consid- (continued from page 4) sonal status, the Zionist project impacts religious erations to impact religious norms. In part, this is standards. For if you do nothing about the crisis of because they are caught between the religious criti- answer, as historian Fritz Stern laid out, was the ter- “Jewish non-Jews,” there will be a concomitant crisis cism of anti-Zionist haredi detractors on the one rible persecution of Jews beginning in May 1867 and of Jewish identity, which is critical for national cohe- hand and the pressure of secular politicians on the continuing into the 1870s by Romania, endorsed by sion. Conversion standards must be different when other. More fundamentally, they shrink from allow- Russia. Although life for Jews in Romania was suppos- people are entering a nation and not just a religion. ing political considerations to undermine spiritual edly a step above that under the tsar, nevertheless Ro- Foreigners, whether as immigrants or converts, values—they worry that Ben-Gurion’s pragmatic mania seemed impossibly cruel, sending Jews to their become assimilated into the broader culture. This nationalist vision will ultimately win. deaths, burning down a synagogue in Bucharest, and was precisely the problem of conversion in the dias- I favor a recent initiative undertaken by denying them citizenship and a right to an education. pora, where Jews were a small minority, but it is the the independent rabbinic organization Giyur From Dara Horn’s description, we learn that some at- solution in today’s Israel, which integrates Judaism Ke-halakha to convert Israeli “non-Jewish Jews” titudes appear never to change. into daily life. After all, Israeli citizens observe many while they are children, utilizing more lenient pro- Bernice Heilbrunn traditional Jewish norms by default. They purchase tocols established in the Talmud for minors who via jewishreviewofbooks.com kosher food in supermarkets, speak Hebrew, mark are not responsible for complete legal observance the Jewish festivals as national holidays, celebrate because they are under the age of bar or bat mitz- Shylock and Jonah symbolically significant rituals like circumcisions vah. This will help, but it is not an overall solution. Noah Millman’s illuminating comparison of Jonah and the Passover Seder, and place mezuzot on their Upon finishing Michal Kravel-Tovi’s important, and Shylock (“Sitting with Shylock on Yom Kippur,” doorposts. Perhaps most significantly, they serve in challenging book, one realizes that there is no rea- Fall 2019) goes right to the heart of the problem of the army and protect the Holy Land. There may be a son for great optimism. Despite 60 years of govern- Jewish dignity, ancient and modern. Since the early “wink-wink” approach in the conversion courts, but ment intervention, the national mission of conver- 1980s, I have taught Jonah as a character haunted by it is in the service of an emphatic head nod to the in- sion is failing. The potential converts are not arriv- his role in his people’s destruction, precisely as por- gathering of the exiles, the miraculous restoration of ing en masse, the rabbis are not enthusiastically trayed here. My friend Professor Martin Yaffe wrote a Jewish sovereignty, and the creation of a Jewish civic greeting those who do; the problem continues to book in the 90s titled Shylock and the Jewish Question, culture. get worse. which did justice to Shylock as a protomodern Jew Kravel-Tovi believes that the rabbis that she in- struggling for dignity and explained how Shakespeare terviewed are finding wiggle room within the “socio- parodied the antisemitic clichés of Marlow. But read- institutional reality of the conversion procedure,” Shlomo Brody is the founding director of the Tikvah ing these two characters together raises the stakes for with their “wink-winks” and “life scripts.” Perhaps Overseas Students Institute and a postdoctoral fellow both. And the identification of that deflating comic this is true, but I suspect that many also understand at Bar-Ilan University Law School. His first book, A element in Jonah, who longs for tragic dignity, raises that the ultimate result is a redefinition of what it Guide to the Complex: Contemporary Halakhic the story to the philosophical heights. Yasher koach! means to become naturalized as a citizen of the Debates (Maggid), received a 2014 National Jewish Reid Heller Jewish nation. Nonetheless, they and the rest of the Book Award. via jewishreviewofbooks.com

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24 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2020 A Life of Dialogue

BY YOAV SCHAEFER

his lifelong effort to probe the depths of the inter- considered the hollow intellectualism of modern Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent personal dimension of human life to his childhood thought and sought redeeming value in mystical by Paul Mendes-Flohr experience of abandonment. traditions. Liberated from the illusion of multiplic- Yale University Press, 440 pp., $26 At age 14, Buber left his grandparents’ home and ity and the constraints of time and space, Buber the largely traditional world in which he had been wrote, the mystic comes to experience “the unity of raised to live with his father, who had remarried. As the self with the world.” Buber’s call for a “Jewish renaissance” provided a generation ershom Schocken, the longtime editor of the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, once of young Jews estranged from their liberal-Jewish inheritance recalled taking a walk with the great Hebrew novelist Shmuel Yosef Agnon, with a vision of Judaism with which they could identify. Gduring which they discussed the many controver- sies in Israel surrounding Martin Buber. “Agnon an adolescent, Buber gravitated, like so many of his Buber had by this time shed any concern with abruptly stopped, looked, and said: I would like to contemporaries, toward the writings of Friedrich Judaism and could be accurately described by one tell you something. There are people about whom Nietzsche. In fact, Buber was so taken with Thus of his cousins as someone who demonstrated a you must decide whether you love or hate them. I Spoke Zarathustra that he resolved to render it into “typical Jewish anti-Semitism.” What brought him decided to love Buber.” Polish—abandoning the project only after learning back—not to his religion but to his people—was Paul Mendes-Flohr’s new biography of Buber, that a prominent Polish poet had already started to Zionism. In 1899, he founded a chapter of the the first to appear in English in more than 30 years, Zionist Jewish Students Asso- is not exactly an act of love, but it is the culmina- ciation in Leipzig. He was mo- tion of an ardent, lifelong preoccupation with the tivated not by political concerns philosopher, extending from his 1972 doctoral but, following the cultural Zion- dissertation to his current work as editor in chief ist thinker Ahad Ha’am (Asher of the 22-volume German edition of Buber’s col- Ginsberg), by a commitment lected works. Deftly setting Buber’s philosophical to Jewish spiritual and cultural and theological writings within the context of both rebirth. For Buber, Mendes- European and German Jewish intellectual and cul- Flohr writes, “Zionism was, first tural life in the early 20th century, Mendes-Flohr’s and foremost, a spiritual ful- book is an excellent general introduction to the crum by which to overcome the life and thought of one of the 20th century’s most personal—indeed, existential— important thinkers. It also documents Buber’s con- condition of the modern Jew.” cern with the spiritual and ethical character of the Theodor Herzl, impressed Zionist movement and, following its establishment, by the 23-year-old Buber’s cha- of the State of Israel. This led him to become, in risma and eloquence, appointed Mendes-Flohr’s words, “a self-conscious outsider in him in 1901 to serve as editor the context of pre- and post-1948 Zionism.” in chief of Die Welt, the offi- Born in Vienna in 1878, Buber suffered a cial organ of the World Zionist terrible blow three years later when his mother Organization. But after only four left him and his father to elope with a Russian months, Buber abruptly broke officer. She left without saying goodbye. Soon after, with Herzl and resigned from his father sent him to live with his own parents in his editorship, apparently over Lemberg, in Galicia (modern-day Lviv, Ukraine). Martin Buber in an undated photo. (Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute.) tensions between what he con- His grandfather Solomon Buber was a wealthy sidered the misguided political philanthropist and independent scholar of the translate it. Buber’s early writings are shot through goals of the mainstream Zionist movement and “science of Judaism,” known for his scholarly edi- with Nietzschean motifs and language, exalting “the the cultural Zionism of the “Democratic Faction,” tions of classic collections of midrash; his grand- will to power and the rebirth of the instinctual life,” to which he belonged. mother Adele was an autodidact who took charge in defiance of modern rationalism. Buber remained Buber gradually withdrew from Zionist activ- of the young Buber’s education and instilled in at heart, Mendes-Flohr writes, “an Apostle of Zara- ity, ceasing to be involved in the movement alto- him a love for languages. Buber became fluent thustra,” even though he would distance himself gether by 1905. Although he would remain com- in seven of them—including German, Hebrew, from Nietzsche’s teachings later in life. mitted to the cause of Jewish cultural and national Yiddish, Polish, and English—and learned to read Buber went on to study philosophy, litera- renewal for the rest of his life, he would do so from several more. He also received a traditional Jewish ture, and art history at the universities of Vienna, the margins. education, studying classical sources and rabbinic Leipzig, Zurich, and Berlin. His two most important literature with his grandfather and great-uncle, a teachers were Wilhelm Dilthey, best known for his uber’s call for a “Jewish renaissance” pro- prominent Talmud scholar. What the young Buber distinction between the methods of the natural and Bvided a generation of young Jews estranged didn’t receive was anything that could even begin human sciences as well as the two kinds of knowl- from their liberal-Jewish inheritance with a vision to alleviate what he later described as the “infi- edge they produced, and Georg Simmel, one of the of Judaism they could identify with. Adopting nite sense of deprivation and loss” with which his founders, together with Max Weber, of the new field his teacher Georg Simmel’s dichotomy between mother’s desertion had left him. Indeed, Mendes- of sociology. Like many other contemporary intel- “religion” and “religiosity,” he juxtaposed what Flohr, following Buber himself, attributes much of lectuals, Buber became disenchanted with what he he regarded as the sterile rationalism and rigid

Winter 2020 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 25 prescriptions of traditional Judaism (religion) found it “utterly scandalous” that his friend could educator Franz Rosenzweig in Frankfurt in 1920. It with its primal spiritual forces (religiosity). As see in the war’s carnage and destruction the “spirit attracted many of the leading Jewish intellectuals of David Biale notes in his biography of Gershom of genuine community.” Landauer found particu- the time. The two philosophers were “drawn to one Scholem, under Nietzsche’s influence Buber larly abhorrent Buber’s claim that Jewish soldiers another by a compelling intellectual and spiritual af- “emphasized the importance of myth over ratio- had enlisted en masse not out of a sense of compul- finity,” Mendes-Flohr writes. In 1922, Rosenzweig nalism in Jewish history” and found Judaism’s sion but in order to fulfill some paramount, cosmic was diagnosed with ALS and was soon confined to creative impulses in “subterranean, even heretical mission. a small attic apartment, where Buber would visit movements.” Buber characterized Jewish history as a perpetual struggle between the conservative Buber’s major contribution to philosophy was to insist that elements of “official Judaism” and the spiritual forces of “underground Judaism.” the human social world of relationships was the primordial Buber, who first encountered Hasidim in his youth in Galicia but hadn’t been attracted to their ground of philosophical inquiry. beliefs, now found in the mystical movement the greatest expression of Judaism’s creative spiritual Landauer’s harsh rebuke provoked, according to him regularly. Although by then Rosenzweig could energy. In opposition to rationalists like the his- Mendes-Flohr, “a radical transformation in Buber’s only write with the help of his wife, Edith, and a torian Heinrich Graetz, who described Hasidism thinking.” Buber moved away from the mystical and specially constructed typewriter, in 1925, the two as “the wildest superstition,” Buber described it as heroic voluntarism of his youthful writings and to- men began work on their monumental translation a wellspring of spiritual dynamism and an ideal ward the philosophy of dialogue for which he would of the Hebrew Bible into German. Buber would con- organic community. Buber’s turn to Hasidism, tinue the translation project alone following Rosenz- Mendes-Flohr notes, was also motivated “by a de- weig’s death in 1929, completing it in 1961. sire to counter the negative views of eastern Euro- pean Jewry.” Buber’s writings on Hasidism, espe- uber’s 1923 classic Ich und Du (I and Thou) cially his early books—The Tales of Rabbi Nachman Bfamously begins by declaring that “The world (1906) and The Legend of the Baal Shem (1908)— is twofold for man in accordance with his twofold were celebrated widely by Jews and non-Jews alike. attitude.” The book would earn him worldwide Even the prominent scholar of Jewish mysticism recognition. In it, he distinguished between two Gershom Scholem, who would later famously criti- fundamental modes of relating to the world. There cize Buber’s portrayals of Hasidism, acknowledged is the “I-It” mode by which one relates oneself the profound significance of Buber’s early collec- to one’s surroundings—including other human tions of Hasidic tales for his generation of German- beings—as objects of use or experience. By con- speaking Jews. trast, there is the “I-Thou” mode, in which “one In his important three addresses on Judaism does not experience, but meets, the Other” in delivered between 1909 and 1911 and published an unmediated relation of true reciprocity and in 1916 to the Bar Kokhba Zionist circle in Prague, recognition. Following the publication of I and Buber called on young German Jews to make the Thou, Mendes-Flohr writes, Buber devoted his life renewal of the Jewish people their “personal task.” to elaborating the thesis that “true life is realized in For the renewal of Judaism will only occur, Buber the I-Thou encounter.” argued, “when Judaism’s spiritual process, which is a We might say that Buber’s was a philosophy process of religious struggle and religious creativity, not of existence but of coexistence. Like no thinker is restored to life, in word and deed, by a generation before him, he highlighted the way that relation- earnestly resolved to translate its ideas into reality.” ships and dialogical interactions between human In 1916, he founded the journal Der Jude (The Jew), Gustav Landauer in an undated photo. beings not only give meaning and purpose to our which became during its existence one of the most (Wikimedia Commons.) lives—they are constitutive of life itself. Human be- influential intellectual forums for German Jewry, ings, Buber taught, are shaped by and through their publishing Franz Kafka, Arnold Zweig, Walter earn great renown. In subsequent years, political relationships with others, without whom their lives Benjamin, and Eduard Bernstein, among others. and social issues, absent from his youthful writings, would be meaningless, empty affairs. Like many intellectuals of his generation, Buber would become central to his thought. This philosophy of dialogue must also be was briefly swept up in the patriotic war fervor that In the years following World War I, Landauer’s viewed as an attempt to overcome the episte- spread across Germany during the First World War. unique brand of mystical and communitarian an- mological starting point of modern philosophy, Despite his initial attempts together with a group archism would serve as the foundation for Buber’s which, ever since Descartes, had grounded reason of intellectuals from across Europe to prevent the political thought, “especially regarding the salience in the reflexive, self-given certainty of the isolat- imminent conflict in the summer of 1914, Buber of interpersonal relations in shaping spiritual and ed thinking subject. Buber rejected the ideas that celebrated the advent of war enthusiastically. Em- communal life.” Buber first outlined his politi- human beings were simply free-floating minds ploying Ferdinand Tönnies’s famous distinction cal ideas in a speech in 1918 that he later dedi- and that Cartesian doubt of everything but one’s between Gesellschaft (society) and Gemeinschaft cated to Landauer, who had been brutally beaten own thinking was possible. The “life of dialogue,” (community), he asserted that the experience of to death during the Bavarian Revolution in May he insisted, is a fundamental orientation toward the war would bring about a new, more authentic 1919. Along with several prominent Protestant the world as a place in which human beings are, at Gemeinschaft. He imagined that young Jewish theologians, Buber played a central role in found- every moment, addressed—by others, by the soldiers, as a result of their experiences in the ing the religious-socialism movement. At the same world, by God, whom Buber called “The Eternal trenches, would be more “seriously” and “respon- time, he developed his own version of cultural and Thou”—and given the opportunity to respond sibly” attached to their Jewishness than ever before. humanitarian nationalism, which was focused on out of the fullness of their beings. Buber’s major Amid the chaos and destruction of total war, Buber guarding Zionism against the moral and spiri- contribution to philosophy was to insist that glimpsed an unmistakable revelation of something tual degeneration of modern European national- the human social world of relationships was the momentous: the rebirth of a new Jewry. ism. “I don’t know anything of a ‘Jewish state with primordial ground of philosophical inquiry. Gustav Landauer, Buber’s closest friend and cannons, flags, and military decorations,’” he wrote an uncompromising opponent of the war, decried to Stefan Zweig. he most important “Thou” of Buber’s life, the “profound confusion and bewilderment” of Buber became a key figure in the Freies Tboth intellectually and personally, was for Buber’s wartime politics. Denouncing what he Jüdisches Lehrhaus, a school of Jewish adult six decades Paula Winkler. She was a Bavar- labeled the Kriegsbuber (the war Buber), Landauer education founded by the young philosopher- ian Catholic by birth but was as religiously

26 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2020 unaffiliated as Buber himself by the time they met in would allow his audience finally to understand after the state’s establishment in May 1948. “I have a seminar in German literature at the University of what he had to say.” nothing in common with those Jews who imag- Zurich during the fall semester of 1899. She had a “bo- Buber was an outsider in the Yishuv, the Jewish ine that they may contest the factual shape which hemian, exotic flair” and had recently been “the only community in Mandatory Palestine. He staunchly Jewish independence has taken.” Instead, he insisted beautiful woman” (at least according to the philoso- opposed the Zionist movement’s pursuit of nation- that henceforth the “command to serve the spirit is pher Theodor Lessing) in a mystical colony in south to be fulfilled by us in this state.” He took his cue Tyrol led by a Jewish-born Muslim sage named Omar Buber's friends joked that from the prophets of Israel for whom, Buber wrote, al-Raschid Bey. They fell in love and had two children “compromise with the status quo is inconceivable,” before they were married. Buber initially concealed his elementary Hebrew but who made no attempt to “escape from it into the all of this from his grandparents for, as Mendes-Flohr realm of a contemplative life.” puts it, in an obvious understatement, “knowing that allowed his audience to finally Even so, Buber was fully prepared to remain, as Martin had two children out of wedlock with a non- Mendes-Flohr puts it, “a self-conscious outsider” Jewish woman would surely have confirmed his understand him. in the fledgling state. He continued to protest Is- grandparents’ fears that secular studies would lead rael’s policies toward Palestinian Arabs who lived him astray.” Only in 1907, after his grandfather had al and territorial sovereignty, fearing that it would within its borders and to voice his concerns for passed away, Paula had converted to Judaism, and inevitably lead to a violent conflict with Palestine’s the ethical character of the country. His status as the couple had gotten married, did Buber let his Arab population. Even before he moved to Pales- a dissenter reached its peak with his opposition grandmother in on the secret. For the next 50 years, tine, Buber had been active, together with other to the trial and subsequent execution of Adolf Martin and Paula shared not only a romantic bond leading Jewish intellectuals associated with the Brit Eichmann—a stance for which he was widely crit- but an intellectual partnership. An accomplished Shalom (covenant of peace), a movement to estab- icized. But at the age of 84, Mendes-Flohr writes, writer and author herself, Paula took an active role lish a binational state in Palestine for both Jews and “Buber had long reconciled himself not to be- in her husband’s work. She was, Mendes-Flohr Arabs. He continued to advocate for binationalism long.” Nevertheless, when he died in 1965, thou- writes, “Buber’s most trusted critic and intellectual on both moral and political grounds even after the sands attended his funeral services at the Hebrew collaborator.” Holocaust. In November 1946, he defied the offi- University. Among the mourners were not only Buber remained in Germany for as long as cial Zionist leadership by appearing independently Gershom Schocken and S. Y. Agnon but Israel’s he could after Hitler’s rise to power, organiz- before the Anglo-American Inquiry Committee to prime minister, Levi Eshkol, who delivered one ing “spiritual resistance” against the Nazis. He present a program for a binational state. In his testi- of the eulogies, and its president, Zalman Shazar, left Germany just in time, in 1938, moving to mony before the committee, Buber declared that the who was a pallbearer. Jerusalem, where he would spend the rest of his life Zionist project “must not be gained at the expense as a professor of social philosophy at the Hebrew of another’s independence.” University. Buber never managed to fully master Nevertheless, Buber’s political radicalism was Yoav Schaefer is a doctoral student in religion at spoken Hebrew, and his friends often joked that, tempered by the constraints of reality. “I have Princeton University, where he studies modern Jewish as Mendes-Flohr writes, “his elementary Hebrew accepted as mine the State of Israel,” he declared thought.

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and uncanny knack for satisfying popular taste but stalled in a cab in Manhattan traffic—wrote in 15 Irving Berlin: New York Genius also to the mysterious gift that biographer James minutes. Yet perspiration was far more common by James Kaplan Kaplan proclaims in his subtitle. Best known for a than inspiration; perhaps no one on Broadway ever Yale University Press, 424 pp., $26 biography of Sinatra, Kaplan fails to mention that worked harder so that the results would seem effort- even Stravinsky called Berlin a “genius.” less. (An insomniac, Berlin often worked through The 21-year-old Berlin needed only 18 minutes the night.) So rapid was his ascent that only 14 years in 1911 to write what became the most popular after “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” created an inter- n 1932, when an aesthete from Iowa named Berlin was generating Tin Pan Alley hits before Ronald Carl Van Vechten was visiting Vienna, he reported back home that “they don’t play Johann Reagan was born and was still writing lyrics when the here anymore; it’s all Gershwin and Berlin.” ISuch exaggeration was defensible. American popu- elderly Reagan occupied the White House. lar music had already been circumnavigating the globe for about two decades. That same year Arthur song in American history up to that time, “Alex- national sensation, Jerome Kern famously declared Koestler was staying in a guesthouse in the Soviet ander’s Ragtime Band.” It is actually a march, not Berlin to be synonymous with American music it- republic of Turkmenistan, with Langston Hughes ragtime—not that he cared about distinctions of self. He was still just 36 years old when he acquired occupying the room next door. Through the wall, genre or the fine points studied in conservatories. In his first biographer: Alexander Woollcott, of the Koestler could hear a gramophone playing Sophie fact, this “New York genius” never learned to read or Algonquin Round Table. Kaplan is the latest in the Tucker’s “My Yiddishe Mame” (words by Jack Yellen, queue, though he lacks music by Jack Yellen and Lew Pollack). This ballad, the musicological in- which Tucker made her signature, exemplified an sights to match Laurence explosion of talent—almost entirely Jewish—that Bergreen’s much fuller was unprecedented in the history of the nation’s saga, As Thousands Cheer. music. Who deserves the most credit for such ubiq- uity, for such enchantment? Who were the very erlin’s versatility was greatest songwriters of the last century? The jury is Bdownright eerie. Para- still out. Jerome Kern, the Gershwins, Richard Rod- mount’s 1942 film Holi- gers and Lorenz Hart, Rodgers and Oscar Hammer- day Inn is set primar- stein II, Cole Porter, and Stephen Sondheim all have ily in a New England their champions among musicologists, as well as the inn open only on public devotees of Broadway. But which of these compos- holidays, including the ers and lyricists happens to have led the most as- one that celebrates the tonishing life? The answer to that question is inar- birth of the Savior. Only guable: Irving Berlin, who was born in Tyumen in a weekend was needed Siberia in 1888 and died in New York in 1989. to write the movie’s most That he lived to a ripe 101 can be dismissed as famous song. No Ameri- an actuarial accident. But consider: Berlin was can Jew—no ACLU attor- generating Tin Pan Alley hits before Ronald Rea- ney, no jurist committed gan was born and was still writing lyrics when the to a high wall of separa- elderly Reagan occupied the White House. He died Irving Berlin and the stars of Alexander’s Ragtime Band, 1938. Standing from left: tion between church and after Reagan left office. In his 1917 novel The Rise Alice Faye, Tyrone Power, and Don Ameche. (The Boston Globe and Wikimedia.) state—ever did more to of David Levinsky, Abraham Cahan already has his desacralize society than protagonist, a textile tycoon, muse that another did Irving Berlin. For Russian Jewish immigrant was creating the songs write music. He played almost only the black keys Americans dreaming of a white Christmas, the that all of America was singing. This was during the on the piano, tuned to the key of F-sharp, and used a theological dimensions of that holiday could eas- rage for ragtime. But the career of Irving Berlin also transposing instrument designed with a lever under ily recede into a democratic ecumenism, and even ran through jazz and swing before sputtering out in the keyboard so that he could play tunes in the other Americans unable to accept the historical actual- the era of rock and roll and country and western. He keys. To transcribe what he heard in his head for ity of the Resurrection could blend into an “Easter lived long enough to hear Willie Nelson sing “Blue purposes of notation and orchestration, Berlin was Parade.” Berlin placed his own faith in the validity Skies,” which reached the top spot on the country therefore obliged to hire secretaries (one of whom of popular taste; he could not imagine any artistic music charts. When introduced in a 1926 show was a kid named George Gershwin). ideal independent of the marketplace. “The mob called Betsy, the song had required two dozen cur- Yet Berlin mastered the trick of achieving sim- is always right” was the credo that Berlin honored tain calls. A year later, when The Jazz Singer broke plicity without descending into banality, of making without ambivalence (and even when the mob was the sound barrier, “Blue Skies” was the first song topical songs seem timeless, and of concocting love no greater than a tryout audience in New Haven). that audiences around the world heard Al Jolson songs as though no one else had thought of treating But because mass taste fluctuates, he had to adapt sing. Longevity enabled Berlin to write the words romance as a subject. He managed to work so fast to ever-changing trends. and music to a whopping 899 copyrighted songs. By that only two months were needed to provide the Virtuosity was Berlin’s response to fickle pop- his own admission, many of them were lousy. But score for Annie Get Your Gun, which ran for 1,147 ular judgments, and one consequence was the an amazing 35 of his songs hit the top of the charts. performances. Among its unparalleled eight “stan- absence of a distinctive musical signature. That Such rankings paid tribute not only to his extended dards” was “Anything You Can Do,” which Berlin— he had grown up in a Yiddish-speaking home on

Winter 2020 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 29 the Lower East Side accounts for the early, satiric this biographer shows even less interest in the Jew- minstrelsy. But news reports of the violence inflicted melting-pot songs, replete with the stereotypes ish dimension of Berlin’s prodigious career than he upon black southerners impelled him to write a poi- clinging to the Italian, Irish, and Jewish newcomers. himself did. (The endnotes cite no works in American gnant indictment of lynching called “Supper Time,” But what, other than his genius, explains the shim- Jewish history.) And yet for those who knew Berlin which Ethel Waters sang in the 1933 Broadway revue mering urbanity and sophistication of, say, “Puttin’ from the Lower East Side, he was still the homeboy As Thousands Cheer. That was six years before Billie on the Ritz,” “Top Hat, White Tie and Tails,” and Izzy; in 1959, a decade after his given name also be- Holiday made famous Abel Meeropol’s more sear- “Cheek to Cheek”? So sinuous a line from Berlin’s ing “Strange Fruit.” In As plebeian origins inspired one observer to marvel at Thousands Cheer, Waters “Park Avenue librettos / By children of the ghettos.” was stuck with a lesser In beginning the lyric for “Alexander’s Ragtime billing because she was Band” with “Come on and hear! Come on and hear!” black, but the four songs Berlin produced the secular equivalent of the Shema, that she sang in that revue the “Hear O Israel!” that he would have chanted with buttressed her later claim his father, a part-time cantor. On the Lower East Side, that no one ever gave her Moses Baline had to be versatile too. He was also a better material than Irving kosher poultry inspector and a house painter, but he Berlin. A decade after that died before his son Israel (Izzy) Baline reached ado- revue wowed Broadway lescence. Berlin busked, ran away from home for a audiences, a segregated couple of years, then moved to the fringes of the mu- military fought the Axis sic industry and eventually into the refuge of Tin Pan powers. Minor breaches Alley. Berlin completely abandoned the practice of of Jim Crow were permit- Judaism, and Kaplan unsurprisingly finds no signifi- ted only at the very end of cant liturgical influences on Berlin’s music. None of the war, but in This Is the the artists and entertainers who started out in the Army, Berlin’s 1943 war- tenements over a century ago propelled themselves time revue, he made sure further away from the old neighborhood. Twice mar- that the touring company ried outside the faith, Berlin did not raise his three Irving Berlin directs the “girls” for his musical, This Is the Army, New York, of the show was fully in- daughters as Jews. May 1942. (Everett Collection/Alamy.) tegrated. It was the army’s Berlin is not thereby excluded from Yale’s Jewish only such unit until Presi- Lives series. Along a spectrum of biographies with came the designation of a new state in the Near East, dent Truman ordered the desegregation of the armed Rabbis Kook and Schneerson at one end and Benja- Berlin celebrated with a song entitled “Israel.” forces in 1948. But as Berlin would later write, “There’s min Disraeli and Sarah Bernhardt at the other, Berlin More central to his story, however, is “God Bless No Business Like Show Business.” is far closer to England’s Anglican prime minister and America,” which was written in 1918 but was then And it was a business, which Berlin conducted France’s convent-raised actress. But oddly enough, relegated to his trunk of unreleased songs. That with considerable shrewdness. He proved to be a was the same year that Berlin, who had landed in zealous guardian of the rights to his oeuvre, care- New York at the age of five, became a naturalized fully monitoring how his genius could be converted citizen. Twenty years later, in the fall of 1938, under into a revenue stream. Yet he was capable of remark- the ominous shadow of a war that threatened West- able gestures of generosity, such as assigning the ern civilization itself, he introduced a revised “God royalties of “God Bless America” to the Boy Scouts Bless America.” It soon became inescapable, despite and the Girl Scouts, and sending the proceeds from arriving a little too late to serve as the national an- This Is the Army to the Emergency Relief Fund. But them, Congress having already picked “The Star- Berlin also operated in an environment notable for Spangled Banner” seven years earlier. Neverthe- its competitiveness. Even the figure responsible for less, in the fall of 1954, when the American Jewish more hit songs than any other American had ever Tercentenary Dinner was held in New York, with written could sense the fragility of success, the dan- President Eisenhower delivering the main address, ger of missing the next sudden shift in the popular Berlin highlighted the gala by singing “God Bless mood. Berlin found revues, which are star-driven, America.” For someone who claimed that his ear- more congenial than what he called “situation liest memory of tsarist Russia was the shock of a shows,” the seamless integration of plot, character, pogrom, the composition of this song seems over- music, and dance. With Annie Get Your Gun, he determined. That a believer in the nation’s majority finally achieved that ideal, which is what Broadway faith is unlikely to have written “God Bless Ameri- audiences had come to expect. By the 1950s the cre- ca” is evident in the sort of deity that Berlin invokes. ative juices were drying up, and two decades later, In asking that the nation be given divine guidance he had turned into a cranky recluse at Beekman and protection, the song leaves no one out (except Place, conducting his business by telephone. for atheists and agnostics) and certainly doesn’t ex- George Gershwin, Berlin’s one-time assistant, clude the Jews. Contrast Berlin’s lyrics with those was fated to live little more than a third as long, but of “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” and “America the his capacity to write orchestral pieces and even an Beautiful,” both of which stem from Protestantism opera made Berlin look, by comparison, like no and mention the Pilgrims. “God Bless America” more than a spectacular tunesmith. His final de- betrays no hint of the existence of any particular cades bring to mind Frost’s “Provide, Provide”: “No faith. Its blessings are nondenominational. At least memory of having starred / Atones for later disre- by inference, everyone in Berlin’s America should gard / Or keeps the end from being hard.” feel at home; no one should feel an outsider. Within the historical limits of Berlin’s long life, he could be considered liberal on the race question too; Stephen J. Whitfield is professor of American studies perhaps his Jewish roots have something to do with (emeritus) at Brandeis University and the author of that sensitivity. To be sure, his early catalog included In Search of American Jewish Culture. His upcoming what were then called “coon songs,” and he waited too book, Learning on the Left: Political Profiles of long to detach himself from the vaudeville tradition of Brandeis University, is scheduled for publication in May.

30 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2020 The Fix Was In

BY RICH COHEN

these players all my life. Though I grew up in the achievement, but merely complicate and darken it. The City Game: Triumph, Scandal, and a sticks, my father is from Brooklyn (if you’d asked The revelations made the CCNY Beavers something Legendary Basketball Team me, at age 10, what my father did for a living, I’d more than a newspaper story—this was literature, hu- by Matthew Goodman have said, “He’s from Brooklyn”). Goodman’s book man nature, life. You thought you knew what it meant, Ballantine Books, 448 pp., $29 adds detail to the stories my father told and explains but it turned out to mean something else too. “Even what happened before and after, but the essentials Fats Roth dumped,” my father would say. remain the same. This is playground lore, the world as it was seen from Gravesend Bay in the 1940s and oodman, whose previous books include orget the Giants/Dodgers one-game playoff 50s, when some of the city’s best basketball was be- GEighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s that ended with Bobby Thomson’s ninth- ing played at the Jewish Community House of Ben- History-Making Race around the World, spent years inning homer, the “shot heard around the sonhurst, where my father saw a 17-year-old Sandy researching The City Game, and the result is a sports- world,” in 1951. Forget the Max Schmeling/ Koufax, a member of the J’s all-star team, dunk over writing masterpiece. Although sports writing is ban- FJoe Louis heavyweight rematch in Yankee Stadium the center of the New York Knicks in a charity game. ished to a ghetto-like section in stores and libraries, in 1938, in which a black American dismantled the To my father, and probably to Koufax, too, CCNY’s it can give you everything. All the emotions people Nazi myth. Forget the perfect game thrown by the defeat of Kentucky was an event of near historical hide in normal life are exposed on the fields and the Yankees’ Don Larsen in the 1956 World Series. The importance. He knew every player on that team, courts of the world. That’s why so much of the best high point of midcentury Gotham sporting life came literature has been a variety of sports writing. in the spring of 1950, when the City College of New Hemingway’s war stories are really sports writ- York Beavers basketball team, with a starting lineup ing another way (as he knew)—ditto, I’d ar- consisting of three Jews and two blacks, wiped the gue, the stories of James Salter and Hunter S. floor with the top-ranked Kentucky Wildcats en route Thompson, not to speak of Tolstoy. to the NIT championship in Madison Square Garden. In The City Game, Goodman has found a Final score: CCNY 89, Kentucky 50. cast of characters as rich as any novel’s, starting It was not just the manner of victory, the fact that with coach Nat Holman, who took the CCNY CCNY was a team with a revolutionary style charac- job with a mission in mind: He’d not only build terized by the fast break, which reflected the speed a quality program but use it to show that the and panache of the city playgrounds. Nor was it the castoff refuse of Gotham could compete with David-versus-Goliath nature of the triumph, the anyone. The big schools, the state universities fact that CCNY, a tuition-free refuge for ethnic over- that had money and recruiting tools, had be- achievers who’d been quota-ed out of the Ivy League, come the dominant powers in the game. These had taken down the basketball elite. It was that this are schools we still associate with basketball: game, coming at a time when being black or Jewish Kentucky, Syracuse, Ohio State. Standout play- was exactly the wrong thing to be, seemed less a meet- ers came from prep schools where boys were ing of schools than a clash of civilizations: old versus taught to shun excesses of style and personality. new, South versus North, prejudice versus tolerance. Holman wanted to work in tougher clay, which Kentucky was coached by a legendary coach he knew he’d find in New York’s outer boroughs, named Adolph Rupp, who had never rostered where veins of talent went unrecognized. blacks and didn’t like to play against schools that Basketball had been invented by James Nai- did. As for Jews, it’s like my father said when I asked smith in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1891 to if he’d faced antisemitism when he moved to Lib- Coach Nat Holman and his CCNY Beavers celebrate after keep kids in shape during the winter, and in the ertyville, Illinois. “They didn’t even know what we winning the NCAA title, March 28, 1950. (AP Photo/File.) 1920s, Nat Holman had been its first great star. were.” But Rupp had no choice. If he wanted to win Growing up in a tenement on Norfolk Street in the NIT tournament, then more prestigious than even the subs, and described them as Homer de- Manhattan, Holman learned the game on the Lower the NCAA, he had to beat CCNY, which was in the scribed the crews of Athenian warships. Ed Warner, East Side, “playing one-on-one against other neigh- midst of perhaps the greatest season in college bas- a six-foot-four power forward from DeWitt Clinton borhood kids in Seward Park playground for a nickel ketball history—it ended with a “grand slam,” that High, “smooth as silk, hard as glass.” Floyd Lane. Ir- or a dime or sometimes an ice-cream cone,” Good- is, championships in both the NCAA and NIT tour- win Dambrot. Ed Roman, the Hebrew behemoth, man writes. “From 1921 through 1929, he was the fea- naments. who’d played high school ball at William Taft in tured player for the Original Celtics, a touring team, The telling moment came before the game even the Bronx. “Roman was the most dominating force that over the course of Holman’s career compiled a started. “As referee Jocko Collins prepared for the in the game.” There was one player from Lafayette staggering record of 720 wins against only 75 losses.” opening toss, the City College players extended High School, my father’s alma mater, named Norm He was a (Jewish) prince of American sport, an am- their hands to their Kentucky counterparts,” Mat- Mager, a six-foot-five forward, who “if he was now bassador no less than Connie Mack or George Halas. thew Goodman writes in his terrific new book The like he was then could start on any team in the Holman’s picture had even been on a Wheaties box. He City Game: Triumph, Scandal, and a Legendary Bas- NBA,” and two players from rival Erasmus High, was also, as Goodman shows, kind of a jerk. As such, he ketball Team. “The pregame handshake was a stan- Alvin Roth and Herb Cohen. tended to stay above the nitty-gritty, which was farmed dard ritual, a simple gesture of courtesy and sports- The fact that several of these players had been cor- out to his assistant, Bobby Sand, who did everything for manship, but this time was very different: This time rupted by bookies and gamblers; the fact that, even as Holman—scouted and recruited kids, ran practices, three of the Wildcats turned away. . . . It was as they went through that magical 1949–1950 season, drew up plays. According to Goodman, Bobby Sand was though a lightning bolt, brief and unexpected and they were being investigated by undercover cops; the the real author of Holman’s book, Scientific Basketball. frightening, had pierced the arena.” fact that they’d taken money to shave points, to win “Sand had heavy eyebrows and a round face like I’ve heard stories about this game, this team, and but not cover the spread, would not diminish their a fellow City College graduate, Edward G. Robinson,”

Winter 2020 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 31 Goodman writes. “He had a perpetual five o’clock tary tickets; it might mean as much as five or ten dicted, including “six from Long Island University, shadow (he had begun shaving even before his bar dollars cash. To bookies and gamblers like Salvatore four from City College, two from Manhattan Col- mitzvah), and his clothes, no matter how new or Sollazzo, this represented an opportunity. The world lege, and one from New York University.” But City recently ironed, always seemed rumpled. At five of college sports was corrupt; it seems inevitable that College got the headlines because City College was foot seven, he was shorter than the young men he that corruption would infect student athletes as well. the best team in the country, as well as a symbol coached and stockier, and his voice was redolent of In the summer, many top college players worked of the city itself. Most of the Beaver players ended his Brooklyn upbringing, in which the game they as waiters in the Catskills—the Hotel Brickman, up with suspended sentences, but point guard Al- played was ‘bask-uh-ball.’” And he was a genius: “He Young’s Gap Hotel, Klein’s Hillside Hotel, Kutsher’s vin “Fats” Roth and tournament MVP Ed Warner was fluent in five [languages] and could read four Hotel and Country Club, the Ambassador Hotel, were sentenced to six months in jail. As Goodman more.” After playing on the 1937–1938 team nick- which “dispensed with individual recruiting and shows, the judge seemed inclined to be harsh with named the Mighty Midgets, Sand got a doctorate in just imported the entire Bradley starting five from these two not because they were more culpable but economics from Columbia; he later taught at City Peoria.” Of course, their real job was basketball. because they weren’t good students, citing Roth’s College. He had a sickly wife and infant daughter They were ringers, brought in to play in the local faked transcript (Coach Holman’s handiwork) and and was stretched very thin, but Goodman portrays Warner’s low IQ scores. Roth’s mother was seri- a man obsessed with basketball: ously ill, and he was granted an extension of bail to visit her. Eventually, a deal was worked out for At home, eating an orange, he’d move pits and him to join the army rather than going to jail. War- pieces of peel around on the counter, lost in ner, who was black, went directly to Rikers Island. thought: he was working out long progressions Warner surely could have played in the NBA, but of moves, imagining the opponents’ responses he was permanently banned by the league, though for each and the most effective counterresponse he and several other players did end up playing in in turn, like a chess player trying to read the the minor league Eastern Basketball Association. future from the position of the board. Along the way, the book illustrates several hard truths about the world and the way it works. Take It was Sand who sold Holman on the fast break, St. John’s, which was a dominant basketball power an innovation the head coach at first dismissed as in the 1950s. St. John’s players, who were likewise unsound. Until then, basketball tended to move at corrupted, were let go soon after their arrests and a stately pace. Absent the shot clock, which was not never charged. Why? introduced in college until the 1980s, players would According to Goodman, it had to do with the rela- pass the ball around for a minute or more, in search tionship between the US Attorney Frank Hogan, “an of a perfect opportunity, which might be a “two- observant Catholic,” and New York’s Cardinal Spell- handed set shot in which the ball was pushed from man. “The story I got was that Hogan wanted to run chest level,” Goodman writes. for governor,” sportswriter Jerry Izenberg said later. Holman’s brand of basketball, which would van- “Spellman called Hogan and said, ‘You know, I can get ish within a decade, was terrestrial, with both feet set Front page headlines, February 19, 1951. you every big Catholic donor. Period. But that team is firmly on the polished maple floor. Sand convinced (New York Daily News.) not to be touched.’” The account of basketball writer Holman that CCNY had to innovate to compete at the Charley Rosen, who spoke with numerous players top level, which meant the fast break, wherein a team league and entertain the guests (Wilt Chamberlain and coaches of the time, differs slightly, Goodman transitioned from defense to offense in a flash, moving had a gig like this at Kutsher’s a few years later). Of goes on. “According to Rosen, ‘Spellman sent a Cath- the ball downcourt via a few long passes, a sequence course, bookies and gamblers need to get away too, olic detective to Hogan to [pass] the word to lay off culminating in a layup or dunk. Sand found kids who so that’s how the connections were made: I’m not the Catholic schools. They couldn’t risk a face-to-face could play this style in New York’s public schools. asking you to lose, kid; just don’t win by so much. meeting, or even a phone conversation.’” The result? New York was a capital of hoops back then, with A strength of Goodman’s book is the way it con- “Unlike City College and Long Island University, over a half dozen top college teams (CCNY, Long Is- jures the lost worlds of New York. The Catskills, aka which never again regained their status as major land University, Brooklyn College, NYU, Iona, Man- the Jewish Alps; the tenements, with their Yiddish- basketball powers, St. John’s continued to maintain hattan College, Columbia, St. John’s) playing in the filled hallways and starch-heavy meals, “brisket and a top-flight basketball program.” metro area. But CCNY was the best of those teams, roast chicken, and potato latkes, and stuffed cabbage The other hard truth? It’s impossible to control a so its players became heroes, extolled in the news- and kugel, washed down with glasses of seltzer and product when everyone is getting rich but the peo- papers. Most home games were played at the old cherry soda”; the Harlem streets, where the numbers ple doing the work, in this case, the players, which Madison Square Garden, where the seats climbed game was a neighborhood obsession; the playgrounds, explains the scandals that still plague college sports. to the rafters, the men wore suits and hats, book- where everyone played basketball because basketball Most of the CCNY players apologized, hung their ies bantered with gamblers in the aisles, and a thick required little space and just one ball, making it the heads, and begged forgiveness. impasto of cigarette and cigar smoke collected along most democratic game. The book draws landscapes Some were less remorseful. Shooting guard Herb the ceiling. (“One prominent head coach, Frank but also people, a series of profiles, a dozen stories of Cohen probably expressed the sentiments of many Keaney of Rhode Island State, would light smudge- rise and fall, of how a childhood passion—hoops— amateur athletes when he recalled, “I would look up pots in the college gym during practices to prepare turned first into a shot at college, then into stardom, and the stadium was always full, 18,000. . . . And I his teams for [the Garden],” Goodman writes.) Few then into criminality and shame. For the 1949–1950 would think to myself, ‘Every one of those people people left before the final buzzer, even when the CCNY standouts, whom Goodman follows into mid- paid to get in tonight.’ And where did that money go? game wasn’t close. According to Goodman, this was dle age and even dotage, the point-shaving scandal Not to me—I was getting maybe five bucks from sell- less because spectators loved the sport than because amounted to 24 months that netted little cash—they ing my tickets.” many had bet the spread and were waiting to see were paid around $1,000 for each adulterated con- “I didn’t care,” Cohen said, when asked if he felt if CCNY would cover, hence the huge cheer that test—but haunted the rest of their lives. bad about shaving points. “I spent the money on might follow a seemingly meaningless free throw. clothes. I earned it; I spent it; that’s all. Fuck them.” And that’s how the worm got into the apple. All oodman tells the story of the team but also that money, so much being made by promoters, ven- Gthe story of the cops, detectives, prosecutors, dors, coaches, and schools—that is, by everyone but and politicians who profited from or uncovered Rich Cohen is the author, most recently, of The Last Pirate the players, many of whom came from lower-middle- the fix. The US attorney’s investigation into illegal of New York: A Ghost Ship, a Killer, and the Birth of a class or poor families. You’d see them, according to gambling—it went far beyond basketball—would Gangster Nation (Spiegel & Grau). He was a cocreator of Goodman, in the street before games, “coats thrown entangle big fish, including New York mayor Bill the 2016 HBO series Vinyl and is a contributing editor at on over warm-up suits,” scalping their complimen- O’Dwyer. In the end, 13 college players were in- Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone.

32 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2020 History of Mel Brooks: Both Parts

BY JESSE TISCH

biography, It’s Good to Be the King. School was mis- kind of primitive wisdom, knowing in his kishkes Funny Man: Mel Brooks ery—you had to sit still and be quiet—and stifled that status and respectability—the normal blandish- by Patrick McGilligan Melvin’s creative urges. He courted the jocks, becom- ments of middle-class life—weren’t for him. Good Harper, 640 pp., $40 ing their jester and mascot. “Pretty soon, I came to instincts. He was, as Funny Man shows, a born co- hate them all,” he later recalled. “I really hated them median. He had quick reflexes, a wonderfully mal- for what they made me be.” Perhaps it was survival leable face, and could think seriously about utter silliness. And he possessed an innate self-confidence. He had quick reflexes, a The flip side of his insecurity was a stunning gran- n the 1940s, when Mel Brooks launched diosity: Brooks would proclaim his genius loudly. himself into comedy, he invented a persona: wonderfully malleable face, (“Is the genius awake yet?” Moss Hart would ask, “Crazy Mel.” Perhaps you remember Crazy years later, on the phone.) On confident days, Mel: He was exuberant, reckless, loud—a wild, and could think seriously Brooks called himself “a tough Jew from Brooklyn” Icomedic id. Carson loved him. So did his audi- and apparently meant it. Once, during his army ence. When Crazy Mel wasn’t vamping on TV, he about utter silliness. stint, a soldier called Brooks a “dirty Jew.” Brooks was mugging in photos, including one gloriously swung his steel mess kit at the man’s face. zany shot in which he appears wild-eyed and open- instinct. A small, sensitive child who wasn’t smart mouthed, like a zoo animal hit with a tranquilizer or athletic but sang “Toot, Toot, Tootsie” and “If You rooks was an incorrigible goofball, but he dart. Silently, he conveys shock, fear, and aggression. Knew Susie” with crack timing and crowd-pleasing Bwas fundamentally serious about comedy in “Tragedy is when I cut my finger,” Brooks once said. gusto, he must have been a magnet for bullies. a way that mirrored the seriousness of the times. “Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” As McGilligan has it, Brooks’s defining quali- In early 1945, just before D-Day, Brooks enlisted in That crazy photo appears, fittingly, on the cover of ties—exuberance, charm, anger, and a deep insecu- the army and shipped out to France. Like so many Funny Man, a rich and revealing biography of Brooks rity—were all present in his teenage years. Brooks soldiers, he returned scarred, damaged, prone to by Patrick McGilligan. It’s an ancient human truth that comedians get away with murder, and here’s proof, 640 pages of it. Consider Brooks’s films, which serve up whatever comic mischief your inner teenager craves. For schlock, Spaceballs. For sheer chutzpah, The Producers. For cheeky homage, Young Franken- stein, High Anxiety, and Silent Movie. For inspired, juvenile hokum—well, pretty much all of them. If you love Brooks’s comic anarchy, you might hope for an appreciative biography. But McGilli- gan, a seasoned chronicler of Hollywood lives, is a cool, methodical narrator with a well-hidden ruthless streak. In Brooks, he has a fine subject, a well- known but not terribly well-understood creative genius. Brooks’s exuberance is legendary; his co- lossal egotism can be inferred—you don’t conquer Hollywood and Broadway without a healthy self- regard. But the rest of Brooks’s character may come as a harsh surprise. That he slavishly pursued wealth and fame, and was often selfish, spiteful, and cruel— Crazy Mel, minus the impish charm—is the main revelation here, served in huge, unsavory spoonfuls. Funny Man tells the improbable story of how Melvin Kaminsky, the short, unbookish, unhand- Mel Brooks with host Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show, July 24, 1991. (Photo by Wendy Perl/NBCU some son of Kitty Kaminsky, became a comedy Photo Bank/NBC Universal via Getty Images.) icon, an Emmy, Grammy, Tony, and Oscar winner. He was Kitty’s fourth son, supremely coddled and cared for. “I’d had such a happy childhood,” Brooks was “always on,” his classmates recalled; he was “the mood swings and depressions. He’d seen devastat- claimed, and maybe so, though its outlines were class shmendrik.” Brooks’s own judgments were just ed French villages, streets strewn with fresh corps- Dickensian. The Brooklyn Kaminskys were poor as harsh: He considered himself “short and ugly,” es. The experience “added a layer of outer shell to (“so poor, we do not even have a language—just a mincing “Hebrew chipmunk.” At some point, his personality,” McGilligan writes, insulating him a stupid accent!” wails a woman in History of the Brooks realized that insecurity could serve his from his own emotions and from other people’s. World: Part I). The family was grieving a tragedy— comedy. “Here I am, I’m Melvin Brooks!” he sang Brooks may have been a mess, but he was a the death of Brooks’s father when Brooks was two. to Catskills crowds, as if daring them to ignore him. charming mess, and a surprising number of attrac- The main absence-presence in Brooks’s life, his fa- His routine ended with a naked plea: “Out of my tive women fell under his spell. One of them was a ther haunts this biography, as he apparently haunted mind, Won’t you be kind? / And please love Melvin lithe young dancer whom he married in 1953, Flor- Brooks long into adulthood. Brooks!” He finished kneeling, arms outstretched, ence Baum. Around that time came Brooks’s first big Brooks’s school years were no easier, and McGil- as if ready to hug or be hugged. break: befriending Sid Caesar, a brilliant TV come- ligan presents a far darker portrait than a previous Brooks wasn’t book smart, but he possessed a dian whose Jewishness, like Brooks’s, was obvious

Winter 2020 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 33 yet hidden. The attraction to Caesar was power- By that point, he’d pulled his life more or less ignores him, refusing to go quietly into that good ful. “There’s something big, you know, emotionally together, leaving his wife for the actress Anne Ban- commercial break. Playing the loud, disruptive Jew missing from my life,” Brooks once said. “[Making] croft, a showbiz pairing that somehow worked. seemed a compulsion for Brooks, an act of defiance. alliances with father figures was always very impor- With Carl Reiner, whom he had met when they “I am a Jew. What about it?” Brooks once said on 60 tant to me.” Brooks cultivated Caesar, becoming a both worked on Your Show of Shows, he created Minutes. “What so wrong? What’s the matter with be- “sort of groupie”—really, a stalker—who shadowed the 2000 Year Old Man, a kvetchy, old Jew based ing a Jew? I think there’s a lot of that way deep down Caesar everywhere, pitching sketch ideas. His persis- on Brooks’s real-life uncle. In 1968, he filmed The beneath all the quick Jewish jokes I do.” tence worked: By the early 1950s, Brooks was writ- Producers, conscripting Zero Mostel for the Max ing for Your Show of Shows, a Jewish-in-everything- Bialystock part. At first, Mostel was appalled: How he great puzzle of Brooks’s life is his anger, but-name comedy revue hosted by Caesar. could he, a Jewish actor, play a scheming, vulturous Tthe intense, hair-trigger temper that sent ac- The Brooks who charmed and bullied his way Jew—an antisemitic stereotype? Eventually, though, tors scurrying for cover. It’s a riddle McGilligan into Caesar’s writing room left an impression on everyone. Brooks was bumptious, crass, effusive, dis- “When people see this, I want them to say, ‘He may be ruptive, chronically late, and wholly undisciplined. He was also very, very funny and ferociously driven. Fun- just a small Jew, but I love him. A short little Hebrew man, ny Man is, among other things, a rather ugly portrait of ambition as a deranging and disfiguring force. Brooks but I’d follow him to the ends of the earth.’” stole jokes, jeered at his fellow writers, and dynamited their work. “I needed a success,” he later said. “I wanted he yielded to Brooks’s importunate charm. “Mel has can’t quite solve, only chronicle, exhaustively, with to be famous.” That might explain why, when a senior great craziness,” he later said, “which is the greatest survivor stories from various writers’ rooms and writer threw lit cigars at his face while yelling “You’re praise I can have for anybody.” film sets. Here, Brooks’s battered colleagues get fired!” Brooks didn’t think of quitting. their revenge, recalling tantrums, meltdowns, and In the competitive hothouse of the writing room, cGilligan is a shrewd biographer, if some- 100 varieties of rude, unmenschy behavior. The Brooks was “evasive, unapologetic, belligerent,” Mc- Mwhat immune to Brooks’s screwball charm. stories are myriad, yet all alike. As a director, Brooks Gilligan writes. Often, he was erratic and hostile. “He Too bad. A more appreciative approach might have tyrannized crews, belittled writers, sent actors into used to bare his teeth like a rodent if you crossed better captured Brooks’s comedy. Brooks called therapy, and behaved like he had in Caesar’s writ- him,” said a cowriter who recalled his “towering” his humor “big city, Jewish” and “energetic, ner- ing room. His sets resembled a family where the rages. “That’s not funny!” Brooks would shout dur- vous, crazy.” The critic Vincent Canby praised its father had gone crazy. ing joke sessions. “You don’t know what’s funny!” In “lunatic highs”—its speed, volume, risk-taking. Of The roots of Brooks’s anger are surely complex, more tranquil moods, he delivered his verdict qui- course, not everyone enjoyed the carnival ride. “He yet clues are scattered throughout his interviews. “I etly: “All shit.” Serene or volcanic, Brooks radiated has been conducting a vocal reign of terror,” Pau- always felt it was my job to amuse those around me,” anger. Friends withdrew; coworkers urged therapy. line Kael, a chatterbox herself, once complained. Brooks once said. “Don’t ask why.” You don’t need McGilligan shapes his narrative around these There was a bullying quality—“laugh, or else!”— to be a Freudian to see how such a burden could episodes; a coy biographer, he withholds insights, to Brooks’s comedy, Kael wrote. It was pushy and stir up intense resentment, even rage, at an audi- revealing character through action and anecdote, excessive. She was gagging on all the gags. ence. Brooks’s response to critics—those profes- like a novelist. As Funny Man makes clear, there But with Brooks, excess was always the point. An sional withholders of approval and gratitude—often were two Mel Brookses: one cruel and peremptory, enemy of solemnness, of piety and cant, of repres- went beyond annoyance into fury. “I have a body the other charming and jocular. The second Brooks sion and restraint, he was built for overflow. Just as of work!” Brooks once screamed at Roger Ebert. drew people to him; he was energetic, funny, avid, surely, Brooks has a counterphobic streak, veering to- “You only have a body.” Deprived of affection, he joyful. He banished boredom from his life and oth- ward danger, accident, and death. Consider the 2000 turned from “Good Mel” into “Rude Crude Mel,” as er people’s. (“Oh good! The party’s about to begin,” Year Old Man, whose antic chatter about lion attacks McGilligan pithily puts it. Brooks’s second wife, Anne Bancroft, would think and fried food (equally lethal, he implies) seems like Brooks’s serious side, such as it is, came through when Brooks came home at night.) Most of all, he an amulet against anxiety. Long before Seinfeld, it in his directing. (Brooks wasn’t a writer, strictly seemed grandly, enviably free saying, doing, and brought a distinctively Jewish voice to mainstream speaking, but a talker, a human geyser of dia- making whatever he wanted. People loved sharing America. At first, Brooks worried it was too Jewish— logue who relied on stenographers.) He certainly that freedom. They felt more alive in his presence. how would it play in Peoria? Pretty well, actually: The was a perfectionist, an exacting editor, a fanatic The delightful Brooks, such grand company, album sold a million copies. To Gentile ears, it didn’t about casting. Actors earned their roles through gets short shrift in Funny Man , elbowed aside by sound Jewish or ethnic. It merely sounded funny. intense, exhausting auditions that included long the angry, belligerent Brooks. Beneath anger, there’s By that point, he had become “Mel Brooks,” interviews. (“It lasted hours. I felt like I was at the usually pain, and in Brooks’s case, there were res- having abandoned Melvin Kaminsky somewhere Mayo Clinic,” Madeline Kahn recalled.) Once ervoirs of it. In the 1950s, while writing Your Show along the Palisades Parkway en route to the Catskills. scripts were prepared, Brooks tolerated no med- of Shows, Brooks suffered frequent nervous break- This act of self-creation was also, of course, an act of dling by big-shot producers. Universal’s Lew downs. There were bursts of hypomania; sudden, distancing, a farewell to Jewish Brooklyn. It was, per Wasserman balked at Springtime for Hitler and acute bouts of mourning; and at least one episode McGilligan, a brief, ambivalent farewell; Brooks, in offered a compromise: Springtime for Mussolini. of paranoid psychosis. Finally, Brooks submitted to classic Jewish fashion, gradually returned home to How would that have worked out? Thankfully, we’ll therapy. “All I did was cry,” he recalled of his psycho- his ethnic roots. After the 50s, Brooks never assimi- never know: Brooks refused, dumping the producer. analytic sessions. “For two years. I did nothing but lated or concealed his Jewishness. He was proudly, He would mock Hitler into oblivion, he later said. sob.” Brooks’s dark night of the soul lasted six years. emphatically Jewish. America assimilated him. Brooks seems to have countered every rebuff with By all accounts, Brooks learned much about Brooks’s Jewish voice could rise into a Jewish roar. similar stubbornness. McGilligan quotes Anne Ban- himself, trading misery for ordinary unhappiness. On a dozen memorable evenings, Brooks hijacked croft: “No man had ever approached me with that What all that therapy didn’t do was change Brooks. the Tonight Show, upstaging Carson with his inspired kind of aggression.” And: “The man never left me He seems to have suffered from a looming sense of meshuggene act. Next to Carson—amiable, unruf- alone.” How might that courtship have gone in 2019, emptiness, an affliction not to be therapized away. In fled, WASPishly suave—Brooks seemed drawn to- we wonder. Brooks seemed to interpret the word “no” the showbiz mindset he carried with him, attention ward self-caricature, the Jewishness turned up to 11. to mean “maybe” or “convince me” and then coaxed, is oxygen; wealth is validation; prizes and praise are “Gentiles! They’ll drink anything!” he’d yell at Ed pressured, and hectored until he got his way. Of the sustaining. The problem, McGilligan makes clear, McMahon, seizing his coffee mug and spraying its Brooks–Bancroft union, McGilligan says little—like is that no amount of applause could satisfy Brooks; contents at the audience. On another night, Brooks all marriages, it is mysterious from the outside— his needs were bottomless. Even after he won an heckles the announcer—“Why don’t you put on a though he implies that Bancroft was a civilizing force, Academy Award for his short film The Critic, Brooks tie, shmendrik!”—and buries him in insults. “We’re quite a task for any wife, but especially Mel Brooks’s. often felt neglected and unappreciated. going to come right back,” Carson smiles, but Brooks Of Brooks’s first marriage, we learn slightly

34 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2020 more, none of it pretty. Brooks gave his account in a Tynan before the film’s premiere, “When people see in a curious way, it mirrors its subject. For nearly screenplay, Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud, written this, I want them to say, ‘He may be just a small Jew, 500 pages, we’re in the company of a tireless show- in the messy aftermath. McGilligan portrays a jeal- but I love him. A short little Hebrew man, but I’d man, always performing. The real Brooks, whoever ous, resentful husband who found marriage stifling follow him to the ends of the earth.’” he is, doesn’t get much stage time apart from his (“I needed more attention from the world, and less meltdowns and rages; there is little sense of who attention from a wife,” Brooks once said). Though or all its liveliness, Funny Man can feel some- he might be in quiet moments, alone with himself. the marriage was a quagmire, divorce freed neither Fwhat dutiful. What it doesn’t do—it would Then comes a singularly revealing moment that also party, certainly not Baum. In McGilligan’s account, have been a tall order—is capture the sheer manic suggests why this biography must have been almost Brooks never stopped punishing her, shirking vitality of Brooks’s best comedy. For that, you’ll impossible to write. On page 482, Brooks’s former alimony while stashing his millions in dodgy shell need Amazon Prime or YouTube, or your own publicist notes that corporations. The couple had three children; Brooks memory reel. It’s easy enough to imagine a theater maintained an aloof interest in their lives after mov- filled with Brooks’s inspired creations: the flatulent In private, Mel turned off. No personality, ing to Hollywood. cowboys; the Yiddish-speaking Indians; campy, deadpan, sullen. It wasn’t rude. But without an Politically, Brooks was a liberal—or so people singing Nazis; the wan inmates of The Psycho- audience, he just turned miserably blank, which assumed after Blazing Saddles. In fact, Brooks’s Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous. no one who saw him publicly would believe. films reveal something else. Brooks’s instincts—his “curious inner compass,” as the critic Kenneth Quite clearly, Brooks was incapable of seeing Tynan put it—were mainly comedic: If a joke himself in those moments; he could only see him- landed, he used it. On a deeper level, he gravitated self through other people, through their adoring toward risk, mischief, transgression—in a word, gaze. It’s equally obvious that, in some fundamental excitement. At the deepest level was a ferocious way, Brooks never fully developed; in his lifelong need for self-expression. “I’ve got to get this stuff rush toward success and applause, he never culti- out of my system,” Brooks once said. It was perhaps vated the parts of himself that would have added that simple. His talent needed a vehicle; his manic depth to his personality. Indeed, you can’t help energy needed an outlet. Lord knows what might notice how woefully narrow Brooks’s life seems, have happened had it remained bottled up. how empty of commitments, convictions, and com- With The Producers (1967), he unbottled it, glee- passion. McGilligan, losing his patience, labels this fully tossing every rude, raucous, just plain wrong “solipsistic”—a painfully accurate term for Brooks’s joke he could think of into the mixture. McGilligan’s self-enclosed universe. account of that film, which gave Brooks his foothold A bit of that rubs off. What this long biography in Hollywood, is wonderful. Arriving on set, Brooks lacks, finally, is the quality of human sympathy. was so nervous he yelled “Cut!” instead of “Action!” Brooks offers none—it isn’t in his character—and on his first take. The entire film seemed doomed, he elicits none, not from friends, fellow writers, or but soon enough, the crew was swept up in Brooks’s his biographer. McGilligan is unimpressed: Having reckless audacity. “Oh my god, are we allowed to seen too much of Bad Mel, he won’t be charmed by show this?” the choreographer wondered. Brooks, Good Mel. Some readers may muster more compas- by being his wild, anarchic self, answered yes, sion for the adult Brooks—like the child, growing up everything is allowed, for me and for you. By most fatherless, with an apprehension of death, he surely accounts, Brooks was a madman on set, yet even deserves our sympathy. And yet, Brooks, selfish and that worked for him. “Brooks’s craziness charged self-concealing, is a hard man to sympathize with. Warner Brothers poster advertising Blazing Saddles, the atmosphere, ramped up excitement on the set,” By the 1980s, Brooks’s long career was winding 1974. (PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/ an actor recalled. Alamy Stock Photo.) down, his firecracker talent fizzing out. It seemed A more confident Brooks began working on spent by the 1990s, then rebounded dramatically Blazing Saddles in 1972. The film skewers West- in 2001, when The Producers conquered Broadway. erns, and with them, the entire mythology of the Nearby, a clumsy, bewildered Moses drops the 15, By then, Brooks had achieved comedic sainthood American West. The writing process was unusually make that 10, commandments. And, talking over and Emmy, Oscar, and Grammy awards. “I never intense. Brooks described it as therapy, but it was them all, is the 2000 Year Old Man, oozing ire and leave show business. It’s in everything I do,” Brooks more like an exorcism: “It just got everything out venting shpilkes. once said, and he kept his word, though, in a way, of me: all of my furor, my frenzy, my insanity, my Even second-rate Brooks has its goofy delights. Brooks had made himself redundant. His 70-year love of life and hatred of death.” Though some crit- I’ll never stop laughing at Brooks’s cameo as a Rabbi war against decorum was over; everything crude, ics griped—“He can be vicious and get away with Tuckman—“purveyor of sacramental wine and mo- vulgar, and offensive was now mainstream; Brooks’s it because he is Mel Brooks,” Kael complained— hel extraordinaire!”—in the harmlessly nutty Robin juvenile gags now seemed positively wholesome Blazing Saddles was a smash success and a turning Hood: Men in Tights. Entering Sherwood Forest, his compared to the gross-out shenanigans of younger point in his career. Brooks had flirted with serious- mule ambles along in a loose zigzag. “You’re fershni- comedians. The culture was more Brooksian, yet, ness in an earlier film, The Twelve Chairs, but from kit!” he taunts the creature, wagging a rabbinical fin- somehow, it was no place for an aging vaudevillian. Blazing Saddles onward, he aimed for mass appeal. ger. “You drunken mule, you!” To the Merry Men, Brooks is 93, alive and quipping, still popping up “I’m just becoming a crowd-pleaser,” he shrugged. he explains what mohels do, using a tiny guillotine on stage. “As far as anyone can tell, he is unaltered,” “What have I got to say?” as a prop. They become suddenly less merry. David Denby observed last winter. Brooks may be The answer was 1977’s High Anxiety, his parody/ If Funny Man neglects Brooks’s comedy, it also a genius as H. L. Mencken defined it—someone homage to Alfred Hitchcock. “I don’t want to sac- sidesteps its many meanings. True, explaining who holds onto childhood. But genius is sometimes rifice a single laugh,” Brooks told critics, and in humor is almost always a bad idea. Still, a little boring on the page, grey and inert. Still, McGilli- the spirit of excess, he crammed it with crude gags analysis wouldn’t have killed McGilligan (or his gan deserves credit for writing a smart, clear-eyed, and clever allusions. It didn’t quite work. Both Mel readers). Brooks’s comedy raises serious questions, revealing biography, devoid of unearned sympathy. Brookses were present, the needy, love-starved or perhaps varieties of the same question. Who He resists charisma. He isn’t charmed by charm. child—“Please love Melvin Brooks!”—and the an- deserves mockery? Should comedy have a moral Sound of mind, he’s cool, not kind, and won’t love gry, bellicose teenager. “He wants to offend, and center? Are some subjects so serious they shouldn’t Melvin Brooks. he also wants to be loved for being offensive,” Kael be turned into a joke? Is anything off limits? These griped. Overall, the response was mixed, but Brooks issues never bothered Brooks, and Funny Man is was pierced, falling into a depression surely made similarly untroubled by them. Jesse Tisch is a writer, editor, and researcher. He lives in worse by his high expectations. As he told Kenneth If Funny Man feels slight despite its heft, then New York City.

Winter 2020 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 35 READINGS The Warning Song and the Medlars: Two Stories

BY GLIKL BAS LEYB, WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY CHAVA TURNIANSKY

f this brilliant and original 17th-century Yid- letters and the little poems a couple of young girls at- All we know about Glikl’s short childhood—for dish writer, who was born in Hamburg in 1645 tached to the books they typeset at the family’s print- a girl betrothed at the age of 12 and married at the and died in Metz in 1724, had seen the various ing shop, the few available women’s writings comprise age of 14 was considered an adult—comes down renditions of her name in published versions poems and prayers of various kinds, a sermon, and to no more than a few sentences: “I was born in Iof her work, she wouldn’t have recognized herself. one major work, Rivka bas Meir Tiktiner’s book of Hamburg, but I heard from my dear parents and Not in the name Glikl Hamel, and even less in the moral instruction, Meynekes Rivke (Rebekah’s Nurse). others—I was not yet three years old when all the more commonly used and far more aristocratic ap- pellation Glikl von/of Hameln, since these epithets Glikl’s “seven little books” (by which she means chapters) are so substitute the name of her birthplace, Hamburg, with that of her husband, Hamel, which became at- utterly different from anything known in the Jewish world until tached to his first name, Chaim, only after he had left the place and settled elsewhere (for what good then that it is not surprising that she did not have a word for it. is it to be called Hamel when you live in Hamel?). Furthermore, such regional epithets were in those was born, so I believe, in the year 5407 Jews of Hamburg were served with an edict of ex- times used among Jews only for men, not for wom- “I[1647], in the holy community of Hamburg, pulsion and forced to move to Altona,” and “It was en. A woman’s name was, first of all, tied to her fa- where my pious, devout mother brought me into in my childhood—I was about 10 years old—when ther (in our case: Glikl bas Reb Leyb) and then, after the world,” says Glikl at the beginning of her life the Swede went to war with His Majesty the King of marriage, to her husband (Glikl eyshes Reb Chaim story—she is mistaken, however, for the year was Denmark. I cannot write much news about it since Hamel). If the husband died first—which Chaim actually 1645—and she goes on to comment on the I was a child and had to sit” in cheder. That she did did—she was identified as his widow (Glikl, almo- saying of the sages: “Better never to have been cre- attend a traditional elementary school in the heart nes Reb Chaim Hamel), unless she married someone else, which Glikl did in 1699. No less than by the strange name, Glikl would have been startled by the titles and genre descriptions given by scholars, translators, and publishers to her writing: zikhronot or zikhroynes, memoirs or Memoiren, Denkwürdigkeiten, Tagebuch, autobiography, “The Life of,” and even “The Adventures of Glikl Hamel.” She herself gave her book no title. Nor did she describe it by genre. Failing to do so was unusual in those days, when most Yiddish books were explicitly named by genre: mayse (story), mayse-bukh (storybook), lid (poem), shpil (play), minhogim (cus- toms), mesholim (fables), tkhines (supplications). Why did Glikl refrain from giving her book a title or naming its genre? Was it only because she did not intend to have it published? Most Hebrew and Yid- dish manuscripts—even if not directly intended for publication—were at that time given a title page or at least a title. But even later on, when Glikl’s grandson supplied the copy his father had made from her manuscript with a regular title page, he too abstained from providing a title. He did adorn the page with a biblical verse in the conventional manner, but when referring to the work itself called it simply ha-ksav (the writing). Not only did Glikl refrain from grant- Bertha Pappenheim, posed as her ancestor Glikl Title page appended to the complete copy of the ing her book a title, but throughout her writing she bas Leyb in a portrait by Leopold Pilichowski. manuscript. (Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian avoided labeling it in any way, referring to it only as (Wikimedia.) Senckenberg, Frankfort am Main.) “it,” “this,” “such,” or “what I am writing.” “I intend, God willing, to leave all this for you in ated than to have been created,” after which there of 17th-century Ashkenaz may strike the reader as seven little books, if God grants me life”—she says. is a page missing in which she is likely to have de- surprising, but, in praising her father, she also re- “Therefore I think it would be most appropriate to scribed the household and charity of her parents. It marks, “He gave his children, boys and girls alike, begin with my birth.” Glikl’s “seven little books” (by is the only missing leaf from the nearly two hun- an education in higher matters as well as in practi- which she means chapters) are so utterly different dred the manuscript comprises. However, this can cal things.” Did these higher matters include all the from anything published and known in the Jewish hardly be the reason for the fact that the period of subjects of the contemporary curriculum for boys or world until then that it is not surprising that she did the writer’s formative years, her growth and edu- just a few of them? And what does “practical things” not have a word to describe what she was writing. cation, her evolution from childhood into matu- mean—writing, arithmetic, correspondence skills, Among those works written by Ashkenazi women rity—precisely the topic that research of modern household chores, bookkeeping basics, rudiments of before the Enlightenment that have come down to autobiography since Rousseau’s Confessions con- trade? And what kind of cheder was it? Who taught us—all but one or two of them in Yiddish—no other siders to be the key to and the quintessence of the what to whom and for how long? Glikl does not pro- account of a personal life exists. Apart from private genre—is almost entirely missing from her book. vide any direct answers to these questions, but the

36 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2020 form and content of her writing attest to her skills financial expertise and her competence in com- down within the family from generation to gen- and disclose many of the sources of her knowledge. merce, develops new original enterprises, and sees eration, eventually finding their way in the late 19th Once Glikl decided to make her birth the starting the business in precious metals and jewels grow and century to the scholar David Kaufmann, who pub- point of her book, she necessarily had to draw upon prosper under her sole management. lished the memoirs with some annotations in 1896. the memories of others. The subject matter of these Even though Glikl explains right at the outset, Since then, one of the copies went missing but for early episodes is mainly family stories, events in the time and again, that her writing was induced by her a small four-leaf folder, which is now held in the Jewish community of Hamburg-Altona, and the fig- mournful state of mind after the loss of her hus- National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. The other ures of her direct ancestors. As a result, Glikl presents band, she does not follow the common practice of (virtually complete) copy is preserved at the Uni- us with a wide gallery of male and female figures, other 17th-century women of focusing primarily on versity Library Johann Christian Senckenberg in most of whom she never met, but whose images— the portrait of the devoted and adored husband and Frankfurt-am-Main. construed from the stories she heard—still thrilled to append to it, with appropriate modesty, a briefer Glikl’s work is known mainly in translation be- and charmed her at the time of writing no less than portrait of themselves. Glikl and her personal life cause the original was reprinted only once, and its they did in childhood. Most of these stories have a story take center stage. original language, Old Yiddish, was no longer un- strong didactic flavor, but they also give a flavor of the Although Glikl had 14 children, 13 of whom derstood by the general public even at the time of Jewish experience of that time and place. survived to adulthood, her normal pregnancies and its publication by Kaufmann. A transcription into German was made by Glikl’s descendant Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936). Pappenheim, a feminist who founded the Jewish Women’s Association, also posed as Glikl for a well-known portrait painted by the artist Leopold Pilichowski. The brief entry on Glikl’s death in the Metz Burial Society Register records only that Mrs. Glik (!), the wife of the deceased community leader Reb Hirtz Levy (her second husband), died and was buried with a good name on Thursday, the second day of Rosh Hashanah of the year 5485, and lies at the right side of the widow Gelle. The longer entry in the Metz community Memorbuch describes her more elaborately as a pious, generous woman and good housewife who was “most wise in the trade of precious gems and also most learned in the rest Altona by Hamburg by Georg Balthasar Probst. (Staatsarchiv Hamburg.) of the respectable virtues.” No mention is made of her writing. In this, she is officially remembered like This is certainly the case with the first selection births are merely mentioned in their proper place other women of her time and place, which only un- below, which tells the story of how Glikl’s father was within the chronological sequence of events, and only derlines the significance of her “seven little books” saved by his clever trilingual stepdaughter from being when they involve an irregularity—illness, danger, as a fascinating and extraordinary historical source. cheated by a Gentile client who had pawned some- death, a miraculous recovery or a funny episode— The text from which these excerpts are taken is thing with him and was scheming to get it back with- do they become worthy of detailed description. One from the newly published Glikl: Memoirs, 1691–1719, out repaying the loan. Although she was not there such episode is her famous account of when she and which I edited and annotated; the English text is trans- (Glikl was the daughter of her father’s second wife), her mother gave birth and were nursing infants at lated by Sara Friedman and adapted from my 2006 she skillfully conjures the scene, using direct speech the same time in the same house, a remarkable event critical edition with Hebrew translation. As such, it is and subtly varying the language used by the charac- even then in a time of young marriages (and hence the first fully faithful English rendition of Glikl’s work. ters. Thus, the father and daughter use the Hebrew- young grandparents). Another is the story, excerpt- Yiddish word mashkon/mashkn for “pledge,” while ed below, of the medlars (an acidic, curiously the German word Pfand is used by the client. The cli- shaped spring fruit once commonly cultivated ent’s angry reference to the young girl as a hur (whore) and eaten throughout Europe), which com- is also implicitly refuted by Glikl’s description of her as bines medical folk wisdom about women’s a bsule (maiden). Here and elsewhere, a careful read- cravings with a vivid evocation of the experi- ing shows that Glikl’s text is not only a unique histori- ence of pregnancy and motherhood. cal source; it is a subtle work of literary art. ecause of the limited and often mislead- hen it comes to the narrative of her life, Bing information available concerning Wthere is no doubt that marriage and a home the education and spiritual world of Jewish women of her own played a central role in the emergence in the early modern period, the modern-day reader Now, my father, of blessed memory, as I mentioned, of Glikl’s self-conscious identity as an individual of Glikl’s work is likely to find the author’s deci- before marrying my mother, may she live long, was and its consolidation into a genuine partnership of sion to write, or even her literacy, somewhat sur- married to another woman, by the name of Reytse, two. Glikl’s keen sense of partnership is clear from prising. In fact, many—if not most—of her female who was apparently an extremely talented person, the start: “My husband, of blessed memory”—she contemporaries were literate, not only those of a most capable woman who ran a large, respected recollects—“was very preoccupied with his busi- similar socio-economic status. The very existence household; she ultimately died without having any ness affairs; although still young, I did my part by of a lively Yiddish literature offers clear evidence of children with my father, of blessed memory. This his side. I do not write this to praise myself—my this, for women were the most significant portion woman already had an only daughter. In this way husband, of blessed memory, did not take advice of its intended readership. It is reasonable, then, to did my father, of blessed memory, gain—along from anyone but did whatever the two of us de- assume that other women of her station had a sim- with his first wife—a stepdaughter too, second cided together.” ilar education and that among them were others to none in both beauty and deed. She spoke flu- That is why no reader wonders at the reply of her who, like Glikl, put ink to paper to tell the story— ent French, which turned out one time to be most dying husband when asked about his will: “I don’t or episodes—of their life, yet only Glikl’s work has advantageous for my father, of blessed memory. know what to say. My wife, she knows everything. reached us. For my father, of blessed memory, had received a She should continue just as she was doing before.” The original text of Glikl’s handwritten manu- pledge from a certain non-Jewish gentleman, val- Glikl does much more than that: She takes on the script has not been preserved, but two copies, both ued at five hundred reichstaler. Well, after some business herself, puts into practice her remarkable made by her youngest son, Moshe, were passed time, this gentleman returned with two other

Winter 2020 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 37 gentlemen, seeking to redeem his pledge. My fa- at a lawyer’s in the Pferdemarkt. My mother asked mother: “Dearest mother, please, tell my Sabbath ther, of blessed memory, suspecting nothing, goes me to accompany her. Although it was far from my maidservant to come to me, I want to send her on upstairs to get the pledge. His stepdaughter was house, and late afternoon, at the beginning of the an errand.” My mother asked where I wanted to standing at the clavichord, playing the instrument month of Kislev, I could not refuse her, since I was send her. I said to my mother, may she live long: so as to render the gentlemen’s wait less tedious. still full of energy. “I’ve been thinking what could have caused those The two gentlemen, who were standing near So I went with my mother into town. At the blotches and the weakness, and I’ve been wonder- her, start conferring together: “When the Jew ing if I was at fault when I wanted med- comes back with our pledge, we’ll grab it from him lars and couldn’t get them, since I ended without giving him the money and get out of here.” up giving birth that same night. I want They were speaking French, never dreaming that to send the woman out to get a few schil- the maiden could understand them. As my father, lings worth of medlars. I want to smear of blessed memory, comes back with the pledge, some of the fruit on the baby’s mouth; she starts singing [a popular Hebrew song] loudly: maybe God will have mercy and there “Beware! Not the pledge! Today—here, tomorrow— will be an improvement.” My mother was gone!” angry at me, saying: “You always have In her haste, the poor girl couldn’t express her- this kind of nonsense in your head; the self any better. So my father, of blessed memory, weather looks as if earth and sky were says to the gentleman: “Sir, where’s the money?” about to melt together, the woman won’t Says the man: “Give me the pledge.” Says my father, go out in this weather—in any case, all of blessed memory: “I’m not giving any pledge; first this is pure nonsense.” I must have the money.” One of the men then turns I said: “Dearest mother, please do to the others and says: “Fellows, we’ve been duped, me a favor and send the woman; I’ll pay the whore must know French,” and with that they her whatever she wants, as long as I get bolted from the house, shouting threats. Next day those medlars. If I don’t get them I won’t the gentleman returns alone, pays my father, of have a moment’s peace.” So we sent for Engraving of the ancient synagogue at Metz. (Private blessed memory, the principal with interest, and Collection/Bridgeman Images.) the woman and told her to go get some redeems his pledge, saying: “Useful for you—you medlars. The woman hurried off—it was invested wisely when you had your daughter learn a long way, and the kind of weather that French,” and with that he went on his way. lawyer’s we saw that a woman living opposite was night you wouldn’t turn even a dog out of doors. selling medlars. I’ve always loved medlars. I told It seemed to me a long time before the woman re- my mother: “Mother, don’t forget that I want to buy turned, as whenever you want something very bad- some medlars on the way back.” We took ly—every minute seems like an hour. The woman care of what we had come for at the lawyer’s, finally returned with the medlars. but when we finished it was very late, nearly Of course, medlars are not the proper food for nighttime, so we went on home, both of us a newborn baby, because of the sourish taste. I in- having forgotten the medlars. As soon as I structed the nurse to loosen the baby’s swaddling got home, I remembered the medlars and clothes and sit down with him near the stove and berated myself for forgetting to buy them. I smear some medlar pulp on his mouth. Although did not give the matter too much thought, everybody laughed at me for this nonsense, I re- however, no more than one does when mained obstinate until it was done. The minute the wishing for something to eat that is not nurse smeared the medlar pulp on the baby’s mouth, available. In the evening I went to bed feeling fine, he opened his little mouth greedily as though want- After my husband returned from Hannover, in a good mood, but after midnight the labor pains ing to swallow the whole thing at once, and then he where his father’s bequest was divided, as you have began and I had to send for the midwife. I gave was sucking and swallowing the pulp of an entire heard—this was about twelve weeks after his death, birth to a baby boy. medlar, when just a moment ago he wouldn’t open and I was pregnant with my son Reb Yosef Segal. My husband, of blessed memory, was told the his mouth even for a drop of milk or for the sugar- Throughout the pregnancy my husband hoped good news right away; he was overjoyed, as now he water you give babies. The nurse then handed the fervently for a boy who would bear my husband’s had his father’s name again, the righteous Yosef, of baby to me in my bed to see if he would nurse. The father’s name again, as indeed happened, thanks blessed memory. But I saw the women who were minute he was at the breast he started suckling like be to God. Here I wish to set down a lesson for my present at the birth putting their heads together, a three-month-old. children, one that is actually true: When young whispering. I could not let it go; I asked what they By the time of the circumcision ceremony, all pregnant women spot different fruits or any other were talking about. Finally, they told me that the the blotches had disappeared from his face and kind of food, whatever it may be, and they entertain baby’s head and body were completely covered with body except for one spot on his side, the size of a even the slightest desire for it—let them not ignore brown blotches. They had to bring a candle close broad lentil. The baby was healthy and well for the this—they should eat of it and not follow their fool- to my bed for me to see for myself. Not only was circumcision, a beautiful baby boy, circumcised ish heads. Ah, it will do no harm. It might actually the baby covered with blotches—he was just lying at the prescribed time, thanks be to God. The cir- be a matter of life and death for them, and the baby there like a heap of rags, moving neither hand nor cumcision ceremony was lavish, the likes of which in the womb might very well—God forbid—be in foot, as though his soul was about to depart, God had not been seen in Hamburg for a long time. danger too, as I found out for myself. forbid. He wouldn’t nurse or even open his mouth. And even though we had just suffered a loss of one My whole life I had scoffed at hearing that wom- My husband, of blessed memory, saw it too, and we thousand mark banco because Isaac Vas had gone en’s cravings could be harmful. I simply refused to were desperate. bankrupt, on this day my husband did not give that believe it. On the contrary, when I was pregnant This was on Wednesday night—the following a thought, so joyful was he at the birth of his son. I’d often see succulent fruit at the market and ex- Thursday was supposed to be the day of his cir- And so, my children, you see that women’s cravings amine it, but if the fruit seemed too dear I did not cumcision, but there didn’t seem any chance of are not sheer nonsense, and they should not always buy it, and I suffered no harm. Buttimes are not that since the baby was growing weaker day by day. be mocked. all equal: When I was pregnant with my son Reb The Sabbath arrived, and on Friday night we held Yosef, I found out that things were otherwise. It so the welcoming for a baby boy, though there was happened—when I was in the ninth month of my no sign of improvement in the baby’s condition. Chava Turniansky is professor emerita in the pregnancy with my son Reb Yosef—that my moth- On Saturday night, as my husband was making Department of Yiddish at the Hebrew University of er, may she live long, had to take care of something Havdalah, my mother was with me. I said to my Jerusalem.

38 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2020 Remembering Harold Bloom

BY NEIL ARDITI

nevitably, at some point in every semester, I “Blake’s prophecies became his Torah and, like a home, Bloom appended a prose poem of his own share with my students my impersonation of Talmudic scholar, he painstakingly commented on composition as his epilogue. Harold Bloom. Face buried in one trembling the profound questions they raised.” The 1970s was the decade of the French Invasion hand (the other holds open a book), I shut The second phase of Bloom’s career was inau- in literary studies in American universities, and Imy eyes in great long blinks, between which I stare gurated by The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Bloom became associated, in the minds of many, wide-eyed at the air in front of me. “I reread this Poetry (1973), his breakaway book. I remember tak- with the Yale school of criticism, a group of critics passage this morning,” I say, or as best I can, in- ing down the slim black paperback edition from the influenced by deconstruction. But although he was cant, pausing almost between each word, “and it . . . wounded me. Why?” Bloom’s terminology was thrilling and baffling, like weaponry My performance has become exaggerated over the years, but it conveys something of the impact of forged on another planet. But the central argument could Bloom’s classroom presence on me and generations of his students. We were at first amused and finally not have been clearer. devastated by the urgency, the veritable spiritual crisis, that attended his encounter with the passages of shelf of my local bookstore in the fall of my senior friends and colleagues with its founding figures, his poetry and prose that he loved. He grappled with year of high school. I had been introduced to some work had little in common with theirs. His obses- them like Jacob wrestling with the angel. Whatever literary criticism already, but nothing like this. Was sive interest was literary strength: What made one the cost (it seemed considerable), we wished to be it criticism? I felt as if I had been dropped into a poem greater than another? How had the strongest transported to the heights of the literary sublime, cosmic, apocalyptic Western. The terminology was literary artists managed to revise the tradition they where he always seemed to reside. And so we went thrilling and baffling, like weaponry forged on an- inherited? What made a poem canonical? back to our rooms and returned to the texts, wheth- other planet. But the central argument could not Starting with his 1975 book Kabbalah and Criti- er Shakespeare or the Bible, Whitman or Kafka, have been clearer. We had arrived too late, “after cism, he turned increasingly to Gershom Scholem’s Freud or Wallace Stevens. We read them again and the flood.” The radiance of the literary tradition was account of the Jewish mystical tradition for his theo- again—this time with feeling, as the bandleader overwhelming, paralyzing. Only the strongest of retical models. Kabbalah, he argued, offered not only says—hoping to see for ourselves what had moved the strong had a chance of literary survival. Weaker a “direct portrayal of the mind-in-creation” but also this most prodigious embodiment of literary insight talents succumb to influence. Strong poets struggle “a model for the processes of poetic influence, and to plead for our (alas) inadequate assistance. We against it, distorting and repressing their literary maps for the problematic pathways of interpreta- wanted to be wounded. inheritance in order to make room for themselves. tion.” Bloom went on, of course, to write extensively No brief overview could do justice to Bloom’s Whatever else he was doing, Bloom was also nar- on religion and religious texts. Most famously and literary career. The sheer heft of his output is over- rating his effort to break out of the confines of his outrageously, in The Book of J (1990), he speculated whelming. He published more than 40 books of his earlier scholarship. The Anxiety of Influence wasn’t that the primary author of the first five books of the own prose (his last is still forthcoming), and his a commentary on Romantic poetry; it was an act Hebrew Bible was a woman, “either a princess of the uncollected introductions and stray essays would of Romantic mythmaking. As if to drive the point Davidic royal house or else the daughter or wife of a fill another dozen volumes, at least. He wrote about seemingly every well-known literary author, and many lesser-known figures, from Homer to the present. No literary critic in the English language was as prolific or covered as much ground as Bloom. He began his career as a scholar of English Romantic poetry at a time when, in academic circles, T. S. Eliot held the keys to the literary kingdom. (A framed photograph of Eliot hung, Bloom would recall, on the wall of the English department at Yale when he was a graduate student.) Bloom’s dissertation book, Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959), defended the reputation of the poet that Eliot had worked hardest to diminish, and began, moreover, by quoting a lengthy passage from Martin Buber. It is hard to imagine anything more antithetical to Eliot’s Anglo-Catholic, anti-Romantic bias. Bloom’s next two books—The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (1961) and Blake’s Apocalypse (1963)—were also lucid and permanently useful commentaries insisting on the aesthetic value and intellectual coherence of Romantic literature. But even in these early works, he comes across as something more than an academic critic. For Bloom, who had been raised as an Orthodox Jew, Romantic poetry constituted a Harold Bloom resting on a stack of his Chelsea House books, January 1985. (Photo by Bernard Gotfryd/ secular scripture. As Paul Cantor recently put it: Getty Images.)

Winter 2020 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 39 court personage,” with a genius for literary irony. It One afternoon, a story was making the rounds at ated him. He was a creature of it. And he created is tempting to say that, having treated the literature “the factory” that had everyone amused. Bloom had himself through it. In this regard, among others, he of English Romanticism as his Torah, Bloom now been interviewing an applicant for an editorial posi- resembled his hero, Samuel Johnson. Over the years, treated the Torah as literature and Kabbalah as liter- tion. At one point, she expressed anxiety about the and particularly in the weeks since his death, I’ve ary criticism. But for Bloom, the distinction between longevity of the Chelsea House project: She wasn’t found myself exchanging stories and anecdotes with sacred and secular texts had no meaning. looking for a temporary job. Bloom assured her that friends and colleagues who studied with Bloom or she had nothing to worry about: He had been told came in contact with him at one time or another. He n the 1980s, when I was his student, Bloom was by a fortune-teller that he would live until 103 years made Boswells of us all. Iin the midst of remaking himself into a critic for of age. As the years ticked by and Bloom continued But in the end, he became his own Boswell. Bloom the common reader. It was a transformation that to teach and publish into his late eighties, I began was fond of quoting Oscar Wilde’s statement that began with a flurry of entrepreneurial activity. In to take the fortune-teller’s prophecy for granted. criticism is “the only civilized form of autobiogra- my final year at Yale, I started working at “the fac- He seemed unstoppable, and indeed he was, until phy,” dealing, as it does, “not with the events, but with tory,” as Bloom called it: a branch of Chelsea House the end. He taught his last class four days before his the thoughts of one’s life.” He used it again as his epi- Publishers that had opened in New Haven, em- death, at the age of 89, and published nine books in graph to Possessed by Memory (2019), his most recent ploying at its peak 16 full-time staffers and a small book and the last to be published in his lifetime. By army of Yale graduate students as research assis- Wilde’s definition, of course, all of Bloom’s criticism tants. The goal was to replace the popular Prentice is autobiographical. But Possessed by Memory pushes Hall series Twentieth-Century Views, editions the genre of literary criticism to its autobiographical of modern essays on major literary authors (and limit and beyond, shuttling between memoir and ex- works) that could be found in both college and egesis. It is a mode that comes naturally to Bloom: He high-school libraries. The difference was Bloom. had been inching toward it for years. Twentieth-Century Views had employed a differ- In one of the book’s most poignant passages, ent editor—an expert on the subject—to introduce from a chapter titled “More Life: The Blessing Given each volume. At “the factory,” we assembled bib- by Literature,” he is flooded by childhood memories liographies and (with Bloom’s final approval and of his mother: occasional tweaking) tables of contents for what would amount to over six hundred volumes, every Last night, in the small hours, an image of my one of them introduced by Bloom. He had always mother came back to me. Vividly I saw myself, been prolific, but now he was writing at an un- a boy of three, playing on the kitchen floor, canny pace. He frequently referred to his need to alone with her as she prepared the Sabbath provide lifelong support for a disabled son as his meal. She had been born in a Jewish village primary motive, but he also seemed to revel in his on the outskirts of Brest Litovsk and remained new role. Who else could have played it? Who else faithful to her traditions. I was the youngest of Samuel Johnson by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1775. could claim to read four hundred pages an hour (Wikimedia.) her five children, and I was happiest when we with retention? Who else had something to say were alone together. As she passed me in her about every writer in the Western literary tradition preparations, I would reach out and touch her from Homer to Philip Roth? What other literary his final decade, six of them in the last three years bare toes, and she would rumple my hair and critic had that kind of strength? “I am writing an of his life. After a fall robbed him of his power to murmur her affection for me. introduction a day!” he trilled, not a little aston- write longhand, as was his custom, he turned to dic- ished at himself. tation—“which I still find strange. Yet the power to Again, on the morning of his 87th birthday, he wakes At “the factory,” Bloom was an expansive and go on exploring literature remains strong.” to the memory of his mother’s face, “as I had seen it jovial presence. He frequently held forth, playing to lighting the Shabbat candles and reciting the Bera- the crowd, or perhaps playing primarily to himself, saw Bloom for the last time in the spring of 1998. khah: ‘Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the but we all stopped to listen. Advised by his doctor to II was finishing my dissertation at the University universe. . . .’” “A reverie took shape in me,” he con- lose weight, he seemed always to be holding a can of of Virginia when he came to lecture on King Lear. tinues, “on the secular blessing given to me and to Diet Coke in his hand. He would wave it aloft and (His great tome Shakespeare: The Invention of the my students by the highest literature, from Homer ask, “Have you observed that the Bloom is vanish- Human would appear later that year.) Onstage, he and the Hebrew Bible through Dante and Chaucer ing?” His rants against deconstructive critics were seemed in pain, repeatedly begging our forgive- and on to Shakespeare, Cervantes, Montaigne, Mil- particularly exuberant performances. “When I read ness for “this grotesquery,” by which he meant ton, and the tradition of Western literature that cul- their discussion of a poem, I feel as if I were read- the frequent flapping of his left arm like a broken minates in Proust and Joyce.” ing an account of a great swimming competition, wing. Time had not been kind to his shoulder, he It is a remarkable and revealing passage in many in which the author reported only on the tempera- explained. All of it strangely abetted his talk, ways, not least of all because it moves, almost with- ture of the water. . . . Language is their demiurge. . . . which was darkly magnificent. He wasbecoming out pause, from the 87-year-old author’s childhood In the end, the only theory is oneself, and one is Lear, or so it seemed, consumed by his own, and memory of his mother’s face to his shortlist of the idiosyncratic.” his subject’s, Jobian afflictions. But at the recep- most important artists in the Western literary tradi- In retrospect, Bloom was warming up for his tion after the lecture, he was all smiles, babbling tion. No one but Bloom could have made that pivot role as the defender of the literary canon. Within the at great length with the infant child of a former credible. His relationship to the masterworks of academy, the very idea of literary value had come student. At dinner at a restaurant later that eve- literary art was intensely personal and passionate: a under suspicion. The “great books” were increasingly ning, he seemed as light-hearted and affable as Fal- form of love reserved, by most of us, for our closest described by scholars as products of their historical staff, ordering several bottles of wine for our table family members and friends. moment, no different in kind from other anthropo- (“This one is going to be a real treat for you!”) and Unable to sustain his mother’s faith in the cov- logical artifacts. Many went farther, regarding them holding forth, incessantly, with humorous stories enant, he “turned to the reading and studying of as cultural propaganda, monuments to a history of about writers he knew or had known. literature in search of the blessing” of “more life,” social and political oppression. Having spent a de- That Bloom could be Lear in the afternoon and which he was granted in great abundance, and cade plumbing the mysteries of literary strength, Falstaff in the evening will surprise no one who has shared for six decades in the classroom and on the Bloom now sought to defend it against its detractors. spent time in his presence. Oscillating between mel- page. We will not see his like again. In his bestseller The Western Canon (1994), he un- ancholy and glee, but displaying both moods with abashedly celebrated the literary originality of 26 of theatrical exuberance, he had always been, from the world’s most famous writers, lashing out against the moment I encountered him, both a literary Neil Arditi is a professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence what he called “the School of Resentment.” critic and a literary character. Literature had cre- College.

40 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2020 ARTS Remembering the Plutocrat and the Diplomat

BY ABIGAIL GREEN

For much of this time, Simon was buying great provided a country repositioning itself as a major James Simon Galerie art—but always with an eye to giving it away. His world power with essential cultural capital, much as Berlin, Germany personal collections of Renaissance and German art it does today. The 10,000 objects Simon donated to were foundational for the creation of what is now Berlin’s state museums during the Wilhelmine and Paul Nathan: Publizist, Politiker und the Bode Museum. For an arriviste European state Weimar years—even as his business crumbled after Philanthrop 1857–1927 like Wilhelmine Germany, the ability to showcase the First World War—were a significant part of that by Christoph Jahr internationally significant collections of oriental art endeavor. Unsurprisingly, however, his generos- Wallstein Verlag, 302 pp., $31.40 and antiquities alongside canonical masterpieces ity was excised from public memory by the Nazis. In this—as in the style, if not the scale, of his giving—James Simon was not alone. To the powers that be in Berlin, the James here’s a grand new building on Berlin’s Simon Galerie is a very conscious attempt to Museum Island: the James Simon Gal- put this right. It is, in the words of Michael erie. Some people think it’s an architec- Eissenhauer, director-general of the city’s tural masterpiece, but the Berliner Zeitung national museums, intended as “a tribute to dismissedT it as “the most expensive cloakroom in him and the Jewish bourgeoisie in Berlin,” the world.” A dramatic expanse of glossy white stone many of whom gave generously to the state skirting the river Spree in the heart of the German museums in their own right. How many capital, the James Simon Galerie is, perhaps, both museum-goers will understand it in that way of these things. For it is unquestionably a beautiful is a different matter. building: The sleek white colonnade and imposing For the James Simon Galerie is a vast but stairway echo the classical idiom of the great mu- empty shell. The minimalism of its neoclassi- seums that surround it, but in a chilly, deliberately cal exterior is reflected in an austere, function- modern key. And yet it is only an adjunct to them, al interior. Millions of tourists and Berliners a place for visitors to enter, buy tickets, leave their will pass through this building every year as coats, and move on. It is a building that towers over they visit the city’s famous museums, but only you as you approach it. But viewed from across a large stone sculpture of a reclining lion hints the water, it appears as a sliver of contemporary at the glories within. As for James Simon, it’s elegance overshadowed by the massive stone bulk unlikely that many will give him a thought. of the Pergamon Museum to which it gives access, a Visiting this summer, I did not see anyone building whose properly monumental scale reflects take the time to identify the massive bronze the drama and ambition of the famous archaeologi- inscription that outlines the foundational cal reconstructions within. Portrait of James Simon by Willi Döring, 1901. contribution of this “Berlin entrepreneur, At 134 million euros, the James Simon Galerie (© Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie/Volker art-collector and philanthropist” to the state is certainly a costly undertaking, one that asserts H. Schneider.) museums. Since most of the tourists were Berlin’s ambition to be a capital of world culture like London, New York, and Paris. It is the city’s answer to the dramatic glass pyramid that now serves as a gateway to the Louvre, just as the iconic bust of Nefertiti—royal wife of the pharaoh Akhenaten and stepmother to his son, Tutankhamun—is regularly described as “Berlin’s Mona Lisa.” Most things in Berlin speak to the city’s troubled past, and the James Simon Galerie is no exception. James Simon (1851–1932)—the man who brought Nefertiti to Berlin in 1913—was a German Jew. A philanthropic industrialist who made a fortune in cotton, although he had never really wanted to enter the family business, Simon was also responsible for bringing the famous blue-and-gold Ishtar Gate to Berlin over a decade after the Nefertiti bust. Few who have seen the extraordinary reconstruction of what was once the eighth gate to the inner city of Babylon (built on the orders of the king who destroyed the First Temple of Jerusalem) will ever forget it. Even fewer will appreciate that it was only one among literally thousands of significant ar- chaeological finds brought back to Germany from excavations that Simon helped to finance through the German Orient Society, which was founded in Visitors enter the James Simon Galerie during the “Long Night of the Museums,” August 31, 2019. (Photo by 1898 on Simon’s initiative. Christoph Soeder/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images.)

Winter 2020 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 41 foreigners and the inscription is only in German, generosity of his cousins Adolphe and Adèle. Mean- because they identified with Germany, Britain, and that may not be surprising. Yet even German tour- while, 150 French museums received some sort of France—and because they valued the prestige that ists will likely struggle to grasp the meaning of this gift from Edmond’s brother Alphonse as part of a came through association with these institutions: commemorative act. For while Nefertiti features systematic program of cultural decentralization that It symbolized, among other things, a precious kind here in the list of Simon’s most significant dona- enriched around half of the country’s museums. As of acceptance. Nor was their generosity uncontro- tions, there is not even a passing allusion to Simon’s Tom Stammers rightly remarked, “The Rothschilds versial. Back in the early 1900s, antisemitic voices Jewishness. The reclining lion—commissioned by did not so much buy into French civilization as did not hesitate to denounce Bode, the Berlin mu- Simon’s Jewish contemporary, the liberal news- constitute it through their munificence.” While this seum director with whom Simon worked closely for paper magnate Rudolf Mosse—carries a similarly oblique message. The description refers to the lion’s history of expropriation under the Nazis and subsequent restitution but gives no sense of who Mosse was. Nor does the interactive display in the base- ment, which outlines the history of Berlin’s state museums, provide enlightenment on either of these issues. A video installation did tell the Simon story at the grand public opening in July, but it was—quite literally—a three-day wonder.

nly the initiated know that if they really Owant to remember Simon, they should leave the crowds queueing for the Pergamon Museum and make their way along the river to the Bode Museum, the Pergamon’s undervisited sister. Here, in the James Simon Kabinett, they will find a more meaningful act of restitution. Back in 1904 when Simon gave his personal collection of Renaissance art to the state, he stipulated that these works, which he had loved, should be exhibited together in the same room for a hundred years. Needless to say, they were not. Only in 2019 was the collection redisplayed in its original format and location. The unexpected density of objects; the confusion of paintings, furniture, and sculptures; the magnificent wooden table at the center; and the lack of labels The reconstructed Ishtar Gate, Pergamon Museum, Berlin. (Wikimedia.) all give this room a warm, inviting quality that even the presence of a few reproductions does nothing to dispel. For the museum’s founding director, Wil- helm von Bode, the domesticity of the room reflected the collection’s origins and its donor’s sensibility. Visitors nowadays may struggle to see a room that includes Andrea Mantegna’s Madonna with Sleeping Child as home-like, yet it does conjure up the taste and culture of a man and a particular historical moment. Leaflets available in English explain the nature of Simon’s original gift and the Nazis’ refusal to honor the museum’s commitment to its most notable “Jewish patron.” By contrast, the failure to provide adequate context for Berlin’s grand gesture denudes the James Simon Galerie of meaning. And herein lies a paradox, since for contemporary Ger- many, the significance of this gesture lies precisely in Simon’s Jewishness. Without the terrible memory of Germany’s Nazi past, it is unlikely that the city would have thought to remember James Simon so emphatically. Other Jewish donors gave generously to great national museums elsewhere in Europe, yet their generosity is now largely forgotten. The German-born chemist Lying Lion by August Gaul sits watch in the foyer of the James Simon Galerie, May 2019. (© Staatliche and industrialist Ludwig Mond, for instance, left 42 Museen zu Berlin/David von Becker.) Renaissance masterpieces to the National Gallery in London, including paintings by Raphael, Titian, generosity is not exactly forgotten (it is the subject decades, for cultivating a clique of Jewish donors Bellini, and Cranach. Like Simon, he wanted them of a recent monumental three-volume work edited to whom he extended cultural respectability and to be displayed together, and in 1928, a special room by Pauline Prévost-Marcilhacy), few of the millions commercial opportunities. The idea of belonging was built for this purpose at the expense of his es- who visit the Louvre associate it with Rothschild to a specific category of “Jewish patron” would have tate. But after the Second World War, the National philanthropy. been abhorrent to these men. (Historians, of course, Gallery chose to break up the Mond bequest, and Did the Jewishness of these men matter? They may well conclude that this is precisely what they few now recall its existence. Edmond de Rothschild, would undoubtedly have hated to think that it did. were.) too, left his peerless ensemble of great master draw- Men like Simon, Mond, and Edmond de Roth- Nowadays, of course, we share these sensibili- ings to the Louvre, which also benefited from the schild chose to give to great national museums ties: first because the liberal project of citizenship

42 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2020 supposedly renders Jewishness irrelevant, and sec- he was, in fact, a cofounder of the Hilfsverein and the driving force until his death in 1927, whereas Si- ond because, in a post-Holocaust Europe, the idea remained closely involved with it for even longer mon kept himself in the background.” In short, the of publicly flagging an individual as Jewish seems than Nathan. The social worker Salomon Adler- two men operated as a double act. distasteful, to say the least—a return to 1941, as one Rudler, who played a crucial role in developing Such partnerships between members of the Jew- ish superelite, like Simon, and Jewish diplomats, Viewed from across the water, the James Simon Galerie like Nathan, were an essential structural feature of these big international Jewish philanthropic appears as a sliver of contemporary elegance overshadowed organizations: The plutocrats bankrolled the diplomats. Simon also worked with Nathan to establish by the massive stone bulk of the Pergamon Museum. the Technion in Haifa, Israel, a scientific institute in the German mold that remains a beacon of Israeli French museum administrator once memorably welfare services for Jewish migrants in interwar science—he contributed 100,000 marks to the cost, told me. But while this desire to avoid “essential- Berlin, recalled, “Although both men were small, and the land on which it was built was purchased in izing Judaism” may be understandable, it is surely Nathan was much the sturdier of the two; Simon, by his name. out of place in a city like Berlin, where memorials to contrast, appeared almost fragile. Nathan remained But Simon was more than just a financial backer victims of the Shoah feature so prominently. By and for the Hilfsverein, which raised a total of 47 mil- large, this is a place where dead Jews are remem- lion marks for Eastern European Jews in Russia bered precisely because they are dead Jews. and Palestine between 1901 and 1918. His wealth There is a more fundamental point here, how- and social status gave him contacts with the ever. If we celebrate the German patriot but not Prussian elite, which Nathan—a campaigning the German Jew, we miss the essence of James liberal journalist with unrealized political ambi- Simon as a man and as a philanthropist. He was a tions—lacked. Thus, Simon cultivated a friend- social philanthropist as well as a donor to Berlin’s ship with Kaiser Wilhelm, which, although too museums and a sponsor of archaeology in what weak to elicit a public expression of support in he and his contemporaries called the orient. From the growing climate of antisemitism in 1914, was the 1880s onward, Simon took an active interest sufficiently warm for the exiled emperor to send in a wide range of initiatives to improve the lot of a wreath to Simon’s grave in 1932. Wilhelm even Berlin’s lower classes. He regularly gave a third of suggested appointing him to the Prussian Upper his annual income to charity. Holiday camps and House—a suggestion Simon refused for fear of convalescent homes for the young, care homes stimulating antisemitism. Unsurprisingly, then, for children at risk of exploitation, even a remark- it fell to Simon to liaise with the Foreign Office ably elegant swimming pool in the city center that over the Hilfsverein’s activities and periodically somehow survived the war: All these were the seek its support. fruits of his generosity. And like other members of Perhaps it is precisely this closeness to the his Berlin Jewish circle—Rudolf and Emilie Mosse, German establishment that explains Simon’s ab- for instance, or Franz von Mendelssohn—Simon’s sence as a significant figure in studies of this peri- generosity was humanitarian not just in its aims od in Jewish history. Paul Nathan does appear in but also because it explicitly benefited all Berlin- studies of the Hilfsverein. Paul Nathan: Publizist, ers. Yet this was a period when Jews faced specific Politiker und Philanthrop 1857–1927 by Chris- challenges, particularly in Eastern Europe. Simon, Paul Nathan in his library with the bust of Ludwig toph Jahr is the first scholarly biography of this an active member of the Berlin Jewish community, Bamberger, 1917. (Photograph from Paul Nathan, Politik important figure. Before there had been only the became a leading figure in the world of interna- und Humanität, Ein Lebensbild, by Ernst Feder.) intimate but uncritical pen-portrait published tional Jewish philanthropy before and during the First World War. In this, of course, he had much in common with other members of the Jewish superelite who gave so generously both to national museums and to local social causes.

ewish historians—who may never have encoun- Jtered Simon—might be familiar with his close friend Paul Nathan, founder and long-serving director of the Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden, a Jewish solidarity organization and German coun- terpart to the French Alliance Israélite Universelle. Like the Anglo-Jewish activist Lucien Wolf, with whom he collaborated, Nathan was a liberal political journalist who made a second career as a Jewish diplomat. He worked behind the scenes with the German Foreign Office to foster the Hilfsverein’s agenda, negotiated with Russian ministers during the revolution of 1905, led the campaign to disprove the blood libel, and initiated humanitarian initiatives on behalf of Jews in Eastern Europe and Palestine before and, more importantly, during the First World War. But Germany’s defeat in 1918 consigned Nathan to diplomatic irrelevance at the Paris Peace Conference, and only a handful of scholars now remember his name. I cannot recall ever coming across Simon’s name The reconstructed James Simon Kabinett in the Bode Museum, 2019. (© Staatliche Museen zu Berlin/ in the scholarship on Jewish internationalism. Yet Antje Voigt.)

Winter 2020 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 43 two years after Nathan’s death by his protégé, the Nathan within two entirely separate historiogra- which he had dedicated his life was failing did German Jewish journalist Ernst Feder. It seems phies: on the one hand, the literature on interna- he devote himself full time to Jewish activism extraordinary that Jahr’s biography of Nathan, tional Jewish relief before, during, and after the First and diplomacy. Jahr’s portrait of Nathan bridges which is admirably concise, had to be actively World War; and on the other hand, the literature on both dimensions of his life and allows us to see commissioned by the James Simon Stiftung at very the decline of German liberalism in the postunifica- the connections between them. It is precisely these considerable cost as part of its campaign to revive tion era. Instead, it brings them together, for Nathan connections that are missing from the one-sided the memory of Simon’s friend. For it is clear that was a pivotal figure in both international Jewish re- picture of James Simon presented at the gallery Nathan led an important and amply documented life. lief and German liberalism as it declined. that bears his name. Jahr notes that Nathan is a forgotten figure in Israel, although he did much to shape the emerg- The sense that a generation of brilliant liberal talents had ing Yishuv, not just through the Technion but also through a network of Jewish schools that, been blocked from fulfilling their potential was widespread although they taught German, were instrumental in spreading Hebrew as a language for everyday at the time; Jews like Nathan felt it particularly acutely. use. This is a country forever building, yet not a single street carries Paul Nathan’s name. As a Ger- Jahr consulted both parts of Nathan’s exten- He played a key part in the international struggle man Jew who opposed Zionism, his memory sank sive personal archive—not just the half in Berlin, against antisemitism and internationally coordi- without a trace. The same was, until recently, true but the other, much less accessible half in Moscow. nated efforts to relieve the crisis faced by Russian of Simon in Germany. This enabled him to bring the man to life in a way and Polish Jews in an age of pogroms, war, and The James Simon Galerie may have transformed I would have thought impossible, at once admir- revolution. Yet he was also a central player in the this situation, but it still tells less than half the sto- ing of his very considerable humanitarian achieve- left-liberal milieu of Wilhelmine Germany. A close ry. Simon was a German patriot, but he was also a ments but aware that he was difficult, nervy, and by collaborator of Theodor Barth, a leading figure on German Jew—and, in a way absolutely typical of no means always likable. the Berlin city council, and one of the founding his milieu, he was as profoundly Jewish as he was Nathan was devoted to his mother, with whom members of the German Democratic Party in 1918, German. In the early 20th century, it was possible he continued to live as an adult. He also had a long Nathan eventually switched his allegiance to the for Jews such as Simon and Nathan to be both pas- relationship with Hedwig Böbel, a woman of lower Socialists and died—like many other members of sionately committed to the German nation-state social status. After his mother’s death, he saw Bö- his circle—a disappointed man in 1927. The sense and Jewish internationalists in the modern sense of bel almost daily. At first, Nathan hid her from his that a generation of brilliant liberal talents had been the word. In failing to recognize this fundamental acquaintances; then, once she began to visit his blocked from fulfilling their potential was wide- truth, the James Simon Galerie is simultaneously a home, he resisted her attempts to extract money spread at the time; Jews like Nathan felt it particu- very high-profile official act of commemoration and from him. Finally, he dropped her altogether after larly acutely. an act of erasure. she caught a sexually transmitted disease from one Nowadays, historians are aware principally of of her other (secret) lovers. his humanitarian activities, and in the long term, Paul Nathan is divided into five sections: “Time they were much more significant. But the truth Abigail Green is a professor of modern European history and the Man,” “Journalist,” “Politician,” “Philan- is that Nathan’s liberal activism came first: Only at the University of Oxford. She is writing a history of thropist,” and “Legacy.” This thematic approach once he recognized that a parliamentary career Jewish liberal activism since 1848 and is leading a major might have reinforced the tendency to situate was impossible and that the political journal to research project on Jewish country houses.

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44 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2020 Not So Innocent Abroad

BY DIANE COLE

paper Alta California in return for twice-weekly environs, the numerous original manuscripts and Mark Twain and the Holy Land dispatches about the trip for the paper; it was these letters in Twain’s own hand, and the various period curated by Michael Ryan and Cristian Petru Panaite columns that he subsequently reworked into the maps, postcards, prints, travel posters, and souve- through February 2, 2020 at the New-York Historical Society book published in 1869. nirs brought home (most notably a pair of velvet Museum and Library What seemed to rankle most—and brought out Twain’s most biting satire—was the fanciful commentary provided

f the 32-year-old Mark Twain had not visited by local guides at sites such as “the tomb of Adam.” Jerusalem in 1867, near the very start of his career, would he still have become the Ameri- The exhibit is relatively small, filling a single slippers embroidered with golden thread) take you can Sholem Aleichem? gallery. But, the array of 19th-century photographs through the journey as surely as Mark Twain does IThat was the admittedly odd question going depicting the sites of Jerusalem and its surrounding in his distinctive narrative voice. through my mind as I viewed the remarkable ex- An atmospheric oil hibit Mark Twain and the Holy Land, on display at painting depicts the the New-York Historical Society until February 2, Quaker City steamship 2020. It celebrates the 150th anniversary of the 1869 itself, with its prominent publication of Twain’s second book, The Innocents broad sidewheel and two Abroad, or The New Pilgrim’s Progress, the author’s tall steam pipes emitting wry-eyed travelogue of the five-and-a-half-month wisps of black smoke, as luxury steamship cruise that would carry him and it sits in calm blue wa- his fellow shipmates across the Atlantic Ocean, ters with misty moun- through the Mediterranean Sea, and on to its tains in the background. ultimate destination, the Holy Land. As for the Quaker City’s Although relatively few readers today would journey, a large map rank this volume as their favorite among Twain’s spread across one wall works—that honor would more likely go to The allows you to trace the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mis- itinerary of the 163-day sissippi, or The Adventures of Tom Sawyer—it was, trip halfway around in fact, his bestselling book over the course of his the world and back lifetime and remains one of the bestselling trav- via steamship, train, el books of all time. In achieving literary fame so caravan, and horse- early in his career—his only previous book was The back. It details stops in Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and the Azores, Tangiers, Other Sketches—Twain jumped onto his own trajec- Spain, France, Italy, and tory of authorial celebrity, his name (or pen name, Quaker City passengers awaiting a visit from the emperor of Russia, August 1867. Greece. Then Twain was his birth name being Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (Photo by William E. James, courtesy of Randolph James.) on to the Black Sea ports recognized throughout the world. So well-known was he that, legend has it, upon meeting Sholem Aleichem in New York in 1906, the great Yiddish writer and humorist was introduced to him as “the Yiddish Mark Twain.” In response, Twain is said to have graciously quipped that, no, it was he who was “the American Sholem Aleichem.” While neither Sholem Aleichem nor his most famous character, Tevye the Dairyman, made it to the Holy Land, Mark Twain did. The American literary critic Leslie Fiedler may have had Twain’s collegial quip in mind when, in the afterword to the tattered paperback copy of The Innocents Abroad I took down from my bookshelf, he described the comic voice Mark Twain used here as that of a “schlemiel . . . a wandering jester.” It is this Twain, the roving author in all his sardonic splendor, who is on display in both the exhibit (organized in partnership with the Shapell Manuscript Foundation) and the book itself. Twain stepped aboard the steamship Quaker City on June 8, 1867, his fare of $1,250 (comparable to around The steamship Quaker City in the Port of Naples by Tommaso de Simone, 1867. (Courtesy of the Shapell $20,700 today) paid for by the San Francisco news- Manuscript Collection.)

Winter 2020 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 45 of Constantinople, Odessa, and Sevastopol. There not on the point of crying over a holy place, Land, I have got everything in Palestine on were debarkations at Smyrna, Beirut, Damascus, he was on the brink of killing an Arab. More too large a scale. . . . The word Palestine always Jaffa, Jerusalem, and finally Egypt, before heading surprising things happened to him in Palestine brought to my mind a vague suggestion of back across the Atlantic Ocean to Bermuda, and than ever happened to any traveler here or a country as large as the United States. . . . I then New York, where the intrepid travelers arrived elsewhere. suppose it was because I could not conceive of a safely on November 19. small country having so large a history. Twain sent characteristically cantankerous descriptions home from all these stops. The vaunted Similarly, Jerusalem itself seemed “[s]o small! beauties of Italy’s Lake Como are nothing, he con- Why, it was no larger than an American village of tends, compared to the transparent waters of Lake four thousand inhabitants,” he wrote. Tahoe, where, he says, “one can count the scales What seemed to rankle most—and brought out on a trout at a depth of one hundred eighty feet.” some of Twain’s most biting satire—was the fanci- He grows weary of the endless parade of religious- ful commentary provided by local guides eager to themed paintings he encounters throughout show the travelers sites such as “the tomb of Adam.” Europe: “[T]o me it seemed that when I had seen He writes, “How touching it was, here in a land one of these martyrs I had seen them all. They all of strangers, far away from home and friends and have a family resemblance to each other.” In Con- all who cared for me, thus to discover the grave stantinople, he finds that “[m]osques are plenty, of a blood relation. True, a distant one, but still a churches are plenty, graveyards are plenty, but mor- relation.” als . . . are scarce. . . . They say the Sultan has eight Religious skeptic though Twain was, he was hundred wives. This almost amounts to bigamy. It well schooled in the Bible. His mother, to whom makes our cheeks burn with shame to see such a he remained devoted throughout his life, had seen thing permitted here in Turkey. We do not mind it to that. Indeed, one of the most striking items on so much in Salt Lake City, however.” display is the present he brought back for her from But the voyage’s main attraction was the Holy Jerusalem: a King James Bible handsomely bound Land. Pleasure trips to Palestine, which was then in oak, olive wood, and balsam wood. The cover, a province of Syria and under Ottoman rule, were front and back, is engraved with the word “Jeru- still novel, with the Quaker City excursion at the salem” in Hebrew, with the inscription, “Mrs. Jane cusp of an emerging travel trend. Many of Twain’s Clemens—from her son—Mount Calvary, Sept 24, 70-some fellow passengers on the trip were pious, Portrait of Mark Twain, Constantinople, 1867.” sober-minded Protestants who frowned on Twain’s 1867. (Courtesy of the Shapell Manuscript It was Twain’s drollery, balanced between his gambling, drinking, smoking, and cursing. Twain Collection.) skeptical respect for the Bible and his irreverent view of humanity, that led to the success of The Innocents Abroad, suggested Jonathan Sar- na, professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, at a program related to the exhibit at the New-York Historical Society. But beyond Twain’s 1867 voyage, Sarna commented, it was his travels to Europe in the 1890s that brought to the fore his rejection of antisemitism. In Paris, he was shocked by the vis- ceral antisemitism exhibited in the Dreyfus affair. Visiting Vienna, he was condemned by the increasingly antisemitic press there for meeting with leading Jewish intellectuals such as Sigmund Freud and Theodor Herzl. Back home, Twain published his well-known 1898 Harper’s essay, “Concerning the Jews.” There he writes: “A few years ago a Jew observed to me that there was no uncourteous reference to his people in my books, and asked how it happened. It happened because the disposition was lacking. I am quite sure that (bar one) I have no race prejudices, and I think Stereograph of the Garden of Gethsemane, 1870–1890. (Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor Historical Society.) creed prejudices. Indeed, I know it.” More proof of that assertion arrived a decade later, when he poked fun at these “pilgrims” and their unques- Throughout the trip, Twain highlighted the dis- wholeheartedly accepted his daughter Clara’s mar- tioning parroting of the romanticized chronicles of parity between the desire of his guidebook-led com- riage to the Russian Jewish pianist and conductor Holy Land travels that he, like them, had perused panions to see what they had been promised and Ossip Gabrilowitsch. in preparation for the trip. The travelers’ guidebook the reality of what was actually in front of them. The But why be surprised? He was, after all, the of choice was William C. Prime’s Tent Life in the contrast reached its peak once they arrived in the American Sholem Aleichem, and the Yiddish Holy Land—an 1857 copy of which is displayed in Holy Land. “I must studiously and faithfully un- Mark Twain would not have expected anything the exhibit, open to a page showing an illustration learn a great many things I have somehow absorbed else. of the domed structure of the Church of the Holy concerning Palestine,” he commented, beginning Sepulchre. Twain’s account of Prime’s purported ad- with the reality of the relatively small size of the lo- ventures is characteristically droll: cal grapes he saw, as opposed to the enormous vines Diane Cole is the author of the memoir After Great portrayed in his favorite Bible story illustrations: Pain: A New Life Emerges and writes for the Wall He went through this peaceful land with one Street Journal, NPR Online, the Washington Post, and hand forever on his revolver, and the other on I must begin a system of reduction. Like my elsewhere, and also serves as the books columnist for his pocket-handkerchief. Always, when he was grapes which the spies bore out of the Promised Psychotherapy Networker.

46 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Winter 2020 LAST WORD "He Called Me Jim"

BY STEVEN J. ZIPPERSTEIN

n a particularly self-lacerating moment in The Atlas go on to write superb biographies himself, been betrayed. What he had expected of Bellow, Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale, he would launch Penguin Lives, a publishing oddly enough, was for him to become a father James Atlas describes what it felt like—at least, enterprise of dozens of brief books, many of them figure; that he might play Boswell to Bellow’s John- in his darker hours—to labor on the life of extraordinary. son. In The Shadow in the Garden, Atlas quotes the ISaul Bellow for nine years: He spent his professional life living with and famous passage in which Boswell recalled that “we overshadowed by complex, overweening literary gi- embraced and parted with tenderness” with still- Most of the time, I didn’t mind our unequal ants. As Atlas himself recognized in his brief and palpable yearning. stature and talents: Go, you be the genius. But touching Audible book, Remembering Roth, released sometimes I felt: What about my life? Doesn’t it earlier this year, there was some truth to Philip Roth’s uch of the edginess—and also the indis- count, too? There comes, inevitably, a moment grim, fictionalized portrait of him as a young man Mputable energy—in Atlas’s Bellow is the of rebellion, when the inequality begins to in Exit Ghost, published in 2007: “the tactless sever- by-product of just this discomfort. Yet, on my ini- chafe. Biographers are people, too, even if we’re ity of vital male youth, not a single doubt about his tial reading, I found the book disconcerting. I had condemned to huddle in the shadow of our coherence, blind with self-confidence and the virtue first met Atlas while writing my biography of Isaac subjects’ monumentality. of knowing what matters most. The ruthless sense Rosenfeld, a brilliant writer and childhood friend of necessity. The annihilating impulse in the face of of Bellow’s who died young and tragically. We Atlas’s death of lung disease this past September an obstacle. . . . Everything is a target; you’re on the developed an easy, amiable relationship that dete- at the age of 70 felt all the more jarring because he attack; and you, and you alone, are right.” riorated when, in the pages of this magazine, in a managed to combine a young man’s brashness and review of Benjamin Taylor’s 2010 edition of Saul raw vulnerability with a literary and historical hun- Bellow: Letters I summed up Atlas’s portrait of Bel- ger so sincere, so winning, as to overshadow all else. low as that of “a crabbed man as vain as a movie His memoir is full of recollections of meandering in star, and as promiscuous as an alley cat.” Atlas second-hand bookshops, dead time between proj- took offense. ects, a failure as a novelist and poet, and the hector- Soon afterward, at the launch for Roth’s final ing that yielded him a job at the New York Times novel, Nemesis, he yelled at me as I stepped off the Magazine. And yet, he produced two illuminating, stage. A few years later, at Roth’s final reading at the memorable literary biographies. 92nd Street Y, I found myself seated in the large hall Of his attraction to the brilliant, ill-fated poet right next to him. At first, he refused to shake my Delmore Schwartz, whose much-acclaimed bi- hand, but then, once we started to talk—at first ography he completed at the age of 28, he admits: haltingly, then more and more warmly over the years—we managed to renew a friendship My connection with Delmore was overt— that only deepened. (Atlas’s recollection of that so much so that I sometimes wondered encounter is more rancorous than mine.) if I was writing my autobiography. . . . My sense of his Bellow had by then changed, Delmore’s attachment to the innocence of in part because Zachary Leader’s subsequent, early childhood, his unrealizable expectations, minutely detailed, authorized two-volume ac- his piercing loneliness, his book hunger, his count largely substantiated Atlas, albeit without literary ambition, his dread of failure, his his petulance. Leader’s narrative prose is cool sense of the sadness of life . . . these were and meticulous; there is nothing cool about At- traits and longings we shared. las’s language. In Bellow, as in nearly everything else he touched, one sees Atlas’s fingerprint smudg- Atlas’s model for telling his own life es, his overheatedness, his tendency to take all-too- was Richard Holmes’s Footsteps: Adven- quick offense. If, as Richard Holmes has observed, tures of a Romantic Biographer, where, in a biography is an uneasy mix of fiction and history, cluster of beautifully etched chapters, Holmes few in recent years have proven themselves better describes biographical endeavors achieved as well suited to expose this uneasiness than Atlas—and to as aborted. In contrast to Holmes, whose per- show the bruises. sonal revelations are oblique, decidedly British, James Atlas. (Illustration by Mark Anderson.) One last glimpse of his rueful self-awareness: Atlas lays himself bare to his readers. He goes so He recalls the first phone conversation he had with far as to admit to the discovery, late in life, of a Roth was outraged by the tone and content of Bellow to discuss the prospect of writing his life. diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and of near-disastrous Atlas’s biography of Bellow. Roth’s ire may also have “He told me to come the next day from one-thirty missteps that, time and again, were checked by a been fueled by the fact that he had, at least accord- to three p.m.” And then, Atlas adds—this a glimpse wise, level-headed, spouse. ing to Atlas, been the one to suggest that he write the of how he had forever sought to be treated, yet with book. Moreover, Roth was now himself the subject an awareness of how infrequent such moments were iven his impatience and an aggressiveness of a biographical endeavor by a handpicked author, to be—“He called me Jim.” Gthat dampened only in his sixties, it was by Ross Miller, who had once been a close friend. That no means inevitable that Atlas would become a project had soured and then been dropped. literary biographer. But at Oxford, he became the Atlas acknowledges in his memoir that by the Steven J. Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor student of Richard Ellmann, author of a magisteri- time he nearly finished his 700-page Bellow tome, in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University. His al biography of James Joyce. In Ellmann, he found he found himself unable to sequester not only his latest book, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History, someone of singular talent who chose to devote his dislike for his subject’s tendency to betray wives, has appeared in paperback. He is currently at work on a life to writing the lives of others. Not only would lovers, and friends, but his sense that he, too, had biography of Philip Roth for Yale’s Jewish Lives series.

Winter 2020 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 47 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS A Publication of Bee.Ideas, LLC. 165 East 56th Street New York, NY 10022

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