Religious Perspectives in Modern Muslim and Jewish Literatures 0203337360, 9780203337363

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RELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVES IN MODERN MUSLIM AND JEWISH LITERATURES

This book brings together discussions of the way in which Muslim and Jewish beliefs and practices are represented in modern literary texts of poetry, fiction and drama. The chapters collected here consider elements of the expression of Judaism and Islam in modern literature. Key topics such as religious ideas and teachings, aspects of mysticism, the tenets of religion, uses made of sacred texts, religion and popular culture and reflections of religious controversies are covered. While there is an embodied comparative element to the chapters, the essays are not confined by comparisons and cover a wide range of the literary expression of religious issues. With contributions from a group of international scholars, all of whom are experts in the field and each of whom has brought a particular perspective to the topic, this book is a significant contribution to, and will stimulate further research on, the various literatures treated, reflection on comparative work on these two cultural traditions, and the new interest in literary expressions of religion and religiousness in general. Glenda Abramson was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, educated in Israel and received her Ph.D. from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Since 1981 she has been teaching in the Oriental Faculty of the University of Oxford and at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Hilary Kilpatrick studied Arabic at Oxford. She has taught Arabic literature at universities in Scotland, the Netherlands and Switzerland. She is one of the editors of the journal Middle Eastern Literatures and has published on modern Arabic fiction and classical Arabic belles-lettres, including Making the Great Book of Songs (2003).

ROUTLEDGE STUDIES IN MIDDLE EASTERN LITERATURES

Editors James E.Montgomery University of Cambridge Roger Allen University of Pennsylvania Philip F.Kennedy New York University Routledge Studies in Arabic and Middle Eastern Literature is a monograph series devoted to aspects of the literatures of the Near and Middle East and North Africa both modern and pre-modern. It is hoped that the provision of such a forum will lead to a greater emphasis on the comparative study of the literatures of this area, although studies devoted to one literary or linguistic region are warmly encouraged. It is the editors’ objective to foster the comparative and multi-disciplinary investigation of the written and oral literary products of this area. 1 SHEHERAZADE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS Eva Sallis 2 THE PALESTINIAN NOVEL Ibrahim Taha 3 OF DISHES AND DISCOURSE Geert Jan van Gelder 4 MEDIEVAL ARABIC PRAISE POETRY Beatrice Gruendler 5 MAKING THE GREAT BOOK OF SONGS Hilary Kilpatrick 6 THE NOVEL AND THE RURAL IMAGINARY IN EGYPT, 1880–1985 Samah Selim

7 IBN ABI TAHIR TAYFUR AND ARABIC WRITERLY CULTURE A Ninth-century Bookman in Baghdad Shawkat M.Toorawa 8 RELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVES IN MODERN MUSLIM AND JEWISH LITERATURES Edited by Glenda Abramson and Hilary Kilpatrick

RELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVES IN MODERN MUSLIM AND JEWISH LITERATURES Edited by Glenda Abramson and Hilary Kilpatrick

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX 14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge, 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2006 editorial matter and selection, Glenda Abramson and Hilary Kilpatrick; individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-33736-0 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-35021-2 (Print Edition) ISBN13: 978-0-415-35021-1 (Print Edition)

Taylor & Francis Group is the Academic Division of T&F Informa plc.

CONTENTS

List of contributors

viii

Acknowledgement

xi

Introduction GLENDA ABRAMSON AND HILARY KILPATRICK

1

1

Urdu poetry as a vehicle for Islamic re-expression CHRISTOPHER SHACKLE

13

2

‘Bless each day that passes’: the search for religious faith in the poetry of Itamar Yaoz-Kest DAVID C.JACOBSON

29

3

Paths to God within the poet: Necip Fazil Kısakürek (1904–83) and his mystical poetry B.BABÜR TURNA

49

4

‘Merciful Father Abraham’: the mystical poetry of Binyamin Shvili NILI GOLD

64

5

Moral education through Islamic songs in twentieth-century Java EDWIN WIERINGA

81

6

‘Together with the shell, they have thrown away the kernel’: Aaron HalleWolfssohn’s critique of contemporary Judaism JUTTA STRAUSS

100

7

The Uzbek short story writer SIGRID KLEINMICHEL

121

8

Kulturkampf in the Israeli theatre: the issue of religion DAN URIAN

134

9

Religion in contemporary Persian prose ISABEL STÜMPEL

146

adaptation of religious traditions

Contents

vii

10

Martyrdom and gender in Jewish-American Holocaust memory SARA R.HOROWITZ

159

11

A ‘Cinderella’ goes to Hausaland: Islam, gender and Hausa literature OUSSEINA ALIDOU

184

12

Rahel Morpurgo in the context of Jewish emancipation in Italy GABRIELLA STEINDLER MOSCATI

197

13

Modern Arabic literature and the Qur’an: inimitability creativity, … incompatibility SHAWKAT M.TOORAWA

209

14

Avrom Goldfaden’s theatre of Jewishness: three prooftexts JOEL BERKOWITZ

226

15

Transcending the boundaries of Islam: written Swahili literature in the twentieth century ALAMIN M.MAZRUI

248

16

Between Eros and Dios: Leopoldo Azancot’s Novia judía STACY N.BECKWITH

262

Index

272

CONTRIBUTORS

Ousseina Alidou holds a doctorate in linguistics from Indiana University (Bloomington). She has taught at universities both in Africa and the United States. She is currently an Assistant Professor of linguistics and African literatures in the Department of Africana Studies at Rutgers University (New Brunswick). Her research focuses on gender and discourse and the politics of cultural production in Francophone Afro-Islamic societies. Her work has appeared as book chapters and in journals such as Research in African Literatures, the American Journal of Comparative Literature, and in linguistics journals. Her forthcoming book is entitled Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005) Stacy N.Beckwith is Assistant Professor of Hebrew at Carleton College. A comparatist, she focuses on intersections of national historiography and collective memory in contemporary Israeli and Spanish literature, particularly in representations of Sephardic/ converso characters and trajectories. She is the editor of Charting Memory: Recalling Medieval Spain (Garland, 2000). Joel Berkowitz is Associate Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at the State University of New York at Albany. He is the author of Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage (2002), editor of Yiddish Theatre: New Approaches (2003), and co-editor of a forthcoming anthology of Yiddish plays in English translation. Nili Gold was born in Haifa. She received her Ph.D. from the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Among her publications is a study of Yehuda Amichai entitled Lo kabrosh (Schocken, 1994), which won the Israeli Culture-Science Ministry Prize. Professor Gold has taught modern Jewish literature at Columbia University, New York, and now teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. Sara R.Horowitz is Director of the Centre for Jewish Studies at York University in Toronto, where she teaches comparative literature and Jewish studies. She is the author of Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction, which received the Choice award for Outstanding Academic Book; co-editor of Encounter with Appelfeld; and co-editor of the journal Kerem. Currently, she is completing a book entitled Gender, Genocide and Jewish Memory. David C.Jacobson is Associate Professor of Judaic Studies at Brown University. He has previously served on the faculties of the University of Michigan, Ben-Gurion University, the University of Pennsylvania and Wesleyan University. He is author of Modern Midrash: The Retelling of Traditional Jewish Narratives by Twentieth-Century Hebrew Writers (State University of New York Press, 1987); Does David Still Play Before You?: Israeli Poetry and the Bible (Wayne State University Press, 1997); and Where Are You?: Israeli Poets on God and Prayer (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). He is co-editor (with Kamal Abdel-Malek) of Israeli and Palestinian Identities in History and Litera-

Contributors

ix

ture (St Martin’s Press, 1999). He is also co-editor (with William Cutter) of History and Literature: New Readings of Jewish Texts in Honor of Arnold J.Band (Brown Judaic Studies, 2002). He currently serves as a co-editor of the monograph series Brown Judaic Studies. Sigrid Kleinmichel studied Turkish language and literature at Leningrad University (1956–61). She taught at the Humboldt University for twelve years before moving to the Zentralinstitut für Literaturgeschichte of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin, where she researched modern Turkic literatures of Central Asia. Since 1991 she has worked mainly on Uzbek and Chagatay literatures, and since 1994 she has lectured on Central Asian languages and literatures at the Free University, Berlin. She has published on Central Asian literatures, both written and oral. Alamin M.Mazrui, Associate Professor of Africana Studies at the Ohio State University, holds a doctorate in linguistics from Stanford University. He has taught at universities in Kenya and Nigeria and has served as a consultant to non-governmental organizations in Africa on such subjects as language and urbanization and language and the law. A member of the Board of Directors of the Kenya Human Rights Commission, he has a special interest in human rights and civil liberties and has written policy reports on those subjects. He is author and editor of several books, including The Power of Babel: Language and Governance in the African Experience (1995) (with Ali Mazrui), and English in Africa: After the Cold War (2004). Alamin Mazrui is also a published poet and playwright and has authored numerous articles on the politics of cultural production in Africa and the African Diaspora. Gabriella Steindler Moscati is an Associate Professor of Hebrew Language and Modern Hebrew Literature at the Univesità degli Studi ‘L’Orientale’, Naples. She has prepared critical editions of such plays as Ghetto by Joshua Sobol and Gan Riki by David Grossman. She has written many essays on Israeli literature in scholarly journals and anthologies. She is also the editor of an anthology of Israeli fiction in Italian translation, Racconti da Israele, and Italian editions of the fiction of Yehudit Hendel and Nava Semel. Christopher Shackle FBA (b. 1942) is Professor of Modern Languages of South Asia at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He has wideranging comparative interests in both literary and religious studies, and has published extensively on Urdu and Panjabi. His most recent books include Treasury of Indian Love (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1999) and Sikh Religion, Culture and Ethnicity (London: Curzon, 2001). Jutta Strauss completed her D.Phil, at the University of Oxford in 1995, on the work of Aaron Halle-Wolfssohn. She then served as the Head of Research for the permanent exhibition and the Learning Centre at the Jewish Museum, Berlin where she is currently Head of the Media Department. She also taught in the Carsten Niebuhr Institute of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Isabel Stümpel studied Islamwissenschaft (Arabic, Persian and Turkish) in Mainz and Freiburg i. Br. (Germany). After her MA in Arabic Studies, she was a research assistant at the Department Interfacultaire d’Histoire et des Sciences des Religions at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. She took her Ph.D. in Persian studies and has been

x Contributors teaching Persian language and literature at the University of Frankfurt. She is currently researching Iranian women’s autobiographies. Shawkat M.Toorawa is Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania (where he received his Ph.D.), Duke University, and the University of Mauritius. He is a co-author of Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition (University of California Press, 2001), translator of Adonis’s A Time Between Ashes and Roses (Syracuse, 2004), and author of Ibn Abi Tahir Tayfur and Arabic Writerly Culture: A Ninth Century Bookman in Baghdad (Routledge, 2005). B.Babür Turna is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History, Bilkent University, Ankara, and teaches history of civilization. He received his B.A. in Theatre at Ankara University. He is currently working on the socio-cultural history of the Ottoman Empire and the continuity and change in traditional Turkish theatre from empire to republic. He is the editor of Complete Stories in the Mathnawi of Jalalu’ddin Rumi (in Turkish). Dan Urian is Associate Professor in the Theatre Department at Tel Aviv University. He has published several books: The Arab in Israeli Drama and Theatre (Routledge Harwood, 1997), Jewish Aspects of Israeli Culture (ed. with Efraim Karsh, Frank Cass, 1999), The Judaic Nature of Israeli Theatre (Routledge Harwood, 2000), ‘Case Studies in Drama in Education’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 2000, The Ethnic Problem in the Israeli Theatre (The Open University, 2004) (Hebrew) and Television Drama (Mahon Mofet, 2004) (Hebrew). Edwin Wieringa is Professor of Indonesian Philology and Islamic Studies at the University of Cologne. He has published several studies and editions in the field of Indonesian literatures..

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We would like to express our great appreciation to Lucie Ewin for the trouble she has taken in preparing a very demanding manuscript for publication. Glenda Abramson and Hilary Kilpatrick

INTRODUCTION Glenda Abramson and Hilary Kilpatrick

Religious Perspectives in Modern Muslim and Jewish Literatures could well be the title for a series rather than a single book. Jewish literature goes back over two thousand years, and the first text of Muslim literature, the Quran, took form in the early seventh century. Since our project was to produce a single volume, however, we decided not to cover the historical spectrum of Jewish and Muslim literatures, but to limit ourselves to modern times, that is, the last 200 years. There are two main reasons for choosing this period. First, where studies have been made of religious themes and expressions of religious experience in these literatures, they have tended to focus on pre-modern writing; the Scriptures and mystical and liturgical poetry, for instance, have attracted much attention. By contrast, work on modern Muslim and Jewish literatures often either does not pay attention to religious themes, or does so tangentially. This may reflect general tendencies in research into modern literatures at the present time, but it does not do justice to the place of religion in the Jewish and Muslim cultures even today. Second, all religions have had to face some similar challenges in modern times, such as the secularisation of public life and the acceptance of the idea of a universe governed by rational laws and of certain principles commonly held to be universally applicable in society, among them the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the principle of freedom of conscience. They have also had to adapt to the conditions of a technological age in which communication has become easier than ever before and is open not only to elites but to a wide range of people who have benefited from mass education. Consequently, traditional structures of authority have been shaken and traditional teachings called into question. Like other religions, Judaism and Islam have had to respond to these challenges. Thus it is likely that Muslim and Jewish writers who explore themes of religion and religious experience today are to some extent working within comparable contexts.

Muslim literatures The term ‘Muslim literatures’ is taken here to mean literatures in which the main religious inspiration comes from Islam. This does not mean that a Muslim literature may not also accommodate a minor strand of explicitly non-Muslim writing. Christian and Jewish writers have expressed themselves in Arabic, using the symbols of their own religion. There is now a tradition of Christian literature in Swahili, the emergence of which is traced by Alamin Mazrui in this volume. Some Muslim literatures combine elements from Islam with others from traditional religions; this is so, for instance, in sub-Saharan Africa, and Ousseina Alidou’s chapter illustrates the process. ‘Muslim literatures’ is a wider concept than the ‘Islamic literatures’ of which Kenneth Harrow writes; the latter stem from authors

2

Religious Perspectives in Modern Muslim and Jewish Literatures

‘whose awareness of themselves, as purveyors or critics of the faith, is reflected in their words’, and they express themselves in texts ‘participat[ing] in a discourse that identifies itself as Islamic’.1 Muslim literatures, by contrast, may also include writings by secularised authors whose preoccupations are not religious but who nevertheless draw on Islamic paradigms and archetypes. The choice of Muslim literatures included in this book was inspired by the desire to offer a representative sample of the literatures of the Muslim world. ‘Representative’ was determined by considerations of the size of countries and ethnic groups, and also the status of certain languages as vehicles of literature. In a list dating from the late 1970s,2 the eight largest Muslim ethnic groups are given as Arabs, Bengalis, Javanese, Punjabis, Anatolian Turks, Persians, Urdu speakers (of North India and Pakistan) and Sundanese. Hausas and Uzbeks occupy the tenth and twelfth places on the list, after Malays and Pushtuns. This ranking was used as a starting point for selecting the literatures. Other arguments then came into play. Traditionally, the religious inspiration in Bengali literature has derived chiefly from Hinduism, a reason to exclude it from this book. The main literary language of Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world, is Indonesian, which is very closely related to Malay; this literary tradition was therefore preferred to the Javanese or Sundanese one. Urdu’s role as the major language of the Muslim culture of the Indian subcontinent dictates that it be represented. Uzbek is the most widely spoken Central Asian language, and Uzbek literature offers insight into the experience of the Muslim peoples of the former Soviet Union. Hausa is not only spoken by a large ethnic group but is also the main language used for regional communication in the countries of the Sahel. The only Muslim literature treated here whose speakers are entirely absent from Weekes’s list is Swahili; unlike Urdu speakers, he does not mention Swahili speakers as a distinct ethnic group (whatever ‘ethnic’ may mean in such a context). But Swahili is the most widely spoken language in East Africa, and its contribution to the Islamic literatures of Africa has been judged more extensive than any other.3 The literatures chosen for the eight chapters reflect the situation at the end of the twentieth century. Writing by North and West Africans in French, important though it is, was not felt to be extensive enough to warrant inclusion. As time passes, however, the body of literature written by Muslims in French, English and perhaps other European languages—a phenomenon which mirrors the emergence of writing by Christians in Swahili—may well increase to the point where it cannot be overlooked even in a book as modest in size as this one. Within the Muslim world the situation may change too. The Bengali literature of Islamic inspiration which has emerged since Partition in 1947 and the independence of Bangladesh in 1971 may in the future establish itself as a major Muslim literature.4 The Muslim literatures treated come from a vast area. The genres and works which are the subject of the essays in this book also vary in other ways. It can be helpful to classify them according to two schemes. The first reflects the dichotomy oral-written. The Hausa folktale analysed by Ousseina Alidou has been broadcast but not published in its original language. A number of other texts, such as the songs treated by Edwin Wieringa or the play mentioned by Sigrid Kleinmichel, exist in writing but have been composed for public performance. Urdu ghazals, too, have traditionally been recited in public. But other texts have no oral dimension; the Iranian novels Isabel Stümpel discusses are intended for private reading. Texts intended for public performance tend to be oriented towards the expression

Introduction 3 of group or community concerns and may seek to affirm current values or ideals; those written to be read in private are more likely to convey an individual’s voice and contain an element of introspection or an expression of radical doubt or protest. A second scheme is based on the popular-elite dichotomy. The Hausa folktale, the Indonesian singirs, and some of the Swahili texts Alamin Mazrui refers to, may be classified as popular literature. Some of the Arabic poetry mentioned by Shawkat Toorawa, the Urdu ghazals and the poems of Kısakürek were composed by and for a cultural elite. But it is important to realise that texts produced for a popular milieu or an elite community, a court for instance, may also appeal to other, wider audiences; there are no insurmountable barriers between the different literary worlds. As can be seen, the two schemes oral-written and popular-elite do not correspond to each other entirely. Nor are they meant as hard and fast guidelines; rather they provide a framework within which the very different texts discussed here may be situated. However varied the texts presented in this book, the societies which have produced them have all been marked by at least two profound experiences in the past two hundred years. The first is that of European colonisation or farreaching intervention. Starting in the nineteenth century, East and West Africa, the Indian sub-continent, Indonesia, Central Asia and parts of the Arab world formed part of the British, French, Dutch, Italian or Russian/Soviet empires for several decades at least. In other parts of the Arab world a quasicolonial situation obtained with the British occupation of Egypt, the French protectorates over Morrocco and Tunisia and the Mandates over Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq granted to France and Britain by the League of Nations after the First World War. Iran retained its independence until 1941, when Reza Shah was deposed by Allied forces, and for the next five years the country was divided into Allied and Soviet zones of occupation. Even after the troops were withdrawn, until 1951 Britain continued to influence the country’s economic and political life through its majority holding in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The only country to have escaped such colonisation or intervention and to have embarked on modernisation is Turkey. After the defeat of the Ottoman empire in 1918 and the loss of the Arab provinces, the Turks under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk organised a national resistance, repelling a Greek invasion, securing the withdrawal of occupying troops and finally obtaining Allied recognition of the new state in the Treaty of Lausanne. In connection with the theme of this book, it is worth noting that the colonising powers either viewed themselves as Christian countries or recognised a significant Christian component in their culture, even if they entertained an ambiguous relationship with it, as in France, or sought to extirpate it, as in the Soviet Union. The colonial experience plays an essential role in Christopher Shackle’s survey of the Urdu ghazal and Alamin Mazrui’s tracing of the emergence of a Christian tradition in Swahili literature; it also casts its shadow in other chapters. As Shackle points out, it has had the effect of strengthening a pan-Islamic consciousness, so that Muslims all over the world share a common memory of the civilisation of al-Andalus and the expulsion of Muslims from Spain, and feel involved in the presentday sufferings of Muslim communities, for instance Palestinians, Bosnians or Chechens. The second shared experience is the encounter with modernity. In the course of the nineteenth century many Muslims came to realise that progress and change in political, economic, social and cultural spheres were taking place elsewhere in the world, while their own civilisation, once so glorious, was stagnating. They faced the question of how to inte-

4

Religious Perspectives in Modern Muslim and Jewish Literatures

grate what they considered to be the positive aspects of these changes into their own societies, yet at the same time preserving their identity. The responses to this problem have been very varied, and have ranged in religious terms from the Salafîya’s brand of traditionalism and present-day forms of fundamentalism to Westernising secularism. The effects of the encounter with modernity have manifested themselves most obviously in the socio-political sphere. For instance, one of the most radical reactions has been in Turkey, where Kemal Atatürk banished Islam from public life, proclaimed a secular state and replaced the sharî‘a with a legal system based on European models; for affairs of personal status, one of the most sensitive issues, he adopted the Swiss civil code. Atatürk’s reforms reflected the thinking of a Western-educated and Western-oriented elite, who believed that with time they could spread their ideas to the rest of the population, and who sought to found the state’s legitimacy on a nationalist ideology. But they failed to take proper account of the positive functions that religion can have for individuals and communities, and they imposed the goals they considered desirable without consulting all sections of society. In particular, groups which were excluded from the benefits of the Republic’s economic and social policies expressed their discontent and opposition through an appeal to Islam. In Iran the reforms of Reza Shah and his son Mohammed Reza Shah were in part modelled on those of Atatürk, but they were less far-reaching. The presence of a well-organised clergy able to focus and canalise opposition, the brutality of the government’s repression of protest from whatever quarter, and the increasing resentment of Western intervention in the country’s affairs (after 1953 British influence was replaced by American) led in 1979 to the overthrow of the Pahlavi regime and the institution of the Islamic Republic. This did not, however, lead to a final resolution of the dilemma of how to reconcile Islam and modernity, as subsequent developments have shown. The irruption of modernity into the Muslim world was not only translated into social and political terms. It led to a rethinking of the aims and organisation of education, stimulated language renewal and brought about profound changes in modes of literary expression. No longer did religious institutions have the monopoly on transmitting knowledge; schools and universities on Western models were set up, some ancient centres of Islamic learning, such as al-Azhar in Cairo, were thoroughly reorganised, and curricula teaching rational and empirical sciences and foreign languages were introduced. Almost all Muslim countries have now subscribed to the ideal of universal primary education at least, even if they have seldom been able to achieve this goal, given their limited means and the explosion of their population. Educational reform has gone hand-in-hand with changes and reforms in language. Languages which had been the vehicles of high culture, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu and Malay, were adapted in order to convey modern modes of thought. Ornate rhetoric was abandoned, simpler prose styles evolved, and vocabulary was developed for modern concepts; this sometimes went hand-in-hand with rejection of older loan-words from Arabic or Persian in favour of borrowings from European languages or neologisms. The reform of vocabulary could take extreme forms; as Turna notes, in Atatürk’s Turkey officials sought to impose Tanrı instead of Allâh for ‘God’. Some languages decreased in status temporarily, as the colonial power introduced its own language for official purposes. By contrast, it was thanks to the efforts of the early twentieth-century reformers that Uzbek acquired a new importance as a literary language, while the nationalists in the Dutch East Indies

Introduction 5 determined that Malay should become the official language of their independent state and developed it accordingly. The efforts of reformers could extend to the script in which a language was written. Whereas Christian missionaries and Soviet officials were responsible for the introduction of Latin and Cyrillic characters respectively to write Swahili and Uzbek, which had traditionally used Arabic ones, it was Kemal Atatürk who imposed the alphabet reform in Turkey; he viewed the Arabic alphabet in which Turkish had been written as not only linguistically unsuited (a problem for which a solution might have been found) but also as associated with the East and the decadent Islam of the Ottoman Empire from which he was trying to emancipate his country. Since 1928 modern Turkish has been written in Latin characters, and older Turkish literature is only accessible to a wide public if it has been (re)published in transliteration. Literature has been equally caught up in the movements of reform. Poets and writers in the nineteenth century turned their attention to the present state of their societies, identifying evils and mobilising their fellow-countrymen to strive for a better future. The canonical genres of poetry were often felt to be incapable of addressing current problems; their form was too rigid and they were too closely associated with a fixed range of themes which had come to be seen as irrelevant. As a result poets took to experimenting. The genre system altered; whereas poetry had been superior to prose and genres such as the qasîda and the ghazal had enjoyed greatest prestige, prose came to establish itself as at least an equally appropriate medium for treating serious subjects. Writers took as their models forms familiar to them from European literatures—the novel, the short story, the drama—while incorporating elements from their own literary tradition. In this changing literary world the poet and the writer saw, and often still see, themselves as critics, voices for change, at times even visionaries. And they have sometimes paid dearly for their independent views. A more recent tendency among some poets has been to turn away from public affairs and concentrate on an inner world, often explored in esoteric language. But while some parts of the literary map have changed radically, others show a greater continuity. Genres such as the folktale continue to exist, and as emerges from Ousseina Alidou’s analysis, they have a great capacity for adaptation to new circumstances.

Jewish literatures The case of Jewish literature is as complicated as that of Muslim literatures because there is neither uniformity of language nor of culture. Jews live and write in practically every country of the world, drawing from their host countries cultural and social ideas which sometimes supersede or entirely eliminate traditional Jewish memory. Jewish literature is written in almost every language and not even when it is written in Hebrew in Israel can it, as a matter of course, be deemed more ‘Jewish’ than the literature emerging from diaspora Jewish communities. The papers on Jewish literature in this book give us some idea of the diversity of approach to topics which fall under the general heading of ‘religion’ or ‘religiousness’ which, it has to be said, remains a minority interest in modern Jewish literary scholarship. These essays cover the sweep of Jewish literary development from the Jewish enlightenment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Haskalah, to modern-day Israel, Europe and the USA, represented in poetry, fiction and drama.

6

Religious Perspectives in Modern Muslim and Jewish Literatures

The great difficulty, of course, is the definition of ‘Jewish’ in relation to literature, or culture in general. Is Jewish literature defined by the biographical fact of its author’s Jewishness? Is it recognisable by its contents? Both these qualifications are arbitrary and reductive. Does ‘Jewish literature’, then, presuppose ‘religious’ literature even in the modern period or can ‘Jewish’ be separated from ‘religious’? Cynthia Ozick goes so far as to make the following statement: ‘The secular Jew is a figment; when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew. This is especially true for makers of literature’.5 For Ozick, drawing on a religious text is essential to the definition of ‘Jewish’—but not necessarily religious—literature. Such a separation of terms, ‘Jewish’ and ‘religious’ would not even have been considered in the theocentric pre-Enlightenment Jewish communities where secularism as a world view was virtually unknown. Only in the modern period did the new thinking propose choices between observance and assimilation, religiosity or secularism and also, and perhaps more importantly, the way in which Jewishness was to be conceived and expressed. Taken as a whole, Haskalah literature depicted the difficult and often painful encounter of Judaism with modernity. The exact definition of ‘modern’ in relation to Jewish culture is still open to scholarly debate, but it seems sensible, if perhaps not entirely scientific, to use the Haskalah as the demarcation line. This movement signified the reappropriation of those rationalist traditions which had existed within Judaism in the past, together with notions of tolerance and humanism. Also, for the first time the ideas of the surrounding cultures, including the natural sciences, were admitted into the Jewish intellectual canon. Before this time, Jewish life had been based entirely on tradition and practice, largely controlled by the communities’ religious leaders. Jewish literature was made up—with very few exceptions—of liturgy, commentary on the Law, homiletical writings and codes of behaviour, its sole purpose being religion. The transition to modernity with the Haskalah signalled one of the greatest cultural watersheds in modern Jewish history, and one of the most enduring problems: the relationship of Jewish culture with modern culture. To this day—and perhaps especially in our time—the powerful and almost insoluble challenges of the Haskalah are as potent as ever. These changes were reflected in the literature of the time, with the establishment of a certain dialectical pattern. Because of its liberalising stance, the intellectual and cultural gains of the Haskalah were achieved against continuing religious opposition, although it is important to stress that the Haskalah itself was not an anti-religious movement. Friction between the religious leaders and the enlighteners provided one of the major oppositional elements in the literature of the time. For example, the satirical writing of the Galician author Joseph Perl was directed primarily against the practitioners of the new Hassidic movement.6 Perl drew a grotesque picture of ignorance, superstition and gullibility of the Hassidim and the cunning of their leaders. Other enlighteners, while remaining apologists for normative Judaism, satirised Hassidism, particularly its populist, unintellectual features. The enlighteners, and later writers who echoed their ideology, rejected the overspiritualised Jewish world, preaching a more practical and modern Jew who abandoned his books and his prayers to sustain himself by physical labour. For the first time, Ashkenazi (European) Jewish writers and intellectuals, teachers and reformers encountered the freedom to choose their cultures and beliefs. The possibility of choice, however, did not free its proponents from lingering ideas of loyalty to their tra-

Introduction 7 dition. Both the eighteenth-century playwright and educationist, Aaron Halle-Wolfssohn, and the Italian poet Rahel Morpurgo (1790–1871), the subjects respectively of chapters in this volume by Jutta Strauss and Gabriella Steindler Moscati, exemplify the confusion generated by the possibilities of cultural choice—even construction—for the first time. This brings to mind Kafka’s celebrated statement of his own generation’s problem, that their hind legs were bogged down in their father’s Judaism and the front legs could find no new ground. The resulting despair was their inspiration. The eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Jewish intellectuals were equally part mired, part free. For them the attraction of the modern movements with their intellectual promise was irresistible, yet those that ran towards the ‘light’ it offered looked back with a nervous glance towards their tradition, fearful of the loss of its stability. Italian nationalism, for example, brought the Italian Jews to ‘a craving for peace and liberty’ together with ‘the universality of its fundamental principles’. Yet S.D.Luzzatto, a follower and propounder of these ideas, also feared for the attenuation of the Jewish religion. Like Halle Wolfssohn, Rahel Morpurgo and her cousin and mentor Luzzatto strove for a synthesis of Judaism and European liberalism, Jewish religion and European secular culture. Perhaps this very struggle is what typifies a ‘Jewish’ writer and Jewish literature. Ilan Stavans, editor of a representative selection of Jewish fiction, writes: It is indeed striking how the modern Jewish literary tradition has been divided: one side pulls toward faith, the other toward rationality. The dialectic between the two cannot be resolved, of course, and one Jewish writer after another uses his craft to explore the abyss between the desire to emancipate, free of the weight of religion, and the need to keep faith intact.7 The conflict between Jewish tradition and modernity remains one of the central defining factors of Jewish literature in any language, often repre-sented by the troubled relationship of generations within a Jewish family, or by madness and suicide. Others who sought compromise, such as the Yiddish playwright Avrom Goldfaden, used Jewish nationalism as the means of moderating the demands of their traditional religious culture. In his overview of Goldfaden’s drama, Joel Berkowitz employs the term yidishkayt as opposed both to ‘Judaism’ and ‘religion’. Yidishkayt is an untranslatable Yiddish word meaning ‘Jewishness based on Jewish knowledge, tradition and practice’—but not necessarily religiousness. It seems to serve as a self-definition of the enlightened Jews— including Halle Wolfssohn, Morpurgo and Luzzatto—who set the tone for the manifold developments within the modern Jewish world, including Zionism. The post-Haskalah development of Jewish literature took place not only in Eastern Europe but in the areas of settlement following the large migrations of Jews from East to West in the last decades of the nineteenth century, primarily to the United States, Western Europe, and Britain and its colonies. Culturally this coincided with an aesthetic revolution that was spanning Europe and the New World, defined, in part, by a growing sense of what modernists termed ‘formal desperation’. The specific cultural crisis brought about by the dissolution of the cohesive East European Jewish communities and their social and cultural norms was able to anticipate, to a certain extent, the sense of deracination which was so prevalent a part of European and American modernism. In addition, the actual encounter

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with new societies, languages and cultures led to more radical transformations in Jewish belief and practice in a comparatively short while than there had been in the previous thousand years, and certainly to an extraordinary literary growth. The confrontation between Jewish tradition and modernity has defined almost every cultural development within Judaism for the past two hundred years, from a wholehearted acceptance of the modern world and all it has to offer, to absolute repudiation of it. Whereas, for example, Modern Orthodoxy adopted a fairly positive attitude of compromise towards modernity, ultra-Orthodoxy represents the negative reaction of traditional Judaism to the challenge of Westernised secularism. Ultra-Orthodoxy was for a long time a minority phenomenon in the diaspora, with Modern Orthodoxy defining most Jewish communities, together with Reform Judaism and other more conservative movements, particularly in the United States. Recent decades have seen the rapid evolution of the messianic but nonnationalist ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects (called haredim in Hebrew) usually constituted by hassidic Jews, politically conservative and religiously extreme. Hassidic emissaries promote outreach globally, particularly among the young, resulting in a growth in the number of ba‘alei teshuvah, those who move to Orthodoxy in a spirit of repentance (teshuvah). A large haredi community resides in the United States, and it is there that Rabbi Shneerson, considered by his followers to be the Messiah, ruled until his death in 1995. All this is, of course, true of Israel as well. Several secondary cultures emerged there during the 1970s, including religious subcultures like those of the religious Zionists ranging from politically moderate to violently militant, and the non-Ashkenazi majority, the Jews of Middle Eastern and African origin, who are predominantly Orthodox. According to Dan Urian, in recent years the emphasis on Zionism in Israel has been replaced by an emphasis on religion.8 While none of the religious parties have openly suggested that Israel should be governed according to Jewish law, they strongly promote their idea of a state based on the principles of the Torah, and to this end they have established and control a network of education institutions. With increasing political power, they seek to promote legislation which preserves the status of Orthodoxy as the only recognised form of religious Judaism, and to legislate for specific religious interests such as the Sabbath, festival observance and kashrut (ritual lawfulness, especially of food). Although this serves local Israeli politics, it has had a marked effect on Jewish communities in the rest of the world. Religious movements and counter-movements have not featured largely in post-Haskalah Jewish writing, despite the continued presence of many of their representatives, including the Hassidim. There is an enduring fashion for popular mysticism, but nowhere has the issue of Jewish religion, rather than Jewishness, been seriously discussed in fiction or drama outside Israel, and not extensively within Israel itself. Still, among the chapters on Jewish literature represented in this volume the emphasis is on Israeli literature, since it is from Israel that much of the new religious thinking emanates and has influenced trends in the Jewish world beyond its shores. For example, one of the most intractable sources of internal conflict in Israel today is the phenomenon of Kulturkampf between the ‘religious’ and ‘secular’—tendentious terms which indicate, in reality, the Orthodox and anyone who is not Orthodox or haredi. As during the Haskalah, today the mutual suspicion of ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ Israelis stems from the impulse of enlightened Jewish thinkers towards intellectual freedom, new ideas and modernity. On the other side stand the forces dedicated to protecting the status quo. In

Introduction 9 Israeli drama, the subject of Dan Urian’s chapter, more than in any other literary genre, the battle lines between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ are drawn with increasing animosity. UltraOrthodox factions, supported by religious forces in the Knesset, constitute a strong voice of opposition to the modern theatre, and are particularly vociferous about original Israeli drama, not least of all about plays by established left-wing dramatists. Religious elements constituted the strongest opposition to the abolition of theatre censorship, mainly on the grounds of immorality and offence to the Torah. Playwrights often respond with exaggerated provocation, perhaps to draw their religious antagonists, who in Israel are political antagonists as well, into an open conflict. So, in the long conflict between Jewish tradition and modernity the balance which, for a while, was weighted towards enlightenment, seems to have been restored, as we are beginning to see in contemporary Jewish literature, particularly in Israel. Even if the religious experience was never entirely absent from Israeli Hebrew poetry of an earlier period, religious or ‘metaphysical’ writers were not regarded as representative of contemporary Israeli culture. The most prominent Israeli writers of the first two generations preferred a version of literary history which proclaimed a clean break with the religious and cultural heritage of the European past, and the new literary tradition was, in the early years, partly built upon their disdain for it. While these were not religious generations in the traditional sense, they did reveal at least a traditional dimension, often through their manipulation of biblical and liturgical texts. By Cynthia Ozick’s definition, this ensures that they are truly ‘Jewish’ writers, although they may disagree. Today, however, the most significant development in Israeli poetry is a movement towards the direct expression of religious ideas, a blend of conventional religiousness and popular mysticism derived in the main from the Kabbalah. The dialectic with tradition that inspired the poetry of, say, the Likrat generation, the first literary generation of Israel, was a literary device rather than the expression of a religious necessity. Today, while the allusive and intertextual methodology may be similar, the need is different. For example, the work of Itamar Yaoz-Kest, born in Hungary, a child survivor of BergenBelsen, raised in a secular household, was initially devoted to reclaiming the repressed memory of the Holocaust. In the aftermath of a pilgrimage to the graves of his rabbinic forebears, as David Jacobson tells us in his chapter, YaozKest began to explore religious themes in his poetry, and ultimately returned to Orthodoxy. The poetry represents this struggle to regain the religion the poet had abandoned under the prevailing secular world view of his youth. Yaoz-Kest is only one of a small but significant group of contemporary ‘religious’ poets in Israel, each of whom offers a different agenda and style, from the most ecstatic to the most cerebral. A mystical strain colours much of this poetry, as it does other Jewish writing. Much of this has to do with the charismatic figure of Shabbetai Zevi, the seventeenthcentury mystic and self-proclaimed Messiah, born in Smyrna, who inflamed the Jewish masses with messianic fervour, and then converted to Islam, to the dismay of his followers. Benyamin Shvili, an Israeli poet who began publishing poetry in 1989, produces fragmented verse filled with religious symbols that derive from the Christian as well as the Kabbalistic Jewish world. According to Nili Gold, Shvili’s writing expresses one of the underlying currents in presentday Israel, that is, that it is spiritual poetry without being

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religious. It blurs the boundaries between Judaism, Christianity and the mysticism of Shabbetai Zevi. This poetry is subversive in the sense that it not only describes religious fervour but also warns against it, using the figure of the false Messiah as a kind of guide. The fascination with mysticism and Shabbetai Zevi as a symbol of the quest to reappropriate traditional Judaism emerges again in contemporary Spanish writing. In 1492 all the Jews were expelled from Spain, in 1498 from Portugal, and they resided among other Jews throughout the world, preserving their own Sephardi culture. Many of them settled in North Africa and the Middle East. Up to the Second World War few Sephardi writers were known across geographical boundaries. The Haskalah was an Ashkenazi phenomenon, involving European Jews and represented by them. Only recently have Jews returned to Spain, to re-establish a community in the country that witnessed one of the most brilliant periods in Jewish social and intellectual history. The preoccupation in the work of the Spanish-Jewish novelist, Leopoldo Azancot, is, like that of much contemporary Jewish writing, an exploration of religious reconciliation. Azancot propels his narrator to seek a reunification with God, Jewish practice, and the Jewish people. His main protagonist is the son of a fifteenth-century converso or New Christian, initiated by his father into Jewish awareness, secret identity, and practice at a young age. In a plot similar to that of a Bildungsroman, the son journeys thought adulthood, at first caught up in Sabbatean fervour and then trying to find meaning after the Sabbatean disappointment. According to Stacy Beckwith, Azancot is the only Spanish-Jewish author to examine the phenomenon of Sabbateanism as it swept across the Sephardic Mediterranean diaspora. Through its multi-layered narrative Azancot’s novel is also an ingeniously convoluted concretisation of Jewish mystical symbolism. For an Orthodox Jew, sanctifying the Name of God (kiddush hashem) through martyrdom is the highest degree of religious observance, with the promise of a reward in the world to come. One of the greatest challenges to Jewish faith is the Holocaust. It is enshrined in modern Jewish history as a defining event with overtones of ritual remembrance and a quasi-religious annual memorial day. The memorials and rituals, and the establishment of Holocaust Memorial Day in the Jewish calendar, serve both to remember the victims and the event, and to perpetuate certain theological and ideological questions for every future generation. The ritualisation takes different forms in different cultures, the most marked divergence being between Israel and the diaspora. ‘The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ is a short, narrative poem that has been incorporated into a significant number of American-Jewish prayer books. The poem relates the story of a group of Orthodox young women who commit suicide together rather than endure sexual violation by the Nazis. Interpolated in the United States into the Yom Kippur Martyrology service as early as 1948, the poem is also utilised across denominational lines in American synagogue commemorations of Holocaust Remembrance Day. The poem’s popularity in the United States indicates that it resonates powerfully with contemporary Jewish sensibilities, and tells us something about the shaping of the collective memory in an American-Jewish context. With an analysis of the function of the poem as a point of departure, Sara Horowitz’s chapter examines the intersection of gender and martyrdom in contemporary American-Jewish writing about the Holocaust.

Introduction 11

Religion and religiousness In view of the differences between Muslim and Jewish literatures set out here, we sought to give this volume some unity by preparing a list of topics relating to the subject of ‘religion and religiousness’ which we sent to contributors. These concerned, for example, texts which affirm or transmit religious ideas and actions; themes directly derived from the religion’s teachings, including the individual’s search for God, religious identity, mysticism; uses made of sacred texts or others fundamental to the religious tradition; allusions to them; the influence of their style, genres and language. Other themes suggested were reflections of controversies and religious polemics, and the relationship of religion and history. Genres to be considered were poetry, prose and drama. Within the framework of these and other topics, the contributors were given the freedom to choose their subjects. The great variety of their chapters made it impossible to arrange the material in neat sections according to genre, subject or approach, and we simply decided to alternate contributions from the two traditions, juxtaposing chapters which have something in common. In Jewish writing, the approach to religion is represented in this collection by a number of individual authors. From the period of the Haskalah to our time, trends within the development of the literature have been exemplified by innovators within their generation, those in the vanguard of fundamental changes. These writers do not represent the growth of popular literature; on the contrary, they are predominantly representatives of a sophisticated intellectual elite. The large bibliography of folk or popular religious literature is confined to Orthodox circles and is not easily accessible to the secular reader unless deliberately popularised, as we see in Dan Urian’s paper. The type of culture presented by Jewish literature here is thus essentially urban and predominantly Western. It should be said, however, that in recent years Jewish literature originally written in Arabic and translated into Hebrew, English and some European languages has attracted scholarly attention. A few of the authors from the Muslim chapters, such as the Uzbek or the Turk Kısakürek, have a similar background to the Jewish writers in this book. And almost all the writers discussed are urban and belong to a cultural elite. But, for reasons sketched earlier on in this introduction, their relationship to Western culture is far more complex than that of their Ashkenazi Jewish counterparts. Further, large sections of the population in many Muslim countries are far removed from elite culture, a fact reflected in two chapters, those on Indonesian and Hausa literature. There is another point where the two traditions differ in emphasis. In modern Jewish culture, Scripture and liturgy are used extensively as a source for many kinds of existential arguments, some of them very far removed from religiosity. Jewish writers generally and Hebrew writers in particular created their own modernist exegesis by reinterpreting the sources to suit their contemporary context, following the trend in European, Symbolist, and post-Symbolist literature towards allusiveness to classical mythology. The most significant function of this kind of allusiveness is to reflect the strong links beween the biblical text and modern Jewish consciousness, even—perhaps especially—among secular writers, such as Avrom Goldfaden, discussed in this volume. Liturgy plays a much reduced role in Islam, except in the circles of Sufism or in the Shi’i tradition. Scripture, the Quran, continues to be drawn on widely by writers in the literatures treated here, many of whom propose new interpretations in response to modern

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conditions and questionings. But, as Toorawa shows, the sacral character of the text of the Revelation, understood narrowly, provides arguments against those authors writing in Arabic who approach it innovatively, and discourages the study of the use of the Quran in Arabic literature. Such reactionary attitudes are, however, either absent or less developed where other Muslim literatures are concerned. And in Jewish literary scholarship the use of Scripture and liturgy has been widely studied and documented as an acceptable, even defining, trend. The chapters in this volume have been able to discuss only a few aspects of the expressions of religion and religiousness in Jewish and Muslim literatures. Nonetheless, we hope that the book, which was originally inspired by a series of publications on Muslim-Jewish relations, will stimulate further research on the various literatures treated, reflection on comparative work on these two cultural traditions, and new interest in literary expressions of religion and religiousness in general. We would like to offer our grateful thanks to our contributors for their patience after having been made to wait for so long for the realisation of this project. Like us, they are committed to it and to contributing to cultural exchange and dialogue.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5 6 7 8

Kenneth W.Harrow, ‘Islamic Literature in Africa’, in Nehemia Levtzion and Randall Pouwels (eds), The History of Islam in Africa, Athens/Oxford/Cape Town: Ohio University Press/James Currey/David Philip, 2000, p. 519. Richard V.Weekes, Muslim Peoples. A World Ethnographic Survey, Westport CT/London: Greenwood Press, 1978, p. 535. Even though the figures are out of date, the relative importance of the different groups will not have changed much. Jan Knappert, African Languages and Literatures: East Africa’, in John L. Esposito, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, vol. I, p. 36. See, for a discussion of some recent Bangladeshi writing, Maimuna Haq, ‘From Poetry to Romance: Islam-Oriented Texts in Bangladesh’, in Dale F.Eickelman and Jon W.Anderson, New Media in the Muslim World, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999, pp. 132–61. Cynthia Ozick, ‘America: Towards Yavneh’, in Hana Wirth-Nesher (ed.), What is Jewish Literature?, Philadephia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1994, p. 28. A popular ecstatic religious movement originating in Hungary, Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine in the mid-eighteenth century. Ilan Stavans (ed.), The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 7. See ‘Introduction’, in Dan Urian and Efraim Karsh (eds), Jewish Aspects in Israeli Culture, London: Frank Cass, 1999, pp. 1–5.

1 URDU POETRY AS A VEHICLE FOR ISLAMIC RE-EXPRESSION Christopher Shackle

The British conquest of the Indian subcontinent forced for the first time the entry of a major segment of the Islamic world into the colonial system, and thereby induced a complex process of cultural contact and inexorable cultural change. As a modest step towards understanding that period, this chapter will look at modern Urdu poetry, which has been far less described in English than modern Indo-Muslim religio-political ideologies.1 The focus is upon aspects of the Islamic religiosity which was so dominant a theme of the Urdu poetry of the later colonial period, from about 1880 to 1940. From a typological as well as an historical perspective, such poetic re-expressions of Islam are indeed the thematic characteristics which most clearly distinguish the verse of the period both from the pre-modern Perso-Urdu poetic tradition and from the more recent Urdu poetry of the later twentieth century. For the clearer establishment of these contrasts, the chapter is organized chronologically. A snapshot approach has been adopted, in which some of the main contrastive characteristics of each period are schematically sketched with particular reference to a few thematic and stylistic features, illustrated through selective quotation.2 It is hoped that the inevitable risks of generalization may be outweighed by the chance of conveying some sense of the larger picture.3

Islam in Perso-Urdu poetry Perhaps nowhere are the relationships between the parallel but different spheres of religion and literature more complex than in the Islamic world where both spheres are so uniquely valued.4 A preliminary mapping of the place of Islam in pre-modern Perso-Urdu poetry provides an indispensable starting point for the present enquiry. Embracing populations of Iranian, Turkic and Indo-Aryan speech, the Persianate world of eastern Islam was marked by a written diglossia between Arabic as the specialist language of technical Islamic prose and Persian as the preferred vehicle for all other purposes, especially for poetry. Practised by both professionals and cultivated amateurs, the most popular genre of this poetry was the ghazal, the short love lyric whose monometre and monorhyme formally united semantically discrete verses, and whose immense store of elaborately interlocking imagery provided a ready vehicle for the individual expression of private senti-

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ments. The rhetorical resources and strategies of the ghazal were shared by the formally 5 more demanding longer genres of public poetry included the monorhymed the narrative mathnawî in rhyming couplets, and various strophic forms. The fundamental unit of all these genres is the two-hemistich verse (shi‘r) end-stopped by rhyme. Persian poetry had been intensively cultivated in India, where the lavish patronage of the Mughal court particularly encouraged the development of the richly ornamented baroque manner known as the ‘Indian style’ (sabk-i hindî). With the collapse of Mughal authority in the eighteenth century, Persian came to be replaced as the generally preferred language of poetry by Urdu, the Persianized style of Delhi speech. The Persian genres and their rhetoric were transferred wholesale into the new language, where they maintained a vigorous life until the British suppression of the Great Revolt of 1857 resulted in the destruction of Mughal Delhi, along with other centres of Indo-Muslim civilization. This classical period of Urdu poetry6 provides the pre-modern standards crucial to the understanding of so many later developments. Nowhere is this truer than in the case of the ghazal, whose primacy as the most popular Urdu lyrical form has continued right down to the present day and whose classical masters continue to inspire. In keeping with the central cultural function of the ghazal as a free arena for private imaginative space, the famously equivocal conventions of the genre permit the expression of an extraordinary range of attitudes towards religion. Most typically, however, the prevailing Sufistic tone encourages the profession of disparaging attitudes towards orthodox Islam. Equally familiar is the expression of similar scepticism as to the hypocritical standards of orthodoxy on the part of free-thinking poets, as in the witty by Ghalib (Ghâlib) (d. 1869), the most famous of all Urdu ghazal poets: What business has the preacher with the tavern door? All I know is, last night he entered as I left.7 The case of the public poetry is more complex, given that it was the prime task of such poetry to reaffirm rather than to question society’s ideal values. Since an Islamic society presupposes the derivation of these values from the truths of the one truly revealed religion, a very clear hierarchy is regularly and repeatedly established in, for example, the conventional sequences of eulogies which preface the narrative mathnawî, first of God and of the Prophet (na‘t), then of Imams, pirs and kings, before the poet consciously locates himself as the skilled artist qualified to act as spokesman of the community subject to their spiritual and temporal authority. The acceptance of the same hierarchy is inherent in the eulogistic qaîda. The Prophet, who is the principal object of Muslim devotional religiosity, is thus the addressee of many a splendid na‘tiyya, composed in the richest classical rhetorical style.8 In keeping with the universalizing values of Islam, the emphasis of the classical Urdu public poetry and its Persian exemplars is thus upon the reiteration of perceived general truths through the deployment of the elaborate strategies of a generally accepted poetic rhetoric. But the rhetoric is itself profoundly universalizing in emphasis, with a marked preference for the typical over the individual, for the general over the particular, and certainly in the case of South Asia for the idealized landscapes of the Indo-Iranian miniature over the partially Islamized realities of India.

Urdu poetry as a vehicle for Islamic re-expression 15 In no classical genre are all these characteristics displayed to greater effect as aspects of an artistic whole in which Urdu poetry is at the perfect service of Islamic devotion than in the marthiya, the Shi‘ite elegy composed for recitation in honour of Imam Husain. The first verse of a six-hemistich strophe (musaddas) describing the valley of Karbala on the morning of the battle from a famous marthiya by the great master Anis (Anîs) (d. 1884) may be quoted in the original as well as translation in order to give some idea of how powerfully the rhetorical resources of the ‘Indian style’ with the elaborate wordplays of its elevated Persianisms are combined with an integral vision of the divine order of creation: qurbân qalam-i âfar îd-gâr thî har waraq sê âshkâr Ah, how the filigree on every leaf Displayed the art of the Creator’s pen Outsoaring poets’ high imaginings With craft that passed all humble craftsmens’ grasp— Shown in that heavenly vale’s enamelling The Lord of men’s great power entranced the world.9

Islam in Hali’s Musaddas This practised integration of poetic aesthetics with Islamic purpose was one of the many intracultural links which was severely interrupted by the radical challenges confronting Indian Muslim society with increasing urgency after the watershed of 1857. Although few members of that society were eventually to escape its consequences, the progressive impact of the colonial challenge was initially experienced with very different degrees of keenness by different groups among its leading religious specialists and its literary artists.10 While some remained protected by the partial survival of the old order, especially in the native princedoms subject only to indirect British rule, all sooner or later had to come to terms with the new material and ideological conditions created by the colonial state. Now that it was no longer possible to maintain plausible claim to their historic status as members of a ruling religious minority, many once axiomatic religious and cultural definitions came increasingly to be questioned. A new environment was created in which old patterns of acculturation and aristocratic patronage were being supplanted by new educational values, along with the rise of a print culture oriented towards the new middle class which the colonial state had brought into being. A whole set of systemic changes in language and in literature resulted from this process. The installation of English as the primary language of the colonial state with Urdu as its vernacular handmaiden in northern India involved the creation of new styles of functional prose replacing the former preference for the elaborate norms of Persianate inshâ through the production of textbooks and translations as well as newspapers and periodicals. These were positively to assist the rapid development of a huge theological prose literature in Urdu and negatively to be accompanied by a rather rapid decline in the quality and

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conviction of most genres of public poetry other than such specialized devotional forms as the na‘t which were to continue to develop in hymn-like segregation from the literary mainstream.11 In the religio-political arena, the most vigorous challenge to established understandings was the modernist response of the Aligarh movement led by Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (Sayyid Khân) (1817–98), himself a prolific and forceful writer of Urdu prose in the new style. Identifying the causes of the Muslims’ palpable weakness in their failure to learn the lessons of Victorian success and to profit from the opportunities offered by British rule in the way that was being effectively pursued by the emancipated Hindu middle class, both the religious rationalism of Sir Sayyid’s programme and its political loyalism to the British empire went hand-in-hand with a strong cultural commitment to Westernization. Thus standing for a whole range of values quite radically different from those traditional to Indo-Muslim society, Sir Sayyid’s devotion to the scientific agenda of modern knowledge was pilloried in the label attached to him by his conservative opponents as a nêcharî or ‘follower of nature’. While literary reflections of contemporary socio-political changes were less apparent in the private sphere, which continued to be largely occupied by the endless adaptable ghazal, a serious gap in the Urdu literary system was created by the failure of public poetry to match the achievement of the new prose in addressing new concerns. This gap was spectacularly filled by Sir Sayyid’s disciple, the poet Altaf Husayn Hali (1837–1914) with his long Musaddas of 1879 entitled Madd-ô Jazr-i Islâm (The Flow and Ebb of Islam), which in many ways remains the single most innovative Urdu poem ever written. While maintaining the formal six-hemistich strophe of the Shi’ite marthiya, the elegy is now not for the life-giving sacrifice of the martyrs of Karbala but for the fate of Islam itself at the hands of the self-professed Muslims of India. It was no longer possible in British India for public poetry to celebrate the organic values of a divinely sanctioned Islamic religious and social order. Instead Hali exalts the past, the glorious flow of Arab Islam described in the first third of the Musaddas, in order to castigate the present ebb of degenerate Muslim society in India which so conspicuously turns its back upon the demands of the new age. For Hali’s conservative contemporaries the most painful feature of the Musaddas was its radically stripped-down style, to which he later gave the title of ‘natural poetry’ (nêcharal shâ‘irî), neatly proclaiming its allegiance to Sir Sayyid’s nêcharî ideals as well as to a new aesthetic which looked more to Wordsworth than to the Ghalib whom Hali had once himself sought to follow. Dispensing with all the artifices essential to the old rhetoric of Persianate public poetry, Hali’s new style relied instead upon a direct use of the Indian (hindî) vocabulary and syntax of straightforward Urdu, which is soberly dignified by the extensive use of Arabic terminology. No longer does the poet project himself as an artist skilled with words, for his strategy is instead consciously to step back in order to allow the objectivity of his message to be directly apprehended. The extreme contrast from the high classical style of Anis may be illustrated by a stanza from the earlier part of Hali’s poem dealing with the Prophetic mission, which is typical in its unadorned versification of a Hadith carefully selected to point the energetic modernist message:

Urdu poetry as a vehicle for Islamic re-expression 17 ‘alâlat sê pahlê ghanîmat hay farâghat mashâghil kî kathrat sê pahlê You have your chance in health before disease In leisure too before abundant tasks In youth before old age’s troubles start In rest before the traveller moves on You have your chance in wealth before you’re poor Do what you must, for little time remains.12 Along with the old rhetoric, Hali also eliminates all consideration of the potentially seductive achievements of that recently and painfully lost Persianate Islamic civilization which in historical fact linked the first centuries of Islam with the India of Hali’s day. An abrupt contrast between the glorious past and the wretched present is thereby created at the turning point which occurs one-third of the way through the poem: Unflinching was the Hijazi faith’s brave fleet Whose flag flew at the edges of the world Obstructed by no apprehensive fear Which faltered not in Red Sea or Oman Which fearlessly once faced the seven seas But which was scuttled at the Ganges’ mouth.13 This splitting-off the past from the present, which is such a key characteristic of all forms of literary as well as ideological modernism from the Romantics onwards, involves Hali in the establishment of a set of new rhetorical strategies extending far beyond the obvious stylistic shift to the new style of ‘natural poetry’. With the loss of political power, the Muslims have lost their former sense of divinely privileged destiny. The poet’s attention therefore shifts from the old strategy of invoking an accepted divine order to a focus upon the community itself and the creation of new types of connection and frames of reference. These are designed to give emotive meaning to the central role which is envisaged for the Muslim community itself, now that it has become bereft of its traditional leadership. Rendered thus remote from God Himself, and lacking a Muslim ruler of the kind until recently lauded as the shadow of God on earth, the Muslim community is invited to focus its devotion and respect not on the Sufis or ‘ulamâ whose spiritual authority that ruler once helped support (but whose present claims to any such authority are rebutted in the later part of the poem), but rather on the Prophet himself, who is praised in a simple stanza which remains the most popular Urdu na‘t: The one who of all prophets is called ‘Mercy’ The one who grants the longings of the wretched The one who helps when others are in trouble The one who feels the pain of everybody The refuge of the poor and of the weak The guardian of orphans and of slaves.14

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The dissolution of the old hierarchies of authority into the focus on this direct link between the community and its Prophet in its turn leads naturally to Hali’s invitation to the community to share his wonder at the achievements of the Arabs during the early centuries of Islam, their outstanding contributions to the revival of learning in the world, their quest for knowledge and their willingness to travel. This formidable list of outward-looking achievements is of course intended to jerk the modern community into dealing with the reality of its very different present condition: Rejecting every chance of travelling Quite unaware of God’s creation We stay at home, whose walls before our eyes Are mankind’s natural limits in our view We are like fish assembled in a tank For whom that tank is their whole universe.15 The only remedy for such perceived ignorance is the didactic message to whose transmission Hali devotes such serious care. Although it might in theory be susceptible to critical analysis in terms of the traditional as a mixture mostly of rithâ and hijâ, the Musaddas is actually a poem of the new type which is called in Urdu. Such a poem may use familiar metrical forms, but identity is primarily defined not in formal terms like the or ghazal, but by the coherence of its content, like a typical English poem of the Victorian era.16 Drawing also upon many of the techniques of the modern textbook,17 the Musaddas offers its readers the repeated opportunity to expand both their historical and their geographical awareness. No passage is more telling in this regard than the verses dedicated to the Arab Caliphate of Spain. Never previously a topos of Perso-Urdu poetry, Hali’s memorable invocation of the lost glories of Andalus was to have an enduring appeal to the Muslims of South Asia: The Arabs made a garden of all Andalus Where many of their monuments remain For anyone to go and see today It is as if the Alhambra spoke these words: ‘My founders were Umayyad by descent I am the token of the Arabs in this land.’18 This theme of the glories of Muslim Spain was to inspire countless Indian imitations in the succeeding decades.19 While the appeal of its exaltation of a once glorious Islamic presence in Europe itself is obvious, the implications of its popularity are equally significant, especially the ways in which this popularity implies a corresponding neglect or devaluation of the local. For the reasons suggested above, Hali’s rhetoric can have no time for the glorious past of the Persianate culture of eastern Islam in general or of Indian Islam in particular. His technique of elegiac reflection on Islamic monuments, which combines something of the guidebook with the old ubi sunt topos, could of course be applied to Mughal architecture. This was indeed done by Hali’s younger contemporary, the didactic poet Isma’il Merathi (Ismâ‘îl (1844–1917) in his eight-hemistich muthamman poem on Agra Fort:

Urdu poetry as a vehicle for Islamic re-expression 19 The mosque said through its stones: ‘I am The mark of Shahjahan upon this fort’— Thus having told of once great majesty It went on to describe its present state: ‘No candles light these chambers, no water fills The pool whose fountains’ heart bears secret pain No praise of God or calls to prayer are heard This locked and lonely place is all that’s left.’20 Similar passages occur in several of the numerous imitations inspired by the popularity of the Musaddas,21 involving invocations of Mughal glories in decay, prior to their expert renovation by the imperial government.22 But the artistic power of the topos is undermined by the lack of any organic connection to a comprehensive rhetorical strategy for Islamic renewal.

Islam in the Urdu poetry of Iqbal and his contemporaries Amidst the rapid changes taking place in British India, the limitations of the Aligarh solution which had inspired Hali inevitably became increasingly apparent. A sustained satirical attack on its advocacy of cultural Westernization was a major theme of the short poems by Akbar Ilahabadi (Akbar Ilâhâbâdi) (1846–1921), the most talented of the anti-modernists.23 Yet Akbar himself shares the Aligarh perception of the dangerously marginalized place of the Muslims within the colonized population of India: Why ask what Akbar’s standing is these days? —A ‘native’, Indian, and Muslim too.24 As such verses indicate, while the Urdu literature of the ensuing period was inevitably to reflect and to develop the concerns of the Indian nationalist movement, the peculiar situation of the Muslims in India as a minority which had formerly ruled the majority Hindu population was often to make rather uncertain the nature both of Indian Muslim nationalism itself and of its literary expressions. Throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, the loudest voice in Urdu poetry Iqbâl) (1879–1938), the unquestioned leading poet was Muhammad Iqbal ( of the generation after Hali’s. Iqbal’s poetic reputation was first established on the basis of a talent for nature poetry very much in the tradition of the English Romantics. But he soon moved to an increasing concentration upon Islamic themes, and it was his powerful expression of these which was eventually to be a major inspiration for the rival Muslim League’s achievement of Pakistan as a separately independent Muslim state. After returning to Lahore from a period of postgraduate study in England and Germany, Iqbal came out with his first grand poetic re-expression of Islam in his Shikwa (Complaint) of 1911. Cast in similar musaddas stanzas to Hali’s poem and addressing a similarly large imaginative agenda, this boldly reverses many of Hali’s strategies by accepting the diminished state of the Muslim community while complaining to God Himself that it is He who must bear some of the blame:

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Religious Perspectives in Modern Muslim and Jewish Literatures We rubbed out error’s tokens from the world We gave mankind release from slavery We filled your Ka‘ba with prostrated heads We caused men’s hearts to hold dear the Qur’an Yet still we hear that we have not been true If we’re not true, then You have not been kind!25

It was this bold encouragement to the Indian Muslims to feel that they had the right to hold their heads high which underpinned the popularity of Iqbal’s poetry through the next three decades, during which nationalist leaders were to exert an increasingly vocal and effective pressure for Indian independence from Britain. At least so far as the Indian Muslims were concerned, much impetus was added to nationalist sentiment by an increasing awareness of events in the western Islamic world as the Ottoman empire disintegrated in the face of European colonial expansion. It was the Italian seizure of Tripolitania which inspired Iqbal’s risâlat-ma’âb mên (Before the Prophet’s Throne), in which he describes being led by the angels before the Prophet who asks him why he has come: ‘Nightingale of the gardens of Hejaz! each bud Is melting,’ said those Lips, ‘in your song’s passion-flood… What do you bring for us, what is your offering worth?’ To which the poet’s response concludes: ‘But I have brought this chalice here to make my sacrifice; The thing it holds you will not find in all your Paradise. See here, oh Lord, the honour of your people brimming up! The martyred blood of Tripoli, oh Lord, is in this cup.’26 Within its brief compass, this short thematic poem encapsulates many of the most characteristic features of Iqbal’s strategies of Islamic re-expression. In contrast to Hali’s self-effacement, here the poet is hugely foregrounded in his capacity of inspired spokesman of the community (ummat) before God and His Prophet. Similarly, the Indian Muslim community itself is no longer narrowly defined as an Indian community condemned by its own feebleness to suffer degradation. Its members are instead grandly encouraged to align themselves with their co-religionists in the western heartlands of Islam in the anticipation of an inevitable retribution on those by whom it is currently being slighted. This grand poetic vision of Islamic regeneration became the dominant theme of Iqbal’s later Urdu poetry, to which his reputation in South Asia is chiefly due, as well of the longer poems of his middle years which, with a hopeful eye to some wider pan-Islamic audience, he chose to write in Persian, thereby winning the attention of a Western readership through his Orientalist translators.27 A similar message is echoed in much of the public Urdu poetry of the period by lesser artists, like the prolific versifier and political activist Zafar ‘Ali Khan ( Alî Khân) (1873–1956),28 who used his newspaper Zamîndâr to pour out immense numbers of short poems. Their fluently resourceful rhymes reflect every twist and turn of the Muslim nationalist politics of the period as they moved from cooperation with the Congress during the Khilafat movement of the early 1920s29 to the increasingly separatist stance of the later

Urdu poetry as a vehicle for Islamic re-expression 21 Muslim League. While Zafar Ali Khan’s verses are thus very varied, their common theme is the exaltation of Islam and the Muslim, as in his Musalmân kî shân (The Muslim’s Glory) of 1916: O Muslim, have you realized what you are? Although a man, your glory is divine Your feet upon the ground, your head in heaven You are half of clay but half of light… The river Nile’s waves may be in search of you Who also are the object of the Ganges’ flood… The whole world’s learning is your legacy Your source of wisdom Yathrib, also Greece The beneficiary of West and East Your bookcase holds both Milton and Qâ’ânî…30 As is generally the case with Iqbal as well, such grand universalizations leave rather little space for that imaginative evocation of local realities of the kind which is natural, indeed central to the poetry of most nationalisms. Since Indo-Muslim history was itself largely one of colonial conquest and imperial exploitation, it provided few obvious opportunities to the Muslim nationalist pen. One of the few historical events eligible to become symbols of resistance to the British was the heroic death of Tipu Sultan, the ‘Tiger of Mysore’, in his capital at Seringapatam in 1799. This was duly celebrated by Zafar ‘Ali Khan in his kê mazâr par do ânsû (Seringapatam: Two Tears at the Tomb of Tipu Sultan): Seringapatam, martyrs’ resting-place Where last was kept the honour of Islam… The Tiger of Mysore sleeps by your side Whose whole life was the Muslim nation’s pride…31 Only rarely is even its sanctification by Islamic association sufficient to admit the local scenery of India into this poetic landscape. While an instance is to be found in Zafar ‘Ali Khan’s brief evocation of a visit made on 29 September 1925 to the rather remote Mughal fortress of Rohtas in the rocky plateau of the north-western Panjab in Rohtâs, even here the allusion is to a deserted Muslim monument: Islam’s bright sun shines in the heaven The world’s revealed to every man The Muslims’ life is not concealed As they outrank Ilyas and Khidr… My pen’s the pride of poetry As ‘Abbas was of standard-bearing This stony land is brought from heaven My problem’s solved in high Rohtas.32 This difficulty in integrating the local with the universal is similarly illustrated in the most ambitious Urdu poem of the period, the Shâhnâmâ-yi Islâm (The Royal Book of Islam), an epic history conceived in imitation of Firdawsi’s famous Persian Shâhnâma. The critical

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Jalandharî) (1901–82) is in fact mainly reputation of its author Hafeez Jalandhari based upon his lyrical poetry, which is generally quite secular in expression. His would-be magnum opus, which eventually extended to four volumes, is often felt to be an overlaboriously versified chronicle and is now little read. For the present argument, however, there is a particularly interesting passage in the introductory pages where the poet speaks of how he was inspired for his undertaking by the neglected tomb in Lahore of Qutb al-Din Aibak (d. 1210), the first Muslim Sultan of Delhi. The tension between the grand narrative to whose treatment the poet aspires and the actual environment in which he finds himself may best be illustrated by summary quotation: As weighed down by these thoughts I sat one day With head bowed at King Aibak’s resting-place That Qutb al-Din, the holy warrior who Awoke this world afresh from heedless sleep… But who himself now sleeps here in Lahore In a forgotten humble alleyway… No flowers and no garlands decorate This tomb at which none care to make a show At which none weep or offer Fatihas For no one knows who sleeps beneath its roof Out there Lahore’s bazaars provide the sights Of wanton faith-destroying modern life In here a silent tomb excites in me Instructive feelings of regretful ache… When tired out by the city’s bustling noise I often come to sit here seeking peace And when I do so, soon I’m overcome By some mysterious state of altered sense In which I drown the present in the past And enter an imagined other world In which I find myself on some dread field Where mighty hosts of men are waging war And where there waves the standard of Islam That standard of Islam dispensing light…33 As this passage also shows, however, even a good poet is hard put to it to maintain this kind of flight from humdrum present circumstance to higher poetic reality without falling into a cliched spinning of words, and it is Iqbal alone who remains the unique master of this style of triumphally reexpressed Islam. The best of the poems which he composed in the 1930s on his final return from Persian to Urdu display Iqbal’s grand manner at its hypnotic zenith. In contrast both to the intricate verbal rhetoric of Anis’s high classical manner and to the bareness of Hali’s ‘natural poetry’, this deliberately flaunts the natural grandeur of the highly Persianized Urdu of public discourse. In the early 1930s the enduring pull of Muslim Spain on the Indian Muslim imagination had led Iqbal actually to visit the sights of which Hali had dreamt half a century before. His impressions are majestically invoked in his Masjid-i (The Mosque of Cordoba), whose lofty Perso-Arabic vocabulary,

Urdu poetry as a vehicle for Islamic re-expression 23 linked by only the minimum number of syntactic markers of Indian origin, is wonderfully designed to evoke through glorious allusion the shimmering example of dynamic Islamic achievement in lands far to the west of India: ka‘ba-yi arbâb-i fan dîn-i mubîn tujh andalusyôn kî zamîn Shrine of the lovers of art! Visible power of the Faith! Sacred as Mecca you made, once, Andalusia’s soil. If there is under these skies loveliness equal to yours, Only in Muslim hearts, nowhere else can it be. Ah, those proud cavaliers, champions Arabia sent forth Pledged to the splendid Way, knights of the truth and the creed! Through their empire a strange secret was understood: Friends of mankind hold sway not to command but to serve. Europe and Asia from them gathered instruction: the West Lay in darkness, and their wisdom discovered the path.34

The recession of overt Islam from later Urdu poetry It is thus difficult not to score the successive poetic re-expressions of Islam in Urdu before 1947 as a rising crescendo over a nationalist groundswell which eventually led to the achievement of independence. Indeed, it was partly through the vision of Iqbal’s Urdu poetry that the Muslim League was able successfully to mount the mass movement which led to the creation of Pakistan. But as the history of nationalism in the modern world has repeatedly demonstrated, the conversion of shared ideals into reality as the consequence of independence leads to an inevitable fracturing of voices previously united by the passion of the nationalist cause. In the special case of Urdu, this fracture was compounded from the outset by the partition of a Pakistan whose many problems proved impervious to Islamic solutions from an India whose large Muslim minority saw its security as depending on the secular ideals of the country’s founders rather than any Islamic irredentism. Moreover, the last fifty years have seen very significant changes in the place of Urdu poetry in the cultural system, with the transfer of some its former functions to new media and of others to prose writing, while the concomitant rise of free verse has significantly distanced much newer poetry from obvious connections with the past. While an Urdu public poetry certainly continues to exist, it therefore addresses a more diverse public with a far more uncertain voice than that which had been fuelled by the emotive power of the Islamic religiosity expressed by Hali and Iqbal and their contemporaries, with their continual emphasis upon the links between nation and religious community. Even by the 1930s, many of the most talented Indian Muslim poets of the post-Iqbalian generation had become disillusioned with the social and political implications of the neoIslamic message and were instead attracted to the secularist solutions promised by Marxism. Many Urdu poems of the period produced by this self-proclaimed Progressive school thus deliberately subvert the unique privileging of Islam in order to express quite different

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hopes for a future in which mankind is at last liberated from the constraints of religion, as in the well known Khwâb-i (The Dream of Dawn) by Majaz (Majâz) (1911–55): The sun has lit the sky for centuries But night has kept its hold upon men’s minds… Religions too have made their vain attempts And revelation’s rain has poured on noble hearts… The son of Mary, Moses and Imran Ram, Gautam, Pharaoh and Haman have come… In superstitious fancy’s darkness And life’s fierce storms, in this dark night The human mind at least has dreamt of dawn And looked to where it never looked before.35 But the apparent alternatives to Islamic solutions provided by this straightforward party line were themselves also soon discredited in the atmosphere of materialistic self-interest which was quickly seen to mark public life in the post-independence period. Rather than looking to fresh ideals as panaceas for national ills, the general tendency was towards that expression of disillusionment which is so marked a feature of most post-colonial literatures. For Urdu poetry, this involved on the one hand a continued recourse to the rich resources of private expression still available in the ghazal, on the other a withdrawal from the positive public expression of Islamic religiosity. It might not be possible to attack Iqbal directly in Pakistan, where he had been installed as a national icon, but the betrayal of the ideals he had proclaimed was soon an object of poetic comment. In the opening verse of one his most famous ghazals, Iqbal had invoked a characteristically glorious sense of public yearning: Beyond the stars more worlds: Love’s grace Has other trials yet to face.36 In a typical strategy of subsequent reversal, these famous words are ironically turned against the society supposedly founded to embody Iqbalian ideals by the satirical poet Zamir Ja‘fari Ja‘fari) to round off a stanza in his (Musaddas of Our Sorry State): Our houses’ furnishings have much increased Our general luxury has much increased Widespread dishonesty has much increased Demands for imports too have much increased Our former limits reach unthought extent We find there are ‘beyond the stars more worlds’.37 As the punning title of Ja‘fari’s parody indicates, the message of Hali’s great poem has now lost all conviction in an Islamic state characterized by the wholesale failure of religion to overcome social discord:

Urdu poetry as a vehicle for Islamic re-expression 25 While all of us profess that God is one Acknowledging Muhammad as our lord And that the Scripture is the Word of God And recognize the Prophet as our guide Suspicion of each other is the rule Our claims of brotherhood are only words.38 In keeping with this generally shared perception of a divided society, it is predictable that there should have been no single voice in the Urdu poetry of recent decades to articulate an unambiguous message capable of commanding general acceptance, as the recession of overt Islamic religiosity as the dominant theme of Urdu poetry has led to a whole variety of alternative strategies for Urdu public poetry in the recent decades. This final section of the present chapter consequently began by signalling the difficulty of neatly characterizing the period in the same way as had been possible for those which preceded it. But while modern Urdu poetry may have had ‘no single voice…to articulate an unambiguous message capable of commanding general acceptance’, it has had in Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911–84) a voice which commanded general acceptance precisely because it avoided delivering unambiguous messages in the manner of Hali or Iqbal.39 Faiz made his name in the 1940s as an outstanding poet of the Progressive school and remained firmly secularist in outlook through the vagaries of political and personal fortune which marked the rest of his life. But the appeal of his poetry derives from its aesthetic rather than its political expression. Faiz was primarily a master of the ghazal, and was able to use this mastery to effect a fresh union between the private and the public in Urdu poetry, whose rival demands on the poet are the subject of one of his most memorable earlier poems: Love, do not ask me for that love again. Once I thought life, because you lived, a prize— The time’s pain nothing, you alone were pain; Your beauty kept earth’s springtimes from decay, My universe held only your bright eyes— If I won you, fate would be at my feet. It was not true, all this, but only wishing… This world knows other torments than of love, And other happiness than a fond embrace; Love, do not ask me for my old love again.40 Here the manner is typical, being half modern in expression, yet timelessly lyrical in feeling. Faiz, who began his career as a college teacher of English literature, owes much to English poetry, but he is also conscious of past Urdu masters, especially Ghalib. While Hali looked sternly to the needs of the present and Iqbal looked back to medieval Persian poetry, Faiz’s poems often naturally evoke reminiscences of the pre-modern Urdu poets, sometimes through direct imitation, as in his adapted quotation of Ghalib’s well known Between stern censor and rake what gulf can be found this evening? One left the tavern just now, the second is arriving.41

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In his public poetry too, Faiz is similarly conscious of his predecessors, but achieves a recall of Iqbal’s invocation of the mysteries of the stars which is far more subtle than the schematic reference in Ja‘fari’s parody, in his powerful lament on the disappointing uncertainties of the post-independence period in (Freedom’s Dawn): This is not that long-looked-for break of day, Not that clear dawn in quest of which those comrades Set out, believing that in heaven’s wide void Somewhere must be the stars’ last halting-place, Somewhere the verge of night’s slow-washing tide, Somewhere an anchorage for the ship of heartache.42 While studious in its avoidance of direct Islamic imagery, very many of the alternative strategies of the modern period which have been sketched earlier here may be located in Faiz’s poetry, notably the continuing westward look towards the heartlands of Islam, where the heroic ideals of the Palestinian cause provide an emotive example which can only be aspired to by Urdu poets frustrated by their palpable inability to influence Pakistani realities. It was therefore natural that Faiz’s voluntary exile in Lebanon in the 1970s should lead him to compose on the Palestinian theme. Playing slightly with the metrical pattern in its unrhymed first line, his shuhadâ jô pardês mên kâm â’ê (The Palestinian Martyrs Who Lost Their Lives Abroad) illustrates the melodious softening of the Iqbalian manner which was Faiz’s hallmark, and which is about as far as the majority of Urdu poetry lovers wish to be taken in the direction of modernism: mayn jahân par bhî gayâ têrî tadhlîl kê dâghôn kî jalan dil mên liyê têrî kê chirâghôn kî lagan dil mên liyê Wherever I went, O soil of my homeland With the scars of your abasement afire in my heart With the lamps in your honour alight in my heart The love and the smart of your memories went with me The scent of your orange groves went with me.43 If it be objected that such delicacy risks the sentimentalization of suffering, there should also be a suitable recognition of Faiz’s overall achievement in suggesting the healing of a torturedly uncertain present. He does this, it may be suggested, by reaching beyond the colonial rupture marked by Hali’s painful shift from being a traditional poet to becoming a modern one with a message,44 and beyond the forceful subjugation by Iqbal of the ghazal to the public style of his poetry, to re-establish a more natural contact with the classical Perso-Urdu tradition, whose equivocal manner proved as well adapted to dealing with the uncertainties which followed independence as it had been to those of the pre-colonial era.

Urdu poetry as a vehicle for Islamic re-expression 27

Notes 1

2

3

4

5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25

Cf. e.g. W.C.Smith, Modern Islam in India: A Social Analysis, London: Gollancz, 1946; A.Ahmad, Islamic Modernism in India and Pakistan 1857–1964, London: Oxford University Press, 1967; B.D.Metcalfe, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. References for verses quoted in this chapter are given wherever possible to bilingual UrduEnglish editions for the convenience of readers wishing to explore further. In all cases other than Kiernan’s excellent versions of Iqbal and Faiz, fresh English translations have been supplied. These are intended to convey the rhythmic regularity of most Urdu poetry but not its rhymes. Urdu words and personal names on first occurrence are transliterated with underlines for retroflex consonants and subscript dots as for Arabic. The picture developed in this chapter overlaps with the concluding pages of my earlier study ‘Settings of Panegyric: The Secular Qasida in Mughal and British India’, in S.Sperl and C.Shackle (eds), Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa, 2 vols, Leiden: Brill, 1996, 1, pp. 206–52. Many relevant issues are raised in Harun al-Rashid, Urdu Adab awr Islâm, vol. 1, Lahore: Islamic Publishers, 1968; and more briefly in M.Abbas, Islâmî Tahdhîb awr Urdu Shâ‘irî, Lahore: Sang-i Mil, 1990. Cf.Sperl and Shackle, Qasida Poetry, 2, pp. 1–62. Cf.K.Islam and R.Russell, Three Mughal Poets: Mir, Sauda, Mir Hasan, London: Allen and Unwin, 1969; M.Sadiq, A History of Urdu Literature, 2nd edn, Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1984; D.J.Matthews, C.Shackle and S. Husain, Urdu Literature, London: Urdu Markaz, 1985; C.Shackle, ‘Urdû’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn, Leiden: Brill, 2000. D.J.Matthews and C.Shackle (eds), An Anthology of Classical Urdu Love Lyrics, London: Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 126. Cf. the great by in Sperl and Shackle, Qasida Poetry, 2, pp. 268–91. Cf. D.J.Matthews, The Battle of Karbala: A Marsiya of Anis, New Delhi: Rupa, 1994, p. 28. Cf.F.W.Pritchett, Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and Its Critics, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994; also Matthews, in Shackle and Husain, Urdu Literature, pp. 94–107. The development of the Urdu na‘t down into the twentieth century is well illustrated in M.Hasan (ed.), Khayr al-bashar kê mên, Lahore: Idara-yi Furogh-i Urdu, 1975. C.Shackle and J.Majeed (eds), Hali’s Musaddas: The Flow and Ebb of Islam, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 32, 116, where Hali’s footnote reproduces his Hadith sources. Shackle and Majeed, Hali’s Musaddas, p. 144. Shackle and Majeed, Hali’s Musaddas, p. 110. Shackle and Majeed, Hali’s Musaddas, p. 148. S.R.Faruqi and F.Pritchett, ‘Lyric Poetry in Urdu: Ghazal and Nazm’, Journal of South Asian Literature, 19(2), 1984, provides a convenient overview. Shackle and Majeed, Hali’s Musaddas, pp. 8–11. Shackle and Majeed, Hali’s Musaddas, p. 132. Cf.Smith, Modern Islam, pp. 59–61. M.Isma’il, Kulliyyât-i Ismâ‘îl, Meerut: Oriental Publishing Company, 1910, p. 132. Shackle and Majeed, Hali’s Musaddas, pp. 37–44. Shackle and Majeed, Hali’s Musaddas, p. 61. Cf.R.Russell, The Pursuit of Urdu Literature: A Select History, Karachi: Royal Book Company, 1983, London: Zed Books, 1992, pp. 129–75. M.Sadiq, Twentieth Century Urdu Literature, provides the best overview in English of Urdu poetry of the earlier twentieth century. Russell, The Pursuit of Urdu Literature, p. 138. D.J.Matthews (ed.), Iqbal: A Selection of the Urdu Verse, London: SOAS, 1993, p. 34.

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26 Trans. V.G.Kiernan, Poems from Iqbal, London: John Murray, 1955, p. 16. 27 Cf.A.Schimmel, Gabriel’s Wing: A Study into the Religious Ideas of Sir Muhammad Iqbal, Leiden: Brill, 1963; along with the earlier translations of Nicholson and Arberry and the studies of Bausani and Bürgel. 28 G.H.Dhu l-Fiqar, ‘Alî Khân: Adîb-ô Shâ‘ir, Lahore: Khiyaban-i Adab, 1967. 29 Cf.G.Minault, ‘Urdu Political Poetry During the Khilafat Movement’, Modern Asian Studies, 8(4), 1974, pp. 463–4. 30 Z.A.Khan, Bahâristân, Lahore: Urdu Academy Panjab, 1937, p. 65. The rhyme induces the mention of the nineteenth-century Iranian poet Qâ’ânî. 31 Khan, Bahâristân, p. 123. 32 Khan, Bahâristân, p. 165. 33 A.A.Hafeez, Shâhnâma-yi Islâm, vol. 1, Lahore: the author, 1929, pp. 40–2. 34 Trans. Kiernan, Poems from Iqbal, p. 40; cf. Matthews, Iqbal, 102–4. Kiernan’s version captures the loud overtones of Kipling often to be caught in Iqbal (I owe this observation to Simon Digby). Zafar ‘Ali Khan, yet another Lahore-based writer, is more closely linked to Kipling through his skilled translation of The Jungle Book as Jangal mên mangal (1910). 35 K.C.Kanda (ed.), Masterpieces of Urdu Nazm, New Dehli: Sterling, 1997, pp. 353–5. 36 Trans. Kiernan, Poems from Iqbal, p. 34. 37 Z.Ja‘fari, Musaddas-i Islamabad: Dost Publications, 1996, p. 17. 38 Ja‘fari, Musaddas, p. 24. 39 This point is underplayed in the harsh assessment of Faiz in Russell, The Pursuit, pp. 229–47. 40 Trans. V.G.Kiernan, Poems by Faiz, London: Allen and Unwin, 1971, pp. 65–7. 41 Trans. Kiernan, Poems by Faiz, p. 121. 42 Trans. Kiernan, Poems by Faiz, pp. 123–5. 43 F.A.Faiz, Nuskha-hâ-yi Wafâ, Lahore: Karwan, 1986, pp. 656–7. 44 Cf. Pritchett, Nets of Awareness, pp. 44–5; Shackle and Majeed, Hali’s Musaddas, pp. 57–9.

Further reading Kiernan, V.G, Poems from Iqbal, London: John Murray, 1955. Kiernan, V.G. (ed.), Poems by Faiz, London: Allen and Unwin, 1971. Matthews, D.J. (ed.), Iqbal: A Selection of the Urdu Verse, London: SOAS, 1993. Matthews, D.J., C.Shackle and S.Husain, Urdu Literature, London: Urdu Markaz, 1985. Pritchett, F.W, Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and Its Critics, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Sadiq, M., Twentieth Century Urdu Literature, Karachi: Royal Book Company, 1983. Shackle, C., ‘Urdû’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn, Leiden: Brill, 2000. Shackle C., and J.Majeed (eds), Hali’s Musaddas: The Flow and Ebb of Islam, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997. Smith, W.C., Modern Islam in India: A Social Analysis, London: Gollancz, 1946. Sperl S., and C.Shackle (eds), Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa, 2 vols, Leiden: Brill, 1996.

2 ‘BLESS EACH DAY THAT PASSES’ The search for religious faith in the poetry of Itamar Yaoz-Kest1 David C.Jacobson

In 1985, the Hungarian-born Israeli poet Itamar Yaoz-Kest (b. 1934) made a pilgrimage to Vac, Hungary, to visit the grave site of his traditional Jewish forebears, Rabbi David Judah Leib Silberstein and Rabbi Isaiah Silberstein.2 This pilgrimage provided the impetus for a significant new thematic direction in Yaoz-Kest’s poetry, as well as for a transformation of his personal life. In the aftermath of this pilgrimage, Yaoz-Kest began an intensive exploration of religious themes in his poetry, while he increasingly took on the observance of traditional Jewish rituals.3 Raised in an assimilated Jewish family affiliated with the Hungarian Reform Jewish movement known as Neologism,4 in 1944 Yaoz-Kest was deported as a child together with his family to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Having survived the war, he settled first in Budapest, where he undertook the study of Hebrew, and in 1951 he emigrated to Israel. In the years following his arrival in Israel, Yaoz-Kest openly opposed the prevailing negative attitudes of Israelis in the early years of the Israeli state toward diaspora Jews in general and Holocaust survivors in particular,5 and he shared with other Israeli immigrant writers a determination to affirm his diaspora roots.6 By the time he undertook his visit to Hungary in the mid-1980s, it had become increasingly acceptable for Israelis to seek to reconnect with their roots outside of the land of Israel.7 Yaoz-Kest’s pilgrimage to the grave site of his religious forebears, however, turned out to be more than just a nostalgic trip to the land of his birth. It inspired him to reconnect with the religiosity of traditional diaspora Judaism from which he had been separated by his nontraditional upbringing, and imbued him with a sense of obligation to rescue that religiosity by writing about it upon his return to Israel.8 There was much in Yaoz-Kest’s life that prepared him for this turn to religion in his poetry and lifestyle. Even as a child being transported to Bergen-Belsen in a freight car, which he describes as ‘loaded to horrible proportions with Jews who were Orthodox, Neologic, or defenders of the status quo all singing out of despair and out of hope’,9 he sensed the presence of a God-like power beyond human control, ‘a hidden, horrifying hand that decrees all fates, even if its representatives are people wearing uniforms’.10 In the responses of these Holocaust victims he discerned the age-old religious human impulse to plead for a supernatural rescue on the order of the miraculous divine acts of salvation recounted in the sacred texts of the Jewish tradition. Of the songs sung by the Jews in that freight train he writes:

30

Religious Perspectives in Modern Muslim and Jewish Literatures Those songs, which at moments were sung by all, whether they were portions of prayers or secular in nature, all expressed a kind of longing for redemption and for a day of reckoning and vengeance, whether in a concrete or a surrealistic manner. Clearly, as we hoped for liberation it felt like we were hoping for a miracle, while we saw the liberation itself on the threshold of death almost as an event that defied the natural order.11

What led this child to fit this traumatic experience into a traditional religious framework in which human beings were at the mercy of a supernatural divinity to which they turned in prayer? Yaoz-Kest writes that his openness to a religious perspective is the product of a personality trait of being unable to stay focused on the present. ‘I was never capable of remaining in the present moment’, he relates. The present always fled me, and I would retreat to other times in which it was a lot easier for me to live—either in the past or in the future’.12 It is this imaginative bent that led him to consider dimensions of reality beyond that which is immediately observable, including a religious dimension embodied in the traditional Jewish world view that had ceased to play a role in the life of his family. In his post-war years as an adolescent in Hungary, Yaoz-Kest discovered elements of Jewish tradition that allowed the religiosity of the past to penetrate his secular existence in the present. Like so many other modern secular Jews, he became particularly attracted to learning more about the Jewish mystical tradition embodied in the Kabbalah.13 It was his study of Hebrew, however, that did the most to reveal the world of Jewish tradition to him. Having come across an anthology of Hebrew literature in Hungarian translation, he became inspired to begin a serious study of Hebrew and even to try his hand at writing in Hebrew in defiance of the anti-Zionist policy of the communist Hungarian government of that time. As Yaoz-Kest studied Hebrew, first in Hungary and later in Israel, he came to see this language of Jewish sacred texts as a means to gain access to a religious awareness that once played a central role in the life of his forebears. ‘My lessons in the Hebrew language’, he writes, ‘constituted for me an entrance to a previously unknown metaphysical world which nevertheless existed in the subconscious of my family—as it became clear to me later when I encountered the Hebrew writings of my forebears of three and four generations earlier’.14 This use of Hebrew to reconnect with the past is captured well for Yaoz-Kest in a poem by the twentieth-century German-Jewish writer Max Brod which speaks of ‘a kind of mythic penetration of a world that declined ages ago, and with the touch of lips speaking the ancient words, it has, as it were, come to life’.15 This ‘mythic penetration’ of the past became concretely alive for Yaoz-Kest after his immigration to Israel, where he was able to experience at its holy sites ‘the feeling of the cancellation of the flow of time until past and present, as it were, merge together’.16 In addition to the Hebrew of sacred Jewish texts and the historically significant sites of the Holy Land, Yaoz-Kest began to discover in Jewish ritual observance a means to draw on the religiosity of the past to enhance his contemporary existence. Yaoz-Kest’s marriage to his wife Hannah, who was raised in a traditionally observant home, was an important factor in his gaining an appreciation for the power of Jewish ritual. There is no doubt’, he writes, ‘that the fact that I married a religious woman helped me [in my religious quest]’.17

‘Bless each day that passes’ 31 Yaoz-Kest came to believe that traditional Jewish ritual could convey the spiritual insights of the past to modern people, providing them with a capacity for joy, optimism, and meaningfulness that would cure them of the alienation and malaise of modern existence. He found in the observance of sanctified time through traditional Jewish holidays an experience of joy that did not depend on ‘the personal qualities of individuals [nor on their] moods or the changing conditions of their lives’.18 He was drawn to what he considered to be the ‘sober optimism’19 of the siddur, the traditional Jewish prayer book. ‘The search for lasting joy’, he writes, has preoccupied me during all my years as a writer. I began to see in the morning prayer service and in the prayers in general aids to joy created by people who aspired to erect a bridge out of language over the abyss of meaninglessness…. From that point on the siddur began to seem to me to be a book of the human war of optimism in the face of paralyzing nothingness.20 During the first decade after his pilgrimage to Hungary, Yaoz-Kest forged for himself a rather idiosyncratic religious identity which kept him from being able to identify fully with any existing traditional Jewish communities in Israel. He saw his religious situation as different from that of Jews brought up in traditional homes, for they had the advantage of having received from their parents ‘a system of habits’ that protected them from religious doubts.21 Yaoz-Kest could identify more closely with those Jews who, like him, became religiously observant later in life (referred to in Hebrew as ba‘alei teshuvah), ‘[accepting] the “yoke of the commandments”, the proper observance of the Sabbath, strict adherence to the dietary laws, and an active engagement in the prescribed prayer structure’.22 Nevertheless, in contrast to most ba’alei teshuvah, whom he saw as attracted primarily to the social experience of joining an observant community, Yaoz-Kest consid-ered the focus of his turn to tradition to be a search for religious faith. He also could not accept the attempts by most ba‘alei teshuvah to turn their backs on the secular world from which they came in order to immerse themselves fully in traditional Judaism. Unlike them, he was driven to create ‘a synthesis between the values of the world of religious faith and the spiritual achievements of the secular world’.23 Yaoz-Kest has assumed the identity of a ‘neo-religious poet’, which he defines as a writer committed ‘to provide a poetic expression for a world of conflicts, as he makes his way from secularism to religiosity, or more accurately, to a certain kind of religiosity, which includes in the end also the problematic nature of the observance of ritual commandments’.24 In the context of the polarization of the religious and secular camps in contemporary Israeli culture, however, Yaoz-Kest has not readily found acceptance for his atypical approach to secularism and religion.25

The theology of Yaoz-Kest’s neo-religious poetry Yaoz-Kest does not consider the neo-religious poetry he began writing in the mid-1980s to be completely discontinuous from the poetry he had written until that time. ‘For years’, he declares,

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Religious Perspectives in Modern Muslim and Jewish Literatures the realization has been gradually developing in me that the kind of poetry to which I aspire that would provide for my personal needs and create a synthesis of all that I have written until now, is a kind of poetry that reflects an ongoing movement toward Judaism, faith, and religion, together with fulfillment of the commandments.26

Yaoz-Kest’s neo-religious poetry is based on the assumption that a religious worldview is as relevant to contemporary Jews as it was to Jews of the past, because, as he puts it, ‘human existence has remained unchanged throughout the generations’.27 His purpose as a poet, he has come to believe, is to discover in his personal life the connection to religiosity that has always been central to people and ‘express [it] in language that is appropriate for the thought processes and methods of expression of today’.28 Yaoz-Kest has recognized the limitations of the language of the siddur to bring alive for the contemporary Jew the spiritual insights of Judaism. At first, he himself found the traditional prayers to be excessively flowery and not sufficiently varied in style.29 Eventually, however, he saw beyond his alienation from the aesthetic norms of the siddur and began to understand that the language of traditional Jewish prayer can convey a sense of holiness that transcends aesthetic considerations, for, as he declares, ‘in the Hebrew and Aramaic of prayer every dot and tittle is meant to bear holiness’.30 Nevertheless, this appreciation of the spiritual power of the siddur has not obviated for Yaoz-Kest the need to compose alternative poetic works that would convey the nature of his own contemporary spiritual quest. He writes of his role as a neo-religious poet who ‘aspires to erect a kind of imaginary synagogue for which he himself will write all the texts that will be introduced there to be used in the framework of the service’.31 Yaoz-Kest does not want the poems that would serve as the texts for his ‘imaginary synagogue’ to be completely disconnected from traditional forms of prayer. He insists that these poems ‘must be based on the existing siddur, even if only in part’.32 Such poems can be seen as existing ‘at the margins of the siddur’,33 drawing their inspiration from traditional Jewish prayers but seeking to express a very individual, contemporary struggle with issues of faith. They hold out the possibility of the revelation of a ‘transcendent divinity within humanity and in its environment, with every detail in reality serving as a kind of medium for this process [of revelation] (whether it be an object, a voice, a thought, a memory, a dream, and so on)’.34 Although Yaoz-Kest thinks that it is easier for contemporary people to experience the presence of God within their own souls than to affirm belief in a transcendent God who exists beyond their inner consciousness,35 it has been important for Yaoz-Kest to affirm both views of God. His theology draws in part on the works of two writers beyond the pale of traditional Jewish thinking: the excommunicated seventeenth-century Dutch-Jewish thinker Baruch Spinoza and the nineteenth-century German critic of religion Ludwig Feuerbach, combining Spinoza’s notion that ‘all [including human beings] has been created as a means for divine revelation’36 with Feuerbach’s notion of ‘divinity as the projection of the individual soul’.37 The teachings of these two thinkers became the basis for Yaoz-Kest’s assertion that the revelation of God experienced within oneself is only a partial revelation that draws on the transcendent, infinite God beyond our inner consciousness, whose existence is affirmed by Jewish tradition. ‘If everything is divinity according to Spinoza’, he writes,

‘Bless each day that passes’ 33 and all that exists is a means to the revelation of God, that means that the projection [of the individual soul] is also divine, even if its origin, it appears, is in the human being. In the case of the monotheistic religions (which are the religions based on revelation) this projection [of the human soul] is called such names as ‘the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’ and ‘the living God’, but all the terms attributed to the revealed God are only terms for that particular image by which the transcendent, infinite God reveals Himself to humans.38 Whether one can actually affirm the existence of that transcendent, infinite God ultimately comes down to a matter of faith. ‘With that’, he writes, ‘arises the problem of faith in the actual possibility of transcendence for humans in our time…. One cannot prove the existence of worlds beyond the five senses, just as one cannot disprove their existence. Each individual must decide this point based on his personal inclinations’.39 Prayer in Yaoz-Kest’s neo-religious poetry departs in some respects from notions of traditional Jewish prayer. His acceptance of the revelation of God within the individual self could suggest that when one addresses God directly, as so much of traditional Jewish prayer does, one is merely speaking to oneself. Nevertheless, Yaoz-Kest affirms the validity of what he calls this ‘inner monologue’ by comparing it to an imagined dialogue with a deceased loved one: ‘Even if this dialogue, from a secular point of view, is actually an inner monologue—[it is] just as a person may speak with his father and mother who have passed away, and yet their presence is very real’.40 The traditional siddur contains two basic categories of prayer (with many prayers belonging to both categories): prayers of petition and prayers of praise. The God of YaozKest’s poetry, however, is not addressed by the speaker in ways that fit exactly with the full range of these two categories of prayer. It is difficult for the poet to see God as a divinity to which one addresses direct praise or makes specific petitions for the fulfillment of one’s earthly needs. Yaoz-Kest speaks instead of inner-directed ‘contemplative prayer (tefillah hamitbonenet)’41 and of petitionary prayer (tefillah hasho’elet) in which we do not ask God to fulfill all of our desires for health, prosperity, or success, but rather we request only inner enlightenment; more precisely: [we request] the ability to accept fully that which will anyway be granted us.42 It is significant that although he is a Holocaust survivor, Yaoz-Kest’s neo-religious poetry does not deal with the issue of theodicy that has so preoccupied Jewish writers since the end of World War II. The questioning of the God of Israel for not intervening to save the Jewish people during the Holocaust that one finds in much postwar Jewish literature is not a central theological issue for Yaoz-Kest. Although as a child he thought in terms of a God who could intervene in human affairs, as an adult Yaoz-Kest does not believe that ‘God is interested in granting reward and punishment for the deeds of the individual’.43 The true divine reward and punishment, Yaoz-Kest declares, is whether one can establish an emotional attachment to God or not, regardless of circumstances. ‘In other words’, he writes, ‘the reward is the ability to be deeply immersed in the path of religious faith and likewise the spiritual enlightenment that a person can be privileged to receive as a result of this’.44

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God revealed in the human soul ‘Love Poem’ (‘Shir ahavah’, 1987) is one of Yaoz-Kest’s earlier attempts to write a sacred text for the ‘imaginary synagogue’ of modern Jews trying to find their ‘poems at the margins of the siddur’. The speaker seeks to overcome the difficulties he has with a verse (Deut. 6:5) included in the selection of biblical passages known as the Shema, read daily in the traditional Jewish morning and evening services. Love Poem ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart…’ And what if I cannot, and what if I cannot love without touching the form of my love, 5 without the ability to take hold of a physical form? Perhaps without a body to touch I must assemble the bodily form with all my powers of imagination, assemble it out of summer and winter and all the days of my life on earth, assemble it as a man walking on the shore of Tel Aviv in the month of November 10 while darkened rain drops fall on his uncovered head, and he carefully considers how he could assemble from all the elements of his existence on earth a body lovable and divine, as if he’s pouring the foundation for an artful creation? Perhaps he could combine the faces of his father and mother like hardened and softened matter, 15 together with the molecules of his childhood, and shape them in a shapeless manner, and when the assembled body is completed and rises within him, many-faceted and omnipotent then a great light will shine from it, while within it will rise the image and form of love made of the portraits of all that is dear to him, the foundations of his existence, the determinants of his fate, while voices will rise from near and far and from every cemetery 20 in which the bones of his father and mother and all of his kinsmen sleeping in the dust await him, connected by a mysterious genetic code, at the time when the wild November wind bears rain clouds from Kiryat Shaul to the Mount of Olives as if bearing damp-edged air mail letters, 25 the November wind that carries earth-bound rumors from grave to grave while my home stands in the middle, and in me someone is monitoring the voices as if they bore a secret message, while the wind, this cemetery courier, communicates between heaven and earth, outside time and space, yet my brain cells listen for it 30 along with all my blood cells and skin pores and they submit and sing with no voice or echo: And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might, 35 and with all in me that still trembles with expectation.45

‘Bless each day that passes’ 35 The speaker cannot grasp what the Bible means when it calls for the human love of God. Intimate human love involves some form of physical contact between the bodies of the lovers. What could be the analogous experience of a love relationship with the God of Israel who, according to Jewish tradition, never assumes a physical form? Drawing on visual images and voices from his past, the speaker tries to forge within his soul ‘the image and form of love/made of the portraits of all that is dear to him’ (17–18). It is important for Yaoz-Kest to connect this contemporary search for God with those of past generations. Thus, he has the speaker refer to the attempt to assemble an image of God from disparate memories as ma‘aseh merkavah (translated as ‘assemble’ or as ‘assembled body’, 8, 9, 16), the Hebrew term traditionally used to refer to the Jewish mystical interpretation of the divine revelation in the first chapter of Ezekiel. Early in this account of assembling a bodily image of God, the speaker shifts from first person to third person as he describes a man ‘walking on the shore of Tel Aviv in the month of November’ (9) assembling the image of God out of memories of his childhood and his parents (14–15). Does Yaoz-Kest make this change to indicate that it is easier to speak of this most intimate internal imaginative process in a more detached manner, or is he perhaps attempting to present a less subjective, more universal view of this process in order to allow his readers to identify with it? The discovery of God within the human soul, however, does not provide a fully satisfactory way to relate to God. As we have seen, Yaoz-Kest insists that there is more to God than aspects of divinity experienced within the individual. Given Yaoz-Kest’s accounts of how the visit to the cemetery of his rabbinic forebears was the catalyst for his return to traditional Judaism, it is not surprising that the speaker discerns an external manifestation of God’s presence in ghost-like voices that emerge from the cemeteries in which are buried the members of his family. As these voices of past generations, ‘connected by a mysterious genetic code’ (21) travel in the wind ‘from grave to grave’ (25), the speaker (returning to first person) must listen very carefully in order to understand that these voices of the dead past are engaged in a dialogue between earth and heaven, which may still be possible to maintain in his day. Although Yaoz-Kest is not prepared to think in terms of any form of physical intimacy between the speaker and God, there is a physical dimension to this relationship: the smallest elements of the speaker’s body (‘my brain cells…/along with all my blood cells and skin pores’, 29–30) attempt to discern God’s presence, and it is those elements that submit to the love of God. The speaker has come a long way from his radical doubt of the possibility of loving God at the beginning of the poem. Nevertheless, he is not as fully assured of his faith as the biblical verse calls on him to be. To the verse, And you shall love the Lord your God with all/your heart and with all/your soul and with all your might’ (32–4), he adds his own fourth expression: ‘and with all in me that still trembles with expectation’ (35), for his faith has a tentative nature that sometimes can be sustained only by hope.

God beyond the souls imagination In a later poem, ‘Submission’ (‘Mesirat ‘atsmo’, 1990), Yaoz-Kest deals more directly with the problematic nature of conceiving of a God who is primarily the product of the soul’s imagination.

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Religious Perspectives in Modern Muslim and Jewish Literatures Submission

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At first, I evoked You only from within me by means of my desires, thoughts, and imprecise senses to be for me the Creator of heaven and earth, thus when I said a blessing it seemed as if I were blessing myself, until awe of You came upon me from all substances when my inner world opened up and was reflected in all surrounding objects; and now I acknowledge Your sovereignty over all existence from within me and outside of me, from within all essences that lack thought and speech, and yet send overwhelming fear to nerves on edge pleading for an evening respite, and I know that in order to accept Your world completely, I must accept myself without condition, and bless each day that passes, and bless on weekdays and on holidays, individually and in community, and blessing means bending the knees and renouncing the option of flight, and also submitting to a hidden power impelling my deeds; thus when I hear the prayer leader in synagogue say: ‘Bless the Lord, the blessed one!’ in me awakes an expectation to see, if only for a moment, the transformation of the forms of all mundane vessels in joy and absolute humility, to see how all the holy books breathing heavily on the shelves divest themselves of their external forms smelling of glue to become like heavenly bodies to the point of burning with a devouring fire and like them, each page of paper, and like them, each poem on each page, that leads my feet to You as I thoroughly traverse my inner being, as my steps arouse an echo from the ancient past to which all limbs immersed in blood and bodily secretions will listen and acknowledge You and bless You now, for You kept them, from the time of their upbringing, from knowing Your commandments so that they will know the taste of the revelation of Your face, on their own; for the source of faith was not planted in them in the house of their father and mother to their current delight, even though deep within them a challenging voice cries out from time to time: Is it not that the key to faith can be found inserted in the lock of childhood? 46

‘Bless each day that passes’ 37 To remain at the stage of imagining God within one’s own soul, the speaker came to realize, is to be in the ironic position of being the one who created the ‘Creator of heaven and earth’ (4). To bless such a God is tantamount to blessing oneself. It is important, he has concluded, to begin to discern God in the external world by projecting the inner experience of God onto the world beyond (‘when my inner world opened up and was reflected in all surrounding objects’, 8), thereby allowing one to sense God’s presence in the world as a whole (‘until awe of You came upon me from all substances’, 7). This changing perspective has allowed the speaker not only to move beyond self-worship, but also to recognize the interdependence of the self and all that lies beyond the self, which are subject to God’s sovereignty. This acceptance of God’s sovereignty allows for a loving acceptance of both oneself and the world (‘in order to accept Your world completely I must/accept myself without condition’, 14–15) and a prayerful acknowledgment of the goodness of the world (‘and bless each day that passes’, 16). Having reached this new religious awareness, an appropriate setting in which to sense the presence of God beyond oneself is that of communal prayer in the synagogue. When the speaker hears the ritual call to prayer recited in the morning and evening services, ‘Bless the Lord, the blessed one’ (21), before him arises a vision of the holy vessels and prayer books of the synagogue (representing the religiosity of past generations), assuming the same attitude of joy and complete submission to God that he experiences from within. As in ‘Love Poem’, there is a concretely physical dimension to this experience of God, as the speaker’s ‘limbs immersed in blood and bodily secretions’ (34) respond to the echo of tradition heard in the synagogue by acknowledging God. The poem concludes with a consideration of Yaoz-Kest’s preoccupation with having been raised in a non-traditional Jewish family. In these final lines the speaker expresses considerable ambivalence about his past. On the one hand, he declares his appreciation that God had kept him from being an observant Jew throughout most of his life, because his sense of God’s presence comes to him more directly than it would have by means of a religious upbringing. Nevertheless, he hears a nagging counter-voice within him that warns: ‘the key to faith/can be found inserted/in the lock of childhood’ (42–4), a lock which cannot be opened by a person who did not observe the Jewish tradition as a child.

The difficulty of speaking about God Yaoz-Kest explores his struggle with how to convey religious faith by means of language in part one of the poem ‘The Difficulty of Speaking About God’ (‘Hakoshi ledabber ‘al ’elohim’, 1991).

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The Difficulty of Speaking About God 1. All speech about Him is so foreign to this time and place, 5

that the words connected to Him sound perplexed and apologetic,

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and if I wish to acquire a book tied to Him I must adopt unexalted language that is most precise like: Frankfurt edition/photocopied/ printed in 1921;

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and until evening I must pretend that I have completely forgotten His existence, until my evening solitude, until He becomes perceptible like the breath of a sighing person, until He resembles a concrete presence;

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while I yet sit on the porch of my house and my eyes see how He recreates for me the heavens and the earth; and even so I don’t know why my need for Him exhausts my strength and I continue to sit awake; perhaps I fear that lacking Him I’ll not awaken next morning, perhaps I fear my soul will suddenly desire to wander outside my body,

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and even so I say, compelled from within: You, who are a king be, I entreat You, Lord of my fingers’ attempt

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to write these lines, for see, I entreat You, I who remembers his dreams so seldom, ask only for the feeling of joy in longing as if I dreamt of You,

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and the courage to speak openly of You, and not just indirectly.47

Language, the speaker suggests, is not a completely reliable vehicle for the conceptualization of God, whether in the form of inner thoughts or verbal and written expression to others. The traditional vocabulary of the siddur strikes the contemporary mind as a reflec-

‘Bless each day that passes’ 39 tion of perplexing concepts or as an expression of the apologetic defence of outmoded beliefs, and thus at times the speaker can relate to the siddur only as an antiquated curiosity (‘Frankfurt edition/photocopied/printed in 1921’, 12–13). When language fails, the speaker realizes, one must free oneself from the realm of words, putting any notions of God out of one’s mind (‘I must pretend that I have completely forgotten His existence’, 14), and open oneself to a non-verbal, intuitive apprehension of God’s presence (‘my eyes see how He recreates for me the heavens and the earth’, 20). As a result of this process, the speaker is able to recall his dependence on God, and he feels compelled to entreat God to give him the ability to discover how to express the reality of the divine presence in his poetry (‘the courage/to speak openly of You’, 35–6). In part two of the poem, Yaoz-Kest makes clear that if one does not follow the nonverbal, intuitive approach to apprehending God’s presence, but rather consciously attempts to develop a conception of God in one’s mind, one runs the risk of experiencing the absence of God. As the speaker declares, the more he thinks of God the more he loses the sense of His presence:

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2. At times the more I think of You the more I lose You, as if I lost awareness and I only look before me,

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as on the day I travelled along the Judean desert and I said: You indeed are like an exalted mountain sitting with its back to me, its head hunched between its shoulders,

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that is what I said as I travelled, a mountain: every time I encircle it I hope to see its front, but only ascending and descending paths are before me with no certainty of the holy or the profane and with no certainty of the place itself,

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even though I keep bending over from time to time and crumble clods of earth between my fingers, and listen to voices within me or listen to voices above me,

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yet how difficult is the effort to distinguish between the revealed and the hidden, as if I live a double life until I am completely spent,

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yes at times the more I think of You the more the thoughts run out of me, and I lose You altogether.48

The absence of God that results from the conscious effort to conceive of God in one’s mind reminds the speaker that he once thought of God as being like a tall mountain in the Judean desert personified as turned inward and incommunicative, ‘sitting with its back to me,/its head hunched between its shoulders’ (47–8). The speakers in ‘Love Poem’ and ‘Submission’ could discern manifestations of God’s presence in the world outside of themselves. In contrast, the speaker here relates that although he ‘listen[s] to voices within me/or/… above me’ (57–9), he cannot be sure how to discover the holy in his mundane existence (‘with no certainty of/the holy or the profane’, 52–3). The problem of thinking about God presented in this part of the poem is never resolved. If anything, it seems to become more intractable. Whereas this part of the poem began with the words: ‘the more I think of You/ the more I lose You’ (39–40), it concludes with a much more desperate vision: ‘the more I think of You/the more the thoughts run out of me,/and I lose You altogether’ (65–7).

Prayer and ritual In traditional Judaism, as in other religious traditions, one can sense God’s presence not only by means of the words of prayer, but also by means of rituals performed at the time of prayer. We have considered the difficulty Yaoz-Kest had in finding a true expression of his struggle for religious faith in the words of the traditional siddur, even as he was developing an appreciation for the spiritual power of the language of traditional Jewish prayer. As Yaoz-Kest sought to relate to God by means of rituals performed at the time of prayer, one particular ritual object, tefillin (phylacteries) proved to be most problematic. Tefillin consist of two small black boxes that contain words of Scripture handwritten on parchment. Traditionally, these boxes are tied by leather straps to a Jewish male adult’s left arm and head and worn during the weekday morning service. Yaoz-Kest did not grow up with this ritual and reports, in fact, that the first time he ever saw someone put on tefillin was when at the age of about twenty he saw his religious father-in-law do so.49 When he decided in his fifties to incorporate this ritual in his daily prayer routine, the strangeness of tefillin proved to be a major barrier. In one poem the speaker expresses the difficulty of putting on tefillin by referring to it in the title as ‘A Commandment That Comes Only in a Dream’ (‘Mitsvah haba’ah rak bahalom’).50 In the poem ‘My Left Arm’ (‘Yad semol shelli’) the speaker seeks to come to terms with the anxiety he experiences as he tries to perform this unfamiliar ritual:

‘Bless each day that passes’ 41 My Left Arm

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Why, my arm, do you fear the black straps being placed at last on the soft rheumatic flesh with seven bindings and three more? Why do you fear contact with words of eternal love, deserts, and faith, and yes, the need to stand each day before your forebears as a memorial to them, as if you have no contact with them anyway as your pen writes of your years that turned to nothing? What’s the matter, my left arm, bearing fingers, attracting with great effort the beating of the fluttering, nervous heart within my chest, while the body is nothing less than a throne for lofty desires? Why do you fear betrothal to your Maker, while He plagues you even so, attracting and repelling? As if the words enclosed in the box at the end of the straps are nothing other than night insects that ceased their buzzing for a time, as if the man who adorned himself in these black straps, who passed on to the other world, bore this box with all the sorrowful words of his illness, and they’re just waiting for their time to spring forth with a rumbling of malicious intentions, that’s what I say to myself in vain! So, why do you fear these entangled, rustling straps, these stripes of the hide of an animal, that died so that it could, unknowingly, serve its Lord by means of kosher parchment trembling before the fear of death while still in life. So, again I ask, why do you fear these tefillin straps at the end of which is a ‘house’, a sanctuary for a piece of parchment: ancient portions all about love. And so, I ask, what is the matter my soul, for you’re only being asked to teach this fearful left arm to adjust itself to putting on tefillin and to instruct this stuttering mouth, to open

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40

and declare: ‘I will betroth you to me forever’. So, why do you still fear, my soul, and look at me as if you don’t believe? For you have already crossed all the borders of fear, and all the barriers to faith 45 whose smell is like the smell of animal hide before it’s cured for the purposes of heaven!51 The speaker asks a series of questions of his left arm, on which he has ‘at last’ resolved to place the tefillin. It is significant that in the first question to his arm the speaker refers to the act of putting on tefillin in the passive voice: ‘the black straps being placed’ (2), as if he does not yet wish to identify as the agent of this action. His distance from the tefillin is also conveyed by the fact that he delays calling them by their name until line 31. Throughout most of the poem they are not yet religiously sanctified ritual objects that accompany prayer, but rather boxes, straps, and parchment with no inherent meaning. As he asks his left arm each question, the speaker in effect reveals a reason why he is so hesitant to put on the tefillin. This creates a tone of irony in which the speaker assumes the pose of one who cannot understand why he hesitates, even while he makes it clear that there is good reason to hesitate. This technique allows him to be on both sides of the argument: as a Jew aspiring to observe tradition he cannot understand why he wouldn’t do so; as a Jew who has come to the observance of tradition late in life, he knows very well why this act is so difficult. In the first question when he describes the flesh of the arm as ‘soft’ and ‘rheumatic’ (3) he suggests why the arm would not want to be bound inflexibly by the leather straps of the tefillin. The next question begins with what the speaker would expect to be a positive reason for the arm to willingly accept the tefillin’. the words contained in the tefillin refer to ‘eternal love’ and ‘faith’ that persist even in life-threatening ‘deserts’ (7). Nevertheless, putting on tefillin routinizes the speaker’s connection to the past (‘the need/to stand each day before your forebears as a memorial to them’, 7–8). The speaker appears to resent the fact that from now on this ritual will connect him to the past, when he in fact already has a less regularized and more creative means to make that connection through his poetry (‘as if you have no contact with them anyway as your pen/writes of your years’, 9–10). Alluding to biblical verses that imagine a betrothal between God and the people of Israel (Hosea 2:21–2), recited at the final stage of putting on tefillin, the speaker again suggests how positive this act should be: it will affirm the connection between himself and God (‘Why do you fear betrothal to your Maker’, 14). Yet, God Himself, it would appear, makes that connection difficult by afflicting the speaker with a profound ambivalence (‘attacting and repelling’, 16). The question continues with the suggestion that the arm perceives the words inside the tefillin not as the affirmation of the covenant between God and Israel, but rather as the bearer of frighteningly negative images: insects and the words of sorrow of the sick man who used to own those tefillin, while the straps are made of animal hide, which calls to mind their source in a dead animal. But with line 31 the tone of the poem shifts. The questions no longer suggest reasons to hesitate to put on the tefillin, and as mentioned above the speaker first uses the term tefillin in this line. In the final question to his left arm, the speaker refers to the box to which the strap is attached, as ‘a “house”/a sanctuary for a piece of parchment: ancient portions

‘Bless each day that passes’ 43 all about love’ (32–3). Then the speaker appeals to his soul, begging it to instruct his arm and mouth to participate in the gestures and words that accompany this ritual act. He wonders why his soul cannot accept this act, for he firmly believes that he has learned how to transcend all of his fears and all of his religious doubts. The poem concludes by associating the process of arriving at religious faith with the process whereby an animal hide is transformed into a ritual object that will serve a spiritual purpose (‘cured for the purposes of heaven’, 45). Thus, the ritual of tefillin assumes a personal meaning for the speaker who sees in it a model for the kind of spiritual purification he seeks in his own life.

Observance of ritual is no guarantee of faith Although, as we discussed earlier, Yaoz-Kest did come to appreciate the value of traditional Jewish ritual in fostering religious faith, he also learned that ritual observance did not provide a bulwark against religious doubts. In the poem ‘Changing Relations’ (‘Yehasim mishtanim’), although the speaker is fully immersed in religious observance, he still wavers in his faith: Changing Relations I had come to believe that You would no more be so far from me; yet now that I have learned the rules of Your house, You place a finger on Your lips as a sign to be quiet. 5

The trees sway by the street in expectation of the coming summer and desire quickens the atoms in what my eyes perceive; why, then, do You demand my silence, when on the porch the geranium raises its contemplative head and peeks into the rooms 10 with the quivering joy of Creation, as I sit and read, and suddenly You blow on me a cold wind from the thicket of the darkening plants and empty my body of heavenly signs. Is the power of faith so weak within me? 15 But perhaps You are testing me again and again, even now in my fifty-ninth year on this earth beneath me, when the evening wind shakes the courtyard of Your house, alternately revealed and hidden, the one I built from thoughts devoid of waking matter.52 The speaker had been convinced that having ‘learned the rules’ of God’s house (3), that is having mastered the ritual obligations of a traditional Jew, he would no longer experience the absence of God. Instead, he sees God signalling to him to expect silence (4, 7). This divine silence is particularly puzzling, because it contrasts so starkly with the dynamic expression of nature: ‘the trees sway by the street in expectation of the coming summer/

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and desire quickens the atoms in what my eyes perceive’ (5–6), and the geranium plant is like a thoughtful person full of curiosity and joy in response to Creation (8–10). When a cold wind blows, the speaker feels even more strongly that God is denying him any way to connect to divinity (12–13). Why has God distanced himself? Why can His presence not even be sensed in nature? ‘Is the power of faith so weak within me?’ (14), the speaker asks. Is this a divine test of his faith? The title of the poem, ‘Changing Relations’, may, however, hold out the hope that this absence of God is really part of a cycle of changing relations between the speaker and God, and that if he can remain patient, he will be rewarded with a restoration of the sense of God’s presence once again.

The constructive powers of the imagination ‘The mind’s ability to create images and characterizations, and imaginatively to weld them together into a unified focus for attention, contemplation, devotion, or address’, writes Gordon Kaufman, is at work in the humblest believer’s prayers as well as in the most sophisticated philosopher’s speculations. In this respect all speech to and about God, and all ‘experience of God’, is made possible by and is a function of the constructive powers of the imagination.53 In his neo-religious poetry Yaoz-Kest does indeed apply the powers of his imagination to evoke images of God for his readers to contemplate. He recognizes that despite his ambivalent relationship to the language of traditional Jewish prayer (‘Love Poem’), as well as to the practice of traditional Jewish rituals associated with prayer (‘My Left Arm’), the traditional forms of Jewish prayer in which truths about God were once transmitted are relevant to present human life. The biblical injunction to love God in the verses of the Shema (‘Love Poem’) and the traditional call to prayer, ‘Bless the Lord, the blessed one’ (‘Submission’), for example, can connect him on some level to the faith of his forebears. If traditional prayer does not always speak to his contemporaries it is not, Yaoz-Kest believes, because it is no longer possible to sense God’s presence. It is rather because a new language of prayer must be forged to help us discover God in sources that are potentially available to us: the spiritual insights of our forebears, the recollection of affirming experiences from childhood, ritual practice and prayer, holy sites, and the beauties of nature. Ultimately, this search for God leads to a willingness to submit to a power beyond ourselves, and thereby to accept ourselves and our world and affirm the worth of human existence. Much of the discovery of God takes place within individual consciousness, but it cannot stop there. We must remain aware that the God discovered within us is present even in the mundane surroundings in which we live. For many of Yaoz-Kest’s contemporaries the inability to sense God’s presence has led to an agnostic or atheistic position. In contrast, when he senses God’s absence, he still believes that God exists, but he attributes this absence to the inadequacy of human thought and speech to fully grasp God (‘The Difficulty of Speaking About God’) or to the fact that it is God’s nature to sometimes distance Himself from us (‘Changing Relations’). Although

‘Bless each day that passes’ 45 this absence of God is reflected often in traditional Jewish texts, it is particularly disturbing to anyone who has hoped that by making a commitment as an adult to accept the yoke of the commandments, one’s religious doubts will never recur (‘Changing Relations’). Despite the fleeting nature of God’s presence, faith in His existence is for Yaoz-Kest the only viable answer to all the terrors of human existence that, in the words of the poem ‘Submission’, ‘send overwhelming fear/to nerves on edge pleading for an evening respite’.

Notes 1 2

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Eitamr kastz oz—shir ahava/yad smohel sheli/mesirat azmo/hakoshi l’edaber eim elohim/ yahasim mistanim ©Yaoz-Kest and Acum. David Judah Leib Silberstein (d. 1884) and his son Isaiah Silberstein (1857–1930) each held the position of rabbi of the Orthodox Jewish community of Vac. Isaiah’s son, Leib Silberstein, also held that position until the community was deported by the Nazis in 1944. Presumably, Leib Silberstein’s place of burial is unknown. Before assuming the rabbinical post in Vac, David Judah Leib had moved with his family to Jerusalem, where they lived and Isaiah spent his childhood, after which they returned to Hungary. Both David Judah Leib and Isaiah were accomplished rabbinical scholars. In his day, Isaiah Silberstein was one of the best known rabbis in Hungary, both because of his erudition and the miracles which he was said to have performed. See Moshe Shamir, ‘Du-siah meshorerim: Itamar Yaoz-Kest-Reuven Ben Yosef, Nativ 6 (65) (1998): p. 84; the introduction by Hannah Yaoz to Itamar Yaoz-Kest, ‘Oleh bahar (Tel Aviv: Eked, 1998), pp. 3–4; Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter, 1972), Vol.14, pp. 1535–1536 and Vol.16, p. 51. Both the poet himself and the literary scholar and wife of the poet, Hannah Yaoz, write of this pilgrimage as a central turning point in the poetic and personal identity of the poet, even while these changes had roots in earlier developments in his life. See the introduction by Hannah Yaoz to the collection of Yaoz-Kest’s poetry, ‘Oleh bahar, 3–4, and Ittamar Yaoz-Kest, Kavvim le’ars po’etikah yehudit ne’o-dattit (Tel Aviv: Sefirah, 1989), p. 7. Yaoz-Kest’s turn to religion on a personal and literary level is documented in collections of essays and poetry he published during the decade following his fateful visit to Hungary in 1985: Le’umiyyut vetrans-hilloniyyut basifrut hayisra’elit (Tel Aviv: Sefirah, 1986); Tsinorot molikhei ’esh (Tel Aviv: Eked, 1986); Kavvim le’ars po’etikah yehudit ne’o dattit; Yihudim ‘alei ‘adamot: shirim beshulei hasiddur (Tel Aviv: Eked, 1990); Zimmun (Tel Aviv: Sefirah, 1992); Shiv‘ah simmanei keshirah (Tel Aviv: Eked, 1994); Utopyah uveit hamikdash le’or hashirah ha‘ivrit umetsi’ut yamenu; Lemargelot hahar (Tel Aviv: Sefirah, 1995). For discussions of this period of Yaoz-Kest’s development see: Avraham Blatt, ‘Siddur hatefillah kemusa’ po’eti’, Moznayim 64 (6–7) (1990): pp. 71–2; Yaira Genosar, ‘Hapahad hazak mitefillah’, Itton 77 (130) (1990): pp. 10, 39; Shalom Ratzbi, ‘He‘avar, hahoveh vetikvat he‘atid’, Itton 77 (130) (1990): pp. 11, 39; Esther Vitkun, ‘Havidduy hanaki mikol sigim’, Moznayim 65 (6) (1991): pp. 33–5; Yaarah Ben-David, ‘Mehavayyah hatsuyah ’el ha’emunah’, Moznayim 67 (4–5) (1993): pp. 87–8; Shalom Ratzbi, ‘Ha’emunah noset betokhah ‘et hasafek’, Itton 77 (177) (1994): pp. 16–18; Esther Zilber Vitkun, ‘Behippus ‘ahar hehag ha’avud uma’avak lehahalato shel koah ‘elyon ‘al hametsi’ut ha’ishit’, Moznayim 69 (4) (1995): pp. 52–4; Avraham Blatt, ‘Hatefillah vehapo’etikah’, Mabua lytsirah dattit basifrut, bahevrah uvamahshavah 28 (1996): pp. 79–88. Moshe Shamir, ‘Du-siah meshorerim, pp. 84–91.

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4

See Encylopaedia Judaica, Vol. 12, pp. 952–4. Yaoz-Kest reports that the family celebrated both Hanukkah and Christmas and that the Yiddish language was despised in his household. See the interview of Itamar Yaoz-Kest in Siah meshorerim: ‘al ‘atsmam ve‘al ketivatam, ed. Yaakov Besser (Tel Aviv: Eked, 1971), pp. 118–19. Yaoz-Kest recalls a very negative assessment by the Israeli poet Ori Bernstein of his collection of poetry, Nof be’ashan:pirkei Bergen Belsen (1961), in which he sees reflected the fact that ‘in effect I represented all that was hated here [in Israel], having come from the Holocaust’. He also remembers his gym teacher at school calling him by the negative epithet used by some Israelis at the time to refer to Holocaust survivors, sabbon (soap), which associated them with the belief that the fat of Holocaust victims was used by the Nazis to make soap. See Moshe Shamir, ‘Dusiah meshorerim’, pp. 87–8. Avraham Blatt writes of a circle of writers known as du-shoresh (doubly rooted), with which Yaoz-Kest was associated. This circle included Ya’akov Besser, Reuven Ben Yosef, Shimon Ballas, and Manfred Winkler. See Avraham Blatt, ‘Siddur hatefillah kemusa po’eti’, p. 71. Aharon Appelfeld is another prominent diaspora-born Israeli writer who, like Yaoz-Kest, was a child in the Holocaust and has maintained an ongoing relationship to his diaspora past. Itamar Yaoz-Kest, Kavvim le’ars-po’etikah, p. 14. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 6. The translations of all prose and poetry passages by Yaoz-Kest in this article are mine. Ibid. Ibid. Moshe Shamir, ‘Du-siah meshorerim’, p. 90. Yaoz-Kest associates his interest in mysticism with a strong interest in the occult in his family when he was a child in the pre-war years. Siah meshorerim, ed. Yaakov Besser, pp. 117–18. Itamar Yaoz-Kest, Kavvim le’ ars-po’ etikah, p. 6 Ibid. Ibid., p. 9. Moshe Shamir, ‘Du-siah meshorerim’, p. 90. Itamar Yaoz-Kest, Kavvim le’ ars-po’ etikah, p. 10. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., pp. 28–9. Itamar Yaoz-Kest, Zimmun, p. 41. Ibid., p. 40. Ibid., Itamar Yaoz-Kest, Kavvim le’ ars-po’ etikah, p. 52. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid. Ibid, p. 52. Ibid. He uses this term in the subtitle of his collection, Yihudim ‘alei-’adamot. Itamar Yaoz-Kest, Kavvim le’ars-po’etikah, p. 53.

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7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

‘Bless each day that passes’ 47 35 Itamar Yaoz-Kest, Zimmun, p. 42. 36 Ibid., p. 41. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid, p. 42. 39 Ibid. Yaoz-Kest’s theological formulations also draw in part on the notion put forth by the Jewish thinker Baruch Felix Weltsch (1884–1964) that God’s presence in the world comes about through the efforts of human beings to develop an inner faith. This internal revelation of God, however, is only partial: it involves one aspect of the transcendent God whose being is beyond human perception. Yaoz-Kest compares this with how the Hassidic master the Maggid of Mezrich interpreted the traditional expression ‘Know what is above you’ (da mah shelema‘lah mimekha) as ‘Know that all that is above you is from within you (da shekol mah shelema‘lah hakol hu mimekha). See Itamar Yaoz-Kest, Kavvim le’ ars-po’etikah, pp. 24–5. 40 Yaoz-Kest, Kavvim le’ars-po’etikah, p. 25. 41 Ibid., p. 20. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid, p. 41. 44 Ibid 45 The poem was published without a title in Yaoz-Kest, Kavvim le’ars-po’etikah, pp. 2–3. It was reprinted in Yihudim ‘alei ’adamot 8–9 under the title ‘Love Poem’ (Shir ‘ahavah). 46 Yaoz-Kest, Yihudim ‘alei ’adamot, pp. 92–3. 47 Yaoz-Kest, Zimmun, pp. 28–9. 48 Ibid., pp. 30–1. 49 Moshe Shamir, ‘Du-siah meshorerim’, p. 90. 50 Yaoz-Kest, Tsinorot molikhei ’esh, pp. 54–5. 51 Yaoz-Kest, Yihuddim ‘alei ’adamot (1990), pp. 10–11. 52 Yaoz-Kest, Shiv‘ah simanei keshirah, p. 6. 53 Gordon D.Kaufman, The Theological Imagination: Constructing the Concept of God (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981), p. 22.

Bibliography Ben-David, Yaarah, ‘Mehavayyah hatsuyah ’el ha’emunah, Moznayim 67 (4–5) (1993). Besser, Yaakov (ed.), Siah meshorerim: ‘al ‘atsmam ve‘al ketivatam, Tel Aviv: Eked, 1971. Blatt, Avraham, ‘Siddur hatefillah kemusa po’eti’, Moznayim 64 (6–7) (1990). ——‘Hatefillah vehapo’etikah’, Mabua lytsirah dattit basifrut, bahevrah uvamahshavah 28 (1996). Genosar, Yaira, ‘Hapahad hazak mitefillah’, Itton 77 (130) (1990). Ratzbi, Shalom, ‘He‘avar, hahoveh vetikvat he‘atid’, Itton 77 (130) (1990). ——‘Ha’emunah nose’t betokhah ’et hasafek’, Itton 77 (177) (1994). Shamir, Moshe, ‘Du-Siah meshorerim: Itamar Yaoz-Kest-Reuven Ben Yosef’, Nativ 6 (65) (1998). Vitkun, Esther Zilber, ‘Behippus ’ahar hehag ha’avud uma’avak lehahalato shel koah ‘elyon ‘al hametsi’ut ha’ishit’, Moznayim 69 (4) (1995). ——‘Havidduy hanaki mikol sigim’, Moznayim 65 (6) (1991). Yaoz-Kest, Itamar, ‘Oleh bahar, Tel Aviv: Eked, 1998. ——Kavvim le’ars po’ etikah yehudit ne’o-dattit, Tel Aviv: Sefirah, 1989. ——Le’umiyyut vetrans-hilloniyyut basifrut hayisra’elit, Tel Aviv: Sefirah, 1986. ——Tsinorot molikhei ‘esh, Tel Aviv: Eked, 1986. ——Kavvim le’ars po’etikah yehudit ne’o dattit, Tel Aviv: Sefirah, 1989. ——Yihudim ‘alei ‘adamot: shirim beshulei hasiddur, Tel Aviv: Eked, 1990.

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——Zimmun, Tel Aviv: Sefirah, 1992. ——Shiv‘ah simmanei keshirah, Tel Aviv: Eked, 1994. ——Utopyah uveit hamikdash le’or hashirah ha‘ivrit umetsi’ut yamenu; Lemargelot hahar, Tel Aviv: Sefirah, 1995.

3 PATHS TO GOD WITHIN THE POET Necip Fazıl Kısakürek (1904–83) and his mystical poetry B.Babür Turna

Turkey has been undergoing a process of modernization and westernization for more than two hundred years, and not surprisingly a cultural and intellectual response to these concepts and their consequences has also long existed. When the Republic was established and its institutions applied the project of modernization and Westernization as a political issue, its opponents similarly began to respond by using political means. ‘Westernization’ was not an invention of the Republic, as the last two hundred years of the Ottoman Empire had witnessed struggles and discussions about the necessity for modernization. However, while the Republican state was trying to put an end to discussions on the subject, a response re-emerged on a social and cultural basis. The concept of Westernization was defined or described through a series of terms such as ‘reason’, ‘science’, ‘technology’, ‘progress’, and ‘well-being’. In the meantime, the other side preferred concepts referring to ‘the nonEuropean’ such as ‘East’, ‘tradition’, ‘past’, ‘religion’, and ‘morality’. The dramatic influence of modernizing ideologies shaped the course of literature and literary criticism, and the response began to be formulated with references to Islamic principles, notions and history. This movement laid a solid foundation for the defence of traditional ideas against Westernization. Its supporters inevitably became ‘traditionalist’ by nature, that is, concerned with everything related to tradition. Always bearing in mind the golden days of a distant but aesthetically brilliant past, they have taken advantage of twentieth-century Turkey’s rich cultural heritage consisting of a combination of Islamic and Ottoman elements. In the history of Islam, tasavvuf has been a major source of inspiration for those desiring ways of reaching God other than the ones provided by orthodoxy. After having accepted the unfathomable and ineffable nature of the divine essence, mystics in search of God are looking for experiences which are out of the ordinary. Mystical experience is rooted in the pure intuition that transcends any ordinary knowledge gained through the senses.1 Not surprisingly, poetry has been a favorite medium for mystics to express their extraordinary, and sometimes even offensive, views on and experience of God. Against this background, modern Turkish poetry has extensively resorted to mystical themes that can be traced in very many modern works, reflecting the uneasy relation between the poet and his material world. However, it is difficult to make a distinction between modern ‘Islamist poets’ and those who use religious symbols and metaphors to create a non-religious ‘mystical’ substance. Use of mystical themes without a religious basis, or religious content without mystical themes, may be found in a given poem, and in

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this case no conclusions can be drawn unless a comprehensive study of the poet’s personality and private life is made. This is the reason why N.F.Kısakürek has been selected for this study. As a famous poet and fervent Islamist activist, Necip Fazıl Kısakürek (1904–83) left hundreds of pages of fictional and non-fictional writing, interviews, recorded speeches and other materials documenting his life, beliefs and opinions in great detail.2 In addition, he is one of the best examples of such a complex subject, since his works perfectly combine different perceptions of mystical poetry with and without a religious basis during the different stages of his life. Kısakürek began writing on mystical themes which he simply used in an ‘artificial’ fashion. That is to say, his early poetry showed a tendency to explore mystical themes of Islam, but he approached mystical themes or figures ‘historically’. In general his early poems mention well-known figures such as Yunus Emre, a twelfth-century Anatolian mystic, and Mansur al-Hallaj, another important mystic who was killed in 922 in Baghdad; or they refer to certain essentials of mysticism such as nothingness, the immortal Beloved, and sacred beauty.3 Later, his poetry lost its previous ‘Eastern’ manner and became influenced by a completely new perception and understanding of art and artistry. This involved treating modern and, to some extent, metaphysical themes of Western origin. Finally, he concluded the adventure of authorship with his definite turn toward religious belief and matured his poetry, considering the act of writing as both a mystical experience and a purified description of it. There is no doubt that Kısakürek is the most significant name among the poets from the early years of the Republican era to mention in connection with religious themes.4 Praised by almost all the recent poets with similar tendencies, he has been recognized by his followers as providing the ideal example of how to deal with mystical themes. His life witnessed two radical transitions that dramatically affected his inner and social world. He was only nineteen years old when he witnessed the end of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of the Turkish Republic. Undoubtedly in the view of Kısakürek and all the poets who were his contemporaries, this historic change provided the coming generation with new ideas, ideals and methods. The second change in Kısakürek’s life was purely personal. Following thirty years of psychological crises, depressions and hesitations, he unexpectedly decided to devote himself to the religion of which he had been unaware during his adolescence. After meeting a famous sheikh of the time in Istanbul, he voluntarily became his mürid (disciple). However, Kısakürek never became a Sufi poet in the strict sense of the term. Always concerned with contemporary events and being a zealously active defender and propagandist of Islam, he was rather a man of action striving on many fronts for the sake of Islam—as a poet, novelist, playwright, journalist, orator and historian. Kısakürek’s schooling was not regular. He was moved from a French school to an American school, and then to a Turkish one. After having received a Western-style education at many different institutions during his childhood and youth, he was accepted by Darülfünun, the most important institution of the time (under the Republic it was converted into Istanbul University) and studied philosophy there before going to Paris. He worked with Professor M.Şekip Tunç, a professor well-known for his studies on and translations from Bergson and Freud. The new regime in Turkey was one year old when Kısakürek, because of his talent, was chosen to be sent to France on a government scholarship as part

Paths to God within the poet 51 of the wide project for educating young people that the young Republic needed. He went to Paris, but returned to Istanbul without finishing his studies. Paris, the ‘nightmarish city’5 for Kısakürek, became the first disappointment connected with Western civilization. The Paris years ‘illustrated a picture of a dream being burnt’ for the young man in search of his own personality.6 The next ten years were the most painful period of Kısakürek’s life. In the meantime, he devoted himself to writing poems in which a pessimistic, even morbid atmosphere dominated. Such a tone was not uncommon among his contemporaries. The French poetry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had deeply influenced Turkish literati, and the fact that France and the French language continued to serve the new Republic as the major gate to the Western world was one of the most significant parts of the late Ottoman legacy in Turkey. Before having had his early Western-style education in Istanbul and then his Paris experience, Kısakürek had already become acquainted with Western literature, which inspired him to take part in this world. Years later, he reflected on his early and unusually strong interest in reading during his childhood and regarded the main reason for the growing negative mood in his mind as the result of the lack of any guidance or limitation: A child of ten reading La Dame aux Comélias was no different from a new-born baby eating yalanciι dolma’.7 This eagerness, therefore, resulted in a ‘sick sentimentality, a painfully acute imagination, and a dreadful fear’.8 In fact, he obviously gained an awareness of self due to his response to what he read during his childhood. Not a complete awareness, and yet dependent on ambiguous memories and illusions, this early step to recognizing the self established a background for a future poet. Kısakürek realized the existence of ‘the self within him very early through what he called ‘sick sentimentality’ and ‘painful imagination’, and this period revealed a bitter awareness which sharply cut the poet off from the rest of the world. Later, it came to his attention that he was doomed to be unreachably alone, separate and different in the rest of his life: No one will ever put a gravestone for me when I die I am cursing even myself.9 (From The Vagabond’, 1924) This belief obviously played a major part in creating his own universe basically composed of profound fears related to imaginary, unknown people and unspecifiable places. In fact, these unfamiliar objects and places are strongly connected to the world that the poet knows. The poet has to be alone in an area with specific features and conditions, such as deserted streets, empty rooms, cemeteries, places where no single human being lives or inhabits anymore, in order to get to his unnatural world. The young man’s awareness that he had no place among other people in the ordinary world forced him to seek a more suitable place to live, whether unreal or not. This constitutes the foundations of Kısakürek’s mystical world:

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Religious Perspectives in Modern Muslim and Jewish Literatures In my room fairies sleep every night, From the deep come long breaths. A burning candle dreams through the window Like a patient’s pulse are the sounds. The ceiling moves down and up, Fingers get smaller and bigger. My garment hanging on the nail comes to life again Another corpse within is disguised.10

[…]

(From ‘Midnight’, 1925) It is pity burns in those narrow rooms In the smoky lamps, in the smoky lamps, A reflection lingers of faces known In the misty glass, in the misty glass, And the shuffling slippers tap secret things On the dingy floors, on the dingy floors, In the naked walls throbs the pulse of pain In the wounds of nails, in the wounds of nails, Weep for those who die without voice or friend In hotel rooms, in hotel rooms.11 (From ‘Hotel Rooms’, 1927)

What Kısakürek found (and wished to find) in this world was a refuge whose unreality served as a barrier to protect ‘the self from those that might be a source of fear. In the meantime, being behind the barrier is not a simple voluntary captivity, but perhaps the only means for the poet to communicate with the outer world, to voice his fears, to express his despair, or just to scream. In doing this, the poet also finds the possibility of illustrating the wicked, frightening, depressing world by showing his intimacy with and interest in fearsome objects, places or situations: The scattered clothes are a strangled man On the broken chairs, on the broken chairs.12 (From ‘Hotel Rooms’, 1927) The dead cry out from their cemeteries Travelers! Sit here on our stones.13 (From The Dead’, 1935)

Paths to God within the poet 53 […] An instant hanging on his drooping lip atremble. Clearly he went of a sudden without a struggle This is my own death, this is death for me. When mine has come, this is how it will be.14 (From The Corpse’s Room’, 1925) ‘Sidewalks’ is much more than a picture of a young poet wandering around the dark streets. When he is walking on the sidewalks, he, who has left his safe (imaginary) world for an unspecified period of time, is a stranger to that fearful street located in the real world. Houses that should represent the safest place seem to be dangerous monsters, and ‘Sidewalks’ is the result of his restless attempts to distinguish what is familiar and friendly from what is not: Drop by drop a terror collects in me At the head of every street the demons wait The houses fix their gaze, dark black and great, On me, like blind men with their eyes ripped free.15 (From ‘Sidewalks’, 1927) In most of his early works, Kısakürek needs to identify with something from the real world in order to remind him of his own world. This act at the same time includes an implicit reminder to the man who does not think about the meaningless life he has been living. Even if the reader is not ready to accept the poet’s unreal world, Kısakürek does not hesitate to throw open its gates and disturb him. However, Kısakürek’s reserved behavior and his focus on his isolated position vis-àvis the real world are perfectly in accordance with the writings of most of his contemporaries.16 The world in the 1920s and 1930s did not have time to recover from the Great War. By that time, modern man in frustration had already lost his faith in the promises and miracles which could be suggested by any religious, philosophical or mystical source. The poet’s almost obsessive concentration on fear, depression, death and dying reflects a concern similar to that of the later Existentialists, who were to attribute a function of such importance to angoisse.17 Kısakürek and most of his contemporaries, in accordance with the Republican ideals of the recently established Turkey, shared this response, which was firmly ‘European’ by nature, both to the other ‘side’ or ‘trend’ whose principles and aims had a passionately nationalistic, local and non-European origin, and to the Marxists with their ideology and internationalism. The pessimistic mood in the poetry of Kısakürek and his contemporaries came to reflect the dissatisfaction with the expectation of ‘golden days to come’. By contrast, Kısakürek successfully manages to combine the bitterness evoked by his self-awareness and the bleakness coming from the outer world. The resulting combination is a sort of dark underworld which one cannot easily perceive or gain access to. However, this place is not fully detached from a supreme deity, since it contains traces, though on a minimal and unidentifiable level, which might convey to the reader an idea of a transcendental existence domi-

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nating the poet’s chaotic world. In fact, there is no one else there except the poet and this supreme entity. Kısakürek’s studies of philosophy were mainly concentrated on Bergson. According to Bergson, the nature of the material world does not change, even if unity is achieved between consciousness and things. Human consciousness recognizes the things around it and encodes them during the inspirational process of identification. This process is an attempt to rediscover those things by unveiling their hidden reality far beyond their material form. As stated by O.Okay, Kısakürek’s works reveal a mental affinity with the material world:18 sidewalks, rooms, windows, curtains, mirrors, and candles. His delicate, exhaustive and to some extent obsessive use of objects serves to penetrate beyond the reality of everyday routine so that one can feel the possibility of another reality. This is where Kısakürek’s universe begins. Although his poetry of this period portrays a mystical experience that its author had somewhere, and shares it with the reader, it will not promise any amelioration or purification in the religious sense of the term, either to the reader or to the author. His mystical experience is not a sacred act but a non-religious process in which an exchange of information occurs. Under the influence of nineteenth-century European poets Kısakürek explores the tragic fate of man as his main theme in this stage of his career as a poet.19 His use of objects taken from the material world leads the reader to an unknown and inner world where the poet represents himself as the only and essential entity inescapably experiencing this tragic fate. All his symbols, spider’s webs, never-ending roads to vague, fearful, strange places, cemeteries, dark streets and rooms, uneasy transitions from day to night, imply a borderline between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Another important part of his poetry is the surprisingly intensive emphasis on the self. This concern that remained unchanged throughout his life can be attributed to the conflicts that had shaped his anxieties, fears and extreme sentimentality before 1934. There is no doubt that both his poetry and his personality were to some extent influenced by the Paris experience and the following years. This period was, in his own words, la vie de bohème.20 I am the only wanderer on earth The only vagabond is me If everyone has a place in this world I say the whole world belongs to me.21 (From The Vagabond’, 1924) […] If solitude is a lantern I am the candle within. Like a crystal cup My light pours in.22 (From ‘Solitude’, 1929)

Paths to God within the poet 55 Let the daytimes be yours, give me darknesses Let me not walk in light nor to eyes appear As in a damp quilt let me wrap myself here Cover me, cover me in their cool darknesses23 (From ‘Sidewalks’, 1927) Vagabondage, loneliness and despair were dominant themes in his early works, and in 1927, one of the most brilliant of these pessimistic works, ‘Sidewalks’, surprised the critics and brought him an unexpected recognition and a nickname, the ‘Poet of “Sidewalks”’. Indeed, the poetry of his early years is an attempt to describe his lonely position on earth because this solitude is both the reason and the means that will open up the gates to his own world. He suffers from being alone; however, by combining his loneliness with the dark, frightening face of the material world, the poet gains the ability to see the invisible things, to hear the unknown voices. Consequently his poetry has become an experience of mystical revelation. I’m in the street, in a street all lonely Walking, walking and never looking back At the point my path is mingled with the black I seem to see a phantom wait for me24 (From ‘Sidewalks’, 1927) […] This rain…This rain…Beyond lunacy, dark And not to be put to flight. The djinns hold a wedding in my brain, Of rain, and voices, and night.25 (From This Rain’, 1934) In 1934, Kısakürek was thirty years old, a well-educated and famous young poet. This was the moment when he came across his mürşid, his spiritual guide. The first stage of his life had come to an end; from then on he became an active Muslim, pursuing a new life founded on a new source and type of education. Islamic civilization became his main concern and replaced the West in his mind. His mürşid, Abdulhakim Arvasi (1860–1943), was a Naqshbandi sheikh.26 The order of the Naqshbandiyya is known for its special emphasis on zühd (a pious and ascetic life) and takva (fear of God), and considers exercising political power as necessary in order to serve the world.27 Kısakürek gives detailed information about his mürşid’s life, ideas, method of irşad (spiritual guidance) and how the mürşid’s teaching influenced him. In his poetry, though not very obviously during his early years, adoration and eagerness to serve a sublime deity were increasingly coming to replace the deep ambiguity and melancholy that once abounded in his poetry. The meeting with his mürşid marked the turning point for a young man who had experienced Western life and philosophy and whose poetry had been dealing with the problematic of ‘the self in a seemingly profane manner; from

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now on he was engaged in discovering the relationship between man and God on a mystical basis. Death, existence, providence and transcendence in the light of an authoritative Islamic approach provided him with new subjects for his poetry, as well as profoundly altering his way of life. Having himself gone through the well-known experience of finding a religious leader, a holy man whose mission was to teach, to guide people and to help them free themselves from their worldly passions, appetites and desires for the sake of God, he saw such a figure as crucial. In accordance with the Islamic mystical tradition, he believed that the operation of liberating man from any kind of human weaknesses should progress under the guidance of a mürşid, a teacher blessed by God. The mürşid indicates the right path to his mürids, disciples who wish to be saved, and teaches them how to struggle against their nefs, or evil self, and Satan. In a very short period of time, Kısakürek realized that he had spent years seeking for mystical guidance of that sort: I saw God’s friend six years ago tonight; beautiful That night, time near the edge of a standstill.28 (From ‘God’s Friend’, 1940) […] You looked at me once, with burning eyes Drove into my soul the nail of the universe.29 (From The Look’, 1940) Time, cosmos, existence and death, all required new definitions, explanations and reasoning in his new life in accordance with Islamic terminology and comprehension. However, Kısakürek did not encounter too many difficulties due to his conceptualization that found a point of intersection with them. Although it may seem contradictory, Islamic mysticism, or tasavvuf, completely corresponded to his expectations, involving as it does a different universe beyond the visible reality that promises a key to the unknown, unusual, and timeless space with its own sensible reality. A transcendental world, hidden reality beyond everyday life, implicit meanings of things, were what Kısakürek’s thinking had already been acquainted with. From then on, he not only based his poetry upon Islamic mysticism and let its notions replace his non-religious, yet metaphysical contents, but also redefined the meaning and objective of his poetry: poetry is a means to find Allah30 through beauty and secrets.31 As a mürid, the poet’s way to annihilate his existence within the supreme Deity and to be one in and with Him could be achieved through one way alone: I’ve realized that the art is to search for Allah That’s the game, the rest is nothing but rubbish.32 (From The Art’, 1939)

Paths to God within the poet 57 […] For thirty-three years my watch worked; I had stopped Busy flying a kite, unaware of the sky.33 (From ‘Thirty-Three Years’, 1938) His mürşid provided him with the ‘clarified, straight truth of the dark and ambiguous mass of information that he had collected during his childhood and early youth’.34 In this way Kısakürek gained direction not only for his life but also for his poetry. This new life and path that bound Kısakürek with a strong belief in the gaib, the unseen world beyond the material world to which only God’s chosen friends have access and where they are allowed to learn the Truth.35 After this radical transition in his life, he became a poet with a mission, as he stated in his Poetika.36 Concomitant with this was an unexpected belittling of his previous works’ importance and nation-wide success so far, if not a complete denial of them in the full sense of the word. Despite the fact that his first three books, namely Örümcek Ağι (The Spider’s Web), Kaldırımlar (Sidewalks), and Ben ve Ötesi (I and Beyond), published before his ‘conversion’, received high praise and widespread approval from both critics and readers, Kısakürek later expressed his deep disappointment with this early appreciation that he considered ‘false’ because at that time his ‘devotion of himself to Allah had not been known’ to his critics and readers.37 From 1934 on, his poetry gradually lost its pessimistic character and became more and more positive and promising. Although some of his favorite themes like death and loneliness remained, new images and concepts inevitably replaced the previous ones. The voice he developed to build a bridge between his new world view and belief and his new approach to poetry reshaped both the style and content of his work, although it involved neither a radical change nor a complete break from what he had done or believed in the past. The poet’s idea of death, darkness, timelessness and despair had never derived from his personal experience only, but now this sort of theme contained a religious core supported by mystical notions such as wisdom, patience, and prayer. His position was almost the same as it had been before his spiritual awakening occurred, standing still in the middle between two opposite worlds. But now his place was not a unique one, alone and painful; on the contrary, he had a twofold mission—to convey poetry through a prayer-like process to God, and then, while searching for the eternal Truth, to discover poetry as a gift from God. The ultimate purpose of poetry, like other forms of arts, reflecting, penetrating into, even identifying with divine intervention, is to build a bridge between man and God. This purpose turns the act of writing poetry both into a mystical experience and into the declaration of this experience. Kısakürek’s poetry, after having being arranged, re-formulated and directed by religious notions, is designed to represent ‘the eternal quest for absolute Truth’, a mission obligatory for all disciples in search of the Truth. Years later, he entitled his complete poems Çile, ‘tribulation and suffering’, a mystical term to define the period of self-mortification and isolation from any kind of worldly desire and appetite, often including weaning the nefs from the ordinary daily activities such as talking, sleeping and eating. This is how Kısakürek considers the act of writing, yet from a wider point of view, his view implies

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that his life turned out to be nothing but a period of long, tough but voluntarily accepted çile after 1934. Since this stage of mortification and suffering is a prerequisite for becoming a real Sufi whose duty is to achieve unity with God, Kısakürek’s title conveys his idea that artistic production is the same as mystical experience. Poetry, in his own words, comes from God and goes to God. The poet serves as an intermediary here between God and society. When compared with the role of the Sufi, the poet’s function and personal responsibilities are determined by the same source and he has the same objective.38 Moreover, Kısakürek’s evaluation of measure and rhyme in poetry as the unknown and mystical value of this form of art conveys his idea of a possible association between artistic intuition and divine inspiration. As Reynold A.Nicholson points out, in the mystical poetry of Islam, traditionally the Sufi poet employs a symbolic style to mask the mysteries that he tells and uncovers, deliberately or not, in his poetry. Being granted by God, these mysteries should be respected and kept secret since they are most precious gifts to God’s friends; moreover, it is not desirable to share the sacred gifts with those who are not aware of, do not claim, and therefore do not deserve any specific knowledge, or interpretation of mystical experience. ‘Gnostics’, as explained by the medieval Andalusian mystic Ibn al-’Arabi, ‘cannot impart their feelings to other men; they can only indicate them symbolically to those who have begun to experience the like’.39 Undoubtedly this is a way of educating the disciples to tell the mystic experience. Moreover, they will be familiar with the mystic style that involves symbols, masks and disguises. Both a religious and artistic education are involved. It seems that Kısakürek attempted to use poetry’s ability to function as a connection between this world and the transcendental one. On the other hand, being a devoted Muslim who left, or was supposed to leave, many things relating to the previous stage of his life behind, his first duty was a struggle against the self-centeredness of human nature: No doubt, before I met him [the mürşid], I was a pitiful goat challenging the whole world arrogantly on a rock. Afterwards I turned into a sheep descending on to the ground, producing great quantities of milk.40 His descent symbolizes a great change in how he dealt with his ‘self: from a selfish, desolate, hopeless poet to a sincere and modest mystic disciple. Meanwhile, his perception of the self was replaced by the very concept of nefs in accordance with Islamic belief. However, he did not hesitate to place himself, as a poet or Sufi, at the core of his poetry again as he had done before. The emphasis on the self did not disappear as one might expect in his later works, even though Kısakürek sincerely confessed his inexcusable faults before meeting his mürşid. But this time, he seems to change the meaning behind the surface. The fact that the self does not seem to disappear from his writings is due to it having undergone a complete and radical transformation, for it does not represent a single, limited, personified self anymore. It is a universal, ideal and immeasurable essence:

Paths to God within the poet 59 I, the lonely traveler of the street of unknowns, I, the child who escapes from the reflection of his own voice. […] Always I, the mirror and the image, always I, the moth and the candle, The dead and Münkir-Nekir,41 the daze and the cliff.42 (From ‘I’, 1939) This is neither anguish nor resentment for loneliness The fault is mine, the wall you cannot get over is within me My shadow has not set off yet, it makes no difference; Paths that reach God are within me.43 (From ‘Within Me’, 1936) Within this universality lies a duality on which Islamic mysticism is based, for everything in the universe is definitely created on the basis of duality as the inevitable consequence of the oneness, the uniqueness, of the Creator. The contradictory character of his symbols denotes this neverending duality given with the origin of the creation, as stated in the dichotomies of mirror and image, dead and angels, moth and candle. With the dramatic change in his life and artistry, first of all, Kısakürek’s poetry inevitably began to reflect a new imagery in accordance with mystical notions of Islam. Although he did not give up his previous style based on the use of objects from the visible world, the meaning behind the visible changed. This process represents his poetry’s move from a gathering of numberless objects, or places—grave, cemetery, street, room; lamp, glass, floor, wall, ceiling, chair—to the frequently used symbolic and meaningfully connected couples taken from mystical literature, such as rose and nightingale, moth and candle, light and darkness. Moreover, the supernatural creatures in his poetry—fairies, demons, phantoms—have become ‘Islamic’ and appear as angels of God. On the other hand, the extreme emphasis on the self again indicates a different form of the mystical poetry of Islam called Şathiye. Expressions, verses, poems that are mostly meaningless, bizarre, or seemingly in contradiction with Islamic law, involve the ultimate and shocking degree of ‘indication’ of a mystical experience as a consequence of momentarily but wholly uniting with God, with the destruction of the self within the absolute, unique Deity. Even though it is not possible to relate this form of writing to what Kısakürek published, his manner inevitably points toward an ecstatic trance. The ‘I’ he describes does not suggest an ordinary, single, human presence; on the contrary, he focuses on the moment when the individual self has supposedly disappeared and the ideal, universal self emerges. This self comprises all the contradictory entities in the universe; moreover, it involves all the paths to God. This is both a unified and unifying self, and because of this combination, Kısakürek’s poetry has been considered the leading and original example of its time. Leaving aside the apprenticeship years of Kısakürek, for the two major stages of his life and career one might argue that only after 1934 did the poet use mystical themes

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in his poetry in the exact sense of the term. Nevertheless, even if it seems that his early poetry before the turning point in 1934 does not involve any mystical element or reference to mysticism, we find hints of those poems’ potentially mystical essence. In preparing the volume of his complete poems the poet did not include his works written before 1934 and disclaimed them—though not without exceptions. When analyzing Kısakürek’s exceptional treatment of ‘Sidewalks’, it is possible to argue that the poem covers a mystical atmosphere. Before and after 1934, many critics regarded ‘Sidewalks’ as a metaphysical or even mystical response to the everyday life of its time. Laurent Mignon, the latest of these critics, provides a definition for it and names the poem a sample of ‘new tasavvuf poetry’.44 According to Mignon, ‘Sidewalks’ can be categorized as a modern mathnavi (mesnevî in Turkish), and it is about passing from human love to divine love: One might argue whether Necip Fazıl [Kısakürek] attributed a mystical content to it or not in the time it was published, in 1927. However, as it was not disclaimed by the poet, he most probably considered it, perhaps much later, as a poem with a religious core.45 From this view one can derive another argument for affirming the signs of mysticism in his poetry, at least for some of it, before 1934. This may be interpreted as the result of a negative theology that, as stated by Philip Leonard, ‘avoids descriptions of divine identity, and instead uses terms such as ‘nothingness’, ‘darkness’ and ‘emptiness’ to allude to God’s inscrutability’.46 These three keywords, indeed, perfectly characterize Kısakürek’s early poetry of Western origin, even if we do not have enough evidence to claim that the poet adopted this stance consciously. Kısakürek’s original use of mystical themes, combined with a new manner, is rooted in the poet’s own life story, shaped by serious contrasts and conflicts. He influenced the following generations with his sharp and strong style based on the combination of different worlds, material and spiritual, associated with West and East. Kısakürek believes that the problem bedeviling these worlds is that each one has what the other does not.47 A great deal has been written in recent years on N.F.Kısakürek, particularly since his death in 1983. He holds an unparalleled place in Turkish literature as a mediator between poetry and religion. Kısakürek’s life and art has had a tremendous influence on the poets from the following generations who create their poetry as a way of allusion or reference to the ultimate reality of God. To take one example, in the 1950s, Sezai Karakoç (b. 1933) emerges as the most important literary figure who based his mystical poetry on the real world as Kısakürek did. His first poems were published in the literary-political Buyük Doğu (Great East) magazine. This was the most popular journal among the social and political malcontents of the time and, predictably, the magazine’s creator, owner and editor was N.F.Kısakurek.48 Deeply affected by the Islamic movement that Kısakürek triggered with his ideas and works in the mid-thirties and forties, Karakoç, to some extent, became a disciple of the famous poet. However, unlike Kısakürek, Karakoç did not undergo a period of ‘conversion’; being born into a traditional Muslim family his devotion to Islam is not a consequence of a sharp transition, but a natural process.

Paths to God within the poet 61 Yet Karakoç shares Kısakürek’s essential arguments about creative writing, and particularly poetry. He claims that ‘the arts always go towards God, even if this is denied’.49 Moreover, his familiarity with Western literature allows him to explicate and value nonMuslim poets’ works according to their mystical-metaphysical essence that all works of art basically involve. For literature, especially poetry, is nothing but an ultimate search for divine essence that transcends orthodox ways of knowing. Despite the differences in the artistic styles of the two poets, it is not difficult to discern a common background in their mentality. A longer and more detailed study can provide an answer to how Kısakürek influnced later poets from very different backgrounds, with different styles, not only Sezai Karakoç but also others such as Cahit Zarifoğlu and İsmet Özel.

Notes 1 2

3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

See Haluk Nurbaki, Evrendeki Mucize, Istanbul: Damla Yayınevi, 1990, pp. 139–40. For detailed biographical and bibliographical studies, see Mustafa Miyasoğlu, Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, Istanbul: Suffe, 1985; Muzaffer Uyguner, Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, Ankara: Bilgi, 1994; and Lütfü Şehsuvaroğlu, Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, Ankara: Alternatif, 2003. For his political activities in particular, see Burhanettin Duran, ‘Transformation of Islamist Political Thought in Turkey from the Empire to the Early Republic (1908–1960): Necip Fazil Kısakürek’s Political Ideas’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Ankara: Bilkent University, 2001. This thesis is accessible online: http://www.thesis.bilkent.edu.tr/0001603.pdf. The poet later harshly criticized his early poetry dealing with Islamic mystical themes and accused himself of using mystical notions of Islam without having a sincere faith in the religion (see Kısakürek, O ve Ben, Istanbul: Büyük Doğu, p. 67). The other major Turkish poet in this period, Nazim Hikmet, was a Marxist. Kısakürek, O ve Ben, p. 64. Kısakürek, O ve Ben, p. 65. A well-known Turkish dish of stuffed vegetables. Kısakürek, O ve Ben, p. 26. N.F.Kısakürek, Sonsuzluk Kervanı, Ankara: Serdengeçti Neşriyat 1955, p. 38. Translations are mine, unless otherwise stated. Kısakürek, Sonsuzluk Kervanı, p. 92. Kemal Sılay (ed.), An Anthology of Turkish Literature, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996, p. 396 (trans. Bernard Lewis). Ibid. S1lay, An Anthology of Turkish Literature, p. 396 (trans. Walter G.Andrews). S1lay, An Anthology of Turkish Literature, p. 394 (trans. Walter G.Andrews). S1lay, An Anthology of Turkish Literature, p. 395 (trans. Walter G.Andrews). The exceptions to this are those who became Marxists, notably Nazım Hikmet. Orhan Okay, Necip Fazıl Kırsakürek, Ankara: Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı Yayınları, 1987, p. 35. Okay, Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, p. 36. Kısakürek’s early works reflect the influence of Baudelaire in terms of the themes he used. Not only his poetry, but also his personality has been compared to Baudelaire, and critics often regard him as a ‘flâneur’ like the French poet. See Ali İhsan Kolcu, Albatros’un Gölgesinde: Baudelaire in Türk Şiirine Tesiri Üzerine Bir İnceleme, Ankara: Akçağ, 2002, pp. 275–335.

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20 21 22 23 24 25

Kısakürek, O ve Ben, p. 69. Kısakürek, Sonsuzluk Kervanı, p. 38. Kısakürek, Sonsuzluk Kervanı, p. 106. Sılay, An Anthology of Turkish Literature, p. 395 (trans. Walter G.Andrews). Ibid. Nermin Menemencioğlu (ed.), The Penguin Book of Turkish Verse, London: Penguin Books, 1978, p. 224 (trans. Nermin Menemencioğlu). Riyazu’t-Tasavvufiye (Gardens of Mysticism), the only known work by Abdulhakim Arvasi, was published by the same publisher who brought out N.F. Kısakürek’s work. Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981, pp. 363–73. Menemencioğlu, The Penguin Book of Turkish Verse, p. 225 (trans. Murat Nemet-Nejat). Menemencioğlu, The Penguin Book of Turkish Verse, p. 224 (trans. Murat Nemet-Nejat). The poet’s use of Arabic or Persian words and writing in the Ottoman style is, no doubt, a reaction to the efforts of the new state to construct a new language that would be pure Turkish divorced from its Ottoman past. As a response to the language reform, Kısakürek deliberately uses ‘Allah’, instead of ‘Tanrı’ (God). Tanrı, a word of Turkish origin, had been proposed and used as a replacement for the Arabic Allah. Therefore, this was much more than a simple linguistic discussion, but another battle between the traditional or conservative mentality and central authority. In this battle, the climax was the prohibition of the Arabic adhan (ezan in Turkish) or call to public prayer, in Turkey as part of the language reform. When the expression ‘Allah is most great’ was heard as ‘Tanrı is most great’, it became one of the most debated and hated practices of the purification process of the Turkish language and Kısakürek, like many conservatives, avoided using Tanrı (see Kısakürek, O ve Ben, p. 30). On the other hand, Tanrı has faced a ‘grammatical’ objection from some Muslim groups in Turkey as well. According to this view, Tanrı simply means ilah (god) not Allah (God), which is a special expression with nothing corresponding in Turkish. Therefore, from this point of view, ‘god’ refers to ilah, not Allah. The first article of the Muslim faith, the declaration of the oneness of God or tavhid: la ilaha illallah, can be translated: ‘there is no god but God’, but in Turkish, according to this view, it should be ‘there is no tanri (ilah) but Allah’. Okay, Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, p. 49. Kısakürek, Sonsuzluk Kervanı, p. 24. Menemencioğlu, The Penguin Book of Turkish Verse, p. 225 (trans. Murat Nemet-Nejat). Okay, Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, p. 48. The second sura of the Qur’an, ‘The Cow’, stresses the prerequisite of believing in it: ‘It [the Qur’an] is a guide to the godfearing, who believe in the Unseen’ (Arberry’s translation). Uyguner, Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, pp. 168–70. Kısakürek, Sonsuzluk Kervanı, p. 8. Peter Connor, The Emptiness of Intelligent Questions’, in Philip Leonard (ed.), Trajectories of Mysticism in Theory and Literature, Basingstoke: Macmillan, p. 181. Reynold A.Nicholson, The Mystics of Islam, repr. London: Arkana, 1989, p. 103. Kısakürek, O ve Ben, p. 135. The examining angels. After death, man is to be questioned in his grave by these two angels. Kısakürek, Sonsuzluk Kervanı, p. 35. Kısakürek, Sonsuzluk Kervanı, p. 36. Mignon, Çağdaş, Türk Şiirinde Aşk, Aşıklar ve Mekanlar, Ankara: Hece, 2002, p. 135. Mignon, Çağdaş, Türk Şiirinde Ask, Aşιklar ve Mekanlar, p. 140. Leonard, Trajectories of Mysticism in Theory and Literature, p. xiii.

26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Paths to God within the poet 63 N.F.Kısakürek, Batι Tefekkürü ve İslam Tasavvufu, Istanbul: Büyük Doğu, 1994, pp. 100, 223–4. 48 Kısakürek himself did not publish poetry in this magazine. He used it as a means to make his socio-political opinions public, revealing himself to be a critical, tough politician bitterly opposed to the government and to Westernization in all its forms. His poetry, by contrast, almost never addresses political concerns and, in the tradition of Islamic mysticism with its universal outlook, it does not voice hostility to other cultures. 49 Mignon, Çağdaş Türk Şiirinde Aşk, Aşιklar ve Mekanlar, p. 130.

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Further reading Alboher, Moise (1982) Brillantes Figures de la Poésie Turque, Istanbul: Fono. Andrews, Walter G. (1976) An Introduction to Ottoman Poetry, Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica. Atis, Sarah Moment (1983) Semantic Structuring in the Modern Turkish Short Story: An Analysis of the Dreams of Abdullah Efendi, and Other Short Stories by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, Leiden: E.J.Brill. Bakhtiar, Laleh (1976) Sufi: Expressions of the Mystic Quest, London: Thames and Hudson. Halman, Talat Sait (1982) Contemporary Turkish Literature: Fiction and Poetry, Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University. Holbrook, Victoria Rowe (1994) The Unreadable Shores of Love: Turkish Modernity and Mystic Romance, Austin: University of Texas Press. Karpat, Kemal (ed.) (1973) Social Change and Politics in Turkey: A Structural-Historical Perspective, Leiden: E.J.Brill. Meeker, Michael (1991) ‘The New Muslim Intellectuals in the Republic of Turkey’, in Islam in Modern Turkey: Religion, Politics and Literature in a Secular State, ed. Richard Tapper, London, pp. 189–219. Preminger, Alex (1975) Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, London: Macmillan, pp. 1311–14.

4 ‘MERCIFUL FATHER ABRAHAM’ The mystical poetry of Binyamin Shvili1 Nili Gold

Binyamin Shvili is a Jewish, Israeli postmodernist par excellence, whose poetry—at least in the eyes of its creator—is a medium for his religious and spiritual quest.2 Born in 1954, Shvili, who first appeared on the Israeli literary horizon in the early 1980s, is far removed from the Israeli religious establishment. At the same time, his work in poetry as well as in prose is steeped in religiosity. He was one of a small group of writers who published the short-lived periodical, Mar’ot (Visions) whose goal was to make room for mysticism and spirituality in Hebrew literature. His unique voice has conquered new territories in Hebrew literature with its confessional verse, which merges eroticism and spirituality. Pinchas Sadeh, a ‘confessional’ author of the 1950s, and Yonah Wallach, a controversial female poet of the 1970s, may be perceived as serving as his inspiration. He has received numerous literary prizes, including the Prime Minister’s Prize. I approach Shvili’s composition from a literary point of view, in order to understand the motivation for the text and its methods. Aware of the pitfalls of this strategy, I argue that it does not contradict the essence of his work. My analysis concentrates on A Boy Flying a Kite in the XVII Century, Shvili’s third collection of poems, published in 1989.3 The postmodern nature of the composition is manifest, among other things, in the use of collage, a concept which describes both the technique and the character of the text. Shvili is a collage artist who imports pieces of texts, borrows segments of stories and events, transports fictional and real characters, and uproots places. He then ‘glues’ these eclectic fragments together. There is no attempt made to conceal the parts and the origins of the materials, or to smooth the edges. The composition does not flow. Shvili enhances and intensifies the interplay of distinctions, without much meddling with the objects themselves. The heterogeneity of the new assemblage is thus maintained. Foreground, middle ground and background collapse in Shvili’s hands. He continuously compresses time, space and distance, and flattens images and characters. There appears to be a refusal of three-dimensionality. Shvili’s approach to the characters inhabiting his poetry and to their surroundings has a caricature aspect to it. The characters, at times, play their own roles and, at other times, an imaginary, or borrowed one. Events do not happen in chronological order. There is a constant resurfacing of the ‘old world’, which lives, breathes, and functions as an integral part of the present. The minimalistic, unassuming, almost non-cover cover of the thin volume makes it difficult to determine when it was written. A Boy Flying a Kite in the XVII Century is

‘Merciful Father Abraham’ 65 the title of both the entire volume and the single poem, printed in an old fashioned typeface, on its cover. The mention of the seventeenth century, the absence of punctuation and the archaic vocabulary, morphology, and syntax, direct the reader to the past. However, the Hebrew neologism afifon (kite) reveals the text’s modern origins. Leafing through the collection, the reader’s bewilderment grows. The language, which is neither modern nor biblical, is drawn from rare ancient texts. It sounds foreign to the contemporary Israeli ear accustomed to modern Hebrew, while aware of biblical reverberations, allusions and reinterpretations which underline much of contemporary Israeli poetry.4 Shvili’s idiolectic diction creates a ‘linguistic shock’.5 It is an explosion of abundance: a unique pastiche of Jewish mystical, messianic and Sabbatean terms, quotations from kabbalistic scriptures, Aramaic constructions, talmudic expressions, Shvili’s own pseudo-archaic neologisms, mystically inspired nonsensical verse, and contemporary Hebrew.6 When biblical references occur, they are filtered through the kabbalistic gaze. Occasionally one detects echoes of children’s rhymes, slang, modern Israeli poetry, hassidic legends, or Jerusalemite JudeoSpanish speech (Ladino). However, the language is not singularly responsible for the feeling of defamiliarization. The volume introduces an unusual cast of characters: Shvili’s family members, historically known messiahs, talmudic personalities, mythological and imaginary figures, and obscure individuals whose names may only be found in indices of scholarly books, footnotes in Jewish history. Some poems are long, elaborate narratives, while others are piercing in their distilled minimalism. The poems’ structure, or lack of it, together with the topography of the volume, contributes to its enigmatic character. The volume’s chaos is manifested in an absence of poetic structure: There is no punctuation, no agreement between line breaks and syntactical units, not even a clear separation between poems and, often, no titles. This poetic tohu bohu (chaos) is in stark contrast to the rigid order of the book’s overall construction of three sections. Those are clearly marked and follow a recognizable (kabbalistic) logic. This ‘chaos’ is juxtaposed with a seemingly rigid framework. The body of the book is divided into three numbered sections, whose inner titles are terms borrowed from the Zohar, the quintessential kabbalistic text. The order of the sections Atika kadisha, Malka kadisha, and Matronita ayalta reflects the kabbalistic hierarchy of the sefirot (spheres, or emanations of God)7, beginning with the highest sefirah, Atika kadisha (Keter), ‘the divine will’, which is not revealed to any being. The second section is titled Malka kadisha (tif’eret), the sixth sefirah. Malka kadisha is the God of Israel, the giver of the Torah. This is also the God in the ‘false’ messiah’s, Shabbetai Zevi’s faith.8 The third section is the lowest, Matronita ayalta, which refers to Ayalta kadisha (malchut), the tenth, feminine sefirah. The suffering of the Ayalta (Doe) during labor symbolizes the messiah’s tortures prior to redemption.9 The use of kabbalistic terms for the inner titles is mainly, but not only, a stylistic measure. It is a clear marker for the reader, signaling the messianic kabbalistic world, from which the author draws. The ‘I’ of many poems inhabits the spiritual universe created in the verse, and is engaged in a surprisingly intimate relationship with its cast of characters. They appear in dreams and visions, or participate in a matter-of-fact form of communication. The lyric ‘I’ is present in centuries-old worlds, in places distant from each other both culturally and geographically. A critical attempt to decipher some of this volume’s representative works, and to understand the adhesive that collates them, leads to messianic kabbalism on the one hand, and to

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the realm of childhood, on the other.10 Therefore, this paper focuses on the quasi-autobiographical introductory poems (printed before the book’s three main sections), and on works which best illustrate Shvili’s mystical, messianic attachments, his historical and textual sources, and his art of collage. The reader’s first encounter with this collection of lyrics occurs before opening the book. The title-poem which is printed on the cover (and again on page 22) relates to the seventeenth-century ‘false’ messiah, Shabbetai Zevi:11 A Boy Flying a Kite in the XVII Century On a hill in Jerusalem a boy is flying a kite and next to him his sister is standing the girl is crying the pretty girl wants to hold the string the little girl flew[.]a kite took her a horned snake took her took the girl to the city of Smyrna there waiting for her is a little groom Shabbetai the bluffer Were it not for its title, one might err and read the poem’s opening lines as a record of a modern-times’, plausible, childhood memory of kite flying, and of siblings quarreling over who-gets-to-hold-the-string. The supernatural chain of events, to which the title alludes, appears only in the second half. The string that connects Jerusalem and Smyrna is a snake in a guise of a kite. The text signals the mythological bond between ‘snake’ and ‘flying’ by rhyming afifon (kite, derived from the ancient root oof, to fly), and shefifon (horned snake). This rhyme alludes to Isaiah’s ‘the viper and the flying serpent’ which symbolize the unfaithful (30:6). Shabbetai Zevi, the ‘star’ of this volume, slowly emerges through the cover-poem’s lyric. ‘Seventeenth century’, ‘Smyrna’, the association with a snake, and finally, the name Shabbetai, all point in one direction. Shabbetai Zevi was the most prominent, and therefore most destructive, ‘false messiah’ in Jewish history. For the author, however, he symbolizes the striving for salvation and some hope for redemption. Documented events from Shabbetai Zevi’s life, his rituals and actions, as well as underlying concepts of his brand of Lurianic kabbalism, are interwoven into the poetry and give it a resplendent hue.12 The cover-poem’s reference to Shabbetai Zevi foreshadows the messianic fabric of the book, but does not prepare the reader for the introductory cycle, which follows the cover. The playful, childish, light-hearted tone of ‘A Boy Flying a Kite in the XVII Century’, is immediately substituted by a dark, sinister, at times obscure diction, which alludes to the kabbalistic universe, but forges its own world of horror:

‘Merciful Father Abraham’ 67 If there is Paradise13 who knows and Hell certainly exists and it exists here sometimes very much and one only needs to see and take notes that this is very Hell here which sometimes exists and who knows what will be (p. 7) These untitled, unpunctuated lines emerge at the bottom of the book’s first page. They set the stage for the internal abyss of the next six fragmented texts that precede the schematically divided body of the work. The simple, matter-of-fact, semi-colloquial vocabulary and the ungrammatical, stuttering syntax of this poem, serve as a modern background for the ancient religious juxtaposition of Heaven and Hell. The supernatural dwells, undisguised, in the everyday experience of the contemplative speaker. The only certainty is the tangibility of Hell in the here-and-now, while the hope for salvation is dim, even in the world to come. The poem that follows allows a peek into the speaker’s ‘Hell’. The phrase lo shama‘ti (I did not hear) heads three of the twelve lines of the poem. It speaks of a missed revelation or a missed opportunity for closeness to a father: ‘I did not hear my father that you came to me’ (line 1); ‘I did not hear my father that you said women are God’ (line 6);14 ‘I did not hear my father that you entered distress’ (line 10). The repetition is reminiscent of the modern Israeli classic, the poem ‘One Moment’, by Natan Zach. It describes a missed encounter with a F/father.15 Zach’s pained regrets: ‘I did not touch’, ‘I did not know’ and ‘I could not know’, are echoed in Shvili’s desperate pleas in: ‘I did not hear my father that you came to me/from the dead’. This poem of longing for a paternal voice is densely packed with archaisms and kabbalistic terms, and is, therefore, practically untranslatable. It is the first of many direct addresses to a F/father in this volume. These appeals blur the boundaries between the human father and the Father in Heaven. This poem’s F/father, who will grant H/his son a crown (Keter) or bequeath to him glory (Tif’eret), is either the corporeal father, or the heavenly one. Although the text may be read literally—words like Keter (crown) and Tif’eret (glory) function as such in modern Hebrew—those even marginally familiar with kabbalistic thought would recognize the presence of a mystical layer. Keter and Tif’eret are two of the ten sefirot.16 Keter is the impersonal revelation of God, while Tif’eret is the sixth and central sefirah into which other sefirot are folded (it includes the sefirah rahamim, mercy).17 The poem’s matrix may either be the spiritual yearning for Keter, the highest sefirah, or the wish to hear, once more, the voice of the father who died. An alternative reading would shift the spiritual journey inward to the depth of the self, as the phrase ‘from the depths’ (mima‘amakim, line 11) may insinuate.18 Although not explicit, this poem begins to delineate the volume’s framework of longing and hope. It opens the possibility for messianic salvation, by alluding to a ‘crown of thorns’ and a scene of anointment. As shown bellow, a dominant aspect of Shvili’s connection to God is the existence of a messiah, or messiahs. When one lends one’s ear to the idiosyncratic vocabulary of the sefirot, it seems that the longing is directed toward a male entity. Keter as well as Tif’eret are considered to be masculine sefirot. Moreover, Keter represents Father, Tif’eret, the Son.19 Although the

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object of the yearning can be deciphered by the reader, the cause for the inner void, which the speaker longs to fill through his intimacy with God, is camouflaged. The closest Shvili comes to unveiling the secret of the void in this volume is in the fifth poem of the opening cycle: Merciful F/father Abraham isn’t it a pity about the child Binyamin Sr. and his blaze of colors keep him in thy divine presence and strengthen him like the light that shineth from the stars of the firmament in the shelter of thy wings hide him from the inferno of the poetry’s block merciful F/father Abraham isn’t it a pity about the child he is your son his soul is in your spirit True Judge if so decreed open gates of sorrow and Garden of Eden and your good angels will lead and place the poetry of Binyamin next to the Tree of Life and let Binyamin lie down and not fear and let his quiet sleep be pleasant (p. 11) The line ‘Abba Rahmana Avraham lo haram al ha-yeled’ (‘Merciful F/father Abraham isn’t it a pity about the child’) opens the poem.20 Abba in Modern Hebrew is ‘Dad’, but in kabbalistic, Aramaic texts, Abba is The Father’, an emanation of God. The opening line may be read in a number of ways: 1 ‘Merciful Father [,] Abraham…’ or, 2 ‘Merciful father Abraham…’ In other words, it is not clear whether the author addresses God, complaining to him about a certain, non-compassionate Abraham (as in reading 1), or whether someone is talking to Abraham, calling him, perhaps sarcastically, ‘merciful father’ (as in reading 2). The ambiguity is especially loaded since the poet’s father shares the name Abraham with the quintessential father of Jewish tradition.21 An ironic twist may be added by juxtaposing Abraham’s biblical role in the story of the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22:9) with the kabbalistic association of Abraham with compassion (the sefirah Hesed). The poem plays on the double entendre of the word abba: ‘dad’, or a form of divine revelation (as in Kabbalah). Three masculine entities are implicitly present in the poem: the divine Father, the human father, and the boy pining for mercy. But the ambiguity of the opening line goes even further. The word, haram, which follows the address in the negative, is ungrammatical. The rare root h-r-m, which has negative connotations such as ‘ban’, ‘excommunication’ or ‘annihilation’, makes no sense in this context. Its reverberations, however, evoke a sense of terror. The reader, influenced by the line’s second word, rahmana (merciful), reverses the letter-order, almost automatically, and rationalizes: lo RaHaM—did not pity—in lieu of lo HaraM—did not ban. However, this reading is ques-

‘Merciful Father Abraham’ 69 tionable: the vocalization of HaRaM is that of a noun, not a verb. Nevertheless, the text exploits the contradictions between r-h-m (pity) and h-r-m (ban). A third interpretation, inspired by Sephardic slang, may be preferable.22 The expression Lo haram is often used in Israeli slang as a question, Lo haram? (isn’t it a pity?). If perceived this way the first line would read: ‘Daddy [merciful father Abraham], isn’t it a pity about your child Binyamin?’ According to this reading, Binyamin may be turning to his natural father, Abraham, in a last attempt to convince him not to hurt his child. When this address fails, he turns (in line 3) to God, the omnipotent, never failing, substitute-Father. Although slang facilitates the understanding of the poem’s opening, the linguistic scandal remains. The entire poem is suffused with archaisms and quotations from sacred texts; the colloquial use is effective here, but is out of place. The author conceals his inner conflict and the difficulty in admitting his father’s failing through the ambiguities and ungrammatical usages. So traumatic is the memory that it is hidden under multiple layers of enigmatic language. The child’s name is given in the second line; it is Binyamin, as is the poet’s. One must wonder about the autobiographical echoes in the poem. The forsaken child, Binyamin, who was denied his father’s compassion, owned a ‘blaze of colors’. Like Binyamin himself, his colors too, did not awaken fatherly emotions. The speaker, who seems to represent the child’s interests, pleads for God’s protection from the hell of losing the multi-colored poetry and thereby losing the bond with the divine spirit. Colors, splendor, the presence of God and artistic inspiration, are intertwined in this hermetic, yet moving text. Even when the supreme revelation is transformed in the middle of the poem from the intimate ‘merciful’ (line 6) to the awesome True Judge’ (line 7), the child’s yearning for Him is devoid of fear. The linguistic references to the Zohar and Kabbalah with which the poem is laced, underscore the mystical nature of the desire for God. The fourth line, ‘and strengthen him like the light that shineth from the stars of the firmament’ is almost a direct quotation from the Zohar, while the wish to rest next to the ‘Tree of Life’ symbolizes the will to strive for the sefirah Tif’eret. In kabbalistic thought, the Tree of Life is ‘all good’, unlike the Tree of Knowledge, which embodies both good and evil. The speaker’s means for reaching the perfect state, the Tree of Life, is poetry. Heaven and Hell mesh in this poem into a mystical experience. Hell is where poetry is blocked and access to God is denied. But the union with God may also signify danger; it is fantastic and awe-inspiring. The splendor of the heavenly stars, with all their beauty, is a known cliché from the prayer for the dead, El Male Rahamim, ‘God full of mercy’. Moreover, the poem is inlaid with words from this prayer’s semantic field, namely ‘death’: ‘True Judge’, ‘decreed’, ‘angels’, and ‘lie down’. Although the grammar and syntax remain archaic, toward its end the poem abandons the kabbalistic vocabulary and turns to a simpler, more contemporary language, reminiscent, again, of Zach’s verse.23 The state of peace, or death, is now described in the terminology of sleeping. It is as if a child were talking, speaking of himself in the third person: ‘let Binyamin lie down and not fear/and let his quiet sleep be pleasant’. The near-death experience is wrought in the poem with expressions such as ‘If so decreed’, ‘open gates’ and ‘Your angels lead’ (lines 8–9). The poetic speaker’s plea for mercy and protection does not, at this point, divulge any specific details. The child’s raw feeling of terror is masked in the poem. Yet, what the poem concealed, the fiction eventually revealed, but many years later. Shvili’s first novel peeks into the ‘black hole’ of his

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childhood ten years after the publication of his third collection of poems. He confesses in his first-person novel Kastoria: 24 When I was a six-year-old-child my father murdered my childhood. We lived in the neighborhood of Yemin Moshe that was next to the border with the Jordanians…. I used to stroll by myself and some-times climb in my wanderings up to Mt Zion. I used to speak with God. One day I continued talking to him until it became dark…. I entered my home and my father immediately attacked me and slapped my face with two strong blows…. My father said that I had to be punished and that he would not forgive…that he was taking me back to my mother’s. The fear paralyzed me because I was very scared of my mother who was a crazy woman. I stood paralyzed swallowing my bitter saliva, believing that my father would regret his terrible decree at any moment…. We went outside, into the night. I saw a long road…. My father stood tall in front of me and his face was angry. He said to me: ‘from this point on you will manage on your own’. He turned his back to me and walked away. I stood and watched how very slowly my father disappeared. I lifted my face to the sky for a moment and saw the stars shining…. I screamed with all my might ‘A-B-B-A!’ a few times and tears started wetting my cheeks. I felt that my soul went up to the stars…. All the way home the stars walked with me happy and humiliated. They were no longer shiny coins in the sky, but wounds. Many years passed…. I thought I had forgotten. (pp.18–19) Speaking about this experience, Shvili explained: It was at that moment that I thought I was alone in the world, and that in some way, my father had died. I became connected to God, the Father… I rose from the world of the corporeal to the world of the omnipotent Father, the cosmic, the infinite…. The one who created the world and was before the world and after. Shvili’s words in the interview, as well as in Kastoria, reveal the connecting thread between the deserted child and the poet’s mystical inclinations. God therefore substitutes for the father, who could never again be trusted. The poem, unlike the prose, veils the authentic memory of that night, and speaks in hermetic, symbolic terms. It implies the emotional shift from father to God through the linguistic ambiguity contained in the word abba. It transforms the stars seen by the sixyear-old, the stars so lovingly depicted in the narrative, into mystical splendor. It turns the child’s wish for his father’s compassion into a spiritual-artistic endeavor suffused with yearning for peace under the ‘Tree of Life’. While the main occupation of the poetry seems to be a spiritual search for a F/father, Kastoria describes a physical and a spiritual quest for the mother. It is written in the form of an old-fashioned travelog, echoing, perhaps, the renowned Jewish traveler of the Twelfth century, Benjamin of Tudela.25 But while the first traveler strove for faraway places, the journey of the modern-day Benjamin is inward-bound. He limits his travels mostly to the realm of Greece, whose towns and people evoke flashbacks from his Jerusalem childhood.

‘Merciful Father Abraham’ 71 Beginning with Athens, he goes through small Peloponnesian towns, some of which warrant entire chapters, and others which are mentioned in passing. An obsessive ‘refrain’ reappears in variations in the novel’s significant junctures: According to legend my mother was born in Kastoria… the snow fell’ (pp. 54, 45, 93, etc.). This refrain exposes the journey’s ultimate goal. It is to touch the mother, whom the author barely knew, if not physically, at least spiritually. The return to her legendary birthplace is an attempt to mend a rupture, to tend to an old wound. The motivating force of this narrative and the journey behind it, is an imaginary mythological figure, a ‘two-thousandyear-old-Jew’, who roams the pages in a mystical hide-and-seek plot. The postmodernist technique of blurring time and identity merges here with that of Jewish folktales. Elijah the prophet emerges unexpectedly throughout the generations, in different disguises, times and places. Shvili’s pseudo-Elijah, the two-thousand-year-old Jew, reveals himself, halfway through the novel to be none other than Shabbetai Zevi (p. 83). A detective-like scholarly detour reveals the connection between the quest for the mother and the messianic figure, so familiar to the reader of Shvili’s poetry. The Macedonian town of Kastoria was the locus of an important Sabbatean community.26 Although the speaker claims that it is only in legend that his mother was born in Kastoria, he states her birth in Macedonia as a fact. Moreover, Shvili traces his mother’s maternal roots to the kabbalistic Ayllon family (p. 48).27 The family, which stemmed from Spain, lived in Greece for generations and was known for its Sabbatean inclinations. Shabbetai Zevi’s ancestry, too, is known to have originated in Greece.28 Shvili’s speaker, who admits to his mother’s madness and to never having known ‘a mother of flesh and blood’ (p. 139), tries to reconstruct her. His unique path to such a reconstruction involves a quasi-mythological rendering of her madness (pp. 55, 87, 117, etc.), and leads to a submersion in a messianic kabbalistic universe, which is not devoid of traces of madness in itself. The postmodernist tale, whereby time, place and identity collapse, is present in Kastoria as a pseudo-continuous narrative. Although the ‘plot’ of A Boy Flying a Kite in the XVII Century provides little autobiographical information, it may also be perceived as an inner travelog. The seven short, dense, poems that open Shvili’s collection have neither a common heading nor individual titles. They read like fragments, morsels of the abyss. The three sections that follow seem to maintain a greater distance from the torment which dominates the introductory texts. They project the striving for redemption of other ‘actors’ and ‘plots’, times and places. However, these ‘actors’ are not as distant from the ‘I’ as it may seem at first glance. They bear a deep-rooted connection to the child of the introductory cycle and of the later work, Kastoria. The father-oriented longing dominates the introduction, and evolves into a male-oriented, spiritual, messianic search in the rest of the book. However, the yearning for the tortured mother leaves traces in A Boy Flying a Kite in the XVII Century as well. The kite-string, which connects Jerusalem to Smyrna, wanders in search of a mother’s image. I argue that it is the identification with the mother which motivates the choice of the means with which to search for God. After all, the mother’s ancestral roots are associated with those of Shabbetai Zevi, the ‘star’ to whom most of the book’s messianic figures relate in one way or another. The body of the book, which is neatly divided into three sections, contains a formal, emotional and spiritual chaos. While the poems in the untitled introduction are all short, those in the three sections that follow alter in length and tone. Some are terse, minimal-

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ist, and concise—like the title poem—others are longer, at times decorative, narrative poems overflowing with fantastic detail and mythological imagery. The three inner titles do not dictate the poems’ progression. Their content rebels against the schematic presentation and suggests a different dynamic. Extreme mood swings, reminiscent, perhaps, of those reported of Shabbetai Zevi, determine the rhythm of the work.29 ‘I saw’, ‘I heard’, ‘I dreamt’, mark renderings of visions, moments of divine revelation; the identification with messianic figures is wrought with ecstasy, with the exuberance of a child playing with toy heroes. But the illuminations alternate with deep despair, madness, images like ‘Jerusalem forever ruined’ (p. 25), or ‘pain without end’ (p. 32). This rhythm of high and low tides is both artistic and psychological. While external autobiographical material is lacking, the movement of the texts affords some penetration into the inner world which motivates it. The messianic search for redemption in this volume is garb and essence simultaneously. Atika Kadisha, Malka Kadisha and Matronita Ayalta, which constitute the body of A Boy Flying a Kite in the XVII Century, embody a mystical literary cosmos. Shabbetai Zevi and Jesus, Joseph Della Reyna30 and Messiah-son-of-Joseph,31 Solomon Molcho,32 Jacob Frank33 and Messiah-son-of-David are all portrayed in lyrical segments, a melange of historical and fictional accounts. The ‘I’ of this work knows them all, plays with them, and, finally, falls with them when the awareness of futility sets in. The poems devoted to Messiah-son-of-Joseph are filled with suffering. According to Jewish tradition, he is a precursor to the coming of Messiah-son-of-David and is killed for the sake of national redemption. Shvili’s depictions of him read like twentieth-century accounts of the Holocaust, superimposed onto seventeenth-century descriptions of Polish pogroms. Solomon Molcho, native of Lisbon, is transported to contemporary Jerusalem to meet two Sephardic women who read the coming of the Messiah in their cards. The sixteenth-century Molcho becomes a practical Kabbalist whose magic is photography. Following him in the book is the Sabbatean ‘false messiah’, Jacob Frank, with all his military glory. He tries to tempt the speaker to descend to the corporeal world in order to reach the spiritual ‘sparkling grains’.34 While Jewish messianic mythology is an important aspect of this work, its other characteristics are equally significant for its study. Shvili’s poems emulate kabbalistic messianic texts in linguistic materials, as well as in the techniques some of them employ. In the manner of the great Kabbalists he rearranges secret, holy letter-combinations to change universes; he manipulates the shapes of Hebrew letters in order to arrive at mystical experiences. An untitled description of erotic acrobatics is a manifestation of typical kabbalistic gymnastics. ‘I dreamt of being a human (adam) and being a snake (nahash)’ (p. 43). This simultaneous existence enables the speaker to enter his own nakedness. The snake with his tail in his mouth is an ancient mythical symbol of life. Forming this self-contained, continuous cycle with one’s body may also symbolize infinity, or a spiritual desire for selfcompletion. This symbol is also characteristic (with some variations) of Sabbatean literature, which identifies the snake with Shabbetai Zevi.35 The numerical value of the Hebrew letters of the word NaHaSh (snake), is equal to that of the word MaShiaH (Messiah), namely 358. Furthermore, according to the Kabbalah, Adam, the first human, is endowed with messianic attributes.36 Being a human (adam in Hebrew) and a snake (messiah, numerically) simultaneously follows mystical logic. A discussion of the role of the snake in the redemptive process in Kabbalah in general, and the Lurianic Kabbalah and its Sabbatean interpretation in particular, is beyond the scope of this paper. However, Shvili’s immersion

‘Merciful Father Abraham’ 73 in these mystical texts and in their manipulations clearly nurtures his verse. Shvili’s familiarity with Sefer ha’ot, written by the ‘false’ messiah, Abraham Abulafia, in the thirteenth century is evident.37 Sefer ha’ot interprets the ‘final letter mem’—which graphically looks like a square—as a circle. It connects head to tail, like the snake. The head may be the first, superior, masculine sefirah, Keter, and the tail, the tenth, feminine, Malkhut. It may also be the reverse, where the tail is Keter and the head Malkhut. This combination, according to Sefer ha’ot, carries a divine meaning. Other poems play with different, mostly nonsensical, combinations of the letters that spell the word mashiah (pp. 18, 36, 65, 68). The origins of the spiritual interpretations of the Hebrew letters are not disguised. They function as stylistic quotes, as fragments in Shvili’s mystical, lyrical collage. They may also signal the author’s identification with the creators of the ancient texts and their subjects. Nowhere in the collection is the compression of time and place more apparent than in the poem entitled A Tale Which the Rabbi Hiyya and Rabbi Simon Showed Me’. Its opening lines: And we three were walking in the Arbela Valley and we saw ayelet hashahar [the doe, star of dawn] fainting in front of us. The ‘we’ featured in the poem ‘A Tale Which Rabbi Hiyya and Rabbi Simon Showed Me’ (p. 18) are an unlikely threesome. According to the Talmud, Rabbi Hiyya and Rabbi Simon compared the coming of redemption to the emergence of dawn in the valley of Arbela.38 While the Rabbis’ interpretation of the dawn is only implied, their historical stroll in the valley is transported to the present. The narrator exchanges tales with the great scholars, as if he were their peer refuting their arguments. He tells them of ‘some Spaniard’s’ failed attempt at bringing about redemption. That event transpired centuries prior to the writing of the poem, on the one hand, and nearly a millennium after the talmudic Rabbis’ lifetime, on the other. The Spaniard’ alludes to Rabbi Joseph Della Reyna who managed to capture Samael (Satan) but, alas, succumbed to his pleadings and fed him. The revived Samael unchained himself and redemption was therefore postponed once again. The story of Rabbi Joseph Della Reyna is told in the poem as a response to the (unquoted, yet implied) original talmudic discussion about the coming of light, ge’ula (redemption). Rabbi Hiyya and Rabbi Simon, for whom time has collapsed, retort with an even later, more catastrophic tale of a failed redemption—that of ‘some Turk’. Moreover, the Rabbis use kabbalistic terminology and references to seventeenth-century disputes in their accounts. The second half of this long-lined, asymmetrical poem reveals the talmudic scholars’ proficiency in the history of Shvili’s favorite character, the ubiquitous Shabbetai Zevi. They describe his snake-shaped ring, know of the positive powers which he attributed to the snake, and mention the infamous informant, Sasportas. While the contemporary narrator’s familiarity with the ancient material is plausible—the Rabbis’ ‘participation’ in the kabbalisticmessianic mental acrobatics is not. The collage of characters and tales ignores chronologies in a postmodernist manner, which also reflects a talmudic interpretative principle, namely that there is no ‘early’ and ‘late’ in the Torah (Pesahim:6). Shvili superimposes talmudic and messianic tales, mystical and historical materials. The literary collage blurs the names of the would-be carriers of redemption: Joseph Della Reyna (the Spaniard) and Shabbetai Zevi (the Turk). Only the supporting actors in this drama are mentioned here by name: Solomon Navarro, who recorded the Spaniard’s story in the sixteenth century and Saspor-

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tas, the Turk’s adversary. The poem ends with Shabbetai Zevi’s conversion to Islam, and with the Rabbis’ statement: ‘and indeed he was close to redeeming the world’. The reader is left wondering whether this chain of unnamed messiahs and ‘near-redemptions’ reflects a belief in true redemption, or echoes resignation to a world without one. The latter seems to be more consistent with the volume. Despair is the conclusion of most, if not all, the mini-collages, which compose the greater collage, namely A Boy Flying a Kite in the XVII Century. The Atika Kadisha section, for example, opens with a dark parody on a children’s rhyme (oy haval havall havall al tapuah shenafall shenafal merosh ha’etz/shenafal vehitpotzetz). While the original rhyme speaks of an apple (tapuah) that fell from the tree (‘etz) and exploded, Shvili mourns ‘a messiah (mashiah) that fell ‘from the end of time (ketz) and shattered’ (oy haval havall havall al mashiah shenafall shenafal merosh haketz/shenafal vehitpotzetz (p. 17). Behind the innocent-sounding rhyme lurks a bitter outcome: the messiah ‘forgot to be redeemed’ (line 8, the last line). Failed attempts, pain, blood, leprosy and imprisonment dominate much of the volume. Even poems like ‘My Father’s Suites’ (p. 47), and ‘I Was Reading a Poem By Abraham Rubio King of Niyark’ (p. 50), which flaunt precious stones and royal riches, often end with a rude awakening, or a fall. The bright exception, which emphasizes the surrounding darkness, is a Disney-like poem: How He Said He Would Conquer All the Nations with Singing On the roof a red cow is standing and under her udders two baskets filled with milk and a deer leaping on the roof playing a violin playing a recorder playing the cymbals of honey snow is falling on Smyrna snow of cotton wool snow of all sorts of colors and the son of David plays and people made of plasticene are leaving for Palestine are leaving their houses a walking-stick of chocolate in their hands and on their backs a rucksack filled with candies they shoot them with fire of liqueur from canons of marzipan and they fall to the ground and anyone who doesn’t fall marches to the land of Israel in sweet shoes of marmalade with sugar and the son of David plays the recorder plays the violin plays the cymbals of honey (p. 20) So sweet is the dream, that when juxtaposed with the collection’s other poems, it appears as a comical, or an ironic statement on the improbability of redemption. However, as I will show, the opposite may also be true. The opening lines establish a clear link to Surrealism:

‘Merciful Father Abraham’ 75 ‘On the roof a red cow is standing and under its udders two baskets/filled with milk/and a deer leaping on the roof playing a violin…’. Chagall immediately comes to mind with his depiction of a fiddler on the roof, a flying dreamer without roots, the Jewish luftmensch. The poem’s ‘deer’ and ‘son of David’ is Shabbetai Zevi. His presence fills the poem through the mention of Smyrna, his hometown, and in the word zevi, deer. The line: ‘and a deer is leaping on the roof plays on the duality of zevi. It is both a deer and Shabbetai Zevi’s name. The poet’s wand turns a man (Shabbetai Zevi) into a leaping, dancing deer who maintains his namesake’s talent for music. Shabbetai Zevi’s name and his love for song and dance nurture the two-way metaphor and heighten the poem’s mystical ecstasy.39 Additionally, the verb ‘leaping’ evokes the lover’s leaping on hilltops in The Song of Songs (2:8), a book whose symbolic, mystical interpretations are linked to redemption.40 However, the strongest intertextual bond yet, of ‘How He Said He Would Conquer All the Nations with Singing’ is with a Sabbatean-Palestinian legend. The poem’s ‘Red Cow’ serves as a clue to the informed Hebrew reader who traces it back to the Red Heifer, an important element of the legend. The poem’s ‘Red Cow’, then, is none other than the now extinct Red Heifer who plays an important role in messianic visions (the Hebrew word para is used in the Bible for either cow or heifer). This cow’s ashes, according to the Bible, are vital for the purification from sin (Numbers 19) which must precede the rebuilding of the Temple and redemption. Nathan Levi of Gaza, the Sabbatean ‘Paul’, prophesied of one Rabbi Benjamin Israel’s purification by such ashes, and connected it to the appraoching Sabbatean redemption.41 His vision developed into a legend in late seventeenth-century Palestine and was transformed into a fantastic tale with many supernatural components. A common thread in all the legend’s variants is the sinking and destruction of churches and mosques throughout the Middle East. This grandiose victory over the other nations reverberates in the poem’s title: ‘How He Said He Would Conquer All the Nations With Singing’. Shvili gives the ancient vision a saccharine-like interpretation. Messiah-son-of-David plays his recorder and people follow him as they did the Pied Piper: And the son of David plays and plasticene people leave for Palestine’. The believers abandon their homes for a chocolate mission, marching in marmalade shoes to the land of Israel. The poem concludes with a quasi-Zionistic dream of redemption. The lurking catastrophe, that is, the devastating results of Sabbateanism, familiar to any student of Jewish history, is outside the realm of the poem. The vision is seductively beautiful and transmits an ecstatic sensation. It dominates most of the senses: sweet taste of honey and candy; sounds of the recorder, cymbals and violin; visions of colors and fire; the feel of plasticene, snow and earth. Ecstasy sweeps the poem as it did the seventeenth-century Jews of Smyrna. Shvili’s fascination with this aspect of the messianic movement and of mysticism comes through in this fantastic account of joy disconnected from reality.42 Shvili surrenders to pleasure and creates an island wrought with childish imagination: chocolate sticks, plasticene, cotton candy. Redemption, if at all, will come to those who suspend their disbelief for the moment: children, mad people or artists. The book’s three inner-titles proceed from highest to lowest, resonating the mystical sequence of the sefirot. The untitled introductory cycle, which precedes the first and superior inner-title, hints, perhaps, to the state before creation. Despite its sinister ambiance, it records near-climatic moments of a union with God and implies the highest topography

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in the collection. The messianic-poetic roller-coaster, which follows in the remainder of the book, ends with the lowest sefirah. The last inner-title is the only one whose content corresponds to its heading. Matronita Ayalta contains the only poems in the volume which feature women in the lead role. These feminine figures are involved in the messianic enterprise. Meliselda of Shabbetai Zevi’s favorite folk love-song, is wedded to Joseph Della Reyna in a typical Shvilian collage. Eve, the daughter of the Messiah (Jacob Frank), is humbly begging for groceries in a text laced with German names, mixing one Jewish catastrophe with another. While the chaotic texts of the volume reject their framing titles and maintain their heterogeneous, collage character, the messianic-oriented descent of the inner-titles is significant. It may suggest the kabbalistic principle of descent for the sake of eventual ascension and restoration.43 At the same time, it insinuates that all quests for salvation, past and present, are doomed to remain within the realm of longing, or end with a fall. This anti-idealistic notion is postmodern in its core. There is no Utopia in this twodimensional, emotionally charged collage. The work is imbued with childhood trauma of abandonment which drives the author’s desire for a union with God. The windings of the path to God pass through mediums of hope and messiahs. Rising above them all is Shabbetai Zevi, who may represent not only the longing for the father aspects of God, but also the identification with a mother. The volume ends without an end, just as it began; the book’s binding does not form boundaries. It is as if the words flow from an unknown point of departure, to an unknown destination. The last printed word—‘time’—is not followed by any punctuation marks. The medium is a message: there is no completed poem; there is no finished book; there is no perfect human; there is no ‘true’ messiah; there is no total redemption. This incomplete collage-like structure mirrors a lack of inner wholeness. It tells many stories that add up to a unique account, that of its composer.

Notes 1 2

3

4

5

6

My special thanks to Professor Moshe Idel of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who generously gave me his time, and whose wealth of knowledge made this paper possible. Binyamin Shvili described his poetry to me in these terms in a telephone interview, April 2000. The interview was conducted in Hebrew. All quotes from the interview used herein, are translated by myself. All references made in the paper to an oral communication with Shvili are to this interview. Binyamin Shvili, Yeled me‘if afifon bame’a hayod zayin: shirim (A Boy Flying a Kite in the XVII Century: Poems), eds Sifriyat Piyut and Dror Green, Eichut, Jerusalem, 1989. Shvili’s work has not been translated to date. All translations of Shvili’s poetry and prose are mine. For examples and discussion of this over-arching phenomenon see: Ruth Kartun-Blum, ‘Profane Scriptures: Reflections on the Dialogue with the Bible’, in Modern Hebrew Poetry, Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College, 2000. Idiolect is a language-usage that is created by an individual author. It is an individual dialect, idiosyncratically his. See Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry, Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1978, pp. 21, 23. Sabbatean (or Sabbatian), is a modern term, which refers back to the ‘Believer’, a technical term by which the followers of the ‘false’ messiah, Shabbetai Zevi, defined themselves. See Gershom

‘Merciful Father Abraham’ 77

7

8 9 10

11 12

13

14

15 16

17

Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676, Princeton University Press, 1973, p. 238 (henceforth Scholem 1973). For the sake of consistency I will be using the spelling in the Encyclopedia Judaica, when available, for this, and all other terms. I will also be following the Encyclopedia Judaica form of transliteration. The hidden God, the Ein-Sof (infinite), is far removed from everything created; he is unrevealed, non-manifest, and unknown. Only the emanation of his power transforms Him into the CreatorGod. The different stages of emanation manifest the hidden potencies and attributes by which God acts. Ten such stages, known as sefirot, constitute the inner life of the Godhead; in them He becomes manifest as a personal God. See Scholem 1973, pp. 15–18, 275 (for an introduction to the sefirot); pp. 119–23 (for a description of the individual sefirot). Henceforth in this article I will refer to God’s emanations as sefirah (singular) or sefirot (plural). The terms Atika Kadisha, Malka Kadisha and Ayalta Kadisha, like many others in Kabbalah, stimulate long theosophical discussions. They receive various meanings in the different texts in which they appear. Here I follow a generally accepted scheme. Its connection to the poetry is, as I state, mostly stylistic. However, there is room for further exploration of the relationship between the Sabbatean view of these concepts and Shvili’s poetry. Shabbetai Zevi (1626–1676), the central figure of Sabbateanism, the messianic movement called after him (Encyclopedia Judaica entry); See also Scholem 1973, pp. 104–24. Scholem 1973, p. 807. Allusions to the New Testament and to Christian, Sufi, Muslim and Buddhist mystical texts predominate Shvili’s corpus. However, this volume, and therefore my study of it, is closely related to Jewish Messianism. I have tried to remain faithful to the literal meaning, (lack of) punctuation and line breaks. Wherever punctuation appears in the poems, it has been added to facilitate understanding. Shvili’s proficiency in Shabbetai Zevi’s biography is evident. It is a source of material for him. However, his references to this source are fragmented. Shvili weaves into the poems Shabbetai Zevi’s incarceration, conversion to Islam, imprisonment in Gallipoli, and the conflict with Sasportas. Shvili alludes to Shabbetai Zevi’s snake-ring, his anointment, the coronation of kings, and to his prophet Nathan of Gaza. In addition to the poems discussed above, the following poems contain similar material: ‘And I Saw Gallipoli at Night’ (p. 21); ‘I Was Reading A Poem By Abraham Rubio’ (p. 50); ‘A poem’ (p. 68). For additional information on the topics, see Scholem 1973, pp. 327–460, 603–86, 687–914, 313, 400–1, 382, 426–32, 233–50, 23–44. For Sasportas, see Eli Moyal, Rabbi Jacob Sasportas, Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1992 (in Hebrew); Scholem 1973, pp. 461–602; Encyclopedia Judaica entry. The Hebrew word Gan Eden—literally Garden of Eden—represents the idea of ‘Paradise’, and that of ‘Heaven’, which is the antonym of ‘Hell’. It is both the primeval Garden of Eden (Genesis 3), and the place where the righteous go after they die. The women who appear in this poem are external, or instrumental in this revelation of the father to his son. For the kabbalistic roots of ‘women as God’, see Elliot R.Wolf son, Circle in the Square, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995, pp. 119, 231. Natan Zach, ‘Rega ehad’ (One Moment), Shirim Shonim (Various Poems), Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 1974, p. 23. The term denotes the ten stages of emanation that emerged from Ein-Sof (the divine infinity) and form the realm of God’s manifestation in His various attributes. Every single sefirah points to an aspect of God in His capacity of Creator, forming at the same time a whole world of divine light in the chain of being. The whole of the ten sefirot, forming the ‘sefirot tree’, is conceived as a dynamic unity in which the activity of God reveals itself. The rhythm of the unfolding sefirot is the fundamental rhythm of all creation and can be detected on each of its different levels. Scholem 1973, p. 120. See also note 6 above.

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18

Yehuda Liebes, The Overall Amendment of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav and its relation to Sabbateanism’, in Zion, vol. 3, The Israeli Historical Society, Jerusalem, 1988. I am grateful to professor Alan Brill, of Yeshiva University, for sharing his knowledge with me, for his illuminating remarks, and especially for his contribution to the analysis of the kabbalistic implications of the poems: ‘Merciful Father’ and ‘I Did Not Hear My Father that You Came to Me’. The original names Avraham and Binyamin, used in the translation and the discussion, are the equivalent of the English Abraham and Benjamin, respectively. For an explanation regarding the use of the phrase ‘Garden of Eden’ see note 12 above. This fact is known to the reader from other sources: see ‘My Father’s Suites’, p. 47, and ‘I Was Reading a Poem By Avraham Rubio King of Niyark’, p. 50, in A Boy Flying a Kite in the XVII Century, and also Kastoria, Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1998, p. 47. My thanks to professor Tova Rosen of Tel Aviv University, for pointing out the relevance of the colloquial expression Lo haram for this reading. Natan Zach, ‘Hakina ‘al daniel adama’ (The Lament for Daniel Earth), in Shirim Shonim (Various Poems), Hakibbutz Hameuchad, Israel, 1974, p. 93. Binyamin Shvili, Kastoria, Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1998. Benjamin of Tudela, second half of the twelfth century, the greatest medieval Jewish traveler (Encyclopedia Judaica entry); see also The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela: Travels in the Middle Ages, Malibu CA: Joseph Simon Pangloss Press, 1987. Scholem 1973, pp. 779–81. Ayllon, Solomon Ben Jacob (c. 1655–1728), rabbi and kabbalist. Born in Salonika, joined the followers of Shabbetai Zevi (Encyclopedia Judaica entry). Scholem 1973, p. 104. Scholem 1973, pp. 131–7. Rabbi Joseph Della Reyna, fifteenth century. Half folk-tale, half-kabbalistic legend of a practical kabbalist, who was on the verge of saving the world (as written by Solomon Navarro); see Scholem 1973, pp. 75–6. Scholem 1973, p. 400. Solomon Molcho (c. 1500–32), born to Marrano parents. He was a kabbalist and pseudo-messiah, in whose writing apocalyptic and speculative Kabbalah had fused. He succeeded in gaining the confidence of the pope, who granted his protection when his prophecies came true. He was later tried by the Emperor Charles V, and burnt at the stake. See Moshe Idel, ‘Shlomo Molcho as a Magican’, in Sefunot, vol. 3, Ben-Zvi Institute, Jerusalem, 1993; Encyclopedia Judaica entry, pp. 225–7. See also Scholem 1973, pp. 18–19, 100–1, 563–4. Jacob Frank (1726–91), pseudo-messiah, successor to Shabbetai Zevi. He was the founder of the Frankist sect, the last stage in the development of the Sabbatean movement. Scholem 1973, pp. 670–1; Encyclopedia Judaica entry. A basic concept in Kabbalah is tikkun, restoration. Fragments of holiness, or lights of the divine emanations (nitzotzot), are scattered even in the midst of the abyss. It is the mission of the Jew to retrieve those fragments, elevate them, and thus bring about redemption. Some messianic writings promoted descending, even committing sin in order to retrieve the particles of good, which were ‘caught’ in the midst of evil. For a detailed description of this strategy see Scholem 1973, pp. 36–43; see also Gershom Scholem, The Kabbalah and its Symbolism, New York: Schocken Books, 1996, p. 110. This strategy was enthusiastically adopted by Shabbetai Zevi and his prophet after his conversion, and later by the Frankists. Yehuda Liebes, Sod ha’emuna hashabta’it (On Sabbateanism and its Kabbalah: Collected Essays), Bialik Institute, Jerusalem, 1995, pp. 158–82.

19

20

21

22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30

31 32

33

34

35

‘Merciful Father Abraham’ 79 36 ADaM can be read as an acrostic, made up of Adam, David, Messiah. See Scholem 1973, p. 57. 37 Sefer ha’ot, in Adolph Jellinek, Ginzei hokhmat hakabbalah, Makor Ltd, Jerusalem, 1969, p. 6. About Abulafia, the creator of Sefer ha’ ot, see also Moshe Idel, Hahavaya hamistit etzel Avraham Abulafia (The Mystical Experience for Abraham Abulafia), Jerusalem: Akademon, 1988 (in Hebrew); and Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988. 38 Midrash Tehilim XXII, 13, as quoted in Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676, Princeton University Press, 1973, p. 48. 39 Scholem 1973, p. 158. 40 The shekhinah—literally in-dwelling of God in the world—is the tenth and last sefirah, which is feminine. It is likened to a daughter/bride, which is the talmudic interpretation of the community of Israel, manifested in the ‘Song of Songs’. See Scholem, Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, pp. 104–9. 41 Rabbi Benjamin Israel, according to Nathan of Gaza, was a reincarnation of the murderer of the prophet Zecharia, and therefore needed to be purified. See Scholem, The Kabbalah and its Symbolism, pp. 214–16. 42 Binyamin Shvili, ‘The Birth of the Infatuated Dance’, Ha’aretz, 15 December 1995. 43 See note 33 above.

Bibliography Idel, Moshe, “Shlomo Molcho as a Magician”, in Sefunot, Vol. 3, Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 1993. ——Hahavaya hamistit ‘etzel Avraham Abulafia (The mystical experience for Abraham Abulafia), Jerusalem: Akademon, 1988. ——Kabbalah: New Perspectives, New Haven, Yale, London: University Press, 1988. ——Meshihiyut umistica (Messianism and mysticism), Ministry of Defence, Israel 1992. Jellinek, Adolph, Ginzei hochmat hakabala, Jerusalem: Makor, 1969 [in Hebrew and German]. Kartun-Blum, Ruth, Profane Scriptures: Reflections on the Dialogue with the Bible in Modern Hebrew Poetry, Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College, 2000. Liebes, Yehuda, Sod ha’emuna hashabta’it (On Sabbateanism and its Kabbalah: collected essays), Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1995. Liebes, Yehuda, “The Overall Amendment of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav and its Relation to Sabbateanism”, in Zion, Vol. 3, Jerusalem: The Israeli Historical Society, 1988. Moyal, Eli, Rabbi Jacob Sasportas, Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1992 [in Hebrew]. Riffaterre, Michael, Semiotics of Poetry, Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1978. Scholem, Gershom, Mehkerei hakabala,’aleph (Studies in Kabbalah, 1), Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1998. ——Pirkei yesod behavanat hakabala usemaleha (Elements of the Kabbalah and its symbolism), Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1976 [in Hebrew]. Translated into English as On The Kabbalah and its Symbolism, R.Manheim translator, New York: Schocken Books, 1996 ——Shabtai Zvi vehatenu’ah hashabta’it biymei hayav (Shabbetai Zevi and the Sabbatean movement during his lifetime), Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1974 (originally published in 1957). Translated, revised and augmented as Sabbatai Sevi The Mystical Messiah 1626–1676, Princeton University Press, 1973. ——The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, New York: Schocken, 1971. ——Sefer da at utevuna (The book of knowledge and wisdom), Jerusalem: Mekor Hayim, 1973. Shvili, Binyamin, “The Birth of the Infatuated Dance”, in Ha’aretz, Dec. 15, 1995 [in Hebrew].

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——Kastoria, Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1998 [in Hebrew]. ——Yeled me‘if ‘afifon bame’a hayod zayin, shirim, (A boy flying a kite in the xvii century: poems), Jerusalem: Sifriyat Piyut, Eichut, 1989. ——The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela: Travels in the Middle Ages, Malibu, California: Joseph Simon Pangloss Press, 1987. Wolfson, Elliot R., Circle in the Square, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Zach, Natan, Shirim Shonim (Various poems), Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1974.

5 MORAL EDUCATION THROUGH ISLAMIC SONGS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY JAVA Edwin Wieringa

Muslims traditionally cherish the search for knowledge and learning, even though, as the oft-quoted Prophetic saying goes, the quest may take the student as far as China. Religious education and knowledge have always been important criteria for being a Muslim. The question, however, of how Muslim norms and values should be defined is rather problematic. The two fundamental norm-giving authorities in Islam are the Qur’ân, God’s word revealed to the Prophet and the sunna, the words and deeds of the Prophet himself. Their interpretation, however, is not uniform and so different Islamic self-definitions have been developed over time. In this chapter I wish to explore the ideas and practices in the field of moral education by the traditionalist group in twentieth-century Java. In their concepts about good and evil we find a reflection of ideals concerning authority, obedience, family and relations between man and woman. I focus my attention on the genre of Javanese Islamic poetry called singir (or syi‘ir, syiir, syi’ir, syair, all possible transliterations of what is spelled in Arabic script as sh-‘-[î]-r) that is mainly sung by girls and women.1 Furthermore I look into related forms of Indonesian Islamic poetry (mainly written by Javanese), demonstrating that moving into the twenty-first century, issues of Islamic identity continue to preoccupy Muslims in Java and the Indonesian Muslim community at large.

The singir genre The singirs which will be discussed in this contribution were all composed in Javanese by kiais, i.e. leaders of religious schools (the so-called pesantrens), and serve to affirm the identity of the traditionalist group, since 1926 united in the Nahdlatul Ulama (‘Revival of the Religious Scholars’, henceforth abbreviated as NU), the largest traditionalist Islamic socio-religious organisation in Indonesia. Hence the performance of singirs mainly takes place in East Java and Madura, NU’s traditional heartland. The script in which singirs are written, viz. vocalised Perso-Arabic script (called pégon), carries symbolic meaning, being a hallmark of traditionalist literature, over against the modernists who prefer books in Romanised Indonesian. The singirs circulate in manuscript and lithographed form, and are for sale in toko kitab, i.e. bookshops specialising in religious literature. The singir genre takes its name from the stanzaic verse form in which it is

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cast. Its structure is rather similar to that of the basic four-line unit of Malay verse (syair) to which it is related. A singir stanza, consisting of four lines, may have 6 to 18 syllables per line and the end rhyme generally has an a-a-a-a or a-a-b-b pattern. The origin and subsequent development of the singir genre is hidden in the mists of time. It is thus impossible to draw a rough chronological development of this literature. Many texts are undated and dates of publication do not have to coincide with dates of composition. Singir books, rarely numbering more than 15–20 pages, are relatively cheap, ranging in price from 600 to 900 rupiyah (in 2000 about US$0.07). Business in singir books is presently mainly one of reprinting old texts, catering for a diminishing public of elderly people.2

Contested systems of knowledge The twentieth-century singirs I have seen, in all some seventy titles, may perhaps best be described as versified moralistic teachings (sometimes in the form of pious stories and with additional hymns and prayers), functioning to present and transmit traditionalist views. Issues of knowledge, education and the proper upbringing of children are overriding matters of concern in singirs. Especially in the earliest printed specimens from the 1920s we see that these topics were emphasised, just like in the Malay modernist fiction of those years.3 The following example is taken from Darnawi’s book on Javanese poetics who wanted to illustrate the singir’s verse form, viz. an a-a-a-a end rhyme pattern and twelve syllables per line: Sun miwiti anarik akaling bocah

I begin by attracting the children’s intellects

Bokmanawa lawas-lawas bisa pecah

So that their minds in the end may open up

Bisa mikir bisa ngrasa bisa genah

And they may think well, feel well and be well behaved

Ngarep-arep kabèh iku min fadli’llah

We hope all this will come true through God’s mercy

Wajib bapa awè h sandhang mangan ngimel

A father’s duty is to feed and clothe his child,

Awèh art a sangu ngaji aja owel

giving money and what it needs to go to Qur’ân school, heedless of the cost

Lah arepen kasil ngilmu buwang sebel

Well, if you want [your child] to gain knowledge, throw off resentment

Aja nganti ati atos amekiyel

Don’t let yourself become hardened and impatient

Wajib ngaèn lanang wadon luru ngilmu

Beyond all doubt men and women have a duty to seek for knowledge

Aja lèrèn yèn durung rupek bodhomu

Don’t stop if you have still not set a limit to your ignorance

Nadyan adoh angèl ilangna taksirmu

Though it’s a long, hard path, you must rid yourself of unknowingness

Kena mulih yèn wus kasil ilmumu

You may go home when you have gained knowledge4

Moral education through Islamic songs in Twentieth-century Java 83 This example comes from the beginning of the Singir Darmawasana, ‘Poem on the Results of Performing One’s Duties’, following the basmala. It was originally written by Shaykh Haji Muhammad Irsyad from the village of Luwanu near Bagelen, Purwareja. It was included as an appendix in an undated lithographed edition of the Kitâb Jawharat printed in Bombay, and was reissued on 30 Sura 1850 of the Javanese calendar, i.e. 25 October 1919 CE, in Javanese and Latin script by Oemar Said Tjokroaminoto as a kind of ‘money-spinner’ for the Sarekat Islam party.5 In the lithographed edition the title of the singir is not mentioned, but it is said that the first six stanzas deal with knowledge (bâb al-‘ilm) whereas the remaining forty-four stanzas contain admonitions (bâb In fact, however, the beginning about knowledge (cited above) is also an admonition, urging parents (especially the father as head of the family) to let children follow (religious) education, and warning children not to drop out of school. In singirs the issues of knowledge and learning are inextricably tied to the punishment in the grave (‘adhâb al-qabr), when the deceased is interrogated by the angels Munkar and Nakîr. Only if the dead person is able to answer the questions correctly and state that Allâh is his God, his Prophet and Islam his religion, is entry into paradise certain. Those who cannot answer the questions correctly will be tormented until the Day of Judgement when they will be sent to Hell. In the Singir Laki-Rabi ‘Poem about Husband and Wife’ its author describes knowledge as the road to salvation: The end of time has arrived, it’s praiseworthy to repent So that your sins will not multiply Search swiftly for knowledge So that at death you may say ‘Yes’ May you be destined to have an Islamic death, So that it will be pleasant for you in the grave.7 The emphasis on the excellence of traditional knowledge may be interpreted, I think, as a reaction to the enormous prestige of modern (i.e. Western) education and ‘secular’ learning. As elsewhere in the Muslim world, in Indonesia too [t]he introduction on a massive scale of education modeled along Western lines leading to increases in literacy and semi-literacy, along with an information boom stemming from both print and electronic media, have all played their part in precipitating a fragmentation of Islamic religious authority. A once fairly unified and restricted idea of knowledge has now been called into question.8 No longer does knowledge lie exclusively in studying the Qur’ân and mastering Islamic law, traditionally the field of the ‘ulamâ’, and hence their authority has been eroded. Western-style education and the possession of diplomas, hesitantly introduced in the latter half of the nineteenth century, were quickly and generally seen in Indonesia as the key to development. The ability to read and write Arabic as well as specifically religious expertise were not the kinds of qualification sought for by people who wished to improve their position in society. Broadly speaking, and simplifying matters somewhat, the Muslim community

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in Java split into two groups in relation to the Western system of knowledge. On the one hand adherents of reformism, predominantly organised in Muhammadiyah, ‘The Way of Muhammad’, founded in 1912, embraced it in their desire to ‘purify’ religion. On the other hand the traditionalists, organised in NU, which can be considered as the successor of the Nahdatul Wathan, Awakening of the Fatherland’, founded in 1916, held to the full authority of the past, unwilling to see changing circumstances affect the time-honoured traditions. The idea behind what has been called the ‘project of modernity’ in the West was ‘to use the accumulation of knowledge generated by many individuals working freely and creatively for the pursuit of human emancipation and the enrichment of daily life’.9 Human emancipation and the enrichment of daily life were also high on the agenda of Muslim modernists. Muhammadiyah concentrated on the areas of education and social welfare and saw religious education as a must, but ‘the promotion of material and physical well-being of oneself and fellow Muslims was equally a God-given obligation’.10 In Muhammadiyah schools Arabic was taught as an independent subject in order to encourage pupils to make up their own minds about the Qur’ân and ‘Bocah-bocah, dimardèkaaké pikiré’ (They may still be children, but their thinking should become independent), as one speaker at a Muhammadiyah congress in 1925 phrased it.11 Another feature of the Muhammadiyah education system was the teaching at the same time of mathematics, biology, chemistry and physics as part of ilmu kegunaan, ‘practical knowledge’. ‘Basic to all this’, Nakamura comments, was a religious notion that nature works regularly as a result of God’s creation and that man, God’s creature equipped with God-given rationality (akal), was capable of understanding nature’s regularity and was indeed obligated to make good use of it. This admonition to acquire scientific knowledge and apply it to everyday life seems to have been conducive to the introduction of various technological innovations by several Muhammadiyah members in the field of economic activities.12 Although for the modernists the pursuit of human emancipation and the enrichment of daily life were deeply embedded in religion, traditionalists were unhappy with the ideas and activities of the ‘innovators’ which to them smacked too much of worldliness. Conversely, traditionalists emphasised the transitoriness of this world, stressing the necessity to prepare for the world to come. In singirs, as a rule coming from the pens of ‘ulamâ’, ilmu ‘knowledge’ (from Arabic ‘ilm) refers to the orthodox heritage, supremely validated as providing the keys of heaven. In Haji Zakariya’s Singir Santri, ‘Poem about the Student of Religion’, ilmu is compared to a pager ‘fence’, ensuring that all that is planted thrives and bears fruit, yielding no sins in the grave.13 This imagery is reminiscent of a favourite saying attributed to the Prophet: ‘This world is the seedbed for the Other World’. Knowledge that does not comply with ilmu is flatly rejected and even demonised in the Singir Santri: The end of time has arrived: many people are clever On the outside they’re wonderful, but inside they’ve gone off the rails They’re not much inclined to turn to ilmu, Which makes tempting devils act ever more rashly.14

Moral education through Islamic songs in Twentieth-century Java 85 At the time of this poem, which was composed in 1928, the term ilmu was still widely understood in the sense of ‘solid (i.e. religious) knowledge’, stemming from divine revelation and based on texts in Arabic, the language in which God’s word was transmitted to humanity. Through Western influence, however, ilmu came also to be applied to mere worldly sciences such as chemistry and the like. The gradual shift in meaning of ilmu away from religion has led to new interpretations of singirs. How this is done may be illustrated by looking at the way D.Zawawi Imron (b. 1946), a man steeped in the Madurese pesantren tradition and a composer himself of ‘fairly conventional poems’,15 in two recent publications interprets an older singir. According to Zawawi, in the 1920s Kiai Haji As’ ad Syamsul Arifin (1897–1990) of Situbondo (East Java), who was later to become a leading figure of NU, issued a Madurese-language book entitled Syi’ir Madura, ‘Madurese singirs’, in which he expressed his concerns about the critical period he was living in: Disorder16 is great in this age Everyone is in difficulty High politics has a hard road to travel The challenges are great, formidable One is in difficulty if one takes the wrong road The economy is on the verge of breakdown The population is growing and growing Numbers are rising while there’s too little to live on It’s our duty to increase the agricultural produce It’s our duty to improve our commerce We are in trouble yet we have no knowledge Let us implore God to have mercy on us.17 These lines show that the poem’s author was well aware of the problematical situation of his time, addressing political, economical and educational matters. But what is the solution? Interestingly, Zawawi interprets the poem’s answer in the light of his own time. Before President Soeharto’s downfall in 1998, Zawawi explained the lines ‘The population is growing and growing, numbers are rising while there’s too little to live on’ as a plea for birth control, some forty years ahead of Indonesia’s official policy of family planning.18 This interpretation, which in my view has no basis in the poem, reflects the importance attached to demographic change and family planning—key items of Indonesia’s policies and development planning during the presidency of Soeharto. In a subsequent article, however, written a little later in the so-called ‘Reformation Era’ after Soeharto had stepped down, Zawawi declares that this poem was originally composed in the 1960s and offers a new interpretation, again mirroring the concerns of the day, that is to say again Zawawi’s time.19 The lack of knowledge in the last line but one is now seen as a lack of ‘scientific knowledge’ (ilmu pengetahuan) and technology. The solution therefore is that efforts have to be made to bring the educational system into line with the needs of the people and modern standards. Curricula should be altered so that schools cease to be ‘unemployment factories’. Finally, Zawawi argues, there needs to be a growing moral sense that Indonesian society has to be freed of corruption, collusion and nepotism. Using

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these last three buzzwords, generally abbreviated as KKN (standing for korupsi, kolusi and nepotisme), which were and are on everyone’s lips since Indonesian ‘Reformasi’, gives his interpretation a very up-to-date touch. I do not know when Kiai Haji As’ ad Syamsul Arifin composed his poem. Cynics might say that it could refer to almost every situation during the twentieth century. In my opinion Kiai Haji As’ ad Syamsul Arifin does not advocate a smaller size of the population, but rather a religious, nationalistic and economic revival. The resultant prosperity would then sustain the population growth. However that may be, it is interesting to note that the term ‘knowledge’, which in the poem is directly followed by a reference to God, is understood in Zawawi’s most recent interpretation as (worldly) science, closely related to technology. Zawawi’s exegesis of the poem, using it in a more or less allusive manner to discuss the burning topics of the day, is an example of how one can turn the text around and create a whole new meaning. In his overall interpretation, however, Zawawi still starts off from the idea that the poem’s message is religious, based on Sûra 11:61 which he interprets as ‘He [God] has created you from the earth and has made you its prosperous user’.20 For a younger generation, the search for knowledge still remains the Islamic answer to the problems of the modern world, but if the idea of progress is embraced, a break with history and tradition is inevitable.

Themes The fact that singirs were written by religious teachers explains their didactic-moralistic character. Kiais chose to clothe their tracts in poetic form not because they were inspired by literary ambition, but simply because songs were suitable mnemonic devices, helping the singers and listeners to remember the contents more easily. With this same aim in mind the kiais preferred the use of everyday language that is easily understood to the specifically poetical vocabulary employed in Javanese verse form (tembang macapat), which would risk obscuring the content.21 Some kiais, however, liked to intersperse their poems with Arabic words and expressions in order to enhance their religious character.22 Looking at the corpus readily available in religious bookshops we may roughly distinguish three categories. First, we see that traditional Islamic stories, which had been handed down for ages in other renditions in Malay, Javanese or other regional Indonesian literatures, were versified. The Singir Paras Nabi ‘Poem on the Shaving of the Prophet’s Hair’, for example, is a rendition of a well-known story which is found in a number of Indonesian languages. It is popular in different parts of the archipelago partly because of the widespread belief that this story can give protection from various disasters and illnesses and also ensures that the correct answers are given to the questions of Munkar and Nakîr, the angels of the grave.23 The Singir Patimah ‘Poem about ’ also belongs to this group, being a version of the story of the Prophet’s daughter’s wedding with Alî, which is also known, albeit in another redaction, in Malay literature;24 in an edition from the 1920s it is said to be based on a collection.25 Second, poems were composed which may be styled fire-and-brimstone sermons, placing a strong emphasis on the theme of impending death and the Last Judgement. Although I cannot directly pinpoint their ‘original’ sources as in the previous category, texts which

Moral education through Islamic songs in Twentieth-century Java 87 dwell on the subject of meditatio mortis are well-known in Malay, Javanese and other Indonesian literatures.26 The titles of such texts, such as ‘Advice for the Last Day’ (Singir Naséhat Jaman Akhir), ‘Rising Moon, Elucidating the Situation at the End of Time’ (Singir Wulan Handadari, nerangaken situasi zaman akhir), ‘Reminders’ (Singir Pangélingan), ‘Warnings’ (Singir érang-érang) or simply ‘The Last Day’ (Singir Kiyamat), already speak volumes. The Singir Kalabang Kurès, which in the first section tells of the Prophet’s teachings concerning the people who will be punished by God on the Last Day, vividly illustrating this in the next part by a story about a terrifying gigantic scorpion (called kalabang Kurès) which devours the infidels and takes them down to Hell, also belongs to this group.27 Finally, kiais also tried their hand at compositions about modern-day socio-religious themes, preferably lecturing on women, education and moral principles. Several of these texts are specifically aimed at women, such as the Advice for Wives’ (Singir Naséhat Kanca Wadon) or the ‘Sweet Talk, on Caring for the Family’ (Singir Omong énak Momong Sanak). The Singir Laki-Rabi, ‘Poem about Husband and Wife’, focuses on the duties of a woman when she is married. In the category of modern subjects the theme of the Last Day remains important: witness the Singir Dagang, ‘Poem about the Trader’, which admonishes ‘workers’ to lead a pious life in order not to lose sight of the hereafter amidst busy worldly affairs: Following the devil will have unpleasant consequences By and by in the grave you will wail Workers should be taught to stand in fear Remember that you are a servant of God.28 Haji Zakariya’s Singir Santri ‘Poem about the Student of Religion’ typically ends with admonitions about the role of good deeds (‘amal) and knowledge (‘ilm) on the Last Day. In the ‘Modern Singir’ (Singir Modèren), composed by Zayn al-’Arifin from Pare in 1408 H/1982–1983 CE, the modern age, i.e. ‘the age which is called the computer age’, is described as a time in which Muslims are severely put to the test, because of the many sinful desires prompted by man’s lusts (nafsu).29 Stressing the obligation for girls to preserve their virginity until they are married, Zayn al-’Arifin points out that the word perawan ‘virgin’ is etymologically related to keperawiraan, ‘heroism’, so that the ‘original’ meaning of virgin is ‘someone who is devoted to God’.30 In the concluding stanzas of his poem he warns us that we will all end our lives in the grave where Munkar and Nakîr will question us about our Lord and Prophet.

Performance in pesantrens As singirs were mostly composed by heads of pesantrens, it is only logical that their performance took place in and around these religious schools. We can gather information about this from a collection of anecdotal stories by Djamil Suherman originally published in 1963, in which he gives a lively account of life in a (fictional) pesantren in East Java, based on his own childhood experiences.31 As Suherman was born in 1924, the period he

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describes covers the 1930s-1940s. In one of his stories the first-person narrator tells that in the direct neighbourhood of his pesantren, the kiai’s wife dispensed primary education to young girls, viz. Arabic, Qur’ân recitation, the Barzanji (i.e. Ja’far al-Barzanjî’s Mawlid, which according to Van Bruinessen is ‘perhaps the most loved text in Indonesia after the Qur’an itself’32) and singirs.33 Whereas boys were supposed to study a rather broad curriculum for many years, for girls education at the lowest level covering elementary subjects was considered to be enough.34 Apparently boys did not occupy themselves with singirs.35 According to Suherman the singirs constituted an important part of the girls’ curriculum and were certainly their most popular subject. Even when girls had finished school they still liked to sing the poems at work or as a pastime during their leisure. They chanted the poems about the Resurrection (Singir Kiyamat), the apocalyptic scorpion (Singir Kelabang Kurès), Heaven’s inhabitants (Singir Ahli Syurga), (Singir Patimah), and marriage (Singir Laki-Rabi). Thus at an early age great care was taken to inculcate into them a proper understanding of their duties to be good Muslims as well as good mothers and housewives. The fire-and-brimstone singirs about the Last Day (Singir Kiyamat, Singir Kelabang Kurès and Singir Ahli Syurga) made it clear that those who obeyed the rules could expect eternal bliss, but everyone else was bound for terrible punishments in Hell. For a woman, obeying the rules entailed not only adhering to the right belief but also embracing her given role as wife and mother and upholding the values inherent in that ascribed social role. Singing the life of , the Prophet’s beautiful daughter, wife of Alî and mother of two sons ( and transmitted a practical example. The Singir Patimah (and also the Hikayat Sitti Patimah which is included in the Singir Ahli Syurga) demonstrate a woman’s exemplary fidelity and loyalty: before marriage as a daughter towards her father, and after marriage as a wife towards her husband.36 According to Suherman most time at school was devoted to the poem about marriage (Singir Laki-Rabi) which was also the most popular song among the older girls.37 The basic theme of this text was that a wife should devote herself entirely to her husband. The theological underpinning of the division of roles between men and women in the Singir Laki-Rabi is that God has appointed men in charge of women and hence wives have to obey their husbands, as set out in Qur’ân, Sûra 4:34: Men are the managers of the affairs of women for that God has preferred in bounty one of them over another, and for that they have expended of their property. Righteous women are therefore obedient, guarding the secret for God’s guarding. And those you fear may be rebellious admonish; banish them to their couches, and beat them. If they then obey you, look not for any way against them; God is All-high, All-great (interpr. Arberry).38 Whereas a wife’s loyalty to her husband and her total dependence on him are normally summed up by quoting the well-known Javanese saying ‘following [him] to heaven, carried along [by him] to hell’ (swarga nunut neraka katuf), Suherman summarises the moral

Moral education through Islamic songs in Twentieth-century Java 89 of the Singir Laki-Rabi as ‘following [him] in this world and the next’.39 The ideal of female dependency, defining women as ‘appendages of their husbands and companions… as mothers and educators of children, as housekeepers’40 is, by the way, by no means restricted to traditionalist Muslim circles, but represents the general feeling in Indonesia. The ‘domestication of women as dependent wives who exist for their husbands, their families, and the state’41 is the official state ideology surrounding gender.

Male composers, female singers Although singirs were composed by men, other sources also confirm that they were generally recited by the opposite sex. Tjan Tjoe Siem informs us that in the 1920s the Singir Darmawasana was normally sung by women after the evening or sunset prayer.42 In those years there was a professional singer called Nyai Patimah, well-known for her beautiful performance of singirs. Her Qur’ân school in the pious district (kauman) of Surakarta attracted many pupils. Especially during the evenings of her singir performances at her school or at places where she was invited were well attended. According to Tjan Tjoe Siem the Singir Darmawasana had its own melody, or rather two, which had nothing to do with the well-known tembang macapat melodies.43 Performance of singirs was also a routine activity among married women in some villages. Basuki recalls that in the 1950s in the village of Ringinanom (in the regency of Magelang), about fifty married women used to visit the local kiai twice a week, on Monday and Thursday evening, in order to attend informal Islamic lessons which were concluded by singing the Singir érang-érang, ‘Poem with Warnings’, together.44 The poet admonishes his audience to centre all their attention on religion as life on earth is only short. This lofty ideal makes him look down on the mundane realities of life. Talking about illnesses, for example, he reminds his public that patience is the best medicine, because the time of illness will in any case be relatively short compared with the time when one is healthy. He recommends five prescriptions for suffering patients: The first of five is to recite the Qur’ân attentively The second, to stay up performing dhikr45 all night long Thirdly, you should spend the night in prayer The fourth of five is to fast Fifthly, you should seek the company of ‘ulamâ’.46 The subject matter of other singirs such as the Singir Naséhat Kanca Wadon ‘Poem with Advice for Wives’, however, is more directly aimed at its female public. Thus, this poem is of a very practical nature, giving ample space to traditional medical lore. Whereas the Singir érang-érang gives metaphorical prescriptions, the Singir Naséhat Kanca Wadon is down-to-earth, reaching out a helping hand to women facing everyday problems during pregnancy and childbirth and caring for their children. One practical piece of advice for mothers, for example, is to give sweetened orange juice to small children who have a poor appetite.47 The Singir Naséhat Kanca Wadon furthermore admonishes women to be good housewifes and mothers. If a mother bathes her baby it is not enough to dip it in a bucket of water; washing the child properly is a religious obligation because the body should be

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free of impurities (najis). A woman should please her husband and be careful not to waste housekeeping money. The poet also warns against close friendships which may threaten family life. If a woman goes out, she should ask her husband’s permission first, and outdoors she should be veiled in order to avoid attracting other men’s eyes, covering not only her hair but her neck as well because this part of her body also belongs to the ‘awra:48 A veil therefore must wrap the entire neck Don’t think it’s enough to cover just the head.49 In order to enforce his arguments the poet refers to ‘Ibnu Hajar’,50 who had written that exposing the ‘awra was a mortal sin. In sum, we can say that the Singir Naséhat Kanca Wadon focuses on the daily routine of women in their traditional role of mothers and housewives, not so much emphasising orthodoxy as the Singir érang-érang does, but rather orthopraxy, i.e. the correct implementation of Islam in practice. Singirs were not only performed during group sessions or sung solo (at home or in mosques) after or before early morning and evening prayers, but according to Basuki individual women would also sing them as a ‘pastime’ at bedtime.51 He also informs us that the recitation of these texts is quickly declining, experiencing fierce competition from alternative modern diversions such as watching television.52 In his opinion the forces of modern times may very well spell the end of the genre. According to him the tradition of singing singirs is nowadays only found in rather secluded rural areas.53

New developments Contrary to Basuki’s gloomy prediction, however, singirs still live on in a modern and sometimes fragmentary form. Kiai Muhammad Siraj’s aforementioned lines with five metaphorical recipes, for example, have gained a certain fame in Java as this fragment from his Singir érang-érang was adapted for the song Tamba Ati ‘Cure for the Heart’. This song nowadays belongs to the repertoire of the so-called gandrung dances in Banyuwangi (East Java)54, and it was recorded at least twice on cassette in the late 1990s.55 Apparently Tamba Ati owes its existence to oral tradition; neither the general public nor the performers seem to know its exact derivation.56 But although the wording has been slightly altered, perhaps in order to fit the melodic structure, the lyrics are clearly based on the Singir érang-érang. Furthermore, new-style singirs have meanwhile appeared, much shorter than those discussed so far, which could be several hundred stanzas in length. Their short form makes them better suited to a modern, more hasty lifestyle. They are used inter alia to pepper the sermons of mubalighs (‘propagator’, ‘preacher’, from the Arabic muballigh, ‘messenger’, ‘informer’) who instruct adults (mostly women) in Islam by giving public lectures, addressing the same themes that feature in the singirs of our corpus. Kiai Bisri Mustofa of Rembang (1915–77), also known under his Arabicized name as Bishrî ar-Rambânî, a highly prolific author of Islamic textbooks and prominent member of the NU elite, has written quite a few singirs. Some years ago a number of them were reissued in an anthology by Hamidi and Abta, this time in Latin script and provided with Indonesian-language translations, thereby rendering his songs (or poems for that matter) more accessible to the general public.57 Bisri Mustofa is reputed to have been a great orator, and is described as a

Moral education through Islamic songs in Twentieth-century Java 91 ‘mubaligh who approached perfection’.58 One anecdote tells that he once mesmerised his female audience with his evocative account of Princess Bilqîs and her meeting with the Prophet Sulaimân.59 In order to give an idea of what his singirs look like, I will quote one of them, entitled Adab mulih sekolah/ngaji, ‘Good Manners when One Returns Home from School/Qur’ân reading’, published in the 1950s in his collection of poems Ngudi Susila, ‘Striving for Decency’: When school is over, you should go home quickly Don’t drop in on someone if you’re hungry When you get home you should change your clothes Be tidy, neat and orderly.60 Fifty of such modern poems have been collected in Hamidi and Abta’s small anthology, written by authors such as Bisri Mustofa, Robbany, K. Muhyiddin, K.M.Asnawi Umar, K.H.Ali Maksum, Asyhari Abta, Badi Asmara, and Abu Nawas. A number of poems in Hamidi and Abta’s anthology have already become public property so that nobody knows anymore who originally composed them.61 Their subject matter is quite similar to the older singirs; they emphasise that Islamic norms extend to all aspects of life. Kiai Asyhari Abta, for example, makes it clear in his poem Tiblantas, ‘Traffic Rules’, that being a good Muslim entails obeying traffic rules too: There are all kinds of people There are good and bad There are young and old There are girls and boys There are people who are responsible and those who are irresponsible Committing sins unawares Again and again yielding to their passions You only live once, as they say Impudently they become part of the traffic Overtaking on narrow roads Driving mindlessly, without standards Careless of knocking anyone down They regard the traffic signs as a joke Racing along rudely like devils Thinking it is just a game Resulting in many accidents.62 Anyone who has ever experienced Java’s intense and chaotic traffic will immediately know what the poet is driving at. As the writer of a recent, practical Qur’ân commentary puts it, Sûra 2:6–7 makes clear that road users with ‘a seal on their hearts and their hearing’ and over whose eyes is ‘a covering’ are infidels.63

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Related forms of poetry The new-style singirs closely resemble the Indonesian-language qasidah moderen, ‘modern qasidah, i.e. ‘a type of popular music, performed by young women, disseminated primarily through the medium of the audio cassette, and targeted at Muslim youth’.64 Remarkably, the singers as well as the instrumentalists of this genre are all female, whereas in Indonesia Muslim musical genres are normally performed exclusively by men. The qasidah moderen apparently first arose in the early 1970s, originating in traditionalist Javanese Muslim circles.65 Arps refrains from hazarding a guess about its historical origins, but in my opinion it seems that the qasidah moderen must have been influenced by the singir genre: both have the same socio-religious background, are sung by women and share similar characteristics with respect to verse form and contents. Although qasidah moderen lack a regular metre, the lines of a verse generally contain about four words and eight syllables. The quatrains furthermore normally have an a-aa-a rhyme, thus corresponding to the singir verse form.66 They are very short (just like new-style singirs), consisting of about 15 to 25 lines, and last between 3 and 5 minutes.67 As regards contents, the qasidah moderen treats roughly the same issues of social life as the new-style singirs, likewise adopting an admonishing and moralistic tone. Its most prominent themes are related to adolescence, emphasising the obligation to make the best of one’s youth. This includes being aware of dangers, particularly in one’s love life, but also pursuing (religious) education.68 A few qasidah moderen refer to specific exemplary figures,69 in one case linking the idea of God’s omnipotence before which man must kneel with the conversion of boxing icon Mike Tyson.70 Mustofa Kamal composed his song entitled ‘Mike Tyson’ after the conversion to Islam of the famous heavy-weight. It was performed by the well-known ensemble Orkes Putri Nida Ria (Female Orchestra ‘Cheerful Appeal’; from Arabic nidâ’, ‘call, exclamation, proclamation, appeal’, and Indonesian ria, ‘cheerful, merry’): Mike Tyson the champion His heart has opened Embracing the Islamic religion Wholeheartedly May he become A genuine Muslim Faithful and devout In his life Now he realises Although he’s a champion He kneels before God So that his life will be happy

Moral education through Islamic songs in Twentieth-century Java 93 That is God’s guidance Which came to him Irrespective of who a person is His rank or even his function If God wills Everything is possible.71 This type of popular music is in a state of flux: a successful qasidah like Kota Santri, ‘The Town of Santris (religious students)’, which was a massive hit in the mid-eighties, has been jazzed up over the years to sound more like disco, keroncong, dangdut and other forms of (Indonesian) pop music.72 Suhaemi, the composer of Kota Santri, was also the man behind Gema Suara Adzan di Bulan, ‘The Resonant Sound of the Call to Prayer (adhân) on the Moon’, a song which tells how Neil Armstrong, the American astronaut, converted to Islam because he heard the call to prayer on the moon. This song sparked off a fierce polemic in the Jakarta mass media around 1983.73 Recently, Suhaemi announced that in order to regain his former successes he was now trying to invent a different style of qasidah because the ‘golden age’ of the older qasidahs was over.74 Popular male bands have meanwhile also discovered the qasidah and created their own songs in this genre. The pop group Bimbo, for example, formerly known as Trio Los Bimbos and Trio Bimbo, left the pop music scene in 1985 and embarked on a new career as a qasidah ensemble.75 In contrast to other qasidahs, their lyrics generally shun any moralising and the group does not aim at dakwah (‘propagation of the faith’, from Arabic da‘wa, ‘[missionary] call, propaganda’).76 Cassettes with qasidah are generally released in Ramadân, a busy month for retailers, in which qasidah cassettes easily reach sales figures amounting to some tens of thousands.77 During this particular month cassettes with qasidahs performed by Bimbo are almost ‘compulsory songs’ as one newspaper once put it; on radio and television, but also in shops their albums are continually played in spite of the ready supply of other Islamic music.78 A few years ago, one of Bimbo’s members started producing a female ensemble of twenty-six young mothers, called Az Zahrah (translated in Indonesian as ‘blossoming flower’, from Arabic zahra, ‘flower, blossom, splendour, beauty’), but its video clip was criticised because the performers appeared without veils.79 This reproach brings up a sensitive issue in that the public performance of qasidah moderen is quite controversial. In Muslim periodicals one regularly finds complaints about the singers’ hip movements which are deemed erotic and hence haram ‘sinful’, and condemnations of the performers’s clothes which do not cover their ‘nakedness’ (‘awra).80 The argument used by those who are seriously involved in qasidah moderen to counter the deep-rooted distrust among strict Muslims of entertainment is the mission they have set for themselves, namely to intensify the awareness of Islam among nominal Muslims (dakwah). As Arps notes, the qasidah moderen is designed both to be fun and to propagate Islam, providing musical pleasure and moral edification.81 The very word ‘music’, however, has so many negative connotations in Muslim Indonesia that Rofiqoh Darto Wahab, a well-known qariah (female reciter of the Qur’ân) and singer of qasidahs who comes from a Javanese family with a strong pesantren background, a few years ago stated categorically that ‘[q]asidahs are different from music’,

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justifying the use of ‘music’ only as the accompaniment of religious songs that should bring people closer to God.82 The modern qasidah, along with modern Indonesian Islamic poetry, shares a playful and sometimes satirical tone which is lacking in singirs. Reading an anthology of Indonesianlanguage poems composed by Javanese Islamic writers from Yogyakarta who are now all in their late twenties or early thirties, we immediately observe that the heavy sermonising tone of singirs is absent. See, for example, how Aprinus Salam, who lectures at the Faculty of Letters of Gadjah Mada University and at the Faculty of Propagation of the Faith (Dakwah) of the Sunan Kalijaga State Institute of Islamic Studies, both in Yogyakarta, addresses the place of petition in the life of prayer in a light-hearted joking way in his undated Sajak Enggak Jelas VII, ‘Unclear Poem VII’: Lord, reduce my cost of living I mean give me lots of money to pay tuition fees pay the boarding house buy books give alms have a good time ha ha ha damn (stop that nonsense).83 Whereas singirs have remained undisputed, Islamic literature and music (or other aspects of culture for that matter) which have entertainment value are not unequivocally appreciated in Muslim Indonesia, but only approved as long as their sole purpose is that of propaganda. One of the main reasons for the bad press that literature gets in Muslim Indonesia is the condemnation of poets in the last verses of Sûra 26, al-Shu‘arâ’, ‘The Poets’, as evil and possessed by the devil.84 According to the Indonesian poet Taufiq Ismail, at the time when these verses were revealed to the Prophet, the Companions who were also poets burst into tears, asking ‘How’s that, O Messenger of God?’ Thereupon the following concluding verse was revealed: ‘Save those that believe and do righteous deeds and remember God oft’ (Sûra 26:221, interpr. Arberry). Taufiq believes that this shows that God loves artists very much, giving them a clear guidance in life.85 In the preface of his Yogyakarta anthology, the kiai-cum-poet Mustofa Bisri declares that labels such as ‘religious poems’ or ‘Islamic poetry’ are devoid of meaning.86 In his opinion all poetry can be religious and Islamic, provided that its writers are truly religious or real Muslims. He is, I think, criticising the situation in which the Indonesian literary world is today; Indonesia is a predominantly Muslim country and yet literature in Indonesia generally is not coloured by Islam. Hence Bisri’s comment in fact lashes out at the majority of Indonesian writers who profess to be Muslims without actually showing their religious persuasion in their work; ipso facto he is branding them as bad Muslims. But what characteristics should a creative Indonesian Islamic literature (and culture) have that would make it manifestly Muslim? In a television programme called Gema Ramadhan, ‘Echo of Ramdân’, which was broadcast on 21 December 2000, Emha Ainun Nadjib put it well:

Moral education through Islamic songs in Twentieth-century Java 95 Reciting Qur’ânic verses fluently doesn’t guarantee that the party in question is Muslim, because even a computer and a hard disc or a compact disc are able to make those verses resound beautifully. Are a computer and a CD or a VCD Islamic?87 Nevertheless, the Qur’ân is, and has always been, ‘the primary point to which reference must always be made in order to define something as “Islamic”’.88 Therefore it comes as no surprise that Suhaemi, a composer of popular qasidahs, when he was asked what he thought about the praise of one academic for the outstanding literary qualities of his lyrics, responded with: ‘That’s obvious, after all my poems are quotations from the Qur’ân.’89 The fact that this ‘obviousness’ apparently escaped the critic’s notice shows revealingly that the Islamic character of contemporary Indonesian Muslim art forms is not so self-evident as in the case of the more traditional ones such as singirs.

Acknowledgments Adnan Oesman Nabhan, director of Toko Kitab Salim Nabhan in Surabaya, provided me in July 2000 with many copies of singirs, both published and unpublished, which otherwise would have been hard to obtain. I am grateful for his help and the extraordinary hospitality he showed me. Kiai Haji A. Mustofa Bisri in Rembang most kindly received me when I paid him a surprise visit in July 2000, and obligingly took the time to answer my questions about singirs. In the Netherlands I should like to thank Prof. Martin van Bruinessen (University of Utrecht) for answering some specific queries and introducing me to Indonesian informants. I furthermore wish to thank my Leiden colleagues Prof. Bernard Arps, Dr Nico Kaptein and Dr Willem van der Molen, who read and commented on an earlier draft. The finished product, of course, is my own and hence entirely my responsibility.

Notes 1

2 3

4

A brief note on the orthography of foreign words applied here (italicised throughout): for Indonesian I follow the standard EYD (Ejaan Yang Disempurnakan, ‘perfected spelling’) orthography. The spelling used for Javanese is also the one officially accepted in Indonesia, with the exception of the use of two diacritical marks, viz. é and è, to distinguish these two sounds from the unmarked mute e or schwa. Javanese words, however, when borrowed by Indonesian appear in their Indonesian form, e.g. pesantren instead of pesantrèn. Arabic words are spelled according to the rules of the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. To indicate plurals I follow a convention in English of adding a final s, e.g. pesantrens. Personal communication by Adnan Oesman Nabhan, director of Toko Kitab Salim Nabhan in Surabaya, July 2000. Cf. Virginia Matheson Hooker, ‘Transmission through practical example: Women and Islam in 1920s Malay fiction’, in Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 67 (1994), pp. 93–118. My translation differs from those given by Soesatyo Darnawi, A brief survey of Javanese poetics, Jakarta: Balai Pustaka, 1982, pp. 54–5; and Tjan Tjoe Siem, ‘Darmawasana’, in Bingkisan Budi. Een bundel opstellen aan Dr Philippus Samuel van Ronkel door vrienden en leerlingen aangeboden op zijn tachtigste verjaardag, 1 Augustus 1950, Leiden: Sijthoff, 1950, p. 275.

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5

According to Van Bruinessen, ‘Kitab kuning: books in Arabic script used in the pesantren milieu’, in Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 146 (1990) p. 252, this concise versified text by Ibrâhîm al-Laqînî (d. 1041 H/1631 CE) is still highly popular; students ‘commit the entire text itself to memory, and study various commentaries on it’. Tjan Tjoe Siem, ‘Darmawasana’, p. 269. Haji Zakariya bin Haji Gazali, Singir Laki-Rabi, Bangil: Haji Abdul Ghani, 18 Sha‘bân 1345 H/10 February 1928 CE, p. 20. Patrick D.Gaffney, The Prophet’s Pulpit. Islamic Preaching in Contemporary Egypt, Berkeley/ Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1994, p. 35. David Harvey, The condition of postmodernity. An enquiry into the origins of cultural change, Cambridge and Oxford: Blackwell, 1997, p. 12. Mitsuo Nakamura, The crescent arises over the banyan tree. A study of the Muhammadiyah movement in a central Javanese town, Yogyakarta: Gadjah Mada University Press, 1983, p. 84. Nakamura, The crescent, p. 88. My interpretation of the Javanese statement differs from Nakamura’s. Ibid., p. 89. Haji Zakariya bin Haji Gazali, Singir Santri, Bangil: Haji Abdul Ghani, 7 Rajab 1347 H/20 December 1928 CE, p. 10. Haji Zakariya, Singir Santri, p. 11. A.Teeuw, Modern Indonesian literature, Volume II, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1979, p. 150. In Indonesian languages the loanword fitna generally denotes ‘slander’, but one of its Arabic meanings, ‘disorder’, fits the context better here. Moreover, it should be remembered that the language of kiais tends to be rather Arabicized. Unfortunately this book was not available to me, and the three stanzas are quoted from D.Zawawi Imron, ‘Muara sastra pesantren’ in M.Syafi’i and Fathudin Muchtar (eds), Sastra dan budaya Islam Nusantara. Dialektika antarsistem nilai, Yogyakarta: SMF Adab IAIN Sunan Kalijaga, 1998, p. 95. Zawawi Imron, ‘Muara sastra pesantren’, p. 96. D.Zawawi Imron, ‘Sepercik puisi K.H. As’ ad Syamsul Arifin’, in idem, Gumamgumam dari dusun. Indonesia di mata seorang santri, Bandung: Pustaka Hidayah, 2000, pp. 180–3. This interpretation in ibid., p. 183, however, is not in accordance with standard interpretations; the reference to verse 63 furthermore must be a misprint. Cf.Anhari Basuki, Singiran sebagai tradisi lisan. [Yogyakarta:] Proyek Penelitian dan Pengkajian Kebudayaan Nusantara (Javanologi), 1987, p. 63. According to Basuki, Singiran, p. 56, singirs with a largely Arabic vocabulary are generally called singir diniyyah (‘religious singirs’). See E.P.Wieringa, Catalogue of Malay and Minangkabau manuscripts in the Library of Leiden University and other collections in the Netherlands. Volume 1, Leiden: Legatum Warnerianum in the Leiden University Library, 1998, p. 73. See also Dick van der Meij, Nabi aparas. The shaving of the Prophet Muhammad’s hair, Leiden: INIS in cooperation with Legatum Warnerianum in the Library of Leiden University, 1996, for an edition of a Javanese version from Lombok. Wieringa, Catalogue, p. 136. Singir Patimah, Bangil: Haji Abdul Ghani, n.d., p. 21. See e.g. E.P.Wieringa, ‘A last admonition to P.P.Roorda van Eysinga in 1828: Haji Zainal Abidin’s Syair Alif-Ba-Ta’, in Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 154 (1998), pp. 116–28; and idem, The dream of the king and the holy war against the Dutch: The kôteubah of

6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16

17

18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26

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27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53

the Acehnese epic Hikayat Prang Gômpeuni’, in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 61 (1998), pp. 298–308. See T.E.Behrend and Titik Pudjiastuti, Katalog induk naskah-naskah Nusantara. Jilid 3-B, Fakultas Sastra Universitas Indonesia, Jakarta: Yayasan Obor Indonesia and École française d’Extrême-Orient, 1998, p. 668. Singir Dagang, Bangil: Haji Abdul Ghani, 1341 H/1922–1923 CE, p. 7. Zayn al-‘Arifin, Singir Modern, Surabaya: Salim b. Sa‘d Nabhan, 1408 H/ 1982–1983 CE, pp. 3, 12. Ibid., p. 7. This kind of folk etymology is common practice in Javanese ways of explaining words. For practical reasons I have used its third edition, Djamil Suherman, Umi Kalsum; kisah-kisah pesantren, Bandung: Mizan, 1990. Van Bruinessen, ‘Kitab kuning’, p. 260. See Suherman, Umi Kalsum, pp. 21–4. Cf. Suherman, Umi Kalsum, p. 24. This is indirectly confirmed in Kiai Haji Saifuddin Zuhri’s autobiography entitled Proceeding from the pesantren, in which the author—NU’s minister of Religious Affairs in 1962–7—makes detailed observations about his pre-war pesantren education, discussing the many books which he studied but not mentioning singirs at all. See K.H.Saifuddin Zuhri, Berangkat dari pesantren, Jakarta: Gunung Agung, 1987. Cf. Suherman, Umi Kalsum, p. 23. Ibid. This Sûra, by the way, was often quoted in 1999 by Muslims hostile to the possible presidency of Megawati Soekarnoputri (the daughter of Indonesia’s first president, Soekarno). Suherman, Umi Kalsum, p. 23. Julia I.Suryakusuma, The state and sexuality in New Order Indonesia’, in Laurie J.Sears (ed.), Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1996, p. 101. Suryakusuma, ‘The state and sexuality’, p. 98. Tjan Tjoe Siem, ‘Darmawasana’, pp. 269–70. Ibid., p. 270. Basuki, Singiran, p. 87. Dhikir (Arabic dhikr), literally ‘remembrance’, ‘recollection’, denotes litanies invocating the name of God which are repeated over and over again, often linked to bodily movements or breathing. Taken from Basuki, Singiran, p. 49. Basuki, Singiran, p. 29. Literally ‘blemish’, a terminus technicus for those parts of the body which must be concealed from public gaze. Text taken from the transliteration in Basuki, Singiran, p. 27. This must be Ibn al-Haythamî (d. 973 H/1 565–6 CE) whose al‘Gift to the Needy’, popularly known in Javanese as Kitab Tuhpah, is one of the most authoritative works of reference on jurisprudence among traditional Javanese scholars. Basuki, Singiran, p. 92. Ibid., pp. 92–3. Ibid., p. 92. According to Prof. Bernard Arps, however, singirs are nowadays still recited in Banyuwangi, a town in the easternmost corner of Java (personal communication, May 2000). With reservations about Basuki’s term ‘rural’, then, this fact does not necessarily contradict his observation about the continued existence of singirs in isolated areas, as the regency of Banyuwangi is almost shut off from the rest of the island by mountains and forests.

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54 Cf. the song Ancur Lebur, e.g. performed by Yuliatin (female vocalist) on the cassette Sekar Arum, vol. 1 (S.l.: Citra Records, c. 1997). 55 The cassette Kado Muhammad/Tombo Ati, performed by Emha Ainun Nadjib and Gamelan Kiai Kanjeng (S.I.: Kalijoga Kreasi, c. 1996) and Tombo Ati/ Sholawat Jawi, performed by Muhammadun Zain et al (Semarang: Pusaka, c. 1997). It should be remembered that in Indonesia the popularity of almost all pop music in regional languages is due to the cassette industry and not to live performances, cf. Bernard Arps, ‘To propagate morals through popular music: the Indonesian qasidah modéren’, in Stefan Sperl and Christopher Shackle (eds), Qasida poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa: Volume I, Classical traditions and modern meanings, Leiden: Brill, 1996, p. 393. 56 According to the sleeve notes of Emha’s cassette, Tamba Ati was adapted from Sayidina Ali bin Abi Thalib, and ‘translated and popularized’ by Kiai Bisri Mustofa. The song ‘Cure for the Heart’ was inter alia briefly discussed by the latter’s son Kiai Haji M.Cholil Bisri in the framework of a pious column in a NU journal during Ramadân (republished in his book Ketika nurani bicara, Bandung: Remaja Rosdakarya, 2000, pp. 13–14). 57 Jazim Hamidi and Asyhari Abta (eds), Syiiran kiai-kiai, Yogyakarta: Yayasan Kodama and Pustaka Pelajar, 1993. 58 Saifullah Ma’shum (ed.), Menapak jejak mengenal watak: Sekilas biografi 26 tokoh Nahdlatul Ulama, Jakarta: Yayasan Saifuddin Zuhri, 1994, p. 331. 59 Ibid., p. 332. 60 Text taken from Hamidi and Abta, Syiiran, p. 42. 61 Cf.K.H.A.Mustofa Bisri in Hamidi and Abta, Syiiran, p. xvii. 62 Included in Hamidi and Abta, Syiiran, p. 65–6. 63 K.H.A.Musta’in Syafi’ie, Mutiara hikmah al-Qur’an. Tafsir Qur’an aktual, Jakarta: Al-Mawardi Prima, 2001, pp. 106–10 (chapter entitled ‘Violating traffic rules is unbelief too’). 64 Arps, To propagate morals’, p. 390. 65 Ibid., p. 395. 66 Cf. ibid., p. 391. 67 Ibid., p. 402. 68 Ibid., pp. 399–400. 69 Cf. ibid., p.401. 70 At the age of twenty the American boxer Mike Tyson (b. 1966) became the youngest heavyweight champion in history. In 1992, convicted of rape, he went to prison. While in jail he converted to Islam, adopting the name Mikhail Abdul-Aziz. In 1995 he was released and resumed his boxing career. 71 Source: the cassette Syafa’at Nabi Muhammad by Orkes Putri Nida Ria, volume 11 (Puspita Records, PQ-223), side A, track 4. Exactly when it was released is unknown, but it must have been around 1995, when I acquired the cassette. 72 Source: the article ‘Suhaemi: Bintang di balik lagu-lagu qasidah’ in the Indonesian Muslim magazine Suara Hidayatullah, February 1999 (this and all subsequent references to Suara Hidayatullah are based on the internet edition). 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid. 75 Source: the article ‘30 tahun Bimbo: Menuju puncak-puncak baru’ in the Indonesian journal Kompas, 14 December 1997 (this and all subsequent references to Kompas are based on the internet edition). 76 Source: the article ‘Bimbo, memberi makna baru bagi kasidah’, in Suara Hidayatullah, January 2000.

Moral education through Islamic songs in Twentieth-century Java 99 77 78 79 80 81 82

83

84

85 86 87 88 89

Theodore K.S., ‘Marak, lagu-lagu menyambut Ramadhan’, in Kompas, 13 January 1997, and idem, ‘Bervariasi, musik-musik Ramadhan’, in Kompas, 18 January 1998. Ush, ‘Bimbo: Nikmat Ramadhan, nikmatnya persaudaraan’, in Kompas, 6 January 1997. Msh, ‘Kelompok Qasidah Az Zahrah: Dari menunggu anak TK sampai rekaman’, in Kompas, 27 December 1999. Arps, ‘To propagate morals’, p. 407. Arps, ‘To propagate morals’, p. 406. Her statement was made in an interview on 11 December 1999. Jamal D. Rahman, ‘Roflqoh Darto Wahab: Qariah dan seniman kasidah’, in Jajat Burhanudin (ed.), Ulama perempuan Indonesia, Jakarta: Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 2002, p. 288. Included in A.Mustofa Bisri and Diah Hadaning (eds.), Oase. Antologi puisi sebelas penyair Muslim Yogya, Yogyakarta: Kelompok Studi Perilaku ‘Kelompok Kamis Malam’, Serikat Diskusi Sastra dan Budaya Pandan Sembilan in cooperation with Titian Ilahi Press, 1996, p. 39. This passage is repeatedly quoted in Indonesian Islamic discourse on literature; see E.U.Kratz, ‘Islamic attitudes toward modern Indonesian literature’, in C. D.Grijns and S.O.Robson (eds), Cultural contact and textual interpretations. Papers from the fourth European colloquium on Malay and Indonesian studies, held in Leiden in 1983, Dordrecht and Cinnaminson: Foris Publications, 1986, p. 62. Source: ‘Keadaan sungguh mengkhawatirkan’, interview with Taufiq Ismail in Suara Hidayatullah, October 1995. In Bisri and Hadaning, Oase, p. vi. Veven Sp. Wardhana,’ “Nadul Fi Tabar” di Televisi’, in the Indonesian internet journal Detikcom, 23 December 2000. Andrew Rippin, Muslims: Their religious beliefs and practices, London and New York, Routledge, 2001, p. 31. Source: the article ‘Suhaemi’.

Further reading Arps, Bernard, To propagate morals through popular music: the Indonesian qasidah modéren’, in Stefan Sperl and Christopher Shackle (eds), Qasida poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa: Vol. 1, Classical traditions and modern meanings, Leiden, Brill, 1996, pp. 389–409. ——(trans.) Four songs in Qasida poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa: Vol. 2, Eulogy’s bounty, meaning’s abundance: an anthology, Leiden, Brill, 1996, pp. 320–31, 464–5. Basuki, Anhari, Singiran sebagai tradisi lisan, Yogyakarta: Proyek Penelitian dan Pengkajian Kebudayaan Nusantara (Javanologi), 1987. Kratz, E.Ulrich, ‘Islamic attitudes toward modern Indonesian literature’, in C. D.Grijns and S.O.Robson (eds), Cultural contact and textual interpretations, papers from the fourth European colloquium on Malay and Indonesian studies, held in Leiden in 1983. Dordrecht and Cinnaminson: Foris Publications, 1986, pp. 60–93. Siem, Tjan Tjoe, ‘Darmawasana’, in Bingkisan budi; een bundel opstellen aan Dr Philippus Samuel van Ronkel door vrienden en leerlingen aangeboden op zijn tachtigste verjaardag 1 Augustus 1950, Leiden: Sijthoff, 1950, pp. 269–80. Suherman, Djamil, Umi Kalsum; kisah-kisah pesantren, Bukittinggi and Djakarta: Nusantara, 1963 (or later edns).

6 ‘TOGETHER WITH THE SHELL, THEY HAVE THROWN AWAY THE KERNEL’ Aaron Halle-Wolfssohn’s critique of contemporary Judaism Jutta Strauss

In the second half of the eighteenth century the German-Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskalah, marked the political, social, and intellectual transition of German Jewry into modernity. The developing interplay between the Jewish religious and spiritual tradition and the new philosophical and secular ideas led to a redefinition of Judaism and its basic texts by the maskilim, as the Jewish enlighteners were called. This paper explores the way in which Aaron Halle-Wolfssohn (1756–1835), one of the main proponents of the German Haskalah, attempted to reconcile Jewish tradition and modern thought. The main focus is on those of his writings which reflect many of the contemporary religious controversies by means of satire, comedy and prose, written in German, Judeo-German and Hebrew. Aaron Halle-Wolfssohn was born in 1756,1 most likely in Nieder-Ehnheim in Alsace.2 After spending his first childhood years there, his father, who was a physician, moved his family to Fürth in Bavaria in 1760.3 In contrast to many of his fellow maskilim Wolfssohn grew up in an atmosphere of Enlightenment tinged with traditional learning and Jewish religious lore. In 1785, at the age of twenty-nine, Wolfssohn went to Berlin where he found himself part of a group of like-minded enlighteners, all eager for a constant and extensive exchange of ideas. He began his literary activities in 1788 and in time became a frequent contributor to the Hebrew journal Hame’assef (The Gatherer), the mouthpiece of the Haskalah, writing on such diverse topics as popular science, Bible exegesis and Hebrew philology. He also composed aphorisms and short poems for this journal. After two years as a contributor, Wolfssohn was appointed to the editorial staff of Hame’assef in 1790. Another literary undertaking, published in the same year, was the composition of a Hebrew primary reader for children, which was based mainly on material from the Bible but also included adaptions of some of Aesop’s fables.4 This reader aims to teach the Jewish children to be part of the modern world without losing their ties to Jewish tradition, showing the children that their own culture and European culture are two complementary concepts. In many respects these years were the heyday of Wolfssohn’s literary activity. From 1788 to 1790 he published his contributions to the continuation of Mendelssohn’s Bible translation.5 He also published an exegetical work in German, in which he attempted to blend traditional Jewish exegesis with contemporary Protestant Bible exegesis, also mak-

‘Together with the shell, they have thrown away the kernel’ 101 ing frequent use of comparative philology.6 But Wolfssohn’s interests were not limited to what could be defined as ‘Jewish’ questions in the widest sense. His curiosity and enthusiasm were also awakened by many of the intellectual endeavours of the Enlightenment in general.7 The life of a ‘free writer’ was difficult, and pecuniary hardship was common among them. This was true for German authors, and even more so for Hebrew writers. The literary audience was small, and for that reason many authors took up additional occupations, especially as tutors. Wolfssohn, too, earned his living as a private tutor, which, as time would show, was to become his real vocation. In addition, he acted as a book sales agent, selling books of maskilic content as well as others.8 In 1792 Wolfssohn was appointed teacher at the Königliche Wilhelmsschule in Breslau. There he taught Hebrew, arithmetic, German, natural sciences, geography and history.9 according to ‘modern’ philanthropic ideas. Besides his duties as a teacher, Wolfssohn was busy editing Hame’ assef.10 He also acted as censor for the publication of Hebrew books, a post to which he had been appointed by the Prussian Government.11 That Wolfssohn had given up the life of a free writer, only restricted by the occasional duty to teach, and had entered a bourgeois career, did not mean that he had completely forsaken his literary ambitions. On the contrary, he wrote and published some of his most interesting works during this period. Quite surprisingly, considering the circles he moved in, one was a comedy, Leichtsinn und Frömmelei,12 which he wrote in the idiom of the ‘masses’ of the Jewish people, namely Judeo-German or Ashkenazic German. This work was probably a reaction to the ongoing arguments between the enlightened and the Orthodox in Breslau. In addition, in 1804, he published an apology of Judaism.13 He continued his exegetical activities and between 1794 and 1797 also published in instalments one of his major Hebrew works in the Hame’assef, namely the satire Sihah ba’eretz hahayim (A conversation in the land of the living).14 Subsequently, Wolfssohn did not focus solely on his role as tutor. His widespread interests and activities continued to occupy him during his life. One major project was the compilation of a textbook and a catechism for the Westphalian Consistory, whose emphasis on paedagogic innovations especially appealed to him.15 He died on 21 March 1835, at the age of seventy-nine. The general view regarding Wolfssohn’s stance towards Judaism is that he was one of the most radical among the maskilim.16 But did he indeed hold such negative views of the religious tenets of Judaism, its post-biblical writings and its institutions? The key for understanding his religious world view is, in a way, his admiration for, even idealization of, Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86)17 and his writings. This veneration strongly permeates all of Wolfssohn’s early writings18 but is also obvious in his later works.19 He sees Mendelssohn as the archetypal enlightened Jew, the shining example of a thoroughly educated maskil whom all should strive to equal. Thus Wolfssohn writes about the different classes of Jewish society:20 The fifth and final class consists of the truly educated and enlightened Jews…. The founder of this class was my venerable teacher, Moses Mendelssohn…. Thus Mendelssohn took the lead for the modern Jew, as did once the pillar of fire for the Israelites in the desert, to light the way for them and to show them the right track.

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The other four classes, as Wolfssohn describes them, are first the rabbinic Orthodox who, even though they are too rigid in their law-abiding nature, are pure of heart and of high moral character. They do, however, pursue with contempt any deviating opinion which is voiced within the Jewish community. The second class is formed by the educated rabbinic Jews who have all the virtues of the first class, but without their intolerance. The group which Wolfssohn abhors the most is that of the ‘pharisees’, whose law-abiding is only skin-deep and often to be very easily superseded by financial interests. The fourth group, that of the pseudo-enlightened, in his understanding causes even more damage to the reputation of the Jews than does the third one. They neglect the ceremonial law only in order to enjoy their life to the full and think of themselves as being educated although, in truth, they have even less education than their elders.21 The division of Jews into four or five different classes was a popular notion among the circle of the Berlin maskilim, who used this scheme to describe the present status of the Jewish nation, pointing out that any social improvement of the Jews had to have reform of the civil rights of the Jews as its starting point.22 The different categories also serve as a foil for the various points of Wolfssohn’s critique of contemporary Judaism.23 In adopting Mendelssohn as his moral rôle model, Wolfssohn is no different both from many of his contemporaries and from generations of later German Jews, all of whom in some way regard Mendelssohn as the prototype of a modern Jew.24 Wolfssohn’s admiration for Mendelssohn is interesting in that it embraces the latter’s view of the religious tenets of Judaism. Wolfssohn decided, as Mendelssohn did, to be a Jew by conviction, not merely by birth. The image of Mendelssohn as a loyal Jew, one who had found a synthesis between traditional Jewish culture and the secular knowledge of non-Jewish society, impressed Wolfssohn most of all. This was the image that he attempted to emulate. Wolfssohn devoted relatively little direct attention to the problem of religion, although it is touched upon in most of his writings. Especially his Hebrew reader Avtalyon, written in 1790, conveys a good impression of which traditional religious values Wolfssohn deemed important enough to impart to his students. Thus the importance of religious law and the adherence to it is stressed;25 Wolfssohn also emphasizes that the religious festivals should be observed.26 It would appear, however, that he advocated only the observance of those festivals commanded in the Pentateuch, in other words Pesah (Passover), Shavuot (Pentecost), Sukkot (Feast of Booths), as well as Rosh Hashanah (New Year), Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) and Rosh Hodesh, the first day of the lunar month. Interestingly, Wolfssohn is especially opposed to the traditional Purim celebrations and aims at reforming the contemporary festivities into more decorous and aesthetic occasions.27 In his understanding, the remaining holidays were based on more-or-less superstitious folklore and were therefore not necessarily to be observed. The importance that the observance of the Jewish holiest days still held in Wolfssohn’s world view, can be seen in the way in which he defends the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) against its Christian critics.28 God’s commandments, as stated in the Torah, should be upheld.29 Here Wolfssohn particularly emphasizes the observance of the Sabbath.30 The Sabbath epitomizes for him a positive Jewish tradition which future generation should not disregard. Religious tolerance is for him very much defined by the Jew’s right to observe the Sabbath and the major holidays, just as the Christians observe theirs.31

‘Together with the shell, they have thrown away the kernel’ 103 In his pedagogical writings Wolfssohn attempted to mediate between traditional and contemporary values when touching on religious topics. It appears that a rather sincere veneration of the values of Judaism and the national heritage prompted his use of them as pillars for his teachings. He might, however, have had a tendency to prefer more general concepts common to all religions, such as the belief in God, the immortality of the soul and divine providence. Wolfssohn gave Jewish teachings a human and universal touch, thus attempting to implant in his pupils the idea that ethical behaviour was universal to all social groups; in other words that the Jews and their religion were no different from other groups.32 Like Mendelssohn, who admitted ‘human additions and misuses’33 within the Jewish religion but who had also said that these were characteristic of any religion as all religions are subject to the ‘poisoning air of hypocrisy and superstitions’,34 Wolfssohn points out that much that non-Jews especially conceive as being an integral part of the rabbinic writings35 belongs as little to rabbinic Judaism, as a number of the teachings of your church fathers belong to true Christianity. In general, however, Wolfssohn expressed an altogether positive view of the Talmud and normative rabbinic Judaism. Thus he describes the talmudic sages as ‘very precious’, and adds ‘and they should serve as an example’.36 A similar attitude can be found in a passage where it is Wolfssohn’s aim to familiarize the Christian reader with the tenets of the Talmud, to illustrate the positive and interesting teachings of the rabbinic writings.37 The words of the sages, epitomizing truth and justice, and the regulations of the ancients, have much in them to benefit the contemporary reader.38 For the words of the sages…how much sweeter are they than honey, how much are they aiming at truth and justice and how much have they benefited us in words and in their regulations. He distinguishes between halakhah (that is, the legal part) and agadah (the homiletical passages) in the Talmud. Even though on the whole he himself, as Wolfssohn tells the reader, prefers the former, ‘a number of gold particles’39 can also be found in the latter part.40 Some of these writings of ‘wonderful wisdom’ are, however, beyond the comprehension of the modern reader, according to Wolfssohn.41 This acceptance, even admiration, of the agadah as an integral part of the literature of the Jewish people finds its expression also in Wolfssohn’s Hebrew closet drama, a satirical conversation between Moses Maimonides, an unnamed Orthodox rabbi, and Moses Mendelssohn, which Wolfssohn published in 1794.42 But in Jeschurun43 Wolfssohn reminds the reader that one should not rely on the agadah as an authoritative source, that it is the responsibility of each maskil to distinguish between the various agadot and to decide for himself which he can accept. This is especially important in view of the fact that some of them appear to be contrary to human reason, a circumstance for which Wolfssohn offers two explanations: either that the author had a special intention which is now hidden from us, or that he has erred. In either case they should not be followed.44

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The conclusion is that every maskil must distinguish between Agadah and Agadah, for there are Agadot in the Midrash and in the Talmud which are full of beauty and moral…and happy is the man who is attentive to their words. And in contrast to that, there are Agadot which are full of matters opposed to all human reason, be it that its writer had a specific intention which is now hidden from us or that its writer truly erred. In order to endow this view with a certain authority, Wolfssohn employs the figure of Maimonides, who counters the claim of the Orthodox figure of the satire and holds that every agadah should be accepted as authentic only if fulfilling a number of criteria. First, agadah should never be relied upon a priori; second, if only one sage is quoted as its source it should not be accepted, and third, agadah is not infallible.45 Obviously Maimonides serves as Wolfssohn’s mouthpiece here, and these reservations are some he shares about employing agadot in an argument. But as has been shown above, this is only one side of Wolfssohn’s attitude towards the agadah. His attitude is also characterized by a sincere appreciation of it; and when criticizing it, he does so mainly because of its lack of organization and editing. He highly praises R.Judah Ha-nasi,46 the compiler of the Mishnah,47 for gleaning, rather than merely collecting, the opinions of the individual rabbis, for had the compilers of the Gemara48 who lived a few hundred years after the compiler of the Mishnah followed the footsteps of this great man, had they emulated his example, had they made a sensible selection and had they included only that which had received general approval and unqualified authority among the nation…the Gemara, although losing considerably in quantity, would have gained in quality.49 But although Wolfssohn does indeed esteem the Talmud in general as a source of knowledge and attempts in a way to point to its interdependence with secular disciplines such as comparative linguistics and history, he objects strongly to the contemporary teaching of it. In other words, one has to distinguish between Wolfssohn’s more-or-less positive attitude towards the historical, literary body of writing (which also encompasses its commandments and regulations) and the negative stance he takes towards its present-day presentation. The study of the Talmud is very much taken for granted, but Wolfssohn voices reservations regarding a number of points, such as age of the students and method of study. As often happens in matters pertaining to religious tradition and its practice, Wolfssohn refers to Mendelssohn and has him voice his objections to the contemporary study and teaching of the Talmud: They expound and study the Bible and the Mishnah not in order to comprehend the intention of that writer and to understand him, but in order to show their strength and the might of their hands in… refuting, dissecting, explaining a difficulty.50 Whatever criticism Wolfssohn may have had regarding the Talmud, he unequivocally praises the works of the mediaeval exegetes. That, of course, is in accordance with the general admiration most of the maskilim showed towards the rational strand of Judaism in

‘Together with the shell, they have thrown away the kernel’ 105 the Middle Ages. Like the other enlighteners, Wolfssohn especially venerated Maimonides (1135–1204), but also others such as Rashi (1040–1105) and David Kimchi (1160?-1235?) are often quoted by him as authorative sources.51 He does not, however, look upon them as infallible.52 Interestingly, Wolfssohn also shows an interest in the study of the Kabbalah. It seems probable that the motive for that interest was once again to show Christian scholars the corresponding elements in the two religions, in this case between the different orientations of mysticism. This seems probable, as a renewed interest in kabbalistic study emerged during the last decades of the eighteenth century, and authors such as Novalis (1772–1801) and Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) attempted to interpret the mystical symbolism of the Kabbalah.53 This Christian interpretation of the Kabbalah offered different readings of the symbolic language from those found in Jewish tradition. Nevertheless Wolfssohn’s new-found curiosity in the Kabbalah’s original writings was probably prompted by this contemporary Christian interest in kabbalistic mysticism. As a true maskil, when criticising the present situation of Talmud study, Wolfssohn naturally already had reforms in mind, a number of which he proposed in Jeschurun. The most important point for him, as a teacher, was the abolition of rabbinic authority over schools, the latter’s only responsibility being that of religious instruction taught according to a fixed curriculum.54 Wolfssohn also advocates the abrogation of rabbinic jurisdiction55 in order further to integrate Jews into Christian society. But although he criticized contemporary rabbinic Judaism in a number of points, he completely opposed the use of any coercion to cause the abolition of some of the rabbis’ antiquated customs, as Wolfssohn perceived them. He also denied the right of the government to interfere in their religious observance:56 No, the observance of the ceremonial law must never be an object of regulation for any justice-loving government…to command the rabbinic Jew: You have to abrogate your ceremonial law, you should no longer serve your God in this manner, such a command, such an encroachment on the rights of the people will no just government ever permit itself and our august monarch is too enlightened not to think as Saladin did: The thousand years of the judge have not yet passed, his throne of judgement is not mine. In order to substantiate his argument, Wolfssohn, as he so often does, goes on to quote Mendelssohn: The government has to continue unceasingly on its way, says the philosopher Mendelssohn, and prescribe that which is beneficial for the communal best; and whoever will find a divergence between his special opinions and the laws may see how he can solve this.57 In his wish to reform certain traditions of Judaism, Wolfssohn deviated from the convictions held by his model, Mendelssohn, who did not believe that Judaism required basic reforms in order to manage the transition to modern society.58 Unlike Mendelssohn, who had believed in the eternity of the laws of Judaism, Wolfssohn conceived of them as being

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to a certain extent open to modification and development according to historical changes in German Jewry. With regard to the development of knowledge in general, Wolfssohn was of the opinion that the store of knowledge of later generations surpassed that of the rabbinic sages, progress he does not, however, perceive as contradicting the sages but rather as a part of the natural evolution of mankind.59 In accordance with a number of German maskilim, he attempted to emphasize the rational quality of much of Judaism’s teachings, including the Talmud. This was done in order to construct an interdependence between Jewish religion and its writings, on the one hand, and secular learning, such as science and history, on the other. In his views on the contemporary rabbinate and its talmudic studies, Wolfssohn presents arguments common among the maskilim of the time. After this brief overview of Wolfssohn’s general attitudes towards the basic texts and tenets of Judaism, its traditions, as well as its past and contemporary adherents, the focus will now be on some of his views in more detail. I Wolfssohn participated in a wide variety of political and intellectual discussions in his time, but three controversial topics were especially important to him. First, there was the fight against obscurantism, against those who understood the Jewish religion as static and incompatible with secular education and enlightened ideas. Wolfssohn fought vehemently against exponents of this mentality, both on the Jewish and the non-Jewish side. This led to—at times acrimonious—attacks against contemporary rabbis and the superstitious beliefs with which—according to Wolfssohn—they often indoctrinated their students.60 In order to illustrate what was, in his opinion, the non-rational mentality of the rabbis, Wolfssohn recounts an anecdote: In the presence of a Polish Talmudist a German once said a number of things about America, immediately the Polack called out to him: What, you, too, believe in America. And when the other one wanted to substantiate his believing unbelief, he was honoured with the… name Epicurean, for, continued the Polack, can you find anywhere in the Bible anything about America?61 Contemporaries62 criticized him for examples such as the one cited above, for ridiculing the words of the sages. But Wolfssohn always stressed that his criticism pertained only to the contemporary misuses in the study and the teaching of the Talmud: For in the days of the Talmudists and during the days of the Geonim and the rabbis, casuistry and hair-splitting were not customary as they are practised nowadays.63 Wolfssohn also distinguished between the beliefs and practices of the East European, that is, mainly the Polish rabbis, and those of the rabbis in Germany. The latter he regarded as comparatively enlightened, attempting to eradicate superstitious and antiquated beliefs among the people,64 whereas the former were for him the very embodiment of everything

‘Together with the shell, they have thrown away the kernel’ 107 obstructing the propagation of the Haskalah. He was, however, at pains to point out that Orthodoxy in general was not harmful, that the Orthodox only burden themselves with their superstitions and superfluous regulations.65 Wolfssohn’s most bitter attack on contemporary obscurantism was an originally anonymously published conversation between Moses Maimonides, an Orthodox rabbi and later, Moses Mendelssohn, entitled Sihah ba’eretz hahayim (Conversation in the land of the living).66 The text is prefaced by an explanation by Wolfssohn claiming that the satire was sent to him by a friend. The satire continued over the next three issues of Hame’assef67 and at the end of the final instalment the author’s true identity is disclosed: It is Wolfssohn himself.68 In this dramatic work, ‘Maimonides’, an Orthodox Rabbi ‘so-and-so’ and ‘Mendelssohn’ engage in polemics on a number of questions which were topical in the Haskalah, such as, for example, the study of the Hebrew language and its grammar, the irrationality of superstition, the empiricism of all human knowledge and the burial-of-the-dead controversy.69 For long stretches, the text is a refutation of Mendelssohn’s translation of the Bible, which had been bitterly attacked by many in the Orthodox camp.70 The play indicates that one of its protagonists, the Orthodox rabbi, in his life, was part of the anti-Mendelssohnian faction, that he too was opposed to the Biur, that is, Mendelssohn’s Bible commentary. In accordance with Wolfssohn’s general emphasis on sensible education, here, too, in the guise of Maimonides, he criticizes contemporary teaching methods, the employment of which is personified in the Orthodox rabbi. All three characters are depicted in absolute black-and-white. Wolfssohn has made no space for any shades in between. Maimonides embodies the rational principle of the Jewish Middle Ages which the maskilim strove to revive.71 He attacks the Orthodox rabbi mercilessly, especially for his interpretation of his, Maimonides’s, own work. In many instances, however, Maimonides’s arguments are fallacious, because he does not so much attack the rabbi’s beliefs but his motives and his character, in other words, Maimonides uses argumenta ad hominem in criticizing his interlocutor. The exaggeration in the delineation of its literary figures was, of course, in keeping with the general character of the satire as a piece of polemical writing whose aim was to create a feeling of community and of a front united in the mutual battle against superstition and obscurantism. Thus, in a way, the satire’s polemic appears to be somewhat overdrawn, since those attacked were likely only to a small degree to read this publication. Wolfssohn is preaching to the converted. Wolfssohn’s closet drama was fashioned after the model of the genre of the Totengespräche (‘dialogues of the dead’) which were extremely popular in the German literature of the second half of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century. The acknowledged father of the genre as a whole is Lucian (born about 120 CE). Most closely associated with the German dialogues of the dead is the name of David Faßmann (1683–1744), who wrote a great number of these conversations. Another author whose dialogues of the dead were widely read in eighteenth-century Germany was Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813), but most contemporary authors also tried their hands at this genre at one time or another. It was adopted by a number of Haskalah authors.72 Like other authors of dialogues of the dead, Wolfssohn, too, has done away with the limits of time, which makes it possible for two of the outstanding rôle-models of the Haskalah to

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meet and discuss the common ground in their ideas, irrespective of the fact that one lived in the twelfth century and the other in the eighteenth century. On an additional level, this neutralization of the course of time also serves to link the Haskalah even more with the tradition of rationality in the Jewish Middle Ages, presenting it, as it were, as its legitimate heir. Wolfssohn also adopted the second important feature of the dialogues of the dead, namely the correspondence between this world and the next which is the prerequisite for any satire of this genre to display its full pugnacity and vehemence. If Maimonides’s attacks were not also aimed at the obscurantism of contemporary Orthodoxy, the satire would lose much of its appeal for the reader. The same holds true for any of the other questions discussed in the text. Their treatment only achieves its satirical impact because it is so closely connected to contemporary maskilic discussions. Thus Maimonides attacks the anonymous rabbi: I have indeed known people from your origin…for they are people without education, there is no order in their sentences and in their deeds. In addition they have not properly learned their language, speaking clearly, as it should be.73 It was indeed Wolfssohn’s and the other maskilims’ contention that many in the Orthodox camp, in addition to their refusal to learn the vernacular, also spoke and wrote deficient Hebrew. Not surprisingly, Wolfssohn employs incorrect Hebrew usage as an important stylistic device in characterizing the most negative stereotypes of obscurantism and casuistry.74 The Orthodox rabbis whom Wolfssohn depicts in his writings are the German Jews’ prejudice towards Ostjuden (‘Eastern Jews’) personified. This conceptual divide into ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ was in itself a product of the modernization of German Jewry.75 It was the image of the Ostjude which served as an argument against full political emancipation, as opponents of such liberation foresaw masses of these Ostjuden invading the German states and especially Prussia. In Wolfssohn’s writings the stereotypical Ostjude is depicted as dirty, immoral, culturally backward and coarse. In other words, he is the exact image of what the enlighteners wanted to overcome. They perceived people like him to be the major obstacle on the way to complete Jewish acceptance into non-Jewish society. In 1816, another maskil, David Friedländer (1750–1834), enumerated a whole list of the standard criticism the enlighteners held against the Jews from Eastern Europe: In every moral aspect they have been isolated and limited to themselves, as they have been for many centuries.—Separated by their foreign, Judeo-German language, with no participation in state schools, no friendly communication was possible, social and neighbourly contacts did not take place. Therefore no convergence of language, manners, dress and habits.76

II Wolfssohn’s second fierce battle was waged against those who ‘together with the shell, have thrown away the kernel’,77 that is, against those among the Jewish youth who had forsaken the Jewish religion and traditions completely, and who mistook hedonism and

‘Together with the shell, they have thrown away the kernel’ 109 idleness for true enlightenment. On one hand, Wolfssohn’s criticism aims exclusively at the Jewish community. However, this critique also has an additional facet to it. While criticizing these internal Jewish conditions, Wolfssohn is at the same time at pains to point out to a non-Jewish audience that this youth is not the real representative of the enlightened segment of Jewish society. In all his writings he mirrors these negative examples of false enlightenment with heroes of true enlightenment who combine religiosity, tradition and secular education to perfection.78 This message permeates all of Wolfssohn’s writings, but none more so than his comedy Leichtsinn und Frömmelei. According to the stage directions, the action of the play occurs in the last decade of the eighteenth century, in the house of a rich Orthodox merchant and conservative Jew, Reb Chanauch. He embodies the type of the traditional paterfamilias who wishes to control the actions of all the family members. His most distinguishing feature is a contempt for everything connected in any way to the Enlightenment and a concurrent veneration of the old, traditional ways. It is for this reason that he has taken into his house a hassid as a Talmud teacher for his son. Jettchen, his daughter, personifies to perfection the foolishness which gives the comedy a part of its title. More encouraged than hindered by her mother, Jettchen keeps the company of officers and noblemen. Aiming at becoming like these people, she has acquired a smattering of dubious knowledge. Her uncle, Markuß, is the hero of the play. He is an enlightened maskil who sees everything in a rational perspective and acts accordingly. He is a foil to the antagonist of the comedy, the hassid. This Polish Talmud teacher, Reb Jaußefche, is the very personification of false piety and hypocrisy, but this of course is only revealed at the end of the play. The play revolves around Reb Chanauch’s intention to marry his daughter to the Polish teacher. Jettchen runs away, seeking shelter with a Prussian officer. This acquaintance abuses her confidence by stealing her jewels and taking her to a brothel. Fortunately the ‘worst’ does not happen, because she is rescued by her uncle, the maskil. It finally is revealed that the alleged Talmud scholar is nothing but a hypocrite whose piety is only a disguise, masking corruption. One of Wolfssohn’s intentions in writing Leichtsinn und Frömmelei was to battle against the jeunesse dorée, which used the newly-acquired possibilities of education mainly as a device to mingle freely with their equivalents in non-Jewish society, completely uninterested in their spiritual identity as Jews. In the introduction to the play Wolfssohn sets out his motives for writing the play:79 I do not intend anything else but to depict for the nation in vivid colours what evil consequences the rigid fanaticism and hypocrisy under the cover of religion on the one hand; and the wrong or insincere enlightenment of our present fashionable youth along with the faulty education of our children on the other hand, might have. In addition to Leichtsinn und Frömmelei Wolfssohn also paints a dismal portrait of wrongly understood acculturation and enlightenment, as he perceived it, in Jeschurun, his apologia for Judaism. Speaking about the younger generation he says:

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Usually they have grown up without education or with an inappropriate one, full of conceit with regard to rhapsodic knowledge and fashionable polish, they regard themselves as enlightened but are less illuminated than their fathers…. They are the ones who painfully injure the Jewish nation daily anew with their evil deeds.80 With this criticism Wolfssohn did not stand alone; it was part of a larger trend of disillusionment with the achievements of some of the goals of the Haskalah and of that kind of secular education which neglected to provide spiritual nourishment as well. Lazarus Bendavid, a fellow maskil, thus wrote in a similar vein: they wrongly believed to have already gained the positive side of enlightenment, if they all took part in the misuse of it, without considering the heart; imagining themselves to be wise and enlightened, if they adopted the sweet aspect of high society… and forgot that the richest Christian is not always the wisest one.81 The antidote to these excesses was, in Wolfssohn’s understanding, sensible education, which would also positively influence character-formation. On a different level, this criticism shows how deeply Wolfssohn had internalized the polemics of the acculturation debate in contemporary German society at large. There was a tendency among both intellectuals and the general population to reject any attempts on the part of the Jews to adopt the culture of their non-Jewish contemporaries and thus to become acculturated. The ‘insincere enlightenment’ which Wolfssohn and other maskilim criticized, was also one of the standard topoi of the opponents and critics of the acculturated Berlin Jewry.82 But all the difference was in the emphasis. Whereas criticism from within the Jewish community was levelled in order to educate and improve the young followers of falsely-perceived enlightenment, the criticism of acculturation was decidedly anti-Jewish insofar as it insinuated that Jews were incapable per se of achieving enlightenment and education.

III The third religious debate in which Wolfssohn took an active and ardent part was the socalled ‘Burial-of-the-Dead’ controversy. The dispute concerned the question of whether Jews should be allowed to bury their dead the day following death as tradition demanded,83 or whether they should adopt the prevalent practice of waiting a three-day period to prevent any possible cases of mistaken death. This discussion was conducted polemically on all sides, that is by those on the Jewish side who insisted on the keeping of the status quo, and those among the Jewish enlighteners who advocated the acceptance of the practice common among non-Jews. There were also those among the government who were in favour of forcing the Jewish communities by legal means to adopt common burial practices. In fact, this question served within contemporary Jewish community as a kind of shibboleth,84 dividing enlighteners and traditionalists. Many of the maskilim advocated delayed burial for two main reasons: First, many of the maskilim had medical training, medicine being the first academic discipline which had

‘Together with the shell, they have thrown away the kernel’ 111 opened its doors to Jews. They therefore adopted the prevalent contemporary medical concern about mistaken (or ‘pseudo’) death. Second, the maskilim perceived the alignment of the Jewish religion, its customs and traditions, with Christianity as one of their most urgent tasks. The question of the burial-of-the-dead was seen as a main stepping-stone to presenting Judaism as a modern religion, equal to Christianity. The burial-of-the-dead controversy commenced in 1772 and flared up again and again in the following decades. In 1772 an edict was issued by the Grand Duke of MecklenburgSchwerin, stipulating that the local Jewish community should have to delay burial for three days.85 The community turned to Moses Mendelssohn, asking him for advice on that matter.86 Mendelssohn drafted a letter to the Grand Duke in the name of the community in which he acknowledges that biblical law does not necessitate immediate burial but he points out that rabbinical law stipulates it. He suggests as a compromise that the community should be allowed to continue with the practice of immediate burial but that a physician should beforehand establish the death. This suggestion was accepted by the government.87 The debate then lay dormant for a few years, only to flare up again with renewed vigour in the last decade of the eighteenth century when various writers took a stand on the issue. One essay on that topic was written by Marcus Herz (1747–1803),88 a well-known maskil, physician and disciple of Kant. This publication is a good example of the extreme polemical nature of the debate. The title-page shows an etching by Wilhelm Chodwiecki (1765– 1805) which is a programmatic illustration of the maskilic attitude. It is of an old Jewish cemetery. On the left side we find the tombstone of Moses Mendelssohn, the icon of the Haskalah. In front of it a man stands meditating, his clothes marking him as modern and enlightened. On the right we can see a grave out of which a prematurely and mistakenly buried man raises his head and an admonishing hand. The combination of these elements is interesting insofar as it shows, on the one hand, how pugnaciously the Jewish enlighteners presented their views and, on the other, how adroitly they presented themselves as standing in the tradition of Moses Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn, although committed to enlightenment and education, had remained an observant Jew all his life. The Jewish enlighteners like Herz and Wolfssohn therefore attempted to convey to their Jewish contemporaries the idea that they too are able to combine loyalty to their faith with the fight against obscurantism. While Wolfssohn was teaching at the Wilhelmsschule (1792–1807) in Breslau, at the same time being a very active member of the circle of Breslau maskilim, conflicts flared up again and again between the Orthodox and the enlightened camps of Jewish Breslau. These quarrels predominantly concerned the question of the Wilhelmsschule and its curriculum and the question of the burial of the dead, raging especially in the year 1797. Under Wolfsohn’s editorship, an article appeared in 1797 in Hame’assef which kindled the argument anew.89 Wolfssohn, of course, was in favour of delayed burial, a practice which had a precedent in ancient times but was nevertheless a deviation from the prevailing customs and from contemporary normative Judaism.90 He and the other maskilim of Breslau founded an additional burial society to provide ‘dignified’ and ‘scientifically safe-guarded’ burials for their members.91 The Prussian government attempted to mediate between the two hostile camps, but it nevertheless came to scuffles between the opponents whenever a burial took place.

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But Wolfssohn did not only participate in this war of words and muscles, he also attempted to prove his point by resorting to dramatic means, staging a rather polemical hoax. On the eve of Purim92 in 1797, he and Joel Löwe, a fellow maskil and friend, assembled a band of Purim players and went with them to the house of a Breslau Orthodox rabbi, Yeshayahu Pick. They wore shrouds and masks, with Wolfssohn playing the part of a wealthy Orthodox Jew who had died the previous evening.93 To facilitate identification, he even carried a placard on which was written: I am Mr ‘X’, I fainted and the people of the [burial] society rushed to bury me and they nearly murdered me cruelly, but with God’s help and by my own power and with the strength of my hand I broke out of my confinement and behold, that I am standing here now is a sign to many.94 This practical joke certainly did nothing to improve relations between him and the Orthodox majority of the Jewish population, which remained acrimonious until Wolfssohn left Breslau. The incident demonstrates how Wolfssohn was at times capable of pursuing an ideological aim without any regard for the religious sentiments of the more Orthodox strata of his co-religionists. In fact, it seems that provocation was his professed intention. The most important aspect in which Wolfssohn differed from a number of his contemporaries was that he did not ever perceive his Jewish origin as a misfortune. He found a great deal that was of value in Judaism, qualities which he wanted to convey to his students. However, he saw points of criticism in some of the contemporary institutions of his faith. In Wolfssohn’s opinion, it was of prime importance to interpret Judaism properly, emphasizing its rational character and its universal elements. It would then show itself to be more compatible with enlightened thought than most forms of Christianity, as the foundations of the Jewish faith were in any case pervaded by the spirit of tolerance: Indeed, I can even claim, should I want to, that—judging by the Mosaic Laws—the Jews had to show much more tolerance towards non-Jews in their former state than a great part of the Christian states has shown towards the non-Christians in their territories or probably even than one Christian religion has shown towards the other, and still is showing now and then.95 Wolfssohn’s depiction of the Talmud and other post-biblical writings as valuable texts of the Jewish mind is comparable with his general conceptualization of the Jewish religion. It is part of his endeavour to create a positive Jewish identity, one which would allow any Jew to understand himself both as an enlightened and modern being and a Jew. Wolfssohn certainly did not any longer fit in the mould contemporary normative Judaism had cast for its image of an observant and pious Jew, and he did not hesitate to criticize harshly that which he perceived to be an aberration and misinterpretation of the ‘true’ tenets of Judaism. Nevertheless, he cannot be termed a radical or an iconoclast. This concern for imparting the value of the basic tenets of Judaism to the younger generation usually prevented any overtly negative criticism. It has to be said, however, that Wolfssohn’s stand towards rabbinic Judaism became more critical in later years, when, disappointed by the propagation of the Haskalah among German Jewry, he re-evaluated a number of his positions.

‘Together with the shell, they have thrown away the kernel’ 113 Notwithstanding that Wolfssohn is much more inclined towards reforms than his model Mendelssohn, he is at the same time not in the forefront of maskilic radicalism.96 Wolfssohn’s esteem for the concept of tradition within Judaism, his admiration for the long chain of Jewish lore, prevented the unrestricted radicalization of his views. Notes 1

2

3 4

5

6 7

8

9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17

Conflicting data exist for his date of birth. However, according to the entry in the Fürth death register 29 March 1835 (no. 578) he died at the age of seventy-nine, thus making 1756 his year of birth. Wolfssohn’s birthplace is also in dispute. Zinberg 1976:147 for example points to Niederheim in Alsace; others, possibly on the grounds of Wolfssohn’s epithet Halle, placed his birth in the city Halle. So among others Zylbertsvayg 1931:652, Rayzen 1929:904. A few sources suggest that Fürth was his birthplace. Thus for example David Fraenkel 1835 in Wolfssohn’s obituary. I go along with Lesser’s (1842:8), Conn’s (1897:369) and Löwenstein’s (1910:153) suggestion of Niederehnheim in Alsace. According to the records of the Fürth Jewish community which are cited in Löwenstein 1910:67. Avtalyon vehu mavo halimud lena‘arei bnei yisrael ulekhol hahafzim belashon ever (Avtalyon which is an introduction to study, for the Jewish youth and every enthusiast of the Hebrew language), Berlin 1790. One of them, namely the commentary on Song of Songs, Berlin 1789, he wrote in cooperation with Joel Löwe (or Bril; 1762–1802), a maskil from among the circle which had formed around Hame’assef. In addition, Wolfssohn translated and commented on the following books: Ruth, Berlin 1788; Lamentations, Berlin 1788; Esther, Berlin 1788, and Job, Berlin 1791. Jeremias Klagegesänge (Lamentations of Jeremiah), Berlin 1790. He did, for example, take a strong interest in the psychological explorations of Karl Philipp Moritz and published a description of a dream he had had in Moritz’s journal Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde. Steinschneider (1892 (5): 168) published a list of approximately sixty of these books which he found printed on the cover of Hartwig Wessely’s (1725–1805) Shirei Tiferet (Poems of glory) from 1792. Freudenthal n.d.:31 and Francolm 1841:27. Together with Joel Löwe, the seventh volume was published during his years in Breslau. Freudenthal n.d.:93. Foolishness and False Piety, Breslau 1796. Jeschurun, oder unparteyische Beleuchtung der dem Judenthume neuerdings gemachten Vorwürfe (Jeschurun or impartial elucidation of the reproaches recently made concerning Judaism), Breslau 1804, which was intended as a refutation of Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Grattenauer’s (1770–1838) anti-Jewish diatribes. In: Hame’assef 1794 (VII):54–67, 1795 (VII):120–53, 1796 (VII):203–28, 1797 (VII):279–98. Cohn 1897:375f. and Lazarus 1914:17f. The project apparently never was carried through. This opinion has, for example, been put forward by Isaac Eisenstein-Barzilay (1955:66), as well as more recently by Dan Miron (1977:5). Moses Mendelssohn, the German-Jewish philosopher, took a very active part in many of the intellectual discussions of his day. Although he himself remained strictly observant, he is often seen as the forerunner of the later Jewish reform movement.

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18 Cf. for example Wolfssohn’s satire ‘Sihah ba’eretz hahayim’, in Hame’assef, 1794–7, VII:54–67, 120–53, 203–28, 279–98, which is for long stretches a defence of Mendelssohn’s Bible translation and a vindication of Mendelssohn himself, amply annotated by quotations from his writings. 19 Cf. for example Jeschurun 1804:24ff. 20 Jeschurun 1804:114f. This and the following translations are my own. Die fünfte und letzte Classe besteht aus den wahrhaft gebildeten und aufgeklärten Juden…. Der Stifter dieser Classe war mein verehrungswürdiger Lehrer, Moses Mendelssohn…. Mendelssohn ging also den neuern Juden voran, wie einst die Feuersäule den Israeliten in der Wüste, ihnen zu leuchten und den rechten Weg zu zeigen. 21 Ibid.:111ff. 22 Thus for example Lazarus Bendavid (1762–1832) in his book Etwas zur Charackteristick der Juden (Something on the characterization of the Jews), Leipzig 1793:44ff. 23 That is the third group of the ‘pharisees’ and the fourth group of the pseudo-enlightened. See below. 24 How this image functioned among German Jewry has been discussed by Altmann 1985. 25 1790:2. 26 Ibid. 27 Purim plays were a traditional pastime in Jewish communities during the festival. In the eighteenth century a debate flared up among both Jews and non-Jews about the harmfulness of these plays. In 1790, only a few years before Wolfssohn wrote his comedy, an anonymous article appeared in the Berlinische Monatsschrift 1790 (15):377–81, suggesting the abolition of Purim. One of his main objections is that it celebrates the victory of Jews over non-Jews and thereby awakens anti-Christian sentiment in the Jews. He adds that the customs with which Purim is celebrated are even more despicable. David Friedländer published a reply (1790:563ff.) in which he also strongly criticized the customs. He is convinced that growing enlightenment among the people will cause the disappearance of the ‘bizarre comedies’, ‘bad farces’ and ‘stuttering and stammering’. Wolfssohn displays a similar attitude towards the traditional plays and the customs surrounding the festival. In his introduction he states that the play should take the place of the ‘usual absurd and inappropriate harlequinades’ (1796:34). 28 Jeschurun 1804:59ff. Likewise in his Lamentations of Jeremiah 1790:V. 29 Avtalyon 1790:5f. 30 Ibid.:1f. 31 Jeschurun 1804:59ff. 32 In a way, Wolfssohn also seems to have been influenced by Francois de Salignac de la Mothe Fenelon’s (1651–1715) position. Fenelon, the theologian and pedagogue, was an author whom he highly cherished, especially regarding the religious education of the child. This position encouraged instruction characterized by cheerful religiousness and opposed pedantic dogmatism (Schmidt 1979:97). 33 ‘Menschliche Zusätze und Mißbräuche’, Jub A 1981 (VII):9. 34 ‘Vergiftenden Hauch der Heucheley und des Aberglaubens’, Ibid. 35 Jeschurun 1804:63. ‘Eben so wenig zum rabbinischen Judentum gehört, als manche Lehren Ihrer Kirchenväter zum wahren Christenthum gehören.’ 36 ‘Tshuvah lehakotev’ (‘An Answer to the Writer’), in: Hame’assef 1797(VII):311. 37 Jeschurun 1804:75ff.

‘Together with the shell, they have thrown away the kernel’ 115 38 Ibid.:334. 39 ‘That a number of gold particles can be found in this Aggada, that it contains much which is suitable, useful and instructive and worthy to be preserved’. ‘Daß nun in dieser Aggada manche Goldkörner zu finden sind; daß sie viel brauchbares, nutz- und lehrreiches enthält, welches der Aufbewahrung werth ist’. Jeschurun 1804:78. 40 Wolfssohn even intended to publish a collection of these homilies in the near future, as he tells his readership in the same paragraph (a project which apparently did not materialize). 41 Ibid. 42 ‘Sihah ba’eretz hahayim’ (‘A conversation in the land of the living’), Hame’assef 1795 (VII): 126). 43 Jeschurun 1804:75. 44 Ibid. Sof hadavar kol maskil tzarikh lehavdil bein agadah ve’agadah, ki yesh agadot bemidrash ubetalmud hamale’im devar hen umusar…ve’ashrei ha’ish asher yiteh ozen ledivreihem. Ule’umat zot yesh agadot hamale’im devarim hamitnagdim lekhol sekhel enoshi, yihyeh sheha’omer otah kiven bah kavanah meyuhedet hane’elmah atah mimenu o sheha’omer otah shagah be’emet. 45 46 47 48 49

‘Sihah ba’eretz hahayim’, Hame’assef 1795 (VII):126ff). Second century CE. Anthologized compilation of the Oral Law, dating from the second century CE. Used here as synonym for the Talmud. Jeschurun 1804:76f. Wären nun die Sammler der Gemara, welche einige hundert Jahre nach dem Sammler der Mischna gelebt haben, in die Fußstapfen diese großen Mannes getreten, wären sie seinem Beyspiele gefolgt, hätten sie eine kluge Auswahl getroffen, und in ihrer Sammlung nur dasjenige, was allgemeinen Beyfall und uneingeschränkte Autorität bey der Nation erhalten…würde die Gemara zwar an Quantität viel verlohren, dafür aber mehr an Qualität gewonnen haben.

50

‘Sihah ba’eretz hahayim’, Hame’assef 1797 (VII):295ff. ‘Dorshim veshonim bamikra uvemishnah lo lema’an da’at kevanat hama’amar hahu ulehavin oto, ki im lema’an harot koham ve‘otzem yadam…velistor lefarek uletaretz’. 51 Hame’assef 1795 (VII):121. 52 Hame’assef 1190 (VI):9. 53 Cf. on the image of the Kabbalah in early German Romanticism, e.g. Kilcher 1993. 54 Jeschurun 1804:123f. 55 Ibid.:125 56 Jeschurun 1804:119. Nein die Beobachtung der Ceremonialgesetze darf nie für eine Gerechtigkeitsliebende Regierung ein Gegenstand ihrer Vorsorge seyn… dem Rabbaniten zu befehlen: Du mußt dein Ceremonialgesetz abschaffen, du sollst nicht mehr deinem Gotte auf diese Weise dienen; einen solchen Befehl, solchen Eingriff in die Rechte der Menschen wird sich nie eine gerechte Regierung erlauben, und unser erhabener Monarch ist zu aufgeklärt, als daß er nicht mit Saladin denken sollte: die tausend Jahre des Richters sind noch nicht um, sein Richterstuhl ist nicht der Meine.

116 57

Religious Perspectives in Modern Muslim and Jewish Literatures Ibid. Die Regierung muß ihren Weg unaufhaltsam fortgenen, sagt der Philosoph Mendelssohn, und das vorschreiben, was dem allgemeinen Besten zuträglich ist; und wer zwischen seinen besondern Meinungen und den Gesetzen eine Collision findet, mag zusehen, wie er diese heben kann.

58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

On the views held by Mendelssohn, cf. Meyer 1988:15ff. ‘Tshuvah lehakotev’, Hame’assef 1797(VII):313 and ‘Sihah ba’eretz hahayim’, Hame’assef 1795 (VII):147f. This view finds its expression for example in a laudatory birthday poem for David Friedländer (Hame’assef 1794 (VII):16) and in ‘Sihah ba’eretz hahayim’, Ibid.:155f. ‘Ein deitscher erzehlt einst in gegenwart eins polnischn lamdan einiges von amerika, sogleich rif ihm der polack zu, was gloibt ihr oich an amerika? Und als jener seinn gläubischn unglauben durch bweise bkräftigen wollte, wurde er von dem polack mit dem…namn epikoros beehrt, den fuhr der polack fort, findt ihr in ganz tanakh eppis von amerika?’ Thus for example Tobias Feder (c. 1760–1817) in his book Lahat haherev (The flame of the sword) 1804:28. ‘Sihah ba’eretz hahayim’, Hame’assef 1794 (VII):59. Ibid.:157f. Jeschurun 1804:63. ‘Sihah ba’eretz hahayim’, Hame’assef 1794 (VII):54–67. Ibid. 1795 (VII): 120–53, 1796 (VII):203–28, 1797 (VII):279–98. 1797 (VII):300. See respectively, 1794 (VII):65f; 1795 (VII): 123; 1795 (VII):127ff; 1797 (VII):132ff. Wolfssohn’s apologetic impetus already becomes apparent in the introduction, where the final words uttered by the alleged author on his deathbed are repeated: This book I composed for the honour of our master, the man of God, our teacher, Moses ben Menakhem from Dessau, whom I loved [for his] love of the world and whose reverence was always with me. (1794 [VII]:53) Hasefer hazeh hibarti likhvod adoneinu ish elohim rabeinu Mosheh ben Menahem miDesau asher ahavat olam ahavtihu veyirato haytah al panai tamid.

71 72

Schorsch 1989:47ff. See Friedländer (1979:124ff.) and Pelli (1983:1ff.). Examples are Solomon Löwisohn’s (1789– 1821) Sihah ba’olam haneshamot (A dialogue in the world of the spirits) which deals with problems in the usage of Hebrew and Aramaic words and expressions by having David Kimchi (1160?-1235?) and Joel Löwe (1762–1802) discuss them. Thus it is in a way similar in structure to Wolfssohn’s ‘Sihah ba’eretz hahayim’. They both bring together prominent figures from the Haskalah and the Middle Ages respectively. Another was Tobias Feder’s (1760–1817) Kol mehatzetzim (The thunder of separation), written in 1813 and published in 1853. 73 1794 (VII):55.‘Eini adam li lirot i mizeh am atah. Yadati anshei mekhoroteikha …ki banim hemah lo imun bam. Velo sedarim…bemishpatam uvema’aseihem, gam lo lamdu leshonam diber nekhohah vezikuk kemishpat’. To drive the point home, Wolfssohn points out that the reader should not be confused by the fact that the words of rabbi so-and-so appear in beautiful Hebrew before the reader; this is only due

‘Together with the shell, they have thrown away the kernel’ 117 to the fact that the rabbi has already spent a considerable time in the hereafter where he finally learned pure Hebrew. 74 So for example Reb Yausefche, in his comedy Leichtsinn und Frömmelei where the villain of the play is presented as wrongly piling Hebraism on Hebraism, in order to show himself as a pious and learned man (1796:52). 75 This has been shown convincingly by Aschheim 1982:3ff. 76 Ueber die Verbesserung der Israeliten in Pohlen (On the amelioration of the Israelites in Poland) 1816:6f. In jeder moralischen Hinsicht blieben sie isolirt und auf sich beschränkt, und sind es seit Jahrhunderten noch.—Getrennt durch die ihnen eigentümliche jüdisch-deutsche Sprache, ohne Theilnahme an öffentlichen Unterrichts-Anstalten, war freundliche Mittheilung nicht möglich, gesellschaftliche und nachbarliche Verbindungen fanden nicht statt. Daher auch keine Annäherung in Sprache, Sitten, Kleidung und Gewohnheiten. Another striking instance of this conceptual divide can be found in the poems of Isachar Falkensohn Behr (1746–1817) who, originating from an East European ghetto, presented himself in his poems as an successful example of acculturation. This he did by contrasting the ‘East European’ appearance and habitus, with his newly acquired ‘modern’ one. He is no longer—as he calls it—‘wild’ and coarse but now adheres to the aesthetic values of the surrounding culture, both in appearance and gestures. 1772:1 If. 77 Wolfssohn 1804:113. ‘Die mit der Schale auch den Kern weggeworfen hat.’ 78 This of course corresponds to his later classifications of contemporary Judaism into ‘pharisees’ and ‘pseudo-enlightened’ on the one hand, and the ‘truly educated and enlightened’ on the other hand. Jeschurun 1804:11 1ff. 79 Leichtsinn und Frömmelei 1796:34.

80

da ich nichtß andrß damit beabsichtigen will, alß bloß der Nation mit lebhaftn Farben anschaulich vorzustelln, welche üble Folgen, der strenge Fanatißmuß und die Heuchlei untr dem Deckmantel der Religion einrseitß, und die falsche odr unechte Aufklärung unsrr jetzigen modischn Jugend, nebßt der fehlrhaftn Erziehung der Kindr andrrseitß, hervorbringn könnn. Wolfssohn 1804:113f.

Gewöhnlich sind sie ohne Erziehung, oder mit einer zweckwidrigen, aufgewachsen, voll Eigendünkels auf rapsodische Kenntnisse und modische Politur, und sind fmsterer als ihre Väter…. Diese sind es, welche durch ihre schlechten Handlungen, der jüdischen Nation täglich neue und schmerzhafte Wunden schlagen. 81 Bendavid 1793:37. wähnten schon die gute Seite der Aufklärung gewonnen zu haben, wenn sie alle, ohne Rücksicht auf das Innere zu nehmen, den Mißbrauch derselben mitmachten; dünkten sich weise und aufgeklärt, wenn sie die süsse Seite der feinen Welt annahmen…und vergassen, daß auch der reichere Christ nicht immer der weisere Christ ist. 82 Cf. on this topic the comprehensive study of the imago judaica in German literature by Och 1995. Thus, for example, Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) complains in 1801 in a letter to his sister about the fact that the Jews are so ‘pretentious about their education’ (‘pretiös mit ihrer Bildung’). Cited in Kobler 1984:149f Similarly Helene Unger described 1798 (:32f) the salonieres: they are still far removed from good taste which never lowers itself to extremes and overacting as they do. The daughters of Israel should be careful! They are already

118

Religious Perspectives in Modern Muslim and Jewish Literatures close to pseudo-education. Frequent contact with scholars have led them astray in attempting to rise to the higher levels of culture without having passed the intermediate ones. Kant, philosophy, Goethe, art, taste and Italy are the catchphrases of their enlightenment which they like to introduce into their converstation during the most mundane opportunities. noch weit ab vom wahren Geschmack; der nie so, wie sie thun, in Extreme oder Übertreibung verfällt. Sie mögen sich hüten, die Töchter Israels! Schon streifen sie hart an Verbildung. Durch den häufigen Umgang mit Gelehrten, sind sie verleitet worden, die höheren Stufen der Cultur ersteigen zu wollen, ohne die mittlern berührt zu haben; und Kant und Philosophic, und Goethe, Kunst, Geschmak und Italien sind Stichwörter ihrer Aufklärung, welche sie gern, bei den alltäglichsten Veranlassungen, hoch tönen lassen.

83 84 85

86 87

88

89 90 91 92 93 94

Anti-Jewish writings of the time routinely describe acculturated Jews as using education as a means to gain financial advantages: ‘and what Moses fails to achieve from the master with bows and flatteries, is then achieved by his daughter Rahel who knows how to talk away in French, has read novels and can act out a novel herself. Grattenauer 1791:114. Unless of course the burial would have had to take place on the Sabbath, in which case burial was delayed for one day. Pelli 1979:28. L.H.A.Mecklenburg, Ministerium für Unterricht etc. (MfU), 11246, 30 April 1772. Cited in Silberstein 1929:280. On the first stages of the controversy see also Wilhelm 1932 and Wiesemann 1992. The letter of 18 May 1772 is printed in Mendelssohn Gesammelte Schriften. Jubiläumsausgabe, vol. 19:154–5. This letter is printed in Silberstein 1929:284–6. Following this compromise., a new edict was issued on 31 August 1772, printed in Silberstein, 287–8. It is interesting to note that Mendelssohn personally held a completely contrary opinion. In a letter, addressed directly to the community and written in German in Hebrew letters, that is, not readable by the authorities, Mendelssohn criticized the leaders of the community for persisting in outdated customs. He argues that even in biblical times when the dead were buried in caves and burial chambers, they were watched over for three days to avoid any instances of pseudo death. Mendelssohn wishes to return to this custom and he thereby risks an argument with the leading rabbinical authorities of his time. Herz, Über die frühe Beerdigung der Juden. An die Herausgeber des hebräischen Sammlers (Concerning the early burial of the Jews. Addressed to the Editors of the Hebrew Gatherer), 1788. He was married to the famous saloniere Henriette Herz (1764–1847). Euchel, Isaak, ‘Ist nach dem jüdischen Gesetze das Übernachten der Todten wirklich verboten (Does Jewish Law Indeed Forbid the Laying Out of the Dead)’ 1797:361–91. Hame’assef 1795 (VII):133f. and Freudenthal n.d.:107ff. Ironically Wolfssohn himself was buried the next day. Cf. death register of the Fürth Jewish community. Ibid.:111. Purim commemorates the deliverance of the Jews of Persia by Esther. It is customary to dress up in fancy dress and wear masks. Shatzki 1940:33f. Bernfeld 1897:93. ‘Ani ploni almoni, hitalafti ve’anshei hahevrah miharu likborni vekimat shafkhu et dami be’akhzariut, akh ba’ezrat hashem uvekohi ve ‘otzem yadai paratzti et gadri vehineni omed poh mofet lerabim’.

‘Together with the shell, they have thrown away the kernel’ 119 95

Jeschurun 1804:33f. Ja ich kann, wenn ich will, sogar behaupten, daß nach den Mosaischen Verordnungen die Juden weit mehr Toleranz, in ihrem ehemaligen Staate, gegen die Nichtjuden zeigen mußten, als ein großer Theil der christlichen Staaten, gegen die in seinem Lande befindlichen Nichtchristen, oder als vieleicht gar eine christliche Religionspartey gegen die andere gezeigt hat, und hier und da noch zeigt.

96

As personified for example by David Friedländer (1750–1834).

Bibliography Altmann, Alexander, ‘Moses Mendelssohn as the archetypical German Jew’, in Reinharz Jehuda and W.Schatzberg (eds), Jewish Responses to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War, Hanover NH/London, 1985. Aschheim, Steven E., Brothers and Strangers. The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923, Madison WI 1982. Bendavid, Lazarus, Etwas zur Charackteristick der Juden, Leipzig 1793. Bernfeld, Simon, Dor hahafukhot, Warsaw 1897. Cohn, Jos, ‘Einige Schriftstücke aus dem Nachlasse Aron Wolfssohns’, in Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 41 (1897). Eisenstein-Barzillay, Isaac, The treatment of Jewish religion in the literature of the Berlin Haskalah, in Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research 24 (1955). Euchel, Isaak, ‘Ist nach dem jüdischen Gesetze das Übernachten der Todten wirklich verboten’, in Hame’assef 7 (1797). Feder, Tobias, Lahat haherev, Bialystok 1804. Fraenkel, David, ‘Nekrolog’, in Sulamith 8,2 (1835). Francolm, J.A., Zur Geschichte der königlichen Wilhelmsschule. Zur Feier des funfzigjährigen Jubiläums, Breslau 1841. Freudenthal, Max, Die ersten Emancipations-Bestrebungen der Juden in Breslau, Breslau n.d. Friedländer, David, Ueber die Verbesserung der Israeliten in Pohlen: Ein von der Regierung daselbst im Jahr 1816 abgefordertes Gutachten, Berlin 1816. Friedländer, Yehuda, Perakim misatirah ha’ivrit, vol. 1, Tel Aviv 1979. Halle-Wolfssohn, Aaron, ‘Jeschurun, oder unpartheyische Beleuchtung der dem Judenthume neuerdings gemachten Vorwürfe’, in Brief en von Aaron Wolfssohn, Breslau 1804. ——‘Erfahrungen über Träume’, in Moritz, Karl Philipp (ed.), Magazin der Erfahrungsseelenkunde, als ein Lesebuch für Gelehrte und Ungelehrte 11 (1791). ——‘Shirim. Al yom huledet hahakham R.David Friedländer’, in Hameassef VII (1794–1797). ——‘Sihah ba’eretz hahayim’, in Hameassef VII (1794–1797). ——‘Leichtsinn und Frömmelei. Ein Familiengemälde in drei Aufzügen’, in Lustspiele zur Unterhaltung beim Purimfeste, vol.1, Breslau 1796. Herz, Marcus, Über die frühe Beerdigung der Juden. An die Herausgeber des hebräischen Sammlers, Berlin 1788. Kilcher, Andreas, ‘Die wahre Ästhetik ist die Kabbala. Zum Bild der Kabbala in der Frühromantik’, unpublished paper, 1993. Kobler, Franz (ed.), Juden und Judentum in deutschen Briefen aus drei Jahrhunderten, Königstein/ Ts. 1984. Lazarus, Felix, Das Königlich Westphälische Konsistorium der Israeliten, Pressburg 1914.

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Lesser, Ludwig, Chronik der Gesellschaft der Freunde in Berlin zur Feier ihres funfzigjährigen Jubiläums, Berlin 1842. Löwenstein, Leopold, ‘Zur Geschichte der Juden in Fürth IF, in Jahrbuch der jüdisch-literarischen Gesellschaft 8 (1910). Meyer, Michael A., Response to Modernity. A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism, New York/Oxford 1988. Miron, Dan, Aaron Wolfssohn. Kalut da‘at utzvi’ut, Tel Aviv 1977. Mosse, W.E., The German-Jewish Economic Elite 1820–1935. A Socio-Cultural Profile, Oxford 1989. Och, Gunnar, Imago Judaica. Juden und Judentum im Spiegel der deutschen Literatur 1750–1812, Würzburg 1995. Pelli, Moshe, The Age of Haskalah. Studies in Hebrew Literature of the Enlightenment in Germany, Leiden 1979. ——‘Kolot shelo me’alma hadin’, in Hebrew Union College Annual 54 (1983). Rayzen, Zalman, Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, vol. I, Vilna 1929. Schorsch, Ismar, ‘The Myth of Sephardic Supremacy’, in Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 34 (1989). Shatzki, Jacob, ‘Der kamf kegn purim-shpiln in praysn in 18ten yorhundert’, in YIVO-bleter 15 (1940). Steinschneider, Moritz, ‘Hebräische Drucke in Deutschland’, in Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland 5 (1892). Wiesemann, Falk, ‘Jewish burials in Germany—between tradition, the Enlightenment and the authorities’, in Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 37 (1992). Wilhelm, Kurt, ‘Die Frage der frühen Beerdigung der Juden in Braunschweig’, in Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland 4 (1932). Zinberg, Israel, A History of Jewish Literature, vol. 8, Cincinnati 1976. Zylbertsvayg, Zalman, Leksikon fun yidishn teater, vol. I, New York 1931.

7 THE UZBEK SHORT STORY WRITER ADAPTATION OF RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS1 Sigrid Kleinmichel

2 Several stories and a short play by Abdurra’ûf have plots determined by motifs taken from a religious context. They form part of a literature that burgeoned in Turkestan from 1910 on. Obstacles to publication—not only the obligatory censorship exercised from Petersburg or Tiflis in Tsarist Russia, but also the frequent banning of newspapers and periodicals—failed to halt this development. The literature in question was meant to be different from Divan poetry and from popular literature. Its distinctiveness was due to the intentions of the authors, who strove to modernize life in Turkestan, so as to surmount the backwardness that some of them had become aware of both in everyday life and in politics and intellectual life, by comparison with the situation in parts of the Near East and Russia. They also hoped that modernization would enable Turkestan to become independent of Russia. In their view both aims could be achieved only if broad sections of society became aware of their own identity as representatives of a culture with deep roots in the past and capable of shaping the present just as masterfully as other peoples were doing. They had acquired their name of Jadid from their first steps towards changing the situation: founding schools with a new teaching method ( -i jadîd) and writing textbooks for various types of school.3 With his two short works (1909, Debate) and Bayânâti-i Hindî (1912, Tales of the Indian traveller), was among the pioneers of the new literature. The ‘Debate’ was subtitled ‘Dispute between a European and a university teacher from Bukhara in India on various issues, including the new teaching methods’. Both works used the approach of critically examining the situation in Bukhara through the eyes of a fictitious outsider and making fun of scholars’ established opinions and certain traditional customs. Further stimuli emerged from the discussions that found expression in recently founded newspapers; Behbûdî in particular had created an excellent forum for these with his periodical Âyina (1913–15). In times when society and literature are developing more or less uniformly, ten to fifteen years seems short. In those days, though, when writers were continually forced to reorientate themselves in accordance with new possibilities and thus to abandon newly acquired illusions, literature produced innovations impressive in both quantity and quality. And among the literary works that were created then, stories and his short play stand out due to his superb narrative technique and his sure handling of a second level of meaning.

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takes up the motif (widespread in the litIn Aq mazâr (1928, The white tomb)4 eratures of the Islamic East in the twentieth century) of superstition focussed on the tombs of saints being exploited for personal gain.5 A man purporting to be a pious pilgrim buries his donkey like a saint and declares the grave to be a place of pilgrimage. At first the Qâdi is appalled, but adroit bribery pacifies him. The story follows Itniñ (The dog’s last will),6 a anecdote. For Afandi the dog’s funeral is a jape that he more or less covers up with his alleged affection for the dog. At the same time uses the dog’s pompous funeral to draw attention to how little seriousness the Qâdi attaches to his place in story is function once he is offered money. The man who takes after the money and gifts that the new place of pilgrimage brings in. The narrator intensifies the aspect of social criticism by supplementing the Qâdi with a figure who unscrupulously taps the religious ideas of the common people as a source of income. However, the figure of himself has disappeared. The laughter at the Qâdi and people like him is less good-humoured; the story aims to unmask. Opposition to religious ideas already had a tradition of its own in literature, popular and otherwise; in the twenties it was intensified, and gave it expression in stories and a one-act play. Periodicals such as Mushtum (Fist, Punch) and Khudâsizlar (Atheists) encouraged authors to write short stories with an anti-religious tendency. The publishers were happy to print this kind of prose. Abdurra’ûf produced the most impressive stories about this set of issues. He blended the fantastic elements in the old stories partly with fairy-tale-like material and invariably with episodes that can be envisaged as real, located in the past or present. This generated an ironic relation to the traditional material. At the same time also dared here and there to criticize the present. Abdulla Qahhâr, who later on also tried his hand at stories of this kind between 1935 and 1940,7 welcomed those of his older colleague at the end of the 1920s. He suggested taking them over from the atheistic periodical in the satirical magazine Mushtum, even though they contained no formal innovations in his view. Their content should be acclaimed, though, for in them he found what he considered necessary—heaven being made fun of. If the aim was to combat religion as such, it was not enough to satirize the mullahs’ actions.8 story Qiyâmat (1923, The Last Judgement)9 portrays the opium smoker Pâchamîr finding his way into Paradise after he runs out of opium (and not while he is in an opium trance). Deprived of opium, he falls ill and, in delirium, experiences his own death, his resurrection and the trials of the Last Judgement. Pâchamîr takes these trials none too seriously, since he notices various inconsistencies in them. At God’s behest the angel-inquisitors Munkar and Nakîr examine his religious beliefs, even though every detail of his life and death is known to God and to them. He finds the weighing of his good and bad deeds extremely tiresome, and the third trial, riding a sheep over a bridge consisting of a single hair, makes no sense to him.10 He sees the angels as a group of corrupt people who want to keep the best sheep for themselves and who hand over the good sheep that Pâchamîr is entitled to only at his repeated insistence. A further trial awaits Pâchamîr in Paradise: he must wander around for a year and a half before he finds the house God has kept for him. Here at last he finds all that Islam promises the true believer in Paradise. However, he is soon tired of inactivity. At the very least he wishes for intoxication, but the wine of Paradise has no such effect. He thinks a kind of poppy that he expects an opium-like trance

The Uzbek short story writer Fitrat’s adaptation of religious traditions 123 from will be the answer. That brings the story back to its starting-point: Pâchamîr awakes from his delirium. projects the central figure’s actual reality and his notion of the present into the story of the Last Judgement. This not only intensifies the comic effect but also generates a second level of meaning. Some features of the desert of the Last Judgement refer to the recent past, to Turkestan as a colony of Tsarist Russia, while other aspects incorporate a satirically slanted, critical perspective on post-revolution reality. The booklet of good and bad deeds that is handed out to every single person resembles the identity passes in the time of Tsar Nicholas, we are told; angel-policemen (malak pŭlislari) drive the crowd on. Pâchamîr tells the angel-inquisitors that they have no mandate, they are not really empowered to decide his fate. He calls the goings-on in the desert ‘disorganized’ (tartîbsiz). Thousands of millions of people are in motion, but there is only a single pair of scales to weigh each individual’s deeds.11 After Pâchamîr has waited two and a half years at the scales to no avail, he finds that it is a case of ‘one step forward—twenty steps back’, and his comment on the situation is ‘Wasn’t it possible, when such a vast enterprise was launched, to make preparations in advance?’ Pâchamîr sees that efforts are being made to safeguard the livelihood of the masses. New shops have been opened, and large gatherings assemble in front of them; organizers see to it that people form a long queue, something quite new in desert life, called ‘ochirat’ (ochered’ in Russian). Pâchamîr’s wish to stay on this side of the bridge forms part of the second level of meaning. He would like to evade the verdict, but evasion is not allowed. Whoever’s name is called must cross the bridge. There the final verdict is pronounced: Paradise or Hell.12 introduces into the story his doubts, quite justifiable at the time, as to whether the tremendous revolutionary change in the whole way of life in Central Asia had been adequately prepared. The story incorporates his fears that unforeseeable new problems might crop up everywhere and that to solve them means incompatible with the overall goal would have to be employed. And in the end he wonders whether the distant goal makes sense as envisaged: whether assigning the central rôle to satisfying every material need would one day lead people to crave for narcotics or intoxicants, as it might be wine, opium or religion as opium.13 With the second level of meaning the first, anti-religious level does not vanish. Religious ideas are not reintroduced by the back door, as it were. The new order of society was a prerequisite for a radical critique of religion, and the idea of the Last Judgement with all its traditional attributes could serve as a poetic image of social events only after it had finally been detached from the religious context and religious purposes. The central figure in story, Pâchamîr, is another buffoon reminiscent of 14 In this capacity he makes fun of disorganization and over-organization, imperfections and ideas from the past that are still carried along without a thought (the dichotomy between people deserving and undeserving of Paradise). He protests when he feels he is being unjustly treated, and makes sure of his own advantage where he can (after he has organized the queue of people waiting at the scales, he takes a place right at the head of the queue). In the first version of the story had made no attempt to delineate Pâchamîr as an individual or to situate him in terms of social psychology. The character’s task was to unmask religious illusions, to investigate whether social Utopias could be realized soon,

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and to confront these with the difficulties in everyday life that were all they had led to for the time being. We can assume that critics asked for Pâchamîr’s social situation to be identified more clearly and for the allusions to the present to be omitted, particularly those that attributed the changes in the structure of society mainly to the initiative of Russian revolutionaries. At all events published a revised version of his story in the mid-1930s,15 in which Pâchamîr, as a labourer, protests against the way he is exploited by his fellow countrymen. This time the story is that Pâchamîr had served as a labourer for twenty-five years without receiving any wages. As a devout Muslim he had stood up to his penny-pinching master only by means of repartee, if at all. When he suffered an accident and could no longer work, his master threw him out. With nowhere to stay and no employment, he could find shelter only with opium smokers, those ‘living dead’. At opium smokers’ get-togethers it was common for popular literature to be read aloud. Initially the devout Pâchamîr rejected the opium smokers’ jokes about Heaven and Paradise. Only gradually do new insights emerge from the ridicule and his own experience of life so far, and then Pâchamîr starts to join in the jesting at religious ideas and at the rich with their hypocritical religiosity. With this lengthy introduction, the story has definitely been shifted to the period before the Revolution. Protest against religion is connected with protest against social exploitation. Any reference to the period of colonial repression disappears, as does the disguised also altered the part concerned with the Last Judgement and reference to the present. with Paradise correspondingly. He replaced the word ‘mandate’, which probably reached Turkestan during the Revolution, with power of attorney). The booklets that the resurrected receive have no further connection with the Tsarist passbooks. The keepers of law and order are no longer called pŭlis but qârâwul, a Turkic word. The social aspects are reinforced in this part of the story, too: Pâchamîr cannot read what is written in the booklets, he is illiterate. A friend who played no part in the first version reads them to him. Pâchamîr learns that the hard work he did for his master counts as good deeds, but his derisive responses to blows and curses from his master count as misdeeds. He is surprised that his master’s authority extends as far as the other world. The other world appears to him as a simple prolongation of this world. The queuing episode has been dropped; there is now no ochirat either at the scales or at the spring in Paradise. The accusation that the great day has not been properly prepared is now directed at the angels themselves, who immediately hasten to request more scales from God. In the dispute about the sheep at the bridge, Pâchamîr in the first version said he did not want this particular sheep, which he had sacrificed in the year 1335 of the Hijra (1916/17); he had sacrificed four or five sheep in the course of his life, and demanded the one from the year 1332. In the later version Pâchamîr, after all a penniless labourer, has sacrificed only two sheep in all, and the one presented first is from the year 1215 AH (1800/1). The dispute about the money with which the sheep to be sacrificed were purchased is also modified. In both versions the angels state that God selects not the better sheep, but those purchased with legitimate income ( pûl). The first sheep, however, had been bought with money acquired illicitly ( pûl). Pâchamîr’s reply in the first version could have come from he points out that on earth there is just no way of coming by money honestly, and he had purchased all the sheep

The Uzbek short story writer Fitrat’s adaptation of religious traditions 125 pûl. In the second version the exploited labourer is morally intact; his sheep have for been purchased with money earned honestly. In the revised version Pâchamîr does not crave opium again; instead, he awakens in the company of the opium smokers, who are listening to the story of the Prophet’s ascent to heaven. After his dream about Paradise he can now act to enlighten them: he has seen Paradise, and it is not worth striving to get there. Anyone who did not know the first version certainly took this second one for a purely anti-religious story. had published his story about resurrection and Paradise in its origiA year after nal version, his verse one-act play tañriga (1924, The Devil’s rebellion against God)16 appeared as a kind of supplement to it. Having depicted the way to Paradise and Paradise itself as completely unparadisiacal in the story, he now presented the Devil’s road to hell as quite undiabolical and hell itself as non-existent. portrayed the Devil as he appears in the Quran and Divan literature, but nudged everything in the direction of justified resistance to God the despot. At the beginning of the play the Devil is still the angel ‘Azâzîl, who occupies the position of a teacher among the angels.17 He comes to detest eternally teaching God’s greatness, purity and eminence. More and more he is repelled by the obsequiousness of the angels, who do not use their wings to fly with, who are indifferent to spring and winter, who have no notion either of blossoming or of wilting, who make nothing and do not die. With his knowledge the Devil is able to reveal contradictions in the ‘Book of Destiny’ ( i.e. the original copy of the Quran). There it is written that God had created everything from nothing, and elsewhere that he had made the angels from light, the Devil from fire and finally a human being from earth. With this last revelation the Devil succeeds in confusing the angels, who know nothing of human beings as yet, let alone of God’s plan to place them above the angels for the latter to serve them. They have worshipped God all those thousands of years to no avail; he puts mankind between himself and them. The angels allow themselves to be intimidated by God’s threatening voice, but the Devil sticks to his protest.18 He wants to escape from dependence. God’s depriving him of wings, staff and crown does not disturb him. For him the attributes of the angels are signs of their lack of freedom. He tells Man that God does not carry out the punishment that he constantly uses as a threat. The Devil himself has not been burnt, devoured by a serpent or consumed by fire; neither Hell nor a sea of flame has appeared. In trying to get the angels to worship Man, God has aimed to trick him, for worship is followed by dependence. The Devil tells Man not to fall into the trap, not to accept staff and crown and not to become an angel in any circumstances. To God’s final threat the Devil replies triumphantly that his knowledge is God’s most dangerous opponent. He now knows that Hell and Paradise are delusions and lies. He is now free from bondage and will in future be guided only by the prophet Science. If he worships anything at all, then only himself; if he believes in anything, then only in what his eyes see. But he is not content simply to be free himself; he will pass his knowledge on to others—here he points to Man. The Devil is not just the archetypal unbeliever and rebel here; he also understands something of how the world works, of dependence and despotism, of the means that despots employ. Logically, though against the will of him who appointed him, he uses his position of teacher to spread enlightenment. He supports emancipation, whether of Man or of a people. A prerequisite for this is that Man or the people no longer worship anyone or permit others to worship.

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story Zayid wa Zaynab (1928, Zayd and Zaynab)19 is based on the tradition of marriage to Zaynab, previously the wife of his adopted son Zayd. Marriage to the wife of one’s own adopted son was forbidden, and it had to be legitimized with verses of the Quran originating in this particular context.20 invents women who, while action in a noisy and quarrelfetching water, discuss the dubious nature of some way. He lends Zayd individual traits that place his separation from Zaynab in a tragic light. The author sets the individual’s right to self-fulfilment against religious dogmata. The devout Zayd, according to tradition one of the first to be converted by submits. But doubts spread among the common people and can be dispelled only by new verses in the Quran. In the same year published the story Zahraniñ îmâni (1928, Zahra’s faith),21 based on the tale of the angels Hârût and Mârût, which the Arabs had borrowed from Jewish traditional sources. The two angels’ doubts about God’s justice, their conversation with God and their mission on earth, their failing the test and their punishment make up the beginning of the story. The central figure is Zahra, who is supposed (according to the legend) to have asked Hârût and Mârût, as the two angels tried to seduce her, for the word or song that enabled them to ascend into heaven; she thus reached heaven herself, only to be transformed by God into a star (‘Zuhra’ denotes the planet Venus, and the woman’s name ‘Zahra’, the original form of which has retained, usually takes the form ‘Zuhra’ in Central Asia).22 In story Zahra is a widow. She becomes a Muslim even though her husband fell fighting against Islam. She converts so as to be able to feed her four or five children. Because of unrest in the region, described in the story as ‘internal struggles’, Zahra cannot enjoy the social security that she hoped to attain though her conversion. She seeks another way of avoiding poverty for her family. She learns magic from the two fallen angels Hârût and Mârût, and feeds herself with its help. In the end Zahra recognizes that the true faith is after all more important than bread. She tries to repent, but her repentance cannot be accepted, since her faith left her when she devoted herself to magic and it has ascended into heaven without her. Thus it is because of poverty that Zahra converts from one faith to another, from paganism to Islam, from Islam to sorcery and then back to Islam, but too late. The story was highly suitable for the atheistic periodical, since it put Islam on the same level as magic and portrayed it as one possible faith among several. In addition, the author attached a brief commentary in which he dissociated himself from the Quran and from its interpretation: commentators on the Quran related this tale in all seriousness.23 But the story contains more than this. The conversion motif, which placed at the centre of his story, had a tradition of its own in the Islamic cultural world,24 and he was able to utilize it while cautiously bringing it up to date. Along with the ‘internal struggles’, the official business (rasmî ishlar), which has to be dealt with before the angels are dispatched earthwards, strikes a very modern note, as if a visa or something of the kind had to be obtained for them beforehand. The most noticeable aspect is the social issues that pervade the entire story. Here paganism, magic and Islam embody ideologies that are associated with defined power structures, but do not represent reality better or worse. To a certain extent each of them offers a way of eking out one’s life. For ordinary folk they are just a way of staying alive.

The Uzbek short story writer Fitrat’s adaptation of religious traditions 127 intentions. His earlier works had already Publication in Khudâsizlar fitted in with made it clear that, in his view, orthodox Islam had little to do either with reality or with the course of development he advocated. At the same time there is an undercurrent of doubt in the story as to whether the current shift in ideology could have an entirely different character from earlier changes in religious allegiance. For could not have overlooked that the revolutionaries knew very little about how social systems work, and that many accepted the new Weltanschauung almost like a new religion to be believed in implicitly. Along with this, the late, all too late conversion to the ‘true faith’ has a special reference to reality, since, apart from the revolutionary forces that trusted the senior intelligentsia to belonged, there were always those who found it was too late for the former which Jadids to ‘convert’ to socialism. story Mi‘râj (1928, Ascension)25 is based on verses of the Quran,26 biographies 27 of and widely disseminated prose works28 about journey to Jerusalem by night, his ascending to heaven on a ladder, his passage through the seventh heaven and his audience with God. supplements the themes from the religious-didactic works with a motif from Uzbek cock-and-bull tales. Like Kal or a similar figure in such tales, and the angel Jabrâil (Gabriel) here climb into a pumpkin (tarwuz) after the knife they wanted to cut it up with has disappeared inside. They have various strange and wondrous experiences in the 75,000 cities located inside the pumpkin before they succeed in climbing out again after seventy-five years.29 In this way eliminates the aura of the extraordinary and the quality of being authenticated from the religious themes in question. In the original cock-and-bull tale the pumpkin motif is derived from the principle of mixing up large and small, inside and outside, swallowing up and being swallowed up. The motif stands independently and functions in its own right. In story, by contrast, it serves to reveal God as a despot. God has detained Jabrâil and a narrator invented by in the pumpkin to demonstrate his might. Other elements of the power structure that calls into question are a giant cock, another motif figuring in the texts about ascension to heaven,30 whose body extends through all seven heavens and who permits or forbids the cocks on earth to crow—i.e. a kind of censoring authority—and the innumerable curtains that the despot conceals himself behind, although his nature resembles that of a human being and he eats their food. As in the other stories, an attack is launched on religious subjects, but there are no obstacles to mentally transferring the elements to secular power structures. For readers of the periodical Khudâsizlar at that time tried to make it even clearer how far he had dissociated himself from the earlier tales by means of a framing device. The first-person narrator experiences the events which have been mentioned in a dream when he falls asleep in a public bath after listening to a conversation between a Quran reader and the attendant. Nonetheless, the editors of the periodical considered it necessary to add a comment of their own. They pointed out in a note that the Prophet’s ascension was not in accordance with the laws of nature and could not be recognized as a fact by science, and that the author had an ironic relation to his themes. turned religious and literary clichés and patterns of thought upside down, invented new connections and thus assigned entirely different values to the old themes. Almost nothing was known about the effect the stories had (from the end of the 1960s on they could be discussed and assessed again, after thirty years’ silence about them).

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Although our knowledge of the facts leaves much to be desired even at the end of the twentieth century, the history of how works have been received would make a fit subject for an in-depth study, reflecting as it does the development of thinking and the contortions it went through in Soviet and independent Uzbekistan. Here only a few remarks may be appended. There can be no doubt that what Fitrat wrote before 1917 found a circle of readers none too large but very interested, and that, together with Behbûdî’s play Padarkush (The parricide) of 1910, it definitely encouraged the appearance of more works of Jadid literature. Unfortunately reviews of the theatre performances after 1917 and articles from that time with claims to a scholarly standard do not provide a picture of what effect literature had in the post-revolutionary period. A school of professional criticism was only starting to develop, and journalists and young literary critics made little effort to grasp the essence of the works they examined. On the contrary, they imposed on them their own ideas of a literature in the service of building socialism. On the other hand, already in his lifetime was known in the Islamic world as an outstanding thinker; for instance, he received an invitation to teach in Cairo. He was highly regarded in the Soviet Union, and an entry about him appeared in the first edition of the Bolshaya sovetskaya entsiklopediya (vol. 57, Moscow 1936, p. 656). The complete silence about him that descended after his arrest and execution without any charge (in 1937 and 1938 the authorities carried out killings without trials or indictments) continued even after his posthumous ‘civil rehabilitation’ in 1957. From the reprinting of stories and his one-act play in the 1960s and 1970s mentioned in this study, though, it is clear that academics and other experts on literature were at pains to make the texts accessible again and to accord the place in Uzbek literary history that he deserves. But they were in the minority. Some devastating verdicts on activity from the 1930s were still circulating in the 1980s and cropped up again in only slightly altered form in all the literary histories that mentioned name, in the histories of the theatre,31 and in the meticulous editions of ‘Âlimjân’s works produced by the Academy of Scihad ences in Uzbekistan.32 It seemed as if the aim was to demonstrate once again that achieved little, and that none of his thinking and writing was needed nowadays. But anyone taking an interest in works before 1990 and searching for sources in Uzbekistan could detect a dogged struggle over him and his oeuvre going on behind the scenes. In his book Razvitie realizma v uzbekskoi literature (Tashkent 1975), E.Karimov had devoted an entire chapter to pre-revolutionary publications (pp. 91–126), without repeating the earlier biased judgements. However, no further works of this kind appeared. If one asked the reason, one would be told that it was all very complicated and that there had been plenty of argument and agitation about the book in question, too. The authors of the publication Adabîyât (vols. I and II, Tashkent 1978–9) produced by the Academy of Sciences succeeded in mentioning name only twice; they avoided giving precise details of sources (vol. II, pp. 188, 226). It is safe to assume that there was a battle about these two references, too. The authors of Istoriya uzbekskoi sovetskoi literatury vol. I, 1917–41 (Tashkent 1987) were still largely in the thrall of the old views. They do mention name much more often than was the case previously, but their judgements are still derived from ‘Âlimjân, and they had clearly not read some of the works they pronounce on (something frequently to be observed since the 1960s). Only in a single footnote (p. 66) is

The Uzbek short story writer Fitrat’s adaptation of religious traditions 129 there evidence of a change brought about by perestroika and glasnost’, namely a recognition that now is the time to reassess the nature of Jadidism from the standpoint of the new thinking. Towards the end of perestroika—from 1989 on—several of stories and plays were published in the periodicals Sharq yulduzi and Zvezda Vostoka. In 1990 his tragedy Khân was put on in Kashkadarya. The weekly Uzbekistan adabiyâti wa published excerpts from the minutes of a round-table discussion (30 March 1990, p. 3) in which it was pointed out that a commission had been set up in 1987 to study and prepare and Chŭlpân’s works, but the results were allegedly meagre, and the publication of the well-known publishing house Ghafûr Ghulâm was said to be delaying publication.33 Academics like Shêr’ali Turdiyev and Beg’alî Qâsimov, who had earlier deployed their detailed knowledge to advocate presenting the Jadids’ works, now wrote articles on the subject. Other authors, such as M.Baqâyev, B. Dûstqârayev, I.Ghanîyev, Q.M.Jŭrayev, B.Imâmov, N. Karîmov, G.Rahîmova and Sh. Riżâyev, also produced studies in this field. In the critical reception of the nineties the Jadids’ concern with achieving a modernization of life and an opening vis-à-vis new ideas remained in the background. Some authors have rejected the idea outright that views had changed so much in the course of his life that he was able to call religion as such into question in any of his works. They prefer to construct a straight line from the Jadids, who they see purely as champions of independence for Uzbekistan, to the independence the country has now achieved. himself suffered many changes of fortune, being tolerated and threatened by the Emir, then (in the Soviet period) first highly regarded, later often attacked and slandered, and finally killed and his memory obliterated. Bearing this in mind, there is no doubt that controversies about writings, which have been frequently misinterpreted, will continue in the future.34

Notes 1

2

The transliteration system employed here is a standard one for Arabic and Persian in Englishlanguage scholarly texts, supplemented by ñ for velar ‘n’ and special signs for the vowels of some Turkic languages: ŭ for the sound between ‘o’ and ‘u’ in Uzbek, â for the labialized ‘a’ in Uzbek, æ for the open vowel between ‘e’ and ‘a’ in Tatar, inodot for velar ‘i’. The literary œuvre ‘Abdurra’ûf left comprises stories, plays and poems in Persian and Uzbek; academic studies of Chaghatay literature and its predecessors in Central Asia, of the versification of Divan poetry, of music, of the development of the Central Asian literary language since ‘Qutadghu bilig’ and the structure of the Uzbek language; and political writings. He was born in Bukhara in 1886 (according to other accounts in 1884), attended a maktab and the madrasa Mîr-i ‘arab, and studied in Istanbul from 1909 to 1913 with the support of a charity founded in Bukhara. He wrote and published his first works in Istanbul. On his return he championed the founding of new schools, for instance in Shahrisabz. He was soon one of the intellectual leaders of the Young Bukharans. In 1917 he headed a delegation that intended to negotiate with the provisional government in Petrograd about how to induce the Emir of Bukhara to start a programme of reform. Halfway there, though, the delegation was forced to turn back. In 1918 he drew up another programme of reform on behalf of the Young Bukharans. At the end of 1918 he founded the group Chighatay gurungi in Tashkent; this group set itself the task of collecting and publishing the literature in Chaghatay, writing textbooks, influencing the development of

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8 9

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Religious Perspectives in Modern Muslim and Jewish Literatures the modern language and reforming the alphabet. In the government of the People’s Republic of Bukhara was Minister of National Education in 1921 and Foreign Secretary, Chairman of the Economic Council and Deputy Prime Minister in 1922. He spent 1923 and 1924 in Moscow as a scientific collaborator at the Lazarev Institute for Oriental Languages. From 1926 until his arrest in 1937 he was a scientific collaborator and then Professor at the Research Institutes in Samarkand and Tashkent, precursors of the Uzbekistan Academy of Sciences. Only some of his academic works were published. was executed on 4 October 1938. The principal textbook authors were Behbûdî (1875–1919), ‘Abdullâ Awlânî (1878–1934) and ‘Abdurra’ûf . Published in Khudâsizlar, 1928, no. 3, republished in shar‘î, Tashkent 1973, pp. 115–20. Cf. the stories by the Turkish authors Ömer Seyfeddin Keramet (The miracle), Refik Hâlit Yatι (The saint’s tomb, 1949) and Fahri Erdinc Testi kıan dede (1951, German trans. Vom Groβvater, der Krüge zerbrach, 1962), for instance. Cf. Tashkent 1970, p. 119, and Turkmenskiy yumor, Ashkhabâd 1967, pp. 123 f., with the grave of a donkey as that of a saint. In Bashârat (1936, Good news) he made use of a background story employed by in Qabrdan tâwush (1940, Voice from the grave) he discovered tyranny and bureaucracy ‘in the other world’. Cf. ‘Abdulla Qahhâr, Atharlar, vol. 6, Tashkent 1971, pp. 214–16, 224 f. The story was published by Millat ishlari komisarligi qâshida Markazi sharq nashriyati (Central Publishing House for Oriental Literature, attached to the Commissariat for Nationality Issues) in Moscow. It was reprinted in the same form in Tashkent in 1926. Cf. note 14 on later, revised editions. had already used the image of the bridge, in his story hindî to represent a rough and difficult road in Bukhara, cf. in the Russian edition Rasskazy indiiskogo puteshestvennika, Samarkand 1913, p. 79. The question whether one or several pairs of scales should be envisaged was discussed by the clergy, cf. M.Horten, Die religiöse Gedankenwelt des Volkes im heutigen Islam, Halle: Niemeyer, 1917/18, pp. 339–43. It should be noted that the poets who regarded Communism as a future close at hand used metaphors for it that summoned up associations with ideas of Paradise, e.g. kommunizmniñ gül baghlarida (in the rose-gardens of Communism) in Uyghun’s poems. We can assume that Marx’s words ‘Religion is the sigh of the creature in distress, the soul of a heartless world, as it is the spirit of mindless circumstances. It is the opium of the people’, in Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie, 1843/44, cf. MEGA 1/2, p. 171, in the abbreviated form ‘Religion is the opium of the people’ were already so well-known in Central Asia at that time that one concept (opium) could stand for the other (religion) in writings. The authors of Adabîyât vol. 1, Tashkent 1978, p. 189 f, draw attention to the relationship to ‘Âlimjân paid tribute to this second version of the story, printed in 1935, in an essay in 1936. Cf. ‘Âlimjân, Uch tomlik tanlangan atharlar, vol. 3, Tashkent 1960, pp. 220–61. The second version was reprinted in Khurâfatdan ma‘rifatga, Tashkent 1956; the first version (together with the play tañriga in Tashkent in 1967. Several translations into Russian also appeared: Strashnyi sud, in: Literaturnyi Uzbekistan 1936, no. 2, pp. 132–42; idem Tashkent 1937; Strashnyi sud (satiricheskii rasskaz), Dushanbe 1964; Den strashnogo Suda. Rasskaz satira, Moscow 1965. Republished in 1967, cf. note 14. Cf. H.Ritter, Das Meer der Seele, Leiden 1955, pp. 537–45, on the Devil in God’s and in his own pulpit, and on the Devil’s protests about God’s despotism in the Persian poet writings.

The Uzbek short story writer Fitrat’s adaptation of religious traditions 131 18

19 20 21 22

23

24

25 26 27

28

29

30

Several passages in the Quran point out the Devil’s arrogance, evidenced by his refusal to kneel down before Adam the man as the other angels did. This led to his expulsion from Paradise. Cf. Quran S. 2, 32; 7, 10; 15, 28–33; 17, 63; 18, 48; 20, 115; 38, 71–7. Published in Khudâsizlar 1928, no. 4–5; reprinted in shar‘î, pp. 95–108. Quran S. 33, 36–40. Published in Khudâsizlar 1928, no. 2; reprinted in shar‘î, pp. 108–15. Cf. inter alia A.J.Wensinck and J.H.Kramers, Handwörterbuch des Islam, Leiden: Brill 1941, p. 168 f.; Encyclopedia of Islam (new ed.), vol. III pp. 236–7. On the way in which the legend of Hârût and Mârût was handed down in Central Asia cf. J.Eckmann on the ’l-anbiyâ’ in: Philologiae turcicae fundamenta, vol. II, Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1964, pp. 277–9. Borıngı tatar ædæbiyâti, Kazan 1963, pp. 239–41, names a Tatar legend of Hârût and Mârût thought to originate in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. Here Zahra is the seducer who succeeds, at the third attempt, in persuading the angels to drink wine. Intoxicated, they then worship Zahra’s idols (put). He names and refers to Tha’labî, whose ’l-anbiyâ’ was translated both into Tatar (printed in 1903) and into Turkish, cf. Enzyklopädie des Islams, vol. IV, p. 796 f.; Encyclopaedia of Islam (2nd ed.) vol. X, p. 434; and Fahir İz, Eski Türk edebiyatinda nesir, Istanbul:Osman Yalçin Matbassi 1964, p. 195. Conversion to Islam and the rejection of further conversions are a motif in popular epics, cf. R.Paret, Die legendäre Maghâzi-Literatur, Arabische Dichtungen über muslimische Kriegszüge zu Mohammeds Zeit, Tübingen: Mohr, 1930, pp. 228 ff.; and Udo Steinbach, al-Himma. Kulturgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zu einem arabischen Volksroman, Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1972, pp. 67, 102. On the treatment of changing one’s religion in the preface by Burzôê/Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ to Kalila and Dimna cf. Th. Nöldeke, Burzôês Einleitung zu dem Buch Kalila wa Dimna, übersetzt und erläutert, Strasbourg: Trŭbner 1912 (Schriften der wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft zu Straßburg, no. 12). Published in Khudâsizlar 1928, no. 1; reprinted in shar‘î, pp. 121–6. The seventeenth Sura is entitled isrâ’ (The Night Journey). There are also indications of the ascension in S. 53, 1–18. Cf. Ibn Hishâm, ‘Abd al-Malik, Das Leben Muhammads nach Muhammad ibn Ishâk, aus dem Arabischen übersetzt von G.Weil, Stuttgart: Metzler, 1864; The life of Muhammad. A translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Sîrat Rasul Allâh, with introduction and notes by A.Guillaume, London etc.: Oxford University Press, 1955. Excerpts from the work were also published in Russian in Tashkent in 1923: Ibn-Hisham, Nukhba min kitâb sîrat an-nabî. Otryvki iz zhitiya Muhammeda po Ibn Khishamu (Izdaniya Turkestanskogo Vostochnogo Instituta, uchebnaya seriya 1, vol. 1). In Central Asia in Nahju ’l-farâdîs, cf. J.Eckmann in: Philologiae turcicae fundamenta, vol. II, pp. 287–91, and in various mi‘râjnâmas, cf. ibid., pp. 291–2. In connexion with the edition of the text by Pavet de Courteille, published in Paris in 1882, a reference to the translation from French into German (for which see note 30 below) should now be added. Cf. the two cock-and-bull stories in Uzbek khalq ertaklari, vol. 2, Tashkent 1964: ‘Uch yâlghânda qirq yâlghân’ (Three lies containing forty lies), pp. 419–23, and ‘Âltmish âghiz yâlghân gap’ (Sixty lies), pp. 299–302. E.g. in Abel Pavet de Courteille, Mirâdj-nâmeh. Récit de l’Ascension de Mahomet au ciel, compose A.H. 840 (1436/37), [1882] Amsterdam: Philo, 1975, p. 5 (French translation), pp. 7–8=fol. 11 v (text). The great white cock appears in the miniatures in this MS., cf. Muhammeds wunderbare Reise durch Himmel und Hölle, ed. Marie-Rose Séguy, Munich: Prestel, 1977, pp. 46 (description), 48 (reproduction of the miniature). A further example is to be found in the lithograph Nâdir al-mi‘râj, Tashkent 1328/1911, p. 134. probably had several Persian sources to draw on as well as these and similar Chagatay ones.

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31

Uzbekskii sovetskii teatr, vol. I, Tashkent 1966, pp. 125–8, 271f.; Istoriya sovetskogo dramaticheskogo teatra v 6 tomakh, vol. III Moscow 1967, p. 442. 32 ‘Âlimjân had repeatedly attacked violently, for instance in the article adabî ijâdi published in 1936. It was reprinted in the edition of ‘Âlimjân’s works in three volumes Uch tomlik tanlangan atharlar, Tashkent 1957–60, vol. 3, pp. 220–62, and reappeared unabridged in the subsequent editions of his works (Besh tomlik atharlar majmû‘asi, Tashkent 1970–2; Hŭn tomlik mukammal atharlar tŭplami, Tashkent 1979–84). Since most of scholarly and literary works remained unpublished, readers for years could only form an idea of his œuvre from ‘Âlimjân’s inadequate presentation of it. 33 In the following years the textbook publisher Úqituwchi, the Tashkent University Press, the publishing house Yâzuwchi and new publishers such as Sharq and Kamalak took over the assignment. 34 Outside Uzbekistan, too, monographs on works have appeared in recent years: Y.Avci Fitrat ve Eserleri (Ankara: T.C.Kŭltŭr Bakanliği, 1997) and E.A. Allworthy The Preoccupations of ‘Abdalrauf Fitrat, Bukharan Nonconformist (An Analysis and List of His Writings), Berlin 2000 (no. 7 in the series Anor). An interpretation of the language and content of play tañriga that has yet to be surpassed comes from I.Baldauf: ‘Abdurauf Fitrat: Der Aufstand Satans gegen Gott’, in Türkische Sprachen und Literaturen. Materialien der erst en deutschen Turkologen-Konferenz. Bamberg, 3–6 Juli 1987, eds Ingeborg Baldauf, Klaus Kreiser and Semih Tezcan, Wiesbaden 1991 (Veröffentlichungen der Societas Uralo-Altaica, vol. 29), pp. 39–74. She characterizes the play’s subject matter and form as archaic, but its language and message as modern. She describes the play, in which she sees supporting an existentialist conception of man in the guise of Satan, as a peak of ‘anti-religious atheistic Uzbek literature’. It turns out that some experts on works in Uzbekistan have difficulty in coping with assessments of this kind. That is attributable not only to language barriers, but also to the ‘roadblock’ put up by those who wish to enlist works purely in the cause of national independence.

Further reading Allworth, E.A., The Preoccupations of ‘Abdalrauf B ukharan Nonconformist (An Analysis and List of His Writings), Berlin 2000 (no. 7 in the series Anor). Baldauf, I., ‘Abdurauf Fitrat: Der Aufstand Satans gegen Gott’, in Türkische Sprachen und Literaturen. Materialien der ersten deutschen Turkologen-Konferenz. Bamberg, 3–6 Juli 1987, eds Ingeborg Baldauf, Klaus Kreiser and Semih Tezcan, Wiesbaden 1991 (Veröffentlichungen der Societas Uralo-Altaica, vol. 29), pp. 39–74. ——‘Jadidism in Central Asia within Reformism and Modernism in the Muslim World’, Die Welt des Islams 41 (1), 2001, pp. 72–88. Khalid, A., The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform. Jadidism in Central Asia, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1998. Kleinmichel, S., Aufbruch aus orientalischen Dichtungstraditionen. Studien zur usbekischen Dramatik und Prosa zwischen 1910 und 1934, Budapest and Wiesbaden: Akadémiai Kiadó and Otto Harrassowitz, 1993. ——‘Die Gestalt des Prosaschriftstellers ‘Abdulla Qādirī im geistigen und kulturellen Leben Usbekistans’, in Bamberger Mittelasienstudien, Konferenzakten, eds Bert G. Fragner and Birgitt Hoffmann, Bamberg 15–16 Juni 1990 (Islamkundliche Untersuchungen Bd. 149), Berlin 1994, pp. 153–68. ——‘Die gefesselten Frauen und Kleopatra bei Čŭlpā’, Studia Turcologica Cracoviensia 8, Cracow 2001, pp. 23–42.

The Uzbek short story writer Fitrat’s adaptation of religious traditions 133 Qosimov, B., ‘Sources littéraires et principaux traits distinctifs du Djadidisme turkestanais (début du XXe siècle)’, in Le Réformisme musulman en Asie Centrale. Du ‘premier renouveau’ à la soviétisation 1788–1937 (Cahiers du Monde Russe XXXVII (1–2), janvier-juin 1996), pp. 107–32.

8 KULTURKAMPF IN THE ISRAELI THEATRE The issue of religion Dan Urian

A discussion of the representation of the Kulturkampf1 between the secular-Zionist culture and the religious counterculture in the Israeli theatre demands several theoretical and methodological assumptions, the most important of which refers to the theatre as representing a social experience. It is accepted that theatre does not necessarily reflect any given reality, but fashions it to its own particular needs. Despite, or perhaps even because of this, however, the ties between theatre and social reality enable the theatrical uncovering of both hidden conflicts and overt dissension. One important aspect of the theatre’s approach to ‘public thought’ is that of ‘the public nature of drama’, as Georg Lukács terms the circumstances of staging a play, and its means of reception by the audience, which is carried out in a public place, as are many political performances.2 An additional component necessary for our understanding of the influence of theatre on extratheatrical reality is the number of addressees: the problem, dilemma or political argument is presented before an audience whose numbers, even for a mediocre performance, can reach tens of thousands. To this, we can add what Fiske includes in ‘vertical intertextuality’3: all those same articles and other information which accompany the play and are offered by the press and electronic media, and so on. Any play impugning the contents and symbols of the Israeli social status quo invites either public or political debate and, most importantly, a television coverage which lends a far greater and more widespread effect than that actually experienced by the spectators in the theatre. Consequently, plays taking a stand regarding a conflict so central to Israeli society may have a far greater ideological effect. The combination of all these components reflects the importance of the debate being carried out on Israeli stages over such a problematic issue as the secular/religious schism. These plays also provide evidence that refutes those versions that attempt to lessen the perceived gravity of the secular/religious conflict in Israel in the 1990s. Israeli culture has sought ways of presenting a solution to society’s conflicts, particularly to the rift between the secular and the religious. This was carried out at first by carefully reproducing the hegemonic status of the secular-western sector of society. The theatre as an institution was one of the tools that served it for this purpose. Problems were raised and ‘solved’ on the theatrical stage, particularly during the first forty years of the State’s existence. From the 1980s on, the Hebrew theatre featured biting revelations of hostilities, discords and contradictions, which it presented as insoluble. During the same period, the

Kulturkampf in the Israeli theatre: the issue of religion 135 ‘mainstream’ Zionist culture progressively weakened, as evidenced in many literary, theatrical and cinematic texts. The weakening of the secular mainstream was also caused by the concomitant strengthening of several secondary cultures, prominent among which are the various religious subcultures. That of the religious-Zionist group, whose nucleus forms an important component of the West Bank settlements, has a large and sympathetic audience among the religious and traditional middle-class Ashkenazi (European origin) population. Side-by-side with this culture goes that of the ultra-Orthodox sector, which for many years was alienated from the Zionist state. In the last decade, however, this has undergone great changes and the negative attitude has turned to one of lively political activity and a nationalist approach in matters concerning the Jewish-Arab dispute. These changes have found theatrical expression in the last decade. The religious, for whom the theatre is ‘set apart’, have adopted a strategy which uses the tools of the media of the dominant, secular section of society in order to advance their own interests. The religious characters in Israeli theatre are stereotypes of a special kind: they include subject and object, the defined object and part of the identity of the definer. In order to deal with obstacles such as censorship and criticism, theatre practitioners need to employ oblique strategies when presenting the religious ‘other’, thus enabling them to present him as a derided and repulsive character, despite their mutual national and cultural origins. The religious stereotype possesses obvious external characteristics that have become fixed in most of the figures, particularly in recent years: black garb, hat or knitted skullcap for men, hat or head scarf for women, beard, sidelocks, mode of speech; a special vocabulary that mixes different ‘languages’—quotes from Jewish sources; Yiddish; ‘Jewish’ gestures. The history of the secular/religious schism from its beginnings and up until recent times reveals that the secular perception of the religious stereotype has not diminished; rather, the negative characteristics attributed to it have increased and figures from the nationalistreligious and Sephardi ultraOrthodox communities have been added to it. Since Megaleh temirim by Yosef Perl (1819) and up to Fleischer by Yigal Even-Or (1993), the recurring pattern has been one of an almost unchanged stereotype of the religious Jew as determined by secularists. This same phenomenon, occurring in different places and throughout different periods in time, illustrates the intensity of the conflict and the extent of the schism. Theodor Herzl, visionary of the Jewish state, and also a playwright, presented such a stereotyped figure in The New Ghetto.4 This play was staged in Vienna in 1898 at the Karltheater, and the censor, who had originally had reservations regarding the content, restricted himself to banning the unsympathetic rabbi in the play from appearing onstage. The rabbiner, Dr Friedheimer, ‘plays the stock exchange’, and according to the stage directions he behaves ‘in a slightly Hassidic fashion’; the rabbiner sees anti-Semitism as a blessing: ‘It has its good side too. Since the outbreak of anti-Semitism in the land I see more fear of heaven. Anti-Semitism is a warning to us, to remain faithful to our unity, that we may not abandon the God of our forefathers, as many did’. Since the 1970s the secular/religious divide has appeared many times on the satirical stage in Israel, with its religious stereotypes becoming particularly intensified in the 1980s. This was a familiar extremism not only in the plays but also in the theatrical semiotic system that was chosen for this purpose: costume, hair, props and music have all been com-

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bined to create a particularly negative image. There have been innovations in the addition of archetypes in recent years, such as the Zionist-religious settler in the Occupied Territories or the Sephardi (Oriental) ultra-Orthodox type. Texts have been written by such writers as Hanoch Levin, Yehoshua Sobol, Yosef Mundy, Daniel Lapin and Yona Lahav, Kobi Niv, Ilan Hatzor, Ilan Sheinfeld, Orly Castel-Bloom and others. These texts reveal the enduring nature of the negative religious stereotypes among sectors of the secular population. The most prominent writer of theatrical texts to deal with the ultra-Orthodox and the Orthodox Zionist is Shmuel Hasfari. The Last Secular Jew (1986) by Hasfari appears to say all that the genre can say on the subject, as a dystopian vision in which only one secular person remains in a totally ultra-Orthodox Israel. Hasfari does not restrict himself to a condemnation of religious coercion. He bitingly discloses the cultural contradiction that divides Israeli society—between the Zionist ‘civil religion’5 and the ultra-Orthodox culture. His cabaret-play derides the ‘civil religion’ in the face of its believers, who are no less than the spectators in the auditorium. The actors in The Last Secular Jew are dressed as ultra-Orthodox Jews participating in a cabaret that explores the establishment of the ultraOrthodox state of Judea upon the ruins of the secular state of Israel. In one of the scenes a character called Chupchik appears; he was once an entertainer—now he demonstrates his devotion to religion. Chupchik is required, like other famous individuals who ‘returned to the fold’ (including the popular Israeli actor Uri Zohar), to use his secular past to deride the very same culture which created him, and in order to do so he is instructed to play the national anthem Hatikva by farting: Chupchik, who found fame because of his wondrous ability to produce tunes from any part of his body, and who understood the hint and gave up his faith. He will demonstrate here a recently developed new number….the artist will play us something spine-chilling—Hatikva, the State’s national anthem that we all remember. In order to allay Chupchik’s last remaining doubts, the ultra-Orthodox desecrate the sanctity of the civil religion. They deride its symbols, the flag of the State of Israel and the sound of the siren announcing Remembrance Day for those who fell in the wars of Israel. More than in any of the earlier texts, the intention of The Last Secular Jew is to disclose the hypocrisy of the religious, revealing it in different ways, including the sexual connection, such as presenting the ‘modesty overseer’ as a lesbian who preys upon prostitutes; and in songs about the young ultra-Orthodox men who cannot control their sexual urges: For beneath the black kapote [long gown] and the streimel [fur-brimmed hat] For beneath the beards the men are still burning And when a hint of backside is displayed and when a breast is revealed Thousands here will stand erect with money in their hand. The Last Secular Jew makes particular use of religious and radical Israeli concepts, with the common denominator for all these groups, according to research by Aviezer Ravitzky, being that it ‘sees contemporary life in the Jewish [Zionist] State, in Israel as if they were in the diaspora’.6 In the dream of redemption of several of these groups there is no place for a secular society, including kibbutz members or Arabs, of whom there is only one example in the play; it is pertinent only to a State ruled by religious fundamental law.

Kulturkampf in the Israeli theatre: the issue of religion 137 Shmuel Hasfari’s Kiddush (1985, 1995), a realistic play depicting the secular/religious schism from the ‘anthropological’ point of view, has no secular figures whatsoever appearing on stage. A more extreme approach to presenting the schism can be seen in the abandonment of the circuitous strategies of adapting drama from translated repertoire and of satire, towards a trend to more realistic staging of the conflict from the mid-1980s. Hasfari wanted to show on stage the change that had occurred among those same Zionist Jews who were attempting to bring together the two religions—the traditional Orthodoxy and the Zionist. He follows the ritual Sabbath eve blessings in one such family and depicts the rising political power of the group to which it belongs, accompanied by extremism and the realization of a dream of power. Following the Six Day War, the religious father says: When I think about my son becoming a paratrooper in the holy places: in Nablus, Hebron, the city of the fathers…Jericho…it’s like a dream.7 Kiddush is a synecdochical reflection of a family representing a particular social group, a process which Horowitz and Lissak described as ‘change from politicisation of religion to religionisation of politics, that also involves theologisation of ideology’.8 The father, a shabby religious clerk who in the past had also voted for a secular party, demonstrates in his own way the revolution that had begun among the religious Zionists. The imaginary world depicts this process and the end of the play illustrates his abandonment, his internal contradiction and the hopelessness of his chances. The son not only becomes secular but also emigrates from Israel to the USA, thus abandoning both religions—the Jewish and the Zionist. The end of the play is therefore broken up into almost Beckettian scenes, in which the characters speak to themselves, to tape recorders, or on the telephone: an ending in which those same grotesque elements that had accompanied the characters from the beginning of the play as background music, now take over the performance. Among Israeli playwrights, Yehoshua Sobol has an interesting view of his own Jewish identity as an Israeli. Sobol has been examining Judaism for the last three decades: first, using satire (Status Quo Vadis, 1973; Repentance, 1977) and later in plays examining Israeli reality and history. Since the production of Wars of the Jews (1981), a play about the destruction of the Second Temple, Sobol has turned the tension between his Jewishness and his Israeliness into a central theme in both his own original works and those that he has translated. His background in philosophy is notable in his approach, which is influenced by the traditions of the Jewish Enlightenment. He adopts from Judaism those same values, images and historical events that he perceives to be of a positive nature, while rejecting and criticizing its darker sides of destructive, extremist nationalism, of superstition and of the religious political establishment. Sobol deals in his plays with figures on the legitimate border of Judaism, such as the anti-Semitic Jewish philosopher Otto Weininger in Soul of a Jew (1982), and he dedicates his play Solo (1991) to Baruch Spinoza: My strong identification is with Spinoza, for he is the archetype of the non-religious Jew… I too am a Jew in essence but not in religion… Spinoza, who is post-post modern, speaks way above the heads of those who convert to ultra-Orthodoxy in our times; he speaks to the individual who will emerge after this stage of retreat to religion that leads to nationalism and the hatred of others, has ended.9

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My next example indicates even more clearly the theatrical reflection of the secular/religious divide. Fleischer, by Yigal Even-Or (1993), is a protest theatre text with many aims: to create political awareness, to examine values and to reveal injustice through the medium of melodrama. The melodrama, as a protest play, features a cross-bearing protagonist fighting immense corruption. As no compromise between conflicting views of good and evil is possible in melodrama, it always ends in either victory or failure. Each of these possibilities serves to enlist new faithful to the cause. Victory can cause pleasure while failure raises righteous anger over the injustice in the world, without our taking the slightest element of blame upon ourselves10—and this is indeed how Fleischer ends. As the playwright writes in the programme notes to Fleischer. Fleischer is the story of an elderly couple, Holocaust survivors, who own a butcher shop near their home…. Without their even noticing it, an ultra-Orthodox neighbourhood has been built under their very noses…. They obtain loans and renovate the butcher shop, paying out a lot of money for the appropriate permits…. They try to stay afloat like survivors on a life-raft on the sea of the ultra-Orthodox that rages around them, threatening to drown them [my emphasis]…. [They] even attempt a partial return to Orthodox Judaism, in order to attract the ultra-Orthodox customers. The butcher shop remains empty and boycotted. This melodrama ends in a victory for the ultra-Orthodox—the death of the butcher shop owners when the shop burns down, the adoption of their retarded son by the ultra-Orthodox community rabbi, and the entire neighbourhood being taken over by the black-clad community. From the theatrical aspect the play presents a process of ultra-Orthodoxisation, with the butcher shop appearing to become kosher. The number of ultra-Orthodox figures increases and the secular characters change their behaviour: they wear skullcaps, headscarves, and carry out the various ritual commandments. The play’s ultra-Orthodox dramatis personae are shaped similarly to those of satire and are clearly stereotypical. They are defined from their first appearance and their future behaviour is predictable. They have no past, unlike the secular figures who are ‘awarded’ biographies for in the past they fought and were wounded for the State, which only serves to emphasize the sense of injustice done to them by the religious. The play makes inflammatory statements from the very first moment: ‘God preserve me from the Jews’; They [the ultra-Orthodox] are stealing our country from under our noses’; ‘Even beasts of prey have souls. Not them’; ‘Soon the entire country will be theirs’ [a remark received with applause by the audience]. The importance of this play lies in its reception. Its great success appears to be the result of the social circumstances of the conflict. The audiences became highly involved, laughing a lot and applauding the anti-religious jokes. One of the performances which I attended was staged the day after the Jerusalem municipal elections in which the ultra-Orthodox parties had achieved great success. To the audience at the Haifa Municipal theatre this was an opportunity to express concern and hatred, through laughter, whispered agreement

Kulturkampf in the Israeli theatre: the issue of religion 139 and much applause. Zaharirah Charifai, who played the role of Berta in Fleischer, defined his relationship with the audience very clearly: ‘I have played this role over one hundred times. The audience accepts it because we are carrying out an action on its behalf and venting all those expressions of anger that the secular have against the religious’.11 Fleischer was nominated among the top ten successful plays for 1993 and 1994. In 1998 the Cameri theatre re-staged the play.12 Analysis of a questionnaire completed by audiences attending Fleischer13 indicates that the type of spectator who went to the play was similar to that attending theatre in general: mainly native Israelis of western origin, well-educated (high-school and above; 36.2 per cent had academic degrees). Among those who responded to the questionnaire the great majority had attended other plays during the season and were active theatregoers. An important finding was that they defined themselves as secular (absolute secularist, 54.6 per cent; traditionalist, 32.9 per cent). Those spectators who were apparently not influenced by some of the negative criticism by theatre critics agreed that the play transmits a social message (94 per cent). A great many of them believed that the play provided a faithful representation of contemporary Israel (51.3 per cent) while another section found a parallel between Israeli reality and what was shown on stage (38.8 per cent). Another interesting finding was that over half the spectators during the course of the performance felt that they identified with the secular characters. Religious spectators sensed such hostility and even hatred directed towards them that they felt inclined to ‘take off their skullcaps’. Presentation of the religious stereotypes in the theatre in its negative form reveals the strong antagonism of a group of theatregoers towards the ultra-Orthodox, the Zionist-religious and the Oriental ultra-Orthodox. From many aspects religious presentation in the theatre is not an exceptional expression by a fringe group, nor is it restricted to an elite secular intelligentsia, for the audiences are more varied than this. It is, in fact, an expression of strong frustration elicited by the religious ‘other’ among Jewish Israeli secularists/ traditionalists. The religious community (ultra-Orthodox and the religious Zionist), living among a secular or a traditionalist Jewish majority, has in the last decade begun to direct some of its own into the media with the aid of some of the ba‘alei teshuvah (‘repentants’ who have returned to the ultra-Orthodox fold) to create dramatic texts. Their main aims are practical: election propaganda, and video-or-audio-recorded sermons, both for internal reinforcement among the community of believers and to present their viewpoints to the external community. The religious camp aims its words directly against the hegemonic group in Israeli society, with its preferential status in Israeli culture. The theatrical-religious sermons are directed in the main to an audience of Oriental origin, characterized by economic and social inferiority. The rabbis/preachers exploit the sense of frustration felt by their audience and attack the secular intelligentsia, the politicians, the media and the judiciary. They announce the failure of the Enlightenment movement [the Haskalah] to achieve its prediction of a Judaism without religion, and proclaim the evil of the Zionist dream in creating a secular Jewish state—an absolute oxymoron from their point of view. The 1980s and 1990s saw the development of a popular religious culture of theatrical preachers who made use of dramatic tools to disseminate Judaism and preach its principles. The most famous of all ba‘alei teshuvah, Uri Zohar, uses his cinematic acting, editing and directing experience to produce video-cassettes of religious tracts that are theatrical in both

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composition and content, and which he uses to present the ‘emptiness’ and ‘worthlessness’ of secular values and customs. Among those who watch his video sermons and see Rabbi Uri Zohar garbed and hatted in black, there are probably many who recognize the actor Uri Zohar, whose films are still frequently screened, displaying a naked upper torso, short pants and outrageous tricks. Zohar uses this tension between then and now, between the past ‘sinner’ whose pleasure-seeking is well documented, and the body language and rhetoric of an angry prophet publicly reproaching the sinful. These theatrical sermons, which are on the increase (also on audio and video-cassettes), adapt the ‘high’ art at the top of Pierre Bourdieu’s model14 to suit audiences who have never been to the theatre. Such ‘lowering’ of the theatre also serves a political role in this case, confusing the artistic hierarchy, and questioning the social hierarchy that lies behind it. The enlightened, secular community, which is mainly of western origin, and for whom the theatre is a specially chosen gathering place, finds itself being attacked by its own artistic tools for being a hegemony in Israeli society. These performances constitute a battle cry by popular religion against the Ashkenazi elite who have converted secularism into a sort of religion. There has been increasing awareness of this conflict since the parliamentary turnabout in the 1996 elections, which saw the rise of several powerful religious groups, particularly those representatives of Oriental religious Judaism. Uri Zohar displays a diminishing awareness of the type of style required to create a link with the audience, and perhaps also a diminished sense of value regarding one important achievement of Zionism—the rebirth of the Hebrew language. There is a certain degree of protest in the choice of language used by the proselytes, particularly in the adoption of Yiddish, or in the deliberately incorrect use of language. Nissim Yagen, a proselytizing performer, tends toward ‘sub-standard Hebrew…he deliberately uses expressions and a vocabulary or broken language…that speak to the less educated stratum of the population’.15 This is also the style used by Rabbi Amnon Yitzhak, another proselytizer: When I was in a secular school, the biology teacher told me that my ancestors were apes. Inteh wa abuk (Arabic: you and your father) are monkeys, I told him (audience laughs). Then he showed me drawings of how such a little monkey becomes a lawyer (laughter). The next day the Bible teacher told me that God created us. I told him: Just a moment, yesterday the biology teacher said that I came from an ape, who is right? Free choice, he told me. Okay, I understood. But during recess where do we play—on the ground or on the trees? (the audience is rocking in the aisles).16 In the secular plays, this mixture of styles and languages is used to depict the proselytizer as ridiculous and a cheat. The jargon that Yehoshua Sobol places in the mouth of the eponymous hero in his translation of Tartuffe, is that used by the proselytizers. The change of language and its fluctuations, the mixture of high and low styles, and religious and secular vocabularies, create a new and self-contradictory language. More than any other play from the classic repertoire, Molière’s Tartuffe has attracted numerous adaptations and translations for the Hebrew (and Yiddish) stage. This is Molière’s most successful play, due in no small part to the many ideological purposes to which it can be put. In the last three centuries Tartuffe has served the so-called forces of light in the French theatre in their struggle against the religious reactionaries. Hebrew drama has made use of several of the play’s motifs, particularly that of l’Imposteur (the hypocrite). Israeli

Kulturkampf in the Israeli theatre: the issue of religion 141 theatre has chosen to assail the religious extremists, to show the lustful nature concealed beneath their pious masks, thus disclosing what it considers to be the real character of the ultra-Orthodox community. The strategy of borrowing a text from the world repertoire, like that of adapting a comedy to satire, offers a tool to the secular playwright or adaptor for criticizing the religious community under the guise of the classics or satire, or both. Molière’s Tartuffe, staged by the Haifa Municipal Theatre (1985) was translated by Sobol into the language of proselytism during a period which witnessed the height of this phenomenon in Israel. The translator’s overt attack on the proselytizers was presented in Cleant’s speech (Tartuffe I, 5): These people who with the fervour of hypocritical messianism [translator’s addition, D.U.] rush around/to make a fortune, please God, and don’t forget to demand/their pleasures between their prayers… /These people who know how to suit their religion to their needs and desires, these are the scoundrels, the bearers of grudges, the peddlers of faith, the plotters/In their bitterness and wrath they endanger humanity/for no weapon sickens them/ including the cynical use of the religious feelings of the people/and so they murder the soul of mankind in the most methodical way/Recently [my emphasis] the counterfeit types have become increasingly common.17 ‘If one chooses to stage Tartuffe today,’ explains Sobol, ‘it is because life in Israel is in the grip of madness, of religious sanctimoniousness and hypocrisy.’ Regarding language, he notes: In translating, I set out from this reality and go towards Molière, with my ears echoing with the language of Shapira, Goren and Porush [noted rabbis and religious politicians in the 1980s]: ‘Kashrut supervisors’, ‘sacrificial hen’, ‘God be blessed’, and so on. Tartuffe interests me as a proselytizer, as a candidate for the Rabbinate, as a rabbi. Orgon, as a ba‘al teshuvah, in Sobol’s version, adopts the language of the ultra-Orthodox, employing such expressions as ‘a blessing for every deed’, ‘he has a watchful, wary and ultra-Orthodox eye’, ‘blessed be the Lord’, ‘as God wills’, and so on. This satirical depiction of Tartuffe reached its height in the play in the courtship of Elmire. Tartuffe undresses before having intercourse with the wife of his friend, a pious man, and remains onstage with his loins barely covered—and a skullcap on his head. In order to seduce Elmire into believing that they are not breaking any religious law, he tells her (in the Hebrew version): ‘If you will become teshuvah, I’ll introduce you to the orchards of the Jewish law. I’ll lead you by degrees to the practice and reveal to you the secret—if you only let me guide you in the way of the flesh.’ Two examples of works intended to unmask the ‘Tartuffeness’ of the Oriental or Mizrahi Orthodox in Israel can be found at the beginning and end of the 1990s, in Hey Rimona (1992) and Rabbi Kame’a (2001). The character of a Shas [an Orthodox political party under the guidance of the Sephardi Council of Torah Scholars] rabbi who requires the services of a prostitute appears in Hey Rimona, a satire by Ilan Hatzor and Ilan Sheinfeld (Cameri Theatre, 1992). Shmuel Hasfari’s play, Rabbi Kame’a, directed by Hasfari, at the

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Cameri theatre, 2001, is an earlier theatrical embodiment of the culture war conducted by secular Hebrew culture in its struggle against forms of religious Orthodoxy, now in its Oriental incarnation. Although Rabbi Kame’a is a new play, borrowing only its outline from Molière’s Tartuffe, it does continue the tradition of using the latter in Hebrew drama and in the Israeli theatre as a tool to attack the Orthodox sector. This time Tartuffe is portrayed as an Oriental-Orthodox rabbi impersonator. Rabbi Kame’a (Tartuffe) is first discovered by Ya’akov Morad (Orgon) in the synagogue. Hasfari’s play differs from previous Hebrew versions in that he especially highlights Morad’s character. By doing so he revives the tradition of Molière, who himself played the role of Orgon. Kame’a evokes within Morad a nostalgia for the traditional Oriental ‘cultural capital’ and the warm intimacy of family, all of which he has lost by being absorbed into secular Israelism: I came to the synagogue on the anniversary of grandpa’s death to say Kaddish [the Jewish prayer for the dead]. You know that grandpa was the cantor at the ‘Descendants of Babylon’ synagogue. So every year I—anyways, at the end of the service I’m just sitting thinking about grandpa, silently talking to him. Telling him what’s going on. What I’m going through. I hear someone behind me praying in this sort of tune. I thought that I had died or that my father had come to life. That tune—that’s how my grandpa in the synagogue in Iraq—that’s how they used to pray. I sat quietly and listened—tears came to my eyes. I said: ‘What am I doing here, Father? What has become of my life? I was thinking about everything at once. I used to sing like that years ago as a kid. (sings) ‘Where have I disappeared to?’ I went up to the man after the prayer and said: ‘Who are you? From where did you come to me? Do me a favour and take this money as a token of the excitement you’ve invoked in me.’ He didn’t want it: ‘I am honoured to have affected you so.’ I begged him. I said: Take it for me, not for you.’ And he said: ‘Very well. But with your permission I’d like to donate it to charity’ I fell in love with him, I admit. A good soul. Rabbi Kame’a is also unique in its pessimistic attitude towards the possible consequences of the struggle between the secular and the Orthodox. In all of Tartuffe’s Hebrew versions, the translators, adaptors (and plagiarists) have scrupulously stuck to the ‘happy ending’ in which Molière forcibly resolves the plot by eliminating Tartuffe (the Orthodox), when the king imprisons him for his sins. Foiling the Tartuffian’ plot in all its versions is a difficult but necessary act of resuming social order. In Hasfari’s Rabbi Kame’a, however, Tartuffe is the victor. Ya’akov Morad’s home is turned into the broadcasting studio of a pirate Oriental-Orthodox radio station. Hasfari has attempted to distinguish between Rabbi Kame’a as an imposter and a fraud, and the Oriental Orthodoxy on whose behalf the Rabbi fraudulently speaks. The fact that this is an impersonation—that Kame’a is not a true Rabbi—does not prompt the secular audience to reevaluate the Orthodox population for better or for worse. Nevertheless, Ya’akov Morad, despite finally having lost all his possessions, succeeds in returning his family to the traditions of his father’s home and the play ends with the scene of a reconciled family. This indicates the ambivalent attitude of the playwright to the Shas movement—high esteem for its values but disgust with its messengers.

Kulturkampf in the Israeli theatre: the issue of religion 143 Many non-Orthodox playwrights, particularly in the last decade, demonstrate a sort of contradiction between the desire to create a dialogue with their Jewish heritage and their rejection of the religious Jews themselves, and particularly the establishment which represents them. These playwrights include Chonni Hamaagal, the Jewish, anti-religious multimedia artist and performance creator. Hamaagal comes from a rabbinical family, and is the youngest son of a family ‘blessed with many children’. He studied at a heder (religious elementary school) but during his youth he rebelled against religion. He makes use of many Jewish materials and is fond of hazzanut (prayer accompanied by song and melody). However, the Jewish religion ‘sickens’ him, due to its texts, ‘the immorality of the Torah’, and in particular because it humiliates women, whom he enshrines in his works within the Holy Ark of the synagogue. Desecration, by Chonni Hamaagal, staged at the Acre Festival of Fringe Theatre (1994), made semiotic use of the entire system of theatre signs in order to demonstrate the ridiculous nature of the teshuvah gatherings. This was an experimental performance that critically examined religious ritual, particularly in Judaism. Prior to the performance the spectators were given two booklets: ‘The Modern Testament’—a collection of selected texts from the Shulhan Arukh (Codification of Jewish law compiled by Yosef Caro, first printed in 1565), including the rules governing the prohibition of the idle spilling of one’s seed, the law of celibacy prior to a woman’s menstrual period, toilet procedures, and laws of atonement on the eve of Yom Kippur. In addition to the programme notes, a catalogue of swimsuits by a well-known Israeli designer was also provided. Chonni Hamaagal, himself from an ultraOrthodox family, referred to the particular choice of text and audience: Each time I try to reach that same level of banality and naivete found in the Torah. It contains so many foolish and stupid things, not to mention immoral, to the extent that I think the Torah should be make illegal…. The principal part of the play is the audience itself…. I tie them to their chairs, hand out tallitot, burn incense, give a few pills to intoxicate them and fly them high into the air with all my music.18 The theatre space, a Crusader Hall, was designed as a church-cum-synagogue. The spectators were asked to remove their shoes, which were collected by one of the actresses, while another actor handed out tefillin (phylacteries). Both were dressed in robes reminiscent of the Hare Krishna sect. Various holy artifacts were scattered around, particularly on the dais in the front, on which was set a Holy Ark with drawn curtains and candles, above which an illuminated sign displayed the prohibition ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’. Television screens showed scenes from Uri Zohar’s secular films, as well as videotapes by Zohar the proselytizer. The textual blend of the sacred and the secular in Desecration, the range of scenes dealing with the halakhic attitude to various personal matters, and particularly the choice of videoclips of Uri Zohar, combined to form a sort of lexicon of desecration; the complete opposite of the religious semiotic dictionary used by the proselytizers in their appearances. The actors read out the passages from ‘The Modern Testament’; actresses strode about attired in the fashionable swimsuits from the catalogue; from time to time a voice could be heard giving instructions to airline passengers; a nun passed by and stood next to the Holy Ark; the Ten Commandments were screened on an electronic board; actresses performed a striptease and one of them masturbated in front of the audience. All

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this was accompanied by heavy rock music. One scene that particularly focused audience attention was performed by a preacher/magician who succeeded first in pulling a dove out of the Holy Scripture and releasing it, and then slaughtered a chicken in a cruel ritual of atonement, while one of the actresses played an enraged member of the audience. The decreased interest taken by secular theatre practitioners in the last decade in a dialogue with their Jewish heritage matches the religious community’s tendency towards seclusion, as can also be seen in their use of theatre as a means of expression within their own community and for their own needs, as if they have renounced any hope of dialogue. Even the stereo-typing displayed by the secular towards the religious finds its match in the Ashkenazi negative intellectual stereotype depicted in the popular religious theatre. Future relations between the two communities, it would seem, will not be determined in the theatre, but in the political field. Nonetheless, the continued conflict between secular playwrights who turn secularism into a religion, and the religious groups who also use theatrical means to voice their protests at the advantages of a hegemonic group, would appear to promise that a continued debate of public thought over the issue of the Jewishness of Israeli society will remain an important subject in Israeli theatre well into the future. Notes 1

See Baruch Kimmerling, ‘Between Hegemony and Dormant Kulturkampf in Israel’, in In Search of Identity: Jewish Aspects in Israeli Culture, eds Dan Urian and Efraim Karsh, London: Frank Cass, 1999, pp. 49–72. 2 Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, London: Penguin, 1969, p. 150. 3 John Fiske, Television Culture, London and New York: Routledge, 1987, pp. 115–26. 4 Theodor Herzl, The New Ghetto, Hechal Bourbon, translated into Hebrew byM. Z.Wolfpovsky, Tel Aviv: M.Newman, 1961, pp. 159–216. 5 As the Zionist culture is termed by Don-Yehiya and Liebman: Eliezer Don-Yehiya and Charles S.Liebman, ‘The Dilemma of Reconciling Traditional Culture and Political Needs: Civil Religion in Israel’, in Religion and Politics in Israel, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984, pp. 41–56. 6 Aviezer Ravitzky, Messianism, Zionism and Jewish Religious Radicalism, Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1993, p. 203 (Hebrew). 7 Shmuel Hasfari, Kiddush, Tel Aviv: Or-Am, 1990, p. 57 (Hebrew). 8 Dan Horowitz and Moshe Lissak, Trouble in Utopia: The Overburdened Polity of Israel, Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1990, p. 98 (Hebrew). 9 Aviva Saltzman, ‘Swimming Against the Stream’, Davar, 7 October 1991 (Hebrew). 10 Ira Hauptman, ‘Defending Melodrama’, in James Redmond (ed.), Melodrama, Themes in Drama, 14, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 283. 11 ‘May God Save Us From the Religious’, Two Cities, 7 January 1994 (Hebrew). 12 Summary of Activities by Public Institutions of Culture and Art in Israel in 1993, Tel Aviv: Administration for Culture and Art, The Council for Culture and Art, July 1994, p. 36 (Hebrew). 13 The questionnaire was presented at two performances of Fleischer at Z.O.A. House on 8 May and 10 May 1994. Of the 543 members of the audience, 152 completed the questionnaire, some during the intermission and most at the end.

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15 16 17

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Pierre Bourdieu, Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel, Jean-Claude Chamboredon and Dominique Shnapper, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, trans. Shaun Whiteside, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1990, pp. 95–8. Eli Yassif, Tales of Religious Conversion: Rhetoric, Folklore and Ideology in Israeli Reality’, Pages for Literary Research, 9, 1993–4, p. 142 (Hebrew). Gai Ben-Porat, ‘He Takes Their Children’, Ha’ir, 3 May 1996. Molière, Tartuffe, Hebrew version: Yehoshua Sobol, Tel Aviv: Or-Am, 1985, p. 21. Sobol retained Molière’s text for the major part, only altering a few details. Nonetheless, the translation is in the main Jewish-Israeli and ‘equivalent’ expressions to the French change their meaning and anchor the play in its Israeli connection. Thus, for example, ‘lately’ is the translator’s addition that brings the play closer to the phenomenon of teshuvah, which reached one of its high points in the mid-1980s. Telegraph, Haifa and the North, ‘Journal of the Festival’, 22–3 September 1994.

Bibliography Bourdieu, Pierre, Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel, Jean-Claude Chamboredon and Dominique Shnapper, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, trans. Shaun Whiteside, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1990. Fiske, John, Television Culture, London and New York, Routledge, 1987. Hauptman, Ira, ‘Defending Melodrama’, in James Redmond (ed.), Melodrama: Themes in Drama, 14, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Herzl, Theodor, The New Ghetto, Hechal Bourbon, translated into Hebrew by M.Z. Wolfpovsky, Tel Aviv: M.Newman, 1961. Horowitz, Dan and Moshe Lissak, Trouble in Utopia: The Overburdened Polity of Israel, Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1990 (Hebrew). Kimmerling, Baruch, ‘Between Hegemony and Dormant Kulturkampf in Israel’, in In Search of Identity: Jewish Aspects in Israeli Culture, eds Dan Urian and Efraim Karsh, London: Frank Cass, 1999. Liebman, Charles S., ‘The Dilemma of Reconciling Traditional Culture and Political Needs: Civil Religion in Israel’, in Religion and Politics in Israel, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Lukács, Georg, The Historical Novel, London: Penguin, 1969. Ravitzky, Aviezer, Messianism, Zionism and Jewish Religious Radicalism, Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1993 (Hebrew). Saltzman, Aviva, ‘Swimming Against the Stream’, Davar, 7 October 1991 (Hebrew). Summary of Activities by Public Institutions of Culture and Art in Israel in 1993, Tel Aviv: Administration for Culture and Art, The Council for Culture and Art, July 1994. Yassif, Eli, ‘Tales of Religious Conversion: Rhetoric, Folklore and Ideology in Israeli Reality’, Pages for Literary Research, 9, 1993–4 (Hebrew).

9 RELIGION IN CONTEMPORARY PERSIAN PROSE1 Isabel Stümpel

Introduction The present volume brings together essays about religion(s) in literature(s). But what exactly are we looking for? How can religion (or religions) be present in a literature—in this case Persian literature? On a first level, I would suggest, religion may be present in idioms—e.g. exclamations or admonitions and other allusions to religious figures or stories of the Scriptures. On a second level, it may be present in the description of religious customs and rituals such as prayer and pilgrimage. On a third level, religious ‘meta-narratives’ may underlie the structure of the story; thus, the hero’s destiny may be similar to that of a religious figure.2 Or, on a final (‘highest density’) level, the literary text may even convey a religious message. As studies already exist in Western languages on modern Persian literature up to the Iranian Revolution,3 I will concentrate here on the more recent, post-revolutionary literature. This offers an opportunity to question the tacit expectation that literature under the Islamic Republic is bound to talk about religion (Islam) or, more specifically, to share in the officially propagated discourse of the Islamic worldview (jahânbini-ye eslâmi).4 In fact, in searching for ‘Religion in contemporary Persian literature’ two genres come immediately to mind: on the one hand the so-called adabiyât-e moqâvemat (resistance literature) which glorifies the martyrs for the Islamic cause in the ‘Imposed War’ (jang-e tahmili) with Iraq;5 on the other hand its counterpart, the protest literature against the excesses of the Revolution and the repression of freedom of speech in the name of religion (Islam).6 Given the mere propaganda character of the first genre and the fact that the second genre has already been reviewed,7 I will deal with neither of them here. Instead I concentrate on literary texts that do not simply advocate or condemn a special (religious) worldview, are taken seriously by critics and enjoy some popularity among the admittedly limited readership of contemporary Persian-language prose fiction in Iran. All the texts appeared in the Islamic Republic. Thus, this paper will throw light on what can be published in today’s Iran, not on Persian literature as a whole, because it does not take into account texts published in exile. Two of the texts are by authors who had already written fiction before the Revolution, five are by newcomers under the Islamic Republic. Two authors are women. Three of the texts are set during the Iran-Iraq war (1980–8), two during the Pahlavi era (1924–79); one is set at the beginning of the Qajar period (early nineteenth century); another story extends from the end of the Qajar (early twentieth century) through the Pahlavi era.8 It is worth mentioning that when I went through five anthologies of short stories9 I could not find even one sample which refers to religion in whatever way. This absence of the Islamic worldview, or of religion in general, is as characteristic of contemporary Persian literature as is its presence in the following samples.10

Religion in contemporary Persian prose 147 I propose to compare first two of the most important contemporary novels dealing with the Iran-Iraq war, namely Zemestân-e 62 (Winter 83)11 by Esmâ’il Fasih; and Bâgh-e bolur (The Crystal Garden)12 by Mohsen Makhmalbâf. As a situation of extreme pressure, war tends to provoke the assertion of group identity by appeals to shared cultural, national or religious values which, in the case of Iran, have been proclaimed as Islamic. Hence, fiction which is not only produced during the war but also makes an issue of it is most likely to touch upon Islam or Islamic values.13

Two war novels: Bâgh-e bolur and Zemestân-e 62 One of the rare figures among the new generation of committed Muslim authors to have become prominent is Mohsen Makhmalbâf (b. 1953). The author, who is best known as a film producer and director,14 was imprisoned under the Pahlavi regime for his political commitment. After the Revolution, Makhmalbâf worked for some time in the newly founded Center for Islamic Thought and Art (Houze-ye andishe va honar-e eslâmi). Once a fervent sympathizer of the Islamic Revolution, he has become more and more critical of what he considers to be a deviation of its initial goal, a view expressed for instance in his film ‘Arusi-ye khubân (The Marriage of the Chosen, 1989). Makhmalbâf’s Bâgh-e bolûr(=B.b.) is set in a house where several families of shahids (i.e. families who have lost one or more members in the war) are lodged together. The novel circles around their everyday problems and conflicts caused or aggravated by the war: children suffering from the absence of their fathers, women from the absence of their husbands, tensions between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, the difficulties of a disabled man to accept himself and the self-sacrificing care of his wife. The story starts with one of the women, a war-widow, giving birth to her third child. For the sake of her children, she remarries some time later. The other widow in the house is given in marriage to the younger brother of her fallen husband. Shortly after, her new husband and his father volunteer for the front and are martyred too. Under the shock of this new loss, she is hospitalized after giving birth to the child she conceived from her second husband. In the meantime, the house community faces difficulty in feeding the new-born baby. After desperately invocating God’s mercy, the old mother-in-law, who has lost her husband and two sons, suddenly feels her breasts filling with milk! The novel ends upon this miracle—the unexpected act of divine mercy suspending the law of nature. The title, ‘The Crystal Garden’, signifying ‘paradise’, hints at the hope of a better life in the hereafter—propagated in the official discourse as something which will come true for the martyrs of war. Esmâ’il Fasih (b. 1934) is an established author who studied engineering and literature in the USA and began his career in the late 1960s. He has two famous novels set during the war. The first, which he translated into English himself,15 deals with Persian intellectual exiles in Paris. The second, Zemestân-e 62 (=Z.62), is set in southern Iran, near the front. In the midst of war, Mansur Farjâm, a young Iranian engineer who seeks to forget the death of his American fiancée, in an accident, returns from the US to build a center for computer and English studies in Ahwaz. He faces numerous administrative obstacles, lack of cooperation from the local authorities and even the sabotage of his plans. Unable to finish his project, he exchanges his passport and identity papers with Farshâd, a young recruit. Thereby he enables Farshâd to leave the country with his fiancée who reminds him of his own deceased beloved. Farjâm goes to the front in his young friend’s place and is martyred. The story is told from the standpoint of Jalâl Âryân, a former university professor dismissed in the

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purges during the (Iranian) Cultural Revolution (of the early 1980s), who makes friends with the hero and helps him to settle as he first arrives in Iran. In B.b., the characters—mostly women—belong to the traditional common people whose idiom abounds in religious imagery and expressions. The mother-in-law, for instance, yells at her daughter-in-law (B.b., p. 218): ‘Do you think you are the suffering Zeynab?… Are you the oppressed Zahrâ? Are you trapped by the liver-devouring Hind? Oh yes, that is why you howl all over the place and make me out to look worse than ‘Âyishe’.16 In Z.62, on the contrary, references to religious expressions are conscious and eclectic, mixing Islamic notions with Western (Christian) culture and thereby relativizing the validity of each. For instance, to his interlocutor who recommends him to have trust in God, the engineer replies (Z.62, p. 25): ‘Of course, trust in God and the intercession of Saint George’. B.b. mentions expressis verbis the characters’ religious practices like the daily prayers and alludes to current religious beliefs and traditions such as the idea that on the eve of Friday, the martyrs’ souls return. In Z.62, in contrast, the narrator confesses that he does not know how to perform the ritual prayer (Z.62, p. 24). But he describes ordinary people in prayer, especially when he has urgent business to settle with them. The characters of B.b. are not only religious, but they have also internalized the particular ethics enforced by the Islamic Republic. At private gatherings, they listen to revolutionary hymns (sorud) instead of dance music (B.b., p. 249). The young Malihe has married a man disabled in the war, an act highly recommanded by Imam Khomayni (B.b., p. 357), and when adopting a baby, she chooses an Islamic (Arabic) name for her (B.b., p. 408).17 The women are pictured as fully respecting the official dress code, that is, they cover themselves in front of men who are not members of the family and they wear thick stockings. Furthermore, Makhmalbâf presents us with a figure whose conscience goes beyond these external signs. Ahmad marries the widow of his martyred brother, an act legally allowed and even regarded as meritorious, but has scruples about consummating the marriage. He spends his wedding night in prayer and finally volunteers for the front. Besides this illustration of revolutionary ideals and ethics, B.b. contains occasional criticism about their decline and even about shortcomings or inadequacies under the Islamic Republic, such as the lack of housing or the application of the hadd18 punishment for minor offences. Thus, Ahmad’s mother blurts out when her son has a brush with the police (B.b., p. 290): You should have hit them on the head. If they mean to do anything, they should straighten other things…. Do they think that everything in this country is so perfect that they should harass motorcyclists…. If they really mean it, they should arrest Khorshid’s husband who smokes opium. They should flog those who monopolize things. Even the cult of martyrdom is questioned. When the children of the house noisily play ‘Martyr’, old Khorshid Khânum screams at them (B.b., p. 395): ‘Martyr! Martyr! What does it mean?!’ and continues murmuring ‘Before the Revolution, there was no such thing as “the family of martyrs”, everyone was a gentleman on his own account’. There is an allusion to the Kerbela paradigm when Hamid, whose only pastime is drawing, paints a drastic representation of Imam Husayn’s wounded horse19 meant to decorate a martyr’s grave. Despite its narrator’s secular viewpoint, Z.62 is no less concerned with the idea(l) of martyrdom than B.b. Thus, going through his young friend Farjâm’s diary the narrator finds an outspoken reference to the Kerbela paradigm (Z.62, p. 212): ‘The most sublime

Religion in contemporary Persian prose 149 (ruhâni) moment is the piercing weeping over the death of the one-year-old ‘Ali Asghar’.20 Farjâm’s private room fills up little by little with posters representing scenes of martyrdom and Islamic slogans. His involvement in the current ideology increases because he has to pass an exam on ‘Islamic ideology’ in order to have his employment contract signed. His personal obsession with death since his fiancée’s fatal accident, the sharp contrast between life in his war-worn native land and the comfortable life he led as an émigré in the USA, and, above all, his youth, make him much more receptive to the cult of martyrs than the older and more skeptical first-person narrator Jalâl Âryân. To the latter, religion means nothing more than a childhood memory (Z. (52, pp. 338f.) His only direct involvement in Islamic ideology is by way of a young war-volunteer, the son of a retired employee whom he has promised to bring back to his father. Since their life-style is denounced by the regime as immoral, Jalâl Âryân’s acquaintances gather in silent protest in private parties crowned with the consumption of ‘drinks’. They are immediately recognized by the common folk who play the moral superior. The interdependence between class and religiosity is significantly captured in one of the last scenes when the narrator comes to bury his friend. First, the washer of the dead lets him know that The rich normally bring camphor along at their own cost’, and then addresses him (Z. 62, pp. 386ff): ‘Hey Sir, this is called embalming, the bodies of Muslims are embalmed’. He thus assesses his interlocutor as ‘upper-class’ and by virtue of this as somebody so alienated from his origins as to ignore even the basic elements of his religious heritage. Yet, Âryân cannot help being touched by the young people’s enthusiasm and readiness for self-sacrifice. In the course of the story, two teenage martyrs’ wills21 are reproduced, and the reader participates in three funeral ceremonies for martyrs. Meeting surviving volunteers is equally touching; when Jalâl Aryân finally finds the employee’s son in a hospital, the latter has lost his arm and leg and is nonetheless taking part in the common prayer with his comrades. Thus, the narrator’s reserve is at least softened. While on the very first page, he notes the posters invoking the appearance of the Mahdi22 as a distant observer watching through the windscreen of his car, at the end, on his way back to Tehran, his ride is rhythmed by prayer-time because of the young war-volunteer he is bringing back to his father. The last word of the novel is even accorded to the praying teenager. Besides such devout young Muslims on the one hand and the atheistic narrator on the other hand, a further type, a moderate Islamic figure, is represented by Maryam Jazâyeri, the daughter of an American mother converted to Islam and a Persian father. Always used to dressing in a discreet manner and to wearing a scarf, she is now harassed by the agents of the present regime because her executed husband had a high-ranking post under the old regime. First demoted, she is finally fired under the pretext that she has violated the Islamic dress code. Before leaving the country with the narrator’s help, she assesses her situation (Z.62, p. 373): ‘I wanted to be here, to be in Iran, to be in this great Revolution, to work and to see its fruits. But here nobody cares anymore about the words, conditions and feelings of women’. And the narrator comments: Perhaps the moment when the ‘Brother Inspector’ from the Office for Moral Decency [Edâre-ye takhallofât-o enzebâtât] entered the room and saw the woman whose scarf had slipped down a bit, was the moment when she reached out for six files from the top of the cupboard…. One must not take a woman’s right to work and her social life away from her, simply because a scarf slips down slightly or a half-pint brother says that her scarf has slipped. Merely because a qualified and experienced woman cannot remember the difference between the ritual cleansing after the major or the minor intermenstrual bleeding in the Ideological Exam one must not prevent her working as a computer specialist.

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Other recent novels Now I will turn to a few other successful recent novels. In a short novel entitled Houz-e Soltân(=H.S.),23 Makhmalbâf chooses the viewpoint of a female first-person narrator. ‘Ezzat-e Sadât is a woman from the poor quarters of South Tehran who has to scrape a living after her husband’s death. By chance she becomes involved in the religious opposition around 1963. She marries again, her new husband being a mosque servant who collaborates with the religious activists. At first, the heroine is not as devoted a believer as her husband, but in the course of action she comes to take religious and ethical obligations more seriously.24 After her husband has been sent to Qom on a secret mission the couple are arrested and subjected to torture. The story ends with ‘Ezzat’s vision of a beautiful garden (Paradise) in which she meets her long-deceased aunt. Here the author depicts the oppressive atmosphere of the 1960s and the struggle and resistance of the religious opposition. As in Fasih’s novel, the class differences are crystallized in the attitude to religion, but Makhmalbâf directs sympathy toward the common people. Thus, while working for an ‘upper class’ family, the heroine assists at a rouzekhâni25 session in their mansion and observes with anger that the guests are laughing! Compared to them, she is much more sincere in her faith. On several occasions, she visits holy shrines, makes vows and, after her marriage, she is frequently mentioned as performing her prayers. At the end, she even undergoes martyrdom with her husband. He is characterized as a man who follows his conscience and takes up the fight with the feeble means of a small opposition group—even at the risk of imprisonment and death, a strategy sharply criticized by his wife. In view of the regime’s virtual power and all-embracing surveillance system, the religious guerilla is doomed to martyrdom. The tragic end is already foreshadowed by the story’s title Houz-e Soltân, the name of a salt-lake near Qom, where the Pahlavi regime was said to drown its (religious) opponents. The parallel to the Kerbela paradigm is evident, all the more so as one of the torturers introduces himself ironically as Shamir.26 Shahrnush Pârsipur (b. 1946), who had already published some fiction before the Revolution, became famous with her Tubâ va ma’nâ-ye shab (Tubâ and the meaning of the night) (=T.).27 This novel centers around Tubâ, a woman whose life spans the time from the latter part of the Qajar epoch to the end of the Pahlavi regime. Born into a conservative well-to-do family, she had received private lessons on religion and literature from her father and thus benefited from an education superior to that of the average woman of her time. Despite this, her worldview is very limited, marked by religiously based ethics and superstitions. Thus, sexuality, in her eyes, is sinful (T., 148): She had committed other sins too. She had watched her father’s naked body secretly from the window as he was taking a bath in the water reservoir. She remembered having looked at her own naked body several times. She also remembered the children’s games with other girls and even boys…. She always thought that the world was founded upon sin…. Woe betide him who committed a sin…and broke away from innocence, God would pour out his anger over everybody.28 All Tubâ’s ideals are religiously colored. As a child she dreams of being the Virgin Mary giving birth to the Messiah. Next she idealizes a socially committed Mullah to whom she ascribes magical powers. She then dreams of making a life-long pilgrimage. After her marriage with a Qajar prince, she comes in contact with Sufi circles and finally finds her Sheikh, whom she consults regularly. The following generations, however, prove to be more and more liberal and secular. Whereas Tubâ’s daughter still performs her prayers,

Religion in contemporary Persian prose 151 does not dare to meet her beloved, and feels guilty about sexuality, her grand-daughter does not believe in God any more, mingles freely with men and even gets pregnant without her family’s knowing. Here religion is closely connected with a sense of guilt and has a paralyzing effect, especially on women. Thus, after undergoing an abortion Tubâ’s daughter is haunted by terrifying visions (T., pp. 335ff): Slowly a baby covered with blood was taking shape in the angel’s left hand…. The angel would say: ‘What did you do with God’s trust?’…In order to escape this nightmare, she spent the nights praying…but when she was not praying, the angel appeared anew. Occasionally he would say: ‘It is the burden of your sin which lies on my left hand’. Even the mystical variant of religion in which Tubâ and her daughter seek refuge only confirms the status quo. Thus, the new generation which wants progress has to leave religion behind, because it offers no solution for burning political and social issues. Tubâ herself completely loses touch with what is going on around her. Hence, when her grand-daughter, who has joined the communist guerillas, seeks refuge in her house, the only explanation Tubâ can think of is that the girl has been rejected by her husband because of ‘immoral conduct’. One of the most widely discussed post-revolutionary novels is Semfoni-ye mordegân (The symphony of the dead) (=S.m.) by ‘Abbâs Ma’rufi (b. 1957),29 a promising author and editor of literary reviews who now lives in German exile. Although the text is preceded by a citation from the story of Qâbil and Hâbil (Cain and Abel) in the Qur’an (5:26), religion plays but a minor role. The story centers on the conflict between two sons of a conservative, semi-literate merchant. Aydin, the elder son, transgresses the narrow borders of his father’s universe by his intellectual as well as his emotional commitment. Thus, he prefers going to school instead of helping in his father’s shop. After having broken with his family, he finds refuge with an Armenian family working as a joiner for them, and falls in love with their daughter. The couple has a child. Âydin’s younger brother enters upon a standard career in his father’s trade. But in the field of social relationships he proves to be unsuccessful. Jealous of Âydin’s popularity, especially with women, he tries to poison him. Aydin becomes mentally ill, but he survives, whereas his brother, who cannot bear being lonely and without offspring, commits suicide. Islam in this novel is just one of the many facets in Ma’rufi’s portrait of the conservative universe. Besides observing the ritual obligations, this milieu is characterized by its resort to superstitious practices, such as consulting spiritual healers and fortune-tellers (S.m., pp. 106ff, 364ff.). The Christian minority is sketched as marginal, but also as a liberal refuge from the conservative Muslim majority. Aydin, the outcast intellectual, is compared to the Messiah and in a nightmare sees himself burdened with a heavy cross. Rezâ Julâ’i (b. 1950) has gained a certain fame with his historical novels set in the Qajar period. Shab-e zolmâni-ye yaldâ (The Dark Night of the Winter Solstice)30 is set during the Russo-Iranian wars in the early nineteenth century. When the hero falls in love with an Armenian girl, they have to flee because her co-religionists would not tolerate her choosing a Muslim husband. After they have gone through some adventures together, she leaves him and returns to her family to take care of her sick mother. Their son grows up far from his father and joins the Russian army. In the meantime, the father has another child from a second marriage. At the outbreak of war, he volunteers in order to spare this younger son

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of his. He comes to face-to-face with a young Russian soldier and shoots him dead, not knowing that he is his own elder son. Shortly afterward, he is wounded and drags himself to a hut which happens to be the refuge of his Armenian ex-wife. The author provides us with a great many details about the religious customs and harsh living conditions of the persecuted Armenian commu-nity.31 In contrast to the indigenous Christians, Julâ’i portrays Western Christian missionaries by means of a bigoted couple with dubious (political) aims. The novel’s references are half Islamic and Iranian, half Christian. In his feverish dreams, the wounded main character hears a passage from the Qur’an (108:3) cursing Muhammad’s adversary with childlessness. Furthermore, there are allusions to the sacrifice of Ibrâhim (Abraham) and the epic of Sohrâb’s tragic death at his father Rostam’s hand. These stories mingle in the hero’s mind, all hinting at his own doomed destiny, the killing of his son. The Armenian characters, on the other hand, quote from the Book of Job. In her youth, the main female character was especially attracted to the Song of Songs, in which she recognized her own longings, but at the sight of her son’s corpse, she joins her co-religionists in voicing Job’s lamentations. Self-sacrifice in Shab-e zolmâni-ye yaldâ does not lead to one life being saved at the expense of another, as in Zemestân-e 62, but only to tragedy. The individual sacrifice is shown to be meaningless in the context of war and conflicts between religious communities. The religious characters of the novel, a dervish and an excommunicated priest, however, belong to a more liberal, ‘alternative’ religious milieu. They act as a kind of spiritual guide to the couple, even if in the eyes of orthodoxy, they are sinners and outlaws; the priest once fell in love with a Western Christian girl, the dervish once took part in pillages. The last book to be discussed, Engâr gofte budi Leyli (As if you had said Leyli) by Sepide Shâmlu (b. 1968),32 won the Hushang Golshiri prize for best novel in early 2000. The main characters, Sharâre and Mastâne, are the wife and sister of Ali, who died during the Iran-Iraq war in a bomb attack when the balcony of his house was hit. Apart from this single event and a brief reference to the child soldiers—in one short dialogue Sharâre’s son tells her that he wants to join them—the war is not central to the story. Mastâne’s husband Mahmud, Ali’s former co-prisoner (during the Shah’s regime), fell in love when Ali showed him his sister’s photo. He is now the spiritual leader of a group of women and men who gather for dhikr (mystical remembrance of God). In the course of the sessions they listen to the recitation of mystical poetry, drink wine from one large bowl, and dance to the exciting sound of the daf (tambourine). At the climax of these gatherings it seems to them as if Mahmud were not sitting on his chair but freely floating in the air (p. 88). However, the story does not actually deal with religion or the mystical counterpart of official religion. The dervish circle stands rather for the mechanisms of authority and power. As a whole, the novel demonstrates in particular the power of men over women. Whereas Mastâne loses her free will and physical health in her relationship with Mahmud—she develops epilepsy while he maltreats her—Sharâre tries in vain to free herself from the memory of her long-dead husband. At the end, when her grown-up son disappears she seeks refuge anew with the deceased. While her sight is increasingly deteriorating (perhaps as a result of overwork in her job as a photographer and film maker) she implores him to discover the whereabouts of their son. In this novel, religion is at first present in the description of rituals. It starts with Sharâre’s pilgrimage to Mashhad,33 where she hopes to revive the memories of her honeymoon trip. During it the couple had witnessed an apparently blind girl in the shrine suddenly crying

Religion in contemporary Persian prose 153 out that she could see. When a white dove settled on the child’s head, mass hysteria broke out during which the pilgrims fought over pieces of the dove’s feathers and the child’s clothes, in order to share in the blessing brought by the miracle. Next to the description of the pilgrimage rituals and such (superstitious) reactions, Sepide Shâmlu focuses on the regulation of gender relations under the Islamic Republic. At the time, Sharâre had witnessed the girl’s healing standing next to her husband, but now, there are separate entrances for men and women. At another point she comments that the strict gender segregation has proved to be providential in her case because it has enabled her to find a job in a photographer’s studio, where she is employed to make women’s portraits. On several occasions the discrimination practiced by men against women in the name of religion is touched upon. Thus, Mastâne’s husband, who allows himself the liberty of transgressing the borders of orthodox religion so far as to live in a ménage à trois with his mistress and his wife, does not even allow a stranger to hear Mastâne’s voice (p. 61). He forbids her to wear make-up and gets angry when she looks into other men’s eyes while speaking to them. The black scarf, the symbol of ‘Islamic morality’ incumbent upon women, is alluded to in another passage as a ‘frame’ men put on what is already a projection—the ideal woman34—without taking into account the woman who really exists: Mahmud said I had moved…like a piece of light in a black frame… I think he had seen the black frame [meaning a black chador or maqna’e, another kind of orthodox accessory, resembling a nun’s head dress] in a dream, because in fact, I wore a white scarf. It was him who wanted the black frame around my face, his subconscious… Where there’s a will, there’s a way, isn’t there? (p. 64)

Conclusion Religion in post-revolutionary Iranian literature is just one issue among others; it may not be alluded to at all. Apart from its role in governmentsponsored propaganda literature it occurs mainly on the first three of the levels distinguished in the introduction. On the first level, that of idioms, it manifests itself especially when the characters are people of the popular classes, as in Makhmalbâf’s two novels. The second level is the portrayal of religious rituals and habits. These may be described in order to underline their superstitious nature (Pârsipur; Ma’rufi). The characters who adhere to them are portrayed as narrow-minded and hostile to progress, such as the father in Semfoni-ye mordegân and Tubâ as she grows old. By contrast, Makhmalbâf describes prayer, pilgrimage and so on as customs of sincere and devoted believers. In Fasih’s novel, the narrator does not perform these rituals himself, but in particular young people who observe them are described as sincere and idealistic. The suffocating character of repressive (sexual) morality operating in the name of religion is mainly sketched by Pârsipur, whereas Fasih (through his character Maryam) and Shâmlu only touch upon the issue. The veil, shorthand for women’s dress code as an eye-catching symbol of the ‘return to Islam’ in post-revolutionary Iran, is approached in different ways. In Bâgh-e bolur, women’s veiling is mentioned, just like the characters’ performing their daily prayers, as part of a model Islamic way of life. In Zemestân-e 62, the narrator criticizes the discriminatory imposition of the Islamic code of dress on women, interpreting it as a means of depriving them of social life (cf. the quotation above, p. 168). Pârsipur makes frequent reference to the heroine’s veiling or her sitting behind a curtain, thereby drawing the reader’s attention to women’s limited access to public space. Shâmlu

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mentions it partly as a matter of fact, an accessory for women. With reference to Mastâne, Sharâre’s sister-in law however, the Islamic dress’ is shown to be forced upon women by men who are unable to perceive them and to deal with them as they are. Two authors present us with a Muslim ideal type. Whereas in Makhmalbâf’s Bâgh-e bolur, it is the devout young Muslim, Ahmad, whose conscience goes beyond the official prescriptions, in Fasih’s Zemestân-e 62 it is a ‘moderate religious’ woman who combines typical (Muslim) womanly virtues (chastity, loyalty to her husband even after his death) with the intellectual and professional qualities of a modern emancipated woman, in her (male-dominated) job as a computer specialist. As far as the third level, that of religious meta-narratives, is concerned, Julâ’i, as well as, to a minor degree, Ma’rufi, present us with heroes whose destiny shows parallels with that of figures common to Islam, Judaism and Christianity (Job, Abraham, Cain and Abel). In Makhmalbâf’s Houz-e Soltân, the torture and death of the heroine and her husband find a parallel in the tragedy of Imam Husayn and his companions. By contrast, the death of the young engineer in Fasih’s Zemestân-e 62 is shown as a consequence of his personal depressive disposition, rather than a parallel to the Kerbela paradigm. Here, as in Pârsipur’s Tubâ, the parallel is on the level of discourse only: in Pârsipur’s novel, as Tubâ dreams of bearing another Messiah, and in Zemestân-e 62 as the hero refers to Kerbela in his diary. Even in Makhmalbâf’s Bâgh-e bolur Kerbela is evoked on the level of discourse rather than on the level of the story, namely in the painting referring to Kerbela (the wounded horse of Imam Husayn). Only in the two works by Makhmalbâf, which end with a miracle and a vision of paradise respectively, do religious beliefs come to underlie the story itself and its message. The author comments that he is influenced by the Qur’an where he is driven from realism to ‘supra-realism’ (farâ vâqe‘ garâ‘i): ‘In the same way as in our Holy Book man and God have a common essence, in my stories, realism and supra-realism go side by side, giving rise to a particular narrative technique’.35 Makhmalbâf’s narrative breaks with the conventions surrounding the strong current of ‘social realism’, but it cannot be categorized either as ‘magical realism’, another important trend in the Persian literature of the last two decades.36 This ‘supra-realism’ seems to be a particularity of Makhmalbâf alone, whose novels have long since been surpassed by his films. Finally, I would like to point out that the religion alluded to in contemporary Persian literature is not only Islam.37 As a counterpart to the Muslim milieu, some authors (Ma’rufi, Julâ’i) portray Christians who may appear as companions in distress or even as more openminded than their Muslim neighbors. Western Christian missionaries’ religiosity in contrast is shown in a negative light. And within Islam itself, the mystical tradition may be introduced as a counterpart to the orthodox version.38 In two instances (Pârsipur and Julâ’i) it is portrayed as a refuge, whereas in S.Shâmlu’s novel it stands for one form of demagogy amongst others.

Notes 1

For their thorough help in making the English of this text more readable I wish to thank my friends and colleagues Dr Hilary Kilpatrick, Lausanne, and Dr Mohsen Zakeri, Frankfurt. For the purposes of this article addressed to the non-specialist reader interested in world literature, I have adopted a simplified version of Gilbert Lazard’s transcription system in his Persian-French dictionary, which seems to me as straightforward and accurate as possible. Where two dates are given together, the first is that of the Iranian solar calendar, which starts with the Prophet’s

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emigration to Medina; the second that of the Christian era. Quotations are my own translation from the Persian originals. In the Shiite context the destiny of Husayn, the prophet’s grandson, who was slaughtered when he and his companions resisted the army of the caliph Yazid at Kerbela (in today’s Iraq) in 680 AD forms a frequent meta-narrative. According to the Shiites, Husayn was the legitimate caliph whereas Yazid was a usurper. This historical tragedy so central to the Shiite self-image lends itself to reinterpretation as a paradigm of revolutionary resistance to any unjust political system. As such it became topical during the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the Iran-Iraq war. Allusions to the Kerbela paradigm are also to be found in modern Persian literature before the Revolution. Cf. Kamran Talattof, ‘The Changing Mode of Relationship Between Modern Persian Literature and Islam: Karbala in Fiction’, In John C.Hawley (ed.), The Postcolonial Crescent: Islam’s Impact on Contemporary Literature, New York: Peter Lang, 1998, pp. 249–65. Notably on several outstanding authors such as Sâdeq Hedâyat (d. 1951). There are also overviews in English (Hamid Kamshad, Modern Persian Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966 (repr. Bethesda MD: 1996); Mohammad R.Ghanoonparvar, Prophets of Doom: Literature as a Socio-political Phenomenon in Modern Iran, Lanham MD: University Press of America, 1984); in German (Bozorg Alavi, Geschichte und Entwicklung der modernen persischen Literatur, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1964) and French (F. Machalski, La Littérature de l’Iran contemporain, 3 vols, Wroclaw: Zakład narodowy imienia Ossolinskich, 1965, 1967, 1980). Cf., with reference to classical Persian Literature, Talattof, ‘The Changing Mode of Relationship’, p. 249: ‘Many critics understand Persian literature as solely an Islamic ideological presentation…. Any general classification of this sort ignores the dialectical relationship between a literary work and the discursive movement of the period during which the work was produced.’ This war deeply marked the first two decades of the Islamic Republic. As it was reaching its end, a special government-sponsored Office for the Art and Literature of Resistance (Daftar-e honar-o adabiyât-e moqâvemat) was inaugurated. Even now, in 2003, authors in spe are taken to the frontier in order to get vivid impressions of the devastations of war they are supposed to write on. Cf. Razie Tujjâr, ‘Hame-ye mâ nevisande-im’ (We are all authors), Ketâb-e hafte, 82, Mehr 1381/October 2002, p. 6. This trend, which has now lasted for over two decades, includes some of the works of established authors such as Hushang Golshiri (1937–2000) with his ‘Fathnâme-ye moghân’ (The Magi’s Victory Chronicle) (dated Nov.-Dec. 1980), Kârgâh-e qesse 1 (n.d.), pp. 1–6; or Simin Dâneshvar (b. 1921) with the title story of her collection Az parandegân-e mohâjer bepors (Ask the migrant birds), Tehran: Nashr-e Kânun/Nashr-e Nou, 1376/1997. Cf. several articles by Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak: ‘Of Hail and Hounds: The Image of the Iranian Revolution in Recent Persian Literature’, State, Culture and Society, I/3 (spring 1985), pp. 148–80; ‘Poetry against Piety: The Literary Response to the Iranian Revolution’, World Literature Today, 60 (1986), pp. 251–6; ‘Revolutionary Posturing: Iranian Writers and the Iranian Revolution of 1979’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 23 (1991), pp. 507–31. This selection thus mirrors some of the main tendencies in recent Persian literature, such as the growing presence of women authors, the preference for historical settings, notably the Qajar epoch, and, in general, the flourishing of the novel in the 1980s. Cf. my overview, ‘Die Literatur in der Islamischen Republik Iran’, in Konrad Meisig (ed.), Orientalische Erzähler der Gegenwart, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999, pp. 77–100. The material offered by contemporary Persian drama and poetry is beyond the scope of the present article. Michael C.Hillmann (ed.), ‘Major Voices in Contemporary Persian Literature’, Literature East And West, XX, 1–4 (January-December 1976); F.Lewis and F. Yazdanfar (eds), In a Voice of

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Religious Perspectives in Modern Muslim and Jewish Literatures Their Own: A Collection of Stories by Iranian Women Written since the Revolution of 1979, Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publications, 1996; Heshmat Moayyad (ed.), Stories from Iran: 1921– 1991: a Chicago Anthology, Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 1991; Soraya Paknazar Sullivan, Stories by Iranian Women since the Revolution, Austin: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of Texas, 1991; Minoo Southgate, Modern Persian Short Stories, Washington: Three Continents Press, 1980. A similar phenomenon in Arabic contemporary literature has been observed by Pierre Cachia: ‘In a Glass Darkly: The Faintness of Islamic Inspiration in Modern Arabic Literature’, in idem, An Overview of Modern Arabic Literature, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990, pp. 201–17. Esmâ’il Fasih, Zemestân-e 62, Cologne: Sina, 1368/1989 (1st edn Tehran, 1987). The German translation, Winter ‘83 (Frankfurt: Glaré Verlag, 1998), is not always reliable. 1983 of our era corresponds to 1362 of the Persian solar calendar. For the depiction of war in this novel cf. Roxane Haag-Higuchi, ‘The Theme of War in Esmâ’il Fasîh’s Novel “Zemestân-e shast-o do”’, in Bert G. Fragner et al. (eds), Proceedings of the Second European Conference of Iranian Studies held in Bamberg, 30 September-4 October 1991, Rome: Istituto per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1995, pp. 255–62. Mohsen Makhmalbâf, Bâgh-e bolur (1365/1986). Reprinted in his Gong-e khâbdide I. Montakhab-e qesse-hâ-ye dahe-ye shast, Tehran: Nashr-e Ney, 1374/1995, pp. 185–440. An English translation, The Crystal Garden, was published in Tehran (Nashr-e Ney) in 1998. For a study of the role of war in literature see David Bevan (ed.), Literature and War (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989). This contains a general introduction and contributions dealing with the First and the Second World Wars, the Spanish Civil War and the Vietnam War in European and American Literature. The credit for having written the first piece of fiction about the Iran-Iraq war goes to the well-known southern Iranian author Ahmad Mahmud (b. 1931), with his novel Zamin-e sukhte (Burnt soil) (1st edn 1361/1982). In the meantime, his fame has even spread outside Iran, notably for his film Safar-e Qandahâr (lit.: ‘Journey to Qandahar’, which is a Persian expression, synonymous with a hard or idle undertaking) about the hard living-conditions in today’s Afghanistan, which was screened for months in European cinemas, for instance in Germany and Switzerland. Sorayya in a Coma, London: Zed Books, 1985. Zeynab is Imam Husayn’s sister. Az-Zahrâ (‘the Shining One’) is a honorific name for Fâtima, Muhammad’s daughter and Imam Husayn’s mother. Both are highly venerated in Shiite Islam. Hind bint ‘Utba b. Rabi’a is the mother of Imam ‘Ali’s rival, the later Umayyad caliph Mu’âwiya. Traditions hostile to the Umayyads draw an extremely negative image of her. When the Prophet’s uncle Hamza b. ‘Abd al-Muttalib fell in the battle fought at Uhud, she is said to have mutilated his corpse and bitten his liver. ‘Âyishe was Muhammad’s favorite wife. She engaged in an intrigue against ‘Ali and so became one of the accursed personalities in Shiite Islam. Cf. Priska Furrer, ‘Propaganda in Geschichtenform: Erzählstrategien und Handlungsanweisungen in islamischen Frauenromanen aus der Türkei’, Die Welt des Islams, 37 (1997), pp. 88–111, here p. 108. Under the Pahlavi regime, the official cult of the glorious pre-Islamic past favored the choice of indigenous, non-Islamic names. Lit.: ‘limit, boundary, frontier’, and by extension, the restrictive ordinances of God. In a narrower meaning, it is used as a technical term for the punishment of certain acts forbidden by the Qur’an, such as unlawful intercourse, drinking and theft. A frequent motive in Iranian popular religious art and in contemporary ‘art of the Islamic Revolution’. Cf. e.g. Husayn Khosrowjerdi, ‘Enqelâb-e eslâmi dar honar-e mo’âser-e irân’, Tâvus, 1378/1999, p. 102. For further examples and analysis cf. Peter Chelkowski and Hamid Dabashi,

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Staging a Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran, London: BoothClibborn Editions, 1995. Imam Husayn’s son, who was killed at Kerbela together with his father. Volunteers used to write their wills before going to the front. Highly standardized, they generally express the wish to be sacrificed, the hope to reach Paradise, and also consolation for their families. Such ‘martyrs’ wills’ were regularly published in the newspapers. ‘The rightly guided one’, an eschatological figure who is expected to restore the Islamic shari‘a (religious law) and rule the world according to them. In Twelver Shiite belief, he is identified with the twelfth Imam who now lives in a state of occultation. Mohsen Makhmalbâf, Houz-e Soltân (1363/1984). Reprinted in his Gong-e khâbdide I. Montakhab-e qesse-hâ-ye dahe-ye shast, Tehran: Nashr-e Ney, 1374/1995, pp. 67–181. In contrast to the heroes in the modern Turkish ‘Islamic novels’ which Furrer describes in her article ‘Propaganda in Geschichtenform’, Makhmalbâf’s character is portrayed humorously and does not undergo a dramatic ideological shift. Despite a deeply-felt religiosity she is far from being an infallible model of Islamic ethics—under torture she betrays the Shaykh who helped them escape from the Fayziyya. Recitation of the story of Husayn, his family and followers at the bloody battle of Kerbela by a master story-teller. This expression is derived from the title of a book called Rouzat ol-shuhadâ (The Garden of the Martyrs) about the martyrs of Kerbela. The audience are expected to beat their breasts and weep. The name of a leader of the caliph’s troops who slaughtered Husayn. Shamir is damned by the Shiites. Shahrnush Pârsipur, Tubâ va ma’nâ-ye shab (1988), 3rd edn, Tehran: Enteshârâte Espark, 1368/1989. German transl. Tuba, Zurich: Unionsverlag, 1995. For biographical notes and an analysis of this novel, see my ‘Raum und (Frauen-) Realität in einem zeitgenössischen persischen Roman’, Asiatische Studien, 50/2 (1996), pp. 445–62. Cf. also the brief remarks in Farzaneh Milani, Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers, London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 1992, pp. 12, 53; and Hura Yavari, ‘Ta’ammoli dar Tubâ va ma’nâ-ye shab’, Iran-nameh, 7/1 (1989) pp. 130–41. Compare T., 380ff: ‘He [i.e. Tubâ’s son-in law] remembered a night undressing her [i.e. Tubâ’s daughter]…but she kept covering her private parts with her hands, continuously whispering that it was sinful’. ‘Abbâs Ma’rufi, Semfoni-ye mordegân (1st edn, Tehran 1368/1989), Cologne: Nashr-e Gardûn, 1376/1997. German transl. Symphonie der Toten, Frankfurt/Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1996. The novel had quite a number of reviews, partially collected in a volume titled Pirâmun-e yek athar (Essen: Nashr-e Nimâ, 1998). Rezâ Julâ’i, Shab-e zolmâni-ye yaldâ, Tehran: Nashr-e Alborz, 1369/1970. For a brief biographical sketch of the author and a discussion of his novel, see Elhâm Mahvizâni’s article in the volume edited by her, Âine-hâ: Naqd-o bar resi-ye adabiyât-e emruz-e Iran. Daftar-e yekom, Tehran: Enteshârât-e Roushangarân, 1373/1994, pp. 72–87, and the report ‘Miz-e gerd-e dâstânnevisi-ye emruz I’, Kelk, 9 (Âzar 1369/Nov. 1990), pp. 163–72. Data collected with the help of an Armenian friend. See Mahvîzânî, Âine-hâ, p. 85. Sepide Shâmlu, Engâr gofte budi Leyli, Tehran: Nashr-e markaz, 1379/2000. A city in eastern Iran, important to Twelver Shiites for its shrine of the Prophet’s eighth successor, Imam Reza (d. 818). The novel’s title alludes to Leyli, the ideal woman in classical Persian literature, notably in the romantic epic Leyli-o Majnun by Nezâmi (d. 1209), which recounts Majnun’s incurable and obsessive love for Leyli.

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Religious Perspectives in Modern Muslim and Jewish Literatures Makhmalbâf, Mohsen, Gong-e khâbdide III. Montakhab-e maqâle-hâ, goft-oguhâ va bar resihâ-ye dahe-ye shast, Tehran: Nashr-e Ney. 1372/1993, p. 245. Cf. Hurâ Yâvari, ‘Nâ-hamzamâni-ye dâstân va ensân. Ta’amoli dar nufuz-e adabiyât-e amrikâ-ye lâtin dar dâstân-nevisi-ye pas az enqelâb dar irân’, Iran Nameh, 9/4 (fall 1370/1991), pp. 635–43. In the two novels discussed, there is no alternation between two equal levels of reality, which is characteristic of magical realism, but a sudden shift from realism to ‘supra-realism’ at the dramatic end. Farkhonde Âqâ’i (b. 1956), who belongs to the post-revolutionary generation of women authors, in her novel Jensiyat-e gomshode (Lost sexual identity) (2000) ventures even to portray Iranians who seek spiritual guidance from Indian gurus, among them the hero, a transsexual woman in a man’s body who is waiting desperately for his/her sex change. Generally speaking, the reference to mystics/mystical poetry may be regarded as a trend in postrevolutionary Persian literature to counterbalance the politicized ‘Islamic worldview’.

Further reading Anthologies of contemporary Persian fiction in English translation Hillmann, Michael C. (ed.) (1976), ‘Major Voices in Contemporary Persian Literature’, Literature East and West, XX, 1–4 (January-December). Lewis, F. and F.Yazdanfar (eds) (1996), In a Voice of Their Own: A Collection of Stories by Iranian Women Written Since the revolution of 1979, Costa Mesa CA. Moayyad, Heshmat (ed.) (1991), Stories from Iran: 1921–1991: A Chicago Anthology, Washington DC: Mage Publishers. Paknazar Sullivan, Soraya (1991), Stories by Iranian Women since the Revolution, Austin: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of Texas. Southgate, Minoo (1980), Modern Persian Short Stories, Washington DC: Three Continents Press.

Secondary sources in English on contemporary Persian literature ‘Contemporary Literature of Iran’ (1988) Yarshater, Ehsan (ed.) Persian Literature, The Persian Heritage Foundation, pp. 291–404. ‘Fiction’, Encyclopedia Iranica IX (1999) Yarshater, Ehsan (ed.) New York: Bibliotheca Persica Press, pp. 572–602. Ghanoonparvar, Mohammad R. (1984) Prophets of Doom: Literature as a SocioPolitical Phenomenon in Modern Iran, Lanham MD: University Press of America. Kamshad, Hamid (1966) Modern Persian Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (repr. Bethesda MD, 1996). Milani, Farzaneh (1992) Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers, New York. Talatoff, Kamran (1997) ‘Iranian Women’s Literature: From Pre-Revolutionary Social Discourse to Post-Revolutionary Feminism’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 29 (1997) pp. 531–58.

10 MARTYRDOM AND GENDER IN JEWISH-AMERICAN HOLOCAUST MEMORY Sara R.Horowitz

In ‘The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’, a liturgical Holocaust poem written in Hebrew after the Second World War, a group of Orthodox adolescent young girls and their teachers commit suicide together rather than endure sexual violation. Ordered to ‘satisfy the lustful desires’ (lemaleh ta’avat libam) of Nazi soldiers, the young women instead ‘poured out their hearts in prayer and swallowed poison and returned their breath to God’ (shafkhu et liban betfilla shatu kos ra’al veheshivu ruhan lelohim). Together with an introductory narrative, this story about female Jewish martyrdom during the war was interpolated into the Yom Kippur Martyrology service in American synagogues as early as 1948.1 Composed by Hillel Bavli in New York and first published in 1943,2 the poem is utilized now in liberal Jewish American synagogues on Yom Kippur, as well as during commemorations on Holocaust Remembrance Day. The episode that the poem commemorates is taught as a piece of history to Orthodox Jewish schoolchildren, however the poem has not been integrated formally into Orthodox liturgy. Although the poem was composed in Hebrew, its regularized liturgical use is unique to North American Jewry. Insofar as The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ has become part of an American Holocaust canon, examining it tells us something about the shaping of collective memory in an American Jewish context. Prayer books containing this liturgical composition present The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ as part of what Hayden White has called the ‘discourse of the real’;3 by now, however, most historians agree that the event did not occur as such, that its roots are in the ‘discourse of the imaginary’, with strong intertextual links to classic rabbinic texts about catastrophe and martyrdom.4 Regardless of the event’s historicity, its popularity indicates that it resonates powerfully with contemporary Jewish religious leaders and congregants across denominations, and that its imagery has a firm hold on the contemporary Jewish imagination. In some high holiday prayer books, this episode is one of a series of anecdotal Holocaust remembrances; in others, it constitutes the only representation of the Holocaust in a portion of the service that looks back at Jewish martyrdom and offers theological and national meaning for the extremities of Jewish suffering. The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ is important to consider for several reasons. First, commemorative liturgy is one way of establishing and disseminating knowledge about the Holocaust and giving it religious and national meaning. Liturgy, where the

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human and the daily encroach upon the theological and the transcendent, is a site where claims to meaning are made beyond the historical, where history is seen as an enactment of and at the same time as a foil to pure meaning. Judged by its popular contemporary usage, particular to North America, The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ may be considered a core component of an evolving Jewish-American Holocaust folk canon. The second reason to consider the The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ is that the issue of sexual violation during the Holocaust—a category I use here to encompass a variety of experiences and behaviors including rape, forced prostitution, and sexual barter—has remained largely outside the compass of Holocaust discourse in America. This, despite the fact that Holocaust representations of different kinds and in different genres have spawned a variety of eroticized tropes which depict sexual atrocity and its aftermath. In examining the liturgical use of the story of the ninety-three maidens, I wish to explore the boundaries and the ethics of representing sexual violation, and its place in American Jewish representations of the Holocaust. The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ emblemizes the Holocaust in the experiences of the young maidens whose lives are cut short. In this liturgical remembrance, Holocaust atrocity becomes identified with, becomes synonymous with, sexual violation. Both the liturgical context and the religiously charged language posit the suicide of the ninety-three maidens as an act of kiddush hashem (sanctification of the Divine name), the traditional Jewish term for martyrdom. Through their inclusion in the Yom Kippur Martyrology, the deaths of the maidens are placed in the context of other historical Jewish martyrdoms—most notably the ten sages martyred by the Romans and the communal suicides in the Middle Ages. In addition, the maidens’ prayer before death invokes the neardeath of the biblical Isaac in the Akedah, or binding episode (Genesis 22), the prototype for martyrdom in Jewish medieval poetry. Even more strongly than the English translation, the Hebrew poem explicitly links the episode with traditional categories of martyrdom. The maidens are ordered to desecrate their honor—‘tehalellna bnot yisrael et kevodarn’. The wording thus sets up the sexual violation as an act of hillul hashem, desecration of the (Divine) name, which is the opposite of kiddush hashem, sanctification of the (Divine) name in martyrdom. Martyrdom implies agency and choice; the girls choose death over sexual violation or prostitution. The liturgy emphasizes this element of choice: the girls are commanded to prepare themselves for the sexual advances of the Nazi soldiers ‘valo mot temutenah’—and if not, they shall die. This language of ultimatum resonates with historical forced conversions—the cross or the stake—of earlier eras, much more than it does with the racially based genocide of Nazi ideology. Moreover, the maidens’ joyous acceptance of martyrdom evokes the figure of Rabbi Akiva, one of the ten martyrs commemorated in Eileh Ezkera, the medieval piyyut (liturgical poem) which it follows or into which it is incorporated in the Yom Kippur liturgy. The piyyut depicts Rabbi Akiva’s torture and his willing acceptance of the pains of martyrdom as God’s will (vehaya mekabel ‘alav ‘ol malkhut shamayim—‘freely accepting the yoke of God’s kingship’).5 As Rabbi Akiva’s students watch him in torment, he explains that, through martyrdom, he can finally fulfill the biblical injunction to love God ‘with all your soul’ (Deut.6:5), understood to mean ‘even if He takes your life’ (afilu notel et nishmatekha). The piyyut draws on the Talmud’s consideration of extreme and unjustified

Martyrdom and gender in Jewish-American Holocaust memory 161 suffering (that is, suffering that cannot be understood as chastisement or punishment for sin). The Talmud terms such suffering yisurim shel ahava, or ‘afflictions of love’. Rabbi Akiva serves as the symbol of such suffering, lovingly inflicted and lovingly accepted.6 In Bavli’s poem, the maidens declare, avadnu elohim bahayim, neda gam lekadesh bamavet shem (we worshipped the Lord in life, we will know, too, to sanctify with death His Name), similarly accepting what must be seen as yisurim shel ahava. In strongly linking the deaths of the ninety-three young women during the Holocaust with traditional Jewish archetypes of martyrdom, The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ provides religious comfort and theological meaning, asserting that, despite the horrors of the Shoah, nothing has changed for the Jewish people. The covenantal relationship between God and Israel remains unaltered and unchallenged by the horrors of the Nazi genocide. Death, atrocity, and the destruction of Jewish lives and Jewish culture in Europe demand no special theological or philosophical explanation, but can be absorbed readily into the continuum of Jewish life and religious practices. But this position, as we shall see, has difficult consequences. While it appears initially that the threat of sexual violation recounted in the liturgy is aimed at the body of the Jewess, the real assault is shown to be against the spirit of the Jew, which triumphs through martyrdom. By extension, all Holocaust victims are martyrs (kedoshim) who die to sanctify the (Divine) name. Traditional participants in the Yom Kippur service would recognize the link between the deaths of these young women and earlier historical and literary martyrs. Moreover, they might categorize sexual violation as an instance of gilui arayot, forbidden sexual relations, one of the three categories of transgressive behavior that one must avoid at all costs, the Talmud instructs, even at the price of one’s life.7 The Talmudic discussion of accepting death rather than transgressing is the earliest extended articulation of the principles of Jewish martyrdom, one I will come back to later. As this liturgical poem sets it up, in defending their sexual purity, the maidens defend against the degradation of Jewish dignity in a context designed to humiliate Jews. The liturgy thus provides an interpretive framework through which to understand and absorb the implications of the Holocaust. While the poem poignantly mourns the premature death of the ninety-three maidens, it celebrates their ultimate purity of body and soul. Finally, for participants in synagogue prayer service, the liturgy serves as catharsis and also as reassurance that Jewish life and Jewish spirituality continue meaningfully past the Shoah and into the present. By invoking the paradigm of Jewish martyrdom, traditionally associated with the choice between death and conversion, the liturgy sees the Holocaust deaths as inherently meaningful, and also as necessary to Jewish continuity. As recounted liturgically, the episode distills the essence of the Shoah into the attempt to violate the sexual chasteness of young Jewish virgins who, instead, die violently and at their own hands. The ninety-three young women whose death glorifies the Divine name symbolically represent all Jewish Holocaust victims. The Jew is thus feminized, and sexual violation becomes a trope for Nazi atrocity generally. At the same time, the poem depicts a gender reversal: the young women are active agents rather than passive victims, opening up the possibility, within constricted circumstances, for a heroic death. Embedded in this story of the suicidal maidens are two truncated, shadow narratives: the unfolding of their future motherhood, which is not permitted to take place, and the enactment of their sexual violation, which is thwarted. That the girls die as virgins underscores both the innocence of the Holocaust victims and the devastation of the Nazi genocide in wiping out future

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generations of Jews. The story links Nazi atrocity with sexual violation in a paradoxical manner: the girls’ deaths are presented both as part of the atrocity and at the same time, as triumph over atrocity. Although The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ was written in Hebrew, depicts a European event, and invokes traditional Jewish tropes and concepts, its liturgical popularity has been largely confined to American liberal Judaism.8 The memorialization of the Holocaust for American Jews differs in many ways from European and Israeli modes of commemoration. There are several reasons for this. The Holocaust did not take place on American soil. When Europeans recollect the events of World War II, whether Jewish or not, they are remembering events that took place locally, on native soil, a part of recent history. The socio-political effects of that war resonate palpably, its traces visible in the postwar European landscape. By contrast, for most Americans, including American Jews, the horrors of the Holocaust took place elsewhere. Nor do American Jews see themselves as owing their existence to the Shoah. Unlike Israeli Jews, for American Jews the Holocaust does not constitute part of a national story of origins—standing neither for the founding of the dominant culture (why America exists) nor for the prototype of ancestral immigration (how Jews reached America). Particularly in the late 1940s, when The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ began to circulate widely, American Jews were at least as likely to identify with the (non-Jewish) American soldiers who fought against Germany and liberated concentration camps, as they were to identify with the European victims of the Nazi genocide. In some measure, the differences from their co-religionists in Israel and Europe distance American Jews from the Holocaust, which becomes both ‘our’ story and not ‘our’ story. This distance offers American Jews a freedom to imagine the Holocaust, faithful perhaps to history, but not bound by memory. Moreover, seen from across the Atlantic, the European events of the war lose geographic and national specificity. Through American eyes, the Holocaust becomes less a story grounded in history, culture, and politics, and more a story about oppression and liberation—a prototypical American story of the forces of good combating the forces of evil. Thus, the story told in The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ holds a certain appeal for American Jews, set in a specific historical time and context but also standing for a type of spiritual resistance, or triumph in defeat, that could take place anywhere, anytime. It brings the Holocaust under the rubric of other formative, identifying and resonant events that occurred in the vague and distant Jewish past—things that happened to Jews ‘before we came to America’. Like all such liturgical uses of history, The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ subsumes a particular historical moment into the continuum of Jewish meaning. Like all stories of origin, these mythic events become ways of asserting or displaying contemporary Jewish values. Rather than solely a part of history, the Holocaust has become significant to American Jews as a civic religion that, along with Zionism, offers a means to articulate ethics and meaningfulness. Seeing its events as fraught with religious crisis and meaning, American Jews are more apt to treat the European catastrophe quasi-theologically than only nationally or politically. As American Jews become increasingly secularized, the memory of the Shoah offers a means to connect with the feelings of spiritual profundity and cosmic meaning traditionally drawn from religious faith and practice. The Martyrdom of the NinetyThree Maidens’ appeals because it enacts an ethical stance even under extreme duress.

Martyrdom and gender in Jewish-American Holocaust memory 163 Moreover, the instance of martyrdom that it represents—death over sexual violation—coincided with American mores about rape during the era when the poem was first introduced into North America. In addition, the spiritual triumph of the dead maidens balanced out the military triumph of the male Israeli soldier, the emblem of Zionism, thereby rounding out the new religious iconography of secular and liberal American Jews. In presenting this possibility for heroic death during the Holocaust, The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ carries forth the implication that rape is too high a price to pay for survival. How would a survivor who had made a different choice—who had endured and survived rape or sexual barter among other Nazi atrocities—how would such a woman feel at a ceremony that invoked the liturgical ideal of The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’? Given contemporary understanding of the dynamics of rape and increased sensitivity about blaming its victims, and given the honoring of sheer survival as a form of resistance against Nazism, the enduring ubiquitousness of the liturgy seems surprising, especially in liberal American congregations whose liturgy features revisions and innovations that reflect contemporary American sensibilities along with traditional Jewish patterns of meaning. The general acceptance of the poem’s sentiments in commemorative ritual suggests, at the very least, an ambivalence about certain gendered strategies for survival, and a reluctance to acknowledge the extent of Nazi atrocity. This ambivalence about sexual atrocity and survival in extremis does not simply reflect a clash between contemporary sensibilities and traditional Jewish ideals, or an imposition of prurient mores on more authentic concepts of Jewish martyrdom. Rather, this ambivalence is already present in the Talmud’s initial development of the concept of martyrdom. Traditional Jewish sources set the boundaries of martyrology, in large measure, by specifying a limited set of transgressions that one must avoid, even at the cost of one’s life. The Talmud designates three such categories of transgression: idolatry, murder, and forbidden sexual relations (gilui arayot).9 This latter category is taken to encompass adultery, which includes sexual relations with a woman married or engaged to another man, as well as incest. The value of preserving one’s life is presumed to be important enough to entail the commission of transgressions not included among the specified three categories.10 The Talmud’s construction of categories of martyrdom are already marked by ambivalence toward sexual violation, signaled by a linguistic interchangeability between the perpetrator and the victim of sexual transgression. This discussion of martyrdom proceeds along two distinct but related trajectories that bear importantly upon one another. The first considers whether one is permitted to save another person from transgressing in these three ways by killing the potential sinner. The second considers whether one must accept one’s own death rather than agree to transgress. For example, one may prevent an act of murder by killing the one intent on committing murder; similarly, if ordered to murder or be killed oneself, one must accept one’s own death rather than submit to coercion. Despite the important principle of preserving life, each of the parallel cases that the talmudic discussions invoke demands that the life of the potential transgressor (whether oneself or another) be forfeited to prevent him from actualizing the act of transgression. However, a certain textual ambiguity arises in with regard to the third category, that of gilui arayot, which has implications for our reading of The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’, and for Jewish-American representations of sexual violation during the Shoah, more generally.

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The Talmud hypothesizes a situation in which a man is about to rape a betrothed woman—that is, a man attempts to commit adultery as defined by biblical law. The text asserts that this potential perpetrator may be killed, not—as the contemporary reader might expect—to save the woman from rape, but to ‘save’ the assailant himself from transgressing. As in the case of the idolater and the murderer, the potential perpetrator’s life must be forfeited precisely in order to prevent his becoming an actual perpetrator. The discussion then elides the question of killing a would-be transgressor into the question of martyrdom, where the same three categories of transgression are evoked, with the phrase that has come to connote martyrdom, yehareg ve‘al ya‘avor, ‘he shall be killed rather than transgress’. However, in the ensuing discussion about the rape of the betrothed woman, there is an unaccountable shift in the gender of the verb, so that she rather than he is the one who must be killed (tehareg rather than yehareg).11 The feminization of the verb seems to suggest not only that one must resist—to the point of death—becoming a perpetrator, but that one must similarly resist falling victim. In other words, a person must die rather than commit murder (that is, he may not assault another person), but a woman must die rather than be raped (that is, she may not be assaulted). There is a difference of agency here. As Aryeh Cohen aptly notes in his analysis of the sugya in question, ‘the murderer has the ability to decide whether he kills or is killed. The maiden is not given the choice’.12 If so, then the injunction tehareg ve‘al ta‘avor—she should die rather than transgress—is a meaningless determinant of behavior. In the move from yehareg to tehareg, the transgression, or sin, or blame, or responsibility thus shifts unaccountably and uncharacteristically to the target of the crime, rather than the culprit. Suddenly it is the potential rape victim who must be saved—or must save herself—even through death. There resides, in this instance, then, a bit of the perpetrator in the victim, a residue of shame and culpability for the transgression. This idea has powerful and disturbing implications for women during the Nazi genocide. At the same time, the Talmud’s discussion here insists that sexual transgression is propelled by male desire and male agency. The text moves to invoke the figure of Queen Esther from the Scroll of Esther, who is not condemned for engaging in forbidden sexual relations with King Ahasuerus. The Scroll of Esther presents its female protagonist as one of the many maidens brought to the king’s harem, with Mordecai as her uncle, while rabbinic tradition casts her in the role of Mordecai’s wife, brought to the palace by force. In either case, Esther must answer to the charge of engaging in forbidden sexual relations— either because she engages in carnal relations with a non-Jew (evoking the ninety-three maidens of the liturgy) or because she commits adultery (as in the case just raised by the Talmud). In any event, because Esther was—in the words of the Talmud—‘like the earth’, karka olam, a passive receptacle for male lust rather than a proactive agent pursuing her own pleasure, she is not considered a transgressor, and not expected to forfeit her life rather than enter into a forced, forbidden relation.13 The instance of Esther is relevant here precisely because the Talmud has just considered generically the case of the betrothed woman, forced into carnal relations with (that is, raped by) a man. Based upon their assessment of Esther’s innocence of sin, one would expect the rabbis not to deem the violated betrothed woman a transgressor, and not to expect that she give up her life rather than endure a forced adulterous union. In other words, unlike the potential perpetrator, the betrothed woman need not be ‘saved’ from transgression at the cost of her life.

Martyrdom and gender in Jewish-American Holocaust memory 165 In the paralleled contexts of martyrdom and preventative killing, these two cases—that of Esther and that of the hypothetical betrothed woman—do not resolve but rather obfuscate the question of whether a woman must die rather than succumb to sexual victimization, particularly one involving a forbidden union. While the textual proximity of the two cases affirms that the rapist, like the murderer, is the true perpetrator, the transgressor who bears ultimate responsibility for the deed, it also leaves open the strong suggestion that the rabbis believe that a Woman should not save her life by succumbing to and enduring rape, especially in the event of adultery and incest.14 Reading ‘The Martyrdom of the NinetyThree Maidens’ against the backdrop of these originary texts on Jewish martyrdom, the liturgical narrative seems to depict a self-sacrifice required by Jewish law.15 While responsa of the war era indicate that one may eat non-kosher food or violate the sanctity of the Sabbath rather than perish, the young women of the poem must remain sexually inviolate at all costs. The insistance, in The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’, on the rightness of death as an alternative to submitting to (and surviving) rape comes out of a traditon that views the possibility of such violation with ambivalence. Used liturgically, Bavli’s poem not only reproduces this attitude. In subsuming the Holocaust into the religious pattern of meaning, the poem demands that the Jewish community view the event depicted through this lens. However, the set of texts and interpretations that The Martyrdom of the NinetyThree Maidens’ invokes has serious and problematic ramifications for Holocaust remembrance. Holding a woman accountable for her own sexual victimization is not a new idea. But importing it into the realm of Nazi atrocity is startling, and has made it difficult to bring the experiences of some women into the compass of Holocaust discussion. Instead of an open and measured discussion, a polarized set of representations has emerged in the popular American discourse about the Holocaust. On the other hand, this idealized narrative of chaste martyrdom has become a singularly important component of liturgical and commemorative ritual. On the one hand, a set of eroticized tropes of Nazi atrocity has developed in literature, film and popular culture. Seemingly in diametric opposition, both depictions of women under Nazism function to displace the real experiences of violence, transmuting the horror of atrocity into images that become at the same time titillating and sanctimonious. When portrayed in film, for example, the eroticized female victim of Nazi atrocity permits the viewer to condemn the evil perpetrator, all the while sharing the erotically charged cinematic gaze. For instance, Alan Pakula’s film Sophie’s Choice, based on William Styron’s novel, centers on a beautiful young woman, victimized by the Nazi regime. Sophie’s past anguish continues into the present Brooklyn, in the form of suicidal depression; knowledge of her past adds to the mysterious allure of exotic attraction she holds for men who meet her after the war. As the film depicts it, the male protagonist’s loss of sexual innocence is coupled with a knowledge of Nazi evil. Stephen Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List presents the Jewish woman victim as the alluring dark beauty of European literature. According to Nazi propaganda, which draws on older European antisemitic stereotypes, the Jewish woman’s visual loveliness veils the hidden repulsiveness of race. The Jewess tempts Aryan men into the crime of miscegenation, Rassenschande, whose monstrous offspring make visible the Jewess’s true ugliness. Imagining a Jewess who tempts men into liaisons with dangerous consequences, Nazi propaganda thus depicts Jewish women as the agents of their own sexual violation. The sexual appetite of the Jewish woman, rather than the desire of the Aryan man for the forbidden Jewess,

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is imagined as the cause for forced sexual performance. The Jewess is portrayed as longing for the Aryan man, even aggressively entrapping him, while he is envisioned as the victim of the encounter. Spielberg’s film depicts the internalization of this aspect of Nazi propaganda in the relationship between Amon Goeth, the Kommandant of a concentration camp, and Helen Hirsch, the beautiful Jewish prisoner pressed into service as his household slave. Goeth yearns for Hirsch, imagining her ‘in [her] loneliness’ desiring him, but fears the consequences of such a liaison. Schindler’s List adeptly exposes this mixture of attraction, fear and revulsion through the relationship between the Kommandant and his prisoner and through the viewer’s constant anticipation of Hirsch’s sexual violation, endlessly deferred.16 In its most extreme form, the image of the eroticized victim characterizes a subgenre of the pornography industry which utilizes the Holocaust as an exotic setting for sado-masochistic explorations. Unlike such Nazi-themed pornography whose purpose is solely to titillate, these more mainstream works incorporate the figure of the eroticized female victim into an aesthetic strategy intended to memorialize, grieve, and pity the victims. At the same time, the titillation inherent in such eroticized imagery constitutes an integral aspect of this aesthetic strategy, contributing importantly to its resonance and power. When I began a research project that entailed examining texts and testimonies by women survivors and diaries of women victims to see whether there were experiences and perceptions unique to women during the Nazi genocide, I did not come upon very much explicit discussion of sexual violation. However, whenever I presented aspects of this work on women and the Holocaust, whether to academic or to more general North American audiences, the first question I would be asked would inevitably raise the issue of sexual violation—had Jewish women been raped in the camps, in the ghettoes, in the streets, programatically, as part of Nazi atrocity? At first, the questions caught me by surprise, because my early work focused on the experiences and consequences of pregnancy and motherhood for Jewish women under Nazi persecution. Mostly men, but also women, would pose these questions, and I did not know the answers. Since I had read a wide range of Holocaust remembrances, conducted personal interviews, and viewed videotaped testimonies, the very fact that I could not answer the questions was in and of itself interesting. I consulted several historians of the Nazi era, who assured me succinctly and decisively that Jewish women were not raped because the Nazi racial laws prohibited sexual contact between Aryans and subhumans. Thus, I encountered, on the one hand, widespread popular fascination with the question of sexual violation, and, on the other hand, and equally widespread scholarly reluctance to probe this issue. Why the fascination? In addition to the potential titillation inherent in linking images of violence and sexuality, focusing on sexual violation makes the Holocaust easier to ‘take’. Like motherhood, sexual violation universalizes the experience of Nazi atrocity, making it more accessible to American readers and writers. Further, many of the issues that emerge in survivor writing—the struggle against silence, belated witnessing, mistrust of memory, the duration of trauma—parallel issues which emerge in remembering sexual violation. Moreover, seeing the Holocaust in terms of eros and sexual violation domesticates the Holocaust, and diminishes its radical horror to a more common horror. Why the scholarly reluctance? In some measure, it emerges from the difficulty in addressing this topic without inviting prurient gazes. Holocaust museums struggle with

Martyrdom and gender in Jewish-American Holocaust memory 167 how—and whether—to display photographs and films of naked victims. An exhibition at Yad Vashem of photographs of Jewish women forced to disrobe moments before mass slaughter brought forth a strong rabbinic protest. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has designed its permanent exhibition in a way that shields unwary or unwilling viewers from film footage of such scenes, and underscores the delicacy. Like other aspects of the Holocaust, evidence of and testimony about sexual violation should not be suppressed. How can it be represented without recreating the offense, without again exposing these women to the gaze of strangers? What are the ethics and the limits of representing sexual violation during the Shoah? From its onset, the trope of the eroticized female Holocaust victim has characterized men’s more than women’s writing. In memoirs and in fiction, women survivors have been traditionally silent for the most part about experiences of a sexual nature linked to the Nazi genocide. In recent years, however, women’s writing about the Holocaust—by survivors and by others —has come increasingly to take on this imagery, to interrogate it, to move in a different direction. Contemporary American women’s fiction about the Holocaust, for example, explores and challenges the ways that our culture has come to imagine and recollect the events of the Nazi genocide, in terms of the connection between eros and atrocity, violence and desire, sexuality and victimization. At the same time, the most recent wave of women survivors’ memoirs has shown increased willingness to explore aspects of sexual behavior and sexual atrocity during the Nazi genocide, pushing past the last taboo of Holocaust memory. Both these fictional and nonfictional representations challenge the popularized female tropes of Holocaust representation at the same time that they propel us toward a more complex consideration of the ethics of representing eros and sexual violation in the context of the Holocaust. Early Holocaust fiction by women, for the most part, avoided the issues of sexual atrocity and sexuality. In fiction by women survivors, the representation of women corresponded to the range of actual experiences under the Nazi genocide—including acts of resistance, survival strategies, ethical struggles, bereavement, the corrosive effects of atrocity on the relationship to one’s family, one’s community, one’s past, one’s memory—rather than having women iconographically represent eros. The four women in the central ‘makeshift family’ of Ilona Karmel’s 1969 novel An Estate of Memory, for example, band together to keep one another alive under the crushing conditions of camp life. Karmel’s realistic prose charts the effects of starvation and disease on their bodies and their spirits.17 Collectively and individually, the women struggle with the implications of atrocity on memory, identity, ethics. A shared purpose unifies them: one of the four is secretly pregnant, and the others wish to protect her, deliver her baby, and smuggle it to safety outside the camp. Briefly, one of Karmel’s protagonists contemplates the erotic forces that might have brought her pregnant fellow-concentrationee to this dangerous state. In the ghetto and in hiding, the cries of an infant put others at risk; in the camps, pregnant mothers were selected for immediate death. Knowing this, the protagonist is repulsed by her companion’s condition—not by the possibility that the woman may have been raped, but by the thought that her condition is the product of her own undisciplined desire. When the protagonist learns that the woman became pregnant on the eve of her husband’s murder in an attempt to comfort him and quell his fears, her revulsion melts away. Like every other behavior in Karmel’s novel, sexual behavior is seen in context and through the prism of ethics.

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Written during a period of ten years, Karmel’s novel emerges out of her own intense plunge into Holocaust memory. By contrast, fiction by American-born women writers emerges out of encounters with Holocaust survivors or with other texts, and also in an engagement with the ways in which the Holocaust has been absorbed into American culture. One way or another, then, their writings have frequently responded to the image of the eroticized victim, exploring aspects of voyeurism, pornography, and sexual violence. For example, Norma Rosen’s 1969 novel Touching Evil displaces the erotic imagery from the female Holocaust victim onto the American women who watch the Eichmann trial on television, at a safe distance from atrocity.18 In Touching Evil Rosen explores the implications of the Holocaust for those not directly involved through the responses of Jean, a non-Jewish American woman who has been seared by the knowledge of the Holocaust. A university student, Jean learns about the Nazi genocide when her sociology professor seduces her in his office and shows her photographs of the deathcamps. Rosen explains elsewhere, ‘I made the moment of discovery the precise moment of sexual seduction, almost of intercourse itself, so that everything should be open and the appearance of penetration complete’.19 In her sexual encounter, Jean touches evil—that is, takes inside of her the knowledge of the Holocaust, along with her sexual partner. This twofold knowing—of evil, of sexuality—resonates with the early chapters of Genesis where the first man and woman eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, become sexually aware for the first time, and realize that the world has changed irrevocably. They toil, procreate, plunge into human history and mortality. Jean, too, encounters eros and the knowledge of evil simultaneously, and her world, too, changes irrevocably. As a result of touching evil, of taking inside herself the knowledge of the Holocaust, Jean decides never to bear children. Moreover, the coupling of seduction with the exhibition of graphic photographs of Nazi violence links the professor’s sexual pleasure with voyeurism. The professor exhibits the photos as a mark of his ethical sensibility, but they also become part of his arsenal of seduction. Rosen’s novel carefully avoids eroticizing the victims of Nazi atrocity. Two images described in the novel which come to symbolize the Holocaust are of a woman survivor of a mass slaughter clawing her way out from a mound of corpses, and of a woman in labor at the foot of a concentration camp guard. In the professor’s photographs and in those shown on television as part of the coverage of the Eichmann trial, the Holocaust victims are depicted as anguished, tormented beyond comprehension, with emaciated bodies which testify to atrocity and genocide. Jean, however, seduced in the presence of these photographs and later raped by a young man she tries to help, comes to represent the mark of the Holocaust as sexual violation. The loss of innocence engendered by touching evil is symbolized by a profound loss of sexual innocence, and by a sexuality which becomes severed from love and from procreative capacities. When I cautiously floated the question of representing sexual atrocity to several women survivors with whom I had been in conversation, their responses opened on complicated and nuanced sets of issues, encompassing sexual violation as well as the more broad topic of sexual behavior during the war years. In recent years, a spate of memoirs by women survivors have been published that also begin to explore these issues, not without ambivalence. Why are these remembrances only now emerging? The belatedness of these narratives stems in part from the realization that as the survivor generation ages, any part of their history left untold will die with them. As survivors in their sixties and seventies engage in

Martyrdom and gender in Jewish-American Holocaust memory 169 the psychic labor of geriatric reconciliation to life as lived, the unresolved past pushes its way into memory and narrative. Moreover, as husbands die, widows feel freer to relate remembered episodes that might embarrass or appall their husbands. In the decades immediately following the war, most survivors threw themselves into the monumental effort to get on with life, to rebuild the lost home, the lost family, the lost center, not to dwell upon past suffering. In particular, the social mores of the 1940s and 1950s were not conducive to speaking publicly (or even privately) about sexual activity and sexual violation. Feelings of shame and even guilt, added to fear of diminishing a woman’s social status and marriageability, and mitigated against a public airing of this topic long after Holocaust survivor testimony entered the public forum. In particular, narratives that emerge from the gray zone, to use Primo Levi’s term, introduce moral ambiguities very different from the sureties of The Martrydom of the NinetyThree Maidens’, ambiguities not sought as Jewish communities struggled to grapple with the utter decimation and collective trauma of the Nazi genocide. One example of narrating the gray zone, Fanya Heller’s recent memoir, Strange and Unexpected Love, describes a sexual liaison between the author as a teenager and Jan, a Ukranian militia man who rescued her and her family.20 While the relationship is portrayed as an affair of the heart, reciprocal and loving, there are sufficient indications that place it in political context— she without the right to live, he with the right to grant or take her life. This imbalance, of course, precludes any real mutuality. As the repeated urging of her parents to be ‘nice’ to Jan remind us, ‘love’ was a viable currency in the genocidal economy. Heller’s memoir suggests that accounts of sexual violation and erotic transactions during the Holocaust are strongly underrepresented in the narratives of women survivors. Heller’s aunt, for example, was raped by a German soldier. But she decided to tell only a few family members. Many years later, the aunt excluded that episode from the memories she transmitted to her children. Under less extreme circumstances, it would not be unusual for a woman to decide to keep silent about a rape or other sexual violation—indeed, until very recently, such secrecy has been the norm. However it is significant that here, in the context of ongoing atrocity, rape should still be considered a thing apart from other forms of torture and humiliation, memories that the aunt does transmit to her children. Indeed, the family’s oral history contains deeply shameful episodes, such as Heller’s grandfather’s betrayal of his wife’s hiding place during a roundup in an attempt to save his own life. The family’s transmission of the Holocaust encompasses even this episode, but apparently cannot absorb the memory of a rape. Other remembrances of sexual violation may be suppressed because they implicate not only Nazis and other antisemites as perpetrators, but also expose ambiguities in the behavior of Jewish men, who, while victims themselves of Nazi atrocity, may have also behaved opportunistically and reprehensibly. Morris Wyszogrod, a Jewish artist who spent the war in the Warsaw Ghetto and a series of concentration camps, recollects that, despite dire deprivations in the ghetto, his family would not permit his sister to work or to stray far from home. The outside world was simply too dangerous for a young girl. There were even cases where Jewish policemen would go into an apartment and rape a girl. Germans would often come into the Jewish sector to have a little fun and they would rape and kill.21

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Heller’s narrative presents a far less neat picture than that of The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’, primarily because of the ongoing ambivalence regarding the relationship with Jan. As in the case of the young Beis Yaakov girls, the events of the Nazi genocide occur simultaneously with Fanya’s sexual awakening as a teenager. Unlike the seminary girls, depicted as choosing a martyr’s death over forbidden sexual relations, Fanya enters into an intense love affair with a Ukrainian militia man who protects her and her entire family at great personal risk and considerable loss of stature in his family and among his community. Unlike the transactional sex depicted in Ida Fink’s short story ‘Aryan Papers’,22 where a teenaged girl offers up her virginity to a scornful and callous man in return for false documents that may save her and her mother’s lives, or Agnieska Holland’s film Angry Harvest, where a Jewish wife and mother accepts the unwanted sexual overtures of the Polish farmer who hides her, Fanya finds their erotic encounters exhilarating and comforting. ‘Love-making surprised me: it felt so right, the only right thing in a time of madness’ (139). Their relationship, as she recollects it, is not an exchange of commodities—sex for protection—but one tenderly nurtured and patiently awaited. There was something between Jan and me that transcended the physical: we had been allied, entwined, intimately involved with each other for over a year before we made love’ (160). In that sense, Heller presents their intimacy as a private and contained world, removed from the horrors occurring outside of it. This feeling of remove is reinforced by descriptions of the places where their love-making occurs: closed spaces, barns, garrets. At the same time, however, one cannot really remove their intimacy from the political context in which it crystallizes. Were it not for the Nazi genocide, the highly literate and intellectually ambitious Fanya would not relinquish her bookish Jewish suitors for the unlettered Jan. Precisely Jan’s ability to protect her—which is also a power over her, however much Jan may choose not to exercise it—makes of him an object of her desire. Like many young women during the Holocaust, Fanya finds that the attributes that attract educated, urban, middle-class Jewish women to intellectual Jewish men bound for the professions or businesses diminish in importance in circumstances where these men lose the ability to protect themselves and their families.23 Racial laws and public humiliation destroyed the political rights and social stature of all Jews; the machinery of genocide robbed Jews of individual and communal power. The Nazi regime created a radical difference in power between Jews, who no longer had the right to live, and non-Jews, who could turn Jews in, to be killed. Thus, Jan’s ability to protect Fanya veils his commensurate power to betray her to the Nazis. In Heller’s account of their relationship, fear of betrayal is curiously absent as a motivation to accept his sexual overtures. Indeed, the narrative takes great pains to downplay any sense of threat in Jan’s presence by subtly feminizing him. In his initial encounter with Fanya, he acquires food for her family from the marketplace, an act of nurturance traditionally female. While Jan is Fanya’s first lover, his lovemaking is so gentle she cannot locate the precise moment when their love is consummated, as though penetration lies outside the realm of their sexual relationship. ‘Jan was very gentle, careful not to rush me, passion so well anointed with affection that during those first three days of our intimacy I could not say precisely when I had stopped being a virgin’ (159). While Jan appears frequently in military uniform, his distinguishing physical characteristic is the missing upper joints of two of his fingers, lost in a machine accident. Indeed, Heller posits both elements in her description of Fanya’s

Martyrdom and gender in Jewish-American Holocaust memory 171 first glimpse of Jan. The Ukranian appears, amid the turmoil of the market, as a ‘tall man with a rifle and wearing the armband of the Ukrainian militia’ (64); Fanya immediately notes ‘that his ring and pinkie fingers were missing: the two knobs where knuckles and fingertips should have been looked forlorn’ (64). If a man under the Reich is defined by his power to kill, which is also a power to command or coerce sexual compliance, Jan’s manhood is compromised by his dismembered fingers, symbolically a displaced castration and also, perhaps, a symbolic circumcision. Thus the narrative attempts to equalize the relationship between Fanya and Jan by equalizing their desire, and by introducing a gender ambiguity that diminishes the image of his manhood—manhood which, in this context, is indistinguishable from the ability to murder Jews. Notwithstanding the narrative’s attempt to neutralize the potential threat that Jan may pose to Fanya and her family, a trace of the coercive possibilities in their relationship also emerges. The social and ethnic distinctions between the educated, middle-class, Jewish Fanya and the illiterate peasant Jan would have made their relationship unthinkable before the war. Their religious differences would have rendered their liaison not merely socially unacceptable for Fanya, but transgressive. While circumstances conspire to make him desirable to Fanya, her parents regard the relationship with painful ambiguity. Aware that the survival of the family may hinge on Jan’s continued attraction to Fanya, and yet unhappy that their teenage daughter has become sexually active—and in particular with a non-Jew—they strike a necessary devil’s bargain, commodifying their daughter’s sexuality. Their repeated admonitions to Fanya to be ‘nice’ to Jan encourage the development of an acquaintanceship into a friendship into a sexual relationship in order to keep her alive. ‘Be nice…. When [Fanya’s father] said it several more times I began to wonder what he meant. I was nice to Jan, same as to any other guest’ (67). Simultaneously, Fanya discerns in them signs of disapproval. Frequently they imply that some gift to Fanya once belonged to another Jew and was acquired by force or exploitation, even if not by Jan directly. In this light, their daughter resembles these valuable items, available cheaply on the black market or free for the taking because of the dire circumstances of the owner. Sometimes what Fanya sees as signs of parental disapproval turn out to be expressions of anguish about other events, which Fanya misinterprets as reflections on her behavior. For example, after she and Jan become lovers, she sees her parents tearful and assumes they are distraught that she is no longer a virgin. The corners of [her father’s] mouth were drawn in so that he looked as if he might burst into tears. It meant he knew I had been intimate with Jan’ (145). As it turns out, an entirely different matter upsets her parents. This shame, then, that Fanya sees in her parents’ demeanor is actually a projection of her own shame—formed from an amalgam of her own burgeoning sexual desires, the inappropriateness of her partner, and the unacknowledged sense of the erotic economy in which she transacts. Once the war ends, the context in which Fanya views Jan shifts. The inequalities between them become newly visible as their cultural differences stand in sharp relief. Jan’s family has always been deeply antisemitic; to marry him would be to live among people who desired her death, ‘a lone Jew among Ukrainians, who hated and had murdered my people’ (275). At the family gatherings that she attends, they drink excessively and serve blood sausages. These cultural habits belatedly reveal the differences in circumstance that enabled the wartime liaison between Jan and Fanya. In retrospect, Fanya cannot separate

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that relationship from the political context in which it developed, cannot divorce Jan from the genocidal movement that empowered him. In imagery that resonates uncannily with the ‘black milk’ of Paul Celan’s famous poem about the death camp, ‘Todesfugue’, Fanya envisions the baby she would bear him, were they to marry: ‘I was myself holding a baby to my breast, and my breast and the baby were black with the ashes of their murdered relatives. Black milk came out of my breast’ (275). Although, years later, from the retrospective stance of half a century, the narrator still maintains, ‘I know that no one would ever love me as much as he did’ (274), Fanya can no longer see him apart from the cultural values that enfold him. Were she to accept his marriage proposal, she would feel like the biblical Esther after the crisis has been resolved, forced to cohabit with the drunken king of an alien nation. The ambiguities that run through Heller’s narrative run counter to the heroic martyrdom depicted in The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’. Heller’s memoir depicts survival and continuity after the Nazi genocide, while the liturgical piece depicts violent, mass death, ‘The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ emerges, in many ways, as more comforting, and Strange and Unexpected Love as more unsettling. Another reason for the recent emergance of Holocaust memoirs treating issues of sexual violation and sexual behavior during the war pertains to the changing American audience. Rather than ‘pure’ and unmediated testimony, survivor narratives are shaped as much by listener’s expectations as by the inner impulses of the teller.24 Judith Magyar Isaacson, for example, began writing Seed of Sarah: Memoirs of a Survivor25 after lecturing at a university in Maine about the Holocaust and her own survival. A woman attending her talk asked whether Isaacson had been raped. The woman posed the question not in response to any particular detail in Isaacson’s talk, but out of a sense of identification with the nineteenyear-old Jutka Magyar in Auschwitz. ‘Nineteen, like me…Dean Isaacson, were you raped in the camps?’ (ix). Picturing herself in the other woman’s situation, the younger woman thinks of the worst physical and emotional assault she can imagine. Thus, while in earlier years women may have felt internal and external pressures to be silent about sexual remembrances, in recent years the impediments have diminished while the interest has increased and been legitimated. Prompted by the teenager’s question, Isaacson depicts a world beset by a constant fear of rape—a fear that seems to override the ultimate threat of genocide. Isaacson recollects being warned repeatedly about Jewish women violently violated or forced into prostitution—indeed, urged by an uncle to ‘Risk your life to escape a girls’ transport’ (53) because Jewish girls were taken as prostitutes. As a result, As for me, I feared rape more than death and I decided to take some poison with me’ (47). In a moment resonant with ‘The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’, the idea of risking one’s life escalates to taking one’s life in order to escape sexual violation. Similarly in Heller’s narrative, her consensual relationship with Jan notwithstanding, fear of sexual violation pervades the description of the Nazi incursion into daily life. Fanya repeatedly hides from a German soldier who comes calling on her drunkenly, eventually raping her aunt instead. Other examples of sexual menace and sexual atrocity pervade the narrative. Although neither narrative depicts a sexual violation of the adolescent who survived and now narrates the memoir, both narratives depict lives sexually menaced and compromised. In Isaacson’s memoir, when a German officer comes in to inspect the young Jutka’s family’s furniture pending confiscation, the narrative affect is of sexual violation.

Martyrdom and gender in Jewish-American Holocaust memory 173 Although the manifest level deals only with material belongings, the intrusion into their house and the violation of their space is presented as a narrative equivalent of rape. The officer inspects the room pronouncing it ‘very clean’, and the women inside it, Jutka and her mother, ‘clean Jews’. The pronouncement anticipates a later moment at the work camp at Lichtenau where the Kommandant requests the kapo to ‘find me a clean girl’ (89) to serve as his scrubwoman, and Jutka fears she has been selected to service him sexually. The mother has been depicted throughout the narrative as associated with her house and with an obsessive concern for its cleanliness. As women’s space, as this particular woman’s space, the intrusion into the house is also an intrusion into her. The man touches the furniture, stares intently and menacingly at Judit, while his leashed dog strains threateningly toward the mother. Finally, the man releases the dog, who bites the daughter in full view of the mother, drawing blood—‘the dog’s fangs penetrated’, Isaacson recollects (59). After the man’s departure, neither woman speaks as the mother dresses the daughter’s wound: ‘She didn’t say a word, didn’t even ask if I was in pain, didn’t hug me or kiss me as she usually did when I was hurt’ (59). The unnatural silence suggests both unspeakable atrocity and the shame of rape. Like Heller’s coming of age during the Nazi genocide, Isaacson’s wartime experiences and fears find expression in terms of sexual assault. In one of her earliest recollections of the Holocaust, her antisemitic high school history teacher ‘seemed to get a perverse enjoyment out of spouting obscenities at the Jewish girls’ (12). On the cattle car to Auschwitz, her nightmare about arriving at a mass killing in the forest frames genocide in explicitly sexual terms: ‘To my left, a line of girls—all nude—with swollen breasts and pregnant bellies’. When she awakens, she immediately thinks, ‘Would I be raped? Buried alive? A girls’ transport! How to escape it?’ (61). Her initiation into Auschwitz she experiences, too, as sexual assault: A voice barked: “Spread your legs!” A razor moved into my crotch’ (67). Later, when an SS officer punishes her, ‘His stiff boot kicked me in the crotch. The excruciating pain in my most private flesh unnerved me completely’ (112). What transpires for Isaacson and the women who accompany her, however, is a violation of a different nature—not rape, as the narrator fears, but the utter and violent erasure of the women’s womanhood. The women discover that their initiation into the camp—the shaving of their hair—unwomans them. When Jutka’s mother first approaches her after being shorn, the girl recoils from her embrace. ‘Her pretty face was transformed by the shorn skull: the features stronger, more masculine. Was it a mere hair style that made her feminine? “Jutka”, said mother, glaring at my scalp, “you look like a boy”’(67). In a letter written soon after liberation, dated 9 September 1945 and reproduced in the book’s appendix, Isaacson conveys a sense of this gender erasure: ‘Our heads were shaved quite bold. Without hair even in womenclothes, everybody looked man. For two days we couldn’t get accustomed to it and we always told each other –please, Mr. or –hallo, my little boy’ (174–5). The shaving itself is experienced, then, not only as a sexual violation, but also as the feminine equivalent of castration, robbing them of their femaleness, unwomanning them. Further, experiencing themselves in the camp casts an appalling retrospective on the women they had been. In front of the barracks, Jutka notices an attractive young woman smeared with thick blood, some of it still flowing, most of it caked. The messy paste covered her shaven crotch, trickling along the inner thighs…. Her bunched-up skirt

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was soaking it up—a loathsome bandage. That’s what we are, I shuddered, under the clean clothes and modest panties, that’s what I have been. (71–2) The description captures the debasement of menstruation without adequate hygienic means. It also conveys a gender wounding, one might say an inverse circumcision, making Jutka’s femaleness loathsome in her own eyes. The strong sense of unwomanning conveyed by the narrative is sometimes at odds with the narrative insistence on the threat of rape at all times. On the one hand, the absence of carnal knowledge, and the erasure of signs of Jewish womanness is presented as part of the Nazi genocidal machinery. A female German guard in the work camp tells Jutka of ‘the Fuhrer’s decree…. No men. No Sex. No seed of Sarah’ (108). The published memoir takes its title from this pronouncement. On the other hand, the narrative frequently depicts the fear of rape as more overwhelming than the fear of death. When Jutka believes that she has been given over to the Lichtenau Kommandant to serve as his sexual slave, she fears rape and pregnancy, not a brutal murder, and wonders, ‘Do women inherit memories of rape?’ (90). Imaginatively allying herself with historical and literary raped women, she thinks, ‘Not some mythical figure but I, Jutka Magyar, would be raped tonight’ (91). Curiously, given the genocidal intent of the Nazi war against the Jews—a purpose largely realized in parts of Europe—Jutka also sees her salvation in this potential role as Kommandant’s mistress. ‘Of course, there was and always will be a way for captured women to avert death: by becoming concubines’. Recollecting her schooling and reading before the war, she turns to what she sees as the lessons of history: The enemy raped and plundered, they slaughtered the men and took all the women and children hostage’ (91). In the context of the Nazi genocide, this evocation seems curious and something of an ahistorical transposition. While some genocidal actions are enacted on the basis described, with only the men killed and the women’s reproductive capacities appropriated by the perpetrators, the Nazi genocide targeted all Jews for murder.26 In some measure, this insistence on sexual violation as the ultimate atrocity in Isaacson’s memoir may emerge out of what the author describes as the initial impetus for its writing, a question posed by a contemporary young woman seeking to understand’s the survivor’s experiences in terms of her own American life. Immediately following the war, however, powerful pressure was applied to suppress memories of sexual violation and to reforge one’s past. Soon after the war, Fanya Heller’s mother exhorts her to reinvent her life, to erase Jan from narrative if not from memory. In this, Heller’s mother echoes the father’s earlier promise: that after the war the slate would be wiped blank, the past would be buried: ‘In Paris no one will know. You’ll be clean, I promise you’ (160). The mother’s urgency suggests a sense of sexual shame on behalf of her daughter, but also for herself as party to an unsavory but necessary exchange. After all, not only Fanya’s life but her own and that of Fanya’s brother may be said to have been purchased through the sacrifice of her daughter’s virginity, although Fanya herself does not see the relationship in those terms. Ida Fink portrays such bald exchanges in her short story, ‘Aryan Papers’, which recounts the encounter between ‘the girl’, who wishes to obtain false documents for herself and her mother, and ‘the man’, who has it in his power to obtain them.27 The story emphasizes the girl’s youth, hunger, and sexual inexperience. She looks ‘like a child’ (64) who is ‘too thin and too short’ for a sixteen-year-old (65); she trembles

Martyrdom and gender in Jewish-American Holocaust memory 175 in fear at the man’s approach, and contemplates vomiting, to curtail his desire for her. The man ‘like[s] to help people. Everybody wants to live’ (65). He sets the price of her life. Immediately after their transaction, he tells his friend she is ‘just a whore’ (67). The starkness of Fink’s narrative, and the closing image of the story—two men chortling over the situation of a Jewish girl who is both a virgin and whore, makes clear that this transaction must be seen as part of the univers concentrationnaire—the concentrationary universe, the world set into motion by the Nazi genocide—a continuation of the girl’s victimization, not an instance of her moral failings. In addition, as Fanya realizes, public knowledge of the affair diminishes her value as a marriage partner after the War. When she repulses the sexual overtures of a suitor, he complains ‘You had a goy. Why not me?’ (245). Her future husband tells her,’ “You know…if you tell me that you’re a virgin, I’ll buy you the nicest Persian lamb coat”. I told him, “You can save yourself the coat”. He said nothing more and never asked me about Jan not then and not ever, and I respected him for this’ (278). After her husband’s death, many years later, Fanya’s children discourage her from publishing her memoir. ‘Think of your grandchildren’, they reproach her. The author reports that friends of long standing snub her after publication; congregants in the New York synagogue where she and her husband had been members for decades avoid her. The implied negative judgment of Fanya’s wartime behavior is twofold: if Fanya did not love Jan, then she prostituted herself; if she did love him, she consorted with the enemy. In either event, Heller’s case is judged without reference to the extenuating circumstances of the Holocaust, which demanded extreme responses. While the fact of survival is itself referred to as an act of resistance against the forces of genocide, while forgery, theft, even killing are understood as necessary tactics, Fanya’s survival strategy is condemned. In part, this may be due to the wish of the Jewish community to see itself as whole again after the unspeakable trauma of the Holocaust. The irreversibility of the loss of virginity, then, offers the unwanted implication that the body of Israel is no longer intact, that the effect of these losses similarly cannot be reversed. Moreover, the debasement of the sexually violated woman or the one who trades sexual favors becomes a symbol for the lingering sense of psychological debasement that Holocaust survivors and their progeny wish to leave in the past. While other forms of Holocaust atrocity seem unthinkable in the present world of the survivor, sexual violence continues, and may seem, in retrospect, more ordinary— merely shameful and hence, inexcusable. In recent years, in addition to memoirs by women Holocaust survivors, women fiction writers have begun to grapple with the question of how one develops an ethical mode of representing sexual violation during the Holocaust—a representation, in other words, that does not serve to titillate the reader or viewer or listener by eroticizing or shaming the victim. Sheri Szeman, for example, juxtaposes the narrative of the perpetrator with that of the victim in her 1993 novel The Kommandant’s Mistress, which first reproduces then interrupts the eroticization of the Jewish woman victim.28 The novel presents first the erotic memories of a camp Kommandant, and then the anguished memories of the Jewish woman who functioned as his sexual slave in order to survive. None of the other characters in the novel refer to the Jewish inmate by name. They call her the Kommandant’s ‘mistress’ or, more crudely, his ‘whore’. The Kommandant’s wife, jealous of her husband’s compulsive philandering, is disgusted by the prisoner’s Jewish-

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ness. A group of Jewish prisoners jealously accuse their fellow prisoner of enjoying a plush existence as she services the Kommandant for her own pleasure. The Kommandant’s adjutant, appalled by the Kommandant’s violation of the laws of Rassenschande, himself lusts after the Kommandant’s mistress, and rapes her when the Kommandant is not around. Even the Kommandant’s best friend begs to ‘have’ her ‘just once’. The sexually charged moments in the Kommandant’s narrative invite the reader to share in his titillation, just as the camerawork in Schindler’s List invites the viewer to participate in Amon Goeth’s lascivious gaze at Helen Hirsch. Against the Kommandant’s erotic memories and the harsh judgments of other characters stands the woman’s own narrative, where she names herself. By focusing on her own physical sensations at the Kommandant’s headiest moments, Rachel’s narrative disrupts the erotic pleasure of the Kommandant’s text. The Kommandant’s erotic narrative focuses on his own sensations of desire and pleasure. These erotic encounters take place in small, closed spaces—a concentration camp guardhouse, the Kommandant’s study. The isolation of the closed rooms symbolizes the way the Kommandant has cordoned off his relationship with this so-called ‘mistress’ from the rest of his life, so that he can imagine their relationship as lovingly reciprocal. I rubbed my cheek against her face and throat as I stretched my body along hers. I wrapped my arms around her and hugged her to me, my knee sliding between her legs. She closed her eyes… I covered her face and throat with kisses. I held her breasts in my hands and I kissed them… I pressed her onto her back, and her thighs were soft on either side of mine…. I brushed the back of her thighs and lifted her hips…. I wanted her to sigh my name against my chest and throat…. I was happy. (91–2) By contrast, Rachel’s memories of those encounters reveal not only the physical pain she experiences, but also place these encounters in the context in which they occur, the Nazi genocide, the death camps. As he undid his pants, he leaned against me, his mouth open and wet and stinking of alcohol. He pressed me hard against the desk…. He pushed against me until I was flat on the desk. When he got on top of me, I turned my head away, toward the window. Outside, in the camp’s yard, rows of men, women, and children stood, naked, waiting to go into showers. The chimneys belched out the black smoke that had been their comrades, and the smoke hung in palls over the shivering Jews. They clung to each other for warmth, or used their hands to hide their nakedness from the soldiers who walked slowly back and forth, their rifles ready. The Kommandant’s fingers dug into me as he thrust, and he rubbed his face against my cheek. He hadn’t shaved. His shoulder jammed my chin…. If I said his name, he would cry out and be done. (176–7) The Kommandant’s catalogue of erotic pleasures maintains the fiction that his desire represents hers, as well. In Rachel’s narrative, on the other hand, a series of physically unpleasant sensations make clear that her participation is forced rather than desired: the hard desk top, the Kommandant’s alcohol breath, the roughness of his unshaved face, his

Martyrdom and gender in Jewish-American Holocaust memory 177 hard fingers. Moreover, these sensations are juxtaposed with the sounds and sights of the deathcamp. Similarly, other moments in her narrative note the sensation of ‘his gloved fingers’ on her thighs, the metal buttons of his uniform gouging her belly, marking him as an SS officer and making clear that his status as such is integral to their sexual encounter. Simultaneous to these encounters, she notes the sounds of ‘the rattle of machine guns… the barking of dogs’, babies and mothers screaming (139–40). In contrast to the jealous prisoners who imagine her ‘living a good life, there in his office’ (154), Rachel’s narrative reveals the inside of the Kommandant’s office to be a continuation of the outside, the deathcamp. In presenting Rachel’s sensations and perceptions, the novel deliberately deeroticizes her behavior. Unlike the poem about the ninety-three maidens, which implicates survival of sexual violation in transgressive practices and thus in an act of hillul ha-shem, a desecration of the Divine, The Kommandant’s Mistress makes clear that the reader is not to judge Rachel’s compliance. Choosing to endure, choosing even to invite the Kommandant’s assaults is no worse than enduring starvation, beatings, selections, and other tools of the Nazi genocide. Rachel’s nakedness in the Kommandant’s office links her to the ‘rows of men, women and children… waiting to go into the showers’, and her torment must be understood as continuous with theirs. Thus, The Kommandant’s Mistress traps the voyeuristic reader. The dual narratives— the Kommandant’s, then the woman’s—first titillate the reader but then expose the reader’s own acquiescence to the combination of eros, violence and victimization. In addition to complicating our ideas about sexual atrocity, then, Szeman’s novel also intensifies our understanding of the ethics of representing sexual violence. The sequential narratives alert us to the dangers of such representations—that the retelling of stories of rape and sexual violation may serve, for some audiences, to eroticize victims, thereby in some measure reenacting the initial atrocity. The novelistic structure works against such a voyeurism, employing frequent and abrupt timeshifts which leave the reader disoriented, and radically fragment the Kommandant’s and Rachel’s memories. As the reader becomes involved in a narrative moment, the action pivots on a key sentence that abruptly shifts to another place, another time, other characters. These shifts function in several ways. They diffuse or puncture the reader’s sense of titillation; they discomfit the reader, making the reader aware of the act of reading; they frustrate the reader’s desire for order and closure, which is also a desire to see the narrated rape brought to its climax. The reader’s discomfort thus becomes a discomfort with one’s own acquiescence, one’s own pleasure in voyeuristic violence. Szeman’s novel makes it impossible to sever the voyeuristic pleasure of contemplating the victim from knowledge of—and acquiescence in—her victimization. The image of the ninety-three martyred maidens with which I began has bearing here, implicated not only in its commemorative function but in provoking a kind of forgetting that pulls the actual experiences of women outside of communal memory and knowing. At the time that The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ was first disseminated, and in the decades that followed, Jewish Americans, like their countrymen, were free to imagine onto the historical facts of the Holocaust sets of imagery that conformed to cultural and religious conventions and needs. While Europeans, too, framed wartime memories in a national context, narratives such as The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ would be measured, inevitably, against the complexity of personal memory and experience. These recollections, more grounded in the war and post-war reality, and with the moral ambigui-

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ties that Primo Levi terms the ‘gray zone’, would have clashed strongly with the idealized behavior recounted in the liturgical poem. By contrast, the proclivity of American Jews to see European Jewry nostalgically, as more innocent and more authentically religious, would have lent resonance to the story of the maidens. For this reason, narratives that challenge the gendered tropes of female chastity as heroism put forth in The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ have been received with deep ambivalence. At the same time, an increasing openness toward both survivor memory and women’s narratives has encouraged women to articulate experiences that had remained silenced in the ongoing American discourse about the Holocaust. These emergent narratives are at odds with, but also strangely resonant with, the erotization of the female victim, prevalent in popular representations of the Holocaust, both in Europe and America. In some measure, these memoirs function as a critique of popular gendered images of the Holocaust, authorizing and fueling some of the contemporary novels that take this as their terrain. Like all liturgy, The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ places Jewish experience into known categories of theological meaning, drawing on traditional narrative patterns and archetypes. These elements permit communities to see the events of the Holocaust as continuous with the Jewish past rather than radically ruptured from it. Some synagogues incorporate into the Memorial (Yizkor) Service a version of the memorial prayer El Malei Rahamim that is designed to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, utilizing the language of the traditional prayer for martyrs. Other synagogues use a version of the Mourner’s Kaddish, inserting between that prayer’s Aramaic phrases the names of deathcamps and other killing grounds. These two liturgical responses to the Holocaust do not specify a particular moment or set of circumstances. This creates an openness in the liturgy and in the experience of prayer that allows those praying to see in the prayer a range of Holocaust experiences without feeling drawn into judging or criticizing any one set of experiences. Moreover, while these memorial prayers suggest a range of theological and religious attitudes, they do not demand that participants in commemorative ritual accept a particular theological stance or a specific religious meaning other than the existence of God. This leaves internal space even for arguing with God.29 The prayer reminds survivors that their losses are acknowledged and mourned communally. By contrast, The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ draws its dramatic and rhetorical force from describing a specific, emblematic episode, constructing a narrative whose intertexts invoke particular precedents in specific ways. The woman are presented as exemplary, as paradigmatic of Jewish martyrdom and righteousness. To question the terms of the liturgical composition is to place oneself outside of the liturgical community. For a survivor who may have chosen differently, who may have endured forced or coerced sexual violation, the prayer would stand in accusation, excluding the survivor from the community of those praying. It is not my purpose here to criticize the choice of the seminary girls recounted in the poem, if this event has some basis in history, nor to criticize any other such choice made by victims of Nazi atroicty to die rather than commit an act seen as abhorrent or unacceptable. My concern is with the liturgical reification of this story as depicted in Bavli’s poem, with its treatment of sexual violation as the central (and sometimes the only) emblem of the Holocaust. Liturgy builds upon tradition patterns of Jewish meaning, drawing on an

Martyrdom and gender in Jewish-American Holocaust memory 179 enormous pool of textual possibilities. Different pieces of liturgy make different use of that inheritance. For example, many prayers invoke the Akedah, or the Binding of Isaac, narrated in Genesis 22 and interpreted in myriad Jewish sources. But prayers utilize the Akedah intertext in varying ways—to invoke the principle of zekhut avot (merit of the ancestors) in supplicatory prayers, or to pray for deliverance from oppression (in essence asking that God save the Jewish community from death as He saved Isaac from slaughter), or to give deaths in their own times of crisis religious meaning (asserting that the merit of the Jews has exceeded that of Abraham, for they endured or performed that which Abraham was merely prepared to perform).30 Bavli’s poem chooses from a range of textual and archetypal possibilities in constructing a particular version of Jewish martyrdom. The liturgical place of ‘The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ imposes a particular way of viewing the Holocaust and martyrdom—a view with which most historians take issue, and with which many congregants may take issue. The word ‘martyr’ is sometimes used loosely in popular discourse to refer to any death that entails suffering or cannot be justified. But Judaism sees in the concept of kiddush hashem the element of choice. Martyrdom is dying for a belief, a principle, a religious practice, rather than choosing a life that entails denial or repudiation of one’s belief or practices. The Nazis did not seek the renunciation of Jewish faith or Jewish practice as a condition for living. While Jews frequently were made to suffer for observing Jewish ritual, and often did so at great risk, they could not buy their lives by abandoning Judaism. The Jews were doomed whatever they chose. The liturgical use of Bavli’s poem emblematically places Holocaust victims in a long line of Jews who died for their beliefs, giving meaning to those deaths. Were this poem to be adopted liturgically in Orthodox congregations, its use would be less surprising. Orthodox communities see their real and spiritual ancestry in religiously observant Jews struggling to maintain their way of life against the forces of religious oppression. In this context, ‘The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ would place the Holocaust in light of a long history of oppression, and express the community’s ongoing sense of the precariousness of Jewish life, and the need for constant reaffirmation.31 But it is within North American liberal Judaism that ‘The Martyrdom of the NinetyThree Maidens’ has formally entered into liturgical practice. The archetypes and patterns of meaning and the piety that the poem evokes is a weaker fit with that community’s sensibilities and self-definition, and so its use bears question. The poem’s enduring appeal may be seen, in part, precisely in the way it narrates an episode during the Holocaust—rhetorically restoring dignity and choice to victims who were deliberately robbed of both. But the poem appeals, too, I believe, because of its sentimentality. Maidens, soldiers, poison, violation, suicide—these elements of the sentimental tame the Holocaust into something familiar and domesticated in Western culture, constructing a narrative that permits congregants to feel safely outside the dangers of history, but leaving others outside the boundaries of their communities.

Notes 1

See, for example, Mahzor for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur: A Prayerbook for the Days of Awe, ed. Rabbi Jules Harlow (New York: Rabbinical Assembly, 1972), 561–3; Mahzor leyamim nora’im: Seder tefillot leyom kippur/High Holiday Prayerbook, vol. 2, Prayers for Yom Kippur

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(New York: Jewish Reconstructionist Foundation, 1948), 396–7; Ben Zion Bokser, The High Holiday Prayer Book (New York: Hebrew Pubishing, 1959), 434–6. According to the notation in these prayerbooks, the liturgical poem written in Hebrew by Hillel Bavli was based on a letter by Chaya Feldman, part of this Bais Yaakov group, dated Rosh Hodesh Elul, 5704 [1943]. 2 Hadoar 22:12 (22 January 1943): 186. 3 See, for example, Hayden White, The Content of the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 20. 4 See, for example, Philip Friedman, ‘Preliminary and Methodological Problems of the Research on the Jewish Catastrophe in the Nazi Period’, Yad Vashem Studies II (Jerusalem: 1958): 122. Friedman pronounces the story ‘without any foundation’, and terms the letter on which the story is based ‘a complete forgery’. See also Lucy S.Dawidowicz, ‘Introduction’, in A Holocaust Reader, ed. Lucy S. Dawidowicz (New York: Behrman House, 1976), 13. Dawidowicz refers to the story as a ‘fanciful and moving tale…a lesson in religious morality, fashioned by people who knew nothing of the Nuremberg Laws’. See also Menachem Friedman, ‘The Haredim and the Holocaust’, The Jerusalem Quarterly no. 53 (winter 1990):99–100. Friedman links ‘The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ with a rabbinic story recounted in the Talmud about young men and women who choose to drown themselves rather than serve as prostitutes for the conquering Romans (Gittin 57b). The Talmud approvingly describes the Jewish adolescents as going ‘like sheep to the slaughter’ (katson latevah) to sanctify the divine name, a phrase used more pejoratively with reference to the murdered Jews of Europe. On the other hand, Judith Tydor Baumel and Jacob J.Schacter maintain that while the story cannot be proven, the arguments against its veracity are not airtight. In ‘The Ninety-three Bais Yaakov Girls of Cracow: History or Typology?’ in Reverence, Righteousness, and Rahamanut (Northvale NJ and London: Jason Aronson, 1992), pp. 93–127, the authors trace the promulgation and reception of the story (including poems, fiction, and essays that narrate it) in publications and through interviews. In an appendix, the authors reproduce a handwritten letter signed by Chaja Feldman from Kracow. After exhaustive research, the authors can come to no conclusion about the story’s historical truth. ‘Maybe it did happen. But, maybe again, it didn’t,’ they conclude (127). 5 See Harlow, op. cit., pp. 556–7. 6 B.Berakhot 5a-b and 61b. 7 While the term gilui arayot, or forbidden sexual relations, is generally understood to encompass incest and adultery, and not sexual relations with an unmarried (and unbetrothed), unrelated women, the question of the culpability of the biblical Esther, which I discuss below, indicates that carnal relations with a non-Jewish man was also sometimes seen in this category. 8 Baumel and Schacter, op. cit., trace the popularity of the story—but not the Bavli poem specifically—in the religious community of post-war Israel, in the Israeli press, and in the JewishAmerican press. 9 B.Sanhedrin 74a-75b. 10 The Talmud also distinguishes between acts committed in public and acts committed in private, and the special demands during a time of shmad, or religious oppression. I will touch on both these issues briefly later. 11 Although one might resolve this by explaining that the betrothed woman must give her life rather than commit the sin of adultery, just as a someone ordered to kill must give up his or her life rather than commit murder, many commentators have found this text, and the equivalence it appears to posit between the potential murder and the woman about to be raped, to be problematic. Many early commentators resolve this by emending the text to read yehareg instead of tehareg, a reading affirmed by Maimonides and others. For a summary of responses to the problem of this text, see Aryeh Cohen, ‘Towards an Erotics of Martyrdom’, The Journal of Jewish

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Thought and Philosophy 7 (1998), pp. 234–5. Cohen’s article raises objections similar to mine, but his argument moves in a different direction. Ibid., p. 234. For a different reading of karka ‘olam in this context, see Cohen. There are, of course, counter-texts in the Talmud. For instance, B.Ketubot 51b affirms that a husband may cohabit with his wife even though she has been returned from captivity where she may have been raped. In addition to the three transgressions discussed explicitly in connection with kiddush hashem, the passage under discussion also makes a distinction between private and public transgression (the prohibition against public transgression is more stringent), and also notes the more rigorous behavioral strictures during a time of religious persecution, or shmad, when a person is required to die rather than commit even a minor transgression—‘even to change one’s shoe strap’ is forbidden. This view is by no means uncontested in Jewish texts. Maimonides, for example, takes issue with it in Igeret hashmad. In the episode recounted in ‘The Martyrdom of the NinetyThree Maidens’, the girls are not in the public sphere; indeed, part of the poignancy of the story rests in their plight being relegated to obscurity, were it not for the letter smuggled out by one of the girls. Moreover, as Baumel and Schacter, op.cit., note, no one else in the Krakow Ghetto reported any knowledge of the event. The question of whether the Nazi genocide constitutes what the Talmud saw as a period of shmad is a more comlex one, and I will address it only briefly here. While some aspects of Nazi atrocity entailed religious persecution—that is, the prohibition of and punishment for specific Jewish practices—the Nazi genocide targeted Jewish life, defined racially and not religiously. In that sense, then, the Nazi genocide would not be defined as a period of shmad, requiring Jews to die rather than transgress even minor precepts. The large body of wartime responsa authorizing certain transgressions (for example, eating nonkosher food or desecrating the Sabbath) would seem to corroborate this understanding. While the concept of Jewish martyrology expands and escalates over time, I have confined myself here to its most limited and bounded definition. For further discussion of the trope of the eroticized victim in Schindler’s List, see Sara Horowitz, ‘But is it Good for the Jews? Spielberg’s Schindler and the “esthetics of Atrocity”’, in Spielberg’s Holocaust, ed. Yosefa Loshitsky (Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1997). Ilona Karmel, An Estate of Memory (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969; reprinted New York: Feminist Press, 1986). Norma Rosen, Touching Evil (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990, reprinted New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969). Norma Rosen, Accidents of Influence (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 12. Fanya Gottesfeld Heller, Strange and Unexpected Love: A Teenage Girl’s Holocaust Memoirs (Hoboken NJ: Ktav, 1993). Morris Wyszogrod, A Brush with Death (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999). In Ida Fink, A Scrap of Time (New York: Pantheon, 1987), pp. 63–8. For further elaboration of this, see Nehama Tec’s insightful gender-based analysis of the Bielski partisans, ‘Women among the Forest Partisans’, in Women in the Holocaust, eds D.Ofer and L.J.Weitzman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 223–33. Tec notes, for example, ‘the privileges of…a fighting man included the possibility of choosing a sexual partner, often a women from a formerly socially superior background, someone a simple, uneducated young man would not even have dreamed about before the war’ (228). Two excellent discussions of the complexities of survivors’ testimony and remembrances may be found in Henry Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life His-

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Religious Perspectives in Modern Muslim and Jewish Literatures tory (Westport CT: Praeger, 1998); and Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). Judith Magyar Isaacson, Seed of Sarah: Memoirs of a Survivor (Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 1990). Helen Fein has spoken with clarity and insight about the different models for genocide. Ida Fink, ‘Aryan Papers’, A Scrap of Time, trans. M.Levine and F.Prose (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), pp. 63–9. All citations are from this edition. Sherri Szeman, The Kommandant’s Mistress (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993). One could see in the Kaddish/deathcamp interpolation an affirmation of God despite the Shoah; one could also see in it a confrontation with God. This later interpretation seems to be at work in André Schwarz-Bart’s 1959 novel The Last of the Just which concludes with the name of various concentration camps interpolated into the phrase ‘And praised’ ‘be’ ‘the Lord’. See, for example, the liturgical poems Eit sha‘arei ratson by Judah Ibn-Abbas, Elohim, al dami by David Bar-Meshulam of Speyer, and Et avotai ani mazkir by Ephraim of Bonn. Even during the Holocaust, Jews sought to understand their situation and to give it meaning by searching for paradigms from the past and from tradition. Secular Jews, such as social historian Emmanual Ringelblum, would look to the histor-ical past for precedents. In November, 1940, Ringelblum wrote that the Jewish confinement in the ghetto was ‘returning to the Middle Ages…. The Jews created another world for themselves in the past, living in it forgot the troubles around them’ (Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, trans. Jacob Sloan [New York: McGraw Hill, 1958], p. 82]. Religious Jews, such as Rabbi Shimon Huberband, also a historian and part of Ringelblum’s Oyneg Shabbes project to document life in the ghetto, would look to Jewish history and traditional texts for models. Huberband links his contemporaries with persecuted Jews in earlier eras, risking their lives to maintain an ordained way of life. In a report on secret trips to the mikveh (ritual bathhouse), which had been forcibly shut, he wrote, ‘the problem of the purity…became as serious as it was in the days of the ancient Roman edicts against Judaism’ (Kiddush Hashem: Jewish Religious and Cultural Life in Poland During the Holocaust, eds Jeffry S.Gurock and Robert S.Hirt, trans. David E.Fishman [New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1987], p. 195). Huberband compares the situation of Jews in the ghettoes to ‘our forefathers in Spain—how they rescued Torah scrolls, how they prayed with a minyan in secret cellars, due to fear of the Inquisition. They certainly never imagined that their descendants would find themselves, four hundred years later, in a much worse situation’ (201).

Bibliography Baumel, Judith Tydor and Jacob J.Schacter, ‘The Ninety-three Bais Yaakov Girls of Cracow: History or Typology?’ in Reverence, Righteousness, and Rahamanut, Northvale NJ and London: Jason Aronson, 1992. Cohen, Aryeh, ‘Towards an Erotics of Martyrdom’, The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 7, 1998. Dawidowicz, Lucy S. (ed.), A Holocaust Reader, New York: Behrman House, 1976. Fink, Ida, A Scrap of Time, New York: Pantheon, 1987. Friedman, Menachem, ‘The Haredim and the Holocaust’, The Jerusalem Quarterly no. 53, winter 1990. Friedman, Philip, ‘Preliminary and Methodological Problems fo the Research on the Jewish Catastrophe in the Nazi Period’, Yad Vashem Studies II, Jerusalem, 1958. Greenspan, Henry, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History, Westport CT: Praeger, 1998.

Martyrdom and gender in Jewish-American Holocaust memory 183 Gurock, Jeffry S. and Robert S.Hirt (eds), Kiddush Hashem: Jewish Religious and Cultural Life in Poland During the Holocaust, ed. and trans. David E.Fishman, New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1987. Heller, Fanya Gottesfeld, Strange and Unexpected Love: A Teenage Girl’s Holocaust Memoirs, Hoboken NJ: Ktav, 1993. Isaacson, Judith Magyar, Seed of Sarah: Memoirs of a Survivor, Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Karmel, Ilona, An Estate of Memory, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969; reprinted New York: Feminist Press, 1986. Langer, Lawrence L., Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. Loshitsky, Yosefa (ed.), Spielberg’s Holocaust, Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1997. Ofer, D. and L.J.Weitzman (eds), Women in the Holocaust, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Ringelblum, Emanuel, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, trans. Jacob Sloan, New York: McGraw Hill, 1958. Rosen, Norma, Touching Evil, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990, reprinted New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969. ——Accidents of Influence, Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1992. Szeman, Sherri, The Kommandant’s Mistress, New York: HarperPerennial, 1993. White, Hayden, The Content of the Form, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Wyszogrod, Morris, A Brush with Death, New York: State University of New York Press, 1999.

11 A ‘CINDERELLA’ GOES TO HAUSALAND1 Islam, gender and Hausa literature Ousseina Alidou

An important attribute of Hausa oral literature, as of Afro-Islamic and other African oral literatures in general, is improvization. The tale exists only when it is narrated/performed, and with every new narration it assumes a new life in response to the artist’s interpretation of the new context of the telling—time, setting, mood and so on. This essay looks at how Islam has impacted on a recent narration of The Story of the Orphan Who Marries the Prince of Masar’—a tale of the ‘Wicked Stepmother’ popularly known as ‘Cinderella’ in the West. This takes place at a time of increasing Islamic resurgence and a growing participation of women in redefining Islam in the Hausa culture of West Africa. Elsewhere I have argued that in general Hausa women’s voices were marginalized in the pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial eras as a result of both local culture and colonial patriarchy. There was, of course, a tiny minority of women of upper- and middle-class households who managed to contribute to public life, especially in the field of Islamic knowledge and literary production.2 In general, however, women were heavily marginalized in formal education and administration, leading to men’s control of economic, cultural and political power, and the exclusion of women from public spheres. Moreover, traditional (Islamic), colonial and postcolonial educational structures combined to further disempower or marginalize women. In this process, Islamic knowledge—still primarily controlled by men—was continuously deployed to construct an ideology that justified the silencing of women, especially in the public sphere. However, the wind of democratization that swept the continent in the 1990s, and calls for pluralistic rights of social constituents—e.g. Christians and ethnic minorities—in the Niger Republic, created room for women to seek Islamic knowledge on their own terms—even if still within patriarchal space—as a means of reaching a new understanding of women’s rights within Islam and Islamic societies. Ever since, women have occupied the political space of liberalization to expose their own knowledge of Islam, make their contribution to the socio-cultural and political reshaping of the nation and engage in the discourse of defining a ‘Nigerien’ Muslim identity by providing a woman’s perspective (Alidou, 1999).3 This development has become particularly noticeable in the public sphere of media, both print and electronic. Nigerien women’s persistence in inscribing their voices in the public space, as the analysis of the radio storytelling of this version of the Wicked Stepmother will show, is a

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significant indication of their resistance to decades of marginalization by patriarchal forces which controlled the power of symbolic meaning—be it of a religious, cultural or political nature—in the nation. Their re-versioning of this ancient tale, with cross-cultural thematic resonances, demonstrates their willingness to use their knowledge of religion and agency to subvert the oppressive patriarchal elements that silence them. Furthermore, through their presence in the media and their appropriation of cultural fields of meaning such as religion and folklore, Nigerien women are creatively participating in the construction of a democratic order more balanced with regard to gender. This process of women striving to re-center their voices in the public sphere—religion, performing arts and politics—of construction of meaning (including self-definition) is a trend sweeping across many cultures of the world, especially the Muslim world. And the process has been engendered in part by forces of globalization, especially in its technological dimension. Thus, radio, for example, becomes both a tool and a site for women to engage their societies and the world that listen to their narratives. The tale of the Wicked Stepmother appears in different versions throughout the world. Its universality bears both multiculturalist and interculturalist traits. For while it assumes culture-specific moralist accounts of how injustice, evil doing and abuse of power are punished and how the weak triumph in the midst of numerous trials and tribulations, there are still elements of commonality in the narrative, especially the psychological representation of the wicked character and the mechanism of her failure, and certain symbolic attributes which allow a crosscultural recognition of the tale as that of the Wicked Stepmother or Cinderella.4 At the same time, the intercultural characteristics of this universal tale are manifested in the narrative motifs that reflect a confluence of cultures, indigenous and foreign, in the society in which it is narrated. It is on this aspect of cultural convergence that this chapter focuses by analyzing the impact of Islam on the crafting of this version of the Wicked Stepmother, whose title in Hausa is ‘The Story of the Orphan Who Marries the Prince of Masar’. And consonant with a modern woman-centered reinterpretation of Islamic culture, the analysis of the tale reveals how an abused female character uses her intellectual prowess to attain freedom from her oppressor subversively as well as skillfully to manipulate the structure of patriarchal hierarchies so as to climb the socio-economic ladder.

Islam, folklore, gender and modernity The Hausa people represent one of the largest ethnolinguistic groups in subSaharan Africa, who converted to Islam probably much earlier than the Middle Ages. Moreover, just as Islam is part of Hausa religious identity, it is equally an important marker of their cultural identity Even the tiny minority of Hausa subgroups who are still animist or Christian tend to be Islamic in cultural practice. The Islam practiced by the Hausas, however, reflects a syncretism between Islamic spirituality and pre-Islamic Hausa cosmogony which continues to prevail, especially in Bori (spirit possession).5 This synthesis of spiritual worldviews is not unique to Hausa Islam, but is found in most other Afro-Islamic communities such as those of the Somali, the Swahili, and the Bambara.

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The impact of Islam on oral literary production in Hausa culture is manifold. First, the inception of Islam in Hausa culture affected its oral literature by infusing themes, style, and language with an Islamic element. Modes of characterization also took a turn toward a more Islamic conception of personal conduct that defines a person as ‘good’ or ‘evil’. Furthermore, many modern Hausa epics and folktales contain metaphorical allusions to spaces relevant to Islamic history and experiences.6 Second, Islam brought literacy into Hausa culture (which had no writing tradition) in both Arabic and Ajami, the latter being a modified version of the Arabic script used in writing the Hausa language. This development had certain implications for Hausa oral literature. Hitherto, male storytelling took place in the public space and was associated with the narration of epics or factual events, current or past. This domain of ‘male stories’ is known as labarai. Women’s stories, known as tatsuniyoyi, on the other hand, were more akin to the fairy tale; exclusively based on fiction and the creative imagination, they were performed in the confines of domestic space. Traditionally the custodians of this female folk genre were elderly women in the community who, through this cultural medium, both entertained and instructed the young. But, because Islamic literacy was primarily the domain of men, the twentieth-century transcription of Hausa folktales was undertaken mostly by male scholars. This trend marked the beginning of male invasion of a female narrative space, in the process infusing it with a male voice and subverting some of its oral features.7 In addition, this male invasion of the female folkloric domain transfomed both the language and style of the original tales by inscribing them within a more markedly Islamic linguistic and symbolic space. Islamic literacy thus came to mark the beginning of the seeming ‘degendering’ of Hausa folktale production and narration in modern times. The interplay between Islamic literacy, folktale and gender was crucial to early European cultural anthropologists who were interested in collecting oral folk narratives in Hausa culture during the colonial era. These scholars relied on the contribution of Hausa male literati who served as collectors, tran-scribers and interpreters of the folktales.8 But European colonization also helped to modernize Hausa culture through the introduction of infrastructures and technology, such as the printing press, the radio and more recently the television. These modern means completely transformed the conception, transmission, reception and interpretation of folktales in Hausa society. This technological process also accounts for both the professionalization of folktale storytelling and the new trend of ‘regendering’ the traditionally female narrative genre. The ‘regendering’ results from the hiring of both male and female radio and TV storytellers, which offers opportunities for a gendered crafting and narrating of folktales and stories. It is within this professional sphere of storytelling through Radio Amfani that this version of the Wicked Stepmother was recorded. The narrator in this case was a young female radio storyteller working for one of the private radio stations in Niamey, the capital of Niger, during the summer of 1997.

The Story of the Orphan Girl Who Marries the Prince of Masar What follows is my English translation of the tale from the Hausa language.

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Here it goes, here it comes to you [A formulaic opening in Hausa tatsuniya]. Once upon a time, in a far away land, there was a trader with his two wives. One wife was called Delu and she had four children who were all girls. The name of the second wife is Rakiya. And Rakiya had only one female child whose name was Facima. In this polygamous living arrangement, Rakiya was more favored than Delu by their husband. And this was the origin of the rivalry that defined their daily shared living. It was in these conditions that, one day, Rakiya fell sick and died. However, before she passed away, she called her co-wife, Delu, and asked her if she could promise her to take good care of her daughter, Facima. A few days after her mother’s death, Facima began to experience terrible hardship for all the chores of the household became her sole responsiblity. This terrible situation went so far that she was not allowed to eat the food she had cooked. She was only permitted to eat the burnt parts or leftovers. And even when she pounded millet for porridge and made the beverage, she was not allowed to have a sip of it. She could only drink the soaked husk. On the other hand, Delu and her children took delight in living off Facima’s labor and their father had no ear for anyone besides them. Thus, during that time Facima’s existence became awfully unbearable. However, one day their father was preparing to travel to a land called Masar [Egypt]. As he was ready to take off, Delu’s daughters rushed to him and the first one said: ‘Father, when you arrive in Masar, buy me a wrapper’; the second one said: ‘a dress’; the third one said: ‘Father, buy me shoes’; and the fourth one said: ‘Father, I ask you to buy me a headscarf.’ When the father was done with Delu’s children, Facima approached him. She had a dala [a penny] in her hand. She said: ‘Father, here is my dala. When you arrive in Masar, buy me the Prince of Masar with my dala.’ When the father arrived in Masar, he got busy first with his trading business. After days and days, when he was done with his trading priorities, he remembered his children’s requests for gifts and spontaneously fulfilled each of Delu’s daughters’ wishes. When it was Facima’s turn, he went to search for where the Prince of Masar was on sale. When people realized that what he was looking for was not to be found in the market, they told him to go to the King of Masar’s palace. Maybe that would be the most likely place for him to get what he was looking for. He rushed to the King’s Palace, announced himself and asked to speak to the Prince of Masar. And the guards indeed took him before the Prince of Masar. Then he transmitted his daughter Facima’s request. When the Prince of Masar heard it, he asked Facima’s father to return home and tell his daughter: ‘He himself, the Prince of Masar will be coming to visit that same night; therefore, she must look for a place to hide herself because he is visiting them.’ When he reached home and rested a bit, Facima’s father gave every daughter what she requested. And when it was Facima’s turn, he told her in detail what he had discussed with the Prince of Masar. When Facima’s sisters, her rivals, heard this, they said: ‘Serves you right! May they come to kill you!’ Facima, then, entered her room, started to cry and kept saying that she brought this upon herself. She kept thinking that if she had known, she wouldn’t have made such a request, to have the Prince of Masar. When night came, the Prince of Masar showed up at Facima’s as he had promised. Even though Facima’s room was closed, that did not prevent the Prince from entering it. Moreover, as he was so determined he entered the room through its roof. As soon as he came in,

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Facima fell into a trance and began to cry and shake her body. When the Prince saw this, he asked her to stop crying because he wanted her to know that he understood her intention. When Facima calmed down, they began to talk, she and the Prince of Masar. When the conversation became sweet [interesting], Facima began to notice that every time the Prince of Masar spat, a piece of gold dropped from his mouth. So, every day, after their meeting at night and courting, Facima collected the drops of gold pieces that came out of the Prince of Masar’s mouth and hid them in a closed jar. They had been meeting for six months and things were as they were, when one day, one of Delu’s daughters who was very naughty, entered Facima’s room and in her nosiness found a piece of gold. She couldn’t wait and as soon as she got out rushed to show it to her mother, Delu. And when Delu asked her daughter where she found the piece of gold, the daughter replied: ‘In Facima’s room.’ When Delu heard this, she asked: ‘Who would give gold to Facima? Or has she begun stealing?’ When the father came Delu informed him of the discovery: ‘Now, Facima steals. Nowadays, only a thief can get gold.’ At this point they rushed into Facima’s room and searched her entire belongings, and collected all the gold that Facima had amassed. But, this did not satisfy Delu, who wanted to see the person who brought this gold to Facima. She mounted guard until she understood the way in which the Prince of Masar got into Facima’s room. With this knowledge, Delu looked for needles and threads which she planted on the path followed by the Prince of Masar. That same day, the Prince of Masar came to visit Facima as usual. He was not aware of the mischief planned by Facima’s stepmother, Delu. Then, kwaram [boom!], he fell down on those needles she laid out to destroy him. They penetrated so deep into the Prince’s body that they caused him to vomit blood. When Facima saw this, her heart was shattered because the Prince, her lover, was on the brink of dying. On that day their nightly meeting was cut short and the Prince of Masar, feeling very sick, returned home quickly. Once he arrived home, the Prince of Masar fell extremely sick. When the King of Masar saw that his son was sick, he became very preoccupied and sought for help to heal him. This led him to gather all the Malams [learned Muslim teachers] and Bokas [the traditional healers], who possessed the secret of healing. However, all the people gathered failed to cure the Prince of Masar. This increased the King’s worries. When he realized this failure, he called upon experts beyond the national boundaries for a cure. The King also promised to reward the successful healer with great wealth. Facima became very concerned, for the Prince of Masar had not visited her for several months. She began to think that probably the disease was sucking her lover’s strength. She then said: There is no rest for me.’ She decided first to shave her hair to complete baldness. Then, she looked for a traditional Muslim male attire, white trousers, a white jallabiya and a white turban. She put on the clothes and wound the turban round her head. Then, she looked for a small Islamic slate and a gourd of water and disguised herself as an Almajiri [a young wandering male Muslim student who proclaims devotion to Allah while living on sadaka (charity)]. She was all in white. She went in exile from her land and headed for Masar without notifying her family or anyone else. She walked for a long, long time across forests and areas of bush. When she became quite exhausted, she sat under a tree which cast a great shadow to rest. While resting she overheard some birds chatting on the branches of the tree above her. They were telling one another in song: ‘May a holy person pass by and collect our excrement spread here on the

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ground below this tree, mix it and give it to the Prince of Masar. Once he drinks the potion, he will be cured.’ The birds kept repeating the song and Facima made certain to catch its details. Once the birds had finished their conversation and flew away, Facima got up and collected their excrement. She filled up her gourd and resumed her voyage to Masar. As soon as she arrived in Masar, she headed for the King’s palace. She announced herself. As she introduced herself to the guards of the palace who mistook her for an Almajiri, they asked her what brought her to the palace. And Almajiri replied ‘I have come to heal the Prince.’ When the chief guard heard this, he said ‘Please, Almajiri turn back if you want to stay alive and in peace. How can you, a mere Almajiri, succeed where famous Malams and Bokas have failed!’ But the young Almajiri insisted that he must be introduced to the King. Once the guard saw how determined he was, he took his hand and led him to the king. The guard informed the King of the boy’s intent. After the King listened to Almajiri’s story, he told him ‘Alright boy! I heard you and I agree. However, if you don’t manage to heal my son, I will kill you. And if you succeed in healing him, you can request anything you would like, even if that means granting you my throne.’ At this point, Almajiri asked to be led to the Prince of Masar. When Almajiri arrived to the Prince’s place, he saw his lover, meaning ‘she’ saw ‘her’ lover, in great pain, completely worn out, and, worst, close to dying. He then asked for water. After the water was brought to him, Almajiri asked the crowd to leave him alone with the Prince of Masar [Facima did not reveal herself to her lover]. Once alone with the Prince, Almajiri opened his gourd and poured the birds’ excrement into a plate and mixed it up for him to drink. As soon as he drank the concoction, the Prince kept vomiting until all the needles in his body came out. And he was instantly cured! Once the King saw his son cured, he asked Almajiri what reward he would prefer. Right there, Almajiri replied, nothing extraordinary, just three simple items. First, he wanted the Prince’s finger ring; second, he wanted the Prince’s turban; and third, he wanted the Prince to promise him to punish whoever afflicted him anytime, except Almajiri in case he wronged the Prince. Right there, Almajiri was granted all his requests, the turban, the ring, and the promise which the Prince swore to keep. After this event Facima, disguised as Almajiri, returned to her homeland where she resumed her old life of hardship at the hands of Delu, the cruel stepmother. However, Facima’s rival half-sisters were not happy with her return. In fact, both her stepmother and her half-sisters wished she had died. They would have felt relieved of her presence in the family household. A few days after her return home, the Prince of Masar decided to visit Facima’s homeland in order to kill her. For he believed she was the cause of his sickness. Arriving at her house, he took out his sword and was ready to cut off her head. When Facima realized that he was determined, she rushed to say to him: ‘Forgive Almajiri in the name of the promise you made to him. Please, for Allah’s sake, forgive Almajiri. Prince of Masar, spare me Almajiri who cured you!’ When the Prince of Masar heard this, he was deeply surprised and dropped his sword. Then he wanted to know who had informed Facima of Almajiri’s story. Right there, she began to tell her lover her story from her life with her cruel stepmother to how she entered his father’s palace to save him from her stepmother’s wickedness. After she finished narrating her tale, the Prince of Masar, not quite convinced, said: ‘If you are telling me the truth, you must show me a proof!’ Facima, then, quickly fetched his

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finger ring and his turban and showed them to him. Even with this proof, the Prince was not convinced. So, he told her ‘But, Almajiri was a boy!’ Facima then took off her headscarf and showed him how she had shaved her hair to baldness. When the Prince of Masar saw that, he was so touched by Facima’s truth and commitment to their love that the blood running in his body cooled down. He believed Facima. The Prince told her: ‘I must return home to talk to my people. They must come to ask for your hand. We must get married.’ As soon as he reached home, as he promised, the Prince of Masar sent his people to Facima’s parents. When they arrived, they introduced themselves and informed Facima’s parents of the purpose of their mission. As the step-mother heard them, she jumped up and warned them to go away for they had misunderstood whose hand they were to ask for, not Facima’s. She told them: ‘You must have been sent to ask for one of my daughters’ hands. Go back to the Prince and ask for more clarification!’ But the go-between said ‘No, the Prince was clear and we clearly heard him. He asked for Facima’s hand.’ The stepmother, Delu, sent them off and Facima’s father did not intervene one way or the other. After he heard his representatives’ account, the Prince of Masar decided to go himself to ask for Facima’s hands in marriage from her parents. He made it clear to Delu that he was not there for any of her daughters. The marriage was celebrated before the evil eyes of Delu and her jealous daughters. The Prince of Masar took Facima to his father’s Palace in Masar and they are still living there to this day enjoying life! In fact, they gave birth to five children. Well, well! Tale, return on the head of Hyena [A formulaic ending of Hausa folktales].

Analysis of the fairy tale In this section, I will analyze the symbolic meaning of motifs within this fairy folktale that reflect the syncretism between Islam and African spirituality and show how this syncretism inspired the narrator who developed this version of the Wicked Stepmother. The folktale begins with an introduction of the main characters and provides the names of some major players of the story, the cruel stepmother, Delu, her co-wife Rakiya, and her daughter Facima. These three names are important for understanding the Hausa naming system. While Delu is a name of non-Islamic origin given to a child born shortly after the death of her father, the names Rakiya and Facima are clearly of Islamic derivation. Here then we witness a dual heritage of naming, part Islamic and part indigeneous. The name Delu also symbolically opens the possibility of non-Islamic conduct on the part of the stepmother. The husband is introduced simply by his occupation, trading, and we know that Delu has four daughters whose names are not revealed. The husband’s anonymity foreshadows the decline in his authority and his reduced function in the story. As for the four daughters, since their actions and their domineering attitute toward Facima are dictated by their mother, Delu, their identification by name is less important than their actions. However, the identification of the husband as a ‘trader’ from a forest and bush land who goes to Masar for commerce has further significance in the story. One can argue that the narrator introduces the motif of trade in reference to the trans-Saharan trade that linked the Sahelian population, among which are the Hausa, and the population of North Africa,

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the Middle East and Europe who exchanged goods during the Middle Ages. Moreover, as travelers such as Ibn Battuta reported, trade is always associated with the inception of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as in other parts of the world visited or conquered by Muslim peoples. We also learn that the stepmother evolved her wicked psychology as the result of unfair treatment by a polygamous husband. Polygamy, a matrimonial practice prevalent among the Hausa before their Islamization, continued after their conversion to Islam; it allows a man to marry up to four wives. However, Islam demands fair and equal treatment of all the wives (Qur’an, Sura 4:3). By violating this tenet and favoring Rakiya, i.e Facima’s mother, the father essentially set the stage for the animosity and cruelty that followed. Rakiya’s death creates favorable conditions for Delu to regain her husband’s attention and avenge herself even on him. Her rivalry with her co-wife and bitterness against her unfair husband lead her to develop such venom against the innocent Facima, a living reminder of what she went through during her polygamous marital life, and thus to break the promise she gave to her co-wife, Rakiya, at her last hour, that she would take care of her daughter. In Hausa Islamic understanding this represents the breaking of amana (cin amana), a violation of trust, which has negative moral implications especially when it involves the treatment of an orphan. After all the Qur’an makes it clear that orphans are to be maintained with fairness and justice, and spoken to with kindly speech (Sura 4:2–4). It is ironic, however, that Facima’s mother, who was preferred to her co-wife, should have asked Delu to promise to take care of her orphan daughter upon her death. One could imagine that given Delu’s jealousy of her rival, Facima’s mother would not expect such a promise to be fufilled. But the myth represents Delu accepting the amana to care for Facima. And by failing to abide by her pledge, Delu is acting contrary to the Hausa Islamic conception of mutumniya mai kirki (a kind woman) or mutumniya wai zuciya d’aya (a woman with one heart), meaning a ‘good’ person endowed with imani–compassion. Following Rakiya’s death, Delu’s internalized bitterness begins to express itself, as does Facima’s tragic fate at her hands. Moreover, Facima also experiences her father’s distance, silence and complacency in the cruelty of her stepmother and stepsisters. There is a Hadith, a saying of the Prophet Muhammad, that when a Muslim sees a wrong being committed (s) he should stop it with his/her hands; if (s)he cannot, then (s)he should stop it with his/her words; and if (s)he cannot, then (s)he should at least feel bad about the wrong being done; that is the lowest level of faith in Islam. The narrator has obviously put Facima’s father outside the referential conduct of this Hadith, since he is oblivious to Delu’s wickedness and Facima’s suffering in his household. As already mentioned, the depiction of the father as a detached character is important for the unfolding of the tale. It allows the stepmother’s cruel psychology to evolve out of an excessive desire to avenge herself and her daughters for her husband’s past unfairness. Thus, while the husband now leans on Delu’s affection and her pledge to care for his orphan daughter, this new monogamous restructuring of the household and Delu’s status as a surrogate mother to Facima provide her with the means to dominate everybody. Facima is thus left alone in her struggle. Equally important in the Afro-Islamic construction of the story is the journey to Masar from the land of forest and bush which corresponds to the Sahelian savannah, home to the Hausa. The place Masar is an important Islamic motif which bears several interpretations.

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First, Masar (Egypt) is the first Saharan region in Africa where Islam became established, already in the first half of the seventh century. Because of the cultural affiinity between the Hausa people and the other populations of the Saharan region, this historic beginning has a special meaning in the religious imagination of the Hausa people. Second, historically Masar was one of the resting places in North Africa for sub-Saharan Muslims on their way to Mecca for the Hajj, in the days before the development of modern transport systems. Masar also became an important site of Islamic learning and cultural activities for Muslims throughout the world, the home of the leading and one of the oldest Islamic universities, Al-Azhar, and of some of the most influential Muslim thinkers in modern times. And Masar was also a major trade center for merchants throughout the Muslim world. Thus, in Hausa culture a journey to Masar is both an act of religious significance and a means to exhibit economic status, and also a site of cultural convergence where Afro-Islamic populations, such as the Hausa, interact with other African and nonAfrican populations. Futhermore, the use of Egypt/Masar as a motif reflects how Hausa Islam has often used the prestige of the wider Islamic world to reform local social and religious practices and how it has provided an avenue for prestige and authority. From Sufi brotherhoods to the relation between Abukar Gumi (the founding leader of the Izala movement which spread from Nigeria to the Niger Republic) and Saudi Arabia, to that between Ibrahim El-Zakzaky (Nigeria) and Nigerian Islamists and Iran, the wider Muslim world is drawn on to reform aspects of the local Hausa world. I must add that this reflects the transnational character of the local Islamic movements in the Niger Republic. And conversely, the transnational character of Islam could account for the fact that Facima could import a local remedy from Hausaland to cure the Prince in Egypt. Third, Masar appears in the Qur’an in a passage referring to Pharaonic Egypt, when Moses tells his followers: ‘Get ye down to Masar [Egypt]—for ye shall have what ye have asked’ (Sura 2:61).9 This remark was, of course, made to rebuke the Jews who complained about their hardships in the desert in the course of their migration to Palestine. But it also alludes to Masar as a place where one can fulfill any form of material desire—the good, the bad and the ugly. In the spirit of this verse Delu’s daughters in this Hausa version of the Wicked Stepmother expect to receive the materialistic gifts which they had requested their father to bring from Masar. But more importantly, it is from Masar that Facima hopes to gain the freedom she was yearning for. Unlike her sisters, Facima sees the material opportunities of Masar as a means to a higher ideal of freedom and as a possible site of transformation of power relations. Moses failed to humble the Pharaoh; but in her assumed identity of a ‘mere’ Almajiri, Facima succeeds in humbling royalty. In his desperation to find a cure for his son, the King of Masar is ready to give up his throne to an Almajiri, while the Prince becomes eternally indebted to his lover from the ranks of the down-trodden. On the other hand, it is through Masar that Facima is able to emerge victorious over her wicked stepmother, Delu. Unlike her half-sisters, who are close enough to the father to feel comfortable in requesting presents without giving anything in exchange, Facima offers her own money for the purchase of her gift from Masar. In this way the narrator signifies that Facima is independent of her father and does not expect gifts from him. Her autonomy is further illustrated by the type of present she orders. Although her request is innocent, the object of her desire, the Prince of Masar, symbolizes power, whose acquisition, in Facima’s mind, might eventually

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lead to her liberation from her cruel step-mother’s grasp. In most versions of the story of the Wicked Stepmother told in Hausa culture the mistreated stepdaughter is depicted as a weak, sorrowful and unimaginative character waiting either for help from the ghost of her deceased mother or for liberation by a savior sent by God. This modern version, however, offers an alternative representation, that of a young woman creatively using her mental faculties to create the conditions for her freedom from subjugation. Facima’s daring request for the Prince of Masar, her father’s search for him, and the Prince’s keenness to meet this audacious young woman from the forest land, his secret nightly visits to Facima and his spitting of gold pieces, are all elements that add more mythical meaning to the tale’s construction. The spitting of gold could be interpreted as symbolic of the role that gold played in the trans-Saharan trade and the exchanges between the populations of the Sahel and their partners from the north. On another level, the incident also foregrounds the significance of gold as a gift of love from the man to the woman. The spat gold is also used as a pretext for yet another illustration of Delu’s wickedness, her plot to eliminate the Prince. The Prince becomes severely sick after falling prey to her machinations, compelling Facima to undertake a journey to Masar in search of a cure to heal her lover. An important Afro-Islamic element is again introduced at this point. For Facima cross-dresses and shaves her head to pass as a man, and she also carries an Islamic slate and gourd, items that have usually characterized itinerant Malams, Muslim holy men. In the narrator’s imagination this disguise was most likely inspired by the form of attire often worn in a quasi-Islamic theatrical parody called Taushe. This could involve comic disguise and female-male dressing or male-female dressing by young people during the month of Ramadan to entertain the fasting community. The parody is often a satire of the religious literati and a social commentary exposing wrongdoing in the community. To this extent Facima’s disguise is also a symbolic message attacking the prevailing oppressive order in her life. The Islamic male disguise, then, allows Facima to escape from her hometown without arousing suspicion. It also allows her to fool everyone in Masar in gaining access to her beloved Prince and administering the cure that eventually heals him. The color of Facima’s disguise attire, white, may also have an Afro-Islamic symbolic meaning. In Hausa Bori, spirits that appear in white are identified as positive and nonmalevolent. White, in Islamic culture, on the other hand, is also repeatedly invoked to represent purification of the soul, body and action. Facima’s choice of white clothing, then, is not only in conformity with a Hausa Islamic male dress code, but it is also a projection of the purity of her intentions and actions when setting out for Masar to visit and cure her lover, the Prince. It is also important to look at how the narrative suggests a shrinkage of time and space. The Prince of Masar pays a daily visit to Facima who resides in a far-away land which, outside the mythical imagination, might involve weeks and even months of travel on camel or horseback. This seemingly unreal characterization of space-time accords perfectly with the magical-realism orientation of Hausa and other African oral literatures which, in more recent times, has also influenced some modern African imaginative writings. But this shrinkage of time and space could also have been inspired by the Islamic tradition of the mi‘raj, the Prophet Muhammad’s journey to the heavens and back. Within a single night, the Prophet traversed the horizontal distance between Mecca and Jerusalem, and the vertical distance between the earth and heavens, all in the age of the camel. He

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further traveled centuries backward in time, all the way to the time of Adam.10 It is within this Islamic tradition of mi‘raj and the indigenous tradition of magical realism, therefore, that the daily trips of the Prince of Masar seem to have been framed. Another important Afro-Islamic convergence relates to Facima’s ability to hear the language of the birds. This is partly derived from an African cosmogonic worldview which presumes a symbiotic relationship between the living and non-living, and between humans and non-humans in the universe. As has been observed, there is no dividing line between life and death, between animate and inanimate objects, between animals and humans.11 Facima’s experience with the birds, then, essentially reflects this African spiritual understanding of the world we share. But the incident of Facima and the birds may also have an Islamic origin based on the Solomonic tradition. The Qur’an tells us that Allah granted Solomon the ability to hear birds and learn from their wisdom, as Solomon himself proclaimed (Sura 27:16–17). Like Solomon, then, Facima is endowed with the capacity to hear and understand ‘bird language’. But, within the Islamic imagination, the bird also has some special significance, thanks to a myth connected with the Prophet Muhammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina—the event that marks the beginning of the Muslim calender. On his journey the Prophet hid in a cave. When his pursuers from Mecca arrived, they could not suspect that the Prophet was hiding within the cave partly because there was a bird, a dove, sitting on its eggs right at the entrance. Inspired by this tradition, then, the bird has come to feature in a number of Afro-Islamic narratives as a kind of a ‘savior’ of the oppressed. Just as Facima understands the birds, however, the birds too have some comprehension of the goings-on in the world of humans. They are fully aware that the Prince of Masar is critically ill and that only their excrement can cure him. Within some indigenous healing practices, it is not anathema to use animal excrement for medicinal purposes. In Islam, excrement is najs—a religious impurity. But here too, what is illegal becomes legal under the critical conditions of life and death. Within this Afro-Islamic perspective, then, the use of najs to cure the Prince of Masar further underscores the extent of his seemingly incurable disease. Within the framework of the gendered politics of Islamic movements, it could be argued that Facima is demonstrating that she too, even though a Muslim female, has been exposed, like the male Malams, to Islamic medicinal healing which often occurs after Qur’anic learning. So, she reveals her status as a female healer, a Malama. After all, as mentioned earlier, Islam has taken on local characteristics wherever it has spread. In general, syncretisms have emerged to the extent that one cannot clearly say where Islam ends and non-Islam begins. It must be added that Muslim women, who in general have not benefited from access to higher Islamic studies, experience an Islam that integrates medic-inal practices and spiritual rituals.12 This integrated account is fundamentally different from the approach that would suggest a discernable ‘paganism’ opposed to Islam in Facima’s recourse to a ‘herbal’ cure to heal the Prince. The narrator consistently continues to develop Facima as an intelligent character with tremendous foresight. Thus, she was able to anticipate that her beloved Prince might not believe her story of being innocent of responsibility for his sickness, nor her disguise as a male during her successful quest for a cure for him. When the Prince eventually confronts

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her and demands proof of her version of the story, Facima is able to present the three intimate items she requested from him, namely his turban, his ring and his promise not to harm Almajiri. This demonstration of innocence, intelligence, anticipation of problems and design of solutions to handle them adequately is what earns Facima, the molested orphan, her freedom from her cruel stepmother’s claws and the complicity of the father who abandons her, and her escape to the heights of Masar’s hierarchy of power. Her crucial role as the successful healer who saves the Prince of Masar’s life empowers her as the most powerful woman within the palace. And just as Sura 2:61 of the Qur’an commands ‘Get ye down into Egypt [Masar]—ye shall have what ye ask for’, Facima goes to Masar, and by overcoming the power structure, she acquires her freedom and lives happily ever after as the Prince of Masar’s wife.

Conclusion To recapitulate, then, this is a version of the Wicked Stepmother story that demonstrates a cultural syncretism extensively incorporating an Islamic dimension. For all practical purposes it is an Afro-Islamic narrative. Given the once male predominance in Hausa Islamic literacy, the initial ‘Islamization’ of this and, indeed, many other Hausa folktales from the female domain of tatsuniya, may have originated from a male transcription of the tale. The narration of this particular version in the 1990s, however, also took place in the context of new attempts to reinscribe the Muslim woman as a significant player in Islamic discourse. Facima, the main character of this story is, perhaps ultimately, a product of this reconfigured Afro-Islamic space in Hausaland, enhanced as it is by the new technologies of communication. What emerges in this Hausa version of Cinderella is a tale of liberation in which women’s agency over their destiny and their triumph over oppression is evident. Furthermore, in this tale Hausa Muslim women appropriate transnational political Islam and impart to it a feminine Hausa touch through Hausa medicinal healing.

Notes 1

2

3

This paper was originally commissioned to appear in this volume. While the preparation of the book was held up, a revised version was published under the title ‘A Cinderella Tale in the Hausa Muslim Women’s Imagination’, in Comparative Literature 54 (2002), pp. 242–55. Ousseina Alidou, ‘Gender, Narrative Space and Modern Hausa Literature’, Research in African Literatures (32.2, 2002:137–153). For examples of such women, see Jean Boyd, The Caliph’s Sister: Nana Asma’u, 1793–1865, Teacher, Poet, and Islamic Leader, London and Totowa NJ: Frank Cass, 1989; Jean Boyd and Beverly Mack (eds), Collected works of Nana Asma’u, daughter of Usman dan Fodiyo (1793–1864), East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997; Beverly B.Mack and Jean Boyd, One Woman’s Jihad: Nana Asma’u, Scholar and Scribe, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Alidou, Ousseina, ‘Women and the Politics of Education in Niger Republic’, paper presented at the Ohio State University’s Center for Folklore Studies Conference on ‘Going Native: Recruitment, Conversation and Identification in Cultural Research’, Columbus, Ohio, 20–22 May 1999.

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4

Cf.Dang Manh Kah, In the Land of Small Dragon: A Vietnamese Folktale, told by Dang Manh Kah to Nolan Ann Clark, New York: Viking Press, 1979; Shirley Climo, The Egyptian Cinderella, New York: HarperCollins, 1989; Marian Roalfe Cox, Cinderella: Three Hundred and Forty-Five Variants of Cinderella, Castskin, and Cap o’Rushes (with an introduction by Andrew Lang) (1893), New York: Kraus Reprint, 1967; Alan Dundes, Cinderella, a Folklore Casebook, New York: Garland Publications, 1982; John Gough, ‘Rivalry, Rejection, and Recovery’, Children’s Literature in Education 21(2), 1990:99–107; Obi Onyefulu, Chinye: A West African Tale, New York: Viking Press, 1994; Virginia Haviland, ‘Twelve Months’, in Favorite Fairy Tales Told in Czechoslovakia, Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1966; J.D.Rustin, The Multicultural Cinderella, Oakland: Rusting Educational Services, 1995. 5 See the discussion in Adeline Masquelier, Prayer has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power, and Identity in an Islamic Town of Niger, Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2001. 6 Neil Skinner, An Anthology of Hausa Literature, Zaria: Northern Nigeria Publishing Company Ltd, 1980; Priscilla Starratt, ‘Oral History in Muslim Africa: Al-Maghili Legends in Kano’, Ph.D. dissertation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1993; idem, ‘Islamic Influences on Oral Traditions in Hausa Literature’, in Kenneth Harrow (ed.), The Marabout and the Muse: New Approaches to Islam in African Literature, Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1996, pp. 159–75. In these studies, the authors also provide detailed descriptions of the influences of Islam on Hausa oral literature in general, and the Hausa epic more specifically. 7 Ousseina Alidou, ‘Gender, Narrative Space and Modern Hausa Literature: Implications for Africa and the Diaspora’, paper presented at Rutgers University, Africana Studies Department, 23 March 2000; Starratt, ‘Islamic Influences on Oral Traditions’. 8 J.F.Schon, Maganar Hausa, Nelden: Kraus [1886] 1971; Neil Skinner, Hausa Readings: Selections from Edgar’s Tatsuniyoyi, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968; idem, Hausa Tales and Traditions, vol. I, London: Frank Cass, 1969; idem, Hausa Tales and Traditions, vols II and III, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977. 9 Quotations from the Qur’an are drawn from The Koran, translated from the Arabic by J.M.Rodwell, Rutland: Everyman’s Library, 1994. The verse numbers follow the Egyptian text. 10 See for details of the journey William C.Chittick, ‘Mi‘rāj’, in John L.Esposito (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, vol. 3, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, 116–17. 11 Charles R.Larson (ed.), Under African Skies: Modern African Stories, New York: The Noonday Press, 1997, p. 27, quoting Dorothy Blair. 12 This holds good even for Saudi Arabia; cf. Eleanor Doumato Abdella, Women, Islam, and Healing in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

Further Reading Alidou, Ousseina, Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. Mack, Beverly, Muslim Women Sing, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Sidikou, Aissata, Recreating Words: Reshaping Worlds, Trenton: Africa World Press, 2003.

12 RAHEL MORPURGO IN THE CONTEXT OF JEWISH EMANCIPATION IN ITALY1 Gabriella Steindler Moscati

Rahel Morpurgo (1790–1871) was a Triestine poet and member of the well-known Luzzatto family, to which the celebrated Shemuel David (Shaddal), her cousin, also belonged. As her first biographer Vittorio Castiglioni points out,2 many distinguished and celebrated intellectuals were related to her family, as were the Kabbalist and playwright Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto, and Efraim Luzzatto who lived in London. In this intellectual environment Morpurgo was initiated into Jewish culture, receiving an exclusive education from private teachers. After learning the Pentateuch and its commentary by Rashi,3 she studied the Babylonian Talmud at the age of fourteen. Her cousin Shemuel David sent her poems to the journal Kokhavey Yizhak, where they were published from 1848 to 1859 and contributed to her fame. She lived in an especially significant period for the history of the Jewish people, and became widely known and appreciated from the moment that her first poems appeared. However, the great interest aroused by her poetry was due mainly to the fact that she was a woman. At that time a woman writer was an oddity, a curiosity to be investigated, but also to be classified as an extravagance. The uniqueness of Morpurgo’s writing solicited oppositional readings from the critics and scholars who evaluated her work in later years, often following the trends of the moment. Consequently, the Israeli scholar Yaffa Berlovitz, whose recent essay on Morpurgo is possibly one of the most detailed and well-informed, goes so far as construing Morpurgo as an ante-litteram feminist.4 Actually, the writings and fortune of Rahel Morpurgo need to be examined in the context of her family background. Her family boasted scholars and acclaimed writers who not only distinguished themselves on the Italian scene for the originality and importance of their poetic production, but also left their mark on European-Jewish culture as a whole. As Vittorio Castiglioni tells us in the introduction to his volume Rachelis Citharae Cantus,5 a collection of her poems, both published and unpublished, she had an especially close relationship with Shemuel David Luzzatto, her cousin. According to Castiglioni ‘the two cousins [Rahel and Shemuel David] spent hours and hours together, studying, investigating, discussing the literal meaning of texts, as well as faith in the existence of God and His unity!’6 Luzzatto must have played a decisive role in Rahel’s spiritual growth. Her education, undoubtedly unusual for the time, laid special stress on the Jewish cultural and religious sphere, to the point of almost blotting out the Italian and ‘secular’ aspects of her upbringing. As Castiglioni confirms:

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As one can gather from a letter in Italian written by Rachel to her beloved cousin Shadal, she mainly studied Jewish subjects, whereas she devoted little study to civil subjects, as is apparent from her rather incorrect letters in Italian, and from what she herself writes in the above-mentioned letter.7 This deep religious commitment is a recurrent feature of her poetry; indeed, the great literary critic Joseph Klausner (who characterizes her as ‘the only Hebrew female poet of the period of the Haskalah’8) judges her lyrics to be full of the fear of God, but totally devoid of the feeling and passion typically characterizing the female creative spirit. Rahel Morpurgo, he maintains, was ‘born old’. Further on, speaking of what he claims to be her total lack of feminine sensibility, Klausner says: ‘Thus, it is no wonder that, when her poems appeared in [the journal] Kokhavey Yizhak, many readers suspected that the author was actually a man hiding behind a woman’s name’.9 Concluding his analysis of Morpurgo, Klausner pronounces this lapidary sentence: ‘Thus, it is clear that Rahel Morpurgo impressed the learned men of her time, not so much for her talent, but for the fact that a woman wrote poetry in Hebrew! Hence the praise and celebration she received’.10 This decidedly negative, almost misogynist, conclusion, is not adopted by later critics. In an essay on Rahel Morpurgo, Dov Sadan highlights the uniqueness of this Jewish woman who devoted herself completely to the study of Jewish culture and became so fluent in the sacred language as to write poetry in it.11 From a typically Zionist perspective, Sadan even finds hints of a longing for Zion in Morpurgo’s famous poem in honor of Moses Montefiore, where she expresses her intention to follow the philanthropist to Jerusalem as a humble handmaid, and to spend the last years of her life there.12 Sadan sees in Morpurgo a forerunner of modern Hebrew women’s poetry, a pioneer, a model for the constellation of contemporary women poets.13 While Dov Sadan has the merit of having highlighted the continuity between Rahel Morpurgo’s poetics and that of the women poets who followed in her wake, Berlovitz perceives in her verses the drama of the woman author. According to her, Morpurgo adds a feminine dimension to her poetry that contrasts with typically male imagery.14 Berlovitz also dwells on Morpurgo’s favorite themes, showing how, in spite of the limitations imposed in those times by feminine decorum, the poet worked with a vast range of subjects. Sometimes her verses are specifically connected to her Italian context, as in the case of some of her poems to be recited at weddings, births, or other family events. On the other hand, some of her poems refer to current events, for example, one in honor of Moses Montefiore mentioned above, which celebrates the philanthropist’s visit to Trieste, and the song Korot hazeman, ‘Current Events’, written in 1848 and commemorating the revolutionary attempts of that year. Current events also inspired other poems: Al haborhim miketev hakolera (‘On the Fugitives from Cholera’, 1855), about a terrible cholera epidemic that affected Europe, and Ume’otot hashamayyim el tahto (‘The Signs of Heaven on Earth’, 1859), about the appearance of a comet.15 Thus, Rahel Morpurgo’s poetry deals with many different themes, and imaginatively combines the Jewish heritage with the events of her time and her everyday reality. While striving with religious fervor to revive her heritage, she does not neglect the events of the present. In terms of form, she employs structures that were widely used in the Italian-Jewish world. Her female sensibility, however, sometimes leads her to excesses of modesty;

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she signs her sonnets Rahel haketanah, ‘Little Rachel’, or with the acronym RMH, which can be read as the Hebrew Rima, that is, ‘worm’. Her poems reflect her increasingly acute awareness of the historical processes taking place in her time. Morpurgo was educated together with Shemuel David Luzzatto, who was a leading exponent of the Haskalah, during the early stages of that movement which was to bring about the emancipation of Italian Jews and their full integration into the Italian nation. Her interest in the Jewish heritage and her religious inclinations, which Klausner found so disturbing, are a reflection of the times in which she lived, and should be read in the light of the Italian Jews’ struggle for emancipation. In Italy, as in other Western European countries, Jewish emancipation had two facets: on the one hand, it created remarkable social, political, and even cultural opportunities; on the other, it posed serious threats to the Italian Jews’ religious identity. While the achievement of equal rights granted the Jews full integration into Italian society, this integration eventually placed the continuity and integrity of the Jewish religious and cultural heritage in jeopardy.16 The Jewish press of the time features the articles and opinions of scholars and rabbis debating this issue.17 In an attempt to reconcile loyalty to the Italian Jews’ country of birth with their observance of the faith of their forefathers, Giuseppe Levi commented: Social life and one’s homeland pertain to man, and the Jew, as a man, belongs to social life and his homeland. But the idea or, to express myself more clearly, Jewish faith, is what makes the Jew a Jew, and as such the Jew belongs to that great idea. A great and sublime idea, which proceeds from truth and leads the soul to greatness, and humanity to its loftiest destiny. One’s country and liberty are sacred, they are saintly names. But faith is the life itself of the soul, it is the heavenly homeland of man. The Jews, being children of their homeland, do not deny either the one for the other, or the other for the one.18 Levi eloquently advocated that, after emancipation, the role of Judaism should be circumscribed to the personal sphere. This position was a premise for social change. The preservation of the Jewish heritage was now entrusted to the family, and the dynamics of the domestic sphere were accordingly redefined.19 Giuseppe Levi himself recommends that the teaching of the cultural and religious traditions of Judaism be entrusted to women. Thus, the woman becomes the moral pivot of the family, being chosen for the delicate and difficult task of preserving group identity. She is the medium through which ‘the idea, the Jewish faith’, to quote Levi, is handed down. The press of the time undertook several initiatives to establish a dialog with women, for example, a special column in Il Vessillo Israelitico where the importance of religious observance for the preservation of one’s identity was stressed.20 Rahel Morpurgo’s choice of employing Biblical models and religious images is, therefore, far from coincidental. She revives the past to define her role as a Jewish woman within the new modernizing movement. She utilizes a specific trend of ItalianJewish poetry, as we will see later, and uses it to reaffirm her identity. In this, she is ahead of her time. There are two reasons for her ability to anticipate future changes. In the first place, she perceives the transformation of the world around her, thanks to her

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emotional and intellectual attachment to Shemuel David Luzzatto; second, at the time Trieste was a unique city, where some of the new developments later to characterize the Italian scene were indeed perceivable in advance.21 The city, while falling within the political and economic sphere of the Habsburg Empire, was culturally Italian. The Jewish community of Trieste, in particular, was a link between the innovative movements of Central Europe and Italian Judaism. It was in a privileged position, ahead of its time. Furthermore, it boasted especially high cultural standards.22 As the scholar Lois Dubin points out: In the eighteenth-century Free Port of Trieste, the cosmopolitan Jewish community had wide-ranging personal and commercial ties and broad cultural horizons. The original Ashkenazi Jews of Trieste were joined by Sefardim and by Levantine Jews. Of diverse origins, the immigrants came mostly from the Italian peninsula, but also from Vienna, Prague, and Hamburg in the north, and the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire in the east. Though the dominant cultural tradition of Triestine Jewry was Italian, Habsburg rule forced the community’s gaze also northward, eastward, and indeed southward, toward the predominantly Askenazic Jewries of Vienna, Bohemia, Moravia, Galicia and Hungary.23 Because of Trieste’s peculiar position of frontier city, ‘the Jewish community of Trieste became part of the history of the Haskalah in central Europe, but by cultural inheritance and its own diverse composition, it belonged as well to the Mediterranean Sephardi world’.24 Rahel Morpurgo draws on religious tradition for her poems, exploring biblical models and speculating about their possible connections to herself and her own spiritual perceptions. This is evident, for example, in her sonnet ‘Kol baramah nishma’25 (‘A Voice Was Heard in Ramah’), whose title echoes a well-known Biblical passage. Here, Morpurgo elaborates on verses 14–17 of Jeremiah, where Rachel, mother of the Jewish people, cries for the children of Israel: A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping; Rahel weeping for her children refused to be comforted for her children, because they were not. Thus saith the Lord: Refrain thy voice from weeping, and thine eyes from tears: for thy work shall be rewarded, saith the Lord; and they shall come again from the land of the enemy. And there is hope in thine end, saith the Lord, that thy children shall come again to their own border. (Jer. 31:14–17) The motivations underlying Morpurgo’s first-person reworking of this Biblical passage emerge from a careful reading of her text. The text is followed by my translation.

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A voice was heard in Ramah My God, my God, Rock of my Redemption Look and see, and hark to my voice I shall weep, cry and implore Pity and have compassion on a bewildered people Would thou pitch my tent For there is none that careth and helpeth me. Children shall come again to their own border With eternal joy over their heads. Forgive the weight of their sins Hasten to extol the chosen people Thou shalt cry no more, for God hath forgiven. Should He tarry, I shall wait for Him He will rebuild His House, its walls and ramparts And Rahel will rejoice in her new song. (Evening, Rosh Hodesh Bul Heshvan 5615)

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The poem features a nearly symmetrical juxtaposition of two cultural spheres. On the one hand, Morpurgo evokes the mythical Rahel of the Bible in the context of the passage from Jeremiah; on the other, she brings her personal sphere into play by employing the first person. This is especially evident in the concluding verse ‘Rahel will rejoice in her new song’, but her wish to put an individual stamp on the poem is already evident from the first verses. Besides that of the first person, there are several references to actuality, and the featuring of a biblical heroine is in tune with the trends of the time. In the light of current events, the evocation of these biblical women, whose courage and qualities had already drawn the interest of scholars and artists, takes on a renewed aura of modernity. And the mythical women of the Bible were also exalted by the teachers and rabbis of Morpurgo’s time.26 Let us analyze the first verses. After the customary invocation to God, a supplication on behalf of the ‘bewildered’ people follows, and then a prayer ‘to pitch my tent’, because ‘nobody careth and nobody helpeth me’. Morpurgo’s combinatory game, drawing on the biblical narrative to shed light on the present, allows different and even antithetical readings. Yaffa Berlovitz interprets the poem in the light of the beginnings of the national movement. She observes that a similar supplication can be found in the lyric of the movement of Hibbat Zion in the 1870s and 1880s, and hence construes Morpurgo as a pioneer.27 This is certainly an intriguing hypothesis, which deserves a more profound examination in the light of the actual importance of the Zionist movement in nineteenth-century Italy. In my own opinion, Morpurgo’s supplication should be viewed in the framework of her poetics, and especially in the light of Shemuel David Luzzatto’s thought, his attempt to reconcile the Jewish faith with the nationalistic political sentiment of the time. Luzzatto saw in the uprisings of 1848 as ‘a sign of God’s will’: Although he had been a loyal subject of the Habsburg monarchy, he considered the struggle against foreign oppression not ‘a rebellion, but a sign of God’s will…Luzzatto adhered to the Italian-Jewish tradition of shunning any form of extremism, and was well aware of the danger that the Jews, ‘oppressed and vilified until yesterday for their religion’, having achieved equal rights, could be swept away by the rising tide of ‘irreligiousness’. Hence, he felt the need to show that the Science of Judaism was well capable of providing the answers and instruments required to deal with the new reality. In March 1848 he began to publish the journal Il Giudaismo Illustrate, whose purpose was to promote a better knowledge of Judaism among his coreligionists. On its pages Luzzatto proclaimed Judaism’s intimate craving for peace and liberty, and its essence itself, as well as the universality of its fundamental principles.28 Thus, Judaism in those years tended to rediscover the values of faith and advocated the cause of freedom in a universal perspective, certainly not a nationalistic one. It is in this light that the two central strophes of the sonnet A Voice Was Heard in Ramah’ should be read. The words ‘I shall weep, cry and implore, oh, have pity and compassion on a bewildered people’, while patterned after the verses of Jeremiah, reflect the state of confusion of the Jewish people in the period following 1848, a year that witnessed violent insurrections and marked a turning point for the chosen people, as well as for the rest of Europe. Morpurgo paraphrases Jeremiah 30:17, ‘She is Zion, there is none that careth for her’ in

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her verse ‘There is none that careth and helpeth me’. This use of a passage of the Prophets has a twofold purpose. To quote Luzzatto himself: ‘The universal destination of Judaism is clearly expressed by the Prophets, when they announce the joyous age when nations will break their swords to convert them into ploughshares’.29 The following verses of Morpurgo’s poem ‘The Children Shall Come Again to Their Own Border’ evokes a return to religion. In the final verses we catch glimpses of a Messianic aspiration: the reconstruction of ‘His House’ and of the walls of Zion, that is, the celebrated Temple within the walls of the Holy City. This wish, present in many prayers, symbolizes a hope for a new age of peace for all nations following the coming of the Messiah. The prayers of the two Rahels, the mythical and the real one, blend into one, and in this context of happiness and peace for all, the poet exults and expresses her creative spirit. This combination of different planes is also prominent in an earlier poem, ‘Korot hazeman’30 (‘Current Events’), written in 1848, which deals with the revolutionary uprisings that shook Europe during that year. The poem juxtaposes two spheres, the political and the spiritual. I quote here the first stanza where, almost as if in a prologue, the bloody events that marked those rebellions are recounted:

A translation of the text will make the author’s purpose clear: He who humbles the proud humbles all the kings of the earth He uplifts the hearts of nations and the massacre comes To all the fortified towns, breach after breach So that the reptile and the insect are soaked with human blood. This vivid and almost realistic description of the events is followed by two other stanzas where the poet’s account becomes even more vivid and detailed, dwelling on the figures of two men, one old, the other young, who, having strapped on their swords, set out to shake off their yoke, contesting the King’s authority. In the fourth stanza, however, Morpurgo turns again to the religious repertory, letting us catch glimpses of her interiority. ‘In a different manner, the servants of the Lord, the brave warriors, will fight their instincts day and night’. The poet ends this stanza with a verse from the Song of Songs: ‘My lover is like a deer and a fawn’ (2:17). This is a verse which, according to Klausner, was used by the Sabbateans, the followers of the false Messiah Shabbetai Zevi. Klausner ironically observes,

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‘It is hard to believe that Rahel Morpurgo knew it’.31 In my opinion, the poet’s vast culture, as well as her kinship with Moses Hayyim Luzzatto, who was sympathetic to Sabbateanism, makes it probable that the verse intentionally refers to Shabbetai Zevi’s doctrine. Furthermore, this hint of the coming of the false Messiah closes the previous stanza, whereas the last resonates with mystical and messianic overtones. A great shofar shall blow and bring the son of Peretz

The Branch of righteousness shall flourish and spread over the earth He shall rebuild their ramparts and close every breach Because the Lord rules and all the earth rejoices And the name of little Rahel These last verses epitomize the religious register of Morpurgo’s poetics, a constant feature of her writing. Once freedom from the heavy yoke and the oppression of monarchs and the powerful has been shaken off, the Messiah will come, ‘the son of Peretz’ and ‘the Branch of righteousness’ will flourish and the ‘Kingdom of the Lord’ will begin. By skilfully weaving the insurrectional events of 1848 with her ancestral heritage, Morpurgo succeeds in highlighting her Jewish identity even while dealing with current events. Morpurgo’s awareness of contemporary events is again to the fore in the poem ‘Shir Tehillah’32 (1855), dedicated to the philanthropist Moses Montefiore. The poem is preceded by a short text in prose, quoted here in Nina Salman’s excellent translation: The saint, the honoured and exalted, ‘unto whom silence is price’ Sir Moses Montefiore, with all that are confederate with him (may God keep them and bless them), passed through this our city on their way to Jerusalem, the holy city. And as for me, rimah vetole’ah [again using r-m-h as her initials], I thought to stand and minister as one of the maids-in-waiting before the honoured lady, his wife, so as to go up with them, and to dwell there. But I was not able [velo altah biyadi]. And after they had journeyed on in peace, a greeting came to me from the sage who went with them R.Eliezer Löwe (may God preserve him). Therefore have I hope that, when the righteous man returns from his journey safely, I shall harden my face to come to supplicate him that that he declare into me whether the dawn is breaking, and whether our land giveth her increase; as it is said: ‘But ye, O Mountains of Israel, shoot forth your

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branches and yield your fruit to my people Israel, for they are coming soon.’ [Ezek. Xxxvi: 8] And as for my haste: To come within the prince’s house I longed— My spirit fainted for the Holy Land.33 Leafing through the journals of the time, it clearly appears that Moses Montefiore’s visits caused a sensation in the Italian Jewish community. His arrival was followed with interest and admiration, and odes in Italian or Hebrew were composed in his honor.34 Morpurgo’s poem for Montefiore reflects, again, the trends of contemporary Jewish culture. In those years, teachers and rabbis tended to emphasize the social role of women. The subject of women’s education, and hence of women’s relationship with the outside world, often surfaces in the Jewish press of those times.35 Thus, Morpurgo, while expressing her heartrending desire to return to the Promised Land and to find eternal rest there, is in line with the cultural trends of the moment. Of course, she also draws her inspiration from the typically ‘religious’ codes of Italian Jewish poetry. Her aspiration to return to Zion has distinguished precedents, notably that of Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto, who spent the last years of his life in Palestine and was buried there. Morpurgo’s poetics are best understood in the framework of the culture of her native city, Trieste, whose contribution to Hebrew literature was outstanding. In the words of the scholar Paolo S.Colbi: It suffices merely to remember that the list of Italian rabbis and Jewish scholars drawn up at the end of the 19th century by the Mantuan rabbi Marco Mortara includes at least thirty authors from Trieste. These authors show an in-depth knowledge of Biblical and post-Biblical texts, and stand out for their total mastery of Hebrew.36 Morpurgo’s continuous references to Biblical characters and her Jewish heritage is connected to the tradition of Italian Jewish poetry, which between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries boasted great poets who attained international renown, such as Efraim and Yizhak Luzzatto and Shemuel Romanelli.37 The latter author’s work, which features themes also found in Morpurgo’s poetry, exemplifies the spirit of this period and its dominant literary trends, of which Morpurgo’s work is representative. Romanelli was born in Mantua in 1757 and was only a little older than Morpurgo. He moved to Trieste in 1799, after leading a rather adventurous life. He had lived in Vienna and Berlin, which at the time were important conservative cultural centers where the ideals of the French Revolution were strongly opposed. He manifested his interest in poetry at Trieste, where he wrote a Hebrew grammar including a section on verse-writing.38 A cursory review of Romanelli’s work reveals similarities with Morpurgo’s. Many of his poems were occasional, that is, written to be read at weddings or to celebrate births, or in honor of illustrious men, as was customary at the time. He also wrote religious, philosophical and moral poems. Of these, two are emblematic: ‘Ruah nakhon’ (‘The Just Spirit’, Vienna 1792) and ‘Mahaze shadday’ (‘Divine Vision’, Turin 1808, written shortly before his death), whose devoted praise of the Lord is somehow reminiscent of liturgical poetry. This profound faith is the

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wellspring of both Romanelli’s and Morpurgo’s inspiration and defines their subject matter and stylistic choices. Thus, while at a first glance Rahel Morpurgo’s poetics are an expression of the patterns and creative trends of her cultural milieu, the peculiarity of her writing should be stressed: it is the writing of an educated woman capable of composing poetry in Hebrew. As the Israeli scholar Tova Cohen rightly observes, Morpurgo employs ‘canonical texts’ to express nationalist themes in a broad sense, but in a totally personal key.39 As the poem ‘A Voice Was Heard in Ramah’ bears out, her personal preoccupations emerge typically within a reconstructed biblical context. Rahel Morpurgo’s poetry reflects the moods and expectations of a minority that had for centuries been ready to acquire secular culture and was waiting for full social and political integration. The poet’s religious inspiration, pervading all of her literary production, must be interpreted as a vindication of her ancestral heritage. Morpurgo claims equality within the Italian nation, but at the same time she demands respect for her different cultural identity. In the wake of her cousin and teacher Shemuel David Luzzatto, she is not willing to give up her religious values for the sake of social acceptance. In my opinion, she epitomizes the numerous cultivated Italian-Jewish women of the Risorgimento who, while steeped in secular culture, had a deep knowledge of Jewish culture as well.40

Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18

Dedicated to my beloved grandmother, Laura Steindler Morpurgo. V.Castiglioni, Rachelis Citharae Cantus. Sive Tergestinae matronae Rachelis Morpurgo e gente Lausatia. Carmina epistula scripta, Trieste-Krakow: Fischeri, 1890, pp. 11–27. Solomon ben Isaac (1040–1105), leading commentator on the Bible and Talmud. See Yaffa Berlovitz, ‘Rahel Morpurgo: hateshuka el hamavet, hateshuka el hashir. Letiva shel hameshoreret ha’ivrit harishona ba’et hahadasha’, in Ziva Shamir (ed.), Dov Sadan, mehkarim besifrut ‘ivrit. Perakim nivharim beshirat nashim ivriyyot, Jerusalem: Tel Aviv University Press, 1996, pp. 11–40. Castiglioni, pp. 11–27. Castiglioni, p. 21. Castiglioni, p. 20. Joseph Klausner, Historiyya shel hasifrut ha‘ivrit hahadashah, Jerusalem: Ahiasaf, 1954, vol. 4, p. 45. Klausner, p. 45. Klausner, p. 48. Dov Sadan, Avney gevul Al ishim uderakhim, Tel Aviv: Massadah, 1964, p. 34. Sadan, p. 36. Ibid. Berlovitz, p. 39. Berlovitz, p. 3. See Monica Miniati, ‘Le “emancipate”: le ebree italiane fra Ottocento e Novencento’, in Claire E.Honess and Verina R.Jones (eds), Le donne delle minoranze. Le ebree e le protestanti d’Italia, Turin: Claudiana, 1999, pp. 243–54. Giuseppe Levi, ‘II massimo problema del Giudaismo. Separazione Assimilazione—Annichilimento’, L’Educatore Israelita 10 (1862), pp. 65–78. Levi, p. 67.

Rahel Morpurgo and Jewish emancipation 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39

40

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Miniati, p. 244. Miniati, p. 248. The column was begun in 1879 in the journal Il Vessillo Israelitico, while Morpurgo died in 1871. In Trieste, although the town was part of the Habsburg Empire, as early as 1719 the Jewish community achieved an extremely privileged position compared to their co-religionists elsewhere in the Empire. In the eighteenth century, the Austrian crown granted to the Jews of Trieste important privileges, such as freedom of cult, the right to carry out economic activities, the right to own real estate, and the freedom to travel within the territory of the Empire without having to pay humiliating taxes. Later, the Toleranzedikten of 1781–2 were issued. During the third French occupation (1809–12), Triestine Jews obtained equal political, civil and religious rights, which were later revoked after the Restoration. Only in 1867 did the Italian government issue a Constitution sanctioning the full civil and political emancipation of the Jews. Tullia Catalan, ‘La comunità ebraica di Trieste nell’Impero asburgico. Dalla fine del Settecento allo scoppio della I Guerra mondiale’, in Shalom Trieste, Gli itinerari dell’ebraism, Trieste: Comune di Trieste, 1998, pp. 13–32. See I.Barzilay, ‘The Italian and the Berlin Haskalah. Parallelism and Difference’, Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 29 (1960–1), pp. 17–54. L.Dubin, The Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste. Absolutist Politics and Enlightenment Culture, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1999, pp. 2–3. Dubin, p. 215. Castiglioni, Rachelis Citharae Cactus, p. 70. See: L.Della Torre, ‘La Donna israelita’, in Scritti sparsi, Padua, 1908. This specific essay was written in 1846. Berlovitz, ‘Rahel Morpurgo hateshukah el hamavet’, p. 33, note 56. M.Miniati, ‘Fra tradizione e integrazione nazionale: temi e problemi della realtà femminile ebraica tra ottocento e novecento’. Florence: Ph.D. dissertation, European University, 1992, pp. 30–1. S.D.Luzzatto, ‘Essenza del Giudaismo’, Il Giudaismo Illustrato I (1848), p. 3. Quoted by M.Miniati, Fra tradizione e integrazione, p. 31. Klausner, p. 44. Ibid. V.Castiglioni, Rachelis Chitharae Cantus, p. 71. N.Salman (ed.), Rahel Morpurgo and the Contemporary Hebrew Poets in Italy, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1924, pp. 43–4. The transliteration of the words in Hebrew is mine. I found two later poems dedicated to Montefiore in Il Corriere Israelitico (1864): the first is by A.Castelfranco, ‘Ode a Mosè Montefiori’, pp. 29–30, the other, in Hebrew, by Aharon Romanini, ‘Shir’, p. 31. Miniati, p. 82. Paolo S.Colbi, ‘Un capitolo glorioso di vita culturale ebraica triestina dei secoli passati’, La Rassegna mensile di Israel LXVI, NE1 (2000): p. 105. Hayyim Schirmann, Letoldot hashirah vehadramah ha’ivrit, Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, pp. 194–6. Schirmann, p. 266. Tova Cohen, ‘Betokh hatarbut umihutzah la: ‘al nikhus “sefat ha’av” kederekh le’itzuv intelektuali shel demut ha’ani hanashi’, in Ziva Shamir (ed.), Dov Sadan, mehkarim besifrut ‘ivrit. Perakim nivharim beshirat nashim ‘ivriyyot, Jerusalem: Tel Aviv University Press, 1996, p. 86. Among these women, Sara Copio Sullam is especially worthy of mention. From 1618 to 1623 she hosted a literary circle in her house in the ghetto of Venice. She is an example of an educated

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Religious Perspectives in Modern Muslim and Jewish Literatures woman drawing her inspiration from the faith of her forefathers. See: Corinna da FonsecaWollehem, ‘Acque di Parnaso, acque di Battesimo: fede e fama nell’opera di Sara Copio Sullam’, in C.H.Noness and V. R.Jones (eds), Le donne delle minoranze. Le ebree e le protestanti d’Italia, Turin: Caudiana, 1999, pp. 159–70.

Bibliography Barzilay, I., ‘The Italian and the Berlin Haskalah. Parallelism and Difference’, Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 29 (1960–1). Berlovitz, Yaffa, ‘Rahel Morpurgo: hateshuka el hamavet, hateshuka el hashir. Letiva shel hameshoreret ha’ivrit harishona ba’et hahadasha’, in Ziva Shamir (ed.), Dov Sadan, mehkarim besifrut ‘ivrit. Perakim nivharim beshirat nashim ‘ivriyyot, Jerusalem: Tel Aviv University Press, 1996. Castiglioni, V., Rachelis Citharae Cantus. Sive Tergestinae matronae Rachelis Morpurgo e gente Lausatia. Carmina epistula scripta, Trieste-Krakow: Fischeri, 1890. Cohen, Tova, ‘Betokh hatarbut umihutzah la: ‘al nikhus sefat ha’av kederekh le’itzuv intelektuali shel demut ha’ani hanashi’, in Ziva Shamir (ed.), Dov Sadan, mehkarim besifrut ‘ivrit. Perakim nivharim beshirat nashim ‘ivriyyot, Jerusalem: Tel Aviv University Press, 1996. Colbi, Paolo S., ‘Un capitolo glorioso di vita culturale ebraica triestina dei secoli passati’, La Rassegna mensile di Israel LXVI, NE1 (2000). Dubin, L., The Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste. Absolutist Politics and Enlightenment Culture, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Fonseca-Wollehem, Corinna da, ‘Acque di Parnaso, acque di Battesimo: fede e fama nell’opera di Sara Copio Sullam’, in C.H.Noness and V R.Jones (eds), Le donne delle minoranze. Le ebree e le protestanti d’Italia, Turin: Caudiana, 1999. Klausner, Joseph, Historiyya shel hasifrut ha’ivrit hahadashah, Jerusalem: Ahiasaf, 1954. Levi, Giuseppe, ‘II massimo problema del Giudaismo. Separazione—Assimilazione—Annichilimento’, L’Educatore Israelita 10 (1862). Miniati, Monica, ‘Le “emancipate”: le ebree italiane fra Ottocento e Novencento’, in Claire E.Honess and Verina R.Jones (eds), Le donne delle minoranze. Le ebree e le protestanti d’Italia, Turin: Claudiana, 1999. Sadan, Dov, Avney gevul. Al ishim uderakhim, Tel Aviv: Massadah, 1964. Salman, N. (ed.), Rahel Morpurgo and the Contemporary Hebrew Poets in Italy, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1924. Schirmann, Hayyim, Letoldot hashirah vehadramah ha’ivrit, Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, n.d.

13 MODERN ARABIC LITERATURE AND THE QUR’AN Inimitability, creativity…incompatibility1 Shawkat M.Toorawa

Wa mā kāna hādha l-qur’ānu an yuftarā min dūni llāhi. And this Qur’an could not have been composed by anyone other than God.

(Qur’an 10:37)

Introduction The Qur’an has been mined by creative writers for centuries, no less in the modern period— defined here as the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first century—than in earlier ones.2 Indeed, there appear to have been several imitations of the Qur’an in the classical and medieval periods.3 Why, then, does there exist no study devoted to its use in modern Arabic literature?4 There are, for instance, only two references to the Qur’an, both incidental, in the Modern Arabic Literature volume of the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature.5 M.M.Badawi’s Early Arabic Drama6 and Roger Allen’s The Arabic Novel: A Historical and Critical Introduction,7 to take but two examples, make no mention of the Qur’an at all. Is it that writers have not turned to the Qur’an for inspiration? Or has this not been studied? If not, why not? Could the answer to both questions be fear of repercussions? Bayyūmī’s recent study of the Qur’an in the oeuvre of Najīb for example, is, to my knowledge, one of the very first serious attempts systematically (and non-judgementally) to document and catalogue the influence of the Qur’an on a modern Arabic writer.8 That this sort of work should appear only in the late 1990s is, as I have adumbrated, partly a function of fear on the part of critics of public reaction. After a short introduction in which he explains that draws on (‘an) and from (min) the Qur’an, Bayyūmī proceeds to divide his study into two parts. Part One covers briefly the following issues: the influence of the Qur’an; the portrayal of Qur’an reciters;9 the Qur’an and death; Qur’anic instruction; the Qur’an as protection; the Qur’an and politics; Qur’anic exegesis; the Qur’an and the media; swearing on the Qur’an; final reckoning; and the Qur’an and humour. Part Two is organised by Qur’anic chapter, documenting every instance of use of particular Qur’anic passages in works. Yet, for all its usefulness, Bayyūmī’s study completely passes over 1959 novel, Awlād (Children of the Alley). One cannot escape the impression that the otherwise meticulous

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Bayyūmī is hedging his bets; that, like other critics, he is (justifiably) fearful of the reaction of the religious establishment and possibly also of the general public—Children of the Alley is (still) banned in Egypt.10 This is to a certain extent understandable,11 of course, but regrettable. Indeed, attempts by modern creative writers to engage the Qur’an have in the majority of cases been met with opposition, anger, and condemnation from the religious establishment, and from masses mobilised by pronouncements from the religious establishment. Usually, this opposition has considered neither the creativity of the borrowing nor even, in cases where borrowing is objected to on ‘theological’ grounds, the pious, deferential, or positive use of words, phrases, verses, or images from what is, after all, the Arabic text par excellence. Let me state at the outset that what I am undertaking here is neither a survey of the interaction of the Qur’an and modern Arabic literature—that would take far more time and many more tomes—nor an analysis of a particular work’s or a particular author’s reliance on the Qur’an—groundwork that is sorely lacking, it is true—but, rather, an aperçu of the ways in which creative use of the Qur’an has been undertaken, (mis)interpreted and opposed. Inevitably, I am also asking certain questions (some implicitly), among them: How pervasive is the Qur’an’s influence, and how easy, therefore, is it to catalogue, document, analyse, and interpret? What, if anything, have critics made of such use, borrowing and inspiration? Why does the mere mention of an author’s use of a Qur’anic passage, borrowing of a Qur’anic phrase, or inspiration from a Qur’anic story often inspire immediate suspicion and (out)rage? I hope to propose tentative answers to these questions and, more importantly, to stimulate interest in the study of the interaction of modern Arabic literature and the Qur’an.

Inimitability… From 610 until his death in 632, son of Abd Allāh, of the Quraysh tribe, recited to the new adherents of Islam the words revealed to him by God through the archangel Gabriel (Ar. Jibrīl), words that are to be found on the the so-called celestial Preserved Tablet.12 These words constitute the very first Arabic book, regarded by Muslims as the inviolate, inimitable (and for many, increate) final Word of the one, true God.13 This book, the Noble Qur’an (from the Arabic al-Qur’ān al-karīm), is divided into 114 sūras (chapters) which are arranged approximately in descending order of length. The Qur’an is normative in questions of grammar; is understood to be literal not allegorical; is regarded as inimitable; and its teachings, injunctions and prohibitions are held by most Muslims to be binding.14 By virtue of being regarded as inimitable, a concept known as i‘jāz, this aspect of it, inimitability, has been the subject of numerous treatises, classical, medieval, and modern,15 and has led some authors to try their hand at ‘imitating’ or ‘surpassing’ it. Significantly, the mere accusation of such an attempt levelled at someone was, and is, damning, so to speak, and was, and is, thus wielded to great effect by a writer’s detractors. The Qur’an has also been credited with being the ‘origin’ of everything literary that followed it in Arabic literary output.16 This position is set out, for instance, by al-Fukaykī

Modern Arabic literature and the Qur’an 211 in his 1996 work on iqtibās (borrowing, quotation) from the Qur’an, essentially a slim anthology of classical and medieval Arabic verse passages which have direct recourse to the Qur’anic text.17 Al-Fukaykī’s book is one of many works in that burgeoning18 literature known as al-adab al-islāmī, ‘Islamic literature’, one which takes as its starting point the communication of a message consonant with Islamic (usually Qur’anic and Prophetic) values within an artistic or quasi-artistic framework. A critical survey of that literature, distinguishing between creative literary output, and literary-critical output, has yet to be undertaken.19 Here is how Fedwa Malti-Douglas has characterised the rise and spread of Islamic literature:20 One of the most important international developments to date, the religious revival, has played a significant role in literary developments, changing the face of Arabic literature…. At stake is the control of various forms of cultural production, some of which—such as literature and the arts—have long been in the hands of more secularised and leftist intellectuals.21 At stake also is control over meaning and interpretation of the various forms of cultural production, whereby conservative theologians not only ‘determine’ what a creative text ‘means’, but also whether a creative text ought to (be allowed to) exist or not.

Creativity… There are three ways, as I see it, in which a creative writer may turn to the Qur’an: (1) thematically, (2) structurally, and (3) textually.22 The first strategy, the thematic (and/or inspirational), can be subdivided into (a) deriving inspiration from a Qur’anic theme without necessarily or explicitly commenting on it, or (b) taking a theme from the Qur’an and doing something creative with it. Examples23 of the former include (b. 1936) wrenching and, as it turned out, prophetic 1974 novel al-Zilzāl (The Earthquake), about an Algeria turned upside-down24—or rather, inside out— by violence. This work is inspired by an event described often in the Qur’an: the terrible earthquake that will convulse the Earth at the end of time. The zilzāl of the title is a reference to Qur’an (hereafter Q) 99, which opens: When the earth is convulsed with convulsions And the earth spits out its human remains And people ask: What are these commotions? On that day, shall the earth provide descriptions25 (idhā zulzilati

zilzālahā…)

The Qur’an is quoted often in the novel, but the passage that has pride of place is Q 22:1–2, which is first put in the mouth of a Friday sermon-giver, but also quoted by the unsavory third-person narrator and main character, Shaykh Bularwah:

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Religious Perspectives in Modern Muslim and Jewish Literatures Every nursing mother will neglect her nursling, and every pregnant mother will abort her burden, and you will see people drunk, yet they will not have drunk. tadhhalu kullu ‘ ammā wa kullu dhāti wa tar a n-nāsa sukārā wa mā hum bi-sukārā

The convulsion described by the Qur’an is imminent for the novel’s main character, and is presaged for him in the condition of one of the quarters of Constantine, where the novel is set:26 The Sidi M’sid quarter looks like the Garabi’ quarter in Najib Mahfouz’s novel, The Children of the Alley. The Egyptians were too cowardly to kill Mahfouz for writing that trash, with all its heathen, heretical ideas and its mockery of our prophets and angels. Not only does write a novel with direct Qur’anic thematic inspira-tion, but he writes it also into a particular history by intertextually invoking controversial Children of the Alley (discussed below). It goes without saying that Wattar does not share his protagonist’s views. Another example of deriving inspiration from a Qur’anic theme is the novel al-Rahīna (The Hostage) by Zayd Dammāj (b. 1943). Set in pre-revolution Yemen, it is the story of a young boy taken hostage as a pledge for his family’s political obedience. In the palace of a city governor, the youth is turned into an attendant, or duwaydar, providing a sexual outlet for the many women of the palace, in particular for the governor’s sister, the beguiling Sharīfa with whom he falls in love. In one exchange, Sharīfa having failed to ensnare the young protagonist, threatens him.27 The exchange between the two is evocative of that between the young and handsome Yūsuf (Joseph) and the wife of the person he serves (given the name Zulaykhā in Islamic tradition). Zulaykhā attempts to seduce Yūsuf, he runs away, and she tears his shirt from behind, causing a scandal—for her (Q 12:23–7). In both cases, Qur’an and novel, handsome youths are being held ‘hostage’ in the house of a powerful man;28 and in both cases a woman related to that man, and in a similar position of power, wishes to take advantage of the youth. The congruities are signalled in an exchange between Sharīfa and one of the older (and presumably less desirable) palace women,29 where Joseph and Zulaykhā are explicitly named.30 Examples of taking a theme from the Qur’an and then doing something creative with it include one of the works of Indonesian-born playwright ‘Alī Bā-Kathīr (d. 1969), who drew inspiration from a wide range of authors and traditions. His 1962 play Hārūt wa Mārūt (Hārūt and Mārūt)31 is inspired by the Qur’anic story of two angels who, after criticising humanity for its disobedience, are told by God not to judge humanity too harshly, for were they subject to the same desires, they would not act any differently. They disagree, so God suggests a number of them try their hand at being ‘human’ themselves. Three descend to earth, one choosing to return immediately to the heavens when he finds that the beauty of women is an irresistible temptation. Hārūt and Mārūt stay behind, and fall prey to human nature, engaging in illicit sexual relations, and killing a man. The angels in heaven then realise God’s wisdom.

Modern Arabic literature and the Qur’an 213 (d. 1987) published Ahl al-Kahf (The Sleepers in the Cave).32 In 1933 Tawfīq The playwright describes its roots as being situated in the European tradition of intellectual drama, and states outright that it was written under the influence of dramatists such as Ibsen, Shaw, Maeterlinck and especially Pirandello, all of whom saw perfomed in Paris between 1925 and 1928.33 But the story is inspired by Q 18:9–26 (drawing also on the early Christian legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus). Alexplained his choice of subject as follows:34 I wanted my source not to be Greek legends, but the Qur’an. My aim was not simply to take a story from the Holy Book and set it in a dramatic framework, but, rather, to look at our Islamic legends with the eye of Greek tragedy, to bring about a fusion of the two mentalities and the two literatures.35 Paul Starkey has noted that36 The publication of Ahl al-Kahf is a decisive date both in career as a writer—it was his first printed work—and in the history of modern Arabic drama, for the use of a Qur’ānic story (that of the sleepers of Ephesus) as the basis for the philosophical play was unprecedented.37 38 It was highly praised by the prominent littérateur and critic, and did particularly well, going through two editions in its year of publication, and being selected as the opening play of the newly established government-sponsored ‘National Troupe’ (alFirqa al-Qawmiyya) in 1935.39 Nonetheless there was an outcry against The Sleepers in the Cave both by people who considered it a blasphemous insult against the norms of the stage,40 and by people who thought it unbefitting to draw from the Qur’an. was accordingly called before the public prosecutor who asked him to account for the commotion caused by the appearance of his play. He was then informed that it would be better if he concentrated on books of law!41 The second strategy available to a creative writer who turns to Scripture is structural, i.e. the use of Qur’anic structure(s) to inform a given work. To my knowledge, the only writer to have attempted this in modern Arabic literature is Najīb (b.1911) in Awlād (Children of the Alley). Children of the Alley was first published in serial form in the Cairo daily Al-Ahrām from 21 September to 25 December 1959.42 It called forth immediate protests, and is the object of a still-enforced ban. The criticisms from the Islamic university al-Azhar and other conservative quarters revolved around three issues. The first was the alleged irreverence of treating the lives of Islam’s prophets in a modern guise.43 The second was the role assigned to Qāsim, the character who ‘corresponds’ to The third, and most important, was the alleged implication that the death of the central character, Jabalāwī, in fact represents the death of God. has completely rejected these interpretations, but that this kind of reading has real purchase is shown by the fact that in 1994 was stabbed by extremist compatriots.44 Philip Stewart, to my mind, utterly misses the point in the introduction to his translation of the novel, unwittingly providing fuel to the detractors’ fire when he decries their ‘refusal

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to approve any realistic representation of the prophets as normal humans’.45 Even though he is appreciative of creativity, he can only see the novel as a (thinly) veiled religious commentary.46 Kenneth Cragg, on the other hand, is able to read allegory more perceptively, and also to read more into it. Here are his comments on the last chapter, which, like the Qur’an’s last chapter, is numbered 114:47 Awlād Hāratinā is the shape of doubt, as Cairo formed it in the life and writing of Najib Mahfuz. It is a splendid interrogation of ‘the Lord of men, the God of men, the King of men’, to whom Surah 114, like its predecessor, 113, repairs for ‘refuge’. It interrogates only because it has explored so sombrely and depicted so sharply the very evils of human society from which the two Surahs yearn to be delivered. By his sustained and vivid picture of how evil they are, Mahfuz is thoroughly loyal to the Qur’ān in reading the human predicament as a vacancy for God. The third strategy available to the creative writer when turning to the Qur’an is textual (or lexical). This may be subdivided into (a) having a character recite a verse; (b) quoting single words or verbatim phrases; or (c) inverting or reworking a phrase. When a writer has a character utter or recite a Qur’anic verse or verses, the choice of passage is evidently often significant, but as there is no reworking, the sacredness of the text remains intact. Examples of this abound throughout the modern Arabic literary corpus, and can be associated with very different moods. For instance, in the following passage from the Salwa Bakr (b. ca. 1950) short story, ‘An Occasion for Happiness’, the Qur’anic text (from Q 55) is intact but the reaction of the little boy provides levity: 48 After that was over the presenter of the show came forward to announce that the programme would begin with the best and greatest of words, at which a Qur’an reciter came and sat on a high gilded chair placed on a platform and began chanting, And which is it of the favours of your Lord that you deny?’ His voice was exceedingly moving, and Fawz’s brother nudged his mother and enquired in astonishment: ‘Has grandpa died once again?’ Textual recourse to the Qur’an may also involve using or quoting single words or verbatim phrases from the Qur’an, or alluding to them, usually ones that immmediately signal to the lecteur averti that it is a significant Qur’anic usage. Few readers or critics would have wa l-layli idhā sajā in the following trouble recognising the opening lines of Q 93 lines by ‘Afīfī (b. 1935):49 The short suras were joined like a tent in the harmonies of youth, in the rhythms of the white forenoon and the brooding night. These lines are memorised by Muslims the world over and heard by them recited on the radio and in the mosque.

Modern Arabic literature and the Qur’an 215 Examples of the use or quoting of long passages or whole chapters from the Qur’an are not common. One of the most fascinating and innovative of such uses occurs in a text written in 1831 by ‘Umar ibn Sa‘īd, a West African enslaved in North America. It opens with a ‘quotation’ of Q 67 in its entirety. The importance of this text in the history of Arabic literature, from several points of view, cannot be overstated. Here is how the most recent translator of the narrative regards the inclusion of the Qur’anic chapter:50 Omar incorporates surat al-Mulk as a kind of prologue to his narrative. Omar’s choice seems deliberate and significant in the context of a slave narrative, for the noun al-Mulk comes from the tripartite Arabic root malaka, meaning both to own and to have dominion. The sura contends that God is the owner of everyone and everything. Through this choice, Omar seems to refute the rights of his owners over him, since only God has the mulk, the power and the ownership. Textual recourse to the Qur’an might also involve inverting or reworking a word or phrase. In one of his long poems Adonis (b. 1930) uses the mystical letters found at the beginning of Q 2 and Q 19 in disturbed and reverse order respectively:51 and a crowd like the powdered sand began to divide up a stretch the extent of lām mīm alif or the size of ‘ayn yā’ hā’kāf, flowing in it, weaving banners and carpets and domes. When Qur’anic passages are reworked, the situation is of course quite different from the use of isolated words, the use being usually both obvious (to the reader) and intended by the writer.52 In ‘lā waqta li l-bakā” (‘No Time for Weeping’), his elegy to Gamal Abdel Nasser, the poet Amal Dunqul (d. 1983) substitutes the word for the word amīn in a passage from Q 96:53 By the fig, by the olive, by the Mount of Sinai… by this land of grief Wa wa z-zaytūn Wa ūri Sinīn… wa hādha l-baladi This is a poignant echo, and rereading, of verses that will be utterly familiar to most Muslims, where the poet, by changing only the final amīn to transforms a safe, secure, prosperous nation into a saddened, grieving one.54

Incompatibility… The poetry of Amal Dunqul has been the subject of a sustained literaryreligious diatribe by Fakhri ‘Imāra.55 For ‘Imāra, the Qur’an may indeed inspire a creative writer, linguistically (lughawī) or thematically (fikrī). The former may involve the ‘use’ (isti‘māl) of a phrase or sentence, possibly a whole verse, or the ‘borrowing’ (iqtibās) of a single

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alqur’ word.56 She also allows for ‘imitation’ (tamaththul) of Qur’anic prose ( ānī) or Qur’anic style (al-nasq al-uslūbī, lit. stylistic arrangement). In the best example of Imāra’s ability only to see error where there is in fact—in my view—unthreatening artistry,’ she writes:57 There would be verbatim quotation from ‘Sūrat al-‘Ādiyāt’ [Q 100] were it not for the forcible introduction of the expression ‘as they say’ which leads the poet into grave error [ jasim]. It is as if he wishes to stir up doubt or uncertainty about the incontrovertible truth of the Divine Text, or, by using this expression, to call into question the veracity of the Divine Word, believed for all time by believers everywhere. The passage in question is from Dunqul’s celebrated ‘al-Khuyūl’ (The Horses’):58 Gallop—or halt—dear horses: You are not the morning racers And not the—so-called—snorting chargers aw qifī l-ān—ayyatuhā l-khaylu: lasti l-mughīrāti Wa lā l-‘adiyāti—kamā qīla— In addition to linguistic inspiration, ‘Imāra recognises thematic inspiration too. This, she believes, may derive from a complete or entire Qur’anic story, from just one ‘scene’ or from one character depicted in the Holy Qur’an. She dwells at length on Dunqul’s ‘Muqābala ma’a Ibn ’ (‘A Private Interview with Noah’s Son’), which mines Q 11:40–6 (‘[The Prophet] Hūd’).59 The following is a passage from the poem:60 Noah’s Flood has come Over there are ‘the scientists’ making for the Ark; the singers; the Prince’s stableboy; the breeders of livestock; the Chief Judge (…and his servant!); the sword-bearer; the temple-dancer (she was delighted when she rescues her artificial hair); the tax-collectors; the importers of arms shipments; the Princess’s sweetheart in all the radiant femininity of his features Noah’s Flood has come Over there are the cowards making for the Ark ‘Imāra writes that the reader has no choice but to notice the ‘marked incompatibility’ between what the Qur’an sets out, i.e. the Truth, and what the poet sets out.61 Dunqul is additionally taken to task for the implications of the poem’s title; for having the ark (‘alfulk in both the Qur’an and the poem) save the ‘wrong’ folk; for allowing his poetic persona to collapse into that of Noah’s son; and for countless other departures from the sacred (version of the) story. ‘Imāra herself misses the boat, as it were. This poem, like

Modern Arabic literature and the Qur’an 217 so much poetry that draws from a rich and layered tradition such as the Qur’ano-Biblical, is not simply reworking the story of Noah, but also using it allegorically as a way to comment on a contemporary situation. does as much in Awlād as much in Ahl al-Kahf, and, more directly relevant here, Adonis as much in his celebrated 1958 poem The New Noah’.62 But ‘Imāra gives Dunqul no quarter, nor evidently 63 would she Adonis: I have no dispute with either the scholar whom Imāra takes to task] or the poet [i.e. Dunqul] about the necessity of employing the tradition [al-turāth, lit.: heritage], of using it as a means of interpreting [expressing?] the present and of prognosticating the future. No dispute with them on that score. But which heritage? We have constantly to bear one thing in mind, that there is an emphatic difference between the Qur’anic text[ual Heritage] on the one hand and the sundry texts of the human or earthly tradition/heritage on the other. In her view, there can only be one motivation for the poet’s conscious resort to the Qur’anic text: his derisory and disrespectful need to contradict and oppose the sacred Word of God, a need that should cause him, and us his readers, to hang our heads in shame.64 ‘Imāra concludes her well-documented tirade by establishing (1) that the poet’s overall faith (naz’a īmāniyya and dīnī) has diminished and led him to divest the Qur’anic text of its sacredness and grandeur, regarding it instead as something man-made basharī); (2) that he has a limited religious culture, and therefore cannot understand the Qur’anic text properly; (3) that, by not having recourse to authoritative exegeses and lexica, he misconstrues words and meanings in the Qur’an; and (4) that he enjoys contradicting the Qur’anic text.

Prospects… Using Qur’anic text, echoing Qur’anic text, mirroring Qur’anic text, reworking Qur’anic text—none of these are strategies from which writers have typically shied away, even though they know this may expose them to public outcry. Not so long ago, student riots erupted at al-Azhar over the reissue of Walīma li-a’shāb (Feast of the Sea Algae) 65 by the Syrian novelist insists that the accusations are based on passages taken out of context. But, for detractors,66 that is no defence. For them, the Qur’an’s only context is itself. It is only appropriate to theological uses. What avenues are left, then, to the writer who wishes to tap into the phenomenally rich universe of the Qur’anic text? Few indeed. It is understandable that there would be an outcry over Karl Lagerfeld having a line from the Qur’an embroidered on a dress modelled by Claudia Schiffer.67 But it is not easy—at least for me—to see why novels such those of plays such as those of or poems such as those of Dunqul must be subject to narrow theological critiques for purported transgressions against the sanctity of the divine text. For a wide spectrum of Muslims hold that the Qur’an, as Divine Revelation, valid for all peoples and all time, is characterised not only by perfection, but also by

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multiplicity of meaning, that no amount of human effort can result in a total apprehension of the Qur’an’s import, obvious and metaIronically, these same arguments can be adduced to allow for creative recourse to the text, to allow for a creative reading and (re)writing. The Qur’an has provided some of the greatest classical and medieval Arabic writers with inspiration—lexical, textual, and thematic. The creative possibilities are endless, and can only enrich a literature that has many of its origins in the rhythms of the sacred text. I should like to close by proposing that the apparent incompatibilities be looked at anew—be looked at as compatibilities. The Compassionate, taught the Qur’an; Created Humanity and taught it eloquent oration. ‘allama l-qur‘ān khalaqa l-insān ‘allamahu l-bayān (Q 55:1–4)

Notes 1

2

3

4

I am most grateful to Hilary Kilpatrick for soliciting this chapter, for her helpful comments on an early draft, and for her jamīl; to Devin Stewart and the anonymous referees for their perceptive and constructive comments; and to Michael Cooperson, Bill Granara, Ali Houissa, Joe Lowry, and Nasser Rabbat for assistance with references. My thanks also to the Muslim Students’ Association at Emory University for inviting me to present this material at Emory University in November 2000; and to Professors George Saliba and Pierre Cachia for inviting me to present this paper at a Columbia University seminar in April 2003. I use the transliteration system of the International Journal of Middle East Studies. See A.M.Zubaidi, The impact of the Qur’ān and on medieval Arabic literature’, in A.F.L.Beeston, T.M.Johnstone, R.B.Serjeant and G.R.Smith (eds), Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 322–43. An early critical work is the lost Kitāb Sariqāt al-Kumayt min al-Qur’ān (The [Creative Literary] Borrowings of [the Poet] al-Kumayt from the Quran) of Ibn Kunāsa (d. ca. 823). The eighth-century secretary Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ (d. 756), for instance, is reported to have tried his hand at producing rhymed prose like the Qur’an’s. As for the celebrated eleventh-century poet and prose writer al-Ma‘arrī (d. 1057), he is credited with a parody of the Qur’an. But the only surviving part of his wa al-ghāyāt fī al-suwar wa al-āyāt [The Book of Paragraphs and Endings Composed on the Analogy of the Qur’an’s Chapters and Verses] is no parody but rather a work heavily indebted to Qur’anic stylistics, lexicon and diction. In this connection, the practice of (turning poetry into prose) is relevant. Works such as al-Washy al-marqūm fī [The Striped Embroidery: Turning Verse into Prose] by al-dīn Ibn al-Athīr (d. 1239) discuss inter alia this procedure with reference to the Qur’an. In accordance with one of the rubrics listed in the introduction. It should be noted that Jacques Jomier’s ‘Aspects of the Qur’an today’, in A.F.L.Beeston,T. M.Johnstone, R.B.Serjeant and G.R.Smith (eds), Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 260–70, opens with ‘At the present time, the influence of the Qur’an on Arabic literature is unobtrusive, yet at the same time considerable’. Yet, belletristic literature (‘The influence of the Qur’an on contemporary literature’) is given but four pages, wherein are only mentioned the religio-historical works of ‘Abbās al-‘Aqqād and ‘Abd

Modern Arabic literature and the Qur’an 219 Jūda

Diyāb’s 1971 novel, madīna (‘A Town’s Sadness’); and Najīb Awlād (see note 45 below); and ‘Izz al-dīn Madanī, about whom Jomier curiously (and unhelpfully) notes (p. 264): ‘There is no point in dwelling here upon an early work by ‘Izz al-dīn al-Madanī published in Tunisia in the revue [sic.] al-Fikr in about 1968, al-Insān which adheres to the very style of the Qur’an in a way that a Muslim should never allow’. I am, alas, not familiar with Madanī’s work. An important recent contribution to the influence of the Qur’an on modern Arabic poetry is Stefan Wild, ‘The Koran as Subtext in Modern Arabic Poetry’, in Gert Borg and Ed de Moor (eds), Representations of the Divine in Arabic Poetry, Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001, pp. 139–60. 5 M.M.Badawi (ed.), Modern Arabic Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. But see Badawi’s early and important study: ‘Islam in Modern Egyptian Literature’, in Journal of Arabic Literature, 2 (1971), pp. 154–94; Pierre Cachia’s 1984 article, ‘In a Glass Darkly: The Faintness of Islamic Inspiration in Modern Arabic Literature’, reprinted in his An Overview of Modern Arabic Literature, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990, pp. 201–17; and Kenneth Cragg, The Pen and the Faith: Eight Modern Muslim Writers and the Qur’ān, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985, which includes three Arabic-language writers: Kāmil Sayyid and Najīb The situation is better for other literatures. See, for instance, Maggi Phillips, ‘The View from a Mosque of Words: Nuruddin Farah’s Close Sesame and The Holy Quran’, in Kenneth W.Harrow (ed.), The Marabout and the Muse, Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, 1996, pp. 191–204; Harrow’s earlier edited volume, Faces of Islam in African Literature, Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, 1991; and Cragg, The Pen and the Faith. 6 M.M.Badawi, Early Arabic Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. 7 Roger Allen, The Arabic Novel: A Historical and Critical Introduction, 2nd edn, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995. In his latest work, The Arabic Literary Heritage: The Development of Its Genres and Criticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, Roger Allen briefly discusses the Qur’an and Arabic literature (p. 101), observing that ‘[i]n modern times the Qur’ānic themes of divine retribution against sinful peoples and the ephemerality of human existence have provided fertile images through which poets can express their political opinions’. 8 Bayyūmī, al-Qur’ān al-karīm fī adab Najīb dirāsa mu’jamiyya [The Holy Qur’an in the Oeuvre of Najīb ] Cairo: Dār alli l-Nashr, 1999. 9 The oeuvre of Yūsuf Idrīs (d. 1992) is particularly rich in such portrayals. See, for example, the celebrated title story in Bayt min Cairo: ‘Ālam al-Kutub, 1971, pp. 5–13, translated by Mona Mikhail as ‘A House of Flesh’, in Yūsuf Idrīs, Eye of the Beholder, ed. Roger Allen, Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1978, pp. 191–8. The title of Idrīs’s story, ‘A Dining-table from Heaven’, min al-samā” (in al-Mu’allafāt al-kāmila I: Cairo: ‘Ālam al-Kutub, 1971, pp. 15–35) is a reworking of Q 5:112. See Renate Wise, ‘Subverting Holy Scriptures: The Short Stories of Yûsuf Idrîs’, in John C. Hawley (ed.), The Postcolonial Crescent: Islam’s Impact on Contemporary Literature, New York: Peter Lang, 1998, pp. 140–54. 10 An argument could be made, it is true, that Children of the Alley does not, in fact, draw any passages directly from the Qur’an and therefore need not find its way into a work organised along the lines of Bayyūmī’s. 11 Understandable in light of the conviction for apostasy on 14 June 1995 of the Egyptian academic Abū Zayd for remarks about the literary nature of the Qur’an. On this and other issues pertaining to academic perceptions of the Qur’an, see Toby Lester, ‘What Is the Koran’, in The Atlantic Monthly, 283(1) (January 1999), pp. 43–56.

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For a creative literary use of this term, see Tawfīq play, al-Mukhrij (The Producer), in al-mujtama Cairo: Maktabat al-Ādāb, 1950, p. 294, where the protagonist’s niece describes a film version of Othello as a lawh 13 Notwithstanding Daniel Madigan’s nuanced study of the Qur’an’s use of the term kitāb, for which he argues the translation ‘book’ is woefully inadequate, the Qur’an is nonetheless the first attested book in Arabic and is, contra Madigan, the ‘physical book at the center of Muslim worship’. See Daniel A.Madigan, The Qur’an’s Self-Image: Writing and Authority in Islam’s Scripture, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 14 For a concise characterisation of the Qur’an, see Andrew Rippin, ‘Koran’, in Julie Scott Meisami and Paul Starkey (eds), Encyclopaedia of Arabic Literature, London and New York: Routledge, 1998, 2, pp. 453–6; see also Michael Cook, The Koran: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 15 On i‘jāz, see Encyclopaedia of Islam, (New Ed.), Leiden: E.J.Brill, 1969, vol. 3, pp. 1018–20. See also ‘Inimitability’ in the Encyclopaedia of the Qur’ān, vol. 2, Leiden: Brill, 2002, pp.526–36. 16 The Quran’s literariness is disputed by many conservative theologians who hold that by virtue of being divine it cannot therefore be literary. There are, of course, alternative and middle-ground views: see e.g. Andrew Rippin, ‘The Qur’an as Literature: Perils, Pitfalls and Prospects’, in British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 10(1) (1983), pp. 38–47; and Anthony H.Johns, ‘In Search of Common Ground: The Qur’an as Literature’, in Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, 4 (December 1993), pp. 191–209. For a statement of the position that the antecedents of modern Arabic fiction are to be found in the Qur’an, see Kāmil al-Qur’ān wa al[The Qur’an and modern fiction]. Beirut: Dār al-‘Ilmiyya, 1970. 17 ‘Abd al-Hādī al-Fukaykī, al-Iqtibās min al-Qur’ān al-karīm fī al-shi’r al-‘Arabī [‘Quot-ing’ the Holy Qur’an in Arabic Poetry], Damascus: Manshūrāt Dār al-Numayr li l-Nashr wa l-Tawzī’, 1996, p. 7. One of al-Fukaykī’s distinguished predecessors is al-Tha‘ālibī (d. 1038), author of al-Iqtibās min al-Qur’ān al-karīm, and also Nathr wa al-‘iqd. 18 Fedwa Malti-Douglas, ‘Arabic Literature: An Overview’, in John L.Esposito (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopaedia of the Modern Islamic World, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, vol. 1, p. 102: ‘Statistically, in Arab countries, sales of Islamic books far outnumber those of secular ones’. 19 But see ‘Abd al-Dāyim, al-Adab al-Islāmī bayna wa [Islamic Literature Between Theory and Practice], Zaqaziq, Egypt: Dār al-Arqām, 1990. Among surveys, Ragai N.Makar, Modern Arabic Literature: A Bibliography, Lanham MD and London: Scarecrow Press, 1998, for instance, lists only twenty-six items under the rubric ‘Islamic Literature’ (pp. 95–7). A starting point for a more comprehensive bibliographic study is the Index of Islamic Literature, published by the Islamic Foundation (Leicester) and the International Institute of Islamic Thought (Herndon VA) as a supplement to the quarterly Muslim World Book Review. 20 Malti-Douglas, ‘Arabic Literature’, p. 102 (emphasis mine). 21 A signal writer in the Islamic revivalist movement was Sayyid (executed 1966), who became the pre-eminent intellectual in the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwān al-Muslimīn) in Egypt. His many works, notably his thirty-volume commentary, al-Qur’ān (the final volume of which has been translated as In the Shade of the Qur’ān, Vol. 30, trans. M.A.Salahi and A.A.Shamis, London: MWH, 1979), have had a formative influence on ‘Islamic literature’ and are to be found in bookstores from Morocco to Mauritius to Malaysia. On , see e.g. Yvonne Haddad, ‘Sayyid Qutb: Ideologue of Islamic Revival’, in John Esposito (ed.), Voices of a Resurgent Islam. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 67–98. The most important literary-critical proponent of an ‘Islamic literature’ who was also a creative writer was Najīb al-Kīlānī (d. 1995). On him, see e.g. Christian Szyska, ‘Najīb al-Kīlānī On His Career, or: How

Modern Arabic literature and the Q ur’an 221 to Become an Ideal Muslim Author’, in Stephan Guth, Priska Furrer and Johann Christoph Bürgel (eds), Conscious Voices: Concepts of Writing in the Middle East, Beirut: Orient-Institut der DMG in Kommission bei Franz Steiner Verlag Stuttgart, 1999, pp. 221–36, and the references FLWHGWKHUH2IKLVPDQ\ZRUNVGHYRWHGWRµ,VODPLFOLWHUDWXUH¶VHHHVSHFLDOO\1DMƯEDO.ƯOƗQƯ DO,VOƗPL\\DZDDOPDGKƗKLEDODGDEL\\D [Islamism and Literary Movements], Tripoli, Libya: 'ƗUDO1njUZKHUHKHDFNQRZOHGJHVKLVGHEWWRERWK6D\\LGDQG .  7KHVHDUHKHXULVWLFUXEULFVZKLFK,UHFRJQLVHUHTXLUHUH¿QHPHQW6WHIDQ:LOGLQµ7KH.RUDQDV 6XEWH[W¶SLGHQWL¿HVWZRSRVVLELOLWLHV There are, I think, two main types of intertextuality between the Koran and modern Arabic poetry. There is, on the one hand, Koranic language used as a means to intensify the religious impact; it is built on the common acceptance of the Koran as the fundamental text of Arabic culture and Arabo-Islamic religion. There is, on the other hand, a use of Koranic language which distances itself from this traditional mode by DÀLSSDQWLURQLFQRVWDOJLFRUHYHQGHVWUXFWLYHFRXQWHUSRLQWWRWKHFRQWH[W Cf. Sasson Somekh’s characterisation of these as ‘linear’ and ‘ironic, respectively, in Genre and Language in Modern Arabic Literature,:LHVEDGHQ2WWR+DUUDVVRZLW]S)RU her part, )DNKUƯµ,PƗUDLGHQWL¿HVWZRSULQFLSDOZD\VIRUDFUHDWLYHZULWHUWREH inspired: linguistically OXJKDZƯ and thematically ¿NUƯ  see note 55 below. 23 I stress that these are simply illustrative examples.   :LOOLDP *UDQDUD µ7UDQVODWRU¶V ,QWURGXFWLRQ¶ LQ 7DKLU :DWWDU 7KH (DUWKTXDNH London: Saqi Books, 2000, p. 20, writes: 

25 26 

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:DWWDU¶VYLVLRQRISRVWFRORQLDO$OJHULDLVDVRFLHW\LQFKDRVDµZRUOGXSVLGHGRZQ¶ and to give literary expression to this vision he taps into the rich corpus of Islamic eschatological imagery and apocalyptic legends, and reworked their symbols of inversion to reinforce the ironic mode of the novel. Translations from the Qur’an are my own. I use published translations for quotations from literary works whenever possible. DO=LO]ƗO %HLUXW 'ƗU DOµ,OP OL 0DOƗ\ƯQ  S  :DWWDU The EarthTXDNH p. 50. =D\G Dammaj, DO5DKƯQD%HLUXW'ƗUDOƖGƗES=D\G0XWHH¶'DPPDMThe Hostage, trans. May Jayyusi and Christopher Tingley, New York: Interlink Books, 1994, pp. ± 7KHEHDXW\RIWKHKRVWDJHLQ'DPPƗM¶VQRYHOLVHYRNHGUHSHDWHGO\HVSHFLDOO\LQDUHIUDLQVXQJ by the soldiers of the palace. The correspondence between the palace women in the novel and the ‘women of the city’ in the Qur’anic story (Q 12:30) is also noteworthy. 'DPPƗMDO5DKƯQDS'DPPDMThe Hostage, p. 104. %Ɨ.DWKƯU+ƗUnjWZD0ƗUnjW Cairo: Maktabat 1962. 7DZIƯT Ahl al-Kahf,&DLUR0DNWDEDWDOƖGƗE,WZDVSHUIRUPHGLQDQG then not again until 1960: see Richard Long, 7DZ¿TDO+DNLP3OD\ZULJKWRI(J\SW London: ,WKDFD3UHVVS$SSHQGL[ /RQJULJKWO\SRLQWVRXWWKDWµ(YHQQRZ[The Sleepers in the Cave] has not been subjected to the attention of critics who have succeeded in explainLQJDQGDSSUHFLDWLQJLWVDWLVIDFWRULO\DVDERRNOHWDORQHDVDSOD\¶S ,KDYHQRWVHHQThe 3HRSOH RI WKH &DYH >DKO DONDKI@ WUDQV 0DKPRXG (O /R]\ &DLUR (OLDV 0RGHUQ 3XEOLVKLQJ +RXVH &REXW,KDYHKDGWKHSOHDVXUHRIUHDGLQJLQW\SHVFULSW The Sleepers in the Cave, trans. Michael Cooperson. 7DZIƯT 6LMQDOµ8PU&DLUR0DNWDEDWDOƖGƗE>@S7KH3ULVRQRI /LIH $Q $XWRELRJUDSKLFDO (VVD\ trans. Pierre Cachia, Cairo: American University in Cairo 3UHVVSS±

222 34

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38 39 40 41 42

43

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46 47 48 49

50

Religious Perspectives in Modern Muslim and Jewish Literatures Tawfiq ‘Preface’ to al-Malik Ūdīb, Cairo: Maktabat al-Ādāb, ca. 1949, pp. 39–40. Cf. Long, Tawfiq al Hakim, p. 35, and Plays, Prefaces and Postscripts of Tawfiq al-Hakim, trans. William M.Hutchins, Washington DC: Three Continents Press, 1981, p. 283. In shams al-fikr (Cairo: Maktabat al-Ādāb, 1938, pp. 108–9), Tawfīq alobserves: ‘One thing prompted me to choose this subject: the desire to write an Egyptian tragedy on an Egyptian basis…. For the Greeks [the basis of tragedy] is “fate” and “destiny”; for the Egyptians it is “time” and “place”’. Although there appears to be little specifically Egyptian about the play, intention that it relate to 1930s Egypt is clear, while its meditation on the persecution of the early Christians has a particular relevance for Copts. The Coptic Church dates its era from the persecutions of Diocletian’s reign (the late third century), i.e. a few decades after those of Decius, the emperor who figures in The Sleepers in the Cave. I am grateful to Hilary Kilpatrick for pointing this out. Paul Starkey, From the Ivory Tower: A Critical Study of Tawfīq London: Ithaca Press for The Middle East Centre, St Antony’s College, Oxford, 1987, p. 28. An interesting feature of thematic recourse to the Qur’an is a preference for pre-Islamic stories, that is, ones that involve Christian, Jewish, or ‘pagan’ characters. So, although The Sleepers in the Cave was pioneering in its use of a Qur’anic story, that story is not one connected to the Prophet or to the events in the life of Islam proper, but rather to earlier Prophets and to events that pre-date historical Islam. This is true of other writers too. This instinct is worthy of further investigation, especially inasmuch as it is a form of self-censorship and/or self-preservation. Quoted in translation in M.M.Badawi, Modern Arabic Drama in Egypt, Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press, 1987, p. 27. Starkey, From the Ivory Tower, p. 28. Long, Tawfiq al Hakim, p. 34. Starkey, From the Ivory Tower, p. 29; cf. Long, Tawfiq al Hakim, p. 34. Najīb Awlād Beirut: Dār al-Ādāb, 1967. On the novel, see e.g. Jareer AbuHaidar, ‘Awlād by Najīb an event in the Arab world’, in Journal of Arabic Literature 16 (1985), pp. 119–31. The character Adham is inspired by Adam; that of Jabal (‘Mountain]’) by Moses; Rifā’a (‘Highness’) by Jesus; and Qāsim by (whose patronymic was Abū al-Qāsim). ‘Arafa (‘scientia’?), whose narrative comes last, would appear to represent a modern Everyman. Motivated no doubt by self-preservation, Mahfouz has upheld the ban of Children of the Alley. ‘Introduction’, in Naguib Mahfouz, Children of Gebelaawi, revised augmented ed, trans. Philip Stewart, Colorado Springs CO: Three Continents Press, 1995, p. vii. And cf. p. viii. Cf. the new translation by Peter Theroux: Children of the Alley, New York: Doubleday, 1996. The novel is analysed in light of its recourse to the Qur’an in Cragg, The Pen and the Faith, pp. 144–64. For a negative evaluation, see Sasson Somekh, The Changing Rhythm: A study of Najīb novels, Leiden: E.J.Brill, 1973, pp. 137–55. Stewart, ‘Introduction’, in Children of Gebelaawi, p. viii. Cragg, The Pen and the Faith, p. 158 (emphasis mine). Salwa Bakr, ‘An Occasion for Happiness’, in The Wiles of Men and Other Stories, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993, p. 54. ‘Afīfī Rubā‘iyyat Quartet of Joy. Poems by Muhammad Afifi Matar, trans. Ferial Ghazoul and John Verlenden. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997, p. 51 (English; emphasis added). Ala A.Alryyes, ‘Translator’s Introduction to “The Life of Omar Ibn Said”’, in Marc Shell and Werner Sollors (eds), The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature, New York: New York

Modern Arabic literature and the Qur’an 223

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56 57 58 59

60 61 62

63 64 65

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University Press, 2000, p. 60. The Arabic unicum is photoreproduced in the volume. I am very grateful to Werner Sollors for letting me see a pre-publication copy. Adūnīs, ‘Introduction to the History of the Petty Kings’, trans. Shawkat M. Toorawa, in Journal of Arabic Literature, 23(1) (March 1992), p. 34; revised translation in Adonis, A Time Between Ashes and Roses, trans. Shawkat M. Toorawa (Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004). The new sequence lām-mīm-alif spells the word ‘limā’, ‘why?’; and the resequenced ‘ayn yā’ hā’ kāf replicate the standard (coat of arms) of the Caliph ‘Alī (d. 661). Amal Dunqul, al-A’māl al-shi’riyya al-kāmila, 2nd ed., Cairo: Maktabat Madbūlī; Beirut: Dār al-‘Awda, 1985, p. 259. The echo of another Quranic phrase, ‘Ij’alhā baladan āminan’ (Q 2:126), ‘Make it [= this city] a city of peace’, is also unmistakable. Fakhrī ‘Imāra, Istilhām al-Qur’ān al-karīm fī shi’r Amal Dunqul [Qur’anic ‘Inspiration’ in the Poetry of Amal Dunqul], Giza: Dār al-Amīn, 1997. See also her al-Islām wa alshi’r [Islam and Poetry], Cairo: Maktabat al-Ādāb, 1992. Cf. al-Fukaykī, Iqtibās, passim. ‘Imāra, Istilhām, p. 88. Dunqul, al-A’māl al-shi’riyya al-kāmila, p. 387. This poem has received deserved critical attention, and a particularly extensive treatment in Sayyid Fi ‘an lu’lu’ at dirāsa li Amal Dunqul ‘Muqābala mā a ibn [In Search of the Impossible Pearl: A Study of Amal Dunqul’s ‘A Private Interview with Noah’s Son’], Cairo: Dār al-Fikr al-Jadīd, 1988. Dunqul, al-A’māl al-shi’riyya al-kāmila, p. 394. See also the Appendices to Fī ‘an lu’lu’ at for several rescensions of the poem. My translation. ‘Imāra, Istilhām, p. 101: 1-qāri’u bayna mā jā’a fī 1-Qur’āni l-karīmi wa-huwa wa-bayna mā dhahaba ilayhi 1-shā‘ir’. Adūnīs, al-jadīd’, in al-A’māl al-shi’riyya al-kāmila, vol. 1, p. 418, 420, cf. the translation in John M.Asfour (trans, and ed.), When the Words Burn: An Anthology of Modern Arabic Poetry, 1945–1987, Toronto: Cormorant Books, 1988, pp. 160–1. ‘Imāra, Istilhām, p. 108. (In 1991,1 was told by the Head of the Arabic language programme at an Islamic University that I should abandon my interest in Adonis because he is an apostate.) ‘Imāra, Istilhām, p. 114. Walīma li-a’ shāb Beirut: n.p., 1983; reprinted Beirut: n.p., 2000. See 11 May 2000 and 18 May 2000. For the riots, see ‘Book Reawakens Islamist Trend’, in Middle East Times (international edition), 12 May 2000. On the literary characterisation of such individuals, see Pierre Cachia, ‘Freedom from Clerical Control—The Portrayal of Men of Religion in Modern Arabic Literature’, in Journal of Arabic Literature, 26 (1–2) (March-June 1995), pp. 175–85. ‘Lagerfeld apologises for dress’, in The Times, 21 January 1994: ‘The Chanel fashion house yesterday scrapped an haute couture design and scrambled to apologise to the world’s Muslims after an Arabic inscription on the bodice of a dress worn by model Claudia Schiffer turned out to be a line from the Koran’. For a picture, see the Houston Chronicle, 27 January 1994, Fashion, p. 2.

Select bibliography ‘Abd al-Dāyim, al-Adab al-Islāmī bayna wa Theory and Practice], Zaqaziq, Egypt: Dār al-Arqām, 1990.

[Islamic Literature between

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Badawi, M.M., ‘Islam in Modern Egyptian Literature’, Journal of Arabic Literature, 2(1971): 154–94. Sayyid, Fī ‘an lu’lu’ at : dirāsa Amal Dunqul ‘Muqābala ma a ibn [In Search of the Impossible Pearl: A Study of Amal Dunqul’s ‘A Private Interview with Noah’s Son’], Cairo: Dār al-Fikr al-Jadīd, 1988. Allen, Roger, The Arabic Literary Heritage: The Development of its Genres and Criticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Bayyūmī, al-Qur’an al-karīm fī adab Najīb dirāsa mu’jamiyya tahlīliyya [The Holy Qur’an in the Oeuvre of Najīb Cairo: Dār alli 1-Nashr, 1999. Cachia, Pierre, ‘Freedom From Clerical Control: The Portrayal of Men of Religion in Modern Arabic Literature’, in Journal of Arabic Literature, 26 (1–2) (March-June 1995): 175–85. ‘In a Glass Darkly: The Faintness of Islamic Inspiration in Modern ArabicLiterature’, in An Overview of Modern Arabic Literature, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990:201–17. Cook, Michael, The Koran: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Cragg, Kenneth, The Pen and the Faith: Eight Modern Muslim Writers and the Qur’ān, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985. Encyclopaedia of Islam (New Ed.), 11 vols, eds H.A.R.Gibb et al, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1969–2004. Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, 4 vols, eds Jane D.McAuliffe et al, vol. 2, Leiden: Brill, 2002. al-Fukaykī, ‘Abd al-Hādī, al-Iqtibās min al-Qur’ān al-karīm fī al-shi’r al-’arabī [‘Quoting’ the Holy Qur’an in Arabic Poetry], Damascus: Manshūrāt Dār al-Numayr li 1-Nashr wa 1-Tawzī’, 1996. Harrow, Kenneth (ed.), Faces of Islam in African Literature, Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, 1991. The Marabout and the Muse, Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, 1996. Kāmil, al-Qur’ān wa [The Qur’an and Modern Fiction], Beirut: Dār al-’Ilmiyya, 1970. Hawley, John C. (ed.), The Postcolonial Crescent: Islam’s Impact on Contemporary Literature, New York: Peter Lang, 1998. ‘Imāra, Fakhrī, Istilhām al-Qur’ān al-karīm fī shi’r Amal Dunqul [Qur’anic ‘Inspiration’ in the Poetry of Amal Dunqul], Giza: Dār al-Amīn, 1997. al-Islām wa al-shi’r [Islam and Poetry], Cairo: Maktabat al-Ādāb, 1992. Johns, Anthony H., ‘In Search of Common Ground: The Qur’an as Literature’, in Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 4 (December 1993): 191–209. Jomier, Jacques, ‘Aspects of the Qur’an Today’, in Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period, eds A.F.L.Beeston, T.M.Johnstone, R.B.Serjeant and G.R. Smith, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983:260–70. al-Kīlānī, Najīb, al-Islāmiyya wa al-madhāhib al-adabiyya [Islamism and Literary Movements]. Tripoli, Libya: Dār al-Nūr, 1963. Madigan, Daniel A., The Qur’ān’s Self-Image: Writing and Authority in Islam’s Scripture, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Phillips, Maggi, ‘The View from a Mosque of Words: Nuruddin Farah’s Close Sesame and The Holy Quran’, in The Marabout and the Muse, ed. Kenneth W. Harrow, Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, 1996:191–204. Sayyid, Fī al-Qur’an, Cairo: Dar al-Kutub al-‘Arabiyya, 1950. English: In the Shade of the Qur’an, Vol. 30, trans. M.A.Salahi and A.A. Shamis, London: MWH, 1979. Reprinted Alexandria VA: Al Saadawi Publications, 1997. Rippin, Andrew, ‘Koran’, in Encyclopaedia of Arabic Literature, eds Julie Scott Meisami and Paul Starkey, London and New York: Routledge, 1998, 2:453–6. ‘The Qur’an as Literature: Perils, Pitfalls and Prospects’, in British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, 10(1) (1983): 38–47.

Modern Arabic literature and the Qur’an 225 Somekh, Sasson, Genre and Language in Modern Arabic Literature, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1991. ——The Changing Rhythm: A Study of Najīb Novels, Leiden: E.J.Brill, 1973. Szyska, Christian, ‘Najīb al-Kīlānī On His Career, or: How to Become an Ideal Muslim Author’, in Stephan Guth, Priska Furrer and Johann Christoph Bürgel (eds), Conscious Voices: Concepts of Writing in the Middle East, Beirut: Orient-Institut der DMG in Kommission bei Franz Steiner Verlag Stuttgart, 1999: 221–36. Wild, Stefan, ‘The Koran as Subtext in Modern Arabic Poetry’, in Gert Borg and Ed de Moor (eds), Representations of the Divine in Arabic Poetry, Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001:139–60. Wise, Renate, ‘Subverting Holy Scriptures: The Short Stories of Yûsuf Idrîs’, in John C.Hawley (ed.), The Postcolonial Crescent: Islam’s Impact on Contemporary Literature, New York: Peter Lang, 1998:140–54. Zubaidi, A.M., ‘The Impact of the Qur’ān and on Medieval Arabic Literature’, in Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period, eds A.F.L.Beeston, T.M.Johnstone, R.B.Serjeant and G.R.Smith, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, 322–43.

Further Reading Allen, Roger, The Arabic Literary Heritage: The Development of its Genres and Criticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Cachia, Pierre, An Overview of Modern Arabic Literature, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990. Cragg, Kenneth, The Pen and the Faith: Eight Modern Muslim Writers and the Qur’ān, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985. Harrow, Kenneth (ed.), Faces of Islam in African Literature, Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, 1991. The Marabout and the Muse, Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, 1996. Hawley, John C. (ed.), The Postcolonial Crescent: Islam’s Impact on Contemporary Literature, New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Wild, Stefan, ‘The Koran as Subtext in Modern Arabic Poetry’, in Gert Borg and Ed de Moor (eds), Representations of the Divine in Arabic Poetry, Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001:139–60. Zubaidi, A.M., ‘The Impact of the Qur’ān and on Medieval Arabic Literature’, in Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period, eds A.F.L.Beeston, T.M.Johnstone, R.B.Serjeant and G.R.Smith, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, 322–43.

14 AVROM GOLDFADEN’S THEATRE OF JEWISHNESS Three prooftexts Joel Berkowitz

Avrom Goldfaden (1840–1908) was a Yankl-of-all-trades, and of shifting notions of Jewish identity. He achieved modest renown as a young man by writing popular Yiddish songs, and then turned to the more prestigious but less widely accessible craft of Hebrew verse with Tsitsim u’frakhim [Blossoms and Flowers], published in 1865. His two books of Yiddish poetry, Dos yidele [The Little Jew, 1866] and Di yidene [The Jewish Woman, 1869], helped bring his poetry to the attention of a wider audience. The latter volume also contained the seeds of Goldfaden’s later renown, with two forays into dramaturgy: a short sketch in dialogue form and a full-length comedy. Both the dramas and the poetry also anticipated another phenomenon: Goldfaden’s lifelong fixation on Jewish themes in his writings. Goldfaden’s work is steeped in Jewish concerns. In his poetry, plays, and music, Goldfaden continually drew upon Jewish texts, traditions, rituals, and liturgy. He blended these ingredients with Western conventions to fashion a theatre of Jewishness in ways that had never been done before, for a professional Jewish theatre had never existed for any sustained period before him. Yet while Goldfaden’s work for the theatre is undoubtedly Jewish, its treatment of religion per se is more circumscribed, and it is not always clear where his concern with religion leaves off and larger questions of Jewish identity politics take over. This very ambiguity is telling, however; for Goldfaden, the idea of the Jewish people is so deeply intertwined with religion that a discussion of one of these elements must necessarily include the other. That being said, this essay will focus on plays from three distinct phases of his work that not only address religious matters head on, but draw upon Jewish texts to comment upon the contemporary Jewish condition: Di bobe mitn eynikl [The Grandmother and Her Granddaughter, ca. 1877]; Shulamis, oder has yerushalayim [Shulamis, or, the Daughter of Jerusalem, 1881]; and Kenig Akhashveyresh [King Ahasuerus, 1887]. First, though, let us take a brief look at the writer’s treatment of Jewish issues in his early work.1

Poetry as prelude Goldfaden would ultimately form the first enduring professional Yiddish troupe, and write dozens of plays that would serve as part of the foundation of the repertoire. He started his literary endeavours, however, as a poet, and his first book of Yiddish poetry anticipates

Avrom Goldfaden’s theatre of Jewishness 227 virtually all of the Jewish issues and imagery that he would constantly return to throughout his career as a playwright. One of the collection’s most ambitious poems, ‘Dos pintele yid’ [The Essence of Jewishness], bursts forth with ahavas yisroel—love for the Jewish people, starting with a meditation on the many synonyms denoting a Jew: Ikh hob lib dayn nomen vi m’git im a drey: Tsi yisroel, tsi yizrael, tsi ivri, tsi yevrey, Tsi yankev, tsi yakob, tsi yude, tsi yid, Ikh hob dikh lib afile baym nomen zhid!!2 [I love your name however one turns it around, Whether Yisroel, Israel, Ivri, or Yevrey, Whether Yankev, Yakov, Jüde, or Yid, I love you even by the name Zhid!] The sentiment is quintessential Goldfaden: an exuberant expression of love for the ordinary Jew, even—or especially—when the Jew is most downtrodden. Throughout ‘Dos pintele yid’ and many of the poems that follow, Goldfaden portrays the Jewish people as persecuted but ultimately triumphant, sinful but ultimately repentant, divinely punished but ultimately forgiven. God is rendered in many metaphors. In this poem, he is by turns a protective father who swears to ‘break the bones’ of anyone who hurts his child and a shepherd tending his flock. God gets a more contemporary look later in the anthology, appearing in ‘Hallelujah’ as a healing doctor and an all-knowing astronomer—scientific incarnations that would please the most rationalistic maskil, or proponent of the Haskalah [Jewish Enlightenment]. In Goldfaden’s hands, God is the Maskil of Maskilim. Yet while Goldfaden’s poetry reveals his sympathy with the basic tenets of the Haskalah, one of its most striking features is how lightly he treads on matters of contemporary Jewish politics that he will treat so sharply a decade later, in his first few years as a professional playwright. There, his comic gifts will make him a favourite with many audiences, but scorned by Jewish assimilationists and traditionalists alike. By contrast, he strikes a conciliatory tone in ‘Dos pintele yid’: Loz nemen an ek sine, khasidim un daytshn, Vos toyg zikh zidlen, krign, vos toyg zikh dos patshn? Der iz yid, der iz yid, mir zenen ale yidn, Lomir tsvishn zikh beser lebn tsufridn.3 [Let’s bring an end to hatred, Hasidim and modernists. What’s the use of scolding, fighting, hitting? This one’s a Jew and that one is, we are all Jews, Let us live more happily with each other.] It was all very well for Goldfaden to express such warm sentiments in the quiet of his study, but unity and harmony hardly make for exciting drama. When trying to fill theatre seats, Goldfaden would go after more controver sial subject matter.

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Early maskilic farces Goldfaden became a professional playwright in 1876, in the process helping the Yiddish theatre to develop beyond the seasonal, amateur undertaking it had been for centuries. The sharp-eyed reader may recall that Goldfaden had already written plays by this point—the dramatic dialogue and full-length comedy included in Di yidene. Today it might seem peculiar for a writer to publish plays when there is no stage on which to mount them, but in so doing, Goldfaden was simply following a Yiddish literary tradition that dated back to the 1790s. It was then, in Berlin, that Moses Mendelssohn’s disciple Aaron Halle Wolfssohn published Leichtsinn und frömmelei (Silliness and Sanctimony), a three-act satire inspired by Molière’s Tartuffe. Wolfssohn’s play, written in a combination of German and Yiddish, reworked the French classic into a Jewish milieu, with the title character transformed into a lecherous Polish Hasid preying on a well-to-do German Jewish family. Wolfssohn’s explicit aim in writing his comedy was to offer the Jewish world a substitute for the centuries-old purimshpil, a form that to him reeked of provincialism and superstition. While he did not manage to abolish the purimshpil, Wolfssohn did lay the foundation for the modern Yiddish dramatic repertoire. For the next seventy-five years, a small but significant group of writers would build upon his work with comedies intended more for the salon than for the stage. Goldfaden, weaned intellectually on the milk of the Haskalah, undoubtedly knew of many of these plays, and it is certain that he knew two of them well: Shloyme Etinger’s Serkele (ca. 1825), and Avrom Ber Gotlober’s Der dektukh, oder, tsvey khupes in eyn nakht [The Veil, or, Two Weddings in One Night, 1838]. Gotlober, a maskil who turned against his Hasidic upbringing with a vengeance, taught Goldfaden at the Zhitomir rabbinical academy, and the student would openly borrow situations from Der dektukh in his plays. Goldfaden got to know Serkele by playing the title role—an overbearing, self-absorbed, hypochondriacal woman—in a rabbinical school production. His first full-length play, Di mume sosye [Aunt Sosye, 1869], is essentially a reworking of Serkele that tightens the dramatic structure, but loses some of its source’s frenzied hilarity in the process. Goldfaden spent the first phase of his career as a professional playwright drawing upon, and perpetually refashioning, the basic ingredients of Haskalah drama. Most of the Yiddish Haskalah plays were comedies, and from Wolfssohn on, they continually turned to a dramatic plot structure dating back to Roman times, when Plautus established the basic formula: two young people want to marry (or at least sleep with) each other, but their plans are blocked by an authority figure (usually male). Ultimately, they find a way to trick the blocking figure and get around his obstacles, and ultimately bring about the union they desire. Wolfssohn grafted the concerns of the Haskalah onto a Plautine plot structure by injecting the issue of yikhes, or family pedigree, into the action of the play. Yikhes was a central target of the maskilim, since it raised fundamental questions of religious tyranny over worldly concerns; that is, they felt that families often emphasized marrying into a distinguished family at the expense of young people’s happiness. In Haskalah plays, then, the blocking figure’s obstacle comes specifically in the form of an undesirable match, almost always an attractive and enlightened daughter being forced to marry a foolish, physically repugnant young man from a well-connected family. Gotlober’s titular “Veil”, for example, suggests a bridal accessory, but in context also refers to a covering that masks a grotesque

Avrom Goldfaden’s theatre of Jewishness 229 omission from the face of the heroine’s designated groom: he has no nose. Goldfaden would build upon Gotlober’s notion of monstrous religiosity in two of his most popular farces: Shmendrik (1877) and Di tsvey kuni lemls [The Two Kuni Lemls, 1880], both featuring title characters whose spiritual backwardness is embodied in their physical shortcomings, speech impediments, and provincial dress.

The Grandmother and Her Granddaughter Goldfaden was not always so unkind to traditional religious figures. Among his early plays, one of the most intriguing—and one of the richest in terms of its treatment of religious issues and texts—is The Grandmother and Her Granddaughter. Based on a Russian ballad, “Nyanya” [The Grandmother], the play was first performed as a two-act vaudeville, then expanded at some later point to the three-act form in which it has been published.4 Bontsye, seventy years old, has been raising her eighteen year-old granddaughter Odele since the girl’s childhood, when her mother died. The two women are separated not just by two generations, but by a huge gap in sensibility. Bontsye is provincial, superstitious, rigid in her piety; Odele finds what subterfuges she can to escape from this environment and embrace the modern world. Their differences, as it turns out, will in effect be a battle to the death. Their weapons: Jewish texts and symbols pitted against secular ones. The play opens with Bontsye granting a matchmaker her power of proxy to make a match for her granddaughter. When Odele enters a moment later, we immediately see that they belong to different worlds, as Bontsye plucks feathers for her granddaughter’s trousseau while Odele holds a book. When Odele expresses her unwillingness to talk about the wedding, her grandmother responds with the first of the play’s ‘texts’ within the text. Although not a written document, Bontsye’s first weapon is a text for all that (and takes up a full four pages of the play!): a dream she claims to have had the night before Passover, and invests with all the authority of a tractate of the Talmud or a study by Maimonides. Bontsye describes an elaborate and gruesome vision. She has died, and the angel guiding her into the next world shows her terrible scenes of sinful Jews, dressed in the modern German style, having their heads and feet chopped off and being thrown into a river, which reddens with their blood. The angel explains: ‘Dos’—entfert er—‘zenen di farshayte layt! Vos hobn nit gehaltn fun yidishkayt. Zeyere kep shtendik on hitlen geven Un zeyere fis flegn keyn mol in shul arayn nit geyn’.5 [These’—he answers, ‘are the profligates Who had little regard for Judaism. They always went around with their heads uncovered And never set foot in a synagogue’.] To this and other punishments, Bontsye offers a steady refrain: ‘Reboynu shel’oylem avade iz rekht/Du bist gerekht, un dayn mishpet iz gerekht.’ [‘Lord of the Universe, it’s certainly right. You are right and your judgement is right’] (Bobe, 8). Odele is less impressed. Not-

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ing that modern science suggests that our dreams at night simply recapitulate our thoughts during the day, she interprets the dream along rationalistic lines. Her grandmother had been making borscht for the Passover Seder. The ‘Germans’, then, were in fact merely beets, which the grandmother (herself the angel from the dream), was ‘decapitating’ and throwing into the boiling river that would become the ‘bloody’ borscht. All this, says Odele, serves Bontsye’s agenda very nicely; she will sacrifice Odele’s joy on Earth for the sake of her own comfort in Paradise. It soon comes time for Odele to offer a textual interpretation of her own: an actual written document this time, but deliberately falsified by its reader. Odele’s German teacher— with whom she clearly has an extracurricular relationship—has come for her lesson, while Bontsye sits across the room plucking feathers. The grandmother has already expressed her contempt for the young man, and her suspicion of him leads her to ask Odele to translate the passages that she and the tutor Ignatz are reading from the book. Bontsye’s fears are well founded, but her actions accomplish nothing. While the youngsters hatch a plan in German for sabotaging Bontsye’s plans to marry Odele off to someone else, the granddaughter simply tells Bontsye what she wants to hear. It comes to the old woman as a pleasant surprise to find that the German text when translated sounds just like her: one should follow all 613 commandments, and he who fails to do so is as if naked. Smug with the success of their ruse, the tutor and student take it one step further, as he sings Odele a love song in German which she ‘translates’ into a pious hymn in Yiddish for her grandmother. While Bontsye is easily duped by her granddaughter’s tricks, she is not about to marry the girl to an assimilated boy who speaks German. The honour of marriage is reserved for a learned young man from a good family. When the matchmaker returns with the news that he has found just such a catch, Odele faints, bringing down the curtain to the first act. The start of Act II finds her in her room, bristling at the ‘two old fools, terrible despots, egotists’ (23). She takes solace, however, in a love letter from Ignatz that she takes from a desk drawer as Bontsye appears on the other side of a divider that bisects the stage. Bontsye mirrors Odele’s most recent action by opening the Tsene-rene (Hebrew: ‘go out and see’), a staple of any Yiddish-speaking woman’s bookshelf since its publication in Prague in 1641. The Tsene-rene freely combines the Torah, Mishnah, and Aggadah [Jewish legend], and Bontsye makes it even more freeform in her rendition, which wends its way around Ignatz’s love letter in much the way that the Tsene-rene weaves in and out of biblical and aggadic passages. Neither Odele nor Bontsye is aware of the other’s presence throughout the scene, but their texts bounce directly off one another as they read aloud to the audience. Rather than read from point A to point B in the Tsene-rene, Bontsye skips around, and some of these jumps are so random and unconnected that one gathers she cannot be merely reading; indeed, perhaps she cannot read at all, but is instead pretending to read, and rendering the stories from memory. Instead of being driven by the logic of a linear, printed narrative, the passages Bontsye cites are prompted by the logic of juxtaposition as dictated by Goldfaden, so that the beginning of each reference given by Bontsye relates directly to the last thing Odele has said. Thus, when Odele reads, and then excitedly repeats, Ignatz’s promise that they will run away together, Bontsye turns to the Tsene-rene’s rendering of the Torah portion Vayyetse (Genesis 28:10–32:3), beginning with, ‘Jacob left Beersheva and set out for Haran’. Goldfaden draws similar connections elsewhere, as Odele’s mention of

Avrom Goldfaden’s theatre of Jewishness 231 a struggle parallels the struggle between Jacob and Esau in the womb, the word ‘dream’ leads to Joseph’s dream interpretations, and reference to an oath immediately precedes Joseph’s vow not to bury Jacob in Egypt. Yet the juxtaposition cannot be fully explained until we look at one more twist Goldfaden inserts into the texts. Bontsye does not just cite the Tsene-rene, but mangles it in several ways. She makes numerous errors. ‘The serpent’, for example, ‘was the cleverest of all the trees in the garden’ (25), or ‘Vayyeytse Yankev mi’bersheva vayeylekh kharana, and Jacob went out of Haran’ (25), reversing the direction indicated in Genesis 28:10. She also mixes various episodes into one, so that Joseph’s dream of the sheaves (Gen. 37:5–8) blends into the story of Potiphar’s wife (Gen. 39) and the famine in Egypt (Gen. 41–7). And although she generally translates specific Hebrew words accurately (she has managed to learn something by rote), one mistake in this area is telling: she turns ‘mayse’ (‘deed’, in this case) into ‘mase u’matn’ (‘negotiation’), perhaps suggesting that her mind is never far away from business. Whether or not this is the case, her piety certainly comes across as ludicrous, for she has so corrupted the text that it is no longer authoritative at all. Goldfaden provides momentary relief from the conflict at the heart of the play with a song in which Bontsye, who earns a living making wicks for memorial candles, gets an opportunity for multiple character assassination by enumerating the sins of departed members of a customer’s family. Once the customer leaves, grandmother and granddaughter finally face each other head on. Bontsye, hearing Odele sigh, offers superstitious theories to explain the girl’s sorrow: someone crossed her path, someone gave her the evil eye, she has been possessed by a dybbuk. Odele can no longer suppress the truth now, and confesses that she is in love with her teacher. As Bontsye runs to get the keys to lock up her granddaughter and prevent such a match from coming about, Ignatz whisks Odele away, and this time it is the grandmother’s turn to swoon as the curtain falls. Since the play initially had just two acts, perhaps this is where it originally ended. That may help account for how strange Act III feels. Most of it consists of a long soliloquy by a repentant Bontsye. She now sees that she was unduly harsh, and says she would do anything to get the girl back, including letting her marry her teacher. This seems to be the making of a comic ending: the idée fixe has been unfixed, opening the door to a reconciliation. Instead, Goldfaden kicks the grandmother when she is down, sending a bas kol (voice from Heaven) with the following message: Because you sinned in this world, you will not be permitted to see the Land of Israel during your lifetime, nor to see your granddaughter. However, you will dream in the hour before your death; in the first dream, you will see the Land of Israel, and in the second, Odele and her husband. And so it goes, with Bontsye moving in and out of consciousness in her last moments, which are punctuated by two tableaux, one showing pioneers in Palestine, the second showing the young couple under the wedding canopy. As Bontsye expires, she calls out her granddaughter’s name. Earlier, we encountered an early Goldfaden poem depicting God as a scientific being. In this play, there is no question that God exists, and He is a maskil.

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Shulamis A simple Eastern European Jew might well have opened up a Tsene-rene on a Sabbath afternoon and read Yiddish adaptations of Biblical stories. A popular alternative would have been Yankev ben Avrom Polak’s Mayse bukh [Story Book, 1602], a retelling of some three hundred legends that, like the Tsene-rene, would enjoy numerous reprintings over the centuries. Among the Mayse bukh’s tales is the Talmudic legend of the weasel and the well, a parable of faith and loyalty that, in Goldfaden’s own words in a note to his operetta Shulamis, has been adapted into stories in the Yiddish, German, Russian, and Hebrew languages by various authors, most successfully by my blessed father in-law, the famous Jewish scholar and poet ELIYOHU MORDKHE VERBL, may his name be a blessing, who masterfully adapted this legend into Hebrew as a verse poem called Edim na’amanim [Faithful Witnesses]—now adapted for the stage for the first time.6 Goldfaden will follow the broad outlines of the Talmudic legend in his retelling of the story, but will give it his own distinctive touch of theatricality and Jewish sensibility. Shulamis opens in the desert, as a caravan of pilgrims makes its way from Bethlehem to Jerusalem. Shulamis, a shepherd’s daughter, leaves the pilgrimage to return home and tend the flock, but gets lost in the wilderness. She becomes thirsty and comes upon a well that has no bucket, but a rope dangling into it. Desperate for water, she lowers herself into the well and drinks her fill, but is then unable to get out. Avisholem, a Jewish soldier, passes by and hears her cries for help; after getting her to swear that she is not a demon, he rescues her. Both are immediately smitten, and swear eternal love in the drama’s central melody, the duet ‘Di shvue’ [The Oath], with the well and a wildcat as witnesses: O der brunem o der! Un di kats o di o! Zoln zayn vi ikh shver, Eydes tsu unzer shvie! Az ver gor fun unz vet brekhn dos vort, Zey aleyn zoln dort Farlangen af dem ort, Rakhe rakhe in eynem fort…

Oh the well And the cat! May they be, as I swear, Witnesses to our oath! So whichever of us breaks the vow Should suffer vengeance, vengeance On the spot… (18)

‘But that will never happen’, they conclude, ‘for God himself has brought us together’. Goldfaden has already made two telling alterations to his source, in which Avisholem’s prototype initially demands sex with the girl as his reward for rescuing her from the well. He desists only when she learns that he is a kohen, or member of the Jewish priestly class, and persuades him that the honourable next step is to legitimize the act with a formal engagement. Avisholem is not nearly so coarse (though he has faults aplenty, as will become manifest in Act II); in fine pastoral tradition, Goldfaden simply has the young couple fall mutually in love at first sight. Theatrical necessities of different kinds also gave the playwright some reason to follow the Mayse bukh’s transformation of the weasel into a

Avrom Goldfaden’s theatre of Jewishness 233 wildcat. On the symbolic level, the wildcat suggests the majestic lion, emblem of the tribe of Judah and of King David, which has always been the animal most proudly associated with the Jewish nation; Goldfaden the spinner of allegories would have found this image better suited than the humble weasel to his metaphorical purposes. And on a more practical note, just ask any stage manager how easy it is to get an actor into a weasel costume. After their duet, Shulamis and Avisholem go their separate ways. He is expected in Jerusalem, he tells her, but will join her soon after the upcoming holiday of Sukkot is over. He sends Tsingitang, his noble savage of a servant, to accompany her home, and the two lovers sing a brief reprise of their oath as they part in the moonlight. One might think that all this vowing and reprising would implant itself firmly in the swearer’s memory. It does with Shulamis who, Penelope-like, fends off her many suitors until the point in the indefinite future when her man will return. Avisholem, on the other hand, forgets it as soon as he comes across another attractive girl, which he does in Jerusalem just two months later. Amid a group of young men, he and his friend Khananye observe a procession of dancing girls, who divide into three groups, each boasting a particular merit: first wealth, then yikhes, then piety and wisdom. The young men and women then join in a game of tag with lasting consequences: he who catches a particularly young lady will marry her. Avisholem conspires with Tsingitang to foil his friend’s attempt to catch Avigail, ‘the kohen’s daughter, pearl of the Orient’ (22). Instead of getting Avigail, Khananye ends up with Tsingitang in his arms, while his erstwhile friend has captured the lovely Avigail. Khananye storms off, hoping that his friend will suffer for his treachery, and Act II ends with the spectacular wedding of Avisholem and Avigail. Traditionally, audiences regard a wedding at the end of a play as a desirable outcome, representing, in Northrop Frye’s archetypal formulation of the comic genre, ‘a movement from one kind of society to another’.7 If the wedding is placed earlier in the play, however, we have the chance to see the marriage go awry, as Frye’s theory implicitly recognizes: We are simply given to understand that the newly-married couple will live happily ever after, or that at any rate they will get along in a relatively unhumorous and clear-sighted manner. That is one reason why the character of the successful hero is so often left undeveloped: his real life begins at the end of the play, and we have to believe him to be potentially a more interesting character than he appears to be.8 Avisholem’s marriage will become less storybook and more nightmarish as the implications of his oath-breaking emerge. But the audience does not have to wait that long to be made uncomfortable by the elaborate display surrounding the wedding of Avisholem and Avigail. No one on stage but the groom has any reason to know that this wedding should not be happening, and he himself shows no signs of knowing it. The audience presumably has a better memory, though, making the ceremony feel a bit like a glittering façade covering an abandoned ruin, even if the deception is not deliberate. The wedding ceremony between Avisholem and Avigail feels even more inappropriate in retrospect, when it is contrasted with Shulamis’s desolate state as Act III opens, two years later. We find her at sunrise, on a mountain just outside of Bethlehem, leaning against the broken pillar of a dilapidated building. How can we help being struck by the contrast between her obvious melancholy and the joyous occasion we have just witnessed—espe-

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cially when a large measure of that joy is experienced by the man who so recently pledged eternal loyalty to her? Goldfaden then underscores her pathos with an aria that might come out of the mouth of Lucia di Lammermoor, Desdemona, or many another forlorn heroine, were it not for the imagery in which the song’s emotions are expressed: Shabes, yontev, un rosh khoydesh Davn ikh mir aleyn far zikh. Ikh hob mir aleyn mayn ornkoydesh Es bet nit keyner in im-nor ikh! … Der khazn bin ikh—alts ikh aleyn, Di tsores—helfn mir vi zingers mit Troyriks, zingen mir oys gants sheyn. Freylekhs? Epes geyt bay unz nit! … Mayn tkhine iz gemakht far nekeyves Vos s’hot zey getrofn dos vos mikh! Zey kenen ale rosheteyves, Dort leyenen shnel azoy vi ikh! Genug gedavnt, genug geklogt, Genug geveynt, es iz tsu fil! Ikh hob kadish shoyn opgezogt. Aheym!… farshlosn iz shoyn di shul!9

Sabbath, holiday, and new moon I pray all by myself. I have my own Holy Ark— No one is invited into it but me! I am the cantor—all by myself, Aided by troubles like singers by Sad songs; I sing about them beautifully. Happy songs? They don’t come out! My Yiddish prayer is made for women Who have experienced what I have! They all know the abbreviations, And can read them quickly, just like me! Enough praying, enough lamenting, Enough crying, it is too much! I have finished saying kaddish… Now home! The synagogue is shut! (27–8)

Jewish festivals are generally not solitary affairs, so one might expect a song bearing the title Shades, yontev, un rosh khoydesh to celebrate the coming together of family and community. Shulamis, however, sings mournfully, andante, in a minor key, of her holiday commemorations. The ironic inversion of the usual spirit of Jewish festivals is all the more fitting given that we have just seen her fiancé marry someone else. Indeed, her soliloquy that follows the song indicates that although she knows of Avisholem’s betrayal, she consciously chooses to feign madness to keep her suitors at bay until her true love returns. There is a place for solitary contemplation in Judaism, but not in terms of most of the imagery Shulamis uses. The cantor is not a cantor except when leading a community in prayer; the ark, eternal light, and dais are shared when the community congregates in the synagogue. For a Jewish audience, what could be a more heart-rending expression of unwanted solitude than in the words of a speaker forced to perform all the religious functions of a community on her own? Of course, many of these activities traditionally belong to the men in the congregation; Shulamis herself could not be the cantor, or say kaddish, or decide when to close the synagogue. She shows her awareness of the gender divide in her mention of tkhines, Yiddish prayers generally recited by women—the only point of human contact in the song. In a song about a community of one, the only real congregation she still shares is an imaginary gathering of other lonely women. Shulamis would not have to be alone if she were willing to break her vow as easily as Avisholem did, for she is soon visited by a parade of suitors that mirrors the women’s processional in Jerusalem. Now, a military hero, a wealthy man, and a kohen sing boastfully of their great accomplishments. Ironically, after having been dumped by the soldier Avish-

Avrom Goldfaden’s theatre of Jewishness 235 olem, it is the warrior Yoav Gidoyni who emerges triumphant in the choosing of lots to win Shulamis’s hand—though her father is enlightened enough to give her the final say in the matter. The braggart warrior Yoav lets his victory get to his already swelled head, and does a victory dance among all the other suitors. Shulamis then arrives and puts on a grand mad scene—so grand, in fact, that we may well wonder whether she has indeed lost her grip on reality, as she rants about a well and a cat, sings snatches of her duet with Avisholem, and repeatedly embraces her father. The suitors look on in sympathetic amazement, though once Shulamis leaves, they do not forgo the opportunity to throw Yoav’s boasting back in his face, and drive him offstage in a vale of jeers. The other war hero, Avisholem, is living a blissfully domestic life now. So far, it seems that his marriage to Avigail has suffered but one significant mishap: the death of their first child, on its first birthday, when it was carried off and eaten by a wild cat. They seem to have put this tragedy behind them, however, for they have a second child, born exactly a year ago, on the same day as their first baby. Then their nursemaid brings them bitter news. The second child leaped out of her arms and into the well, and has died as well. She brings Avigail to the scene of the accident, leaving Avisholem lying on the divan, making convulsive movements. From time to time, we hear him sigh deeply. The music of ‘The Oath’ plays quietly. From the middle of the wall, a tableau appears. Under a blue scrim lit by moonlight, this scene is illuminated: the well, with the cat near it. Shulamis sadly leans against the well, looks at the cat, and embraces it. Above them is an angel. With one hand he points at the scene, while with the other he beckons Avisholem to look. (43–4) Like Odele’s grandmother, Avisholem is met with an otherworldly and highly theatrical vision that indicates how his past actions have brought about his present predicament. To extricate himself from it, he must go through several stages of confession and repentance. The first hurdle is to explain the situation to his wife, and this is where the rhetoric of atonement begins. Leading up to his admission that he was already pledged to another woman before he married her, Avisholem tells Avigail, ‘You did not deserve to have such a sinful husband,/Who is false—and can break a holy vow!’ (46). Avigail is of course astonished to learn the truth, but does not readily accept his conclusion that he must return to Shulamis: ‘God has many such penitents—he doesn’t need you./And all I have in the world is you—you’re the only one I have!’ (47). Avigail already foresees the ‘happy’ ending; because he has sinned, her life should be ruined? Significantly, Avisholem has no answer to this, and ultimately resorts to an adolescent form of manipulation in order to break his marital oath for the sake of his earlier vow: he threatens to stab himself if she does not release him. Avigail, preferring to lose her husband rather than keep his corpse, sends him back to Shulamis. The next stage of Avisholem’s confessional comes in public, on the way back to Shulamis. In the middle of the desert, he comes across an encampment of shepherds. When he tells them of his quest, they report that Shulamis has gone mad. He breaks down upon hearing the news: ‘Oh Shulamis! Oh, faithful, innocent child!/I am guilty—the sin is mine!/… You have not punished me enough, fair God!/Kill me! I am the sinner! I am the evil-doer’

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(54). The shepherds, however, tend to this member of the flock who has strayed. Avisholem is indeed more like a lamb than the lion he used to be, for his guardians give him milk and put him to bed. The following day, Avisholem can proceed to the next stage of repentance, as he finally reunites with the woman he wronged. Reaching Shulamis’s house, he looks inside and finds her bed-ridden, muttering to herself a la Ecclesiastes about the insignificance of human life. Afraid to do her further damage by approaching her too suddenly, he waits to hear whether she still talks about him. She continues to do so, in her inimitable, allegorical way, and lapses once again into the beginning of The Oath’, giving Avisholem the chance to echo her ‘O di-o’. They continue this call-and-response for a few more lines of the song, until they reach the word ‘vengeance’, leading Avisholem to exclaim, ‘Yes, vengeance! Vengeance! Bitter vengeance has already come!’ (59). But she assures him that she does not want revenge, and they are reunited. Mr Immediate Gratification even manages to get an affirmative answer to his apprehensive, ‘Say you aren’t angry’ (60). In the tradition of the pastoral idyll that brought Avisholem and Shulamis together in the first place, the tale might well end here. He is satisfied, she is satisfied; let’s have a wedding and call it a day. But in the time-honoured Jewish tradition of reading texts on multiple levels of meaning simultaneously, the seminary graduate Goldfaden has his drama operate on at least two levels at all times: the personal and the communal. The personal focuses the audience’s concentration on a narrative that would not be dramatically compelling otherwise; it is difficult to build a drama around abstract ideas. The communal level, on the other hand, connects the drama back to the theatregoers’ own lives, and seeks to teach them something about the Jewish condition. Ultimately, it is not just Avisholem who receives absolution, but the entire Jewish people. After the lovers’ reunion, to which Tsingitang adds comic relief and Shulamis’s father adds further poignancy, the curtain falls and we hear voices behind it begging God to forgive the Children of Israel. The priest leads in the congregation, bringing sacrifices and making supplication, and then Avisholem and Shulamis enter in festive clothing. In a conventional romance, this would be the time for their wedding, but we never witness that event—though what we do see serves to move the characters toward Frye’s ‘new society’. What Goldfaden does show at the end is the couple kneeling and being given absolution by the kohen, and then leading the entire congregation in a processional around the altar of the Temple. The names of the play’s central characters may help us make sense of this structurally peculiar ending. Avisholem is linked to each woman by his name. His and Shulamis’s names both contain the Hebrew word root for ‘peace’—a peace that the dénouement tries to effect. This sort of etymological linkage connects him to Avigail as well, for ‘father’ can be found in both of their names (his: ‘father of peace’; hers: ‘father of joy’—intensely ironic in both cases, as it turns out). In addition, both are connected historically to King David, for Avisholem (or Absalom, in English) was his third son, who led a failed revolt against him, and Avigail the name of both his sister and of one of his wives. This postbiblical epic thus harks back to the ultimate proto-Zionist, the king who placed Jerusalem at the centre of Jewish life. The Jewish capital city plays a multi-layered role in the drama’s message. We first encounter Jerusalem in the play’s subtitle (Shulamis is ‘the daughter of Jerusalem’), and

Avrom Goldfaden’s theatre of Jewishness 237 then see it looming in the distance as the pilgrims make their way towards it. Shulamis’s movement away from the city leads to her bittersweet encounter with Avisholem; his movement away from her and to Jerusalem precipitates his forgetting of his first love and his quick marriage to someone else. Avisholem’s outrageous forgetfulness, his abandonment of a woman whose name also belongs to the Song of Songs, suggests an inversion of the affirmation espoused by Psalm 137: ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,/Let my right hand forget her cunning’.10 Most of Goldfaden’s audience would have known the psalm—indeed, his readers could have read his own freely adapted Yiddish rendition of it in Dos yidele11—and would have appreciated its status as perhaps the ultimate statement of the Jewish condition in exile: By the rivers of Babylon, There we sat down, yea, we wept, When we remembered Zion. … How shall we sing the Lord’s song In a foreign land?12 In a sense, the entire epic is a response to that question, and the travails of the three lovers illustrate just how discordant that song can be. As a geographic entity in Shulamis, Jerusalem is the city towards which the masses of characters onstage at the beginning of the play are moving, in which the action of the drama is resolved, and—for the play’s original audiences of the early 1880s—a place towards which beleaguered Eastern European Jews are casting an eye in more than just a symbolic sense. So if Avisholem is to be allowed to atone for forgetting Shulamis—particularly if that forgetting takes on allegorical meaning—then there is no more fitting place for atonement to happen than in the holiest site in the holiest Jewish city on the holiest day of the year.

King Akhashveyresh, or, Queen Esther The sense of historical urgency in response to the pogroms of 1881 that can be felt in Shulamis surfaces in numerous other places in Goldfaden’s life and art. As a playwright, he turned away from the maskilic comedies that dominated the first phase of his career, and towards epics that celebrated the Jewish nation: Shulamis, Doctor Almasado, and Bar Kokhba. As a poet, he responded with several volumes of verse: Dos fidele [The Fiddle, 1883], Yisrolik (1884), and Shabsiel (1885). As director of a theatre company, he found conditions increasingly difficult. In 1883, he fled to St Petersburg when pogroms erupted in southern Russia, where his company had been performing. But a ban on Yiddish theatre soon forced him to leave the country altogether. He would spend a few years in Poland, try in vain to break into the American market, then spend the rest of his life (another two decades) struggling to make a living, as he shuttled back and forth among a number of cities, particularly New York, London, Paris, and Lemberg. Goldfaden had taken a bleak view of the Jewish future—via the Jewish past—in Bar Kokhba, his retelling of the Jewish resistance against Roman rule in ancient Palestine,

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culminating in a suicidal last stand from 132 to 135 CE. Although the play includes voices who passionately disagree with Bar Kokhba’s militancy and urge cooperation with the Roman regime, the ending focuses on the doomed uprising itself. The final tableau presents an apocalyptic scene: The entire Jewish army comes running across the ramparts. They are met by the Roman forces. The battle begins: sword fights, stabbings, screams. We hear the clanging of swords and the creaking of walls. The Beitar Fortress is aflame, and all its towers tumble and break apart. Several Roman soldiers run to the central gate and rip it open. Through this gate we see a terrible scene: one Roman soldier murders a child in its mother’s hands as she kneels, pleading for his life; another Roman hero holds an old Jew by his hair, raising his sword above him; still another holds a Jew to the ground with his foot, and runs him through with a spear. The entire scene is illuminated by green light from behind the gate and red light from above the ramparts. During the tumult, the curtain falls slowly.13 Goldfaden’s finale is even harsher than the historic one. However, when dramatizing an even more familiar story of persecution and resistance a few years later, the playwright in exile would apply a far lighter touch. Goldfaden drew upon a wide range of performance traditions in his work, incorporating situations, characters, and music inspired by (and sometimes taken directly from) both Yiddish and other European drama and opera. Notably absent as a direct influence on the first decade of his professional playwriting, however, is the purimshpil, the form of drama that would have been closest to home for much of his audience. Perhaps it was the maskil in him that resisted the old-fashioned purimshpil for so long, and perhaps it was a sense that he had come into his own that gave him enough self-assurance to write plays in the mid1880s using two of the most popular subjects for purimshpiln: the sacrifice of Isaac and the story of Queen Esther. Both works show the touch of a dramaturgical hand at ease with both his source materials and with the demands of the theatre, and while the opera Akeydes Yitskhok [The Sacrifice of Isaac] deserves a discussion in its own right, I have chosen King Akhashveyresh to represent this phase in Goldfaden’s work, since it more pointedly demonstrates the intersection of Jewish texts, Jewish nationalism, and dramatic conventions. The play opens with a banquet in the court of Akhashveyresh, the harddrinking, funloving, foolish King of Persia. As usual, he is in party mode, and to show off the beauty of Persian women, calls for his queen, Vashti, to dance naked before his courtiers—the very event that kicks off the drama of the Megillah, or Book of Esther. The Megillah gives no reason for Vashti’s refusal, but rabbinic tradition fills in the gap by having her cover up a sudden bout of leprosy with excuses.14 Goldfaden ignores the dermatological underpinnings, but does paraphrase her reasons for bowing out: Queen Vashti said that she cannot believe that the great king would place so great a demand upon her as to embarrass herself before all his lords. If he is making this demand for real, he should not forget that her lineage is nobler than his, for he was merely her grandfather Belshazzar’s stable-keeper.15

Avrom Goldfaden’s theatre of Jewishness 239 The maskil in Goldfaden, who spent so much time deconstructing the issue of yikhes in his early plays, must not have been able to resist the temptation offered by the rabbinic literature to insert this quip. The rest of Act I dramatizes three key events from the first two chapters of the Megillah: the banishment of Vashti, the selection of Esther as the new queen, and the foiling of a plot to assassinate the king. Goldfaden’s treatment of the latter two incidents is telling. Having seen no less than three processionals in Shulamis, we might expect Goldfaden to make an elaborate display of the pan-Persian beauty pageant that ends with the crowning of Esther. Instead, he bends over backwards to avoid glorifying this process. We hear Mordkhe resisting his friend Hasekh’s [Hatakh] exhortations to promote her for the position, and her guardian gives in only when Hasekh reminds him of the king’s edict to kill anyone who hides an eligible young woman from his scouts. Goldfaden shows us nothing of the potentially glamorous proceedings, or of the coup de foudre that leads Akhashveyresh to single out Esther among all the young women in the kingdom. Esther’s coronation feels more like an installation, and in much the way that ancient Greek tragedians tended to keep bloodshed offstage, Goldfaden even reports Esther’s winning of the king’s heart secondhand, through Hasekh. Where Goldfaden dances delicately around the issue of the great Jewish heroine marrying a Gentile, he elaborates on the Megillah’s terse mention of Mordkhe and Esther uncovering an assassination plot. In the Megillah, the entire incident unfolds and is resolved in three lines. Goldfaden, by contrast, shows the plotters scheming, Mordkhe eavesdropping, and Esther dramatically stopping her husband from drinking his poisoned wine at his banquet and revealing the identity of the would-be killers. Their sentence is handed down in a light-hearted tone befitting the festive holiday on which the Megillah is read, and anticipating the mood of most of the rest of the drama. Akhashveyresh offers, in mock magnanimity, to spare the plotters the death penalty: ‘we’ll just hang them a little’ (13). The hanging of the traitors, of course, foreshadows other hangings, planned and actual. Homen (Haman) comes into his own early in Act II, when he gives the king a long list of reasons for hating the Jews: they cannot be trusted because they are not fully Persian; they have their own set of laws that dictate customs such as diet; they do not work on their Sabbath, when ‘if someone wants to buy something from them, they will not sell it, and if someone speaks to them, they will not answer’ (15); they celebrate a holiday called Passover, which recalls a time when they stole Pharaoh’s things and left Egypt in a hurry; and they mourn for the destruction of the Temple, and are angry with Akhashveyresh for dining on the silver that was taken when the Temple was destroyed. Goldfaden skilfully arouses the indignation of his audience with Homen’s litany, which so blatantly distorts Jewish laws and customs. Yet again in keeping with the saturnalian spirit of Purim, the playwright simultaneously turns the whole exchange into a joke. He does not need to do much to make Akhashveyresh funny; the king’s quotient of buffoonery starts at a high level in the Megillah, is elaborated upon in the Midrash, and is further expanded in the purimshpil tradition. Goldfaden draws him in a few broad, swift strokes, having the king constantly reply to his ministers’ suggestions, ‘Yes, yes, I said that already’. More idiosyncratic is the playwright’s choice to give an entirely new function to another character in the Purim story: Homen’s youngest son, Vayzose. The Megillah treats the ten sons of Homen as a unit, but the Yiddish language does not. Outside of the context of

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Purim, a vayzose is a generic word for a fool (as well as for a penis, joining the ranks of Yiddish words that do double duty describing people and sexual organs). Goldfaden anachronistically imposes the connotation the name acquired with the name’s original bearer, giving Homen’s own Vayzose an individual identity as a lovable fool. Vayzose has tagged along with his father for this meeting, and as Homen spews venom against the Jews, Vayzose chimes in with foolish commentary. Referring to kashrut, Homen claims that the Jews spit out unkosher food, and Vayzose illustrates: ‘Tfui, tfui—that’s what they do, as I’m a Vayzose—tfui, tfui’ (15). When Homen accuses the Jews of sleeping all day on the Sabbath, Vayzose parodies the biblical injunction to set aside a day of rest (Exodus 20:8–11): And they sleep, and their horses sleep, and their servants sleep, and they themselves sleep, and snore and snore’ (16). Even the dreaded threat of blood libel accusations is not sacred here, as Vayzose has this to say about Passover customs: It’s true, as I’m a Vayzose, that [the Jews] commit a murder that no other nation does. With sharp spears, they mercilessly stab the dough and make so many holes in it that it does not manage to rise, poor thing, and they bake it and eat it and it cries between their teeth, ‘Crunch, crunch’. (16) So charmed is the king by Vayzose’s foolishness that he takes him on as his servant. Goldfaden presumably would want the audience to like the boy as well, thus setting entertainment on a collision course with the exigencies of the text, as we shall see. Meanwhile, Mordkhe provides a more serious perspective. He fasts, he worries about Esther being distracted from her protective mission by the wealth that surrounds her, and he sings an allegory-within-an-allegory. Purim is an eternal reminder to the Jews that their treatment at the hands of other nations is always precarious, and what seems like a comfortable balance can easily be disturbed by the emergence of a powerful enemy. This message surely resonates more strongly at some times than at others; Eastern European Jews in the mid-1880s would surely have taken notice that Mordkhe’s predicament was theirs as well. He outlines it in ‘Elnt, kleyn, un nimes’ [Lonely, Small, and Weary], a ballad of the Jewish people, personified by Yankele,16 constantly beset by enemies. As they gather their armies and sharpen their weapons, Yankele fasts, and hurries to synagogue to pray: Er broykht keyn shverd afile Fastn iz zayn gever. Tshuve, tsdoke, u’tfile, Dos iz zayn militer.

He does not even need a sword; Fasting is his weapon. Repentance, charity, and prayer, That is his army. (20)

As he goes on to describe the ways in which enemies assail the Jews, Mordkhe repeatedly returns to the refrain, ‘in shul arayn’—‘into the synagogue’.17 And that is where he goes at the end of his song, to join other Jews in praying for God’s protection in this time of crisis. Homen, back home with his sons, continues to scheme against Mordkhe’s people. Even Homen fears the Jewish God, however, and brings in an adviser to determine how to time the massacre of the Jews so that God will not erase the decree against them. We have just

Avrom Goldfaden’s theatre of Jewishness 241 seen Goldfaden deal with persecution comically, then seriously. Why not supernaturally as well? In this regard, he can again follow rabbinic commentaries on the Megillah while capitalizing on his own proven success with theatrical sorcery. In Di kishefmakherin [The Sorceress, 1879], Goldfaden had drawn on the Romanian folk legend of the Baba Yaga to create one of his most popular plays, a musical tale of a wicked stepmother and the fraudulent witch she hires to get rid of her stepdaughter. In King Akhashveyresh, Goldfaden uses legends of Homen’s sorcery to decide the day on which to cast the lots determining the day of the Jews’ destruction.18 Rather than have Homen work black magic, though, Goldfaden introduces a Soothsayer, who gets a scenestealing number enumerating the Jewish months in search of a suitable time to attack the Jews. After the month of Adar is chosen, the Soothsayer’s work meets with a divine response; as in The Grandmother and Her Granddaughter and Shulamis, a voice comes down from Heaven to comment on the proceedings. As Homen and his sons prepare to send news of the annihilation plan throughout the kingdom, the has kol warns them that the evil decree will be deflected from their enemies and turn against them. Unlike Bontsye and Avisholem, however, they are unmoved by the divine message; perhaps they have not heard it at all. Vayzose has been a part of these activities, but far from at one with them. One of his brothers laughs at his foolishness, while Vayzose contributes to a quarrel between his parents by telling his mother how much Esther seems to like Homen. More important in terms of the audience’s response to Vayzose, he does not follow his father’s logic in wanting to exact revenge on the Jews for Mordkhe’s unwillingness to bow to Homen: ‘Daddy, one Jew sinned. Why are you having all the Jews slaughtered?’ (33). After being teased by his brother, Vayzose sings about being a lovable fool, but in the tradition of the wise simpleton, his naive statements are often not so foolish after all. How, then, should Vayzose be treated when Homen’s plans unravel? Homen himself, in trying to answer his son’s deceptively simple question, explains that the feud has a long history, for he is a descendant of Amalek while Mordkhe (and of course Esther, though Homen does not yet know this) traces his lineage back to Saul, rival and victor over Amalek. Homen’s line thus needs to be wiped out if the seed of Amalek is to stop spreading; accordingly, the Megillah has Homen’s entire family hanged, the beginning of the Jewish victory. Goldfaden, however, has radically—even subversively—departed from his sources by making Vayzose so likeable. The boy has not harmed anyone. He has unwittingly undercut Homen’s criticism of the Jews, and questioned his father’s motives. If we did not know that the Megillah disposes of Vayzose along with the rest of the family, we might think that he will be spared; indeed, we may well wonder whether Goldfaden will go so far as to rewrite the ending and spare the fool anyway. Since the triumph of Esther and the defeat of Homen are all but foregone conclusions, Vayzose’s fate is the most suspenseful feature of the story. He is truly shocked to find himself lumped together with the rest of his villainous family: Vayzose: Esther: Vayzose:

What, you really mean me too? Honestly, what’s gotten into you? From a snake, no sheep will be born. Take him. (He is seized) Just wait—my lord and king, you don’t need me any more? What did I do to deserve being Homen’s son? No, I won’t do such foolishness any longer; I’ll be a son to you. After all, can you be without a Vayzose?

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King: Vayzose:

I like the boy, but take him to the gallows… Weep, women and girls. You will never find another Vayzose like me. (46)

That Homen’s son might reasonably ask a Jewish audience to mourn for him shows how far Goldfaden has gone to soften the impulse for vengeance. In the aftermath of Homen’s execution, the Megillah tells of the Jews annihilating tens of thousands of their enemies. King Akhashveyresh bears not a trace of such violence. In the spirit of Mordkhe’s call to prayer in the middle of the play, the story ends with a duet between him and Esther, thanking God for sparing the Jews from an evil decree. Goldfaden’s audience would not be able to imagine slaughtering their oppressors even if they wanted to, but they could find comfort in seeing a precursor to their precarious situation in Eastern Europe reaching a happy conclusion.

Conclusion One could be forgiven for concluding, after reading the countless assessments of Goldfaden’s work, that he was sui generis in every way, rising Aphrodite-like out of the theatrical foam to create single-handedly a theatrical culture that had never existed before. To take an extreme example, critic Alexander Mukdoyni pronounced in 1940, Avrom Goldfaden literally created the Yiddish theatre, like any true artist creates something out of nothing. And he created not only the Yiddish theatre, but also the Yiddish actor, Yiddish drama, Yiddish comedy, Yiddish opera, and Yiddish melodrama. He created both the body and the soul of the Yiddish theatre.19 If, as Mukdoyni asserts, Goldfaden created so many Yiddish genres, he must have created at least a substantial part of their content. Was he equally innovative in infusing the repertoire with Jewish themes? Before answering that question, it must be said that Mukdoyni, notwithstanding his leading position in the ranks of Yiddish theatre critics, greatly overstated the case. Goldfaden was clearly a central figure in the creation of the modern Yiddish theatre, but a centuries-old Yiddish theatrical tradition preceded him, and he was hardly alone in the first years of sustained professional activity either. Indeed, within the first year of his work as a professional playwright, he had two competitors: self-styled ‘Professor’ Moyshe Hurwitz (1844–1910) and Joseph Lateiner (1853–1935). Each formed his own company and provided its repertoire. The extent to which these playwrights drew upon Jewish themes in their work could provide useful perspective on how typical or atypical was Goldfaden’s exploration of these ideas. Attempting to answer this question may tell us at least as much about the critical reception and historiography of these playwrights’ work as it does about the work itself. Among the countless articles about Goldfaden’s biography and theatrical activity, only a couple of scholars have taken his texts sufficiently seriously to subject them to critical scrutiny.20 Lateiner and Hurwitz have received only a fraction of the attention that Goldfaden has, and again their texts have been largely overlooked as being worthy of analysis. There are sev-

Avrom Goldfaden’s theatre of Jewishness 243 eral practical reasons for this. Fewer of their plays were published than Goldfaden’s texts, and fewer of their works were revived posthumously than Goldfaden’s (the most popular of which would seem virtually ubiquitous in the Yiddish theatre for decades). Goldfaden himself also recorded more of his views about his dramaturgy in print.21 In the case of all three playwrights, the dearth of critical commentary about their dramas reflects a strong bias against ‘popular’, as opposed to ‘literary’ theatre. With a paucity of published texts by Lateiner and (especially) Hurwitz, it is difficult to evaluate their treatment of Jewish themes to the extent that we can explore Goldfaden’s. Yet an overview of play titles alone demonstrates that Goldfaden was in good company in his use of biblical and other Jewish material. Hurwitz’s signature would ultimately become the tsaytbild: a play dealing with current events, such as a blood libel trial in Hungary (Tisza Eszlar, 1887), a strike in Pittsburgh (The Heroes of Homestead, 1892), or the Kishinev pogrom (The Destruction of Kishinev, 1904). Nevertheless, he would steadily chronicle biblical stories throughout his career, with his repertoire covering much of Genesis and beyond, including Adam and Eve, or Paradise Lost (1892); Noah’s Ark, or the Sinful Generation of the Flood (1897); Jacob and Esau (1902); The House of Jacob, or the Brothers Simeon and Levi (1897); Joshua, Son of Nun, or the Fall of Jericho (1898); The Mighty Samson (1890); and Jonah the Prophet, or the Journey Through Water and Fire (1893). If one felt that the Bible had been insufficiently dramatized by Hurwitz, one could always fill in the gaps with Lateiner’s ‘biblical operettas’ and ‘historical operas’, such as Joseph and His Brothers (1885); Judith and Holofernes (1890); David, Son of Jesse (1887); The Judgement of Solomon (1887); Daniel in the Lions’ Den (1891); Esther and Haman (1884); Judah Maccabee (1893); The Destruction of Jerusalem (1890); and Zion, or By the Rivers of Babylon (1903).22 In addition, both writers—as well as Goldfaden—added numerous works spanning Jewish history, from the destruction of the Second Temple to the Middle Ages to modern times. And all three writers ‘borrowed’ extensively from each other, just as their successors would borrow, either knowingly or unconsciously, from them. Both Lateiner and Hurwitz deserve further study, for they dominated the early years of the American Yiddish theatre, and their plays can thus teach us a great deal about the production values and audience sensibilities of that time and place. Goldfaden’s work had broader appeal both temporally and geographically, enjoying regular revivals and reinterpretations throughout the Yiddish-speaking world over the course of several generations. And tracing Goldfaden’s treatment of Jewish texts and traditions through discrete phases of his work can help us draw larger conclusions about his own vision of Judaism. Although Goldfaden began his writing career in the maskilic tradition, a wave of anti-Semitic sentiment in the 1880s led him to back away from critiquing internal Jewish matters. He then turned to the heroic Jewish past, either by retelling well-documented episodes from Jewish history such as the Bar Kokhba rebellion, or by refashioning Jewish legend, as in Shulamis. It was not until well into the 1880s, when some two thirds of his dramatic output was behind him, that he turned to Biblical stories as source material. In each phase, the plays are thoroughly permeated with yidishkayt. Drawing upon Aristotle’s analysis of drama, it is no exaggeration to say that the Goldfaden plays discussed here—and many others—are Jewish in every way: that is, in plot, character, thought, diction, music, and spectacle. Yet while the foundation of Goldfaden’s apprenticeship as a playwright was built upon his reading and watching European drama, Aristotle’s principles

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only partially account for how these plays work. Goldfaden mixes genres with abandon. The Grandmother and Her Granddaughter is an odd sort of tragicomedy—essentially a satire of religious fanaticism, but rather than simply curing or punishing the character with the idée fixe, Goldfaden cures her and then kills her! Under Shakespearean taxonomy, Shulamis might be classified among the ‘problem comedies’. The play ends with a happy (?) marriage built on the ruins of a doomed union and the corpses of babies destroyed because of their father’s capriciousness—a scenario that makes Isabella’s marriage to the Duke at the end of Measure for Measure seem baggage-free by comparison. And King Akhashveyresh, in keeping with its carnivalesque roots and the riotous spirit of its source texts, plays form against content: a deliberately goofy vaudeville populated by hapless fools who are nevertheless on the verge of destroying the Jewish people. The three plays discussed here are united by a strand that Goldfaden weaves through much of the rest of his output as well: the parable of sin vs. atonement, punishment vs. redemption. The conclusions towards which Goldfaden leads the audience in each case depend on who is doing the sinning and what is the nature of the repentance. It may seem peculiar that in the case of The Grandmother and Her Granddaughter, Goldfaden seems to steamroll over Bontsye’s atonement and deprive her of ever seeing either her granddaughter or the Land of Israel. It is unclear, however, to what extent the published versions resemble what Goldfaden’s audiences would have seen. The ending is also less anomalous in the context of all of Goldfaden’s maskilic plays; rather than viewing the grandmother’s death as Goldfaden’s definitive statement about such figures’ just desserts, we should keep in mind that the playwright reached very different conclusions with many of Bontsye’s counterparts in other plays. It is her misfortune to be on the wrong end of this particular dramatic experiment. However surprised we may be at the harshness of Bontsye’s fate, its connection to the play’s message is unambiguous: in the maskil’s cosmic view, the fanatic must either convert or pay—or in Bontsye’s case, both. Shulamis presents a more slippery case. On the surface, the moral of the story, if any, seems to belong purely in the realm of romantic love: Avisholem’s marriage to Avigail was built on caprice, not true love, and therefore must give way to the bond between Avisholem and Shulamis. If we look more closely, however, Shulamis also offers a tale of redemption. Avisholem has broken a holy vow, and the House of Avisholem must be punished. If we are to apply the dramatic death penalty even-handedly, he seems to be a better candidate than Bontsye, yet there are reasons to spare him. First, we need him for the happy ending of the love story. And perhaps just as important, we need him as the representative of a sinful but repentant community. It is fitting for the play to end not just with the promise of the long-awaited wedding of Avisholem and Shulamis, but with the Jewish people seeking forgiveness in the Temple. This time, the characters are allowed to move beyond their earlier missteps. The line between good and evil in the Purim story seems inherently clearer—the Megillah is, indeed, a melodrama in the strictest sense of the term. Goldfaden, however, purposely blurs that line by positioning Vayzose in a grey area. By the time he got around to dramatizing the Purim story, Goldfaden seemed to enjoy making the muddying of his characters’ moral waters part of the drama, and part of what the audience could mull over afterwards. Giving someone from the villain’s family a prominent, sympathetic place in the story makes it difficult for the audience to be completely satisfied with his punishment,

Avrom Goldfaden’s theatre of Jewishness 245 which, while perhaps necessary, does not seem to fit the crime. Still, there must be a sense of relief in seeing that the Jews’ prayers, as articulated by Mordkhe, have been answered. Goldfaden was a consummate man of the theatre who placed every element of theatrical production in the service of entertaining his audiences. Sharply attuned to what worked on stage, he was just as sensitive to questions of Jewish identity circulating beyond the walls of the theatre. Part traditionalist, part maskil, part Zionist, he poured his love of the Jewish people, and his intense concern for their internal and external predicaments, into his work. His skilled interweaving of Jewish texts and traditions and Western conventions created a powerful blend of entertainment and Jewish philosophy, a running treatise on three decades of Jewish life in the form of theatrical spectacles that would serve as powerful models of how to create a Jewish theatre.

Notes 1

2 3 4 5 6

While a comprehensive critical study of Goldfaden’s works has yet to be written, his life and work have attracted extensive attention from biographers and historians of Yiddish literature and theatre. Chief among the biographical studies of Goldfaden are Nachman Mayzel, Avrom Goldfaden: der foter fun yidishn teater (Warsaw: Farlag Groshn-bibliotek, 1935); Nokhem Oyslender and Uri Finkel, A. Goldfadn: materyaln far a biografye (Minsk: Institut far Vaysruslendisher Kultur, 1926); Yitskhok Turkov-Grudberg, Goldfaden un Gordin (Tel Aviv: S.Grinhoyz, 1969); Zalmen Zylbercweig, Avrom Goldfaden un Zigmunt Mogulesco (Buenos Aires: Farlag Elisheva, 1936); and the entries on Goldfaden in the Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, 2:77–87, and in Zylbercweig, Leksikon fun yidishn teater (New York: Farlag Elisheva, 1931), 1:275–367. Goldfaden-bukh (New York: Idisher Teater-Muzey, 1926); and Hundert yor Goldfadn (New York: YIVO, 1940), both edited by Jacob Shatzky, contain important critical as well as biographical material. Other noteworthy critical studies of the plays are Paola Bertolone, The Text of Goldfaden’s Di kishefmakherin and the Operetta Tradition’, in Joel Berkowitz (ed.), Yiddish Theatre: New Approaches (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2003), 77–86; Sh. Bilov and A. Velednitski, Introduction to A.Goldfadn, Geklibene dramatishe verk (Kiev: Melukhe-fargal far di natsyonale minderhaytn in USSR, 1940), 3–64; Yekhezkel Dobrushin, Di dramaturgye fun di klasiker (Moscow: Melukhe-farlag ‘Der Emes’, 1948), 6–52; Uri Finkel, ‘Sotsyale figurn in A.Goldfadns ershte verk’, Tsaytshrift 1 (Minsk, 1926), 87–103; Reuven Goldberg, Introduction to Avrom Goldfaden, Shirim u’makhazot (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1970), 7–55; B. Gorin’s series of articles on Goldfaden’s plays in ‘Idishe dramaturgen’, Der teater zhurnal, 15 Dec. 1901–15 April 1902; Alyssa Quint, The Botched Kiss: Abraham Goldfaden and the Literary Origins of the Yiddish Theatre’ (Ph.D. Diss., Harvard University, 2002); and Seth Wolitz, ‘Shulamis and Bar kokhba: Renewed Jewish Role Models in Goldfaden and Halkin’, in Berkowitz, 87–104. Avrom Goldfaden, Dos yidele (Warsaw: Lidski, 1903), 5. All translations from Goldfaden’s texts are my own. Ibid., 16–17. Between 1879 and 1905, Di bobe mitn eynikl was published a remarkable eight times in three different cities: Odessa (one edition), Warsaw (five), and New York (two). Avrom Goldfaden, Di bobe mitn eynikl (Warsaw: Farlag Y.Lidski, 1904), 8. All subsequent citations from this play will be cited in the text. Avrom Goldfaden, Shulamis, oder has yerushalayim (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, n.d.), 4. All further quotations from Shulamis will be cited in the text.

246 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17

18 19 20

21

22

Religious Perspectives in Modern Muslim and Jewish Literatures Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 163. Ibid., 169. The song’s central conceit may again have been inspired by Gotlober, whose Veil opens with the heroine describing her sadness through various metaphors: ‘Ven ale mentshn freyen zikh/Um Simkhes-toyre un um Purim,/Vern mir dervekt in hartsn/Mayne bitere yesurim’ [When everyone else celebrates/On Simchat Torah and Purim/Is when my bitter troubles/Awaken in my heart]. In Gotlober’s play, however, the metaphor goes no further. See Der dektukh, oder, tsvey khupes in eyn nakht (Warsaw: Verblenski, 1876), 5. Psalm 137:5. The Psalms, trans. Dr A.Cohen (London: Soncino, 1958), 448. Goldfaden, ‘Al nehores bovl’ [By the rivers of Babylon], in Dos yidele, 42–3. The Psalms, 447. Avrom Goldfaden, Bar Kokhba (der zun fun dem shtern), oder, di letste teg fun yerushalayim (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, n.d.), 80. For a list of talmudic and other sources for this midrash, see Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1939), 6:455–6, note 35. Avrom Goldfaden, Kenig Akhashveyresh, oder, kenigin Ester (New York: B. Rabinowitz, n.d.), 5. Further quotations from the play will be cited in the text. Yankele is the diminutive form of Yankev (Jacob). In Genesis 33:25–30, Jacob wrestles with a divine agent, and upon prevailing, is given the name Israel. For ‘Yankele’, we can thus read ‘Israel’. It is characteristic of Goldfaden, writing in deliberately folksy style, to choose the most familiar form of the patriarch’s name, making the hero of Mordkhe’s narrative an ordinary Jew rather than an inaccessible abstraction. The same three words play a central role in Y.L.Peretz’s symbolist nightmare, Baynakht afn altn mark (1907), a dream play in which a badkhn [wedding jester] raises the dead in a Polish shtetl and tries in vain to summon the Messiah. Peretz’s play recalls Goldfaden’s not just in the repetition of the words, but in the theatrical treatment of the synagogue, which in both cases is situated in the background, and used as a liminal space from which a chorus of voices emanates. Goldfaden’s potential influence on Peretz’s dramaturgy deserves further investigation. For sources, see Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 6:464–5, notes 106–10. Alexander Mukdoyni, quoted in Sholem Perlmutter, Yidishe dramaturgn un teater-kompozitors (New York: YKUF, 1952), 53. Most notable among these are Y.Dobrushin’s section on Goldfaden in Di dramaturgye fun di klasiker (Moscow: Emes, 1940), and Uri Finkel’s ‘Sotsyale figurn in Goldfadens ershte verk’, Tsaytshrift I, 87–104. See, e.g., ‘Fun shmendrik biz ben ami’, reprinted in Moyshe Shtarkman, ‘Materyaln far Avrom Goldfadens biografye’, Arkhiv far der geshikhtefun yidishn teater un drame, vol. 1, ed. Dr Jacob Shatsky, Vilna: YIVO, 1930. These titles and dates have been taken from B.Gorin’s Geshikhte fun idishn teater un drame (New York: Literarisher Farlag, 1918), 2:237–8 and 2:243–4.

Bibliography Dobrushin, Y, Di dramaturgye fun di klasiker, Moscow: Emes, 1940. Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. Ginzberg, Louis, The Legends of the Jews, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1939. Goldfaden, Avrom, Di bobe mitn eynikl, Warsaw: Farlag Y.Lidski, 1904. ——Shulamis, oder bas yerushalayim, New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, n.d.

Avrom Goldfaden’s theatre of Jewishness 247 ——Bar Kokhba der zun fun dem shtern, oder, di letste teg fun yerushalayim, New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, n.d. ——Kenig Akhashveyresh, oder, kenigin Ester, New York: B.Rabinowitz, n.d. Gorin, B., Geshikhte fun idishn teater un drame, New York: Literarisher Farlag, 1918. Perlmutter, Sholem, Yidishe dramaturgn un teater-kompozitors, New York: YKUF, 1952. Shtarkman, Moyshe, ‘Materyaln far Avrom Goldfadens biografye’. Arkhiv far der geshikhte fun yidishn teater un drame, vol. 1, ed. Dr Jacob Shatsky, Vilna:YIVO, 1930.

15 TRANSCENDING THE BOUNDARIES OF ISLAM Written Swahili literature in the twentieth century Alamin M.Mazrui

Introduction Much of pre-twentieth century written Swahili literature, especially in its poetic form, could be described as Islamic, not only because of the subjects it treats but also because of the influence of the wider Muslim culture on canons of composition in East Africa. What Thomas Hodgkin said of Ghana’s Islamic literary tradition is also true of the earlier stages of much of classical Swahili literature: ‘It is a literature which can properly be called Islamic in the sense that its authors were Muslim, trained in the Islamic sciences, conscious of their relationship with the Islamic past, and regarding literature as a vehicle for the expression of Islamic values’.1 By the turn of the twentieth century, however, there was already evidence of Swahili verbal artistry in traditional religious rituals of some non-Swahili ethnic groups living in close proximity with the Swahili on the East African coast. This, unfortunately, is an area of research that has remained unexplored. Because of this dearth of information, and because it still belongs to the realm of the oral, this development in Swahili literature will not receive any further attention in this chapter. The inception of European colonial rule in East Africa generated new forces—religious, linguistic, literary—in its cultural space. These forces eventually led to the use of the Swahili language in religious functions of Christianity and the expansion of Swahili literature beyond the boundaries of the Islamic religion. In addition to its development within the Islamic culture of East Africa, therefore, this chapter also tries to capture this movement of Swahili literatures into the new religious space of East African Christianity.

Swahili Islamic literature Pre-twentieth century Swahili poetry was full of didactic religious poetry, rendered in an indigenized version of the Arabic script, calling upon members of the Swahili society to live within the framework of Islam. Many of the poems were couched in religious terms, often derived from a wider Islamic tradition. Some of the verse forms that emerged during this period have continued to be used to this day for themes that are almost entirely religious. These have included the wajiwaji and the ukawafi—compositions of five-line

Transcending the boundaries of Islam 249 and four-line stanzas, respectively, with fifteen syllables to a line and caesuras between the sixth and seventh, and again, between the tenth and the eleventh syllables; and the inkishafi (with four lines to a stanza, ten syllables to a line, with a caesura between the sixth and seventh syllables). These types continue to defy any separation between form and Islamic substance. As indicated by Hodgkin above, significant also has been the fact that much of the poetry was composed by the ulamaa, scholars versed in Islamic theology and jurisprudence. Some were descended from a line of scholars, all with a high sensitivity to a spiritual relationship with the world around them. Many of these ‘lived and worked on the northern coast of Kenya… writing religious and didactic verse in the Arabic script and using one of the northern dialects of Swahili’.2 One of these ulamaa-poets who is now considered the most prominent is Seyyid Abdallah bin Nasir (1720–1820). A descendant of a long line of Swahili scholars, he composed the epic Al-Inkishafi (Self-reflection) around the beginning of the nineteenth century. In this poem the poet draws inspiration from the historical ruins of the island-state of Pate on the coast of present-day Kenya and draws the analogy of death from them. By reflecting on the once accomplished and splendid achievements of the Swahili people of Pate, the beautiful architectural relics, the hedonist rulers, the intellectual life of the time, the poet castigates his own heart and urges it to take its cue from the fallen ruins and ephemeral nature of life. After describing the depths beneath and beyond the grave with terrifying clarity reminiscent of Dante’s Divine Comedy, he warns his heart against taking this life seriously: Moyo wangu nini huitabiri! Twambe u mwelevu wa kukhitari Huyui dunia ina ghururi? Ndia za tatasi huzandamaye? Suu ulimwengu bahari tesi, Una matumbawe na mangi masi. Aurakibuo juwa ni mwasi Kwa kula khasara ukhasiriye Why, O my soul, heed’st not thy future fate! Soothly, if thou wert wise, discriminate, Would’st not perceive this world of vain frustrate? Why to its turmoiled paths dost ever turn? ’Tis as a surging sea, this mortal vale, of found’ring reef and shoal of ragged shell. Who rides it, as a tyrant knows it well That loseth all to loss man’s hoped-for gain.3 By verbal dexterity and touching imagery of pythons in hellfire, solitude amid ruins, he almost begs this heart to repent its past sins and pray for the eternal peace and happiness that can only be found in the life after death.

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For all the innovations that have taken place over the years, the Swahili classical tradition continues to exercise its hold on the literary imagination of more contemporary poets. Their poetry is replete with archaisms drawn from the generation of poets who were contemporaries of Nasir, going back in time. To fully assimilate, appreciate and evaluate their poetry often requires grounding in classical poetry. Swahili Islamic culture is so vital a component of their poetry that it is difficult to dig into the nuances without some familiarity with the various registers of Swahili as an Afro-Islamic language. And even with their more secular orientation, some have continued to compose verse that is essentially Islamic. An obvious example is Abdillatif Abdalla (b. 1946), who stands out as one of the most prominent of modern poets. Currently a lecturer in Swahili at the University of Leipzig, he is best known for his collection of prison poetry, Sauti ya Dhiki (Voice of Agony),4 composed while serving a five-year jail term on charges of sedition in his native Kenya. In spite of the secular and radical political thrust of much of his poetry, however, Abdillatif also composes verse on religious themes. His Utenzi wa Maisha ya Adamu na Hawaa (The Epic of the Life of Adam and Eve), a 637-stanza verse in the classical prosodic tradition, is a critical account of ‘the Fall’ as narrated in the Qur’an. Reminiscent of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Abdillatif virtually sides with Hawaa (Eve) who accepts her humanness and seeks to live it to the full. And far from being the victim of the wily machinations of his partner under the influence of Iblis (Satan), Adam emerges as a figure robbed of his humanity by his seeming self-righteousness. Through this poem, then, Abdillatif was inaugurating a new genre of critical Islamic literature—offering radical readings of Islamic texts that deviate from the other-worldly outlook of many a classical verse from Nasir’s generation, but still within the conceptual world of Islam. There has been some debate, of course, on just how Islamic the Swahili literature of the nineteenth century and earlier periods has been. As demonstrated in the following two excerpts—and these are not atypical of the views that prevail in the general run of scholarship on Swahili literature—Jan Knappert is of the position that the literature is immersed in Islam in its entirety: Swahili literature is profoundly immersed in its [Islamic] spirit. The Koran, the legends of the Prophet Muhammad and other prophets and saints of Islam, points of doctrine and theology are referred to on every page of traditional Swahili literature.5 Swahili literature, both prose and poetry, is full of references to Islamic law, and of admonitions to the faithful to observe it in every detail. A knowledge of Islamic law is essential for understanding Swahili literature, especially with regard to marriage and family law.6 The density of references to Islam in this literature made it seem a product of the mosque. And it is no accident that the Swahili poet Muyaka bin Mwinyi Haji (1776–1856), who lived and composed in what is today Kenya’s major port city of Mombasa, is often celebrated as the first poet to attempt to take poetry from the mosque to the market place. Others have tried to demonstrate that at no point in their history did the Swahili produce a greater proportion of religious verse than secular verse. What ended up being documented in writing, however, was overwhelmingly Islamic in orientation. This is a tendency that was partly due to the fact that:

Transcending the boundaries of Islam 251 Until the more recent days of German and British colonization in East Africa…the most literate among the Swahili were themselves students, former students, or Islamic scholars who acquired their writing craft from the religious institutions. Hence, most of the scribes attached greater importance to the preservation of homiletic verse than of secular poetry.7 Assibi Amidou8 and several other scholars have expressed views similar to those of Shariff. If there is exaggerated emphasis on Islamic literature, then, it is partly due to an orientalist bias toward the written as opposed to the oral word. Much of the pre-twentieth century written verse, on which Knappert and many others have tended to focus, is indeed Islamic in the sense defined above. It is in the oral domain of Swahili literature that we find an abundance of secular verse. Naturally, therefore, the process of trans-religious expansion of Swahili literature that began in the early twentieth century is related most systematically to its written tradition.

The Swahili language: between Islam and Christianity But the story of this trans-religious development of the literature is itself founded on the spread of the language beyond its native Muslim population. In time Swahili became a medium of worship and theology for Christianity and indigenous African religion, as well as Islam. Today, Swahili is the language of a Christian hymn, of an Islamic sermon, and of funeral rites in African traditional religions. Swahili religious concepts which were originally intended only for Islamic discourse have now penetrated the vocabulary of the Bible and of African initiation rites. But in what sense was Swahili an Afro-Islamic language in its origins? Languages are not only, on one level, products of purely linguistic evolution from other languages; they also arise out of, and are vehicles of, whole cultures and civilizations. It is true that Swahili is partly a product of the interaction between Bantu languages in East Africa and Arabic. But the impact of Arabic upon the development of Swahili is itself part of the wider impact of Islam. The Islamic component in Swahili is shown partly in the language’s readiness to borrow concepts, words, and idioms from Arabic and from Islamic civilization. It is by no means accidental, then, that classical Swahili poetry is at once part of the heritage of Africa and part of the universal legacy of Islam. As the language of the Qur’an, Arabic is, of course, permeated with Islamic imagery and connotation. This helped enrich Swahili alongside borrowings from Bantu (and non-Bantu) languages of Africa. The word for God in Swahili (Mngu) comes from Bantu, whereas the word for angels (malaika) comes from Arabic. The word for heavens (mbingu) comes from Bantu, whereas the word for earth (ardhi), especially when used religiously, comes from Arabic. The word for prophet (mtume) is from Bantu, whereas the word for devil (shetani) comes from Arabic. A wider range of illustrations could be added to these, showing an important interplay of meaning and symbolism between the universes of religious experience in the traditions of the Bantu and the legacy of Islam.9

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The original alphabet used in writing Swahili also added to its Islamic image. Swahili has been a written language for over 500 years. Until the twentieth century the script was based entirely on the Arabic alphabet, with such modifications as were necessitated by the more elaborate sound system of the cross-cultural language of East Africa. The classical poems of Swahili, steeped as they were in Islamic tradition and imagery, were all originally written in this revised Arabic alphabet and preserved for posterity through that medium. The trans-religious expansion of Swahili began with its entry into the mainstream of formal education in East Africa which came with European colonization and Christian missionary infiltration of African societies. The great debate then got underway about media of instruction for Africans, the comparative merits of Swahili as against what were called ‘vernacular languages’ and the comparative merits of Swahili as against the English language. This debate, especially when it touched upon the fundamental issues of educational policy, became quite often an issue between church and state in a colonial situation. It is to the ramifications of this grand dialogue, half religious and half political, that we must now turn. A rather simplistic, but nevertheless suggestive distinction needs to be made between training the mind of the colonized African, on the one hand, and converting his/her soul, on the other. Colonial policy-makers in the administrative field at their most enlightened viewed education as a medium for the training of the African mind; but the Christian missionaries viewed education as a method of winning the African soul. In reality, there was a good deal of overlap between these two approaches and, in practice, they were rarely sharply differentiated. But it is still true that the missionaries in those early days were especially concerned about ‘spiritual transformation’, the elimination of ‘heathen tendencies’, and the spread of the gospel itself. The secular colonial policy-makers, on the other hand, were interested in producing some levels of indigenous human-power, and in legitimizing colonial rule itself to the outside world by providing education as an instrument of ‘modernization’, rather than as an aid for spiritualization.10 In the earliest days of European colonization and evangelism, the association of Swahili with Islam was not held against the language by the Christian missionaries. On the contrary, quite a number felt that since both Islam and Christianity were monotheistic religions drawn from the same Middle Eastern ancestry, and sharing a considerable number of spiritual concepts and values, Swahili would serve well for the conversion of indigenous Africans to Christianity precisely because Swahili could already cope with the conceptual universe of Islam. As early as 1850, the Reverend Dr Johann Ludwig Krapf of the Church Missionary Society was already campaigning for Swahili as a language of evangelism. Its status as a lingua franca and its rich reservoir of religious concepts relevant to Christianity, made Swahili in the eyes of Reverend Krapf an ideal language for East African Christianity. The only aspect of the language that Krapf found objectionable was its use of the Arabic script which, if left to continue, would leave a door wide open to ‘Mohammedan proselytism among the inland tribes which may hereafter be Christianized and civilized’.11 It was partly due to this fear that Krapf initiated the use of the Roman script in writing Swahili. Otherwise Krapf, like Bishop Edward Steere and Father Sacleux, is among the missionaries who not only championed the use of Swahili for the Christian gospel, but also made substantial contributions toward the systematic study of the language.12

Transcending the boundaries of Islam 253 By contrast, ‘vernacular languages’ were deemed too saturated with associations and connotations drawn from an indigenous religious experience much further removed from Christianity than Islam was. The utilization of the languages for Christian proselytism supposedly carried the risk of conceptual distortion greater than that posed by Islam. It is against this backdrop that Bishop Edward Steere concluded: ‘Neither is there any way by which we can make ourselves so readily intelligible or by which the Gospel can be preached as soon or so well than by means of the language of Zanzibar’.13 For a brief while Christianity came to be identified partly with the knowledge of Swahili and the ability to read in that language. But as this identification began to get underway, a new swing of opinion was also becoming discernible. Certainly in Uganda, a movement to replace Swahili altogether with the major local language, Luganda, became quite strong. Swahiliphile views of some missionaries were coming under increasing challenge, and the old association of Swahili with Islam was now regarded as ipso facto dysfunctional to Christianity. As Bishop Alfred R.Tucker in Uganda once commented about Bishop Alexander Mackay: Mackay…was very desirous of hastening the time when one language should dominate Central Africa, and that language, he hoped and believed, would be Swahili…. That there should be one language for Central Africa is a consummation devoutly to be wished, but God forbid that it should be Swahili. English? Yes! But Swahili, never. The one means the Bible and Protestant Christianity and the other Mohammedanism… sensuality, moral and physical degradation and ruin. Swahili is too closely related to Mohammedanism to be welcome in any mission field in Central Africa.14 Similar sentiments were expressed in neighboring Tanganyika, then under German occupation, where Swahili was declared to be so ‘irredeemably mixed with Islam that every expedient ought to be employed to obstruct their joint penetration’.15 By this time, however, Swahili had begun to make sufficient inroads into and enjoy the support of a sufficiently large constituency within the Christian community, to continue having an expanding role in East African Christianity in spite of the new opposition to it. With the pioneering work of missionaries, the Roman alphabet quickly gained the ascendancy in written Swahili and, expectedly, came to be used extensively in the production of Christian-oriented materials. Today very few people even among the Swahili themselves or other East African Muslims any longer use the Arabic alphabet for the Swahili language. And with the instrumentality of this new script, the promotion of Swahili literacy skills became virtually normalized in Bible classes, especially in Kenya and Tanzania. Within a couple of decades Swahili writing in the Roman script had become so established, and so much a part of the colonial school environment, that it began to cause ripples within the ranks of East African Muslim scholars. In 1931, for example, Sheikh Al-Amin bin Ali Mazrui (1891–1947), the distinguished reformist Muslim scholar from Mombasa, Kenya (and father of the renowned political scientist, Professor Ali A.Mazrui), complained that the Roman script was not only inadequate in representing Swahili sounds but, worse still, it distorted the Swahili sound system. The orthographic Latinization of Swahili negatively influenced Swahili speech in a manner that violated its norms of aesthetics and sophistication. It was increasingly transforming the language itself, divorcing it more and

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more from the rest of society. He suspected that the entire colonial project was intended to ‘de-Arabize’ and, perhaps, ‘de-Islamize’ Swahili. In his words: It is indeed a great loss on our part to speak this Swahili which has been tampered with by Europeans. Swahili is the language of the coastal people, and it is not pure except by its mixture with Arabic. (Al-Islah, 20 June 1932) Linguistic purity is usually conceived in terms of filtering out what is linguistically ‘foreign’. But here was Sheikh Al-Amin celebrating a concept of purity based precisely on hybridity—the mixture between the indigenous (Bantu) and the foreign (Arabic)—reemphasizing once again the perceived centrality of Arabic and Islamic civilization in the construction of Swahili. And using his paper, Al-Islah, he urged his community to boycott this ‘school Swahili’ that came with colonialism and the Christian mission. But, with the colonial control of the education system and other structures of society, this momentum of orthographic change had become too strong for even an influential figure like Sheikh Al-Amin to resist. In the final analysis, however, neither Christian reservations about the Islamicity of Swahili nor Muslim fears about its seeming de-Arabization in the hands of Europeans were sufficient to arrest the spread of the language beyond its traditionally Muslim borders. As European missionaries promoted Christianity they also sought to constrain the spread of Islam. Yet, ironically, they often used the Afro-Islamic language of Swahili to spread the Gospel of Jesus. Even when some Christian missionaries preferred ethnic-bound languages to Swahili, as they did in Uganda, they still looked to Swahili for neo-Islamic loan words. Thus Swahili continued to expand its religious role either directly or indirectly throughout East Africa.

Transcending Islam in Swahili literature By the beginning of the twentieth century Swahili already had a substantial body of written poetry oriented toward the secular. Everyday issues of social and political importance were captured in verse and preserved for posterity by the Arabic-Swahili alphabet. The pioneer and leading spirit behind the popularization of the more secular poetic tradition was the aforementioned Muyaka bin Mwinyi Haji, who had produced poems with an unmatched mastery—in their aesthetic quality, in their power of evocation, in stylistic innovativeness—on the topical issues of his period. He wrote of love and infidelity, prosperity and drought, the sex exploits of key figures of his time and the calamities of his fellow Mombasans. Muyaka’s genius lay partly in his linking the social with the ego. The poetry of the private self is more limited in Swahili Afro-Islamic literature than in Afro-European literature. Issues of collective focus have featured more prominently than those of individual concern. But poets like Muyaka helped to build bridges between individual privacy and public concern. Many modern Swahili poets, working within the traditional prosodic framework, have been significantly influenced by the classical Swahili tradition. Muyaka’s poetic influ-

Transcending the boundaries of Islam 255 ence in terms of theme, style, and tone has had a direct impact on a number of these modern poets. Unlike many African poets writing in European languages, these poets writing in Swahili are seldom groping for ethno-cultural identity. There is a conspicuous absence of poems obsessed with cultural alienation. The poets themselves were trained in the classical Islamic education system and, in most cases, suffered a minimum of cultural dislocation. While the traditional Islamic system of education accommodated aspects of traditional African culture, the Western system of education alienated and sometimes suppressed traditional value systems. The recipients of traditional Islamic education came out equipped with both the Arabic alphabet and the Roman alphabet and tended to use the two interchangeably. They became conscious of the existence of the legacy of Swahili literature before being initiated into the heritage of literature in European languages. They accepted the legacy of the ulamaa, the priestly poets of old, and at the same time groped for a new idiom of the modern world. Side-by-side with this secularization of Swahili written literature, however, was the development of the trans-religious tradition. A pioneering figure in this new trend was William Edward Taylor, a missionary who lived in Mombasa, Kenya, in the 1880s and 1890s. His greatest contribution was to render portions of the psalms into a Swahili poetic form that to some extent conforms to the received prosodic framework, as in his ‘Zaburi I’ (Psalm I) below: Yuna heri aso njama akenenda na wabaya kiumbe aso simama kwa ndia ziso lekeya za wadhambi si za wema wala hajajikaliya na wacheka mambo piya kwa kikao cha wabishi

Blessed is the one without intrigue who does not go with the wicked the mortal who does not stand on paths that are not right of sinners, not of the good, nor take his/her seat with those who laugh about everything in the abode of the quarrel—makers.

This composition seeks to approximate to the quatrain earlier popularized by Muyaka, even though the attempt has resulted in a rather stilted product. But Taylor also reputedly ventured into new prosodic forms and new styles partly intended to make his verse more accessible to African converts, most of whom were not products of the Swahili Islamic culture and had little exposure to the Swahili classical tradition in poetry. He tried to avoid the archaisms and Arabisms that characterized the most cherished poems among the Swahili themselves.16 In the final analysis, then, Taylor introduced a poetic style that was alien to the Swahili Islamic ear, a style that laid the foundation for a characteristically Christian Swahili versification. Just as much as the missionaries applied Swahili to Christian texts, however, they sought to make new infiltrations within Islam. Most significant was Canon Godfrey Dale’s translation of the Qur’an in 1923, the first-ever complete Swahili rendering of the Muslim holy book. A Christian missionary of the Zanzibar-based Universities Mission to Central Africa between 1889 and 1925, Dale made a special attempt to study and penetrate the ‘mind of Islam’. And the primary objective of his Swahili translation of the Qur’an was to provide

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Christian missionaries with a better understanding of East African Islam in order to combat it better. Expectedly, Muslim reception of Dale’s translation was a hostile one. The initiative was seen as a conscious Christian invasion of an Islamic space. The fears and suspicions were reinforced by the claim that the translation was replete with errors in the transfer of meaning from Arabic to Swahili, and by the fact that the translation was not accompanied by the Arabic original. The very absence of the language of the Qur’an in the text rendered it less than authentic in the eyes of East African Muslims. Desiring to limit the presumed damage caused by Dale’s translation, therefore, Muslims were now inspired to produce their own Swahili translations of the Qur’an. Sheikh AlAmin bin Ali Mazrui was the first to initiate this project, but he did not live long enough to produce a published translation himself. It remained to his disciple, Sheikh Muhammad Kasim Mazrui (1912–82), to continue with his mission. By the time of his death, Sheikh Muhammad had published the first four suras of the Qur’an based on the translation he had received from his teacher and mentor, Sheikh Al-Amin. Once the Chief Kadhi of Kenya, Sheikh Muhammad wrote books on the lives of the first four caliphs of Islam among other publications; but his most influential work was his Islamic periodical, Sauti ya Haki (Voice of Truth/Justice) which popularized a Swahili Islamic idiom based on the Mombasa dialect of Swahili, Kimvita. Indeed, Sheikh Muhammad was of the belief that, due to its greater phonological proximity with Arabic, Kimvita (among Swahili dialects) was best suited for a Swahili Islamic discourse. The translation by Sheikh Muhammad, however, was by no means the first in Swahili undertaken by Muslims. The translation of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Mission, a body founded by the nineteenth-century Indian religious militant Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, appeared several decades earlier. The Mission published the first full Swahili translation of the Qur’an in 1953, with a prologue that condemns Dale’s translation in a way that clearly demonstrates how Dale’s work may have spurred the Ahmadiyya initiative. Later, in 1969, the renowned Sheikh Abdalla Saleh Farsy (1912–82), then the Chief Kadhi of Kenya, produced his complete Swahili translation of the Qur’an in which many of his commentaries condemned, ironically, not the alleged distortions of Dale, but those of the Ahmadiyya translation. Perhaps the most prolific writer of Swahili Islamic books, Sheikh Farsy had by this time relocated to Kenya after the 1964 revolution in his native Zanzibar, where he had served as Kadhi for several years. There were, of course, other translations of the Qur’an, including a complete version by Sheikh Ali Muhsin, the leading Zanzibar politician now resident in Oman. But none of these later attempts were directly inspired by the Christian (i.e. Dale’s) translation of the Muslim Holy Book. Even as Christian missionaries tried to invade the Islamic space, however, they continued to inscribe the Euro-Christian literary tradition on the shores of East Africa through Swahili translation of European classics, from Bunyan to the Bible. In the words of Rollins: In terms of literary influence, one set of figures alone will explain more than several paragraphs. Between the years 1900–1950, there were approximately 359 works of prose published in Swahili; 346 of these were written by Europeans and published mainly in England and Germany. Many of these were translations: Swift, Bunyan,

Transcending the boundaries of Islam 257 Molière, Shakespeare, but none more pervasive, in more abundance, and having more effect than the Bible. The British and Foreign Bible Archives in London show that thousands of copies of either books from the Bible, or the entire Bible itself had been distributed in East Africa by the turn of the century. A common yearly run was between 5–10,000 copies. This is not to mention the many editions of individual hymn books, catechisms, prayer books, lives of saints and so on that also quickly found their way into Swahili by the beginning of the 20th century.17 In his statistics Rollins is unlikely to have included works published by Muslim scholars like Sheikh Al-Amin bin Ali Mazrui. Nonetheless, the overwhelming proportion of materials in wide circulation produced by Euro-Christians became a good measure of how rapidly Swahili language and literature were entering the ecumenical stage of their historical development. It was not until the 1960s that East Africans themselves, rather than Europeans, began to gain some prominence in compositions of Christian orientation. Pioneering among these was Mathias Mnyampala (1919–69), himself a devout Roman Catholic of Tanzanian origin to whom Swahili was a second language. Unlike his European predecessors who sought to Europeanize Swahili verse to accommodate their Euro-Christian tastes, Mnyampala composed in the classical tradition of the Muslim ulamaa. His was a poetry that was still Islamic in form but Christian in content. As seen below, his Utenzi wa Enjili Takatifu (Epic of the Holy Gospel) followed the Islamic liturgical tradition of tenzi—four-line verses with eight syllables to a line and an aaab rhyming pattern. Mungu unipe wajio nitowe masimulio nitimize kusudio la Enjili kusifia Nasifia utukufu Mandiko matakatifu Mungu wetu kumsifu Mwana nae Roho pia

God, give me instruction that I may give my narration that I may accomplish my purpose of praising the Gospel I will appraise the honor of the Holy Scriptures (And) to praise our God the Son as well as the Holy Spirit.

In spite of his allegiance to the local linguistic and literary traditions of AfroIslam, however, Mnyampala is said to have been ‘closer to European or western thought since he had the outlook of a Christian’ in many important ways.18 But it is not only in the realm of poetry that Swahili literature began to develop an ecumenical legacy. Some writers have addressed Christian issue through imaginative prose. One of these is John Ndetei Sumba (1930–70), a Kenyan novelist and, until his death in 1970, the editor of the Swahili Christian newspaper Kesho (Tomorrow). In his Kuishi Kwingi ni Kuona Mengi (Living Long is Witnessing Much),19 Sumba subjects his main character, Katua, to much personal suffering for trying to prevent his wife, Kamene, from living a devout Christian life. As a consequence Katua finally sees the light and becomes a practicing and upright Christian as he enters his old age. Another example is that of Serapius Komba (b. 1941), a Catholic friar of Tanzanian origin and a Swahili novelist, playwright and poet of modest accomplishment. In Komba’s Pete (The Ring),20 Tim, the main character of the story, ends up committing suicide in a church after violating his Christian

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vows and following his expulsion from the seminary for succumbing to his obsession with virginity, that leads him to marry a fifteen-year-old virgin. From the print pages of books and magazines to the screens and waves of the electronic media, therefore, a peculiarly Christian Swahili literature continues to make its presence in poetry as much as in drama and prose fiction.

Swahili literature and Islamic renewal If the Swahili language and Swahili literature came to serve Christian interests, however, they did not lose their Islamic appeal as far as the Swahili people were concerned. It has sometimes been suggested that culturally, East African Islam (especially among the Swahili) has been more Arabized than West African Islam. Contrasting these two regions of Africa in their models of Islamization, Ali Mazrui has noted, for example, that, in East Africa the Arab factor has been more pronounced in the arrival and expansion of Islam from the earliest days into the twen-tieth century. Major religious leaders were overwhelmingly people who claimed Arab descent, if not indeed descent from the Prophet Muhammad himself. One adverse consequence of this Arab leadership was that it prolonged the image of Islam as a ‘foreign religion’.21 Ironically, however, rededication to the study of the Arabic language has been more a feature of the recent history of West African than of East African Islamic revivalism. Within East Africa, it is the Swahili language and Swahili literary production that have been at the center of Islamic renewal in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, the pervasive role of Arabic in East African Islam had remained unchallenged. This was partly due to the status of the Qur’an in Muslim theology, which has no real equivalent in Christianity. The Qur’an is regarded not merely as divinely inspired, but as literally the utterance of Allah, with the Prophet Muhammad serving as no more than a channel of communication. As a result, many believed that the translation of the Qur’an into Swahili was itself a sinful imitation of the Muslim Holy Book. This view did not begin to change until the twentieth century under the influence of Sheikh Al-Amin bin Ali Mazrui, whose name has been mentioned earlier in connection with issues of change in the Swahili language. His thinking marks the beginning of a shift from an Arabophone Islam to a Swahiliphone Islam—in spite of the central role that Arabic continued to play in Islamic ritual. Regarded as the leading Islamic reformer of the region in the first half of the twentieth century, Sheikh Al-Amin was, of course, a strong advocate of Arabic. He condemned as the height of religious ignorance the parroting of Qur’anic verses and passages in Arabic without knowledge of their meaning. Appraising the central role of the Arabic language as the medium of the Qur’an and Islamic prayer and in the history of Islam generally, he regarded the study of Arabic as mandatory for every Muslim, male and female. Nonetheless, at the same time Sheikh Al-Amin was quite instrumental in making Islamic knowledge accessible in Swahili. He pioneered the systematization of the Arabic script,

Transcending the boundaries of Islam 259 through the use of superscript and subscript diacritical symbols, to make it more suitable for the writing of Swahili. Hitherto, different Swahili writers had used different letters of the Arabic alphabet to represent different peculiarly Swahili sounds. Sheikh Al-Amin also held regular classes on the translation and interpretation of the Qur’an: It is his work in these mosque madrassahs that eventually became the foundation for the Swahili translation of some Qur’anic suras undertaken posthumously in his name by Sheikh Muhammad Kasim Mazrui. Sheikh Al-Amin also translated some forty hadiths of the Prophet Muhammad, initiated an entirely new tradition of delivering portions of the sermon for Friday midday prayer in Swahili, and launched a Swahili journalistic project devoted to Islamic affairs. Sheikh Al-Amin’s legacy was later to be inherited and nurtured by some of his disciples, especially Sheikh Muhammad Kasim Mazrui and Sheikh Abdalla Saleh Farsy—both of whom served consecutively as Chief Kadhis of Kenya. The two sternly opposed the dogmatic position, coming especially from the ranks of the shariifs of East Africa, that insisted on an Arabic Islam everywhere and at whatever cost. By producing published translations of the Qur’an in Swahili, and making the language the primary medium of their religious presentations and publications—from Islamic theology to Islamic poetry—the two, in combination with others of their generation, made a significant contribution to the consolidation of the position of Swahili as the language of East African Islam. Islamic resurgence in the 1980s and 1990s has given a further boost to the language, as young and fiery Muslim preachers, from Mombasa to Zanzibar, turned to it as an instrument of an intellectual jihad. Some of the disciples of Sheikh Muhammad Kasim Mazrui and Sheikh Abdalla Saleh Farsy continued to expand its role in East African Islam. Sheikh Abdalla’s ideas, for example, are being continued today by his pupils, notable among whom is Sheikh Saidi Musa (b. 1944), who writes extensively from his headquarters at Ugwene, Moshi, on mainland Tanzania. The outcome is that Swahili has today made inroads in areas previously reserved for Arabic.22 This era is also marked by a rebirth of Islamic journalistic projects in Swahili, reviving a trend first initiated by Sheikh Al-Amin in the early 1930s. Swahili language newspapers have routinely carried special columns of poetry on topical issues of the moment. They publish not only letters but also poems to the editor on a wide range of subjects like inflation, debt and government policy. A similar tradition has now established itself in Swahili Islamic periodicals, providing space for Swahili poetry calling on the Muslim ummah to hold fast to the uniting and guiding rope of Allah and advocating Islamic conduct in the collective and individual lives of the believers.

Conclusion We began this chapter with the observation that the religious face of Swahili literature remained predominantly Islamic for centuries. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, it had crossed these traditional boundaries and established a presence in East

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African Christianity as well as, in the oral domain, in some African indigenous religions on the coastal strip of East Africa. Both Christianity and Islam, of course, regard themselves as reli-gions of the Book. Ironically, however, though Islam has deeper roots in East Africa than Christianity, its book, the Qur’an, continues to be more widely read in Arabic than in Swahili partly because reciting the Qur’an in its original language of revelation is itself considered an act of piety. The Bible, on the other hand, is probably more widely read in translation (in Swahili and other East African languages) than in English. But beyond the holy books of the two religions, the production of Islamic and Christian literature in Swahili continues unabated, sometimes as part of the competition for the soul of the East African. In the final analysis, then, Africa’s triple heritage—indigenous, Islamic and Euro-Christian—continues to condition the interplay between language, literature and religious faith in the stark realities of post-colonial history. The story of the Swahili language and its literature is partly one of both tension and accommodation between Islam, Christianity and more indigenous religious traditions of Africa. But even as the language and its literary products proceed to expand their religious horizons, their Afro-Islamic core continues to demonstrate remarkable resilience, constantly feeding the Afro-Islamic identity of the native speakers of the East African lingua franca, Swahili—even as Arabic continues to serve as the main language of Islamic ritual and Qur’anic recitation. And where the religion had once Islamized the Swahili language and culture, the language is now gradually Swahilizing Islam, seeking to give it more of an indigenous imprint.

Notes 1

Thomas Hodgkin, ‘The Islamic Literary Tradition In Ghana’, in I.M.Lewis (ed.), Islam in Tropical Africa: Studies Presented and Discussed at the Fifth International African Seminar, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, January 1964, London: Oxford University Press, 1966, p. 442. 2 Wilfred Whiteley, Swahili: The Rise of a National Language, London: Methuen, 1969, p. 18. 3 William Hichens, Al-Inkishafi: The Soul’s Awakening, Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1972, pp. 65–7. 4 Abdillatif Abdalla, Sauti ya Dhiki, Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1973. 5 Jan Knappert, Four Centuries of Swahili Verse, London: Heinemann, 1979, p. xix. 6 Ibid., p. xvii. 7 Ibrahim Noor Shariff, ‘Islam and Secularity in Swahili Literature’, in Kenneth W.Harrow (ed.), Faces of Islam in African Literature, Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, and London: James Currey, 1991, pp. 41–2. 8 Assibi A.Amidu, Kimwondo: A Kiswahili Electoral Contest, Vienna: Beiträge Zur Afrikanistik, 1990, pp. 3–4. 9 Ali A.Mazrui and Alamin M.Mazrui, Political Culture of Language: Swahili, Society and the State, 2nd edn, Binghamton NY: The Institute of Global Cultural Studies (Binghamton University), 1999, p. 33. 10 Ibid., pp. 70–2. 11 J.L.Krapf, Outline of the Elements of the Kiswahili Language with Special Reference to the Kinika Dialect, Tübingen, 1850, p. 170. 12 Mazrui and Mazrui, op. cit., p. 74.

Transcending the boundaries of Islam 261 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21

22

Edward Steere, A Handbook of the Swahili Language as Spoken at Zanzibar, London: Sheldon Press, 1870, p. ii. Alfred R.Tucker, Eighteen Years in Uganda and East Africa, London: Edward Arnold, 1911, p. 262. I.e. the penetration of both Swahili and Islam into the East African regions. Marcia Wright, German Missions in Tanganyika: 1891–1941, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971, p. 113. Knappert, op. cit., pp. 233–7. Jack D.Rollins, ‘Early 20th Century Swahili Prose Narrative Structure and Some Aspects of Swahili Ethnicity’, in Eckhard Breitinger and Reinhard Sander (eds), Towards African Authenticity, Language and Literary Form, Bayreuth: University of Bayreuth, 1985, p. 51. Knappert, op. cit., pp. 272–3. John Ndeti Somba, Kuishi Kwingi ni Kuona Mengi, Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1968. Serapius M.Komba, Pete, Dar-es-Salaam: IKR, 1978. Ali A.Mazrui, ‘Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa’, in John L Esposito (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, vol. 2, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 262. Topan, Farouk, ‘Swahili’, in C.E.Bosworth, E.Van Donzel, W.P.Heinrichs and G.Lecomte (eds), The Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., vol. IX, Leiden: Brill, 1997, p. 917.

Further reading Abdulaziz, Mohamed H., Muyaka: 19th Century Swahili Popular Poetry, Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, n.d. Allen, J.W.T., Tendi, New York: Africana Publishing Corporation, 1971. Bertoncini, Elena Zubkova, Outline of Swahili Literature, Leiden: E.J.Brill, 1989. Knappert, Jan, A Survey of Swahili Islamic Epic Sagas, Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1999. ——Four Centuries of Swahili Verse: A Literary History and Anthology, London: Heinemann, 1979. ——Swahili Islamic Poetry, Leiden: E.J.Brill, 1971. Mazrui, Alamin M. and Ibrahim N.Shariff, The Swahili: Idiom and Identity, Trenton NJ: Africa World Press, 1994. Shariff, Ibrahim N., Tungo Zetu, Trenton NJ: Red Sea Press, 1989. Wamitila, Kyallo Wadi, Archetypal Criticism of Kiswahili Poetry, Bayreuth: Bayreuth University, 2001.

16 BETWEEN EROS AND DIOS Leopoldo Azancot’s Novia judía Stacy N.Beckwith

Introduction As early as the first decades of the seventh century, when Visigothic kings in Iberia adopted Catholicism as their official religion, local Jewish-Christian relations deteriorated to the point where one ruler, Sisebut (612–21) issued an order for Jewish conversion, or exile from his kingdom. The Spanish (non-Jewish) author and Sephardic studies scholar, Paloma Diaz-Más, sees this as the first precursor to mass conversions which followed ‘an extensive wave’ of pogroms throughout Spain in 1391.1 Haim Beinart confirms that 1391 saw the real emergence of ‘a new kind of population—the converses, a population which had ceased to be Jewish by faith and in theory should have been assimilated into the Spanish (or Portuguese) Old Christian population’.2 Beinart’s renowned archival work in Spain reveals instead that New Christians found few professional or social entrées into their old blood surroundings, and so ‘remained an “in-between” or “intermediate” society’3 throughout three periods of liminal existence and Inquisitorial persecution, from 1480 into the eighteenth century.4 This is not to obscure the fact that New Christians were variously courted when the Spanish imperial government sought revenue enhancement. Recognizing their unchanged financial adroitness, the crown opened the Portuguese border to converse returnees as early as November 1492, following their official expulsion from Spain as Jews seven months before. At the same time, to maintain broad Old Christian allegiance, Spanish monarchs instituted a national Inquisition for routing out all ‘remnants of Judaism’ from New Christians and their contacts, under the umbrella of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) statutes.5 These barriers to converses holding public office or entering many religious and educational institutions also had Visigothic precedents.6 The crux in both periods was an intergenerational exclusion from civil and political society by ‘the principle that the sins of the fathers should be visited on the sons and grandsons’.7 After the Inquisition was finally, officially abolished in 1834 and freedom of religion became increasingly apparent in successive state constitutions, the Spanish military re/ discovered unconverted Jews during its invasion of Morocco in 1860. Army reporters sent back descriptions of Iberian Jewish descendants, their Judeo-Spanish language, and their customs. By 1865 a ‘substantially nourished’ community of Sephardic immigrants coalesced in Madrid and laid the foundations for a resumption of Jewish literary activity in contemporary Spain.8 Among the first- and second-generation European, South American,

Between Eros and Dios 263 and North African Jewish novelists writing in the country since the 1910s, however, only one has engaged with the indigenous subject of medieval through modern converso religious identity, and detrimental family legacy. Leopoldo Azancot (b. Seville, 1935) is an author of Moroccan Sephardic origins. He has written five novels portraying local Spanish and globally dispersed Jewish characters. Two of his Iberian protagonists seek the kind of religious self-knowledge and public affirmation that may allow them to advance beyond a troubled existence in between a persecuting gentile society on the one hand, and an ancestral, but skeptical Jewish ‘home’ community on the other. In these cases Azancot takes up the elements of suspicion, interrogation, and defense from the crypto-Jewish and Spanish Inquisitorial repertoire and he melds them into a composite looking-glass. The novelist’s narrative plots and structure give the unprecedented view of reversed trajectories: converso quests for re-acceptance and security within Judaism instead of Catholicism. Rabbinic law is the arbiter and gatekeeper to non-syncretic Jewish society, and two prodigal sons, apostates by bloodline, are in the dock. Empirically, the Talmud’s trans-generational pardon for religious conversion would obviate such a trial.9 However, except for the lack of coercion and lethal consequences for either confessing or not doing so, Azancot’s converso protagonists face an Orthodoxy that is the mirror image of the Catholic Inquisition: a Judaism that does not tolerate bequeathed hybridity in personal religious character. As a result, the ‘mestizo’ Jews strive to compensate for their intrinsic Otherness by comparing their outwardly subversive features and deeds with far greater immoralities, imagined and set in earlier periods in Jewish history (Azancot 1977, 43). In this way the fifteenth-, seventeenth- and twentieth-century plots in La novia judía (The Jewish Bride, 1977) and Jerusalén: una historia de amor (Jerusalem: A Love Story, 1986) interweave and promote ‘a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships’ that is hardly puritanical.10 The story of La novia judía takes place in two periods of Jewish history, during the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. The plot developments during the Middle Ages, before the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, involve the strange legend of a dibbuk (the soul of a dead person and its transmigration into a living person’s body) with destabilizing social consequences. The protagonist in the 1660s is an unnamed converso’s son. Having fled his native Spain for Rome, at the end of his life he is in the process of giving a pair of students a confessional autobiographical history. He explains his life with recourse to the medieval dibbuk legend, having heard the tale from an older Sephardic refugee. Azancot’s second converso protagonist, the son of a Spanish Catholic mother and converso father, appears in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in 1985, in Jerusalem: una historia de amor. A firsttime visitor to Israel, Carlos is a scholar and the author of a novel entitled La novia judía, which he is introducing to its first all-Jewish audience.

The perennial converso At the center of Azancot’s two novels is a recollected epic of Jewish aristocratic ruin in late fifteenth-century Spain. The Catholic armies of Castile and Aragon, joined through royal marriage, are poised to retake Spanish Iberia from Muslim rule. The Arabs’ impe-

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rially managed multiculturalism has endured through several religiously and politically distinct dynasties since their first invasion in 711 of the Iberian peninsula. Azancot draws on the apocalyptic momentum leading up to the Catholic reconquest of Granada, the last southern Muslim kingdom in Iberia. While populations of pure or mixed Moorish blood are not expelled forthwith as Granada falls in 1492, all Spanish Jews are. This engenders their greatest push toward religious conversion and survival as crypto- (secretly practicing) Jews or New Christians, in an environment of consolidating faith and political power, and socio-economic exclusion. Azancot’s circa 1492 drama features no conversos as such, which is appropriate for the mix of Jewish tenacity and apostasy that just predated the Sephardic expulsion. However, in keeping with the Catholic Inquisition’s reliance on duplicitous body language and ritual in order to trap lapsing New Christians and proselytizing ‘Judaizers’, a tension between corporeal morality and perceived impropriety drives the story. As if banished from the biblical Eden, just after her wedding Deborah, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish merchant in the northern town of Tudela, dies ‘enigmatically’ by falling into the garden well at her in-laws’ estate (Azancot 1977, 86 ff.). The cistern is a symbolic conduit to the hellish environment of a house now plunged into chaos, in whose dark lower passages the newlywed husband and wife experience a coincidental, metempsychotic reunion. What appears to be a homosexual assault on the widowed groom, Baruch, by a young family gardener, Jacob, is actually a religiously permissible overture by Deborah, the deceased bride. Her soul has transmigrated and come to occupy the body of the gardener as a dibbuk, the spirit of a dead person, according to Jewish folklore. With the dead bride’s normal impulses misunderstood from the outside, the couple flee from Jewish and Catholic public condemnation, mapping the southern half of Spain, giving people further sightings of apparently blasphemous sodomy and unnatural, compound bodies. Such incidental specters include a werewolf whose halfconcealed human hands are ‘horrible and sacreligious, but snow white’, in a fair representation of the Sephardic converso caught between abomination and sanctity from either a Jewish or a Catholic Inquisitorial point of view (Azancot 1977, 144). The newlyweds do not fully consummate their marriage until they reach the last area of Iberia that tolerates manifest personal hybridity; the Nasirite kingdom of Granada ahead of the final Christian military advance. However, even here their climax is platonic since the Armageddon consumes Baruch’s body, leaving the two souls to copulate discursively by speaking the needs of their now completely immaterial genitalia. In a reversion to a preGenesis type of chaos and void, these sexual referents soon lose their conventional gender correspondence to the bride and groom’s lingering voices. In this limbo, as foreshadowed by the androgynous dibbuk-refugee and the werewolf, the human body no longer serves as a pre-eminent bill-board for Jewish or Christian virtue. It ceases to function as a system which is both the construction and reflection of the way the world is ordered, according to generations of religious teachings. Instead, the fluid, essentially multicultural image of the body that prevails in Baruch and Deborah’s story resonates with a conflicted, unnamed converso’s son who hears their tale in the seventeenth century. This Spanish expatriate is perceived as a model Sephardic scholar and Jewish spouse in Rome, yet a sense of being fully at home in the religious community he has voluntarily rejoined continually eludes him. Inside he persists as a Christian/

Between Eros and Dios 265 Jewish mestizo, interpreting an adolescence of wild sexual abandon as a history of violating Jewish law in the same vein as his father and forefathers’ absolute rejection of it in medieval through contemporary Spain. Late in his life a part tutorial, part confessional opportunity arises in which the teacher attempts to overcome his identity as a religious werewolf which he intuitively feels. He works to neutralize his erotic adventures in the shadow of Baruch and Deborah’s apparent excesses, and he succeeds in complicating first impressions of sacrilege on his part and on theirs. At the same time, however, he never fully converts his final pair of students to his proposition that in any era Jewish religious observance can take many forms without eroding the spirit of the inherited religious law. Indeed, the two students react to Baruch and Deborah’s fantastic journey and to the narrator’s potentially subversive sexual record with disorientation and panic. They remain instinctively grounded in the oppositional thinking of good and evil, and in this way their side-by-side silhouettes conclude La novia judía as a caricature of the apostate Jew/prodigal Jew Janus-face which still marks the converso’s son. He persists as a mestizo in a Jewish world that is still predominantly imagined with breaches of purity and otherness, similar in some ways to its Spanish Catholic counterpart. It is much easier for the fictional Sevilian author of La novia judía to relinquish his family’s longstanding New Christian countenance and to find not only acceptance, but also a Sephardic, ‘cosmic twin’ lover in modern Israel in 1985 (Azancot 1986, 18, 48). For Carlos, a Spanish writer and scholar, and Azancot’s converso descendant protagonist in Jerusalem: una historia de amor (Jerusalem: A Love Story), the crossover from Spain to Israel and from his childhood Catholicism to Judaism is smooth logistically and religiously. This is because he eventually makes his home within a predominantly secular Jewish circle, an Israeli academic community in which any implicit ‘who is a Jew?’ questions, from recent state immigration debates, are cultural and ideological, not genetic or biological. In terms of family heredity, a person is usually considered to be Jewish if this is the religion of his or her mother. Carlos’s audience is willing to overlook the fact that his mother is Catholic, and to regard him as Jewish through his converso father. However, it is when he introduces his La novia judía with such black-and-white emphasis on Spanish anti-Semitism versus Israeli redemption, that his complete acceptance is assured and he is acclaimed as even more Jewish than his circumcized male listeners. With such a simplistic overview however, the Spanish writer significantly under-emphasises the novel’s nuanced scrutiny of Jewish dualistic thinking. Persecution from without is not Carlos’s lynchpin in La novia judía. Rather, the text makes manifest Judaism’s capacity to discriminate against its own internal diversity, thereby to a degree mimicking historically adversarial religions such as Catholicism. In the novel’s medieval and early modern contexts, rabbinic intolerance of difference is borne out by the almost impossible quests of the 1490s and 1660s to merge ways of being and seeming Jewish. Despite a name-change to David, with its echo of ancient Hebrew sovereignty, in Jerusalem during the 1980s Carlos is still morally tied to a Catholic wife in Seville and a second non-Jewish lover in Prague; another pair of gatekeeper silhouettes that obscure the way to full romantic and religious integration into the People of Israel.

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Eroticism and Judaism The tension between Eros and Dios (God) that holds the characters in La novia judía is rooted in post-biblical rabbinic concern over the volatility of the human body. As seen, the body can model either adherence to the worldordering precepts of Jewish divine revelation, or their subversion through sexual missteps that risk encroaching on a protective, legislative ‘hedge around the Torah’.11 In prescribing such a ‘warning’ line, Jewish oral law, as codified in the Talmud, also enjoins its rabbinic advocates to ‘be deliberate in judging’ infractures. There should be ‘[a] desire to study a question from every point of view, and to take account of every possible, even though improbable, contingency’.12 Having learned not to count on such circumspection, in 1666 the converso’s son seeks to remove any appearance of sin in the provocative eroticism he defends by taking account of every possible contingency, no matter how ‘improbable’. Typically, each sexual act in the medieval epic is multi-dimensional, such as Baruch’s encounter with the gardener/Deborah, after the bride’s drowning. To establish the religious legality in this apparently unworldly union, the converso’s son first anticipates how each diverse, coinciding form of sexual expression might be narrowly construed and judged. Baruch and the gardener’s visible homoeroticism is also auto-erotic, since Baruch stimulates his dibbuk bride through Jacob, who intensifies the effect through additional self-touch. Sephardic mysticism exceeds the Talmud in treating masturbation as ‘taboo…non-procreative intercourse’ that is ‘beyond atonement’ and ‘not susceptible to repentance’.13 A male masturbator could also be a metaphor for a converso whose rejection of Judaism has intergenerational repercussions similar to ‘kill[ing] one’s own sons’ by wasting one’s seed.14 The gardener’s apparent auto-eroticism risks incurring such condemnation and it might not be mitigated simply by discovering the basic legality of the whole erotic triangle in the dibbuk’s heterosexual impulse, as sanctioned by Deborah and Baruch’s recent marriage. Writing on Jewish sexuality in historical context, David Biale explains that, in post-biblical Judaism even heterosexual relations within marriage constitute a problem to be discussed, investigated, and possibly controlled. If for the Bible, sex [is] always an issue of bodily practices and their cultic implications, for the [Talmudic] rabbis the problem [is] not the body as such but desire, the psychic state of passions that might overpower the body…as a potentially destructive evil force.15 In the novel, the converso descendant’s response is to return guilt to the body in biblical fashion. The post-biblical rabbis might exonerate the body in uncontrolled sexual situations, but an overpowering desire is very easily confused with a conscious will. In the medieval and early modern Sephardic worlds he portrays, the converso’s son finds greater clarity and more exculpatory advantage in showing how problematic physical practices cause exclusion from the religion, and how they can naturally absorb the blame. Playing to traditional rabbinic affinities for the analysis of minute details, the converso’s son develops a nuanced rhetorical formula for removing any perceived character stains from Baruch and Deborah’s ‘erotic theatrics’, in conjunction with his own.16 First, he peels back the auto-, homo-, and heterosexual layers in each compound erotic encounter and analyzes them in terms of somatic, rather than willed ‘impulse components’

Between Eros and Dios 267 (Azancot 1977, 127). The converso’s son always attunes his listeners to the different types of environmental stimuli that might collude without warning in a given situation and provoke an instigating or voyeuristic human gaze. Parts of the body in such a line of vision predictably start to move and seek reciprocal touch on their own, without direction from conscious or even psychic desires. The body is thus the incubator of passions in both the medieval tableaux and in the analogous experiences which the converso descendant subsequently imports from his own life. In so doing he erases the temporal distance between his actions and those of Baruch and Deborah, and creates ‘real life’ precedents for the morally innocent eroticism in their legend. The converso descendant’s sexuality not only appears more mundane in comparison with theirs, but his lack of serious religious offense gains the backing of ancestral Sephardic wisdom, as well. The medieval epic itself is especially venerable because it revives some of the pre-exilic Iberian Jewish past from where it seems to have been rescued. What comes of a play of chance in seventeenth-century Granada illustrates the benefits that accrue to the moral reputations of Baruch, Deborah, and the converso descendant, through his patterns of interweaving all of their sexual encounters. As he reconstructs from his childhood, the converso’s son is startled one morning by hearing a strange sound in his family’s derelict estate. Undressed, he seeks its source while murmuring the Jewish morning prayers. (He has just learned of his father’s religious heritage and is feeling organically re/called to Judaism.) The converso’s son stumbles accidentally into an unknown hall where, of its own accord, ‘an avalanche of light’ bursts through two open windows. For the first time he sees his full frontal reflection in a standing mirror. On both sides of the looking glass body parts initiate masturbation and homosexual communication, having been introduced by circumstance and visual surprise (Azancot 1977, 120–1). Instantly one has a graphic illustration of how Baruch and Jacob’s sexual organs engage one another as well, through chance and glance in Tudela. In both centuries each visible protagonist in these scenes, the converso’s son, Baruch, and the gardener, remains worthy of religious redemption overall because there is no proof that he has consciously committed any erotic sin. Establishing and reinforcing this personal innocence is critical to the converso descendant speaking in 1666, lest the reader infer that the purpose of his discourse is to seek ‘redemption through sin’ for himself, and in a retroactive sense, for Baruch and Deborah. The concept of ‘redemption through sin’ was central to the prophecies of Judaism’s most notorious messianic pretender, Shabbetai Zevi, between 1665 and 1666. Drawing on mystical calculations, Zevi captivated most of the contemporary Jewish world with predictions of a divinely rendered exodus from oppression in the diaspora to restitution in the biblical homeland. From Greek to Polish Jewish communities, ordinary people could hasten the event by indulging in all manner of amoral and anti-religious behavior. The promise of ‘redemption through sin’ insured against reprisal.17 The precept was completely discredited, however, when Shabbetai Zevi was imprisoned by Turkish authorities on a minor theft offense, and chose conversion to Islam over martyrdom at the stake. His failed messianic mission and divinity were disappointing enough, but his exit via apostasy was cataclysmic, especially to large numbers of New Christian followers. At its height, ‘redemption through sin’ resonated with the conversos’ religious duality. The Jewish historian Cecil Roth discusses the ‘concourse of [converso] adherents’

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who attempted to leave Iberia to join Shabbetai Zevi, as well as the printing presses in Amsterdam and London which, ‘when the fever reached its height…kept busy turning out devotional works in Hebrew and Spanish for use in the many services, private and public, by which it was hoped to hasten the great consummation’.18 Moshe Idel concurs that The conversos…made a great contribution to the acceptance of the messianic message of Sabbatianism. The presence of significant numbers of former conversos in many centers of Jewish population paved the way for a positive response to Sabbatian nihilistic and antinomian doctrines. These doctrines struck a deep chord within those religiously tormented people, sometimes unsatisfied or in many cases also more strongly uneasy with the painful process of acceptance of rabbinic Judaism.19 In the very year of Shabbetai Zevi’s collapse, Azancot’s converso descendant is much more strongly engaged in the painful process of acceptance by rabbinic Judaism. In the prevailing climate, trying to seek ‘redemption through sin’ would cement him to his apostate family background, and so he turns to demonstrating an absence of sin throughout his personal sexual record. Interweaving apparent erotic extremes from a legend which nonetheless has great nostalgic value and ancestral insight, the converso’s son develops a rhetorical means of showing that the religious sins of his fathers did not translate into his wide-ranging adolescent sexuality. Perhaps because of the Sabbatian debacle, however, the converso descendant’s students remain dubious as to whether their teacher can ascribe the eroticism of his past entirely to his body’s parasympathetic faculties.

Belonging to a broader Jewish people As representatives of their religious community, the students’ reticence to fully accept the converso’s son as a bona fide non-apostate and non-sinning Jew by the end of his tutorial discourse also reflects a wider rabbinic hesitation. Despite the mestizo’s imitation of Talmudic interpretive methods, his message that there is Jewish legality within visible Jewish diversity does not resonate with his audience the way Carlos’s division of the world into Jews versus oppressive others so obviously appeals to his Israeli listeners in 1985. In 1666 the type of Jewish world that would be most receptive to the converso descendant’s self-reckoning, an environment in which religious tradition and variation are not mutually exclusive, is portrayed in Baruch and Deborah’s epic. The medieval narrative is textured with biblical, kabbalistic, midrashic and liturgical influences. It is also continually traversed by quite different figures, such as a feminine image of God’s presence in the world, a renowned conservative rabbi from thirteenthcentury Barcelona, and both the dibbuk and an atypical golem from folkloric imagination. (Baruch encounters a destructive golem rather than a clay humanoid created to defend Jewish communities from outside attack.) Altogether the epic’s panoply of classical religious, mystical, and popular voices would transmit multiple ideological and physiological responses to the ‘who is a Jew?’ question from the late twentieth-century discourse on Israeli citizenship. Like the different forms of sexual expression in its erotic scenes, the novel’s Jewish multiculturalism is also layered.

Between Eros and Dios 269 As Judaism’s foundational text, the Bible provides the first allegorical backdrop for the epic. The garden in which Deborah dies at the outset parallels Eden in most respects, except for the large well at the center of converging paths. The cistern adds mystical symbolism since it is a coital simulacrum in the Zohar (Azancot 1977, 85, 86, 97) (Zohar, 151b-152a).20 By falling into the garden well Deborah is figuratively consumed by the type of sexual union that she will never experience physically. Instead, particularly when her soul enters Jacob’s body before the fall of Muslim Granada, it brings to life a midrashic interpretation of man’s creation in Genesis: ‘Rabbi Jeremiah ben Leazar [says]: When the Holy One…created Adam, he created him an hermaphrodite, for it is said [in Genesis 5:2], male and female he created them’ (Bereshit Rabba 8:1).21 David Biale observes that A number of midrashim pick up the Greek idea of a primordial androgyne, a first human who preceded the division into male and female. But while Hellenistic [Jewish] thinkers…saw this androgyne as devoid of gender and thus devoid of sexuality, certain rabbis regarded the primordial Adam as both embodied and engendered. The rabbinic androgyne had both sexes at once rather than none at all.22 With his lover, Leila, in Tel Aviv, Carlos discusses this second, rabbinic duality, ‘the original androgyne’, as divided into two halves, male and female, [which] desperately seek each other in order to recuperate [a] unity and plenitude that surpass [any] such relation prior to their separation. In reunion both halves come together again, conscious of what [still] differentiates them [even] when joined. In this way each half can take more pleasure in itself and in its foreign counterpart. (1986, 117) Baruch and his dibbuk bride are not the only separated entities that seek a recuperative completeness. Just after he is widowed, a phantom of Solomon Ibn Adret passes in front of Baruch. Ibn Adret (c. 1233–1310) not only led the ‘influential Jewish community’ of Barcelona, but he also defended Judaism legally against Catholic theological attack. Like Baruch he was born into the Sephardic upper class. A proponent of ‘aristocratic forms of [Jewish] government’, Ibn Adret represents religious noblesse oblige as he crosses Baruch’s field of vision.23 Both he and the youth seek reunion with their respective Jewish brides, or novias. For the Rabbi, it is the hour during Sabbath eve when God’s feminized earthly shekhina (presence), also imagined as the Divine bride, is liturgically invoked and welcomed.24 Far removed from these pre-eminent religious and legal figures, the dibbuk and the golem in Baruch and Deborah’s epic have roots in Ashkenazic folklore, but issue primarily from Isaac Bashevis Singer’s first novel in Yiddish, Satan in Goray (1935). In Tel Aviv Carlos attributes his ‘seminal idea’ for La novia judía to Singer, who recorded his ‘epic poem’ before rural shtetl life in Poland became a personal, and then a wider collective memory (Azancot 1986, 45).25 In Satan in Goray, Singer’s childhood fears during the ‘apocalyptic’ First World War are reflected in Shabbetai Zevi’s 1665–6 maelstrom. The messianic pretender’s licentious trajectory is seen through the prism of ruined believers

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in the fictional, composite shtetl of Goray where rabbis and impostors vie for moral and administrative control in the shtetl’s frenzied arena of ‘redemption through sin’.26 It is after this slogan has spent itself that Leopold Azancot’s most substantive Sephardic converso character struggles to gain full acceptance by rabbinic Judaism. In the post-Shabbetian world Eros is equated only with hedonism, the polar opposite of Jewish religious observance and constancy. Whether or not his once-uncontrolled sexuality forever conveys the apostate sins of his fathers, the con verso’s son never feels fully ratified by the Jewish Dios. In his historical era rabbinic Judaism is not open to the possibility that someone who still seems half Catholic and half erotic can become a devout Jew who will not corrupt the religion for future generations. In the meantime, Leopoldo Azancot’s literary tribute to Isaac Bashevis Singer in La novia judía underscores his desire to earn membership in the community of internationally recognized Jewish authors.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19

Diaz-Más, Paloma, Sephardim: The Jews from Spain, trans. George K.Zucker, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, pp. 2–3. Beinart, Haim, The Converses and their Fate’, in Elie Kedourie (ed.), Spain and the Jews: The Sephardi Experience, 1492 and After, London: Thames and Hudson, 1992, p. 92. Ibid. Ibid. Lynch, John, ‘Spain after the Expulsion,’ in Elie Kedourie (ed.), Spain and the Jews: The Sephardi Experience, 1492 and After, London: Thames and Hudson, 1992, p. 144. Lynch p. 144; Beinart p. 95. Jesuit historian Juan de Mariana, cited in Lynch, p. 145. de Quirós, Bernaldo Torroba, Los judíos españoles, Madrid: Sucursal de Rivanadeyra, 1967, p. 308. Talmud Tractate Sanhedrin 44:a. ‘A Jew even though he has sinned remains a Jew’. Haim Beinart writes that this principle ‘guided not only the generations which in a moment of weakness had converted, but subsequent generations as well’. ‘The Converses and their Fate’, p. 92. Bakhtin, M.M. ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in The Diaologic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990, p. 263. Pirkei Avot 1:1, quoted in Herford, Travers R., The Ethics of the Talmud: Sayings of the Fathers, New York: Schocken Books, 1962, p. 19. Herford, pp. 20–1. Biale, David, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, p. 110. Biale, pp. 56, 110, 115. Biale, p. 35. Foster, David William, ‘Pornography and the Feminine Erotic: Griselda Gambaro’s Lo impenetrable’, in Hispanic Marginal Literatures: The Erotic. Monographic Review/Revista monográfica, vol. 7 (1991), p. 285. Scholem, Gershom, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, New York: Schocken Books, 1995, pp. 78 ff. Roth, Cecil, A History of the Marranos, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1932, pp. 250–1. Idel, Moshe, Messianic Mystics, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998, p. 184.

Between Eros and Dios 271 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Tishby, Isaiah (ed.), The Wisdom of the Zohar: An Anthology of Texts, trans. David Goldstein, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, vol. 1, p. 393. Freedman, H. (trans.), Midrash Rabba, London: Soncino Press, 1983, vol. 1, p. 54. Biale, p. 41. Baer, Yitzhak, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, trans. Louis Schoffman, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, vol. 1, 1992, pp. 281, 283. Nulman, Macy (ed.), The Encylopedia of Jewish Prayer, North vale NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996, pp. 223–4. Aaron Zeitlin, cited in Wisse, Ruth R., ‘Introduction’, in Isaac Bashevis Singer, Satan in Goray, New York: Noonday Press, 1996, p. xxxviii. Wisse, xxviii.

Bibliography Baer, Yitzhak, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, trans. Louis Schoffman, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, vol. 1, 1992. Beinart, Haim, ‘The Converses and their Fate’, in Elie Kedourie (ed.), Spain and the Jews: The Sephardi Experience, 1492 and After, London: Thames and Hudson, 1992. Biale, David, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Diaz-Más, Paloma, Sephardim: The Jews from Spain, trans. George K.Zucker, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Foster, David William, ‘Pornography and the Feminine Erotic: Griselda Gambaro’s Lo impenetrable’, in Hispanic Marginal Literatures: The Erotic. Monographic Review/Revista monográfica, vol. 7 (1991). Freedman, H. (trans.), Midrash Rabba, London: Soncino Press, 1983. Kedourie, Elie (ed.), Spain and the Jews: The Sephardi Experience, 1492 and After, London: Thames and Hudson, 1992. Herford, Travers R., The Ethics of the Talmud: Sayings of the Fathers, New York: Schocken Books, 1962. Holquist, Michael (ed.), The Diaologic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Idel, Moshe, Messianic Mystics, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Lynch, John, ‘Spain after the Expulsion’, in Elie Kedourie (ed.), Spain and the Jews: The Sephardi Experience, 1492 and After, London: Thames and Hudson, 1992. Nulman, Macy (ed.), The Encylopedia of Jewish Prayer, Northvale NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996. de Quirós, Bernaldo Torroba, Los judíos españoles, Madrid: Sucursal de Rivanadeyra, 1967. Roth, Cecil, A History of the Marranos, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1932. Scholem, Gershom, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, New York: Schocken Books, 1995. Tishby, Isaiah (ed.), The Wisdom of the Zohar: An Anthology of Texts, trans. David Goldstein, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, vol. 1. Wisse, Ruth R., ‘Introduction’, in Isaac Bashevis Singer, Satan in Goray, New York: Noonday Press, 1996.

INDEX

Abba 76 Abdalla, Abdillatif (Swahili poet) 285 Abdalla bin Nasir, Seyyid (Swahili poet) 284–5 Abraham: in Akedah prayers 203; in Julâ’i’s novel 171, 173; in Shvili’s poetry 76 Abta, Asyhari (Indonesian poet) 101, 102 Abu Nawas (Indonesian poet) 102 Abulafia, Abraham 81 Academy of Science, Uzbekistan 144, 145n Acre Festival of Fringe Theatre (1994) 160 Adam 81, 307 Adonis (Syrian poet) 246, 248 Aesop’s fables 112 African heritage 297 African spirituality: syncretism with Islam in ‘Story of the Orphan’ 216–22 African traditional religions: use of Swahili 286, 297 African/Afro-Islamic literatures 2, 2–3, 209; Swahili 2, 285, 287, 290, 297; see also East Africa; West Africa Agra Fort: Mêrathî’s poem 22–3 Ahmad Khan, sir Sayyid 19, 20, 322 Ahmadiyya Muslim Mission 292 Ajami script 211 Akedah 180, 203 Akiva, Rabbi 181 Algeria 241–2 ‘Alî (Prophet’s son-in-law) 98, 176n Alidou, Ousseina 2, 3, 6 Aligarh movement 19, 23 144 ‘Âlimjân, Allah: in Kısakürek’s poetry 63, 64; and Qur’an 295 see also God; and Solomon 221 allegory:

in Goldfaden’s work 266, 271; 244–5 Awlād Allen, Roger 239 American fiction: contemporary women’s writing on Holocaust 189, 189–90, 199–201 Amidu, Assibi 286 Amsterdam 306 Anatolian Turks 2 Andalus 4, 22; see also Muslim Spain androgyne: rabbinic 307 angels: in Bâ-Kathîr’s Hârût wa Mârût 243; in stories 92, 96, 137, 139, 140, 141–2; in Kısakürek’s poetry 66; in Shvili’s poetry 77 Angry Harvest (film) 192 Anis (Urdu poet) 18, 20, 27 anti-religious meaning: in stories 138, 138–9, 142–3; jokes in Even-Or’s Fleischer 154–5 anti-Semitism: in Herzl’s The New Ghetto 151; Nazi propaganda 187 Appelfeld, Aharon 52n Âqâ’i, Farkhonde 178n Arabic language: in East African Islam 295, 296, 297; effect on Hausa culture 211; Jewish literature in 13; language of Islamic learning in Persianate world 16; modernisation of 5, 6; in Muhammadiyah schools 93–4; West African rededication to study of 295 Arabic literature: effect of religious revival on 241; importance of ‘Umar ibn Sa’îd 245–6; use of Qur’an 14, 106, 239–40, 241–9 Arabic poetry 3, 245–8

Index Arabic script 5–6, 90: Swahili poetry 283, 284, 287; and Swahili 295 Arabs: ethnic group 2 Aristotle 279 Armenians in Iran 170–1 Armstrong, Neil 104 Arps, Bernard 103, 105, 106 Arvasi, Abdulhakim 62 Ashkenazi Jews: folklore 308; Haskalah period 8, 12; in Israel 150, 156; stereotype in popular Israeli theatre 161; Trieste 228, 229 Asmara, Badi 102 Atatürk, Kemal: reforms 4–5, 5–6 atheism 51, 136, 167 Auschwitz 195 Âyina (periodical) 135 Ayllon, family 79 Az Zahrah (singing ensemble) 104 Azancot, Leopoldo 12, 300; Jerusalem: una historia de amor 300, 301, 303, 307, 308; La novia judía 300–1, 301–2, 303–6, 306–7, 308 al-Azhar 5, 218, 244, 248 (Arabic dramatist) Bâ-Kathîr, ‘Alî 243 ba’alei teshuvah 9, 36–7, 155, 156 Baba Yaga 275 Badawi, M.M. 239 Baghdad 56 Bakr, Salwa (Egyptian short-story writer) 245 Baldauf, I. 148n Balkans 228 Bangladesh 3 Bantu languages 287, 290 Barcelona 308 al-Barzanjî, Ja’far: Mawlid of 98 Basuki, Anhari 100, 101 Baumel, Judith Tydor 204–5n, 205n Bavli, Hillel 179, 181, 186, 204n Bayyūmī, 239–40

273

Beckwith, Stacy 12 Behbûdi, (Uzbek dramatist) 135, 143 Behr, Isachar Falkensohn 131n Beinart, Haim 299 Bengali literature 2, 3 Bengalis: ethnic group 2 Benjamin of Tudela 78 Bergen-Belsen 11, 34 Bergson, Henri 57, 60 Berkowitz, Joel 9 Berlin 124, 234–5, 260 Berlovitz, Yaffa 225, 226–7, 231 Bernstein, Ori 52n Bevan, David 176n Biale, David 304, 307 Bible: in Azancot’s La novia judía 307; in East Africa 293, 297; Mendelssohn’s translation 113, 120; models in Morpurgo’s poetry 229–34, 234; and Swahili religious concepts 286; in Yaoz-Kest’s poems 40, 48 Biblical stories: Goldfaden’s use of 264, 265, 279; Hurwitz’s plays 278; Lateiner’s operas and operettas 278 Bimbo (pop group) 104 birds: motif in Hausa ‘Story of the Orphan’ 221 Bisri, Mustofa (Indonesian poet) 101, 102, 106 blasphemy 244, 301–2 Blatt, Avraham 52n the body: in Azancot’s La novia judía 302, 303, 304–5; in Parsipur’s Tuba va ma’na-ye shab 169 Bohemia 229 Bori (Hausa spirits) 220 Bosnians 4 Bourdieu, Pierre 156 Breslau: Wolfssohn 113, 125, 125–6 Britain: as colonial power in India 16, 17, 18–19, 20, 23; as colonial power in Muslim regions 3, 4; colonisation in East Africa 286; migrations of Jews to 9 British colonies 9

274

Index

British and Foreign Bible Archives, London 293 Brod, Max 35–6 Bruinessen, Martin van 98, 106 Budapest 34 Bukhara 135, 145n Burial-of-the-Dead controversy 124–6 Büyük Doğu (magazine) 68 Cain and Abel 170, 173 Caro, Yosef 160 Castiglioni, Vittorio 225, 225–6 Catholicism: Iberia 299; Inquisition 299, 300, 301; reconquest of Granada 301 Celan, Paul 194 censorship: of Israeli theatre 150, 151; 240, 244; Awlād in Turkestan 135; of Yiddish theatre in Russia 271–2 Center for Islamic Thought and Art, Iran 164 Central Asia: colonisation 3; revolutionary change in 137–8 Central Europe: importance of Trieste 228, 229 Chagall, Marc 83 Charifai, Zaharirah 155 Chechens 4 childhood: in Shvili’s poetry 73, 77–8, 85 Chodwiecki, Wilhelm 125 Christian literature: in Swahili 2, 3, 4, 286, 291–2, 293–4 Christianity: colonising powers in Muslim world 4; in contemporary Persian literature 165, 170, 171, 174; interest in Kabbalah 118; missionaries in East Africa 287–8, 289, 290, 293; missionaries in Iran 170, 171, 174; missionaries and Swahili literatures in East Africa 283, 289, 293–4, 296–7; Wolfssohn’s view 126–7 Chulpân 144 Church Missionary Society 288 Cinderella story see Wicked Stepmother tale Cohen, Aryeh 185

Cohen, Tova 235 Colbi, Paolo S. 234 collage: Shvili’s poetry 71, 81, 85 colonialism: effect on Islam 16, 18–19, 25 colonisation: influence on Muslim world 3–4 comedy: Goldfaden’s plays 259, 260, 279; Wolfssohn’s writings 112, 113, 122–3, 260; Yiddish Haskalah plays 261 computer age: described in singir 97–8 conversion: ‘inner conversion’ of Kısakürek 64, 68 conversion to Christianity: following pogroms in Spain 299, 301; of East Africans 287–8 conversion to Islam: in stories 141, 142, 147n; Hausa 217; Mike Tyson 103–4; Shabbatai Zevi 82, 305–6 conversos 299; in Azancot’s novels 12, 300, 301, 302, 308 Cragg, Kenneth 244–5 cross-dressing: in Hausa ‘Story of the Orphan’ 220 cultural change: British rule of Indian sub-continent 16, 18–19; dissolution of East European Jewish communities 9; Urdu poetry in India 28; women’s in Niger 210 cultural production: effect of Islamic religious revival 241 Dale, Canon Godfrey 292 Dammâj, Zayd (Yemeni novelist) 242–3 Dâneshvar, Simin 175n Dante Alighieri: Divine Comedy 284 Darnawi, Soesatyo 91 Darülfünun (later Istanbul University) 57 Day of Judgement 92 Delhi 17 Deuteronomy 181 Devil 105, 139–40;

Index see also Iblis; Satan dhikr (mystical invocation of God) 100, 171 Diaspora Jewish communities 6, 9, 152; Sephardi 12 Diaspora Judaism: Yaoz-Kest’s reconnection with 34 Diaz-Más, Paloma 299 dibbuk: in Azancot’s La novia judía 300, 301, 301–2, 304, 307, 308 Divan literature 135, 140 domestic space: performance of tatsuniyoyi in 211 drama: Arabic 243–4, 248; European 6, 243, 272, 279; Jewish 9, 10, 149–55, 258, 270; Uzbek 139–40; see also plays, theatre Dubin, Louis 228–9 Dunqul, Amal (Egyptian poet) 246–8, 249 East Africa: Christian literature in Swahili 2, 283, 289, 293–4, 296–7; European colonisation 3, 283, 286, 287–8; Islam 294–5; Swahili Islamic literature 283–6, 287; trans-religious expansion of Swahili 287–90 Eastern European Jews 264; in 1880s 271, 275, 277; dissolution of communities 9; Wolfssohn’s view of rabbis 120 education 1: with colonisation of East Africa 287–8; of modern Swahili poets 291; and Orthodoxy in Israel 10; reforms in Java 93; reforms in Muslim countries 5; and singirs in Java 90, 91–2, 96; in Turkestan 135; in Turkey 57 Egypt: 240, 244; banning of Awlād British occupation 3; National Troupe 244; see also al-Azhar; Masar

275

Eileh Ezkera 181 Elijah 79 Emre, Yunus 56 English language: in colonial India 19; Muslim literature in 3 English poetry: influence on Urdu poets 23, 30 epics: Goldfaden’s plays 271; Hausa 211; Swahili 284–5, 285, 293–4 eroticism: dealt with in Szeman’s novel 199–201; in Holocaust representations of sexual violation 180, 186–7, 190, 202; and Indonesian qasida moderen 104; and Judaism in Azancot’s La novia judía 303–6, 308; in Shvili’s poetry 71, 81 Esther, Queen 185–6, 195; in Goldfaden’s King Akhashveyresh 272, 273, 275 Etinger, Shloyme 260 Europe: colonisation of East Africa 283, 287–8, 290; colonisation of Muslim regions 3–4; commemoration of war and the Holocaust 182–3; Jewish literature 7; see also Eastern European Jews European literatures 6; Swahili translation of classics 293 Even-Or, Yigal: plays 150, 153–5 exegetical work: Wolfssohn 113 Existentialists 60 faith: modern man’s loss of 60; Zahranin imani 141; loss of and rationality in Jewish literary tradition 8; in Yaoz-Kest’s poetry 37, 38–9 Faiz, Faiz Ahmed (Urdu poet) 30–1 ‘false’ messiah see Zevi, Shabbetai family: context of Rahel Morpurgo 225; and Judaism after emancipation 228; in Persian novels 164, 168; yikhes as target of Haskalah plays 261 Farsy, Sheikh Abdallah Saleh 292–3, 296

276

Index

Fasih, Esmâ’il (Iranian novelist): Zemestân-e 62 164, 165–8, 168, 171, 173 Father/father: in Shvili’s poetry 74–5, 76–7, 78, 85 (Prophet’s daughter) 96–7, 98, 176n Feldman, Chaya 204n, 205n Fenelon, François de Salignac de la Mothe 129n Feuerbach, Ludwig 38 fiction: American women’s writing on Holocaust 100–201, 189, 199–201; by women Holocaust survivors 189; see also novels, short stories films: portrayals of female victims of Nazis 187 Fink, Ida: Aryan Papers’ 192, 198 First World War 3, 60, 308 Fiske, John 149 Abdurra’ûf (Uzbek short-story writer and dramatist) 13, 135–45 folklore: Ashkenazic 308 folktales: Hausa 3, 211–12; Jewish 79; Uzbek 142 France: as colonial power in Muslim regions 3, 4; influence in young Turkish Republic 57 Frank, Jacob 80–1, 85 freedom of conscience principle 1 French language 2–3; and Turkish literature 57 French Revolution 235 French theatre 157 Freud, Sigmund 57 Friedländer, David 122, 128–9n, 133n Friedman, Menachem 204n Friedman, Philip 204n Frye, Northrop 266, 270 Fürth (Bavaria) 112 Gabriel see Jibrîl Galicia 229 Gema Ramadhan (TV programme) 106 gender: and Hausa oral folktales 211–12; and Islamic knowledge 209–210;

and Islamic medicinal healing 221–2; and martyrdom in American-Jewish writing on Holocaust 13, 182, 202; relations in post-revolutionary Iran 171, 172, 173; and strategies for surviving Nazism 184 Genesis 180, 190, 203, 263, 307 genocide (of Jews) 181, 182, 193, 195 German Jews: and Haskalah 112; importance of Mendelssohn 114; Wolfssohn’s view of rabbis 120 German writers: in late eighteenth century 113 Germany 286; see also Berlin; Hamburg Ghafûr Ghulâm (publishing house) 144 Ghalib (Urdu poet) 17, 20, 30 Ghana 283 ghazal 3, 4, 6, 17, 19, 22, 29, 30 gilui arayot (forbidden sexual relations) 181, 184 Il Giudaismo Illustrato (journal) 231 glasnost’ 144 Gnostics: Islamic mysticism 65 God: controversy in Turkey over Arabic word for 5; in stories 137, 139–40, 142; in Kısakürek’s poetry 64, 67; in Shvili’s poetry 75–6, 77, 85; in Urdu poetry 17, 23–24; in Yaoz-Kest’s poems 39–46; Yaoz-Kest’s views 38–9, 50–1 Gold, Nili 11 Goldfaden, Avrom 9, 258; achievement in Yiddish theatre 277–80; Bar Kokhba 271, 272, 279; Di bobe mitn eynikl (The Grandmother and Her Granddaughter) 258, 261–4, 276, 279, 279–80; Kenig Akhashveyresh (King Ahasuerus) 258, 272–7, 279; poetry 258, 259–60, 271; Shulamis, oder has yerushalayim (Shulamis, or, the Daughter of Jerusalem) 258, 264–71, 276, 279, 280 golem: in Azancot’s La novia judía 307, 308

Index Golshiri, Hushang 175n; prize 171 Gotlober, Avrom Ber 260, 261 Granada: in Azancot’s La novia judía 301, 307 Gumi, Abakar 219 Habsburg Empire: Trieste 228–9 Hadiths 20, 218, 295 Haifa Municipal Theatre 155, 157 Hajj 218 Tawfîq (Eygptian dramatist) 249; Ahl al-Kahf 243–4, 248 Hali, Altaf Husayn (Urdu poet) 27, 28, 30, 31; Musaddas 19–23, 24, 29 al-Hallaj, Mansur 56 Halle-Wolfssohn, Aaron see Wolfssohn, Aaron Halle 125–6, 128n Hamaagal, Chonni: Desecration 160–1 Hamburg 228 Hame’assef (journal) 112, 113, 120, Hamidi, Jazim 101, 102 haredim (messianic Jewish sects) 9, 10 Harrow, Kenneth 2 Hârût wa Mârût (Bâ-Kathîr) 243; in Zahranin imani 141 Hasfari, Shmuel: plays 151–3, 158–9 Haskalah (Jewish enlightenment) 12, 13; denounced in ultra-Orthodox sermons 156; Goldfaden’s sympathy with 259, 260, 261; importance of Morpurgo 226, 227; influence on Sobol 153; Jewish community of Trieste 229; literature 7–9; Wolfssohn’s contribution 112, 113, 120, 127 Hassidim/Hassidic movement 8, 10 Hatzor, Ilan 158 Hausa language 2 Hausa oral literature 3, 13, 20, 209, 210, 211–12, 220 Hausas: ethnic group 2, 211 (Syrian novelist) 248 healing: Islamic medicinal practices 221–2; miraculous 172

277

Hebrew language: Israeli literature 6, 11; Shvili’s mystical use of 81; Wolfssohn’s educational studies 112–13, 115, 120; Yaoz-Kest’s study of 34, 35–6; and Zionism 156 Hebrew literature: contribution of Trieste 234; Yaoz-Kest’s studies 35–6 Hebrew theatre see Israeli drama/theatre Heller, Fanya: A Strange and Unexpected Love 191, 192–5, 196, 198–9 Herz, Marcus 125 Herzl, Theodor 150–1 Hibbat Zion movement 231 hillul hashem (desecration of the Divine name) 180, 201 Hinduism: in Bengali literature 2 Hindus 19 Hiyya, Rabbi 81–2 Hodgkin, Thomas 283, 284 Holland, Agnieska 192 Holocaust: and eroticisation in popular representations 186–7, 202; Jewish-American collective memory 12–13, 179, 180, 182–3, 201–2; recent women’s writing about 188–201; reflected in Shvili’s poetry 80; Yaoz-Kest’s concern with 11; see also ‘The Martyrdom of the NinetyThree Maidens’; Shoah Holocaust Memorial (Yizkor) Service 202 Holocaust museums 188 Holocaust Remembrance Day 12, 179 Holocaust survivors 34, 39; in Even-Or’s Fleischer 154; texts and testimonies by women 187–8, 188–9, 190–1, 192–9, 202 Horowitz, Sara 13 Huberband, Rabbi Shimon 207n Hungary 229; Yaoz-Kest 34, 35, 36 Hurwitz, Moyshe 277, 278 Husayn, Imam 18, 166, 173, 174 Iblis 285;

278

Index

see also Devil; Satan Ibn Adret, Solomon 308 Ibn al-’Arabi 65 Ibn al-Muqaffa’ 249n Ibrahim see Abraham Ibsen, Henrik 243 Idel, Moshe 306 idiolect: Shvili’s poetry 72 Ilahabadi, Akbar (Urdu poet) 23 imagination: in Yaoz-Kest’s poems 42–3, 50–1 ‘Imâra, Fakhrî 246–8 India: achievement of independence 28; Great Revolt (1857) 17; Persian poetry in Mughal court 17; Urdu speakers from north 2 Indian sub-continent 3; Britain as colonial power 16, 18–19, 20, 23, 24 Indonesia 2, 3, 93; see also Java Indonesian languages 2, 96; translations of singirs 101 Iqbal, Muhammad 23–5, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31 Iran 3–4, 219; contemporary prose literature 163–4, 172–3; Islamic Republic 163, 166; Revolution (1979) 163, 174n Iran-Iraq war 163, 164, 171, 174n Iraq 3; see also Iran-Iraq war Irsyad, Shaykh Haji Muhammad 91 Isaac: in Akedah 180, 203; in Goldfaden’s work 272 Isaacson, Judith Magyar: Seed of Sarah 195–7 Al-Islah (newspaper) 290 Islam: challenges of modern times 1; and contemporary Persian literature 163, 164, 170; effect of colonialism 16, 18–19; elements in Muslim literatures 1–2; stories 141, 142; in in Hali’s Musaddas 19–23, 28;

and Hausa women’s voices 209–10; impact on Hausa culture 209, 210, 211–12, 218–19; issues of identity in Indonesia 90; Kısakürek’s concern with 57, 61; mystical experience and poetry 55, 65; in Perso-Urdu poetry 16–18; in poetry of Iqbal and contemporaries 23–5, 28; recent revival in East Africa 295, 296; recession from later Urdu poetry 27–31; role of liturgy 14; syncretism with African spirituality in ‘Story of the Orphan’ 210, 216–22; traditional stories versified in singirs 96–7; Zevi’s conversion to 305 Islamic literatures 2; in Arabic 241; in Indonesia 105–6; in Swahili 285–6, 297 Ismail, Taufiq 105 Israel 6, 7; in Azancot’s Jerusalem: una historia de amor 301, 303; secular/religious schism 10–11, 149–50; Yaoz-Kest’s life in 34, 35, 36 Israeli literature 6, 10, 11; Shvili’s location in 71 Istanbul University 57 Italian Jewish poetry: Morpurgo in context of 234–5 Italian Jews: and achievement of emancipation 8, 227–8; impact of Moses Montefiore 234; importance of Trieste 228–9 Italian nationalism: and Judaism 231, 235 Italy: capture of Tripolitania 24; integration of Italian Jews into 227–8 Izala movement 219 Jabrâil see Jibril (Gabriel) 142, 240 Jacob 38, 263 Jacobson, David 11 Jadid literature 135, 143, 144–5 Ja’fari, Zamir (Urdu poet) 29, 30 Jakarta 104 Jalandhari, Hafeez (Urdu poet) 26–7 Java/Javanese 2;

Index moral education through singirs 90, 96; performance of singirs 90, 101; split between reformists and traditionalists 93–4 Javanese literature: traditional Islamic stories 96 Jeremiah, Book of: in Morpurgo’s poetry 229–30 Jerusalem 221; in Goldfaden’s Shulamis 270–1; in Morpurgo’s poem in honor of Montefiore 226; in Shvili’s poetry 73, 80 Jesus 28, 80, 290 Jewish-Americans: collective memory of Holocaust 12–13, 179, 180, 182–3, 201–2, 204 Jewish-Arab dispute 150 Jewish culture: conflict between tradition and modernity 7, 9; effect of integration of Jews into Italy 227–8; and significance of Morpurgo 225, 226, 234–5; Trieste under Habsburg Empire 228–9; uses of Scripture and liturgy 14 Jewish enlightenment see Haskalah Jewish heritage: in Morpurgo’s poetry 227, 234, 235 Jewish identity see Jewishness Jewish literatures 1; religion and religiosity 6, 13–14 Jewish people: Goldfaden’s ideas and concerns 258, 259, 275; Wolfssohn on different classes of society 114 Jewish sacred texts: Yaoz-Kest’s concern with 35, 35–6 Jewish texts and traditions: in Goldfaden’s work 258, 279, 280 Jewishness: addressed in Jewish literature 10; by conviction rather than by birth 114; Goldfaden’s work 258, 259–60, 279; ideas of 7, 9, 11; Morpurgo’s Jewish identity 233; in Sobol’s work 153 Jibrīl 142, 240

279

Job, Book of 171 Jomier, Jacques 250n Joseph 263 Joseph della Reyna, Rabbi 80, 82, 85 Judah Ha-nasi, R. 117 Judaism: after Jewish emancipation in Western Europe 228; challenges of modern times 1; criticised in Hamaagal’s Desecration 160; and eroticism in Azancot’s novels 303–6; idea of martyrdom 203; rational strand in Middle Ages 117, 121; Shemuel Luzzatto’s thought 231, 231–2; in Sobol’s work 153; Wolfssohn’s stance 113–14, 115–16, 118–19, 126–7; Yaoz-Kest’s return to 34, 37, 41 Julâ’i, Rezâ (Iranian novelist): Shab-e zolmâni-ye yaldâ 170–1, 173, 174 Kabbalah 11, 35; references in Shvili’s poetry 72, 72–3, 74–5, 77, 81, 82; Wolfssohn’s interest in 118 Kafka, Franz 8 Kamal, Mustofa f(Indonesian poet): qasida moderen 103–4 Kaptein, Nico 106 Karakoç, Sezai (Turkish poet) 68 Karbala 18, 20; see also Kerbala Karimov, E. 144 Karmel, Ilona: An Estate of Memory 189 Kastoria (Macedonia) 79 Kaufman, Gordon 50 Kerbela 166, 168, 173–4, 174n, 177n; see also Karbala Kenya: expansion of written Swahili 289, 292, 293; scholars composing Swahili poetry 284, 286 Kerbala see Karbala/Kerbela Kesho (newspaper) 294 Khan, Zafar Ali (Urdu poet) 25–6, 33n Khilafat movement 25 Khudâsizlar (periodical) 136, 142, 143 kiais (Indonesia) (leaders of religious schools, Indonesia) 90, 96, 97, 100, 101

280

Index

kiddush hashem (sanctification of the Divine name) 180, 203 Kimchi, David 117 Kimvita (dialect of Swahili) 292 Kısakürek, Necip Fazıl 3, 13, 56–68 Klausner, Joseph 226, 227, 232 Kleinmichel, Sigrid 3 Kleist, Heinrich von 132n Knappert, Jan 285–6, 286 knowledge and learning: in Islamic culture 21, 90, 218; Islamic in East Africa 295; traditional and modern in Java 93–4; Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s views 19; Wolfssohn’s views 119; and women in Hausaland 209, 221 Kokhavey Yizhak (journal) 225, 226 Komba, Serapius (Swahili novelist) 294 Kracow Ghetto 205n Krapf, Dr Johann Ludwig 288 Kulturkampf 10, 149

effect of Islam on Hausa culture 211; in Indonesia 93; in Swahili 289 liturgy 14, 180, 202; American-Jewish use of ‘The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ 179–80, 180–2, 184, 186, 202–4 London 272, 306 love: in Kısakürek’s poetry 67; Urdu love lyric 17, 30; in Yaoz-Kest’s poems 40–1 Löwe, Joel 126, 127n Lucian 121 Luganda 288–9 Lukács, Georg 149 Luzzatto, Efraim 225, 234 Luzzatto, Moshe Hayyim 225, 232–3 Luzzatto, Shemuel David (Shaddal) 8, 9, 225, 225–6, 228, 231, 231–2, 235 Luzzatto, Yizhak 234

Lahore 23, 26 language: of Shvili’s poetry 72, 81; Yao-Kest’s concern with 43–6, 50 language reforms: in Muslim countries 5; in Swahili 289–90 Last Judgement 97, 137, 138; see also Day of Judgement Lateiner, Joseph 277, 278 Lausanne see Treaty of Lausanne League of Nations 3 Lebanon 3, 31 legends: early Christian 243; Islamic 141, 146–7n, 285; Jewish 72, 79, 263, 265, 275–6, 279, 300–1; Sabbatean-Palestinian 84 Leipzig, University of 285 Lemberg 272 Leonard, Philip 67 Levantine Jews: immigrants to Trieste 228 Levi, Giuseppe 227–8 Levi, Primo 191, 202 Likrat generation (Israel) 11 literacy:

al-Ma’arrî 249–50n Macedonia 79 Mackay, Bishop Alexander 289 Madanî, ‘Izz al-dîn 250n Madrid 300 Madura 90 Madurese language: singirs 95 Maeterlinck, Maurice 243 Maggid of Mezrich 53n magical realism: African oral literatures 220; contemporary Persian literature 174 Najîb 239–40, 242, 244–5, 248, 249 Mahmud, Ahmad 176n Maimonides, Moses 116, 117, 120, 205n Majaz (Urdu poet) 28 Makhmalbâf, Mohsen (Iranian novelist) 164; Bâgh-e bolur 164, 164–8, 173, 173–4; Houz-e Soltân 168, 173, 174 Maksum, K.H.Ali (Indonesian poet) 102 Malams (Hausa holy men) 220, 221 Malay language 2, 5 Malay literature: traditional Islamic stories 96 Malays: ethnic group 2 maleness:

Index Hausa oral culture 211–12 Mantua 234 Mar’ot (periodical) 71 marthiya (in Urdu poetry) 18, 19 martyrdom: Holocaust victims 181, 182; in Iran-Iraq war 163, 167, 168; Jewish 12, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184–6, 203 ‘The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ 12–13, 179–80, 180–2, 183–4, 186, 195, 201–4 martyrs: in India 25; Iranian; 165, 166, 167, 168; Jewish 2, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184–6, 203; of Karbala 20; Palestinian 31; in Tripolitania 24 Ma’rufi, ‘Abbâs: Semfoni-ye mordegân 170, 173, 174 Marx, Karl 146n Marxism 28, 60 Masar: in ‘Story of the Orphan’ 218–19, 222 maskilic literature 113, 261; Goldfaden’s plays 260–1, 263, 279–80 maskilim (Jewish enlighteners) 112, 113–14, 116, 118, 119, 122, 125–6, 260 ‘Afîfî (Egyptian poet) 245 material world: Kısakürek’s ideas and poetry 60–1 mathnawi 17, 17–8, 67 Mayse bukh (1602) 265, 266 Mazrui, Alamin M. 2, 3, 4 Mazrui, Ali A.Mazrui 289, 294–5 Mazrui, Sheikh al-Amin bin Ali 289–90, 292, 293, 295–6, 296 Mazrui, Sheikh Muhammad Kasim 292, 296 Mecca 27, 218, 221 Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Grand Duke 125 Medina 221 Megillah: Goldfaden’s King Akhashveyresh 272–4, 275, 276, 277, 280 memoirs: by slave ‘Umar ibn Sa’id 245–6; by woman Holocaust survivors 189, 190–1, 192–9

281

Mendelssohn, Moses 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118–19, 120, 125, 127, 260 Merathi, Isma’il 22–3 Messiah 9; in contemporary Persian prose 169, 170, 173; in Morpurgo’s poetry 232, 233; in Shvili’s poetry 75, 80–1, 82, 83, 85 messianic Judaism: haredim 9, 10; in Morpurgo’s poetry 232; Sabbateanism 306; in Shvili’s poetry 73, 80, 81, 84–5 meta-narratives: religion in Persian literature 163, 173 metaphysical themes: in Kısakürek’s poetry 56, 68 Middle Ages/medieval era: in Azancot’s La novia judía 300, 303, 304, 307; Jewish martyrs 180, 181 Midrash 116 Mignon, Laurent 67 Milton, John: Paradise Lost 285 mi’r raj (Prophet’s journey to Heaven) 220–1; story 142–3 Mishnah 117, 263 Mizrahi Orthodox Jews 158 Mnyampala, Mathias 293–4 modernism 9; and Urdu poetry 21, 31 modernity/modernisation: conflict with tradition in Jewish literature 8–11; context of Morpurgo’s poetry 228; German Jewry 112, 122; Hausa culture 212; Jewish encounter with 7; Muslim encounters with 4–6, 93–4; in Turkish literature 55; Turkestan 135 Molcho, Solomon 80 Molen, Willem van der 106 Molière 293; see also Tartuffe Mombasa 286, 289, 290, 291, 292, 296 Montefiore, Moses: Morpurgo’s poem in honour of 226, 227, 233–4

282

Index

Moravia 229 Moritz, Karl Philipp 127n Morocco 300 Morpurgo, Rahel 8, 9, 225–35 Mortara, Rabbi 234 Moscati Steindler, Gabriella 8 Moses 28, 219 mother: quest for in Shvili’s work 78–9, 85 Mourner’s Kaddish 202 mubalighs (preachers) 101 Mughals 17; architecture and monuments 22–3, 25–6 Muhammad see Prophet Muhammad Muhammadiyah 93 Muhsin, Sheikh Ali 293 Muhyiddin, K. (Indonesian poet) 102 Mukdoyni, Alexander 277 musaddas 18; Iqbal’s Shikwa 23 music: in Indonesia 103, 104, 105 Muslim League 23, 25, 28 Muslim literatures 1, 1–6; classical Swahili literature 283; religion and religiosity 13–14 Muslim norms and values 90 Muslim Spain 22, 27, 301 Muslims in India: effect of British colonial rule 18–19, 20, 23, 23–4, 25; nationalist movement 25, 27–8 Muslims in Indonesia 106 Muslims in Java 90 Muyaka bin Mwinyi Haji 286, 290–1 Mysore 25 mysticism: elements in Shvili’s poetry 71, 73, 77, 80, 84; in Islam 55, 62–3, 65–7, 174; Kabbalah 35; in Kısakürek’s poetry 56–68; see also popular mysticism; Sufism mythology: classical 14; Hausa tale of Facima 217–18, 221; Jewish 73–4, 79, 81, 230 Nabhan, Adnan Oesman 106

Nadjib, Emha Ainun 106 Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) 90, 93, 101 Nahdlatul Wathan 93 Nakamura, Mitsuo 94 Naqshbandiyya 62 Nasreddîn stories 136, 139 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 246 Nathan Levi of Gaza 84 nationalism 28; in India 23, 24, 25, 26–7; ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel 150; see also Italian nationalism ‘natural poetry’ (Hali) 20, 27 Nazis: effect of regime on Jews’ relationships 193; eroticised tropes of atrocity by 186–7, 190; issue of sexual violation of Jewish women 188; and ‘The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ 179, 180–1, 182; nature of genocide by 182, 197, 205–6n; survival as resistance against 184 nazm poetry 22, 24, 31 Neologism (Hungarian Reformed Jewish movement) 34 neo-religious poetry: Yaoz-Kest 37–9, 50 New Christians 299; in Azancot’s novels 12, 301; followers of Zevi 306 New York 179, 198, 272 Niamey 212 Nicholson, Reynold A. 65 Nieder-Ehnheim, Alsace 112 Niger Republic: Islamic movements 219; recent entry of Hausa women into public sphere 209–10 Nigeria 219 Noah 247–8 North African: writing in French 2 North American Jews: and ‘The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ 179, 180, 204; see also Jewish-Americans Novalis (Friedrich Leopold von Hardenberg) 118 novels: Arabic 241–3, 248; Azancot 300;

Index Awlād Hāratinā 240, 242, 244–5, 249; European model 6; Persian 3, 164–76; Shvili’s Kastoria 77–8, 78–9, 79–80; in Swahili 294; see also fiction obscurantism: Wolfssohn’s criticism of 119–120 operettas: Goldfaden’s Shulamis 265–71; Lateiner 278 oral literatures: Hausa 3, 209, 210, 211–12, 220; Swahili 283, 286 oral tradition: singirs 101 oral-written dichotomy 3 Oriental religious Judaism 156, 158 Orkes Putri Nida Ria (singing ensemble) 103 Orthodox Jews: in Azancot’s novels 300; depicted in Hasfari’s plays 151; importance of ‘The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ 179, 203–4; in Israel 10; modern communities 9; Wolfssohn’s views 116, 120, 121–2, 126; see also ultra-Orthodox Jews Ottoman Empire 4, 6, 55, 228; end of 24, 56 Özel, Ismet (Turkish poet) 68 Ozick, Cynthia 7, 11 Pahlavi, Muhammad Reza Shah 5 Pahlavi, Reza Shah 3–4, 5 Pakistan 23, 28; Urdu speakers 2 Pakula, Alan 187 Palestine 3 Palestinians 4; in Faiz’s poem 31 pan-Islamic consciousness 4; and Iqbal’s poems 24–5 Paradise: stories 136–40; in in Iqbal’s poetry 24; in Makhmalbâf ‘s stories 165, 168, 174;

283

in Shvili’s poetry 74 Paris 243, 272; Kısakürek’s experience 57, 61 Pârsipur, Shahrnush (Iranian novelist): Tubâ va ma’nâ-ye shab 168–70, 173, 174 Passover 115, 262, 274–5 Pate (Kenya) 284 Patimah, Nyai 99 Pentateuch 115, 225 perestroika 144 Perl, Yosef 8, 150 Persian language 5, 16 Persian literature: poetry 16–17; religion in contemporary prose works 163–74 Persians: ethnic group 2 Perso-Arabic script (pégon): 90–1; see also Arabic script Pesah (Passover) 115 pesantrens (religious schools) 90, 95; singirs in 98–9 philosophy: Kısakürek’s ideas 60; Sobol’s background 153 Pick, Yeshayahu 126 pilgrimage 136, 163, 169, 172; see also hajj Pirandello, Luigi 243 piyyut (liturgical poem) 181 Plautus 261 plays: 135, 136, 139–40, 144; Arabic 243–4; Wolfssohn 120–1, 260; see also drama; Israeli drama/theatre poetry: Arabic 3; Bisri’s view 106; Hebrew 11, 12–13, 71, 226–7, 235, 258; Indonesian 90, 103–6; and mystical experience 55; Persian 16–18, 20, 24–5, 30, 31; reform of genre systems 6; Swahili 283–6, 285, 287, 290–1, 293–4, 296; Turkish 56; Urdu 16, 17–18, 19, 20, 23–31;

284

Index

see also singirs pogroms: Russia (1880s) 271–2; in Shvili’s poetry 80; Spain (1391) 299 Polak, Yankev ben Avrom 265 Poland 272 politics: in Goldfaden’s work 259; and public nature of drama 149; and religious Orthodoxy in Israel 10 popular literature 3; in Central Asia 135, 136, 138, 147n; Jewish Orthodox writing 13 popular music: qasidah moderen 103–5, 106 popular mysticism: in post-Haskalah Jewish writing 10, 11 popular religious culture: theatrical sermons in Israel 156 postmodernism: Shvili’s poetry 71–2, 79, 85 Prague 228 prayer: as poetry 64, 105; ritual prayer 69n, 163, 165 prayer books: containing ‘The Martyrdom of the NinetyThree Maidens’ 179–80, 202; see also siddur pre-modern writing 1; Jewish literature 7; Perso-Urdu poetic tradition 16 propaganda literature: Iran 163, 172 Prophet Muhammad 90, 221, 240, 295; referred to in Swahili literature 285; in singirs 94, 97; stories 140–1, 142; traditions in in Urdu poetry 21, 24; see also Hadiths; mi’raj protest literature: Iran 163 Prussia 122 psalms: in Goldfaden’s work 271; in Swahili poetic form 291 public performance 3; politics and drama 149

public poetry: in British India 20, 25; Persian 17, 20; Urdu 17–18, 28, 30–1 public sphere: Hausa women’s entry into 209–10; in Iran 173 Punjabis 2 purification: symbolism of white in Islamic culture 220; in Yaoz-Kest’s poems 49 Purim (feast commemorating deliverance of Jews) 115, 126, 275 purimshpil 260; Goldfaden’s King Akhashveyresh 272–7, 280 Pushtuns 2 Qahhâr, ‘Abdulla (Uzbek writer) 136 qasîda 6, 17, 18, 22, 105; qasidah moderen 103–5, 106 Qâsimov, Beg’alî 144 Qur’an 1, 90, 141, 295; erosion of authority of 93, 94; stories 140, 141, 142; and and Hausa ‘Story of the Orphan’ 217, 219, 221, 222; influence on Iranian literature 170, 174; and inimitability 240–1; recitation 98, 245, 297; in Swahili literature 285; translations into Swahili 292–3, 295, 296; used in modern Arabic literature 14, 106, 239–40, 241–9 Sayyid 252n Qutb al-Din Aibak 26 rabbinic Judaism 306; in Azancot’s novels 300, 303, 304, 308 Rachel/Rahel: in Morpurgo’s poetry 229–31, 232 radio and qasidah moderen 104: storytelling of Hausa ‘Story of the Orphan’ 210 Radio Amfani 212 Ramadan 99, 104, 220 rape: experiences during the Holocaust 180, 188; in Holocaust memoirs 191, 192, 195;

Index and ‘The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ 183–4, 186; in Talmud’s categories of martyrdom 185 Rashi (Solomon ben Isaac) 117, 225 rationality/rationalism: reappropriated in Haskalah literature 7, 8, 117, 119, 121 Ravitzky, Aviezer 152 redemption: in Azancot’s La novia judía 306; in Shvili’s poetry 84; in Shabbetai Zevi’s prophecies 305–6, 308 Reform Judaism 9 religion/religiosity: in contemporary Persian literature 163, 164, 165–6, 171, 172; critique of 138, 142–3; differences between Muslim and Jewish literatures 13–14; in Goldfaden’s work 258, 261; Islamic poetry 106; Israeli literature 10–11; Jewish literature 6, 7; Kısakürek’s poetry 56–7, 62–8; Morpurgo’s poetry 226, 227, 229–34, 235; works 135; motifs in quest of Shvili 71; rise and spread of Islamic literature 241; role of Swahili in East Africa 290, 296–7; themes and expressions 1, 13; Urdu poetry of later colonial period 16, 28; Wolfssohn’s emphases 115; Yaoz-Kest’s reconnection with 34–7 religious festivals: Jewish 115; Islamic 139 religious identity: and emancipation of Italian Jews 227–8; Islam in Indonesia 90; see also Jewishness religious idioms: Persian literature 163, 172–3 religious knowledge and education see knowledge and learning religious stereotypes: in Israeli theatre 150, 151, 155, 161 religious-Zionist subculture 150 resistance literature: Persian 163 Reza Shah see under Pahlavi

285

rhetoric: Persian classical poetry 17, 18 Ringelbaum, Emmanual 206–7n Risorgimento 235 ritual: East African ethnic groups 283; Islamic 163, 173; Jewish 10, 12, 36, 37, 46, 49, 50, 160 Robbany (Indonesian poet) 102 Rohtas (Mughal fortress) 25–6 Rollins, Jack D. 293 Roman alphabet: introduction into Swahili 5, 289; into Turkish 5–6 Romanelli, Shemuel 234–5 Romanticism 21, 23 Rosen, Norma: Touching Evil 190 Rosh Hashanah 115 Rosh Hodesh 115 Roth, Cecil 306 Russia: pogroms (1880s) 271–2; Tsarist rule of Turkestan 135, 137 Russian Revolution 138, 139 Russo-Iranian war 170 Sabbateanism 12, 232–3, 306; references in Shvili’s poetry 79, 81, 84 Sabbath: Jewish observance of 115 Sacleux, Father 288 Sadan, Dov 226 Sadeh, Pinchas 71 Saharan region 218 Sahel 2, 217, 218, 220 Said Musa, Sheikh 296 St Petersburg 271 Salaf îya 4 Salam, Aprinus (Indonesian poet) 105 Salman, Nina: translation of Morpurgo poem 233–4 Sarekat Islam party 91 Satan 62, 82; see also Devil; Iblis Sathiye 66 satire: stories 136, 137; Goldfaden’s plays 279; Ilahabadi’s poems 23;

286

Index

in Israeli drama 151, 152, 153, 154, 157; Jewish writing against Hassidism 7–8; Wolfssohn’s writings 112, 113, 128n Saudi Arabia 219 Sauti ya Haki (periodical) 292 Schachter, Jacob J. 204–5n, 205n Schindler’s List (film) 187, 199 Schlegel, Friedrich 118 Schwarz-Bart, André 206n Second World War 182 secular Jews: attraction towards Kabbalah 35; denounced in ultra-Orthodox dramatic sermons 156; Ozick’s view 7; search for meaning of Holocaust 206–7n secular literature: in Arabic 241; Muslim 2; Swahili verse 286, 290–1 secular/religious dichotomy: writing 142–3; in and Israeli theatre 10–11, 149–55, 161 secular-Zionist culture: denounced in ultra-Orthodox sermons 156; weakening of 150 secularisation/secularism 1; American Jews 183; and Judaism 7, 9, 37, 112; Urdu poetry 28, 30; among Muslims 2, 4; of Swahili written literature 291 sefirot (spheres/emanations of God): reflected in Shvili’s poetry 72–3, 75, 84–5 self: in Kısakürek’s poetry 57–8, 59, 65, 66–7; Yaoz-Kest’s poems 43 Sephardi Jews 12, 228, 229, 300, 308 Seringapatam 25 sermons: dramatic texts of ultra-Orthodox Jews 155–6; in Indonesian literatures 97, 101 Seven Sleepers of Ephesus 243 sexual violation: experiences during the Holocaust 180, 188; in memoirs by women survivors of Holocaust 190–1, 195–9; Talmud’s ambivalence toward 184;

and ‘The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ 181, 182, 183, 203; women writers’ ethical representation of 188–9, 199, 201 sexuality: in contemporary Persian fiction 169, 173, 178n; referents in Azancot’s La novia judía 302, 303–4, 305, 308 Shackle, Christopher 4 Shâmlu, Sepide (Iranian novelist): Engâr gofte budi Leyli 171–2, 173, 174 Shari’a a 4 Shariff, Ibrahim Noor 286 Sharq yulduzi (periodical) 144 Shavuot (Pentecost) 115 Shaw, George Bernard 243 Sheinfeld, Ilan 158 Shema 40 Shi’i/Shi’ite tradition 14, 18, 19, 174n shmad (religious persecution) 205–6n Shneerson, Rabbi 9 Shoah see Holocaust short stories: Bakr’s 245; European model 6; Fink’s Aryan Papers’ 192, 198; 135, 136–45; Persian 164 Shulhan Arukh 160 Shvili, Benyamin 11, 71–85 siddur (traditional Jewish prayer book) 36, 37–8, 40, 44–5 Silberstein, Rabbi David Judah Leib 34 Silberstein, Rabbi Isaiah 34 Silberstein, Leib 51n Simon, Rabbi 81–2 Singer, Isaac Bashevis 308 singirs: composers and singers 99–101; genre 90–1; new developments 101–2; performance in pesantrens 98–9; related forms of poetry 103–6; themes 96–8; to convey knowledge 91–3, 94–6 Siraj, Kiai Muhammad (Indonesian poet) 101 Sisebut (Visigothic ruler of Iberia) 299 Six Day War 152

Index Smyrna 11, 73, 80, 83–4 Sobol, Yehoshua 153; translation of Tartuffe 157–8 Soeharto, President Raden 95 Solomon 221, 308; see also Sulaîmân Song of Songs 84, 127n, 171, 232 songs: sung by Jews on train to Bergen- Belsen 34–5; Yiddish 258; see also singirs Sophies Choice (film) 187 South Asia: classical Urdu poetry 18, 22, 24 Soviet Union 2, 4; arrest and execution 143, 145 Spain 22, 27; expulsion of Muslims 4; expulsions of Jews 12, 299–300, 301; forefathers of ghetto Jews 207n; return of Jews 12, 300 Spielberg, Steven 187 Spinoza, Baruch 38, 153 spiritual guidance 62, 63, 178n spirituality: Shvili 11, 71, 73 Starkey, Paul 243 Stavans, Ilan 8 Steer, Bishop Edward 288 Stewart, Philip 244 ‘The Story of the Orphan Who Marries the Prince of Masar’ (Hausa tale) 209, 212–16; analysis of motifs 216–22 Strauss, Jutta 8 Stümpel, Isabel 3 Styron, William 187 sub-Saharan Africa 2 Sufism 14, 64–5, 219; in ghazal 17; see also tasavvuf Suhaemi 104, 106 Suherman, Djamil 98–9 Sukkot (Tabernacles) 115 Sulaîman 101; see also Solomon Sumba, John Ndetei 294 Sundanese 2

287

sunna 90 superstition 136, 141 supra-realism: Makhmalbâf’s work 174 Swahili language: contribution to Afro-Islamic literatures 2, 283, 294, 295–6; development and trans-religious expansion 286–90, 291; introduction of Latin characters 5; translation of European classics into 293; translations of Qur’an into 292–3, 296 Swahili literature 3, 283–97; emergence of Christian writing 2, 3, 4, 283, 286, 290, 291–2, 293–4, 296–7; and Islamic renewal 294–6 Syamsul Arifin, Kiai Haji As’ad (Indonesian poet): Syi’ir Madura 95–6 symbolism: Kısakürek’s mysticism 61; motifs in Hausa ‘Story of the Orphan’ 216–22; in Shvili’s poetry 73–4, 81; style of Sufi poets 65 synagogues: Holocaust Memorial (Yizkor) Service 202; in Yaoz-kest’s poems 43; Yom Kippur Martyrology services in America 179, 182 Syria 3 Szeman, Sheri: The Kommandant’s Mistress 199–201 244 Talmud 82, 300, 301; concept of martyrdom 181, 184–6; legends 265; Wolfssohn’s views 115–16, 117, 118, 120, 127 Tanganyika 289 Tanzania 289, 293, 294, 296 Tartuffe (Molière): and Hasfari’s Rabbi Kame’a 158–9; Sobol’s translation 157–8; and Wolfssohn’s Leichtsinn und frömmelei 260 tasavvuf (mystical experience) 55, 63;

288

Index

poetry 67; see also Sufism tatsuniyoyi (Hausa women’s stories) 211 Taushe (theatrical parody) 220 Taylor, William Edward 291–2 Tec, Nehama 206n technology: enabling women in Niger 210, 212 tefillin (phylacteries): in Yaoz-Kest’s poetry 46–9 television: Hausa storytellers on 212; singirs on 104, 106 theatre: Goldfaden’s achievement 258, 280; see also drama, plays theodicy 39 Tipu Sultan 25 Tjan Tjoe Siem 99 Tjokroaminoto, Oemar Said 92 Toorawa, Shawkat 3, 14 Torah 10, 115, 160, 263 Totengespräche (dialogues of the dead) 121 trade: motif in Hausa ‘Story of the Orphan’ 217, 218 traditionalism: in Java 90, 93; anti-Westernisation movement in Turkey 55 traditions 7, 11: challenges in modern times 1; conflict with modernity in Jewish literature 7–11; in Urdu poetry 19, 23, 31; Wolfssohn’s esteem for 117, 119, 121, 127 Transjordan 3 Treaty of Lausanne 4 Tree of Life 77, 78 Trieste: in eighteenth century 228–9; and Morpurgo’s poetry 227, 234–5 Tripolitania 24 Tsene-rene 263–4 Tucker, Bishop Alfred R. 289 Tunç, M.Sekip 57 Turdiyev, Shêr’ali 144 Turkestan 135, 137, 139 Turkey:

Atatürk’s reforms 4, 4–5, 5–6; establishment of Republic 55, 56 Turkish language 5, 6, 69n Turna, Babür 5 Tyson, Mike: qasida about conversion of 103–4 Uganda 288–9, 290 ‘ulamâ/ulamaa 21, 93, 100, 284, 291, 293 ultra-Orthodox Jews 9, 10, 150; depicted in Israeli theatre 151, 154, 157, 158; dramatic texts by 155–6 Umar, K.M.Asnawi (Indonesian poet) 102 ‘Umar Ibn Sa‘îd (West African Arabic writer) 245–6 Umayyads 176n Unger, Helene 132n United States of America (USA): Holocaust Memorial Museum 188; Jewish literature 7; Jews 9; Yiddish theatre 278; Yom Kippur Martyrology Service 179; see also American fiction; Jewish-Americans Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1 Universities Mission to Central Africa 292 Urdu language 2, 5, 17, 19 Urian, Dan 10, 13 Uzbek language 2, 5 Uzbek literature 2; importance differing views of 143–5 Uzbekistan 143, 145 Uzbekistan adabiyâti wa 144 Uzbeks: ethnic group 2 Vac 34 Van Bruinessen, Martin see Bruinessen, Martin van Van der Molen, Willem see Molen, Willem van der veil (women’s dress code) 100, 104, 173 II Vessillo Israelitico (journal) 228 Vienna 151, 228, 229, 234–5 Virgin Mary 28, 169

Index Wahab, Rofiqoh Darto 105 Wallach, Yonah 71 Warsaw Ghetto 192 (Algerian novelist) 241–2 Weininger, Otto 153 Weltsch, Baruch Felix 53n West Africa: European colonisation 3; Hausa culture 209; Islam 294, 295 West Africans: writing in Arabic 245–6; writing in French 2 West Bank settlements 150 Western ideas/literature: influence on Goldfaden 258; influence on Kısakürek 56, 57, 68 Westernisation: of education in Muslim countries 5, 93; secularism 4, 9, 291; in Turkey 55; and Urdu literature 19, 23 White, Hayden 179 Wicked Stepmother tale 210; see also ‘The Story of the Orphan Who Marries the Prince of Masar’ Wieland, Christophe Martin 121 Wieringa, Edwin 3 Wild, Stefan 252n Wolfssohn, Aaron Halle 8, 9, 112–27, 260, 261; Leichtsinn und frömmelei 122–3, 260 women writers: contemporary American writing on Holocaust 188–9, 189–90, 199–201; contemporary Persian literature 164; Hausa voices and Islamic discourse 209–10, 211–12; uniqueness of Morpurgo 225, 226–7, 235; see also Bakr, Salwa, Parsipur, Shahrmush, Shamlû, Sepide women: Biblical figures in Morpurgo’s poetry 230; Holocaust survivors’ texts and testimonies 187–8, 188–9, 190–1, 192–9; and Islamic medicinal practices 221–2; issues addressed by Hamaagal 160; issues addressed in contemporary Persian fiction 167–8, 173;

289

and Judaism after emancipation 228, 234; in ‘The Martyrdom of the Ninety-Three Maidens’ 180–2, 186, 203; performers of singirs 90, 99–100; as singers of qasidah moderen 103; singirs aimed at 97, 98–9, 100–1; victims of sexual violation by Nazis 184, 186, 186–7, 187–8 Wordsworth, William 20 written texts see oral-written dichotomy Wyszogrod, Morris 192 Yad Vashem 188 Yagen, Nissim 156 Yaoz, Hannah 36, 51n Yaoz-Kest, Itamar 11, 34–51 Yemen 242 Yiddish language 52n; speech of religious stereotype in Israeli plays 150; used by Israeli theatrical preachers 156 Yiddish literature: Goldfaden 9, 258, 259–60, 272; Singer 308 Yiddish theatre 260–1, 277–80; ban in Russia (1880s) 271–2 yidishkayt 9, 279 Yitzhak, Amnon 156–7 Yogyakarta: poems from 105, 106 Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) 115; Martyrology Service 12–13, 179, 180, 181 Young Bukharans 145n Zach, Natan 74, 77 Zakariya, Haji (Indonesian poet) 94, 97 El-Zakzaky, Ibrahim 219 Zamîndâr (newspaper) 25 Zanzibar 288, 292, 293, 296 Zarifoglu, Cahit (Turkish poet) 68 Zawawi Imron, D. 94–6 Zayn al-Arifin (Indonesian poet): Singir Modèren 97–8 Zevi, Shabbetai: influence on Jewish writing 11–12; prophecies 305–6, 308; reference in Morpurgo’s poetry 232–3;

290

Index

in Shvili’s poetry 73, 73–4, 79, 80, 82, 83–4, 85 Zhitomir rabbinical academy 260 Zionism 9; Israel 10; meaning to American Jews 183; perspective on Morpurgo 226, 231;

see also secular-Zionist culture Zohar, Uri 151, 156, 160 Zohar: references in Shvili’s poetry 72, 77; symbolism in Azancot’s La novia judía 307 Zvezda Vostoka (periodical) 144