Studies in Contemporary Jewry: Volume XII: Literary Strategies: Jewish Texts and Contexts (VOL. XII) 0195112032, 9780195112030

Citation preview

STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY JEWRY

The publication of Studies in Contemporary Jewry has been made possible through the generous assistance of the Samuel and Althea Stroum Philanthropic Fund, Seattle, Washington

THE AVRAHAM HARMAN INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY JEWRY THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM

LITERARY STRATEGIES Jewish Texts and Contexts

STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY JEWRY AN ANNUAL

XII

1996 Edited by Ezra Mendelsohn

Published for the Institute by OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS New York • Oxford

Oxford University Press Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Bombay Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lampur Madras Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan

Copyright © 1996 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

ISBN 0-19-511203-2 ISSN 0740-8625 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 This volume is dedicated to the memory of Moshe Davis (1916-1996), founder of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY JEWRY

Editors Jonathan Frankel Peter Y. Medding Ezra Mendelsohn Institute Editorial Board Michel Abitbol, Mordecai Altshuler, Haim Avni, David Bankier, Avraham Bargil, Yehuda Bauer, Sergio DellaPergola, Sidra Ezrahi, Allon Gal, Moshe Goodman, Yisrael Gutman, Menahem Kaufman, Israel Kolatt, Hagit Lavsky, Eli Lederhendler, Pnina Morag-Talmon, Dalia Ofer, Gideon Shimoni, Geoffrey Wigoder

Managing Editors Laurie E. Fialkoff Hannah Levinsky-Koevary International Advisory and Review Board Chimen Abramsky (University College, London); Abraham Ascher (City University of New York); Arnold Band (University of California, Los Angeles); Doris Bensimon (Universite de la Sorbonne Nouvelle); Bernard Blumenkrantz (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique); Solomon Encel (University of New South Wales); Henry Feingold (City University of New York); Martin Gilbert (Oxford University); Zvi Gitelman (University of Michigan); S. Julius Gould (University of Nottingham); Paula Hyman (Yale University); Lionel Kochan (University of Warwick); David Landes (Harvard University); Seymour Martin Lipset (George Mason University); Heinz-Dietrich Lowe (Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat); Michael Meyer (Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati); Alan Mintz (Brandeis University); George Mosse (University of Wisconsin); Gerard Nahon (Centre Universitaire d'Etudes Juives); F. Raphael (Universite des Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg); Jehuda Rcinharz (Brandeis University); Monika Richarz (Germania Judaica, Kolner Bibliothek zur Geschichte des deutschen Judentums); Joseph Rothschild (Columbia University); Ismar Schorsch (Jewish Theological Seminary of America); Michael Walzer (Institute for Advanced Study); Bernard Wasserstein (Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies); Ruth Wisse (Harvard University).

This page intentionally left blank

Preface

Over the years, Studies in Contemporary Jewry has devoted a considerable amount of space to modern Jewish politics, a central concern of its three editors. However, in keeping with the academic philosophy of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry, which takes pride in its interdisciplinary approach, Studies has featured symposia on a wide range of subjects, including Jewish Orthodoxy, messianism and historiography. Nor have we ignored the burgeoning field of cultural studies. The symposium of volume VI, published in 1990, demonstrated how the study of visual images, produced by Jews and non-Jews alike, contributes to our understanding of modern Jewish history and society. Volume IX, which appeared in 1993, brought together the work of musicologists interested in the role of Jews in the modern musical world and, in particular, in the emergence and significance of various forms of Jewish music—the creation of a national classical style in Palestine/Eretz Israel, the role of Israeli popular songs in the process of nation-building, Sephardic music as an ethnic marker, and the "music of Jewish prayer." The present volume brings to a conclusion our cultural trilogy by focusing on a much more familiar area of research— Jewish literature. A more familiar area, to be sure, and also an infinitely rich and diverse one. Jewish literature, in the broadest sense of the term, can be understood as referring to all works of fiction written by Jews, both in Jewish and non-Jewish languages. A symposium on this vast subject can be justified only if it achieves at least a degree of coherence. This is easier said than done, but it does seem to me that the scholars whose work is published in these pages all deal, in one way or another, with the manifold ways in which literary texts reveal their authors' attitudes toward their own Jewish identity and toward diverse aspects of the "Jewish question." In short, by delving into these authors' "literary strategies," the essays place Jewish texts in Jewish contexts. The degree to which the novelists, dramatists and poets whose names appear in these pages relate to these Jewish issues differs widely. Some regard themselves, and by extension their work, as directly involved in the Jewish drama, while others allude to Jewish concerns so obliquely that only the keen eye of the literary critic can discover the Jewish subtext. A crucial and obvious distinction is to be made between those who write in Jewish languages and who are therefore inevitably involved in the effort to create a national Jewish culture, and those who write in the language of the majority culture and regard themselves above all as American, English, German or even Russian writers. This distinction lies at the core of Ruth Wisse's comparison of Yiddish and English-language Jewish writers in interwar America.

viii

Preface

A theme that runs through a number of the essays collected here is the Jewish author's depiction of the Jewish past. It serves to connect, however tenuously, Liliane Weissberg's essay on Ludwig Robert, one of Germany's first Jewish playwrights, and Chonc Shmeruk's piece on a totally different figure, the Yiddish master Isaac Bashevis Singer. The search for a usable past is the subject of David Roskics' survey of modern Yiddish writers and their portraits of rabbis and rebbes, while Marcus Moseley's essay on Micah Yosef Berdichevsky highlights this celebrated Hebrew and Yiddish author's preoccupation with the problematics of remembering and forgetting. The contributors to the symposium also scrutinize literary texts to explicate Jewish writers' attitudes toward contemporary Jewish issues—as in Ruth Wisse's essay, in Sidra Ezrahi's consideration of the "diasporic" views expressed in Philip Roth's novel Operation Shylock, and Michael Stanislawski's examination of the views of the young Zev Jabotinsky as reflected in his early, virtually unknown works for the theater. Finally, Bryan Cheyette analyzes how the work of modern British Jewish writers is influenced by their special status as outsiders who possess a peculiar and rather uneasy relationship with the powerful "native" English literary tradition. The symposia featured in Studies are usually ambitious to a fault, resulting in well-founded complaints that many important aspects of the selected subject are left out. Our intentions, this time as always, are not to cover all the bases but rather to raise interesting questions and present new and innovative research. In compensation we offer our readers a number of essays unrelated to the symposium theme, reviews of more than sixty new books (including six review essays) and a list of recent dissertations in the field of modern Jewish studies. It is always a pleasure to record my thanks to our wonderful staff, which consists of managing editors Laurie Fialkoff and Hannah Levinsky-Koevary. This time, more than ever, I am in their debt, since for much of the time that this volume was being prepared 1 was not in situ. It seems that our journal, like certain famous orchestras, suffers not at all (and perhaps even profits) from the occasional absence of its "conductors." My thanks are also extended to my fellow editors, Jonathan Frankel and Peter Medding, and to our maecenas, Samuel Stroum, whose continued generosity makes possible the appearance of our journal. Finally, I note in sorrow the passing away of four distinguished colleagues and members of our editorial board—Moshe Davis, the Institute's founder, and professors Roberto Bacchi, Simon Herman and Uziel Schmelz. Brief obituaries appear at the back of the volume.

E.M.

Contents

Symposium Literary Strategies: Jewish Texts and Contexts Liliane Weissberg, Dramatic History: Reflections on a Biblical Play by Ludwig Robert, 3 Bryan Cheyette, Englishness and Extraterritoriality: British-Jewish Writing and Diaspora Culture, 21 Michael Stanislawski, Jabotinsky as Playwright: New Texts, New Subtexts, 40 David G. Roskies, Rabbis, Rebbes and Other Humanists: The Search for a Usable Past in Modern Yiddish Literature, 55 Marcus Moseley, Between Memory and Forgetfulness: The Janus Face of Michah Yosef Berdichevsky, 78 Chone Shmeruk, The Frankist Novels of Isaac Bashevis Singer,

118

Ruth R. Wisse, Language as Fate: Reflections on Jewish Literature in America, 129 Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, The Grapes of Roth: "Diasporism" Between Portnoy and Shy lock, 148 Essays David Rechter, Autonomy and Its Discontents: The Austrian Jewish Congress Movement, 1917-1918, 161 Joseph Heller, Jabotinsky's Use of National Myths in Political Struggles, 185 Arthur Aryeh Goren, Pageants of Sorrow, Celebration and Protest: The Public Culture of American Jews, 202

x

Contents

Review Essays H.M. Daleski, Literary Representations of "the Jew," 221 Chone Shmeruk, The Perils of Translation: Isaac Bashevis Singer in English and Hebrew, 228 Noah Lucas, Democracy in Israel: Proven Yet Precarious,

234

Hillel J. Kieval, "Fantasy" and "Reality" in Modern Antisemitism, Mitchell Cohen, Imaginary Jews and Jewish Imagination,

244

251

Benny Kraut, American Antisemitism, Black/Jewish Relations: A Matter of Perspective, 259

Book Reviews (arranged by subject) Antisemitism, Holocaust and Genocide Mitchell G. Bard, Forgotten Victims: The Abandonment of Americans in Hitler's Camps HENRY FEINGOLD, 277 Richard Bolchover, British Jewry and the Holocaust GIDEON SHIMONI, Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America BENNY KRAUT,

279

259

Murray Friedman, What Went Wrong? The Creation and Collapse of the BlackJewish Alliance BENNY KRAUT, 259 Saul S. Friedman (ed.), The Terezin Diary of Gonda Redlich (trans. Laurence Kutler) LiviA ROTHKIRCHEN, 282 Frederic Cople Jaher, A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness: The Origins and Rise of Anti-Semitism in America BENNY KRAUT, 259 Mordecai Paldiel, The Path of the Righteous: Gentile Rescuers During the Holocaust MICHAEL BERENBAUM, 284 Carol Rittner and John K. Roth (eds.), Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust NECHAMA TEC, 285 Teresa Swiebocka, Jonathan Webber and Connie Wilsak (eds.), Auschwitz: A History in Photographs YESHAYAHU NIR, 287 Erno Szep, The Smell of Humans: A Memoir of the Holocaust in Hungary ROBERT ROZETT, 290

Contents

xi

History and the Social Sciences Gary A. Abraham, Max Weber and the Jewish Question: A Study of the Social Outlook of His Sociology SAMUEL Z. KLAUSNER, 293 Shmuel Almog, Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira (eds.), Ziyonut vedat (Zionism and Religion) CHARLES S. LIEBMAN, 295 Alan Astro (ed.), Discourses of Jewish Identity in Twentieth-Century France DAVID WEINBERG, 297 Avraham Barkai, Branching Out: German-Jewish Immigration to the United States, 1820-1914 HASIA DINER, 299 David Cesarani, The "Jewish Chronicle" and Anglo-Jewry, 1841-1991 LLOYD P. GARTNER, 301 Christopher Clark, The Politics of Conversion: Missionary Protestantism and the Jews in Prussia 1728-1941 ODED HEILBRONNER, 303 David Englander (ed.), A Documentary History of Jewish Immigrants in Britain 1840-1920 SHARMAN RADISH, 304 Catherine Epstein, A Past Renewed: A Catalog of German-Speaking Refugee Historians in the United States after 1933 ODED HEILBRONNER, 306 Immanuel Etkes (ed.), Hadat vehahayim: tenu'at hahaskalah hayehudit bemizrah eiropah (The East European Jewish Enlightenment) DAVID E. FISHMAN, 308 Marko M. Feingold (ed.), Bin ewiges Dennoch. 125 Jahre Juden in Salzburg KLAUS HODL, 310 Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State GEOFFREY ALDERMAN , 311 Michael John and Albert Lichtblau, Schmelztiegel Wien—Einst und Jetzt: Zur Geshichte und Gegenwart von Zuwanderung und Minderheiten MARSHA L. ROZENBLIT, 312 John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza (eds.), Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History MARC RAEFF, 314 Eli Lederhendler, Jewish Responses to Modernity: New Voices in America and Eastern Europe LLOYD P. GARTNER, 317 Hartmut Lehmann and James Van Horn Meltons (eds.), Paths of Continuity: Central European Historiography from the 1930s to the 1950s ODED HEILBRONNER, 306 Carolyn Gray LeMaster, A Corner of the Tapestry: A History of the Jewish Experience in Arkansas 1820s-1990s JONATHAN D. SARNA, 318

xii

Contents

Robert M. Levine, Tropical Diaspora: The Jewish Experience in Cuba VICTOR A. MIRELMAN, 319 Robert Liberles, Salo Wittmayer Baron: Architect of Jewish History ROBERT CHAZAN, 321 Albert S. Lindemann, The Jew Accused: Three Anti-Semitic Affairs Beilis, Frank, 1894-1915) HILLEL J. KIEVAL, 244

(Dreyfus,

Paul Robert Magocsi, Historical Atlas of East Central Europe EZRA MENDELSOHN, 323 Henri Minczeles, Vilna, Wilno, Vilnius: La Jerusalem de Lituanie THEODORE R. WEEKS, 325 George L. Mosse, Confronting the Nation: Jewish and Western Nationalism ANTHONY D. SMITH, 327 Faith Rogow, Gone to Another Meeting: The National Council of Jewish Women, 1893-1993 BETH S. WENGER, 329 Marshall Sklare, Observing America's Jews STEPHEN SHAROT,

330

Shelly Tenenbaum, A Credit to Their Community: Jewish Loan Societies in the United States, 1880-1945 ELI LEDERHENDLER, 332 Gerald Tulchinsky, Taking Root: The Origins of the Canadian Jewish Community HAROLD M. WALLER, 333 Piotr S. Wandycz, The Price of Freedom: A History of East Central Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present EZRA MENDELSOHN, 335 Jonathan Webber (ed.), Jewish Identities in the New Europe EI.IEZER BEN-RAFAEL, 337 Jack Wertheimer (ed.), The Modern Jewish Experience: A Reader's Guide AVRAHAM GREENBAUM, 340

Language, Literature and the Arts Robert Alter, Hebrew and Modernity NAOMI SOKOLOFF,

342

Ziva Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation: The Influence of the Holocaust on the Visual Arts DORE ASHTON, 344 Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of "the Jew" in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875-1945 H.M. DALESKI, 221 Sarah Blacher Cohen, Cynthia Ozick's Comic Art: From Levity to Liturgy D. MESHER, 346

Contents

xiii

Gila Flam, Singing for Survival: Songs of the Lodz Ghetto 1940-45 EDWIN SEROUSSI, 349 Neal Gabler, Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity STEPHEN J. WHITFIELD, 350 John Gross, Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend H.M. DALESKI, 221 Menachem Mor (ed.), Jewish Sects, Religious Movements, and Political Parties STEPHEN SHAROT, 352 S.S. Prawer, Israel at Vanity Fair: Jews and Judaism in the Writings of W.M. Thackeray H.M. DALESKI, 221 Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Certificate CHONE SHMERUK, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Meshuga CHONE SHMERUK,

228

228

Religion, Thought and Education David R. Blumenthal, Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest EMIL L. FACKENHEIM, 354 Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture SHMUEL SHILO, 356 Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew MITCHELL COHEN,

251

Gershon Greenberg, The Holy Land in American Religious Thought, 1628-1948: The Symbiosis of American Religious Approaches to Scripture's Sacred Territory ROBERT L. WILKEN, 358 David Novak, Jewish Social Ethics SHUBERT SPERO,

360

Emanuel Rackman, Modern Halakhah for Our Time SHMUEL SHILO,

362

Zionism, Israel and the Middle East Isaac Alteras, Eisenhower and Israel: U.S.-Israeli Relations, 1953-1960 ZACH LEVEY, 364 Myron Aronoff, Power and Ritual in the Israel Labor Party: A Study in Political Anthropology NOAH LUCAS, 234 Edy Kaufman, S.B. Abed and R.L. Rothstein (eds.), Democracy, Peace, and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict NOAH LUCAS, 234 Keith Kyle and Joel Peters (eds.), Whither Israel? NOAH LUCAS,

234

Contents

xiv

Ian Lustick, Unsettled States, Disputed Lands NOAH LUCAS,

234

Michael B. Oren, The Origins of the Second Arab-Israeli War: Egypt, Israel and the Great Powers, 1952-56 SHLOMO SLONIM, 366 Yochanan Peres and Ephraim Yuchtman-Yaar, Trends in Israeli Democracy NOAH LUCAS, 234 Ehud Sprinzak and Larry Diamond (eds.), Israeli Democracy Under Stress NOAH LUCAS, 234 Avner Yaniv (ed.), National Security and Democracy in Israel NOAH LUCAS, 234

Recently Completed Doctoral Dissertations, Obituary Notices,

375

Contents for Volume XIII, Note on Editorial Policy,

383 385

368

Symposium Literary Strategies: Jewish Texts and Contexts

This page intentionally left blank

Dramatic History: Reflections on a Biblical Play by Ludwig Robert Liliane Weissberg (UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA)

Le Juif, le nom de Juif s'echange aussi avec le schibboleth, contre lui. Avant meme de se servir du gage ou d' en etre la victime, avant tout portage entre le portage de discrimination, qu'il soil sauf ou perdu, le maitre ou le proscrit, Juif est le schibboleth.—Jacques Derrida1

Making Vows He was the son of a prostitute. After he was driven from his father Gilead's house and denied his parental inheritance by his half-brothers, Jephthah made his home in the region of Tob. Here he chose an outsider's existence. He gathered adventurers around him and went on raids. In the book of Judges, which tells the story of Jephthah (10:6-12:7), this tale of a private life intersects with the history of the people of Israel. Israel has been enticed by alien gods and has been punished by God for this transgression. As the story of Jephthah opens, Israel has already rejected the heathen creed, but the hostilities with its enemies, brought about by God's wrath, are not yet over. The inhabitants of Gilead, Jephthah's father's land, are threatened by the Ammonites, and they are looking for a leader to guide them in future battles. "Who is the man who will be able to fight against the Ammonites?" the notables ask, "He shall be head over all the inhabitants of Gilead."2 The Gileadites approach Jephthah, who wonders why they have chosen to turn to one who has been dispossessed. "It is precisely because of this that we have turned to you, that you may go with us and fight against the Ammonites," the Gileadites reply. With Jephthah's dispossession transformed into a proper reason for appointing him a leader in crisis, the war turns into a homecoming of sorts. The conversion from outcast to leader makes possible a heroism that does not ask for parental legitimacy. At first, however, Jephthah does not elect to be a hero of war. He assumes the position of diplomat, sending missives to the king of the Ammonites that both explain Israel's position and propose a peaceful resolution. War becomes a last resort only when these letters fail. Before the battle against the Ammonites, Jephthah makes a vow before the Lord: "If you will truly give the Ammonites into 3

4

Liliane Weissberg

my hands, then whatever [whoever] first comes forth from the door of my house to meet me, when I return safe and sound from the Ammonites and from fighting with them, I will offer up in sacrifice." We are told little about Jephthah's house. No wife is mentioned, no animals who may reside with him and possibly exit the house through its entrance door. But Jephthah has an only child, a daughter. She meets him with tambourines, songs and dances to celebrate the Gileadites' and her father's victory—thus sealing her own fate. After learning about her father's vow, the daughter asks leave to retreat to the mountains for two months with her friends, both to mourn her virginity and to prepare for her impending death. She returns to be sacrificed by her father, and the Bible notes that it has become a custom among Israelite women to commemorate her death and bewail her virginity each year. Ritual and story blend. 3 While the question of parental legitimacy accompanies the first part of Jephthah's story, the second part concerns the issue of the death of his daughter. Human sacrifice is, of course, not at all alien to the Bible; the most well-known story is that of Abraham, who was asked by God to sacrifice his son. In a narrative that is so strikingly devoid of extraneous description, temporal structure, or even epithets that Erich Auerbach would choose it as a prime example for an anti-epic and antirealist description,4 the biblical author reports this gruesome errand. God summons Abraham to take Isaac at a certain time to a certain place to prepare his son's death. But at the last minute, the same God who has demanded the sacrifice reverses his orders. The tragic task is not performed, and Abraham's preparation for the sacrifice is turned into a test of his faith, an affirmation of God's authority. Moreover, human sacrifice is made to appear as something alien to the Jewish faith. The test of obedience turns into a call for humanism and a description of the new religion. To the outcast Jephthah, this humanism may be foreign or simply unknown, given his seeming willingness to perform a human sacrifice. In contrast with Abraham's tale, Jephthah's willingness to kill his child does not elicit God's mercy. Jephthah has volunteered his vow, offering to God what was not asked from him to give. Whom or what did he envision leaving his house? How did he want to be greeted upon his return? We are not sure, but Jephthah seems to be surprised by his daughter's greeting. The reader, meanwhile, is surprised by her existence, which is first mentioned only after Jephthah makes his vow. Her name is not given. (Perhaps it should not surprise the reader that the name of the rescued son, Isaac, is mentioned, but that the name of a daughter destined to die is not.) Further, this daughter bears her fate with resignation, in contrast to her father, who rents his clothes and assumes the posture of mourning. For Jephthah, it is not his promise to God but the daughter's appearance that "dealt fhimj"—not her—"a deadly blow." Thus, Jephthah turns himself into a victim of tragedy. The victim is allowed to switch gender: it is Jephthah's story after all, not that of his nameless daughter. Jephthah's story is thus carried by the power of a name and of a word. Derived from yiftahel, the designation of a place located on the boundary between Zebulun and Asher (Josh. 19:14, 27) whose literal translation is "God opens (the womb)" or "God frees (the captive)," the name Jephthah points to birth, leadership and the hero's marginal existence.5 As Jephthah's story continues, the Gileadites' war

Dramatic History

5

against the Ammonites is followed by their war against the Ephraimites, and a word other than Jephthah's or his daughter's name assumes major importance. A password, Shibboleth—signifying an ear of grain or a water torrent—serves to distinguish the Gileadites from the Ephraimites who could not pronounce it properly. While the written word has been unsuccessful in the political bargaining with the Ammonites, the spoken word sets the dramatic stage for the Gileadites' ultimate victory.

Jewish Passwords Jephthah's story has captured the imagination of many European writers since medieval times. In Jephthah and his Daughter: A Study in Comparative Literature, Wilbur Owen Sypherd produces long lists of puppet plays, musical productions, poems and, above all, dramas—and he does not even cite the many references to Jephthah's fate in the works of William Shakespeare and other prominent writers.6 George Buchanan's Jephthes sive Votum, a play composed between 1539 and 1542 and published in 1554, is one of the better-known and most popular earlier renderings of the story; the time of its conception and publication coincides with the more general rediscovery and new appreciation of Greek and Roman literature and biblical themes for stage performance. In Buchanan's drama, Jephthah's daughter receives a name, Iphis, only to lose it again or have it altered in later renderings of the story by other authors. Her name is changed to Ismerie, or more Hebrew-sounding names like Mirza, or Jemima7 in works such as Jephtha, the London oratorio composed by Georg Friedrich Handel (1752). Next to the Latin, English, French and Italian literary renderings of the theme, German literature has produced a particularly large number of tragedies focusing on Jephthah's story, among them Hans Sachs' play Der Jephte mit seiner tochter (1555) and Christian Weise's Der Tochter-Mord Welchen Jephtha unter dem Vorwande eines Opfers begangen hat (1680). The literature concentrating on Jephthah's story was especially pronounced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; since the Baroque era, dramas and poems like Hofman von Hofmanswaldau's "Thranen der Tochter Jephta" (ca. 1647) incorporated an important shift. As Johanna Porwig observes, it is no longer Jephthah whose figure forms the center of the plot, but rather his mourning daughter, ready to face death while at the same time bewailing her virginity.8 For the early German authors who tried to cope with the effects and aftereffects of the Thirty Years War, the story of a war hero and his terrible pledge of human sacrifice must have had a different significance than for the emerging bourgeois audience of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. Ludwig Robert, who sought to establish himself as a playwright with his first major work, Die Tochter Jephthas, completed in 1810, stressed the shifted focus on the fate of Jephthah's child with the very title of his work. Writing in the early nineteenth century, Robert faced the problem of adjusting a biblical tale for an audience already acquainted with the Sturm und Drang dramas, as well as the classical plays by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller and the new Romantic poetry. Moreover, he had to react to the interpretations of numerous predecessors who had dealt with the

6

Liliane Weissberg

Jephthah theme. Finally, while Robert regarded himself as a German writer, he also approached his topic as the first German Jewish author to deal with this biblical subject. Conceived within a different cultural and historical context than the works by Buchanan or Sachs or Handel, Die Tochter Jephthas was neither intended as a religious fable, nor as a morality play, nor as the libretto for a grand oratorio to be performed in a Christian church. What, then, was at stake for him? By considering the events of his life, some answer may perhaps be found. Ludwig Robert was born as Lipman (Louis) Levin in Berlin in 1778, the third child of the diamond dealer Levin Markus Cohen and his wife Chaie. Shortly after the death of their father in 1790, Robert's older sister Rahel established herself as the most prominent of the Berlin salonieres, opening her family's home to a flow of visitors that included Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, the Swedish diplomat and poet Karl Gustav von Brinkmann and the political writer and politician Friedrich von Gentz, as well as many other artistocrats, actors and poets—all of whom Robert thus encountered. He attended the Franzosisches Gymnasium, and in 1795, he moved to Breslau to become an apprentice to the merchant Liepmann, a close friend of his father's who had promised to name one or several of the Levin children as his heirs.9 In numerous letters to his older sister, Robert confesses his interest in literature, about which he probably learned much more in Rahel's salon than in Liepmann's office. 10 Robert's first poems seem to date from his years in Breslau. In 1801, he journeyed to Paris, where he studied French drama and tried to compose various translations. Two years later, Robert settled again in Berlin. There, family connections proved to be helpful for his future career. Robert's older brother Markus, then in charge of the family business and his family's finances, counted August Wilhelm Iffland, the well-known actor and director of the Berlin court theater, among his clients. Iffland was probably instrumental in placing Robert's translation of Moliere's Les Precieuses ridicules, entitled Die Uberbildeten (The Overeducated), on the court theater's stage in April 1804. Iffland himself took part in the production, which remained for several years in the theater's repertoire.11 There followed Robert's translations of French musical librettos for Anselm Weber's Die Wette (The Wager, 1805) and Heinrich Himmel's Die Sylphiden (The Sylphides, 1806). Robert published his first poems in Der [griine] Musenalmanach, a literary almanac edited by Adelbert von Chamisso and Karl August Varnhagen between 1804 and 1806. In all probability, Robert was introduced to the two editors by family friends, the wealthy merchant Ezechiel Benjamin Cohen and his wife Pauline. Varnhagen was employed as their children's tutor; he later married Robert's sister Rahel. One of Robert's first poems, published in 1804, served as a introductory exercise in dealing with the Jephthah theme:12 "Das Geltibde: Eine Ballade aus der Bibel" ("The Vow: A Ballad from the Bible"), which also appeared in his collection of poems, Gedichle, published in 1838.13 Despite its title, the poem takes up the voice of Jcphthah's daughter, who encourages her friends to greet the leader of the Gileadites as he approaches home. For the later drama, Robert would generally abandon rhymes, except for Jephthah's actual vow. In 1806, Robert spent some time in Vienna, attended lectures in Halle, visited his sister Rose in Amsterdam, and returned to Paris. In all of these places, he strove to

Dramatic History

1

learn more about literature and aesthetics, and, above all, about the dramatic stage. During this time, Robert moved from being a translator of other writers' works to becoming an author in his own right. His reputation was that of a man well-versed in literature though perhaps not overly original in his own production; he was also known for his witty epigrams, good appearance and skillful use of social connections. Following the war of 1806-1807, the Levin family's financial means diminished, and Robert felt obliged to return to Berlin. In late 1808, he seems to have attended August Wilhelm Schlegel's lectures on dramatic art and literature in Vienna. Robert's translation of Pierre Baour-Lormian's drama, Omasis oder Joseph in Agypten (Omasis, or Joseph in Egypt), was performed in Berlin in August 1808 and in Stuttgart a few months later. There is nothing to document Ludwig Robert's life during the period between 1807 and 1812, but it was sometime after 1807 that he must have begun work on Die Tochter Jephthas. As with Omasis, Robert chose a biblical subject of great popularity, one that would conceivably promise success. A letter from his sister Rahel to Rebecca Friedlander announced the completion of the play in 1810. "Please put in a good word for Jephtha with Goethe, if you can," Rahel urged her friend, who had penned a couple of novels under the name of Regina Frohberg. Rahel then added a punning sentence alluding to Goethe's near-divine powers: "He [sic] has been sent to Weimar now, and, so Goethe will, he will be performed."14 Although Friedlander's response does not survive, the fate of Robert's manuscript is documented in correspondence between Robert's cousin, Baroness Sara von Grotthuss, and Goethe. Grotthuss was actually a better advocate for the play, as she was more closely acquainted with Goethe. Born Sara Meyer, she had converted to Christianity after the death of her first, Jewish husband, and had married a Livonian baron. She and her sister Mariane (later Frau von Eybenberg) had met Goethe in 1795. The author had been enchanted with the two sisters' graciousness, and especially with Mariane's beauty. Goethe's correspondence with Grotthuss, however, seems to have been founded as much on pragmatism as on disinterested friendship, as the baroness answered each of his letters with delicacies that included a shipment of caviar, smoked geese and pike perch.15 Either Rahel or Robert himself must have asked Grotthuss to contact Goethe and send him the manuscript for consideration for the Weimar stage. Grotthuss' note to Goethe accompanying the manuscript is not preserved, but Goethe's letter to her, dated December 7, 1810, combines his thanks for her gifts of a commemorative china cup and a money purse with a comment on Die Tochter Jephthas, a manuscript he was ready to return: "The play could perhaps be performed, if the author would make changes that I would request."16 Writing soon thereafter to her sister Mariane, Goethe noted that "the protege of our dear Grotthuss should not fare badly, and we shall take the proper care with his productions." With regard to Jephthah's daughter, it was still unclear to him, Goethe continued, "in which way this good child should be sacrificed."17 Goethe thus assumed the position of Jephtha himself. In response to one of Sara von Grotthuss' reminders, Goethe commented on Robert's play more extensively. In a letter dated January 6, 1811, he insisted again that a production of the play "may not be impossible,"18 but that changes were

8

Lilianc Weissberg

advised. Goethe asked Robert to shorten his play, to reduce the number of its warriors from four to two and name them, and to change the rhymed verses in which Jephthah makes his vow. Meanwhile, on February 1, 1811, the unaltered version of the play was first performed in Breslau, a performance that Robert attended personally.19 If the later published version can serve as evidence, Robert was hesitant to follow Goethe's suggestions for revision, but on September 21, a probably slightly shorter version of Die Tochter Jephthas was staged at the court theater in Weimar. Without mentioning that Robert's play would be featured, Goethe reserved a seat in his balcony for Friedrich Schiller's wife Charlotte for that day.20 The theater bill announcing the play did not list Robert's name: although Jephthah's daughter had received a name (Dina), the playwright remained anonymous.21 Robert remained a largely unknown dramatist in Weimar, unable to break into the local literary scene. After a second performance on October 26, Die Tochter Jephthas closed, although it was staged in the following years in Prague (1813), Mainz (1815), Stuttgart (1818), Hamburg (1830) and Mannheim (performance date unknown). 22 Indeed, only Robert's second play, Die Macht der Verhaltnisse (The Power of Circumstances)—the first of his dramas to be published (1819)—was more successful.23 Nonetheless, Robert himself was dissatisfied with Die Tochter Jephthas. In 1820, the year the play was finally published, he wrote to his sister Rahel: "You don't care about Die Tochter Jephthas, I don't either! But it has a theatrical effect a la Kotzebue"24—a reference to the popular but much maligned dramatist August von Kotzebue. Two other plays authored by Robert were concerned with (or at least alluded to) Jews or Jewish issues. Die Macht der Verhaltnisse did not deal with any biblical theme; according to Robert, it was a pure product of his imagination. The audience, however, regarded it as a drama a clef based on a contemporary scandal involving Achim von Arnim's social misbehavior in a Berlin Jewish salon and his subsequent refusal to engage in a duel with Moritz Itzig, the hostess's nephew, on the grounds that Itzig was a Jew.25 In contrast to Die Tochter Jephthas and Die Macht der Verhaltnisse—Robert's only tragedies—Kassius und Phantasus oder der Paradiesvogel (Cassias and Phantasus or the Bird of Paradise, 1825) was a lighter play in which the German speech of one of his characters was laced with Yiddish words. Robert actually irritated some of the participants at a literary circle when reading excerpts of this dialogue.26 His use of Mauscheln, or German Jewish slang, seemed an allusion to Karl Borramaus Alexander Sessa's popular farce, Unser Verkehr (Our Social Trade)—a play that ridiculed its Jewish protagonists and had caused much consternation among Berlin's Jews. 27 Unlike Sessa, Robert was Jewish, and the Mauscheln of one of his heroes was considered a rather embarassing feature, especially in light of Robert's evident desire to assimilate. Indeed, in 1812, the former Lipman Levin had legally assumed the name Ludwig Robert-Tornow, and in 1819 he converted to Christianity shortly before his marriage to a non-Jewish woman.

Father and Child Ludwig Robert's Die Tochter Jephthas is set in the mountains near a place called Mirza. The drama opens with the appearance of Achas, a Seer, who laments both

Dramatic History

9

the horror of war and what is about to transpire in the near future. Achas has a son, Nimrod, who wants to become a soldier in order to win fame and make himself worthy for Jephtha's daughter, Dina. Achas struggles to hold him back, predicting Nimrod's death alongside Israel's victory. But Nimrod joins the troops secretly. Meanwhile, Jephtha has been wounded in battle and pledges a sacrifice to God, his vow being presented in the only trochaic verses in the drama. In the second act, Dina comes to Achas with a terrible dream requiring interpretation. Fearing his son's death, Achas turns away. Eleasser, Jephtha's nephew and Dina's betrothed, appears to announce to her Israel's victory. Nimrod, it turns out, has saved Jephtha's life. When Nimrod appears, he is greeted warmly by Dina, and it is clear that she is attracted to him. The act ends with Dina's wish to prepare a welcome for her father. Songs are introduced in the third act (both the Breslau and the Weimar productions of the play used original music for the production,28 as was customary in the theater of the time). Dina comes forth to meet Jephtha, and learns about her fate. While she accepts her impending death, Jephtha, Eleasser and Nimrod protest. Achas advises Jephtha to seek advice from the high priest; Nimrod in turn wants to flee with Dina. Eleasser loves her but suspects that she may love his rival. Meanwhile, Jephtha enters, struck with madness. In Robert's play, Jephtha's victory is one battle in a war that has not yet ended. In the fourth act, Eleasser returns to report Nimrod's death: in his madness, Jephtha had mistaken him for the king of the Ammonites and had killed him. The final act presents Eleasser and Achas, the latter mourning his son. Jephtha has recovered from his madness and realizes that he has murdered Nimrod. A chorus of priests announces the death of Jephtha's daughter, who has clearly chosen to fulfill her father's vow. It is now clear that she is the heroine of the drama. The love story of Dina and Nimrod, and that of Eleasser's unrequited love, was grafted by Robert onto the original biblical tale. As noted, Robert also gave Jephtha's daughter the name of Dina, an allusion to another biblical story, that of Jacob and Leah's daughter Dinah, who was raped by Shechem (Gen. 34).29 In Die Tochter Jephthas, Dina dreams of blood, and her nightmare is repeatedly mentioned. Her dream rivals the visions of Achas the Seer, even though Dina learns how to interpret it only toward the end of the play. In contrast to the biblical Jephthah, Robert's Jephtha is both warrior and madman, a hero turned irrational, able to kill his daughter as well as Achas' son. His madness parallels his tragic vow, except that it is beyond his control. Through his madness, a higher power is introduced that limits man's responsibility for his actions. Robert's drama is written in blank verse. In this it is similar to the plays of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who not only helped to shape the classical German theater but also reinvented the figure of the Jew on stage. In the Levin home—as in most Berlin Jewish households—Lessing's works were de rigueur, an essential part of German Jewish Bildung.30 But Robert's Jephtha does not have the wise judgement of Lessing's Nathan, who preached tolerance among all religions and tribes. Jephtha's madness and Dina's dream are rather the fare of the Romantic stage—or of Shakespeare's plays, which were much admired by the early Goethe and the Romantics alike. Indeed, Jephtha's madness draws him close to a particular Shake-

10

Liliane Weissberg

spearean figure, King Lear, who may have had different reasons to tear his clothes or feel victimized by a daughter. When Goethe finally engaged in a more extensive discussion of Robert's play, he focused specifically on the parallels between Lear and Robert's Jephtha. Die Tochter Jephthas had closed in Weimar after its second performance, and Sara von Grotthuss had apparently asked Goethe for a fuller appraisal. In a letter dated January 8, 1812, Goethe explains that while the play may have had its strengths, its weaknesses would prevent its future success. The audience could too easily detect that the characters, situation, and ideas that Robert had used for his play were essentially derivative in nature. And while the first three acts could hold the viewer's attention, the fourth act simply recalled King Lear "in an unpleasant way."31 The last act, according to Goethe, was characterized by "vain pomp" ("vergeblicher Pomp"). But the problem may lie deeper still: If the fable here at issue should have some significance, Jcphtha's daughter has to be a domestic girl, be it because of public or private mores; the father cannot even imagine her leaving and entering the house at will, as he is making his vow, and her first step out of the door, guided by her childlike love, has to provoke her death. This good Dina, however, runs around in the countryside right from the beginning, and reminds one of her namesake, who would also have done better to remain at home, instead of going to Sichem to visit the daughters of the country, which caused her of course to become the prey of the country's sons.32 For Goethe, then, the derivativeness of the play from Shakespeare is less problematic than the depiction of the female character. Part Jephthah's daughter and part biblical Dinah, she is a victim—but a somewhat inappropriate one. As a character, Dina does not show much development. She roams the wild landscape both before and after Jephtha's return. While Jephtha may not expect his daughter to come and greet him, for Goethe, this exit from her father's house offers no surprise. Even her maid Bilka, whom Robert had invented as a mother surrogate, is unable to keep Dina in rein. Quite clearly, Dina lacks not only the properties of a well-developed dramatic figure, but also those of a well-educated girl. She does not present an image of domesticity. It is not so much the comparison between Jephtha and Shakespeare's King Lear that may be troubling to Goethe, but that of Dina and one of his own dramatic characters, Iphigenie. Goethe's drama Iphigenie auf Tauris was published in 1787; it refers to Euripides' Iphigenia plays, but establishes a heroine who has to confront human sacrifice while preserving bourgeois values. Somehow, Dina not only defies domesticity, but becomes, as a consequence of this defiance, an unbelievable dramatic character. The only reviewer of the printed version of Robert's drama, Amandus Gottfried Adolf Mullner, had little commentary on Dina's love interest or Jephtha's madness. Instead, he compared Dina to Iphigenia, bypassing Goethe, however, while insisting on the Greek sources.33 Milliner's reference to Euripides' dramas has precedents within the tradition of the Jephthah plays themselves. In dramas such as the Sacrificium divinae providentiae sen filia Jephtes, published anonymously in 1755, the story of Agamemnon and Iphigenia appears in the interludes both as a comment on

Dramatic History

11

Jephthah's tale and as a bond between the Bible and the world of Greek mythology.34 In Milliner's reading, however, an interplay between the two stories is not necessary. The similarities between Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis and Robert's Die Tochter Jephthas are, according to him, quite obvious. The "Greek apple" and the "German pear," the Greek and the Jewish material, merge into a common, ancient source. For Mullner, Die Tochter Jephthas' Jewish material parallels the Greek tale and provides a story for the modern playwright that is both narrative (Geschichte) and history (Geschichte). That is, it becomes a contemporary German play: The similarity of the Jewish material with the Greek is obvious, and, if one presupposes that the modern poet deals with history, at least the ancient one, as freely as the Greek with his fables of heroes, it would undoubtedly be possible to make this material into a dramatic production that would have the same effect as a work of art; especially as in this particular case, the additions to the facts seem more pertinent than any changes of them.35

Thus, Mullner's review inserts Robert's play into the debate concerning the ancients and the moderns, and the relationship between contemporary drama to that of ancient Greece. Robert himself had already referred to this debate, not with regard to Die Tochter Jephthas, but rather concerning Die Macht der Verhaltnisse, published in the previous year. Although Robert prefaced that publication with a citation from Goethe's autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit (Fiction and Truth) claiming that true representation does not have any didactic purpose, he added two instructive letters to a "female friend" as an introduction and an afterword to that play.36 In these letters, Robert is less concerned with the question of whether the contemporary author should work on ancient material or choose "modern" material instead. Playwrights have been successful in their imitation of Greek drama, Robert suggests, citing both Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris and August Wilhelm Schlegel's Ion as such "recreations".37 However, he added, both plays do not necessarily touch their audience's emotions, but offer intellectual pleasure only. Lessing had already distinguished between ancient and contemporary tragedy; the latter, according to him, would rely on a modern setting and the bourgeois family. He called this genre biirgerliches Trauerspiel, or a (modern) bourgeois play of mourning. By the time Robert began producing his dramas, however, the notion of biirgerliches Trauerspiel had come under severe attack. Kotzebue in particular, but also other authors of the early nineteenth century, appeared to have discredited it by staging scarcely believable plots full of what Robert himself had referred to as "theatrical effects." In his first letter prefacing Die Macht der Verhaltnisse, Robert anticipates the reader's surprise at being once again faced with this genre, and goes on to refer to dramas very different from Kotzebue's plays. The plots of Shakespeare's plays or Schiller's drama Kabale undLiebe (Intrigue and Love), he argues, also rely on family structures; they stress human decisions rather than God's power and represent the recognizable quality of the prosaic and commonplace. "Should we disregard a whole genre because it was not treated well, but had achieved a monopoly on the stage nevertheless?" he asks. Perhaps there is no need to refer to pagan

12

Liliane Weissberg

themes and distant times and places. Sophocles would not have wanted to be an Indian, Robert argues, taking up the defense for the familiar, much as art criticism had done in the wake of Johann Joachim Winckelmann's essay of 1755 on the Nachahmung (imitation) of Greek art. Robert's conclusion is that the modern Christian drama, focusing on the person rather than stressing a supernatural and mysterious power, can discuss evil with a newly defined moral clarity.38 Whereas Mullner compared the Greek with the biblical material and saw both as "ancient" sources, Robert likened his first drama to a burgerliches Trauerspiel', a genre that he would at first condemn—like many other Romantic critics—and later, with Die Macht der Verhaltnisse, embrace. Although he dealt with an "ancient" subject, the printed version of Die Tochter Jephthas already bears the designation Trauerspiel. Aspects of the drama become more striking if the reader or viewer keeps Robert's views in mind. God seems absent in this play, and Jephtha's independent vow of human sacrifice draws the tale closer to the realm of the Trauerspiel— as does Robert's insistence on, and elaboration of, the family settings with fathers and children, lovers and betrothed. Goethe's insistence on Dina's domesticity points to those moments in which Robert seems to deviate from nineteenth-century social decorum that Goethe, like other viewers, would expect. Thus, Robert's play may indeed be a "modern," "Christian" drama with Jewish characters, a burgerliches Trauerspiel projected into the biblical past. Instead of a Nachbildung (recreation) of an ancient subject, it may be an example of the new German dramatic art. For Robert, the modern drama can rival that of ancient times, engaging its audience by means of relating more closely to the audience's experiences. For Miillner, too, the contemporary drama can achieve the same effect as the ancient one, once the author uses true poetic license with given historic facts. But Miillner says more than this. Both the ancient Greek and the "Jewish" material are historic for the contemporary German audience, and in a similar way. While Mullner views Die Tochter Jephthas as a tragedy rather than a Trauerspiel, its material nonetheless contributes to the current literary and social scene. The drama provides German art with its own "German" history. Miillner does not hint at Robert's own Jewish heritage. The "Jewish" material of the play is biblical. Johann Gottfried Herder, in his various writings on "oriental" literature, on the Bible and on the conversion of Jews (his essay "Bekehrung der Juden"), had long since distinguished between the Jews of old, as described in the Bible, and the Jews who lived in the German countries of his time.39 The Jews of the Bible were admirable, and Moses himself was a model for the guide the new German nation would demand. Contemporary Jews, however, were without land and proper creed. Thus, for the theologian Herder, the Old Testament did not provide the context for contemporary Jewish religion so much as for modern Christianity. Herder's own version of the Jephthah story, "Die Opfertaube," published in the collection Blatter der Vorzeit: Dichtungen aus der morgenlandischen Sage (Pages from Ancient Times: Poetry from the Oriental Sagas), combines a curious set of elements. Herder focuses on Jephthah's daughter's fate.40 His Jephthah wants to keep his word and sacrifice his daughter, even though the priest instructs him that God would not ask for her death. At the final moment, another biblical figure, Abraham, interferes and rescues the girl, and Jephtha sacrifices a dove instead.

Dramatic History

13

While Jephtha's daughter still meets an early death, this death is "natural" and Godwilled; Jephtha is punished by being made childless. The dove easily combines the story of the Old Testament with Christian symbolism. This is where Milliner seems to take his cue: a Jewish subject viewed as biblical material can become a "German pear." But what can be said about Ludwig Robert's choice of story? If the drama is not just viewed as a Tragodie, but as a burgerliches Trauerspiel as well, can it contribute to our understanding of the Jews of Robert's time—those who embraced bourgeois values, but were not, or had just become, citizens (Burger) themselves?

Israel and Prussia Thirty years before the completion of Robert's drama, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had staged his opera Idomeneo as a Greek fable of promised human sacrifice, using the tale as a symbolic private reckoning with his father.41 Robert's father, Levin Markus, was known as a man of volatile temper who kept a tight rein on his family; it was rumored that he had been a member of a band of thieves and had been brandmarked before he established his position as a prominent businessman in preNapoleonic Berlin. Whether Robert sought posthumous revenge on his father in his depiction of Jephtha, the outcast, while portraying himself in the character of a beloved but victimized daughter, remains in the realm of speculation, as does the possibility that Robert did not view himself as a legitimate heir to his father's life and profession. There can be no speculation, however, about another father figure in Robert's life who may also have influenced his play. Robert, as well as his sister Rahel, was a great admirer of the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Robert read through versions of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre and attended at least some of his lectures, certainly after 1807, in Berlin. During the winter of 1804-1805, Fichte had offered his lecture series Grundzuge des gegenwartigen Zeitalters (Features of the Current Age), which came out in written form in 1806.42 The Grundzuge were followed by his lectures Reden an die deutsche Nation (Lectures to the German Nation).43 Fichte combined Romantic philosophy with a call for German nationalism that was appreciated by many Berlin Jews (despite Fichte's occasional antisemitic remarks). Robert, his sister, and many of their Jewish friends subscribed to Fichte's lessons and attended them with much enthusiasm. Moreover, Rahel and Ludwig Robert became Prussian patriots, and they began to adopt Fichte's views concerning the Christian religion that was to define the future, unified German state. Rahel's newly found patriotism would soon be called into action. The wars of liberation commenced in 1809, and Rahel fled from Berlin to Prague in 1813 as the fighting drew closer. In Prague, Rahel worked as a nurse for wounded Prussian soldiers, collected clothes and medical supplies, and solicited money from her Jewish friends, with great success. After the formal Jewish emancipation in 1812, Jewish patriotism became fervent and "official." "If the Christians would give as much as the Jews, there would be no want," Rahel wrote to her gentile friend and future husband, Karl August Varnhagen.44 During this time, Rahel also promoted

14

Liliane Weissberg

her brother's literary work: as noted, Die Tochter Jephthas was performed in Prague in 1813. Featuring as hero a military leader set on victory, Die Tochter Jephthas could not be viewed in these times of war as being bereft of allusions to Prussian patriotism. The context of Die Tochter Jephthas had changed and had provided the play with new topicality. Indeed, the Prague performance of Robert's drama followed that of another of his works, a short-lived play called Der Tag der Schlacht oder das Granzdorfchen (The Day of the Battle, or the Little Village at the Border),45 The reception of these works, as well as Robert's political views at that time, can be traced in his and Rahel's surviving letters.46 During and after the wars of liberation, Robert continued to write poetry. His collection of patriotic poems, Kampfe der Zeit. Zwolf Gedichte (Battles of Time: Twelve Poems), was published in 1817, and is dedicated to Fichte.47 With reference to the war, he describes Fichte's notion of freedom, and declares the philosopher himself to be an immortal spirit that had guided him. At the same time, Robert's patriotism was constantly put to the test. In a letter to Ludwig Tieck dated March 30, 1816, for example, Robert reports that notes were posted on the announcements of Die Macht der Verhaltnisse, declaring that his play was simply a "mess by a Jew" (Sudelei von einem Juden). He considered a departure from Berlin: "This true regression of true Bildung drives me away from here; from now on, I would like to live as a stranger in strange lands, because my fatherland cannot be from this world."48 Karlsruhe may have appeared as a better place, as "these Swabians, it seems to me, have the best gift to become the most perfect Germans."49 But it is precisely from Karlsruhe that Robert reports to Rahel the Hep Hep riots of 1819, describing the persecution of Jews there and the damage to Jewish property.50 Indeed, Robert's correspondence with his sister is filled with comments on Jews and on issues pertaining to Jews. 51 He chose to convert to Christianity later than his sister or his brothers, and questions about his own identity mark the time both before his conversion and thereafter. For Robert, Judaism was not a matter of religion. In a poem entitled "Jude oder Christ" ("Jew or Christian"), sent to Rahel in 1816, Robert sees the definition of Christian and Jew as an ethical one, much in the spirit of the Enlightenment. While there seems to be a choice, there is perhaps no choice at all: Wenn der ein Jud' ist, der im Mutterleibe Verdammt schon war zu niederm Sklavenstande; Der ohne Rechte lebt im Vaterlande, Dem Pobel, der mil Koth wirft, eine Scheibe; Dem gar nichts hilft, was er auch thu' und treibe; Des Leidenskelch doch voll bleibt, bis am Rande, Verachtungsvoll und schmachvoll und voll Schande— Dann bin ich Jud'—und weiss auch, dass ichs bleibe. Und wenn Der Christ ist, der sich streng befleisset, Sein Erdenkreutz in Demuth zu ertragen,

Dramatic History

15

Und die zu lieben, die ihn todlich hassen; Glaubend, dass Alles, was sein Herz zerreisset, Der Herr, um ihn zu priifen zugelassen;— Dann bin ich Christ!—das darf ich redlich sagen. (If he's a Jew, who was already in his mother's womb / Doomed to assume the lower status of a slave / Who has to live, without any rights, in his fatherland / A target for the rabble-throwing shit // Who is not helped by anything he makes or does / Whose cup of suffering remains full to its brim / Filled with contempt and shame and also with disgrace— / Then I am a Jew—and know as well that I will remain one // And if he is a Christian who is trying hard / To wear his earthly cross with some humility / And strives to love those who hate him to death // Who believes that everything that rips his heart apart/ Was offered by Him as a test—/ Then I am Christian!—and I can say this honestly.)52 Robert's poems collected in Kampfe der Zeit, and his remarks on antisemitism and on his own position as a Jew, date between the completion of Die Tochter Jephthas in 1810 and the drama's publication in 1820. Jephtha may have been the figure of a "Christian" drama, but he was a Jewish soldier and had become a patriot as well. But for which country and which nation? In 1810, this question was left to the audience's imagination. This audience could distinguish the biblical war hero from the contemporary Jew and view Jephtha as an early Christian and pre-German. By 1820, however, the scene had slightly changed. Following the emancipation edict of 1812, it was still impossible for Jews to be transformed from outcast to military leader, as was the case with Jephtha, but they could become soldiers. Hundreds of Jews joined the Prussian army to liberate their country and drive back the Napoleonic forces. Moritz Itzig, for example, who had challenged Arnim, died as a soldier in the war, while Arnim himself chose not to fight. Robert himself never joined the army, but his motives were quite different from those of Arnim. In a letter to Rahel from 1815 that refers to the 1812 edict as well as to the Itzig case, he explained: What is to become of me you ask?—A soldier I cannot become; 1 don't ride and on foot I would be in the sick bay within the first eight days; and even if 1 were healthy and vigorous enough, I still could not go along. I have examined myself carefully and earnestly. It is impossible for one, after he has been forbidden as a Jew for 35 years, suddenly to have courage—1 mean this kind of courage—1 have another kind—I wouldn't let myself be insulted without fighting [a duel]. Living in this society, we were conditioned from childhood in this notion. I would, in order to achieve a great goal, give up my comfort and quiet; suffer an amputation for something that would be salutary to humanity; indeed, even give this miserable bit of life—But to be the cog in the wheel of a violent death and dying machine—to suffer and fall in with the rank and file—That thought has entered my mind so little during all my life, was so impossible given my circumstances, that 1 couldn't grasp, couldn't suffer it even with the most robust constitution, which unfortunately I do not have—If the state can make no other use of me; as a soldier it will not get me, this three-year-old child, because this is how long I have been a citizen.53

The biblical Jephthah turned out to be a rather problematic hero for a Jew who strove for assimilation, whose nation was neither (quite) Israel, nor (quite) Prussia,

16

Liliane Weissberg

and could not quite be both. Was Robert ever really in a position to rival Jephthah's military success? Or was he not, in turn, a virgin, powerless, child-like daughter who was condemned to death by her own father? The Prussian king was not only the highest military leader, but also the Landesvater to his people; his monarchy enforced an ideology in which the relationship of father and child provided the metaphor for Prussia's politics. As Robert's letter suggests, however, this father was hardly allowed to sacrifice his (Jewish) child for any victory.54 The story of another Jewish child should perhaps be considered. Just a few months after Robert's completion of Die Tochter Jephthas, another Berlin Jew, the young Meyer Beer (later known as Giacomo Meyerbeer) would compose his first opera, Jephtas Gelubde. The opera was first performed in Munich on December 23, 1812, and met with some success.55 Meyerbeer called Jephta's daughter Sulima and brought the story of father and child to a happy end. Sulima is a dutiful daughter, Jephta proves his obedience to his people and God, and human sacrifice is prevented. Meyerbeer himself had just become a Prussian citizen in the year of his opera's performance; he was not eager to follow a call for arms, however, or stay at home as an obedient daughter would. He extended his Prussian exile, traveled to Austria and later even to France. Unlike Robert, Meyerbeer did not justify his actions, but rather subjected them to scrutiny. In a letter to his former tutor, who stayed, as his parents did, in Berlin, Meyerbeer writes: Last year, when the Prussian government asked the entire youth to join the army voluntarily, I believed, according to my own view of things, and also in regard to my own personality, that it would be advantageous for me not to enlist. These views may have remained the same, but I have attained (unfortunately, too late) the conviction that one cannot have any views in a moment such as that. As the moment itself decides and defines, all contemplations about one's relationship to the past and future are without any purpose in crises such as these. Because of this conclusion, I cannot deny that I have, in reality, embezzled the state of my own person, and I fear that I have put, with this memory, a scorpion on my breast that will gnaw on my sense of honor until the end of my life.56

While Robert, who would refuse to enlist, converted to Christianity, Meyerbeer, eager to call upon a sense of civic honor, never did. Having been written, respectively, in 1810 and 1812, Die Tochter Jephthas and Jephtas Gelubde do not comment directly on the dilemma of combining Prussian patriotism with a sense of Jewish identity. But their authors' decision to take up the Jephthah theme at the time of the debates about Jewish emancipation rephrases the contexts of their work. The warrior and his daughter as present on the Prague or Munich stage had to allude to Israel as well as Prussia, to the Bible and to the reality of the contemporary war, to the Hebrew past and Jewish present, to the Jewish commitment to the Prussian state. Was Mirza in Palestine? Or was it a battlefield closer to Berlin? For at least one critic of Ludwig Robert's play, this question finds a straightforward answer. In an article on Robert Ludwig in the Grundrisz zur Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung aus den Quellen (Outline of the History of German Poetry from Its Sources) published in 1905, Karl Goedeke discusses Die Tochter Jephthas by focusing on the 1820 date of its publication in book form:

Dramatic History

17

The references to contemporary events, to the fall and rise of Prussia, are obvious, and these do not hurt the dramatic objectivity. These references are kept as individual ones, however; they are only made in regard to an individual, the figure of Nimrod, and not presented in terms of the people itself. They are allusions only, and they point from the play to the poet's own life.57

But while Robert still tried to think of the possibility of being Christian, Prussian, and a Jew, for Goedeke, the separation of Prussians and Jews had already been established. It marked the difference between politics and religion, contemporary Germany and the Jewish past. In Robert's play, the rigidity of Jewish laws, the joy of Jewish obedience, was presented along with a problem in Jewish history, he writes, and Robert was therefore unable to succeed with a unified plot or solve Jephtha's dilemma from the point of view of modern, contemporary ethics. Many years later, following the Second World War, Lion Feuchtwanger would take up the subject of Jephthah and his daugther again.58 In the afterword to his book Jefta und seine Tochter (Jefta and his Daughter), Feuchtwanger reflects on the character of a biblical tale and wonders how it could be transformed into a historical novel. For such a novel, the Bible's Geschichtlichkeit (historicity) would have to be translated in a way that would engage its readers while offering a detailed panorama of a time past. This panorama should provide a distanced view of the story's characters.59 Robert's drama, on the other hand, produces a distance of a different kind. In the difference between his rendering of biblical characters and the reality of his own life and times, he inscribes his aesthetic concept of the new German drama as well as early nineteenth-century German Jewish history.

Notes I have adopted the spelling of Jephthah's name as presented by the individual authors of the literary works quoted. If not marked otherwise, all translations from the German are mine. I would like to thank Lisa Horowitz and Laurie Fialkoff for their help in preparing this manuscript for publication. 1. Jacques Derrida, Schibboleth pour Paul Celan (Paris: 1986), 92. 2. Quoted after J. Alberto Soggin, Judges: A Commentary (Philadelphia: 1981), 203. 3. See Walter Baumgartner, "Jephtas Geliibde Jud. 11 30-40," Archiv fur Religionswissenschaft XVIII (1915), 240-249. 4. Erich Auerbach, "Odysseus' Scar," in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: 1953), 3-23, esp. 14-15. 5. See The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 3, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: 1992), 680. 6. Wilbur Owen Sypherd, Jephthah and his Daughter: A Study in Comparative Literature (Newark, Del.: 1948). See also Murray Roston, Biblical Drama in England: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day (Evanston, 111.: 1968). 7. See the program forJephte Tragedie (Dijon: 1752), a play given by the scholars of the College de Dijon, cited in Sypherd, Jephthah and his Daughter, 163-164; Johann Zihler, Der Jephte mil seiner dochter (Nordlingen: ca. 1612); Ann Wilson, Jephthah's Daughter (London: 1783). 8. Johanna Porwig, "Der Jephtastoff in der deutschen Dichtung" (Ph.D. diss., University of Breslau, 1932), 38-39. 9. In the Levin family correspondence, and in much of the secondary literature, Liepmann is generally refered to as the "uncle."

18

Liliane Wcissbcrg

10. Sec Heidi Thomann Tewarson, "German-Jewish Identity in the Correspondence between Rahel Levin Varnhagen and Her Brother, Ludwig Robert: Hopes and Realities of Emancipation 1780-1830," Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 39 (1994), 3-29, esp. 6-15, and Miriam Sambursky, "Ludwig Roberts Lebensgang. Die Briefe," Leo Baeck Institute Bulletin 15, no. 52 (Neue Folge, 1976), 23-47. Sambursky's paper, which largely relies on research by Percy Matentko, corrects information included in an earlier article by Lothar Kahn, "Ludwig Roberts Lebensgang," Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 18 (1973), 185-199. A critical edition of Ludwig Robert's correspondence with his sister Rahel, edited by Consolina Vigliero, is forthcoming from Beck Verlag, Munich. 11. Sambursky, "Ludwig Roberts Lebensgang. Die Briefe," 6-7. 12. See Ernst Altendorff, "Ludwig Robert. Bin Beitrag zur Berliner Romantik" (Ph.D. diss., University of Leipzig, 1923), 44. 13. Ludwig Robert, Gedichte, vol. 1 (Mannheim: 1838), 70-74. 14. Rahel Levin to Rebecca Friedlandcr, 27 Sept. 1810, Briefe an eine Freundin: Rahel Varnhagen an Rebecca Friedlander, ed. Deborah Hertz (Cologne: 1988), 271. See also my forthcoming essay on Rahel Levin and Rebecca Friedlander, "Bodies in Pain: Reflections on the Jewish Salon," in The German-Jewish Dialogue: A Non-Event? Festschrift for George Mosse, cd. Klaus Berghahn. 15. See Ludwig Geiger (cd.), "Einundzwanzig Briefe von Marianne von Eybenbcrg, acht von Sara von Grotthuss, zwanzig von Varnhagen von Ense an Goethe, zwei Briefe Gocthes an Frau von Eybenberg," Goethe Jahrbuch 14 (1893), 27-142. See also his letterto Mariane von Eybenberg, ca. January 1811, Goethes Werke IV, vol. 21, Goethes Briefe (Juli 1809Dezember 1810), ed. for the GroBherzogin Sophie von Sachsen (Weimar: 1896), 436-437. The letter has been incorrectly dated "December 1810" in this edition of Goethe's works. 16. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Sara von Grotthuss, 6 Jan. 1811; Goethes Werke IV, vol. 21, 436. 17. Goethe to Mariane von Eybenberg, ca. Jan. 1811, ibid., 437. 18. Goethe to Grotthuss, 1 Jan. 1811; ibid., 434-435, here 434. The letter is incorrectly dated "6 December 1810" in this edition of Goethe's works; see Ludwig Geiger, "Einundzwanzig Briefe," 122. 19. Altendorff, "Ludwig Robert," 118. 20. Goethe to Charlotte von Schiller, 21 Sept. 1811, Goethes Werke IV, vol. 22, 166-167. 21. Porwig, "Der Jephthastoff in der deutschen Dichtung," 81n. 22. See Altendorff, "Ludwig Robert," 119, and handwritten corrections on this page in the Leipzig archival copy. 23. Ludwig Robert, Die Macht der Verhdltnisse. Ein Trauerspiel in fiinf Aufzugen und zwei Briefe uber das antike und moderne und uber das sogenannte burgerliche Trauerspiel (Stuttgart and Tubingen: 1819). Die Macht der Verhdltnisse may have been completed as early as the summer of 1811; it was first performed on 30 Nov. 1815 in Berlin. 24. Altendorff, "Ludwig Robert," 118. Die Tochter Jephthas came out in printed version in 1820 as Tochter Jephthas: Ein Trauerspiel in fiinf Aufzugen (Stuttgart and lubingen). 25. See Altendorff, "Ludwig Robert," 106-109. 26. See Robert to Rahel, 23 Sept. 1822; Sambursky, "Ludwig Roberts Lebensgang. Die Briefe," 42. 27. Sec Hans-Joachim Neubaucr, "Auf Begehr: Unscr Verkehr," in Antisemitismus und Jiidische Geschichte. Studien zu Ehren von Herbert A. Strauss, ed. Rainer Erb and Michael Schmidt (Berlin: 1987), 313-327, and Neubauer, Judenfiguren: Drama und Theater im fruhen 19. Jahrhundert, (ser.) Schriftenreihe des Zentrums fur Antisemitismusforschung Berlin 2 (Frankfurt: 1994). 28. Altendorff, "Ludwig Robert," 118-119. 29. This is not only a talc of rape and revenge—Dinah's brothers proceed to kill Shechem and raid his city—but also the story of an attempt to become Jewish. After the rape, Shechem falls in love with Dinah. As a precondition for any marriage, Dinah's brothers demand that Shechem and the other inhabitants of his town should be circumcised. While they lie recuperating, Dinah's brothers plunder the town.

Dramatic History

19

30. Compare, for example, Rahel's early correspondence with David Veil in which Lessing's works are often cited, Briefwechsel zwischen Rahel und David Veit vols. 1-2, Aus dem Nachlafi Varnhagen's von Ense (Leipzig: 1861). 31. Goethe to Grotthuss, 8 Jan. 1812; Goethes Werke IV, vol. 22, 239-243, here 241. 32. Ibid., 241-242. 33. [Amandus Gottfried Adolf] Milliner, "Dramatische Dichtkunst," review of Die Tochter Jephthas. Ein Trauerspiel in fiinf Aufziigen von Ludwig Robert, Morgenblatt, LiteraturBlatt 31 (7 April 1821), 121-124. 34. See Sypherd, Jephthah and his Daughter, 164. 35. Mullner, "Dramatische Dichtkunst," 122. 36. Robert, "Erster Brief" and "Zweyter Brief," Die Macht der Verhaltnisse, 3-12 and 134-148. Robert's views on ancient and modern drama are also presented in his later reviews of dramas or operas for the Morgenblatt fur gebildete Stande or the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung and other papers. See, for example, his "Bemerkungen, weniger fur Deutsche als fiir Franzosen, iiber Goethe's Tasso und den von Herrn Alexis Duval in Paris," Morgenblatt 37 (12 Feb. 1827), 145-151. 37. Robert "Zweiter Brief," 39. 38. Robert, "Erster Brief," 5, 7, 10. 39. See Liliane Weissberg, "Juden oder Hebraer? Religiose und politische Bekehrung bei Herder," in Johann Gottfried Herder: Geschichte und Kultur, ed. Martin Bollacher (Wurzburg: 1994), 191-211. 40. Johann Gottfried Herder, "Die Opfertaube," Zerstreute Blatter. 1. Blatter der Vorzeit. Dichtungen aus der morgenlandischen Sage. Dritte Sammlung, Samtliche Werke 26, ed. Bernhard Suphan, Poetische Werke, ed. Carl Redlich (Berlin: 1882), 347-348. 41. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Idomeneo was first performed in Munich in 1781. 42. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Grundzuge des gegenwartigen Zeitalters in Vorlesungen, gehalten im Winter 1804/05 (Berlin: 1806). 43. Fichte, Reden an die deutsche Nation (Berlin: 1808). 44. Rahel to Karl August Varnhagen, 10 April 1813; Briefwechsel zwischen Varnhagen und Rahel, vol. 3 Aus dem NachlaB Varnhagen's von Ense (Leipzig: 1875), 48. 45. See Altendorff, "Ludwig Robert," 37. 46. See Sambursky, "Ludwig Roberts Lebensgang. Die Briefe"; other letters and comments by Robert are included in Wilhelm Dorow's Denkschriften und Briefe zur Charakteristik der Welt und Litteratur (Berlin: 1838), Dorow's Erlebtes aus den Jahren 1790-1827 (Leipzig: 1845) and Dorow's Reminiscenzen. Goethe's Mutter nebst Briefen und Aufzeichnungen zur Charakteristik anderer merkwurdiger Manner und Frauen (Leipzig: 1842), as well as Heinrich Heine's Briefe, ed. Friedrich Hirth (Mainz: 1950), and Ludwig Tieck's Briefe an Ludwig Tieck, vol. 3, ed. Karl von Holtei (Breslau: 1864). 47. Ludwig Robert, Kampfe der Zeit. Zwolf Gedichte (Stuttgart and Tubingen: 1817). 48. Robert to Ludwig Tieck, 30 March 1816; Briefe an Ludwig Tieck, 144. 49. Robert to Tieck (undated), ibid., 145. 50. Robert to Rahel, 22 Aug. 1819; Sambursky, "Ludwig Roberts Lebensgang. Die Briefe," 34-37. 51. See Sambursky, "Ludwig Roberts Lebensgang. Die Briefe," and Tewarson, "GermanJewish Identity." 52. Robert to Rahel, 27 Jan. 1816, Sambursky, "Ludwig Roberts Lebensgang. Die Briefe," 28. 53. Robert to Rahel, 18 April 1815, Sambursky, "Ludwig Roberts Lebensgang. Die Briefe," 23. I am quoting here the English translation in Tewarson, "German-Jewish Identity," 17. 54. With regard to the father/child relationship enshrined in the political structure of the Prussian state and the position of the Jew, see Weissberg, "Literary Therapy: Lazarus Bendavid and the Possibilities of Jewish Authorship," Transactions of the Ninth International Congress on the Enlightenment (Munster, 23-29 July 1995) (Oxford: forthcoming). 55. See Giacomo Meyerbeer's diary entries from Sept.-Dec. 1812, Briefwechsel und

20

Liliane Wcissberg

Tagebucher, vol. 1, ed. Heinz Becker (Berlin: 1960), 212-213; his letter to J.G. Wohlbriick, dated 6 Jan. 1813, Briefwechsd and Tagebucher, vol. 1, 214, and to J.B. Gansbacher, dated 16 Jan. 1813; Briefwechsel und Tagebucher, vol. 1, 216. See also the discussion in Georg Richard Kruse, "Meyerbeers Jugendopern," Zeitschrift fur Musikwissenschaft 1 (19181919), 399-413, esp. 400-401. 56. Meyerbeer to Aron Wolfssohn, 20 Jan. 1814; quoted in Heinz Becker, Giacomo Meyerbeer in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Reinbek: 1980), 27. 57. Karl Goedikc, Grundrisz zur Geschiche der deutschen Dichtung aus den Quellen, vol. 8, 2nd edition, ed. Edmund Goetze (Dresden: 1905), 514. 58. Lion Feuchtwangcr, Jefta und seine Tochter (Reinbek: 1957). 59. Feuchtwanger, "Nachwort des Autors 1957," in Jefta und seine Tochter (Frankfurt: 1983), 260-268.

Englishness and Extraterritoriality: BritishJewish Writing and Diaspora Culture Bryan Cheyette (UNIVERSITY OF LONDON)

We are lifted of all we know And hang from implacable boughs—Isaac Rosenberg, "Chagrin" (1916) The locus of truth is always extraterritorial: its diffusion is made clandestine by the barbed wire and watch-towers of national dogma—George Steiner, "Our Homeland, the Text" (1985)

In a recent essay Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi contends that, after the Second World War, Yiddish and Hebrew literature became "reterritorialized" on American and Israeli soil.1 Jewish linguistic or cultural "nonterritoriality" was no longer historically viable; the main thrust of Jewish writing, she maintains, was toward a gradual territorialization on the brutally redrawn post-Shoah map. But the narrowness of this contention is most apparent when we look at those metropolitan centers of postwar Jewish culture as cited by Ezrahi: New York, Montreal, Chicago, Buenos Aires, Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem. Had London and Manchester been included on this list (not to mention numerous other major European cities), then it might have been possible to see a continuation, rather than a stark discontinuity, with an extraterritorial canon of Jewish literature.2 These English cities represent a place that simultaneously belongs to European culture and, at the same time, is determinedly separate from the continent of Europe and its history. Most obviously, London and Manchester avoided Nazi rule and, in terms of their Jewish occupants, they have an unusually continuous sense of a Jewish past.3 In this regard, these cities might be related to their North American counterparts—except for the fact that Jewish culture has evolved on both sides of the Atlantic in radically different forms. The problem with concentrating only on the American side of the Atlantic, as is so often the case, is that this tends to Americanize diaspora Jewish culture. American Jewish literature is frequently characterized in terms of Loren Baritz's paradox: "To be a Jew is to remember. An American must forget."4 What British Jewish authors encounter, however, is not merely an enforced cultural amnesia but an alternative Englishness, rooted in the past, that they are meant to absorb uncritically. 21

22

Bryan Cheyette

To a large extent, the difference between American Jewish and British Jewish writing is crystallized in terms of this opposing relationship to the past. Richard Chase has long since argued that the American novel "tends to rest in contradictions and among extreme ranges of experience," whereas the English novel "gives the impression of absorbing all extremes, all maladjustments and contradictions into a normative view of life." This distinction, as Ann Massa has shown, can be applied equally to Jewish literature.5 But what is interesting about British Jewish writing is the apparent difficulty that it has in assimilating a monolithic Englishness. Whereas American Jews can constantly reinvent themselves using prevalent American mythologies, English "national culture" is made up of a peculiarly homogenous and unchanging construction of the past. As Philip Dodd notes, British Jews, along with other immigrant groups, "were invited to take their place, and become spectators of a culture already complete and represented for them by its trustees."6 In contrast, American Jewish writers are able constantly to reimagine or remythologize their relationship to a European past in a much less "normative" and less harmonious manner. Though this "normative" Englishness contrasts starkly with the mobility and protean nature of American culture, it also has some distinct attributes of its own. The very impossibility of absorbing the Jewish past into a territorial Englishness—or even Britishness—has led precisely to the continuation of a culture of Jewish extraterritoriality. Before examining in more detail this English tradition of Jewish extraterritoriality, it is worth briefly reminding ourselves of the historical alternative to this form of writing. The failure to transcend a territorial Englishness can be seen quite clearly in the case of Israel Zangwill (1864-1926). After making his name as an English "New Humorist" toward the turn of the century, Zangwill published his best-selling Children of the Ghetto: A Story of a Peculiar People (1892). This was the first fictional account of London's East End Jewish "ghetto," and it quickly established him as a writer with an international readership. By the age of thirty-one, Zangwill was to chair Theodor Herzl's maiden address to an English-speaking audience on the issue of Zionism. For the next few years, he was a leading Herzlian Zionist in England. At the same time, he continued writing fiction about the East End "ghetto." But Zangwill, for much of his career, also chose to publish works on what he considered to be more "universal" themes. It is this self-conscious and irrevocable split between "English" and "Jewish" culture that characterized—and greatly weakened—a good deal of Zangwill's writing. 7 The high point of Zangwill's universalizing writing was attained in his play The Melting-Pot (1908). President Roosevelt saw this play on its opening night in Washington, D.C. and is reported to have shouted across the theater, "that's a great play, Mr. Zangwill."8 Zangwill popularized the idea of America as an ethnic "melting pot," proclaiming it to be: "God's crucible, the great Melting Pot, where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!" In this brave new world, a Zangwilllike Jewish immigrant from Russia argues that "God is making the American" and that the "feuds and vendettas" between Jews and Russians (among many other ethnic groups) will eventually die out in "God's crucible."9 On the surface, this very English assimilationism is a far cry from Zangwill's

Englishness and Extraterritoriality

23

Zionism. But as David Vital has noted, Zangwill intermarried at about the same time as he became an active Zionist.10 This was, in fact, perfectly consistent with his extreme political Zionism, which proposed a refugee Jewish state only for those Jews under threat and the "melting pot" for the rest. In 1905, Zangwill chose to leave the World Zionist Organization over his support for the "Uganda scheme," which aimed to form a refugee Jewish state in British-controlled East Africa. After the plan was rejected, he went on to form the rival Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO) in order to pursue other potential "ITOlands" throughout the world. His aim was to create a national homeland that would be "Jewish" only through the preponderance of its Jewish population. In this way, Zangwill demonstrated the unbridgeable gap between his universal "melting pot" and his "ghetto" territorialism. What is clear from Zangwill's literary politics is that it was impossible for him to imagine an Englishness that could in any way accommodate a Jewish past. The severe division between the oblivion of the "melting pot" and his narrow territorialism should be seen as a product of the restrictive choices allowed within English national culture. As early as his important article on "English Judaism" (1889), Zangwill attempted to combine, in a spiritual melting pot, what he called the "scientific morality of Moses and the emotional morality of Christ."11 It was this article that persuaded Judge Mayer Sulzberger, a founder of the Jewish Publication Society of America (JPS), to commission Zangwill to write Children of the Ghetto. But the protracted negotiations with Sulzberger over its writing indicates Zangwill's extreme unease at being "shut up in the ghetto," as he was to put it in a later letter. In February 1891, he wrote to Sulzberger that "behind all the Jewish details, there must be a human interest which will raise it into that cosmopolitan thing, a work of art." His great fear, he went on to explain, was that a novel based on the East End Jewish "ghetto" would "appeal exclusively to a section."12 Zangwill wanted to write in a "more catholic form" and so transcend the "Jewish detail" in the novel. There are, therefore, two contradictory impulses in Children of the Ghetto. On the one hand, the novel sets out to "explain" the East End to the wider world. On the other hand, Zangwill wanted to "artistically" transcend the East End so that it would be of more "universal" interest. In these terms, Children of the Ghetto was a particularly reassuring novel for an English readership. As a grateful Times reviewer pointed out, it turned a "sudden light upon the darkness" and explained the "East End Jew" for the first time. 13 The documentary aspect of Children of the Ghetto—explaining the unknown to a fearful wider world—is, however, always in tension with Zangwill's universalizing ideals. Despite her father's Judaic "strenuous inner life," Esther Ansell, the novel's heroine, confesses to her brother that she enjoys reading the New Testament: "Why do I feel good when I read what Jesus said?" she wonders. All of the major characters in the novel wish to transcend a Judaism that is described, at a pivotal point in the novel, as an "endless coil of laws winding round us and cramping our lives at every turn."14 Zangwill's much loved The King of Schnorrers (1894), written soon after Children of the Ghetto, was also a satirical attack on the materialism of Anglo-Jewry's leaders. But in the fantasy world of the Sephardic schnorrer—Manessah Bueno Barzillai Azevedo da Costa—the splendor of Judaism's spiritual heritage overcomes

24

Bryan Cheyette

all in its way. With the publication of Ghetto Comedies (1907), Zangwill, at the age of 43, stopped writing on explicitly Jewish themes. Instead he chose to live in East Sussex near Rudyard Kipling, where he wrote novels modeled on Thomas Hardy or Jerome K. Jerome, and universalizing plays like those of George Bernard Shaw. At the same time, he devoted much of his abundant energies to "saving" East European Jewry from persecution, promoting his version of Jewish nationalism and, in general, seeking to modernize the Anglo-American diaspora. These two contradictory sides to Zangwill were summed up in his important and largely forgotten Dreamers of the Ghetto (1898). This book, a series of historical portraits of heterodox Jews—among them Baruch Spinoza, Ferdinand Lassalle and Heinrich Heine—points to the extreme division in Zangwill's outlook. What is significant about Zangwill is the extent to which he separated off the Jewish past from his increasingly pronounced and universalized Englishness. His early domination of Anglo-Jewry's intellectual life did much to undermine the historical impact of those writers who attempted to construct a usable Jewishness in their work, one that could elude the corrosive embrace of a universalizing Englishness. One such writer, a contemporary of Zangwill's, Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918), is worth focusing on as a poet whose work offers a radically different, extraterritorial tradition of British Jewish writing. Interestingly enough, Rosenberg sent a copy of his verse drama Moses (1916) to Zangwill—who replied to Rosenberg's sister, Annie Wynick, that it contained "a good many beautiful and powerful lines, but that I hope his experiences of war will give his next book the clarity and simplicity which is somewhat lacking in this."15 This retort clearly indicates the differences in approach between the two writers. Whereas Zangwill saw the world in terms of simple, irreducible oppositions, Rosenberg tended to incorporate such oppositions into a more complex and hybrid vision. For Rosenberg, "simple poetry [is] understandable and still ungraspable."16 In one of his best-known poems, "Break of Day in the Trenches" (1916), written as a private soldier in the British army during the First World War, Rosenberg gives the reader an ironic self-image of someone who is between cultures and who is unable to assimilate, even in wartime, into any one national identity: Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew Your cosmopolitan sympathies. Now you have touched this English hand You will do the same to the German— Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure To cross the sleeping green between. Rosenberg's poetry, as Adam Phillips has rightly maintained, is full of such images of subversive mergings across seemingly incongruous domains.17 The droll, cosmopolitan rat is a creature that is intriguingly given an attractive human consciousness as compared with the more conventional negative association of parasitism. Such images, needless to say, were used in turn to dehumanize Jews (including Rosenberg), both in the British army and in the broader society.18 Unlike Zangwill, who in his fiction had attempted to domesticate stereotypes of the Jewish "alien" or "pauper,"

Englishness and Extraterritoriality

25

Rosenberg completely changes the meaning of such stereotypes by humanizing them and, above all, placing them in an ironic context. If for Zangwill the Jewish past is a realm that must be either universalized or banished, for Rosenberg it is rife with subversive possibilities, especially in relation to the chaos of the First World War. That Rosenberg was particularly open to these possibilities can be seen in a formative poem, entitled "The Jew" (1916), reproduced in full below: Moses, from whose loins I sprung, Lit by a lamp in his blood Ten immutable rules, a moon For mutable lampless men. The blonde, the bronze, the ruddy, With the same heaving blood, Keep tide to the moon of Moses, Then why do they sneer at me? Here, characteristically, Rosenberg brings together the timeless presence of Moses and the brutally contingent contemporary world, combining—uneasily—the physical and spiritual realms of two radically differing kinds of Jews. But who exactly "the Jew" is in this poem, the towering figure of Moses or the lowly army private, is pointedly left unanswered. A deliberately enigmatic series of images culminates in the spiritual tidal pull of the moon and its association with Moses' supposed bloodline. That the past here literally throws a new light on the unpleasantness of the present does, however, anticipate Rosenberg's method in his maturer work. The yoking together of contrary temporal realms can be said to characterize much of Rosenberg's poetry. In a letter to the poet R.C. Trevelyan, Rosenberg described his verse-drama Moses as "symboliz[ing] the fierce desire for virility and original action in contrast to slavery of the most abject kind."19 As Phillips argues, there is a strong sense in this verse drama in which Moses himself has become an "abject slave" in relation to the Judaic God. To some extent Moses, like "The Jew," blurs the distinction between lowly "slaves" and their more illustrious biblical counterparts. Rosenberg wrote many poems in which the opposition between God and man was deliberately undermined by the events of the First World War. As can be seen from the first seven lines of "God" (1916), for instance, Rosenberg's Judaic deity is above all a bullying presence who is embodied in the deathly landscape of trench warfare: In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire, Lanthorned in his oblique eyes, guttering burned! His body lodged a rat where men nursed souls. The world flashed grape-green eyes of a foiled cat To him. On fragments of an old shrunk power, On shy and maimed, on women wrung awry, He lay, a bullying hulk, to crush them more. The "rat," no longer the mock-heroic self-image, is now what Jon Silkin calls a "rat-God," the logical outcome of God-like men making a world where they live

26

Bryan Cheyette

like "rats."20 The "old shrunk power" of God reminds one of the "great sunk silences" that mysteriously "join" the dead in "Dead Man's Dump" (1917). Words themselves make new and indiscriminate relationships in Rosenberg's poetry and thus often take the unlikely form of worms, bees and fleas—as well as the ubiquitous rat—in his imagination. The opposing dominions of God, man and animal merge in Rosenberg's writing, along with the temporal realm of past and present. Thus, his reaction to the horrors of trench warfare was to invoke the vibrant figure of Moses, who simultaneously challenges the slave-like position of diasporic Jews and the emasculated working-class soldier in the British army. That Moses was primarily a romantic visionary, not unlike Rosenberg, can be seen from the last lines of the verse drama. As Moses decides to liberate the Jewish slaves, and thus strangles the hated Egyptian Abinoah, there are unconscious resonances of Rosenberg's own promiscuous poetic method even though Moses is referring to the Jewish people: Their hugeness be a driving wedge to a thing, Ineffable and useable, as near Solidity as human life can be. So grandly fashion these rude elements Into some newer nature, a consciousness Like naked light seizing the all-eyed soul, Oppressing with its gorgeous tyranny Until they take it thus—or die. Here the figure of Moses gives the reader a sense of visionary unity that takes place both on a social as well as an aesthetic level. The sense of an "ineffable and useable" Jewish people is not unlike Rosenberg's earlier description of his poetry as "understandable and still ungraspable." The fashioning of "rude elements / Into some newer nature" is exactly what Rosenberg attempted to achieve in his poetry. These "rude elements" crossed time, were between spiritual and physical realms, and were above all not bounded by any one national culture be it "Jewish" or "English." By definition, Moses' wish to fashion a "newer nature, a consciousness / Like naked light seizing the all-eyed soul, / Oppressing with its gorgeous tyranny" cannot be reduced merely to the Judaic tradition. At the same time, his evocation of the figure of Moses as a response to his own personal slavery and vilification in the British army shows that it was impossible for him to wholly assimilate into an English poetic tradition. Rosenberg's extraterritorial poetry, which created a no-man's land in the midst of war, contrasts starkly with Zangwill's neatly divided world in which "Ghetto" was separately housed from "melting pot." That Rosenberg died so young, at the age of 27, foreshortened disastrously the transnational development of modern British Jewish literature. Along with the premature death of Amy Levy (1861-1889) at the age of 28, Anglo-Jewry lost two of its most outstanding talents. It was not until after the Second World War that British Jewish writers began to fully realize the true potential of Rosenberg's writing and its centrality to an extraterritorial tradition in British Jewish literature. In his poem "Chagrin" (1916), Rosenberg utilizes the figure of Absalom, hanging by his hair, to summarize his own diasporic condition:

Englishness and Extraterritoriality

21

From the imagined weight Of spaces in the sky Of mute chagrin, my thoughts Hang like branch-clung hair To trunks of silence swung, With the choked soul weighing down Into thick emptiness. For Rosenberg, "thoughts," "silence" and "emptiness" are weighty as opposed to the weightless "cloud-boughs" from which Absalom is "caught and hanging still." This topsy-turvy world has been described by Jon Silkin as an image of the diaspora and, specifically, of the rootlessness of British Jewry.21 The poem ends by extending the figure of Absalom to incorporate a wider community that includes both his fellow soldiers and Anglo-Jewry: "We are lifted of all we know / And hang from implacable boughs." This seemingly endless sense of being caught in mid-air, neither flying nor standing still, is reminiscent of Kafka's self-image as a fourlegged animal, his hind legs grounded in his father's Jewishness and his forelegs thrashing about for some stable new ground. Such grotesque representations of estrangement and homelessness, as is well known, characterized much prewar diaspora Jewish writing in Europe.22 And this tradition has continued to influence and shape much postwar British Jewish literature. If we now move from Rosenberg to the contemporary British Jewish writer Clive Sinclair (1948- ), we can see again the self-conscious creation of an inverted universe in which language carries considerable weight—as opposed to history, which in Sinclair's fiction is merely a function of language. From his earliest collections of short stories, Hearts of Gold (1979) and Bedbugs (1982), Sinclair has attempted to "write fiction that owes nothing to any English antecedents" and has thus self-consciously located his "national" history as a Jew in Israel, America and Eastern Europe.23 Continuing this theme in his Diaspora Blues: A View of Israel (1987), Sinclair defines himself as having a "dual loyalty" to "the language of England and the history of Israel," and argues that, for a writer, there is "something to be gained from having a language but no history, a history but no language." Compared with his alienation from England, his interest in Israel has provided him with a "narrative" in which to situate himself.24 The construction of a "national" past beyond his English birthplace—which is displaced onto both the Jewish diaspora and Israel—has posed an interesting dilemma for Sinclair. On the one hand, as the story "Bedbugs" demonstrates, the history of the Shoah is deemed to be outside the moral purview of his protagonists. When asked to teach First World War poetry to German students, Joshua (Sinclair's persona), fantasizes about teaching a parallel course called "Rosenberg's Revenge" that would highlight Nazi atrocities. Rosenberg's poem "Louse Hunting" (1917) is evoked in this story as a metaphor for the Holocaust, as Joshua and a German student burn the bedbugs that infect their living quarters. But all of Sinclair's stories are about the dangers of turning such historical metaphors into reality. Although Joshua ultimately acts as if he has the right to exact "revenge" on behalf of the Nazi victims, by the end of the story he is clearly deranged.

28

Bryan Cheyette

Sinclair's protagonists are often made delirious by their impossible displacement of an "English" identity onto a Judaized history. In "Ashkenazia," Sinclair takes such solipsism to its extreme limit by inventing a world without the Shoah. Situated somewhere in Central Europe, Ashkenazia, a fictitious Yiddish-speaking country, is defined exclusively as a language-community outside of history: Many of my fellow-countrymen do not believe in the existence of God. I am more modest. 1 do not believe in myself. What proof can I have when no one reads what I write? There you have it: my words are the limit of ray world. You will therefore smile at this irony; 1 have been commissioned by our government to write the official Englishlanguage Guide to Ashkenazia.25 By the end of the story, all that remains of "Ashkenazia" is a "field of wooden skeletons" and Sinclair's demented persona truly becomes bounded by his words, "Now the world will listen to me, for I am the guide to Ashkenazia. I am Ashkenazia." This conflation of selfhood with nationhood is on one level the necessary solipsistic response of an author who displaces the past onto a useful fiction. For the post-Holocaust writer, however, such "imaginary homelands" cannot merely be constituted by words alone. A purely textual "Ashkenazia" is an act of writerly megalomania precisely because Sinclair's narrator thinks that he can bring these "skeletons" to life. The need to imagine more interesting homelands, which can never be fully possessed by the writer, is the key to Sinclair's early fiction. "The Promised Land," for instance, is a story told by a "schlemiel" who wishes to possess Hannah Ratskin, who lives in Tel-Aviv. Considered an "irrelevance" by Hannah—who loves a handsome Israeli soldier, Ami Ben Tur—the "schlemiel" of the story is in a state of unrequited love that also defines his diasporic relationship with the actual "promised land" of Israel. The opening line of the story is (pace Melville) "Call me Schlemiel," and Sinclair's narrator later expands, lewdly, on this reference to Moby Dick: "To tell you the truth, I want to fuck Israel. Okay, so Ahab was obsessed with Moby Dick; well, my Promised Land is only an Israeli cunt!"26 A non-Hebrew-speaking Jew in Israel is, according to Sinclair, the ultimate outsider: "I am Jewish but my tongue is not circumcised."27 Unlike the writer-narrator in "Ashkenazia," who deludes himself into making a "homeland" out of language, Sinclair's "schlemiel" turns into a Nazi-like rapist by thinking that his sense of existential displacement can have an all too literal physical solution. Sinclair's first two novels, Blood Libels (1985) and Cosmetic Effects s (1989), take to its logical conclusion the insane union, in his stories, of selfhood with nationhood. Both novels, that is, are personal histories that have national consequences. As in one of Sinclair's later stories, "Kayn Aynhoreh," hypochondria is the natural condition of those who place the imagination at the center of nationhood. Jake Silkstone, the alter ego in this story, reappears in Blood Libels and describes his various Scriptophobic and Dermagraphic ailments as "the psychosomatic approach to history": "Just as the mind, knowing the symptoms, has no need of bacillus or virus to counterfeit an illness, so history does not need facts to proceed. What people believe to have happened is more important than what actually did."28 "The psychosomatic approach to history" has especially telling consequences in Blood

Englishness and Extraterritoriality

29

Libels, resulting in the emergence of the fascistic "Children of Albion" in England and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. In this novel, Sinclair deliberately undermines the idea of history as the "pseudo-scientific study of facts"29 by treating wellknown political events in Israel as grotesque fantasy and by turning grotesque fantasy in England into seemingly plausible historical narrative. In Cosmetic Effects, the centrality of the imagination in the creation of historical and political "facts" becomes the subject of the novel. This can be seen especially in the involvement of Sinclair's protagonist, Jonah Isaacson—a teacher of film studies at the University of Saint Albans—with the making of a biblical western in Israel called The Six Pointed Star. The producer of this film, Lewis Falcon (based on John Ford), is quite explicit about the fictionality of his "America": Every people has its story . . . which is not the same as its history. It is this story that roots them on the land, that sustains their sense of identity. It may not be the truth, but it is believed. I have lived all my life in the twentieth century, I am not ignorant of the importance of truth, but I am an artist and my first responsibility is to the story—the story of the American people.30

Sinclair's own short story called "America" anticipated Falcon by showing that the idea of America, based on a series of puns and word-plays, is always liable to inventive reinterpretation. The depiction in Cosmetic Effects of "America" as being not only a nation-state but a "state of mind,"31 not unlike Sinclair's Israel or "Albania" (named after Sinclair's hometown, Saint Albans), interestingly reverses Philip Roth's well-known account of the difficulties of writing American fiction. For Roth, "the American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's meager imagination."32 Far from being beyond the grasp of the "imagination," Sinclair's "America" in Cosmetic Effects, like much else in the novel, is a metaphor that eventually becomes "real." Jonah Isaacson recognizes this when he proclaims, "give my imagination a metaphor and it'll have the mise-enscene worked out in no time." Isaacson, in fact, comes to embody the competing stories that, as he shows, are literally fighting it out to the death in the Middle East: Although I have only one arm I really feel like two people—a smooth man and a hairy man—two people in a single body, like the Israelis and the Palestinians are two people in a single land; there's Jonah Isaacson, the good husband, here to watch over his pregnant wife, and there's his double, the anonymous philanderer, who simply wants to fuck Stella Richmond.33

Cosmetic Effects s deals with the possibility of Jonah Isaacson being unwittingly turned into a human bomb by his Palestinian doctor, Said Habash, who fits him with a prosthetic arm. Whether Isaacson is a "Son of Ishmael" (the name of a terrorist group) or the son of Isaac (an Israeli national hero) is deliberately left open to question. Isaacson loses his memory for much of the novel and thus has a number of competing national stories imposed on him. His animalistic desires and domestic constraints embody this terrorizing or civilizing doubleness but are also part of a conscious narrative "pluralism" that encourages "a proliferation of stories and inter-

30

Bryan Cheyettc

pretations [so that] the future won't be fascistic."34 For Sinclair, the imagination "bind[s] more strongly than kinship" and, like Philip Roth's The Counterlife (1987), he therefore constructs a multiplicity of possible "counterlives" and national identities for his increasingly fractured and decentered alter ego. In Augustus Rex (1992), Sinclair again radically questions the limits of the imaginative reconstruction of the past at the same time as he creates his most comprehensive "imaginary homeland" in 1960s Sweden. Augustus Rex brings August Strindberg back to life, after half a century in the grave, with the devilish temptation that he will once again become an all-powerful writer and unbridled lover of women. The novel is narrated by Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies, who tempts the resurrected Strindberg to overreach himself, with Faustian consequences (he is turned into a fly). Following on from the megalomaniacal storyteller of "Ashkenazia"—who thinks that he can breath life into Europe's "skeletons"— Augustus Rex sets out to constrain the supposedly unlimited power of Strindberg's death-defying art. By the end of the novel, Strindberg's uncontrollable jealousy and his antisemitic loathing of his wife's lover, Emmanuel Adler, prove to be his downfall. As with the professor of philosophy in Sinclair's "Titillatio" (who is torn between Spinoza and spermatozoa, Kant and cunt), Strindberg's intellectual sense of "detachment"35 is unable to dissociate itself from the physical presence of his wife's body. In this way, Sinclair once again exposes the pretensions and selfdelusions of the male imagination. In a world where history happens elsewhere, Sinclair's deranged writer-narrators try to control the past, but such power-crazed ambitions invariably prove to be delusory. Sinclair's imaginary homeland, displaced from history, is a megalomaniacal fantasy—and as such (as Ezrahi shows with reference to American Jewish literature) is a telling comment on the limits of an extraterritorial tradition in a postShoah world. But as the British-born writer Elaine Feinstein (1930- ) shows, this need to escape from history can also be related to the desire of British Jewish writers to locate themselves beyond a restrictive Englishness. Elaine Feinstein's tight, poetic novels have been especially centered on a largely imaginary but historically specific Central Europe. Interestingly enough, when she does write directly about her British antecedents, in The Survivors (1982), she is unable to go beyond the restrictions inherent in the form of the conventional family saga. In other words, her writing needs an extraterritorial sense of the past to eclipse the parochial representations and received images of British Jewry. When Feinstein's early novels were thought of as a species of contemporary "Gothic"—along with fiction by Angela Carter, J.G. Ballard and Emma Tennant—she was quick to differentiate herself from what she thought of as this "steely rejection of humanism, a fashionable resistance to compassion which I believe is as much a luxury of our English innocence as the euphoria of the flower generation."36 Her career as a writer has gone precisely beyond such "English innocence." Only when she became the translator of the poetry of Marina Tsvetayeva and, later, Margarita Aliger, Yunna Moritz and Bella Akhmadulina, did Feinstein discover her voice as a "European" writer. In this sense, her writing was self-consciously opposed to an early influential group of Essex University poets (including Lee

Englishness and Extraterritoriality

31

Harwood and Tom Pickard) who wished to foreground their common "Englishness" and "de-Europeanize" themselves.37 As a woman writer, Feinstein has situated "magical" father-enchanters at the heart of her fiction. Unlike Sinclair, the megalomaniacal writer is not merely a persona in Feinstein's fiction but a force that threatens to fatally disable her female alter egos. Feinstein's enchanters are always thoroughly ambiguous, both breathing "life" into her female protagonists and, at the same time, threatening to make them "dead with dependence." In The Shadow Master (1978), the seventeenth-century Jewish false messiah Shabbetai Zvi is the ultimate historical expression of this double-edged enchantment. By the time of The Border (1984) and Loving Brecht (1992), Feinstein had situated Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht in this "magical" role. If the source of this life-giving "magic" is the "music of words," as suggested in The Circle (1970), then male writers are peculiarly uncertain embodiments of this imaginative "refuge" for her women personae.38 In The Border, Walter Benjamin—"a Marxist who is not a materialist"—is a "mystical" synthesizing figure which the novel deliberately fragments. Set in Vienna before the Anschluss, this work is written as a triptych in diary and epistolary form as a way of allowing for three equally passionate accounts of an erotic triangle. Far from a single male consciousness, the multiple, hallucinatory sense of reality in this novel—which is split along the lines of gender, poetic emotion and scientific reason—comes into play even when the main characters are faced with the threat of Nazism. The Spanish border at Port Bou in 1940, where Benjamin committed suicide, signifies by the end both his tragically fixed place in history and his internal fissures that are writ large in the novel. This is acknowledged in the very form of The Border, which reads an arbitrary version of its own story back from a contemporary perspective. By situating a great many different kinds of texts in a historical novel, Feinstein—like Sinclair—establishes the possibility of reimagining a European past in terms of limitless "magical" word-play as well as acknowledging the insurmountable "borders" of history. But this is not, as Mark Shechner has argued, merely a "journey of self-integration" into the European past for the Jewish novelist.39 On the contrary, it is the lack of a sense of "integration" into another history that these British Jewish writers highlight in their fiction. In other words, all of these writers evoke an indeterminate Jewish past precisely to help us rethink the presumed certainties of the present. It is not a coincidence that many of the Jewish writers who thrive in Britain, such as George Steiner (1929- ), Dan Jacobson (1929- ) and Gabriel Josipovici (1940- ), are not British-born. As emigres, these writers do not have to unlearn an Englishness that was imbibed with their mother's milk. Because they do not need to engage with the cultural fixity of the past in Britain, all of these writers have a radically skeptical relationship to the past in general. In his characteristic essay "Our Homeland, the Text," Steiner contends that the "dwelling . . . ascribed to Israel is the House of the Book" and that the "centrality of the book does coincide with and enact the condition of exile."40 Steiner's textual homeland has been criticized by Cynthia Ozick for emphasizing a surface aestheti-

32

Bryan Cheyette

cism that is defined as "a-thing-that-subsists-for-its-own-sake-without-a-history."41 But Steiner is well aware of the tension between his extraterritorial homeland and the contingencies of history, which he defines as: "the dialectical relations between an unhoused at-homeness in the text . . . and the territorial mystery of the native ground, of the promised strip of land."42 This struggle between the historical specificities of the past and the other-worldly ideal of the textual homeland is, to a large extent, the theme of much of Steiner's fiction and cultural criticism. To be sure, Steiner's different modes of writing have always been intimately connected. Anno Domini (1964), his first collection of novellas, echoes many of the preoccupations—concerning a too easy forgetfulness after the Shoah—voiced in his important set of essays Language and Silence (1967). His next work of fiction (which was also dramatized), The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. (1981), puts into the mouth of an aged Hitler ("A.H.") words that Steiner himself had used a decade earlier in his In Bluebeard's Castle: Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (1971). It is as if the ideals of Steiner's essays are invariably held up to scrutiny in his fiction. This creative self-sustenance refigures, in less damning terms, the ahistorical solipsism of Sinclair's alter egos. Just as Sinclair's "Ashkenazia" reimagines European history without the Holocaust, Steiner's The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. is written as if Hitler remained alive after the war. Steiner's selfconscious rewriting of history is, in other words, a means of exploring the extent to which the Shoah continues today. Steiner's recent work of fiction, Proofs (1991), collected in Proofs and Three Parables (1992), is his most explicit enactment to date of the abiding unease between history and textuality. This novella concerns an Italian proofreader, known as the Professore, who is a devoted member of his local circle for Marxist Revolutionary Theory and Praxis. The story is set against the backdrop of the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, which is recreated by Steiner—as it was initially experienced in the West—as a series of television images. As the Berlin Wall begins to crumble, the Professore discovers that his eyesight is deteriorating rapidly. These two events are brought together as the Professore remains a Marxist "because otherwise I could not be a proof-reader! . . . Communism means taking the errata out of history." Messianism, which Steiner has always located at the heart of both socialism and Judaism, is not unlike his character's obsessive perfectionism. We learn right at the beginning of the story that the Professore is there to "order the world as only print can."43 On one level, Proofs simply juxtaposes the growing blindness of the Professore with his inability to see just how far Stalinism has strayed from the Utopian vision of Marx. At the core of the novella is a debate regarding the importance of the messianic impulse behind his unreconstructed Communism, even at the point at which he acknowledges its legacy of mass murder and inhuman oppression. Just as the early Christians "panted for the end of time like dogs dying of thirst," it is the biblical "prophecy and promise" of Marx that is said to have struggled to accomplish earthly perfection.44 Steiner's messianic humanism locates his seer-like protagonist in history so as to show the ubiquitous sense of failure and expediency that surrounds his need to find a "home" in perfection. History, in this sense, struggles to be reconceived in Steiner's textual homeland. In contrast to the way in which ideals

Englishness and Extraterritoriality

33

of textuality are treated in his essays, they founder, in his fiction, on the realities of history. Dan Jacobson and Gabriel Josipovici can also be said to evoke extraterritorial fictions in which to rethink our received notions of the past. Over four decades, Dan Jacobson has moved from writing naturalistic South African novels and stories to his The God-Fearer (1992), whose setting is described as "Another history! Another past for the human race!" In this alternative history, it is the minority "Christer" people—"the followers of Yeshua, Jesus, the Christus, the Natzerit (sic), whatever they liked to call him?"—who suffer pogroms, prejudice and expulsions. Without the advent of Christendom, medieval Europe is governed by Old Testament GodFearers or followers of the one true God. This inversion of history is accompanied by a series of imaginary homelands and myth-figures, such as Manasse, Sar of the Upperland, who are superimposed on more familiar versions of the past. Although Kobus, Jacobson's octogenarian protagonist, has a great deal of trouble remembering even his deceased wife's name, the one thing that he is sure of is that the past alone could not be "forever without ambiguity." Out of the "wreckage of what was left of his mind," Kobus spends most of the novel, like the reader, trying to make sense of his ambiguous past.45 In his The Story of the Stories: The Chosen People and its God (1982), Jacobson was at pains to show that the choseness of the biblical chosen people was an arbitrary man-made myth as opposed to a God-imposed truth. In The God-Fearer Kobus is a "bookbinder," not unlike Steiner's proofreader, because he embodies the theological need to canonize or fix stories that are inherently capricious. For this reason, Jacobson has a good deal of fun in this novel dramatizing a multitude of possible national stories and imaginary communities that are not a part of received history. The strength of The God-Fearer is that these abiding concerns are not merely of intellectual interest. Kobus's "pain of recollection" is felt throughout as he thinks of his existence as a "kind of postscript to a life that was already concluded." That he is dominated by his "errant, grotesque, utterly absurd" memories is finally realized in the ghostly figures of the two young "Christer" children who, as the novel progresses, begin to engross him. It is these "phantom lives," taken from Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898), who fatally disrupt the certainties that Kobus has about himself and the choseness of his people.46 The God-Fearer demonstrates, above all, the extent to which the past needs to be continually remade. By playfully sketching a fantasy world made up of "nonhistoric peoples," as he put it in his novel Hidden in the Heart (1991), Jacobson shows the extent to which our notions of the past are both arbitrary and variable. Josipovici's novel In a Hotel Garden (1993) is similarly concerned with the difficulties of both representing and reproducing the past. In the last three decades, Josipovici has moved from the cosmopolitan modernism of his early fiction to a more explicitly Judaic understanding of the world. Not that Josipovici's Judaism is in any way fixed or easily formulated.47 The epigraph of In a Hotel Garden is the midrash on Gen. 39:7, "Potiphar's wife, too, wished to belong to the history of Israel." Just as Rosenberg includes his fellow soldiers in a wider postbiblical community of suffering, Josipovici's "history of Israel" also eschews well-worn images and cliches of what it is to be a Jew.

34

Bryan Cheyette

Ben, the protagonist of In a Hotel Garden, eventually belongs to Josipovici's contemporary "history of Israel" even though he is not Jewish. While on vacation in the Italian Alps, he meets Lily, the granddaughter of a family of Italian Jews. Lily remembers a story that her grandmother told her about a rendezvous in a hotel garden with a distant cousin who, she learns later, died during the war. The cousin fell in love with the grandmother but married someone else, and thus the grandmother refused to answer any of his letters. Lily decides to return to her grandmother's meeting place in an attempt to commune with her lost family. Ben, as the novel progresses, gradually re-enacts the story of Lily's grandmother and in this way continues her family's history for another generation. To recount Josipovici's novel in these terms, however, is to ignore just how fragile and transitory is Lily's retelling of her grandmother's story. Ben relates to friends his encounter with Lily, but also virtually forces Lily to turn into an oversimple story her desire to visit the site of her grandmother's unrequited love affair. That her grandmother's cousin was killed along with his family, during the war, makes In a Hotel Garden, on one level, a post-Holocaust novel. But, again, it is somewhat reductive to think of the novel merely in these terms. Lily throughout is undecided both about the nature of her visit to the hotel garden and the import of her grandmother's memories. She does not accept at face value that the rediscovery of the past is necessarily valuable or enlightening. At times she believes that "everything" would be "resolved" by entering the garden,48 but at other times she remains skeptical of this absolute sense of past and present coming together. Here Lily, like Goldberg in Josipovici's previous novel, The Big Glass (1991), negotiates between a "Christian ache for redemption" and a more Judaic uncertainty.49 This markedly Hebraic imprecision concerning Lily's transcendent resolution of past, present and future is pointedly juxtaposed with an English disdain for dwelling on the past. Toward the end of the novel Ben's friend, Fran, becomes exasperated with Lily's story and complains that she is "fed up with people being obsessed by the Holocaust. It's done and we've got to move on." Her husband remarks that "it's different if you're Jewish," and these competing versions of the past are highlighted throughout by Josipovici. At one point in the novel, Jews are thought of primarily as a memory community. Speaking of her grandmother's family from Constantinople, Lily comments that "Jewish families from that part of the world had spread all over the Eastern Mediterranean. And as they didn't own land they had memories instead, and genealogies, as Jews have always had."50 Here Jewishness is presented as an imaginary diaspora held together by the deceptive power of memory and genealogical storytelling. Lily herself exemplifies this version of Jewishness—though Josipovici, like Rosenberg, does not simply want to reduce it to a fixed myth. For this reason, Lily often quotes another midrash, "Absalom gloried in his hair—therefore he was hanged by his hair."51 Lily cites this midrash because she wishes to avoid at all costs such overly simple transfigurations of the past into easily comprehensible patterns. This established rabbinical reading of Absalom is also distinguished interestingly from Rosenberg's poem, "Chagrin," where Absalom, hanging by his hair, represents in part the tenuousness of the diaspora. The sense of in-betweeness in Rosenberg's poem—where Absalom is located neither in the past nor present, myth nor history—also captures the spirit of Josipovici's writing.

Englishness and Extraterritoriality

35

Josipovici's sense of inner exile, and of writing in a language that he was not born into, can also be understood as an expression of his paradoxical Jewishness. Just as he rejects a rigid and homogenous Englishness rooted in past glories (which cannot by definition accommodate the Holocaust), Josipovici questions a too easy communion with a Jewish past. This self-conscious rethinking of Jewish memory is also related to his work on writers and musicians such as Benjamin, Schoenberg, Proust and Kafka.52 Josipovici has increasingly recognized such figures as dispossessed Jews who have an acutely ambiguous relationship to their Jewishness as well as their given culture. As with Proofs and Three Parables and The God-Fearer, In a Hotel Garden does not replace the fixity of Englishness with an alternative and equally rigid sense of Jewishness. As emigre writers, Steiner, Jacobson and Josipovici all seem to have the freedom to invent alternative, hybrid histories that, above all, situate Jews in an extraterritorial past that goes beyond overly facile oppositions between "Englishness" and "Jewishness." In the first full-length study of its kind, Ephraim Sicher has categorized British Jewish writers in terms of their relation to the "East End" and "North West" of London.53 Writers who are not easily confined by these city limits, such as Elaine Feinstein or the emigre writers, are simply excluded from this study. But even those writers who are deemed to belong to the "East End" or "North West" districts of London are severely reduced by such territorial boundaries. One cannot understand a writer such as Harold Pinter (1930- ) or Anita Brookner (1928- ) in terms of this urban geography since, like all of the best writers in Britain, they are determined to transcend the received cultural boundaries of Englishness. On a more mundane level, virtually all postwar British Jewish writers have located a good deal of their fiction or drama either on the continent of Europe or in either the state of Israel or America. If a Jewish past has been written out of British history and culture, then British Jewish writers have invariably looked elsewhere for their sites of Jewishness. Pinter and Brookner are worth referring to in this context precisely because of their position at the center of English national culture. Both of these writers, paradoxically, established themselves at the heart of English literature by locating their writing in a European context. This European dimension is the essential supplement to their writing, as it seems to invigorate an increasingly moribund Englishness. Even Pinter's most autobiographical work, The Dwarfs: A Novel (1990), written originally between 1952 and 1956, belies its East End origins. European literature and philosophy overwhelm this youthful bildungsroman, which shows the extent to which Pinter, from the beginning, wished to transfigure his parochial Englishness.54 While the novel is dotted throughout with Yiddish jokes, references to the Talmud and "the gaschamber," Pinter does not in any way merely reproduce the social and cultural milieu of Hackney or London's East End. Given that much of the Jewish East End was destroyed during the war, Pinter's modernist sense of deracination does have a real historical subtext. The intense seriousness of the gifted Jewish men in the novel also indicates something of the flavor of Pinter's background without simply being reduced to that background. In The Birthday Party (1958), produced soon after The Dwarfs was written, Goldberg, Pinter's most unequivocal Jewish figure, simultaneously articulates both

36

Bryan Cheyette

an unreal and nostalgic Englishness as well as a fixed Jewishness. On the one hand, he extols the virtues of "a little Austin, tea in Fullers, a library book from Boots" in a self-consciously artificial construction of an idealized English past. But, within a few lines, he acts as if Stanley's grotesque "birthday party" is not unlike an AngloJewish family "Simchah": "Stanley, my heartfelt congratulations. I wish you, on behalf of us all, a happy birthday. I'm sure you've never been a prouder man than you are today. Mazeltov! And may we only meet at Simchahs!"55 Englishness and Jewishness are brought together by Goldberg in relation to a contrived and illusory past, since his underlying menace goes hand in hand with his sentimentality. Anglo-Jewish insiders know that the phrase "may we only meet at Simchahs" is rather ominous, as it is normally said at funerals. Throughout the play, Goldberg's blatant inconsistencies concerning his upbringing expose both his Englishness and Jewishness as specious fabrications, a refusal to come to terms with the past. As Goldberg delineates them, these cross-cultural identities are no longer opposites but rather mirror-images of each other. Ultimately, their equally distorted sense of an all-consuming community threatens to overwhelm Stanley's sense of self—which explains, in part, his breakdown in the final scenes of the play. Anita Brookner, while writing in a more conventional mode than Pinter, also undermines received images of both Englishness and Jewishness. As John Skinner has argued, although Brookner writes "stylistically" as an English "insider," her predominantly female protagonists are "mentally, if not ethnically, outsiders."56 Brookner's precarious position—as neither an "insider" nor an "outsider," neither "Jewish" nor "English"—can, in this regard, be related to Pinter. After The Birthday Party, Pinter, not unlike Brookner, universalized his Jewishness so as to make it unrepresentable. Until A Family Romance (1993), Brookner similarly refused to explicitly represent her characters as Jewish outsiders, although this does not apply to the way she represents herself in various interviews.57 As her novel The Latecomers (1988) demonstrates, Brookner's reluctance to represent her Jewishness explicitly in her fiction was above all a self-conscious strategy. In an article on contemporary Anglo-Jewry, she defines "latecomers" as 1930s German Jewish emigres to Britain, 58 and two such "latecomers," Thomas Hartmann and Thomas Fibich, are at the heart of Brookner's eighth novel. The status of Hartmann and Fibich, however, remains teasingly inexact in this work. If Hartmann and Fibich are "latecomers" to England, then this assumes a line of earlier arrivals—but this is an immigrant story that Brookner pointedly refuses to tell. Brookner's narrative method has in this sense been rightly described as a "refusal of employment."59 Hartmann and Fibich are both child refugees from Nazism who lost their families during the Shoah, but Brookner uses the word "Jew" only once in her novel. Not unlike the painfully incomplete storytelling of Aharon Appelfeld, what is left unsaid in The Latecomers becomes the subject of the novel. To this extent, both Brookner and Pinter have usefully made explicit the silence that surrounds the location of a Jewish past in English history. What is interesting about the extraterritorial realm that distinguishes much British Jewish literature is that it neither universalizes Jewishness out of existence nor straitjackets it in preconceived images. This sense of being unsettled both in a

Englishness and Extraterritoriality

37

spurious English universalism, as well as an overly homogenous Jewish particularism, has been a feature of much British Jewish writing in recent years. This sense of extraterritoriality—neither English nor Jewish—enables British Jewish writers to question the misconceived certainties embedded in both an English as well as a Jewish past. The refusal to belong to any one national culture may well be a peculiarly English form of skepticism. But one can only hope that such skepticism will influence a Jewish world increasingly defined by the Americanization of the diaspora and the nationalization of history in Israel.

Notes 1. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, "State and Real Estate: Territoriality and the Modern Jewish Imagination," in Terms of Survival: The Jewish World Since 1945, ed. Robert Wistrich (London and New York: 1995), 428-448. This article was originally published in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 8, A New Jewry? America Since the Second World War, ed. Peter Y. Medding (New York: 1992), 50-67. I will be referring to the later version of the essay. 2. Ezrahi, "State and Real Estate," 431. George Steiner, in his Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution (London: 1972), 21, considers "extraterritoriality" primarily in relation to writers who are "unhoused and wanderers across language." I will follow Steiner's later essay, "Our Homeland, the Text," Salmagundi no. 66 (winter-spring 1985), 4-25, and attempt to broaden this term beyond the issue of bilingualism. 3. See, for example, Bill Williams, The Making of Manchester Jewry, 1740-1875 (Manchester: 1985), and David Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840-1914 (London and New Haven: 1994). 4. Loren Baritz, "A Jew's American Dilemma," Commentary (June 1962), 525. 5. Richard Chase, The American Novel and its Tradition (New York: 1957), 1-2. See also Ann Massa, "Fictions of the Ghetto: A Trans-Atlantic Comparison," The Jewish Quarterly 35, no. 4 (1989), 21-24. 6. Philip Dodd, "Englishness and the National Culture," in Englishness and Culture 1880-1920, eds. Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (London: 1986), 22. 7. For a recent biography along these lines, see Joseph Udelson, Dreamer of the Ghetto: The Life and Works of Israel Zangwill (Tuscaloosa, Alabama: 1990). 8. Neil Larry Shumsky, "Zangwill's The Melting Pot: Ethnic Tensions on Stage," American Quarterly 27, no. 1 (March 1975), 29. 9. Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot (London: 1925), 33. 10. David Vital, Zionism: The Formative Years (Oxford: 1982), 356, 438. 11. Israel Zangwill, "English Judaism: A Criticism and a Classification," Jewish Quarterly Review 1 (1889), 403. 12. Quoted in Harold Fisch, "Israel Zangwill: Prophet of the Ghetto," Judaism 13, no. 4 (1964), 414, and Bernard Winehouse, "Israel Zangwill's Children of the Ghetto: A Literary History of the First Anglo-Jewish Best-Seller," English Literature in Transition 16 (1973), 95. 13. Quoted in Udelson, Dreamer of the Ghetto, 82-83 and chap. 5, and Bryan Cheyette, "The Other Self: Anglo-Jewish Fiction and the Representation of Jews in England, 18751905," in The Making of Modem Anglo-Jewry, ed. David Cesarani (Oxford: 1990), 106111. 14. Israel Zangwill, Children of the Ghetto: A Story of a Peculiar People (New York: 1895), 66, 174-175, 138. 15. Israel Zangwell to Annie Wynick, 12 June 1916, quoted in Joseph Cohen, Journey to the Trenches: The Life of Isaac Rosenberg, 1890-1918 (London: 1975), 149. 16. Rosenberg to Gordon Bottomley, 23 July 1916, quoted in Ian Parson (ed.), The Collected Works of Isaac Rosenberg (London: 1979), 238.

38

Bryan Cheyette

17. Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (London: 1994), 175-195. 18. For evidence of antisemitism in the British army, see Cohen, Journey to the Trenches, 127-128. See also Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of "the Jew" in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875-1945 (Cambridge: 1993). 19. Rosenberg to R.C. Trevelyan, 15 June 1916, quoted in Parson (ed.), The Collected Works of Isaac Rosenberg, 235, and Phillips, On Flirtation, 193. 20. Jon Silkin, Out of Battle: The Poetry of the Great War (London and New York: 1972), 268-269. 21. Silkin, Out of Battle, 264-265. 22. See Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge and Cornell: 1991), passim and 181-182. 23. "'On the Edge of the Imagination': Clive Sinclair interviewed by Bryan Cheyette," The Jewish Quarterly, 31 nos. 3-4 (1984) 26-29. 24. Clive Sinclair, Diaspora Blues: A View of Israel (London: 1987), 50-53, 65 and 202. 25. "Ashkenazia," in Clive Sinclair, For Good or Evil: Collected Stories (London: 1991), 238. 26. "The Promised Land," in ibid., 20. 27. Ibid., 18. 28. Clive Sinclair, Blood Libels (London: 1985), 188. 29. Ibid. 30. Clive Sinclair, Cosmetic Effects (London: 1989), 163. 31. Ibid., 61. 32. Philip Roth, "Writing American Fiction," in Reading Myself and Others (Harmondsworth: 1985), 176. 33. Ibid., 5, 204. 34. Ibid., 45. 35. Clive Sinclair, Augustus Rex (London: 1992), 196. 36. Peter Conradi, "Elaine Feinstein: Life and Novels," Literary Review (April 1982), 2425. 37. Ibid. 38. On this issue, see the entries on Elaine Feinstein in British Novelists Since 1960, ed. Jay L. Halio (Detroit: 1983) and The Blackwell Companion to Jewish Culture, ed. Glenda Abramson (Oxford: 1989). 39. Mark Shechner, The Conversion of the Jews and Other Essays (London: 1990), 100. 40. Steiner, "Our Homeland, the Text," 5. 41. Cynthia Ozick, An and Ardor: Essays (New York: 1984), 155, 225 and 151-177 passim. 42. Steiner, "Our Homeland, the Text," 5. 43. George Steiner, Proofs and Three Parables (London: 1992), 50-51, 4. 44. Ibid., 32, 34. 45. Dan Jacobson, The God-Fearer (London: 1992). Quotes are from pp. 65, 18, 53, 6869. 46. Ibid., 84, 3, 126. 47. For Gabriel Josipovici's most explicit account of his Jewishness, see his "Going and Resting" in David Theo Goldberg and Michael Krausz (eds.), Jewish Identity (Philadelphia: 1993), 309-321, and his The Book of God: A Response to the Bible (New Haven and London: 1988). 48. Gabriel Josipovici, In a Hotel Garden (Manchester: 1993), 107. 49. Gabriel Josipovici, The Big Glass (Manchester: 1991), 54. 50. Josipovici, In a Hotel Garden, 125, 110. 51. Ibid., 42. 52. See, for example, Josipovici's The Lessons of Modernism and Other Essays (London: 1977). 53. Ephraim Sicher, Beyond Marginality: Anglo-Jewish Literature after the Holocaust (New York: 1985).

Englishness and Extraterritoriality

39

54. Martin Esslin, Pinter: The Playwright (London: 1977), 121-130. 55. Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party, ed. Margaret Rose (London: 1993), 86. 56. John Skinner, The Fictions of Anita Brookner (London: 1992), 6. 57. See, for example, John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview (London: 1985), 60, where Brookner describes the Polish Jewish antecedents of her parents. 58. Anita Brookner, "Aches and Pains of Assimilation," The Observer, 23 April (1989), 44. 59. Skinner, The Fictions of Anita Brookner, 137.

Jabotinsky as Playwright: New Texts, New Subtexts Michael Stanislawski (COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY)

In April 1898, Vladimir Jabotinsky, an 18-year-old student at the prestigious Richelieu gymnasium in Odessa, wrote a letter to Vladimir Korolenko, then one of the most famous and influential writers in Russia.1 Jabotinsky was seeking the master's literary blessings and imprimatur; he had recently had his first attempt at journalism published in an Odessa newspaper and had begun to write short stories and to translate English and French poetry into Russian. Confident of his abundant literary talent, he had also decided to abandon his formal studies at the gymnasium in order to travel and write in Western Europe and had even convinced the editor of one of the Odessa daily newspapers to subsidize his travels in Switzerland and Italy as a roaming foreign correspondent. At the same time, he began to seek ways to get his literary works published at home. The letter to Korolenko, the first of a series to both this and other Russian literary figures, managed to be at once fawning and self-congratulatory. It came with a copy of one of Jabotinsky's recent stories—which, according to the author, no one in poor, provincial Odessa was capable of appreciating. Two weeks later, Korolenko responded to Jabotinsky: 1 have read your story ... as well as the afterword to it; the story evoked a complicated reaction in me: it demonstrates clear signs of artistic or literary talent, but it is also clear that you have employed that talent poorly. ... In general, the story leaves me with an impression utterly contrary to that which you claim in your postscript—not edification, as you submit, but a decidedly unhealthy pornographic aftertaste. I am by no means an advocate of dry artistic didacticism, but your tone is false and possibly unhealthy. 1 am writing so candidly precisely because I see in you clear talent—but hardly anything can come of that talent unless you mend your ways. . . . Healthy realism requires a subtle harmony of colors, shades, and light, as in life; in your work there is apparent a certain artificially exotic refinement. . . . If you would like to send me something else to read, I would gladly do so, with the hope that the negative characteristics I have just pointed out are merely fortuitous aspects of this one particular short story. I wish you all the best. V.L. Korolenko2

On Korolenko's own copy of this letter, the handwritten note appears: "VI. Jabotinsky, admirer of Verlaine; very intelligent; very stupid afterword written in artificially decadent taste."3 40

Jabotinsky as Playwright

41

This anecdote beautifully adumbrates some of the main themes of this essay, which presents an analysis of one of the least studied parts of Jabotinsky's massive oeuvre, the three plays he wrote in Russian in the early years of his literary career. This analysis is part of my effort to reassess the crucial transition made by Jabotinsky and other early Zionist leaders from cosmopolitanism to nationalism in the fin de siecle. This reassessment will be based on recently discovered archival and published evidence, especially but not solely in previously inaccessible Russian collections; and on a self-conscious attempt to produce a detached scholarly account of early Zionism that deliberately eschews intramural polemical disputes and pays special attention to the European and Russian contexts of intellectual and ideological developments in Jewish life. The Korolenko-Jabotinsky exchange can serve as an introduction to this approach both methodologically and substantively: the Jabotinsky letter to Korolenko was recently discovered in Korolenko's archive in St. Petersburg and brought to the Jabotinsky Institute in Israel, where it has been included in the new—and generally superb—edition of Jabotinsky's correspondence up to the First World War.4 But even the diligent editors of this correspondence did not seek to discover if there was an extant answer on the part of Korolenko to Jabotinsky—a task easily enough done, for Korolenko's collected letters were published in Moscow already in 1936.5 The problem, quite clearly, was that the editors of the correspondence assumed they knew who Jabotinsky was—they were working, after all, for the Jabotinsky Institute, housed in the headquarters of the Herat Party, located in a building called "Mezudat Zeev"—the fortress of Zev, i.e., Jabotinsky. Moreover, they assumed they knew why Jabotinsky was writing to Korolenko; after all, in his memoirs Jabotinsky described this episode in the following terms: "I wrote a novel, whose name and content I cannot recall, and sent it to the Russian author Korolenko. He answered me politely, that is, he advised me 'to continue.' "6 In other words, though helpful and beautifully written, Jabotinsky's autobiography—and the various biographies and interpretive accounts of him that take his autobiographical writings at their word—may not be the best source for an objective scholarly account of his life and thought. Jabotinsky's three plays are Krov' (Blood), written, produced on stage and published in 1901 ;7 Ladno (All Right), written and produced in 1902;8 and Chuzhbina (Alien Land), written in 1907, never produced on the stage, and only published in full in Berlin in 1922.9 Of these plays, only the last has been accessible—the Berlin edition is found in many libraries in its Russian original, and there is a Hebrew translation, titled Nekhar, in the collected works of Jabotinsky published in Jerusalem.10 The first two plays have never before been seen or studied by scholars, as their texts have not heretofore existed outside of Russia; indeed, the standard Hebrew edition of Jabotinsky's works erroneously asserts that Blood was never published. (This is true not of Blood, but of All Right, which only exists in a typewritten copy submitted to the theater censor of St. Petersburg in 1902 and discovered in the theater archive of that city several years ago.) To set the stage, as it were, for an understanding of these plays, it is important to see their author as he was in these early years of the century. Vladimir Jabotinsky was born in Odessa in 1880 to a russified upper middle-class family that witnessed a

42

Michael Stanislawski

sharp diminution of its economic circumstances after the death of Vladimir's father, a very successful grain merchant. Typical of many bourgeois Jewish families in finde-siecle Odessa (though this goes against received stereotypes), young Jabotinsky was reared in a home with minimal Jewish knowledge, content or ceremonial. He was tutored in Hebrew by the well-known Hebrew writer Y.H. Ravnitsky—but this was mostly in preparation for his bar mitzvah, and had virtually no lasting effect on his mind or psyche; he himself testified repeatedly that he forgot almost all the Hebrew he learned, knew virtually no Yiddish, and had absolutely no interest in matters Jewish or consciousness of his Jewishness throughout his adolescence and young adulthood. What Jabotinsky was, then, was a precocious, rather pretentious and thus all-tootypical Russian intellectual (inteligent)-m-lh&-making: after abandoning the gymnasium, he lived first in Bern (where he sporadically attended the local university) and then in Rome, where he spent two of the most formative years of his life studying law—again without graduating—from the University of Rome. By this time, Jabotinsky had moved from one Odessa liberal Russian daily to another, and was serving as a frequent contributor to Odesskie Novosti, to which he submitted hundreds of feuilletons and theater and opera reviews over the next decade and a half. In sum, by the time Jabotinsky wrote the first of his plays, he was an ambitious and much published twenty-one-year-old journalist who truly felt himself destined to be a major figure in Russian letters—but could not quite make it, stuck as he was in provincial Odessa. He was also a young Russian enamored of Italy, its culture, politics and women, but without the means to remain in the place where he had attended the lectures of (and even drunk wine with) such giants of Italian Socialism as Enrico Ferri and Antonio Labriola. Notwithstanding, despite his later claims to the contrary, Jabotinsky never became a true believing socialist, adopting instead the common liberal/radical views and cultural pose of so many Russian students and inteligenty of the turn of the century: more the Odessan version of "political correctness" circa 1900 than any structured and coherent radical point of view. While Jabotinsky continued to write the decadent short stories that so disturbed Korolenko and penned a good number of original poems and translations of poems—especially of Edgar Allan Poe and of Paul Verlaine—it was now to the theater that he turned his attention, hoping to make his fame and fortune as a playwright. His first play, Blood, was a reworking in verse, with many emendations and additions, of a prose play by an Italian friend of his, the otherwise unknown Roberto Lombardo. In his memoirs, Jabotinsky explains: That fall, in 1901, the [Odessa] Municipal Theater presented my first play—"Blood." Who would believe that in my youth I wrote a pacifist play, against wars in general and England in particular? I wrote it while still in Rome; the subject, connected with the Boer War, I took from the manuscript of one of my friends, but changed the plot, introduced new characters, etc.; three acts and in verse yet! The best "stars" of our city troupe, headed by Anna Paskhalova, performed in the play; but the theater was empty—maybe 300 people, maybe fewer, half of them my friends or acquaintances, who applauded, of course, and called for me to appear at the curtain call at the end: I went out to take my bow, in tails ordered especially for the event, and tripped on the

Jabotinsky as Playwright

43

curtain rope; had not Madame Paskhalova caught me, I would have fallen off the stage. I didn't sleep all night long; at daybreak I rose and ran off to buy the newspapers, all the newspapers, even the Police News, and devoured the reviews. The critics were gentle— even in the Police News, and didn't wreck my joy; but the play was only performed twice in the Odessa theater.11

And for good reason: this three act play in verse, which is all of sixty-four printed pages long, has fourteen major characters, many minor parts, and no discernible action on stage. As Jabotinsky explained in a letter to one of the most famous actors of the Russian stage, this was deliberate, since "the theme of the play is blood, war; therefore, necessarily, all the action takes place behind the scene, and on stage there is expressed only the gravity of the hidden actions, setting a mood"; moreover, rhymed verse, he maintained, was absolutely essential to the "symbolist nature of the play."12 The story, such as it is, is simple: Georg Gamm, the minister of the interior and foreign affairs of an undisclosed state, is visited by his former teacher (a dignified foreigner), who demands that Gamm stop the bloody, unjust and imperialist war he is leading. Gamm is shocked by this assault and rebuffs his professor, explaining that he is no longer the idealistic youth he once was. Exit the professor and enter Gamm's lady friend, an elegant and noble woman, who pleads for the release from service of a poor soldier, the husband of a desperate young acquaintance of hers, the sole support of his wife, child and aging father. Gamm tries to accede to his friend's pleas, but he is too late: the soldier's ship has already sailed, and we soon learn that the young man has been killed in a bloody battle that ended in hopeless defeat. Act II opens in the home of the soldier, where we meet his elderly father, wife and assorted friends and colleagues, including once more the brave old professor, who reports on the perfidy of his former pupil and the tragic immorality of the war. The soldier's father is temporarily swept up in the patriotic fervor of the crowds chanting support for Gamm and his war, but abandons this support—and indeed loses his mind—upon hearing of his son's death. The third and final act takes place at the seaside dacha of Gamm's wealthy paramour, where the bereaved widow and her now deranged father-in-law seek solace, and to which Gamm, too, soon repairs—for the war is going badly, and he has not only been disgraced, but is now under criminal investigation. His old mentor, the honest professor, has died, decrying his student's actions to the end. Gamm, unable to come to terms with his own grief and that of the crazy old man whose son he himself sent to death, realizes the error of his ways and flings himself into the sea as the final curtain descends. Despite the obviously limited dramatic and literary qualities of the work, Jabotinsky's Russian (as always) is supple, rich and idiosyncratically alive. It is not surprising to find a play with this subject and point of view written and performed in Odessa by a playwright recently returned from Italy: the Boer War was still raging and the British seemed to be winning, much to the chagrin of radical and liberal public opinion throughout Europe, including Russia and Italy.13 For example, both Odesskie Novosti and the Italian Socialist daily Avanti! (in which I have, not incidentally, discovered several articles by Jabotinsky in support of radical students in Russia) were full of new reports chronicling and denouncing British actions in South Africa.

44

Michael Stanislawski

As the author himself recalled decades later, Blood is indeed a political polemic in the guise of symbolist drama. Its pacifism and anti-imperialism, however jejune, are conveyed in sharply worded monologues attributed to the aged professor; one brief snippet should suffice to convey the tone and point of view: For years your legions have Pitilessly sent their sons—their best sons— To a far-off sandy hell devoid of rain

Uninhabited from end to end And wait for every last one of them to die Not knowing why, for what, for whom. . . . Out of idle greed, for the benefit Of dishonorable leaders You have driven innocents to a deadly, Bloody battle with savage hordes. . . . A holy war for the right to plunder.14 But Jabotinsky's Blood is not simply a pacifist and anti-imperialist tirade; it is in many interesting respects an antinationalist tirade, or more precisely, an attempt to express dramatically—albeit in a wooden manner—a condemnation of nationalism, patriotism and the unconscious lust for power. Minister Gamm is not an unselfconscious lout; on the contrary, he is portrayed as a genuinely moral man blinded by his patriotism, sense of national duty and attraction to power. In perhaps the most authentically dramatic moment of the play, at the end of Act I, Gamm frantically but compellingly rebuts the arguments of his erstwhile teacher: I decisively and directly recognize The utter horror of this war But I am ready for anything I send young men off in droves "To a far-off sandy hell, devoid of rain" In order later to cover it with gardens To settle millions of people. And if the honor of my homeland Which I—son and leader, am entrusted to serve With my trusted sword and all my might—demands it, I will trample, if I must, on everything that is sacred Everything! Like others, I hold law and freedom dear And have done so all my days But let law and freedom not come at the expense of my nation! ... If 1 must stand in a pool of blood Like an automaton, like a wild beast, unrestrained That is my duty, and I have no regrets!15 To Jabotinsky in 1901, such a stance was the height of immorality and political incorrectness—though it is fascinating to note that he was able to parse with deftness and subtlety its psychological and ideological attractiveness.

Jabotinsky as Playwright

45

A year after completing this first play, Jabotinsky wrote and had produced in the same Odessa theater his second dramatic piece, Ladno (All Right). About the production of this play he devotes only one small, self-deprecating paragraph in his memoirs: "A year later, they performed my second play, also in verse, but in one act, again with Paskhalova; but this time the critics did not take pity on me, and wrote—every one of them, as if in a conspiracy—the same pun on the name I gave to the play: 'Ladno'—i.e., all right; they called 'Neladno' 'Neskladno'—not all right, incoherent. . . ,"16 And right they were—although here again, behind an even weaker dramatic facade, there hovers Jabotinsky's gradually more discernible philosophy of life. All Right—whose subtitle is "A Scene from the Life of Youth"— is best described as a very brief one-act sketch, so flimsy in dramatic interest or poetic power that it is truly difficult to imagine it actually being performed on a stage, even if only once. The scene opens with an extended though very laconic conversation between a schoolteacher mother and her schoolteacher daughter over whether the younger woman should marry a man she barely knows and does not love, but who promises her a life of comfort and ease. The young woman seems to decide to accede to this offer, if ever so reluctantly, but her musings are interrupted by the appearance of some former students of her mother. These have come to celebrate the awarding of a silver medal to one of them for a piece he wrote on the philosophical theme of "Jura in se ipsum"—the right over oneself. There is much fuss over this medal— especially by the proud mother-teacher—and much discussion of the appropriate drinks and pastries needed to celebrate this accomplishment; much laughter and foolish banter of youth; much bemoaning of the poverty and hunger of student life. Presently, we learn that the recipient of the medal is in fact the true love of the daughter, but she rebuffs his advances, and indeed his love, because his philosophical devotion to unbridled freedom of the self prevents him from committing himself to her in any honorably sustainable fashion. Soon we get to hear the prize-winning oration, declaimed in verse to the accompaniment of some laughter but meant with great earnestness by the student (and his alter-ego, the playwright): "No man can be master of himself." So spake Rome, and long thereafter this view was held . . . and confirmed as the core of ethics especially here [in Russia]. And so, in the last decades it has led to the denial of the right of a man over himself. Duty to one's nation is held to be the core of morality. ... I reject such a morality: I recognize one and only one law for myself, one untrammeled and seamless law. No one is bound by any duty. There is no duty. A child does not come into the world voluntarily, and life is cruel and harsh. Who can be blamed for dedicating himself solely to a struggle for happiness, for one's self? We, of the future, have a new Holy Writ: Pursue your own wishes, be happy, jealously guard your own desires . . . wherever they may lead, to love, to art, to knowledge, to idleness, or even to the ancient calling of service to your nation. But even if you follow such an ancient path, follow your own spirit, not out of duty, but out of your own desires. . . . For the world is sick, ugly, putrid; we will grant it a flood of magnificent power, much beauty, and much fresh blood; but with one and only one command: fight for happiness, ruthlessly fight anything that stands in your way!17

46

Michael Stanislawski

This cri de coeur is followed and expanded in a rather bizarre, ornately written mock-Nordic epic about a young hero, Vitmald Eagle, who resists the blandishments of the gods and the king to rescue a beautiful damsel in distress, actually the imprisoned princess of the realm. (This strange piece was reprinted by Jabotinsky under the title "Noella,"18 and can be found in his collected verse in Russian and in an adequate, if bowdlerized Hebrew translation in his Hebrew collected works.) To rescue the maiden from her horrible imprisonment, Eagle must desecrate his own father's grave, which he does willingly: What do I care, my spring lily of the field— About the sacred spirit of my father, my fatherland, my nation? 1 want you—I want to be intoxicated again and again by the caresses of your beloved eyes and press my lips again and again against your silken skin; To satisfy your soul, I will destroy temples of God, desecrate all that is sacred—19 The deed accomplished, he rides off on his steed into the sunset, along with his beloved princess. But All Right itself does not end so happily—the boy does not get the girl, although she offers herself to him in lines so forthright that the Russian censor forbade their utterance on the stage in Odessa (apparently it was not only Korolenko who was offended by Jabotinsky's "decadent" voice). The problem is that our heroine feels duty-bound to her impoverished mother and brothers to accept the offer of the man she neither loves nor can ever grow to love; but she is torn, and leaves it to our hero/philosopher to decide her fate: duty or passion? To which he answers "Ladno"—okay, whatever, and walks out of the room without looking back, stopping in the wings to put on his coat and boots, and strides off, as the curtain falls. In his autobiography of 1936, Jabotinsky explained that this play resulted from his deepest philosophical principle at that time: 1 did not abandon the teachings of Labriola or Ferri, kept them in my heart, but didn't use them or take interest in them. I emphasized only one idea: . . . the idea of individualism ... the idea that were I a philosopher, I would place at the base of my system: In the beginning, God created the individual, every individual is a king, equal to his friend, and his friend is a king as well; it is better for an individual to sin against the collective than for society to sin against the individual. Society was created for the individual, and not vice versa, and the future end of the days, the messianic era, will be a paradise for the individual, a glistening state of anarchy. . . . You might assert that there is a contradiction between this view and my nationalistic pronouncements; one of my friends, who read this manuscript, said that he heard another theme from me—In the beginning, God created the nation. But there is no contradiction between these two views. I developed the second theme in opposition to those who assert that in the beginning "humanity" was created. I believe with perfect faith that in a contest between these two views, the nation must take precedence; and similarly, that the individual comes before the nation. And even he who subjects his whole life to service to the nation, that is not a contradiction in my eyes—he does so voluntarily, not by force.20

Jabotinsky as Playwright

47

This rather confused statement has engendered a minor industry in Jabotinsky scholarship.21 But whatever success scholarly studies have had in explicating the later Jabotinsky, they fail to understand the historical Jabotinsky of 1902. Back then, the stance he was advocating was not that of radical individualism somehow reconcilable with extreme nationalism. Rather, this was an ideological/moral/artistic/ philosophical position that was only understandable in its contemporary Russian context, and more specifically in the ideological, philosophical, psychological and political crisis of the Russian intelligentsia—particularly the younger members of the Russian intelligentsia during the so-called Silver Age of Russian culture and letters, from 1890 to 1914. In brief, Jabotinsky's hero-philosopher was here espousing the rather prototypical if confused stance of many young Russian inteligenty of the day, an aestheticized individualism bordering on solipsism yet often combined, in a typically Russian way, with radical political sentiments. This combination of nihilism and aestheticism was often accompanied, not insignificantly, with the celebration of sexuality— including the first public emergence of homosexuality—and was frequently expressed through symbolist drama by such important figures as Merezhkovskii, Gippius and Blok. (Sergei Diaghilev, for his part, translated this movement into a new form of the dance in his Ballets russes.)22 Though already torn by serious differences over aesthetic theory and politics, the Russian Symbolists of this period rejected the monolithic world view of the older Russian intelligentsia that had "enjoined the individual to devote his or her life to serving the people." Instead, "the value of the individual, the supremacy of aesthetic-spiritual over materialisticutilitarian considerations, and the exaltation of cultural creativity over economic progress constituted the main tenets of symbolism."23 In sum, Jabotinsky's radically individualistic, antinationalist, quasi-nihilistic and aestheticist stance was typical rather than idiosyncratic, shared by thousands of young Russian inteligenty and pseudo-inteligenty at the turn of the century. The popularity of this Weltanschauung was such that it would soon be denounced in a celebrated essay by Semen Frank, an important Russian critic, as "nihilistic moralism." Consider only a few lines from Frank's essay, entitled "The Ethic of Nihilism," which could have been a gloss on Jabotinsky's hero's speech: The Russian intelligentsia's moralism is only the expression and reflection of its nihilism. To be sure, if one reasons according to strict logic, then in the sphere of morals, too, one can derive from nihilism only nihilism, that is amorality. ... If existence has no intrinsic meaning, and subjective human desires are the only rational criterion for the way a person lives his life, then why must I recognize any obligations? Wouldn't a simple, egotistical enjoyment of life, an ingenuous and natural carpe diem be my legitimate right? . . . But at this point let us assume that one can make a logical leap and psychologically get from egotism to altruism, and from concern with one's ego to concern for the daily bread of everyone, or of the majority—or, to put it another way, let us assume that the irrational instinct of tribal or social solidarity replaces rational proof. Then we can derive all the rest of the Russian intelligentsia's world view perfectly from its nihilism.24

As is well known, this analysis was part of one of the most controversial tracts in Russian intellectual history—Vekhi (Signposts), issued in 1909 by a group of Rus-

48

Michael Stanislawski

sian intellectuals (several of them Jewish) who sharply indicted the Russian intelligentsia as a whole for its moral and intellectual failings, its combination of vulgar and reductionist leftism, moral relativism and decadent sexual mores.25 This critique of the Russian intelligentsia is important to the present discussion in another sense: by 1909, when Signposts was published, many of the Symbolists had reversed their militantly apolitical stance and had gravitated toward leftist political movements—Blok, for example, carried a red flag in a revolutionary procession and wrote poems bemoaning the poverty of the Russian people; Bely began to study both Marxism and anarchism;26 and indeed the authors of Signposts themselves were on the road to new spiritual and philosophical points of view, largely involving a turn to religion, mysticism, spiritualism—and nationalism. Thus Frank, brought up in a middle-class Jewish household in Moscow, became a Marxist, was exiled to Germany, where he came under the influence of Nietzsche; and then, in 1912, converted to Christianity. Another central figure of the Signposts group, Peter Struve, had evolved from being an orthodox Marxist to a revisionist Marxist to a left liberal to a right-wing liberal, and by 1909 was imbued with belief in Russian Orthodoxy and Great Russian nationalism, to the extent that he was condemned, in a famous phrase by another Russian modernist intellectual, as a "zoological" nationalist.27 Jabotinsky followed a parallel path during this time, becoming a convinced if idiosyncratic Zionist, and indeed one of the most important Zionist polemicists in Russia between the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 and the Bolshevik Revolution. Why and how this transformation occurred cannot yet be answered with any certainty; but some intriguing building blocks of the eventual answer are contained in his third and last play, Chuzhbina (Alien Land). This play, as already pointed out, was written in 1907, never produced on the stage, and first published in Russian in Berlin in 1922—and in a problematic and bowdlerized Hebrew translation in Jabotinsky's Collected Works.28 Despite the importance of this work to Jabotinsky's worldview and its availability in Hebrew, it has not to my knowledge been analyzed in any serious scholarly fashion by anyone; the best-known biographer of Jabotinsky, for example, devoted a mere two pages to an extremely unsatisfactory summary of the play, which misrepresents not only the plot but the overt message and fascinating complexity of its point of view.29 Unlike its predecessors, Alien Land is a very long play—five acts, almost all in verse, with much Odessan dialect, covering some 240 pages. The plot, involving thirty main characters plus a chorus, is rather convoluted, but reducible to the following: In a city very much like Odessa, a group of Jewish revolutionary socialists hold a meeting to protest the beating by a Jewish factory owner of one of his workers. To this meeting come not only committed Jewish socialists but a cast of other characters: an upper middle-class Russian woman named Natasha; a variety of more or less traditional Jewish business and synagogue types who speak in a wonderfully amusing mixture of Russian and Yiddish; and two alienated Jewish intellectuals of radically different miens: Gonta, a former revolutionary who, after witnessing the Kishinev pogrom, despaired not only of his socialism but his Jewishness as well, went off to New York to find his bearings, and has now returned to fight against Jewish socialists in the name of a liberated and proud Jewish national-

Jabotinsky as Playwright

49

ism; and extern (that is, an external student) Abram, the secularized son of a Hassidic zaddik, who hovers elliptically over the whole play (until its last scene) as the characters' authentic, if deracinated, Jewish conscience. As the protest over the humiliation of the worker evolves into a strike, we learn that, after Kishinev, Gonta (the ex-socialist nationalist hero) has had a brief fling with Natasha (the liberated emblem of Russian womanhood) in which he pretended not to be a Jew. They now meet again serendipitously, the inevitable sparks fly, and despite his newfound nationalistic consciousness, Gonta succumbs not only to her but to the attendant allure of forgetting his Jewish sorrow, reveling instead in the liberation of unadulterated humanness (much like the hero of the mock epic "Noella" in Ladno). Meanwhile, the strike has taken on greater proportions than ever anticipated, and the revolutionaries begin to hope that their longed for apocalyptic battle with the bourgeoisie has finally come, as the non-Jewish urban masses swell the ranks of the protesting Jewish proletariat. Soon, however, politics are overwhelmed by vodka, the strike snowballs into a riot and then into a pogrom against the Jews. The revolutionaries scatter in disarray and despair, interrupting the shemoneh 'esreh prayer in the synagogue to hold an emergency meeting, at which the assembled flock discuss the possible solutions to their plight—a renewed commitment to internationalist or Bundist socialism, self-defense, Palestine, Labor Zionism, or Gonta's new-found proud, pure and hard-nosed Jewish nationalism. Gonta seems to be gaining the most ground, but then he is shooed off the stage and humiliated by extern Abram, who waives a mysterious letter testifying to Gonta's essential hypocrisy, what may be deduced as a love letter from Natasha detailing their consummated love. Gonta retreats in shame, and then extern Abram abandons his silent role as observer and launches into a scathing attack on all the characters and ideologies he has witnessed, from left to right and in-between—a rather shocking denunciation of what he lambasts as the pathetic gallery of Russian Jewish types. His only solution is rank cynicism: all hope is lost, the only recourse is wine, women and song. With this, he too is chased out of the synagogue and off the stage, and as the other characters retreat, the scene freezes on the old Jewish businessmen who know they have lost the battle and their children but have no recourse but to resume their evening prayers, as the sounds of the shemoneh 'esreh reverberate through the theater and the curtain falls. On its simplest level, Alien Land is indeed a dramatic reflection of Jabotinsky's public polemics of these years in favor of Zionism and against Jewish socialism (most importantly, that of the Bund). Throughout the play, the radical students and revolutionary organizers are depicted by Jabotinsky with a scorching sarcasm that reduces most of them to pathetic dupes, pitiful parrots of a party line that defies reason and reality and serves only to harm the interests of their ostensible allies, the Jewish working class. Perhaps the most searing indictment occurs at the very beginning of the pogrom: when the news comes back to the Jews that the protesters are turning to violence and to drink, two of the revolutionaries—one is appropriately named Kautsky—engage in a debate over whether the incipient pogromshchiki are stevedores or porters, for there is, they believe, a crucial and

50

Michael Stanislawski

scientifically demonstrable class difference between the two groups. It turns out, of course, that it is both the stevedores and the porters and everyone else who is running wild through the streets, screaming "bei zhidov"—"beat the dirty Jews." The most intelligent and sympathetically portrayed revolutionary, Makar, early on in the play delivers one of its most interesting speeches, in which he denies the importance of his Jewishness and proclaims his solidarity with the Russian working class, even though he understands, deep inside, that ultimately he and the other Jewish intellectuals will be swept aside by the longing of the non-Jewish masses for a leader from among their own ranks, "a new ataman," but one serving the revolution.30 On the same level, we see here enunciated in a fascinating form Jabotinsky's incipient new ideology of Jewish nationalism, one that does not rely on traditional Jewish forms and content—of which Gonta, its representative and obviously its author's alter ego—is largely ignorant. More than that: Gonta, with some assistance from Natasha, viscerally and vociferously rejects the bearing, demeanor, and deeply etched impotence of East European Jewry, whether traditional, revolutionary or inbetween: Let me introduce myself: to cite Christ— I am a guest at your fest, but not in festive attire. . . . I do not believe in your idols, I do not believe in you: When a bottomless sea rages all around you Flinging you about in powerful tides— You pretend that you yourselves made the storm You, petty droplets on other peoples' waves; Not powerful enough to ignite or to extinguish The flame of worldwide fire. In a muscleless arm you hold a harmless sword You are superfluous in the battle! By the boot of History you were kicked into exile Running away, like scared little boys, from the fight Believing all the while, that your pathetic nation Was the hope and leader of all mankind. You ought to have stood, my nation, like a rock, But instead you skulk around, ... a nation without pride I have nothing to say to you— I don't give a damn. 31 But of course he does, and time and again he returns to save the Jews with his newfound vision; near the end of the play, after all that has happened, after the Zionist handwriting should be clear on the wall, he screams out: I call on you to stop lying to yourselves To know that we live here in the lions' den All our truths and words and beliefs are in vain. We must cut off once and for all The bridge between us and this alien land

Jabotinsky as Playwright

51

Curse it for good, and go on— Never looking back at others' beauty and riches Striding forth proud of our disheveled rags The pride that once was that of a king.32 Yet despite the force of Gonta's new nationalistic fervor, he does not carry the day; he is unmasked—right at this moment—by the revelation of his essential dishonesty and hypocrisy. For what Jabotinsky is able to convey in a powerful and complex manner through the medium of drama—perhaps not possible in his polemical and ideological writings—is the wrenching pathos that lay at the core of his new faith: while steadfastly maintaining this new belief (which would, in due course, become fully articulated as the concept of hadar—Jewish pride—at the core of Revisionist Zionism) he grappled in Alien Land with his own consciousness of the artificiality and inauthenticity of his hero and alter ego's solution, their formidable but inescapable existential plight. Jabotinsky knew only the externalities, not the inner core of Judaism—as extern Abram puts it in Alien Land, only the prose, not the poetry of his people. Put more clearly, he recognized that his hard-nosed, proud and self-conscious Jewish nationalism was at its core but an attempt to mimic the non-Jews he was ostensibly urging the Jews to reject, a replication for the Jews of the natural, unselfconscious proud bearing of the gentile. Early on in the play, Natasha confesses her profound distaste for Russian Jews: You are strange, somehow all sick All this fuss and bustling about No quiet, none of that crucial silence— The pride that inheres in calm [gordosf, kotoraia v pokoe]33 Indeed, perhaps the most searing moment of this play is Gonta's restatement of this indictment in his monologue detailing his reaction to the Kishinev pogrom—penned by the man who had translated Bialik's "In the City of Slaughter" into a startling and highly successful Russian version: I was in Kishinev [Gonta explains] There for three days. . . . On the third day I left—I thought 1 would choke and suffocate. I thought, people were Jeering and pointing their fingers at me Saying: look, there's a Jew A beaten-up kike. I hid in a corner never went out, tried not to talk, not to think, not to move, And yet to go forward. And then I heard that phrase—the pride of calm— . . . from a Russian girl, with whom I was cavorting And do you know what? I told her I wasn't a kike, but a Russian I went over and talked, like an equal, like a free man.

52

Michael Stanislawski 0 it was so easy, I could breathe deeply and fully No hate, no disdain—my soul became so pure As if I had left a putrid Jewish tavern For the pure air of God's open fields Or as if music had transported me to a fairy-tale kingdom and given me a crown. The next morning the girl left, I don't remember where to. I felt ashamed, ashamed to the depths of my being. But were it not for that night, were it not for that princely sleep I would have gone mad. And then, 1 learned the only solution to the riddle of this world: The commandment of pride, the cold, Implacable, insurmountable, callous, Bottomless, pride of a king Deprived of his throne and his crown.34

In the end, the Jabotinsky that emerges in the evolution from Blood to All Right to Alien Land is not the hero of the morality tale of traditional Zionist historiography, neither the Jew born naturally to Love of Zion nor simply the "assimilated" Jew who realizes the errors of his ways and returns to his people and his true being. Rather, as with West European Zionists such as Herzl and Nordau, Jabotinsky traversed a painstaking movement from cosmopolitanism to Jewish nationalism, and in the process evolved a version of Zionism that both rejected the universalist underpinnings of socialist or cultural Zionism and retained an essential aloofness and superior distance from the masses it aimed to serve and to save. Already in 1907, Jabotinsky was in the fascinating position of being convinced that Zionism was the only possible answer to the Jewish plight—but because he was who he was, precisely because he had breathed the air of a free man, he believed that he saw through the cliches, the jargon, the ethnocentrism, the provincialism (kleynshtetldikeyf) of East European Jews and East European Zionism. He was not willing to follow Abram into cynicism and despair; he proceeded rather to create a version of Zionism that consciously attempted to destroy the traditional stance of East European Jewry not through what he took to be the vain, indeed pathetic strictures of self-defeating socialism (of which the Jews, he believed, would inevitably be the victim) but to replace the hunchbacked, stooped, weak and sniveling East European Jew with a hard, cold, dignified—indeed virtually Aryan—type of Jew, imbued with a militant and cold patriotism reminiscent of Minister Gamm. But all the while, Jabotinsky acknowledged, at least to his private self in the plays and poetry he wrote and shelved, the ironies and self-contradictions, if not the inauthenticity, of his own response. In the end, how Vladimir Jabotinsky—like other famous Zionists such as Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau—made the tortuous shift from cosmopolitanism to nationalism is crucial not only to an understanding of their vitally important lives, but to the overarching revolution of modern Jewish life that ensued. And not only Jewish life: for here, as in so many other realms, the case of the Jews can serve as an

Jabotinsky as Playwright

53

extraordinarily sensitive barometer of one of the central, shared, but still mysterious ideological shifts of our times, the abandonment of universalism for parochialism.

Notes I am indebted to Viktor E. Kel'ner of St. Petersburg for providing me with copies of the two plays discussed herein that are not available outside of Russia, and with the other archival material used in this study. 1. The original letter, dated Odessa, 26 April 1898, has recently been published in Vladimir Zhabotinskii, Pis'ma russkim pisateliam, ed. Kh. Firin and A. Kolganova, Vestnik evreiskogo universiteta v Moskve, no. 1 (Moscow and Jerusalem, 1992), 203; a Hebrew translation is available in Zeev Zhabotinski, Igerot 1898-1914, ed. Daniel Carpi and Moshe Halevi (Tel-Aviv: 1992), 3. 2. V.G. Korolenko, Izbrannye pis'ma v trekh tomakh, ed. N.V. Korolenko and A.L. Krivinska (Moscow: 1936), vol. 3, 122-123. 3. Ibid., 123. 4. See Zhabotinski, Igerot 1898-1914, 3. 5. Korolenko, Izbrannye pis'ma, vol. 3, 122-123. 6. See Zeev Zhabotinski, "Sipur yamai," in Autobiografiyah in his Ketavim (Jerusalem: 1947), vol. 1, 23. 7. Altalena [Vladimir Zhabotinskii], Krov' (Odessa: 1901); the frontispiece reads: "Altalena, Minister Gamm [Blood] in 3 acts. On the subject Sangue, drama sociale di R. Lombardo. First performed by the company of N.N. Solovtsov in the Odessa City Theater, 29 September 1901." 8. Ladno is extant only in a typescript submitted to the St. Petersburg theater censor in 1902 and recently discovered in the St. Petersburg Theatrical Library. It is signed "Altalena" and bears the catalog number 23929. 9. Vladimir Zhabotinskii, Chuzhbina 2nd. ed. (Berlin: 1922). I have been unable to locate the first edition. There is no doubt, however, that this play was written in 1907—see n. 28 below. 10. Zeev Zhabotinski, Nekhar: mahazeh behamesh ma'arakhot, trans. Hananiah Reichman, in Ketavim, vol. 11. 11. Zhabotinski, "Sipur yamai," 37. 12. Vladimir Zhabotinskii to Modest Pisarev, Odessa, 16 Feb. 1900, Institut russkoi literatury (IRLI), f. 231, ed. khr. 74, pp. 1-2. 13. See, for example, Elizabeth Kandyba-Foxcroft, Russia and the Anglo-Boer War, 1899-1902 (Roodepoort: 1981), and Thomas Packenham, The Boer War (London: 1979). It is also possible that Jabotinsky was influenced by the contemporary Italian Abyssinian War, in which Crispi played a part reminiscent of the fictional Minister Gamm in this play. See Dennis Mack Smith, Italy and Its Monarchy (New Haven: 1989), 113 ff. 14. Krov', 11. 15. Ibid., 28. 16. Zhabotinski, "Sipur yamai," 37. 17. Ladno, 18-20. 18. In Russian: "Noela," in his Stikhi (Paris: 1930), 103-111; the poem appears in Hebrew translation in Zhabotinski, Ketavim, vol. 2, Shirim (Jerusalem: 1957-1958), 261264. 19. Ladno, 23. The last line is rendered effectively by the Hebrew translator as: "lehazin bakh lev 'ad godesh, ahalel kol din vakodesh." 20. Zhabotinski, "Sipur yamai," 38. 21. See, for example, Raphaella Bilski Ben Hur, Kol yahid hu melekh: hamahshavah hahevratit shel Zeev Zhabotinski (Tel-Aviv: 1988).

54

Michael Stanislawski

22. See the valuable introduction by Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal and Martha BohachevskyChomiak to their A Revolution of Spirit: Crisis of Value in Russia, 1890-1924 (New York: 1990), esp. 32-33. 23. Ibid., 29. 24. Semen Frank, "The Ethic of Nihilism (A Characterization of the Russian Intelligentsia's Moral Outlook)," in Signposts, translated and edited by Marshall S. Shatz and Judith E. Zimmerman (Irvine: 1986), 135-136. 25. See the introduction to Signposts; also see Richard Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Right, 1905-1944 (Cambridge: 1980), especially 106-114. 26. Rosenthal and Bohachevsky-Chomiak, A Revolution of Spirit, 31. 27. Pipes, Liberal on the Right, 94. 28. See n. 9. There is no difficulty in ascribing Jabotinsky's views as expressed in the printed version of the play to the time of its composition, since a summary of the play with extensive quotations was published by S. Gepshtein in Rassvet #13, 28 March 1910, revealing no differences between the original and the later published version. 29. Joseph B. Schechtman, The Life and Times of Vladimir Jabotinsky: Rebel and Stateman, the Early Years (New York: 1956), 139-141. 30. Chuzhbina, 35. 31. Ibid., 43-44. The "citation" of Christ is an imprecise allusion to Jesus's Parable of the Marriage Feast, Matthew 22: 1-14. 32. Chuzhbina, 225-226. 33. Ibid., 21. 34. Ibid., 50-52.

Rabbis, Rebbes and Other Humanists: The Search for a Usable Past in Modern Yiddish Literature David G. Roskies (JEWISH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY)

"And your Torah, Noah?" "Would you like to see it, Rabbi?" "See the Torah?" The Brisker was astonished. "Come, I will show you. I will show you the glory and the joy that radiate from it and touch all of Israel."—I.L. Peretz, 1900

These Zydki, wooden figurines of traditional Polish Jews, come in all shapes and sizes. Where once they played a talismanic role for Polish Catholic peasants—as protectors of beehives, of home and hearth, or simply as Easter toys for the very young—they have now been turned into souvenirs. There are gaunt ones, stained a deep brown, from Lodz, and grotesque ones, in gaudy colors, from Nowy Sadz. In the Old Town of Warsaw, lovingly rebuilt from the ruins, sculptors hawk their wares—in English. Too young to have ever seen these Jews in the flesh, Polish woodcarvers seem to know what caps the men once wore, how they draped a tallis over head or shoulders, that they carried oversized books, and that the women always covered their hair. But as Polish folk artists try to keep pace with the demand for ever new types of Jews, the naive medium is being pushed beyond the pale of collective memory. To the standard Jewish klezmer band of fiddle, bass and drum, and to the Jew carrying a bag of gold (a piece of sympathetic magic, if there ever was one), there are now ritual slaughterers, tavern keepers, various and sundry craftsmen, and a dizzying array of effeminate-looking rabbi-types with curly sidelocks. In one upscale store on Marszalkowska, I spied a marionette of a young hasid carrying a book with Hebrew lettering, which, upon closer inspection, read: Farlag Shveln Lodz. This would be roughly analogous to depicting a Virgin Mary cradling a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover. They don't make wooden rabbis the way they used to. Whereas to the Polish folk mind, the only real Jew was (and still remains) a bearded Jew with his tsitsis showing, the status of these same rabbis and hasidic rebeim among the purveyors of modern Jewish culture has been extremely problematical. This is because modern Jewish literature in Eastern Europe began where the 55

56

David G. Roskies

folk culture ended, and the rise of secular forms of Jewish self-expression coincided with the Kulturkampf between Hasidism and the Haskalah. Precisely because each camp claimed to speak in the name of Jewish tradition, the image of the rabbi and rebbe (a.k.a. zaddik, or guteryid) became the battleground for the hearts and minds of the impressionable masses. And what better way to stake one's claim to the future than to read that image all the way back to the past? Even a new translation of the Book of Proverbs into the Yiddish vernacular could be used by the reformers (wolves in sheep's clothing) to draw a firm line between the biblical zaddik, glossed as an erlekher, or a koshere neshome, and the usurpers of that title in the present.1 Meanwhile, in the rival camp, hagiographic tales about the great zaddikim of old were used for propaganda and popular education from 1815 onwards.2 Because, moreover, each movement could spread its gospel in at least two languages at once—Hebrew and Yiddish—and because the audience for each language was differentiated as to gender and educational level, there soon developed a division of literary labor. The Hebrew biblical epic written by a noted maskil in syllabic verse and starring a tragic and neoclassical King Saul became a modest, anonymous and didactic Yiddish folk book in prose. The Hebrew was designed for a literary salon frequented only by men, while the Yiddish could be adapted for the one-daya-year theatrical farce of the Purimshpil, performed before an audience of men, women and children. The Yiddish-reading audience had as yet no access to the noncovenantal past, to the past as a foreign country. Not until the 1860s did there emerge a highbrow literary culture in the Yiddish vernacular, its concern being the here-and-now, the ills of the feudal economy, the corruption of shtetl society, and the exploitation of the masses on the part of hasidic rebeim. Explorations of the Jewish past, meanwhile, remained the province of Yiddish popular writers.3 Foremost among them was Isaac Meir Dik (1814-1893). Beginning in 1855 with a tiny mayse-bikhl, or chapbook, titled Der yoyred (The Impoverished Man), Dik made a conscious effort to supplant the zaddik and miracle worker with a normative, rationalist, nonhasidic rabbi as hero.4 Himself a descendant of Rabbi Yom Tov Lipmann Heller (1579-1654), Dik translated and supplemented his forebear's autobiography in Stories of the Gaon, Author of "Tosafot Yom Tov" (1864) and a year later tried to make a culture hero of Rabbi Abraham Danzig (1748-1820) in Seyfer beys Avrom. "He came to Vilna on account of business," wrote Dik in his gushing preface to the latter work, and earned his living strictly from trade, though study always remained of paramount importance, ... his pronunciation was pure German. He dressed entirely |in traditional] Jewish [garb], though very clean and proper. He lived well and expansively and in a highly dignified manner for he was a worldly man and it was a joy to speak to him. . . . As an able Leipzig merchant he always knew what merchandise to order for he was never idle even for a moment.5 The rabbinic ideal was a man who combined Torah with business acumen. Dik quotes from Danzig's ethical will in which he instructed his sons on what prayer to recite for success in business (ch. 16), how to lend money on interest (ch. 39) and how to leave a will of their own (ch. 42). Though greatly idealized, Dik's fictional rabbis were portrayed in scrupulously

Rabbis, Rebbes and Other Humanists

57

human terms. Theirs was a faith in God, a faith that had no truck with the Devil. Indeed, his rabbinic heroes were not above exploiting other people's superstitions in order that justice and morality might prevail. This is what happens in Der siem hatoyre (The Ceremony of the Torah Completion, 1868), Dik's superb historical romance set in seventeenth-century Poland.6 It is the story of Reb Yosl the Parvenu, who gains wealth and power by making use of the anarchy in Poland following the Cossack revolt but also seeks legitimation for his crimes by ordering a Torah scroll written in his name. The man who unmasks him is the brilliant halakhist Rabbi David Halevi (1586-1667), author of the Tur zahav, and thus known as the TaZ, who is seen here as a henpecked husband and underpaid rabbi of the town of Olyk. More to the point, the TaZ is aided in his undercover work by no less a historical personage than Count Potocki, which proves that in the seventeenth century, at least, Polish rabbis could win the confidence, admiration and, ultimately, the undying friendship of enlightened gentiles. In the Yiddish chapbook, the moderate maskil could have it all. He could invent a "true" story that extolled the life and salvific deeds of the great European rabbis. He could follow the normal practice of learned Jewish storytellers down through the ages, mixing fact and fiction for the sake of a good moral and rereading the past in the light of the present. By laying claim to the lineage of his illustrious forebear Yom Tov Lipmann Heller, Dik was less concerned with perpetuating the traditional Jewish view of history—may the accumulated merit of the ancestors redound to the later generations—than with portraying the Sages in an enlightened image. Dik assembled a portrait gallery of distinguished rabbis, from Heller and David Halevi to Reb Shmelke of Nikolsburg (1726-1778), all the way to Abraham Danzig of his own Vilna childhood, in order to unveil a proto-maskilic Hall of Fame. Yet a storyteller who saw the drama of exile and redemption played out on the stage of secular history, by human actors alone, could not use memory for the sake of moral improvement in quite the same way as traditional hagiographers had before. And a storyteller whose audience had become more fragmented than ever— men versus women, pietists versus enlighteners, East versus West—could no longer assume that one kind of story would appeal to all. And a storyteller for whom change was both inevitable and desirable, who felt that the old way of life was about to disappear forever (would that it had happened a little sooner!) had to engage in a form of triage in order to save what he deemed worthy of saving. So he divided the past, once timeless and covenantal, into a normative and farcical realm, and drew the sharpest possible line between "earlier times" and "more enlightened ages."7 He used the history of past events and personalities to underscore the progress Jews had already made since the dawn of emancipation. The privations suffered by Rabbi Heller could only have occurred then; nowadays, under the benign rule of Alexander II, Russian Jews enjoyed equal rights, engaged freely in trade and their educated children could achieve high rank in the empire.8 Russian Jews, in particular, could count their blessings now that the Polish republic had been replaced by the tsarist empire. "Khelem a shtot un Poyln a medine," Dik was found of saying—that is, Poland is as much a state as the foolstown of Chelm is a city.9 The one Polish nobleman worthy of praise in that whole rotten bunch was the aforementioned Count Potocki, not only because of his friendship with Rabbi

58

David G. Roskies

David Halevi, but also because one of the Potockis, Count Valentine, had converted to Judaism and died as a martyr. Dik rewrote the legend of the Ger Tsedek (the righteous convert), as he was called, to kindle the one bright light in Poland's Counter-Reformation.lo However selective, Dik (and his army of imitators) brought about a veritable explosion in the gallery of heroes, heroines and villains that henceforth peopled the octavo-sized pages of Yiddish popular fiction—both real and legendary figures drawn from medieval Ashkenaz, from the Polish-Russian Wild East, and from the most recent past. Through their deeds and misdeeds, the rabbis and merchants of Yiddish popular romance plotted the progress of Jews and all humanity from feudalism to enlightened despotism; that is to say, the course of redemption in and through history. This linear and ameliorative view of the Jewish past was not at all what a thirtysix-year-old former lawyer named Yitskhok Leybush Peretz had in mind when, in a series of Hebrew letters, he lectured Solomon Rabinovitsh (alias Sholem Aleichem) on the need to educate Jewish women in the history of their people. Peretz was equally keen to provide the educated male readers with highbrow and especially scientific material in Yiddish, lest the latter defect to reading only Polish, Russian or German. 11 From that day in June 1888 until his death in April 1915, writing under various and comical pen-names in the pages of his own literary almanacs, Peretz tried to liberate Yiddish both from the lifeless repertory of the study house and shtibl and from the narrow concerns of the maskilic salon. The portrait gallery that Peretz brought to life would necessarily reflect the critical transition in modern Jewish culture from the low ground of satire and the pantheon of biblical and bourgeois heroes to a serious reengagement with the Volk and its spiritual leaders. Yet satire was the natural province of a writer infected with the virus of Heine's "brilliant mockery," especially someone raised in the walled city of Zamosc, with its local rhymsters, innovative playwrights, and visiting Yiddish entertainers, the famed Singers of Brody.12 Insofar as Yiddish was still associated in Peretz's mind with Jews and jesting, the more "Jewish" the subject, the more it became for him an object of ridicule. Where there was no music to be found; no informal, emotional outlet for one's individual strivings; where the tradition sold ready-made solace in the world to come or in a legendary past, Peretz was roused to heights of righteous—and revolutionary—anger. Until he discovered a positive use for this material, Peretz distilled his parodic venom into Yiddish miracle tales. Verging on blasphemy, he turned the first-century miracle-worker Hanina ben Dosa—a beloved figure of talmudic legend—into a heartless exploiter of his wife. Hanina studied while she and their children starved. l3 More subtly, Peretz retold the Golem of Prague legend to expose how the heirs of the great Maharal had reduced the legacy of Jewish heroism to mere sophistry: To this very day the golem lies concealed in the uppermost part of the synagogue of Prague, covered with cobwebs that have been spun from wall to wall to encase the whole arcade so that it should be hidden from all human eyes, especially from pregnant wives in the women's section. No one is permitted to touch the cobwebs, for anyone who does so dies. Even the oldest congregants no longer remember the golem. How-

Rabbis, Rebbes and Other Humanists

59

ever, Zvi the Sage, the grandson of the Maharal, still deliberates whether it is proper to include such a golem in a minyan or in a company for the saying of grace.14 Dead to Jewish collective memory, the golem lived on to delight the brains of the Jewish intelligentsia. Since cobwebs were the golem's only physical remains, they too were enshrouded in sanctity. If there was no going back to the cobwebs and casuistry of a moribund civilization, then a meaningful past, one that would instill a feeling of nationhood and heroic purpose, would have to be sought elsewhere. Guided by new, postEnlightenment ideologies, Peretz began his search with the Bible, then cast about for something much closer to home. Under the spell of Romanticism, he conjured up the biblical Prophets as the font of poetic vision; indeed, as the wellspring of all modern literary movements.15 For Peretz the positivist, the Bible was also the record of the nation's history. For Peretz the ideologue of cultural renewal, the Bible was the Jewish perspective on the world.16 His first mandate to the Yiddishist movement in 1908 was to retranslate the Bible into a modern idiom.17 But unlike his contemporaries Hayim Nahman Bialik and Yehoshua Ravnitzky, Peretz stopped short at the Hebrew Bible, and never warmed to the idea of rescuing postbiblical legends for modern times. Excessive Talmud study, according to Peretz, like excessive doses of modernist angst, produced nothing but madness, "zigzags and dilemmas and hairsplittings."18 Peretz the neoromantic wanted to wipe the slate clean. He wanted a new Oral Torah without its old content. He wanted a Jewish humanism and piety without Jewish law. He wanted folk narrators who only raided the Talmud for a legendary motif, a turn of phrase. Instead of studying Talmud, a male prerogative in any event, Peretz reimagined his Jews, male and especially female, singing Yiddish folk songs about love and death. Peretz recalled with fondness the songs he himself had collected during a four-year period among Jewish artisans and seamstresses in Warsaw. These anonymous lyrics were a mirror of the people's life!19 They expressed the ethos and moral sensibility of the folk far better than any rabbinic dictum. The folk-song recitals at his home with that indefatigable young fieldworker Judah Leib Cahan (b. 1881) had the intensity of a revivalist meeting.20 Peretz and the young intellectuals (some, aspiring folklorists; others, aspiring writers) spent their Saturday afternoons sharing a mystical experience of self-discovery.21 If rabbinic lore seemed stale, folklore offered a new and seemingly inexhaustible source of poetic inspiration. If rabbinic lore seemed reactionary and remote, folklore was a secular alternative of the people, for the people. If once Peretz had thought that Yiddish, and Jews in general, were "without feeling for nature, for simplicity, for love, beauty and poetry," these Yiddish folk songs proved otherwise.22 And if the Poles, bereft of a political base and state support, could use folklore to affirm their national identity, then so could Jewish intellectuals. While his Polish compatriots, however, predicated the study of Jewish folklore on the rapid assimilation, if not actual conversion, of the Jews, Peretz was among the first of the positivists to turn that study into a tool of Jewish national revival. 23 The same ideal—self-knowledge as the basis of a new secular identity—that inspired Peretz's group to collect Yiddish folklore, inspired others to rehabilitate

60

David G. Roskies

Hasidism as a Jewish folk phenomenon. Simon Dubnow, the dean of East European Jewish historians, began his explorations of the hasidic movement in the pages of the Russian Jewish periodical Voskhod (1888-1893). There, or in the Polish translations of the Warsaw Izraelita, Peretz had surely seen the Ba'al Shem Tov described as a radical reformer and the tales In Praise of the Besht defended as latter-day Gospels. Perhaps Peretz also knew the work that had inspired Dubnow to begin with: Ernest Renan's History of Christianity. Like Renan, Dubnow separated the nature-loving spiritualist from the earthbound institutions that he spawned; the teacher from his disciples; the man from the miracles.24 If the Besht could be Jesus, he could be anything at all. Equally bold was Micah Joseph Berdichevsky's manifesto "The Soul of Hasidim" (1899), which identified the "new hasidic man" (i.e., the first generation of hasidim) with the Nietzschean transvaluation of values. "Standing upright, with the spirit of life in him, a spirit that penetrates the world open before him in all its breadth and depth, ... he will be like a king among troops, like a man with the wreath of God on his head among those who sit in darkness."25 Virile antinomian, pantheist, king among troops, the Besht and his early followers were revolutionaries for all seasons. The fact that Peretz met a hasidic rebbe only once in his life, in the offices of the Warsaw Jewish community council, gave him freer rein than Dubnow, who had to mediate historical documents, and Berdichevsky, who had to reconcile his personal experience.26 Peretz's hasidim were free to dance and sing to their hearts' content. Peretz, much like his contemporaries, salvaged from the ruins only those aspects of Jewish culture that could stand for secular humanistic values: the Bible as prophecy and history; folk song as lyric poetry; sacred legend as collective saga; Yiddish as the surrogate for nationhood; Hasidism as the route to transcendence. And since Peretz did not believe in the rebbe's miracles himself, it behooved him to find a credible narrator who did. Reb Shmaye of Biala, the aged narrator of "Between Two Mountains," is a storyteller in Peretz's own image: he combines the language of learning with unusual descriptive powers.27 Though himself a man of faith, he can also envision other people's doubts. Reb Shmaye understands why Talmud study without a social base and without agadic flights of fancy can drive a young man like Noah (his future rebbe) out of the yeshivah of Brisk (Brest-Litovsk, a bastion of Lithuanian Jewry). Reb Shmaye's own spiritual yearnings are pure enough that he does not expect the young-man-turned-Bialer-rebbe to spend his time giving out amulets and performing miracles. Yet Reb Shmaye is true believer enough to explain the labor pains of the Brisker rov's daughter as divine punishment. "It was known that because the Brisker rov had once ordered a hasid to be shaved—that is, to have his beard and sidecurls shorn by gentiles—the rov's good name had been tarnished in the eyes of the saintly men of his generation." How to turn the shtetl talmudist into a romantic hero? By charting his journey from the "cold" and empty precincts of the Lithuanian yeshivah to the warm embrace of the Polish-hasidic court. How to make the miraculous come alive in a skeptical age? By fashioning a narrator who perceives the hand of heaven at work the moment he sets out to fetch the Brisker rov and bring him to Biala.

Rabbis, Rebbes and Other Humanists

61

Will the daughter merit a miracle for the sake of her learned father or will the rabbi's sin be visited upon his child? Will the "two mountains" be reconciled? Meanwhile, "the wind increased, piercing the cloud as if it were tearing apart a sheet of paper. The wind began to chase one piece of cloud into and over another, as if herding ice floes on a river." Folk narrators, Peretz apparently believed, routinely yoked the concrete to the abstract.28 With so versatile a storyteller as Reb Shmaye, Peretz can eat his cake and have it, too. The "cake" is the story's climactic vision, an apotheosis of Romanticism called by another name. "And your Torah, Noah?" "Would you like to see it, Rabbi?" "See the Torah?" The Brisker was astonished. "Come, I will show you. 1 will show you the glory and the joy that radiate from it and touch all of Israel."

Accompanied by Reb Shmaye, the two spiritual giants look down from the rebbe's balcony at hasidim dancing in honor of Simhat Torah, but what they see is nature in perfect harmony with man, religion in harmony with life, and disparate individuals united in song. "Everything sang—the sky, the constellations above, and the earth below. The soul of the world sang. Everything sang!" Yet never was a miracle so filtered through the eyes of its beholders. The Brisker rov has only to remind his former pupil that it is time for afternoon prayers and the spell is broken: Silence fell. The curtain closed again before my eyes. Above me, an ordinary sky, and below, an ordinary pasture; ordinary Hasidim in torn caftans murmuring old tattered fragments of song. The flames were extinguished. 1 looked at the rebbe. His face too was somber.

In Peretz's own day, the Brisker rov's disenchantment was shared by very few readers. Alone among contemporary critics, Hirsh Dovid Nomberg maintained that the rov, of plain speech and direct action, was far more memorable than the rebbe, who didn't even perform the deeds expected of a zaddik and was merely a mouthpiece for universal values.29 Almost every other reader aspired to the rebbe's vision of things. Since they had no intention of becoming hasidim themselves, or for that matter of returning to the study of Talmud, they were content to read a story about Simhat Torah that celebrated the universal appeal of Judaism: music, joy, nature and the unity of all men. Peretz, for his part, made his revisionism abundantly clear by titling his two major collections Khsidish (In the Hasidic Mode) and Folkstimlekhe geshikhtn, a highfalutin title meaning Stories in the Folk Vein. Peretz was well aware how little of the "real thing" remained in his stylized Yiddish folk and hasidic narratives. Yet for all that he subverted the Yiddish romance and sacred tale in the name of radical individualism, he did remain true to the one hasidic master whom he greatly admired: the first "modern" Yiddish storyteller, Rabbi Nahman ben Simha of Bratslav (1772-1810). Like Reb Nahman, Peretz reused old plots and motifs to argue for the redemption of humankind from history: Nahman—through a new kabbalistic world order with himself at its helm; Peretz—through a new humanism with every man, woman and child acting in accord with his inner light and to the sound of her inner

62

David G. Roskies

melody. Early Hasidism, moreover, as opposed to its later, dynastic rule, served Peretz as the breeding ground for a true spiritual leader who could hasten the millennium by severing the bonds of historical determinism. Enter: Reb Shloyme, the most famous zaddik in the annals of Yiddish literature, the first and most vital link in Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain) of Jewish messianic struggle.30 From Act I of Peretz's verse drama to all subsequent Yiddish literary representations of the great hasidic masters, we come in on the rebbe in his moment of crisis. Since the more overtly "religious" the setting of a modern Yiddish play, novel or poem, the more secular its concerns, and since the messianic theme in particular, as Chone Shmeruk has cogently argued, arose not from an ongoing debate with past traditions but precisely from the crisis of Jewish modernity, it follows that the figure who stood for that crisis could not be some fabulously successful miracle worker busily negotiating This World and the Next, but rather the zaddik at odds with his surroundings, captured in a state of personal, religious and existential turmoil.31 Reb Nahman might have served this purpose, had his cryptic Tales and fierce messianic struggle been better understood.32 Another early master, Reb Levi Yitskhok of Berdichev (1740-1810), had long since been transformed—on the basis of a few Yiddish-Hebrew songs ascribed to his pen—into the ombudsman of his unruly flock. Expunged from folk memory and literary representations alike were the actual, esoteric (Hebrew) writings of this presumed democrat for all seasons.33 Conversely, the highly esoteric teachings of the Ba'al haTanya, Shneour Zalman of Liady (1745-1812), did not spread much beyond Lubavitch and its environs until well into the twentieth century, despite the dramatic tale of the rebbe's imprisonment in St. Petersburg, as retold in M.L. Frumkin's Shivhei harav.34 For high drama and internecine warfare, there was always the flamboyant Yisroel Rizhiner (1797-1850), and his loyal opposition, the Sandzer Rebbe, Reb Khayiml Halberstam (1793-1876). But these revered dynastic rulers were of no use to a generation of Jewish neoromantics trying to read their own rebellion and angst back into the people's past. That left only one possible candidate, the reclusive Menakhem-Mendl of Kotsk (1787-1859), the model for Peretz's Reb Shloyme, and the rebbe of choice for Peretz's disciples. Reb Shloyme desires nothing less than the abrogation of Time. Calling for a race of spiritual giants, much as the Kotsker cried out for "ten men of truth," Reb Shloyme's ecstatic vision of shabes-yontefdike yidn who would force God's hand by ushering in the messianic Sabbath is doomed from the start. Each of his successors will likewise attempt a reversal of the natural order and will face defeat within his own hasidic court, but for sheer poetic and psychological force, none will match Reb Shloyme's defiance of history itself. Shloyme's offspring, with weaker lines to speak and less transcendental ambitions, are that much worse off, coming as they do after the last great hurrah of Jewish self-liberation.35 And so Peretz's reengagement with Hasidism led in two complementary directions: toward the populism of the Bialer rebbe, who drew his strength from the dancing, singing Volk; and toward the giants in each generation who went for broke, trying to force a cosmic solution at the expense of the folk and its petty concerns. ("Oylem, der oylem" is how the unruly masses were characterized in Di goldene

Rabbis, Rebbes and Other Humanists

63

keyt.) Both scenarios ended essentially the same way, however: either with a rude return to mundane reality or with a tragic sense of loss. That sense of loss was quickened by the physical destruction of the hasidic heartland in the First World War. A plot of generational decline no longer sufficed for S. Ansky (1863-1920), eyewitness and chronicler of that period of monstrous upheaval. Conceived before the war and completed after the Bolshevik seizure of power, Ansky's Between Two Worlds, or The Dybbuk was also an outgrowth of contemporary history, when Ansky observed the Jewish spirit struggling to maintain itself against forces of overpowering destruction. Thus, in each of the play's four acts, there was one figure who tried to reconcile This World with the Next: Khonon, the young kabbalist; Leah, his predestined bride; Reb Azrielke, the zaddik of Miropolye; and the town rabbi, Reb Shimshon. Cast in a Peretzian mold, however, Reb Azrielke was frail and plagued by self-doubt, while Reb Shimshon, the halakhic complement to Reb Azrielke's charisma, was a character so devoid of character that most actual productions of The Dybbuk, whether on stage or screen, telescoped into one the rebbe and the rov. While young and old alike, in Ansky's scheme of things, struggled with temporal forces, only the young rebels, alone and in the face of all odds, could challenge the moral and metaphysical order by sacrificing their own earthly pleasures and desires.36 In the sixty-five years that separated the publication of Dik's inaugural tale from the premiere of Ansky's The Dybbuk (the all-time greatest hit of the Jewish, not to speak of Yiddish, theater), the complex web of East European Jewish spiritual life had been reduced to a cultural artifact—the rabbis reimagined as strict rationalists facing off against the wonder-working mystics. This radical flattening of the Jewish cultural landscape, moreover, occurred over an ever-widening literary field. Whereas hasidic wonder tales and maskilic romances were once deemed fit only for women, servant girls and boors, the neohasidic tales and "dramatic legends" by Peretz and Ansky were written with a highbrow audience in mind. Other Yiddish playwrights, meanwhile, were beginning to raid the East European Jewish past for its historical plots. Whereas the father of the modern Yiddish theater, Abraham Goldfaden (1840-1908), divided his repertory clean down the middle between satires set in the here-and-now and historical melodramas set in the time of Bar Kokhba and the biblical Shulamis (much as Abraham Mapu and I.M. Dik had done before him), Goldfaden's heirs were soon to (re)discover the heroic saga of the Ger Tsedek in their own backyard, the tragedy of Jacob Frank, the Polish Jew who claimed to be the Messiah, and most suggestive of all, the extra-marital relationship of King Casimir the Great with his Jewish lover, Esterke.37 The issues raised by this reapropriation of converts, lovers and messianic pretenders from the Polish Jewish past had nothing to do with faith or the legitimacy of traditional leadership. The subject of debate in the literary salons of Jewish Eastern Europe from the nineteenth century's end until the outbreak of the First World War was over the Jewish claim to nationhood. To qualify as a nation, the Jewish intellectuals understood, the Jews would need not only a bona fide folklore and artfully crafted fakelore, but also a fullblown, secular history. And so, with their wives dutifully serving them tea, the Odessa Circle of Dubnow, Ben-Ami and Ahad

64

David G. Roskies

Ha'am convened in the salon of Sholem-Yankev Abramovitsh (1836-1917) to prevail upon the crotchety old gentleman to finally write his memoirs. "Our people have no memory of past experience," says the anonymous guest who espouses Dubnow's position, and even events in our own times disappear into oblivion like a dream. Many things have happened in our lifetime that have not been recorded in any book only because of the foolish belief held by many people that nobody but the historians of the next generation can properly ascertain the true facts and form a correct and balanced picture. By that time, many of the events of our age will have been forgotten.38

But "Reb Shloyme" (i.e., Abramovitsh) can give as good as he gets. In his lengthy and acerbic rebuttal, he shows the absurdity of holding up Jewish corporate existence in Russia-Poland to Western criteria: None of us ever did anything to set the world on fire. Dukes, governors, generals, and soldiers we were not; we had no romantic attachments with lovely princesses; we didn't fight duels, nor did we even serve as witnesses, watching other men spill their blood; we didn't dance the quadrille at balls; we didn't hunt wild animals in the fields and forests; we didn't make voyages of discovery to the ends of the earth; we carried on with no actresses or prima donas; we didn't celebrate in a lavish way. In short, we were completely lacking in all those colorful details that grace a story and whet the reader's appetite.39

Devoid of any political history, bereft of individual acts of heroism or perfidy, all the Jews can offer is an unbroken and utterly banal record of collective suffering: In place of these we had the cheder, the cheder-tcacher and the cheder-teacher's assistant; marriage brokers, grooms, and brides; housewives and children; abandoned women, widows with orphans and widows without orphans; people ruined by fire and bankruptcy, and paupers of every description; beggars who make the rounds on the eve of Sabbath and holidays, new-moons, Mondays and Thursdays and any day at all; idlers and officers of the community; poverty, penury, and indigence, and queer and degrading ways of making a living. This was our life, if you can call it a life—ugly, devoid of pleasure and satisfaction, with not a single ray of light to pierce the continual darkness.40

Reb Shloyme finally relents, however, goaded into reconstructing his childhood in the shtetl of yore not so much by the arguments of his peers as by a jolt of painful memories unique to his own experience. In the novel that follows, the portrait of an artist as a young man, historical forces are depicted as operating behind the scenes, wreaking havoc with the medieval economy, the education of the young, and finally casting the shtetl's native sons far and wide. For all its ethnographic and historical sweep, there are no rabbis or even Talmud scholars in Abramovitsh's reimagined Lithuanian shtetl. Besides mother and father, both portrayed in soft hues, those who loom largest in Shloyme's spiritual landscape are shtetl artisans who occupy the margins of respectable society. Father, who collects the tax for kosher meat, is the only man in town to interact with the Polish count. When Father dies, the shtetl's security dies with him. In the fictional shtetl of Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916), Abramovitsh's self-professed grandson, there is similarly no historical role for rabbis to play. All of Sholem Aleichem's main actors

Rabbis, Rebbes and Other Humanists

65

are salt of the earth: Tevye the dairyman, Menakhem-Mendl the schlemiel, ShimenElye Shma-Koleynu, Shimele Soroker, Motl the orphaned son of Peyse the cantor. At best, Reb Yuzifl the rabbi of Kasrilevke can offer up psalms in times of distress ("The Great Panic of the Little People," 1904), or the rabbi of Krushnik may himself be offered up upon the gallows as a silent prayer ("Tales of 1001 Nights," 1914).41 Keenly aware of their responsibility during this critical period of nationbuilding in Europe, the leading East European Jewish intellectuals responded with a secular, populist and egalitarian agenda. In the imagined Jewish community of the future, there was little nostalgia for "men of the cloth."42 Three were the schools of historical thought that developed over the course of the nineteenth century: one that owed its existence to Reb Nahman (via Peretz and Nietzsche) and celebrated the visionary leaders who transcended historical exigency; a second, going back to Isaac Meir Dik and the bevy of popular fiction writers and playwrights, which created a Jewish heroes' gallery akin to the "dukes, governors, generals or soldiers," or who otherwise performed deeds of true historical import and engaged in "romantic attachments." The third school, represented by Abramovitsh and Sholem Aleichem, asserted that only social history was worth recording, not the nonsense of legends, fairy tales and sentimental romances. The historical record of how the Jewish family and community collapsed or were severely challenged in the face of modernity was the stuff of the realistic "Jewish novel," which they had introduced. If the Jews of Eastern Europe were ever to boast of a history worthy of the name, then its story would have to be told in a novelistic form that portrayed the individual as shaped by social, sexual and intellectual forces. Whether among those competing forces there was any role for rabbis or rebbes to play was very much an open question. The answer given by Joseph Opatoshu (1886-1954), author of the first bona fide historical novel in Yiddish, would seem to have been a resounding: yes. By choosing young Mordecai to be the intellectual hero of In poylishe velder (In Polish Woods, 1921), Opatoshu implied that if the young did not rescue the past, it would be lost forever.43 By choosing as his initial setting a forest far removed from organized Jewish life, Opatoshu made the contest among competing cultural forces that much more dramatic. Mordecai's life is a crash course in the history of Polish Jewry; a Jewry, he is to learn, that sprang directly from the verdant Polish forests with its birdsong and beech trees, each inscribed with the names of the Jewish Founding Fathers; with its half-pagan, half-Christian fisherfolk; with its Jewish military heroes and heretics, its mystics and rebels, its scholars and saints. The novel leaves nothing out and nothing to chance: The eyes of the sixteen-year-old youth opened wide in wonder, and all at once, unconsciously, he reached out behind him to the preceding generations and felt in him a surge of power to continue spinning the thread. He believed, as did the woodcutters, that when this beech-tree, perhaps the solitary representative of its kind left in all Poland, disappears from one country, it grows in another, returning in a few generations.44

Mordecai, the narrative equivalent of a shadow puppet, seen but seldom heard from as his silhouette flits from one historically luminous landscape to another, gets

66

David G. Roskies

himself pretty tangled up in these threads. As who would not, given that Opatoshu constantly interrupts his very thin plot with lengthy "historical" digressions: the legend of Napoleon, the cobbler's apprentice who rose to be emperor; the legend of the Kedushas Levi, the saintly Berdichever; the saga of Berek Joselewicz, martyred to the cause of Polish independence; the story of Yosl Shtral, the last "light-beam" of the Haskalah, a disciple of Nahman Krochmal, friend to Moses Hayyim Luzzatto and Solomon Geiger; the glorious exploits of Shlomo Molkho—"Elijah the Prophet, who came to tell the world that the Messiah was seated before the gates of Rome, preaching God's word, declaring that the Tiber would innundate the sinful city, and that Clement the Seventh was abandoning his palace in terror, was running away. . . ,"45 Young and ever so malleable Mordecai is also on the run—from one century to another—as he tries to keep the precious thread of Jewish continuity from snapping. The crucible of Jewish continuity is Kotsk, the goal of Mordecai's pilgrimage and the place of his longest sojourn. But his timing is disastrously off, since the rebbe has emerged from thirteen years of self-imposed isolation just long enough to blaspheme against God. And the more reclusive he becomes, the more the zaddik is beset by the lamed, the crazed, and the impoverished. Mordecai's first encounter with one of Polish Jewry's greatest religious personalities is most inauspicious: The rabbi, a diminutive gray figure, with a beard so heavy that it obscured his face altogether, was at the window, his fists clenched, and was shouting to the crowd: "You oxen, you! Out of my sight! I'm no physician! I had hoped to be a doctor of souls, but you've turned me into a horse doctor. What do you want now?"46

Nor do things improve once he is granted an audience with the rebbe. Mordecai discovers a misanthrope motivated solely by self-interest, a man preoccupied with death and the afterlife. Kotsk is in its death throes, as is the rebbe himself. Not even the saintly and Christ-like figure of Reb Itche, who routinely brings solace to all the infirm, whether Jewish or gentile, and who throws himself at the Kotsker's feet to demonstrate his fealty before the unruly crowd, will ultimately keep our impressionable hero loyal to Kotsk. Militating against the decision to stay is Mordecai's growing attraction to the worldly and unhappily married Felice, followed by the grotesque sight of the community fighting over who will wash the zaddik's corpse. Other anarchic forces have been unleashed upon poor Mordecai as well: a Sabbatian orgy organized by the rebbe's own son and daughter-in-law; the insurrectionist fever once again taking hold among the Polish intelligentsia; the discovery of an exact analogy between "their" messianism and "ours." Kotsk, in the end, offers a limited choice of Jewish spirituality, and becomes but a stepping-stone to the greater riches that lie in store for our hero in the salons of Poland and beyond.47 Whereas for Peretz, the return to myth and historical legend signaled the growing distance—nay, the unbridgeable gap—between Jew and gentile, the opposite was true for Opatoshu.48 From beginning to end, the novelist who made the New York melting pot his home after 1907 insisted upon there having been an absolute moral symmetry between the Jews and the Christian Poles. The credulous hero who "believed, as did the woodcutters," that all belief systems were equally valid, would

Rabbis, Rebbes and Other Humanists

67

eventually pick up a crucifix in the face of a Cossack attack, would stand in for a Polish serf being flogged, and would be hailed by the peasants as a latter-day Christ. The same hero who as a youth had no head for Talmud study would grow up to recognize that hasidim were the Essenes incarnate, and the Virgin Mary, a pagan goddess in Jewish garb. Against such a transhistorical backdrop, the hero's sojourn in Kotsk was of far less consequence than those mystical "threads" emanating from Poland's sylvan splendor. No wonder, then, that on both sides of the Atlantic the Yiddish edition of In Polish Woods sold an unprecedented 31,000 copies between its first printing in 1921 and its twenty-first, in 1947.49 How comforting to believe that the Polish beech tree, cut down in its native habitat, would grow in another, "returning in a few generations." Opatoshu's novel, and the trilogy of which it was to form a part, did much to make the history of the Jewish people, studied in the light of social, political and intellectual forces the world over, into a covenantal narrative. Whatever split, inspired by Durkheim, Freud and Proust, which might later be discerned between history and Jewish collective memory, was not in evidence among the readers of Yiddish literature between the two world wars.50 Yiddish secular readers were perfectly willing to accept a guiding principle running through all of Jewish history, so long as those doing the guidance were not the male authority figures—the bearded rabbis and greasy rebeim—whom they had left so far behind. The desperate need to believe in a living Jewish past, rooted in a mythic, preindustrial landscape and answering the call of universal redemption, could be met only by expunging the arcane halakhic particulars of rabbinic Judaism and the extreme particularism of East European Jewish pietism. Back to Peretz, then, to the zaddik as shorthand for messianic dreamer and apocalypticist, except that now, with the rise of real apocalyptic ideologies— Communism and Nazism—Peretz's followers made a choice between hope and fear. Sholem Asch (1880-1957), his chief disciple, wrote the first full-scale Yiddish biography of a saint, Yechiel the psalm-sayer, who, like Mordecai before him, honed his spiritual craft in the court of the Kotsker rebbe, becoming the progenitor of a new Judeo-Christian faith. In its own way, Der tilim-yid (1933), translated into German as Der Trost des Volkes, and from there into English as Salvation, is a very subversive work.51 Though it takes its saintly protagonist from cradle to grave, there is no real character development. Yechiel is what he is almost from the moment of birth: a prerabbinic Jew who will countenance no mediation between himself and God, himself and suffering humanity, and who—like Jesus—addresses God in the language of psalms. The first miracle occurs to Yechiel in childhood when Elijah the Prophet appears to him at a fair; the second, when he finds a hidden crust of bread for the town fool by achieving bitul hayesh, the total annihilation of self; the third, when, through the recitation of psalms, he stops a Polish nobleman from shooting him dead, thus gaining Yechiel legendary status. Most wondrously of all, Yechiel acts as the spiritual catalyst in the birth of a girl to a childless couple. This not only comes close to superseding the Christian Nativity, but also constitutes an act of hubris for which he, the girl, and her parents must suffer greatly. A final miracle on the part of

68

David G. Roskies

Yechiel, who meanwhile has become a rebbe himself, resolves the theological conundrum of the girl's legitimacy. Her decision to convert to Christianity in order to marry outside the faith tips the scales of heaven, and to prevent this from happening, Yechiel's prayers take away her life on the very eve of the ceremony. To fully expiate his own sin, in the Christian logic of this Polish-Yiddish narrative, Yechiel, too, must die.52 Throughout, Yechiel has only two spiritual mentors: the Kotsker rebbe, more awe-inspiring than in Opatoshu's rendering, but still little more than a reclusive, "Aristotelian" foil to Yechiel's faith in the healing power of Psalms; and the shadowy Pitch Jew (he goes by no other name), who turns out to be a hidden Sabbatian. Asch is careful to distinguish between one form of antinomian behavior and another. It is one thing to challenge the Kotsker's emphasis on the primacy of Law, or to harness the untramelled sexuality of Yechiel's beloved and future wife, Reyzl, for spiritual ends; quite another to proclaim Shabbetai Zvi the true messiah. For Yechiel—the rebbe of poor, downtrodden Jews—is the apotheosis of a true Christianity, fusing as he does the "universal" aspects of Jewish culture with the highest ideals of European humanism. 53 After Peretz, Berdichevsky, et al. had redefined Hasidism to mean "Jewish transcendentalism" or "Promethean struggle with the forces of darkness," it provided Yiddish writers with a succinct cultural code with which to address the question of spirit versus matter. Sholem Asch's goal in Der tilim-yid was to explore the psychological implications of a life dedicated solely to the spirit. And so, he invented Yechiel. "Yechiel's was no speculative mind," Asch tells us. "His own strength lay in his faith, a deep, inward, blind faith in God's g o o d n e s s . . . . He believed . . . that there was no evil either in God or in His creation."54 Despite his becoming a zaddik, a saintly public figure, which intensified the psychological struggle to achieve a state of oneness with the Godhead, the arena of struggle for Yechiel, as for Reb Shloyme and the various incarnations of the "Kotsker Rebbe," remained a solitary one. "That is the purpose of man's life on earth," Yechiel concluded, "to enrich his soul and bring it back to the throne of God's Majesty more noble and beautiful than when he received it."55 Hence, Yechiel's recourse to the book that first taught Jews—and Christians—how to talk to God. In almost homiletic fashion, Asch used the Book of Pslams as both prooftext and subtext of the whole novel. But the debate over spirit versus matter was never an abstract philosophical question for the Jews of Eastern Europe, especially not in the 1930s, with Communism here, Fascism there, the European continent increasingly cut off from the North American haven, and Bundist here-and-nowism in fierce competition with Zionist utopianism. Der tilim-yid was therefore designed and understood to be a work of consolation that addressed the more immediate question of home versus homelessness. "What another nation calls homeland goes by the name of Torah for the Jew," Asch stated boldly in the Yiddish original, though he considered this too provocative for his German and English readers.56 Hasidism, then, was the home of the spirit: solitary, movable, eternal. Where such solace was not vouchsafed, Hasidism represented the very opposite —atavism, dynastic rule, a diaspora still living in the hoary Middle Ages. Prolonging the agony of superannuation, Polish Hasidism in interwar Poland was politically

Rabbis, Rebbes and Other Humanists

69

aligned with the Polish Right. This contemporary reality does much to explain the satiric venom of I.J. Singer's Yoshe Kalb (1932), which features a portrait of the zaddik of Nyesheve that would have made Peretz blush. 57 A venal ignoramus, ironically named Reb Melekh (King), Singer's patriarch sets the plot in motion by marrying off his youngest daughter in order to make room for his own remarriage. In a grotesque replay of Peretz's "Between Two Mountains," Singer has the misnagdic Rabbi of Rachminevke meet his hasidic counterpart in Carlsbad: The Rabbi of Rachminevke found his prospective relative insufferable. He was ashamed of him, ashamed of his wild voice and his wilder gestures, ashamed of the noisy way he sucked his cigar and spat on the floor, ashamed of his shapeless, unbuttoned satin capote, his unkempt beard and ear-locks, his indelicate language, and his whole vast body, covered with hair and reeking of sweat, cigar smoke, leather, food and drink. 58

Not since the feisty days of the Galician Haskalah were Jewish readers treated to a zaddik more earthbound than the Rebbe Reb Melekh. Or a zaddik more corrupt. The moral bankruptcy and social disparity of the hasidic court, whose royal family take the European spas at the expense of their vassals, make Nyesheve resemble nothing so much as a New Testament version of Herod's temple. If for Opatoshu the hasidim were likened unto Essenes, for I.J. Singer they are the temple priests incarnate. To expose the hypocrisy and bring about the destruction of this rotting temple, there appears the ascetic and perpetually seeking figure of the rebbe's son-in-law, Nachum-Yoshe, one of many "homeless" heroes in Singer's oeuvre. That the eponymous hero is as psychologically flat as Opatoshu's Mordecai, however, considerably weakens the thrust of Singer's indictment. Ever the critical realist, I.J. Singer cannot imagine either a past where the supernatural was real or a present where a zaddik's true motives are inscrutable. The only usable past is parodic and perverse, featuring at best a latter-day Yoshke Pandre, the Yiddish folk-Jesus, an equivocal sinner condemned to wander in perpetual silence.59 The rebellion of the young, be they the idealistic Leah, Khonon, Mordecai and Yechiel, or the pathological Nachum-Yoshe, presupposes a secular humanistic world order in which individual action counts for something and where the betterment of life on earth is a laudable goal. When Isaac Bashevis Singer abandoned the critical realism of his youth, he also repudiated the secular humanistic legacy of modern Yiddish culture. Returning to the scene of the literary crime—to the Polish shtetl, still governed by its rabbis and sometimes swayed by harbingers of the Messiah—he created a youthful protagonist who was utterly destroyed by being turned into an agent of redemption.60 The medieval Polish shtetl of Goray, torn apart by the messianic heresy of Shabbetai Zvi, becomes Bashevis's fictional laboratory within which to enliven the terrors of history, which are uncannily similar to the moral and political crisis of today.61 The illusion of historicity in Satan in Goray (1933) is brilliantly sustained by several layers of stylization: by short, syncopated sentences; a heavily Hebraicized and archaic diction; by embedded rhymes, a richness of descriptive detail, a grotesque landscape redolent with demons, golems, messianic signs and portents. The characters, drawn from the rabbinic or monied aristocracy, are larger

70

David G. Roskies

than life and arranged in binary oppositions: Rabbi Benish Ashkenazi, his body and soul intact in the wake of the Ukrainian massacres, versus the broken and impoverished Eliezer Babad; Itche Mates, who abnegates his body and views sex in theological terms, as opposed to the charismatic and sexually active Reb Gedalye.62 Standing in the eye of the storm is Rechele, her weird behavior psychologically grounded by virtue of her total isolation as a child, her special education, her suppressed sexuality. She is the first character whom Bashevis turns successfully into a metaphysical portrait. Instead of embodying the shekhinah, the feminine aspect of the divinity, as she herself imagines, she becomes the kelipah, the shell into which evil finds its way. Itche Mates is attracted to her because of her wildness; he sees in her the unclean vessel that must be purified. Manipulated by all, she is finally left to Satan. The ending is a tour de force. Inspired by a seventeenth-century chapbook about an exorcism in the town of Korec, the storybook finale showcases Bashevis's stylistic virtuosity. More to the point, its pious formulae deliver the story's antimodernist message. Primed by all the data and detail to expect a resolution on the plane of history, the reader is left completely baffled. Whatever happens to the town proper? To the rabbis' sons? Does Reb Mordecai Joseph, the penitent sinner, indeed become the community's new spiritual leader, as this "marvelous" and patriarchal narrative suggests? Why does the arch-villain Reb Gedalye get off scot-free? For all the revealing facts about Rechele's psychological make up, how is it that her dybbuk has a biography of his own, totally separate from the Sabbatean heresy that presumably gained him entry to her body in the first place? By collapsing history and psychology into a moral parable, as the characters themselves might have done, the storyteller frustrates any secular, twentieth-century reading of the story, which in turn delivers the ideological punch: the only thing that can save society from being destroyed by its self-appointed prophets of the millennium is the artificial imposition of a moral order from above. So much, then, for the novel, a genre that expressed dynamism, change and confrontation with the future. The best that can be hoped for from Bashevis's point of view, given the corrupt state of humanity, is a future harnessed to an uncompromising past.63 I.B. Singer's storybook dybbuk provides a useful closure to Yiddish literature of the interwar years not only because this period of unprecedented terror began with Ansky's dybbuk (albeit a lover in disguise), but also because the great destruction to follow acted as a kind of collective exorcism. The dream of Enlightenment, conceived in Goethe's Weimar, was purged in nearby Buchenwald. Once the surviving Yiddish writers committed to memory their memorial poems for the countless dead, it was time, for the last time, to revisit the study house, shtibl and synagogue of yore, not as symbolic settings for the crisis of faith and for youthful acts of rebellion, but as real places at the very center of Jewish particularism and Jewish genius. Thus, Jacob Glatstein, who as late as 1935 delighted in parodying the attempts of "Reb Yosl Loksh of Chelm" to reconcile all differences, reimagined himself as Reb Nahman of Bratslav in a series of dramatic monologues written between 1943 and 1953.64 Significantly, it was not to the figure of the zaddik as poet-dreamer that

Rabbis, Rebbes and Other Humanists

71

Bashevis Singer and Chaim Grade—the two major Yiddish prose writers to emerge after the war—turned, but to the hard-nosed halakhist. The return of the sober, mature and bookish rabbi called upon to adjudicate manifold problems in the hereand-now signaled a profound rethinking of the past. Singer, never shy to voice his opinions, begins his first attempt at autobiographical memoir with a manifesto.65 To set the stage for Mayn tatns bezdn-shtub (In My Father's Court, 1956), he provides a genealogy of the rabbinical court, from Moses through the Men of the Great Assembly and the Sanhedrin to his own father, the penurious Rabbi Pinches Menahem Singer of 10 (and later 12) Krochmalna Street in Warsaw. More than being the longest lasting institution among the Jews, it became the crucible of Jewish particularity as well, for The Beth Din could exist only among a people with a deep faith and humility, and it reached its apex among the Jews when they were completely bereft of worldly power and influence. The weapon of the judge was the handkerchief the litigants touched to signify their acceptance of the judgment.

This truest sphere of justice and morality, moroever, naturally encouraged the individual traits of each rabbi to come to the fore. "The Beth Din not only differed in every generation, but every Rabbi who participated in it colored it with his character and personality."66 In recalling episodes from his father's court, Singer gives full voice to his restorative impulse. Beyond embodying the principles of longevity and individualism, the Beth Din, he foretells, "will be reinstated and evolve into a universal institution," based on the concept "that there can be no justice without godliness." Chaim Grade (1910-1982) was another rebel who came in from the cold. He too signaled the decisive turn in his career—from present to recent past and from poetry to prose—with a statement of purpose, combined with a critique of the portrayal of rabbis in modern Yiddish literature. "Our only spiritual leaders," he wrote in the preface to The Agunah (1961), have either been characterized in a completely negative way, under the general, pejorative, label of "clergy"; or they have been described only in terms of externals (the beards, the kaftans and the gestures) but not separated into different types, as though following a formula that "all rabbis have one face"; or they have been removed from their bodies and appearances altogether in order to present than as symbols of good deeds or personifications of pure ideas; or they have become legendary heroes; or theatrical figures, decorative and pathetic.67

Following this thumbnail sketch of the main Yiddish literary trends from the Haskalah until the Holocaust, which accurately summarizes this essay as well, Grade lays out his own overview of the Jewish past as an ongoing struggle between "the study house and the street"; Since I spent my youth in the study house and in Lithuanian yeshivahs, I came to know well scholars and their human temptations, their frame of mind and way of thinking, their social circumstances and family life, and the ones of great faith for whom the world to come was a tangible thing, often truer than the world of their daily lives. I also came to know the neighbors on our poor street and their relationships to the students in

72

David G. Roskics the house of study—sometimes full of courtesy and love, and sometimes at war with the students of the Torah and even with the Torah itself.

The novel that follows, set in post-First World War Vilna, recapitulates (perhaps unconsciously) the plot of Satan in Goray: two powerful and contrasting male figures wrestle for the fate of an orphaned young woman. In the contest between them, she is destroyed, and her death acts to purge the "street" of its baseless hatred. Unlike Singer's concluding hellfire sermon, however, Grade allows the saintly Reb Dovid Zelver to upend the uncompromising and misanthropic Reb Levi Hurwitz. Grade also makes good on his promise, giving flesh and human feeling to these once-faceless rabbis. More than that, he shows how even for men with the purest of motives, the instinctual and egotistical drives come first, the halakhic rationale, second. No matter that a literature that once embraced the world entire now occupies a few impoverished city blocks. It can still lay claim to the universal drama of id versus superego. After serving as jacks-of-all-literary-trades, the rabbinic elite of Eastern Europe finally came into their own as the shakers and makers of a meaningful Jewish past. In a sense, because of the Holocaust, every novel set in prewar Vilna or Warsaw or Lodz could be read as an historical novel, recreating a life that the Germans had consigned to oblivion. Grade's achievement, then, was as symbolic as it was real. Beginning with The Agunah and culminating in his monumental Tsemakh Atlas (translated as The Yeshiva, 1967-1977), Grade placed the rabbis and their world in center stage. The rabbis and rogues who peopled Satan in Goray were still living in the shtetl, after all, and behaved more like characters in a romance than a novel, while Bashevis's tales of the Warsaw Beth Din were just that: disparate episodes arranged in a very loose chronology. The rabbi regained full human stature when and only when he negotiated both city and town, the study house and the street, the courtroom and the bedroom. Yiddish, of course, remained a natural vehicle for preserving the language and lore of prewar Lithuanian, Hungarian, and Polish Hasidism; to wit, Menahem Boraisha's epic poem Der geyer (The Wanderer, 1933-1942); the exalted portrayal of The Hasidic Kingdom (1955) by eyewitness Boruch Hager (1898-1985), followed by In the Throes of Redemption (1969), and the masterful poetic essay by Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972), scion of two hasidic dynasties, on Kotsk in Its Struggle for Truth (1973).68 But for the most part, the romance of Hasidism had played itself out alongside the various redemptive schemes that once held Yiddish culture in their thrall. To revise the secular humanistic foundations of modern Yiddish culture—and of Jewry as a whole—required that the rov and mara deatra occupy center stage. No longer serving as beacon of Enlightenment, as populist agitator, as prophetic visionary, as progenitor of a new ecumenical faith, or as catalyst for the spiritual rebellion of the young, the rabbi came to define that which was truly distinctive about the Jews: dispersed among the nations, they bore the signs of the covenant upon their hands and on the doorposts of their segregated houses, and in lieu of temporal rulers, they were guided by scholars noted for their piety and full-length beards. What distinguished the Jews, for better or worse, was

Rabbis, Rebbes and Other Humanists

73

the somber and somewhat forbidding figure they cut in the world, as captured in those wooden statuettes that Polish peasants had been carving all along.

Notes I should like to thank Abraham Novershtern for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this essay. 1. See Chone Shmeruk, " 'Al 'ekronot ahadim shel tirgum mishlei leMendl Lefin," in his Sifrut yidish bepolin: mehkarim ve'iyunim historiyim (Jerusalem: 1981), 180-183. 2. See Joseph Dan, Hasipur hahasidi (Jerusalem: 1975); Gedalia Nigal, Hasiporet hahasidit: toldoteha venoseha (Jerusalem: 1981). 3. David G. Roskies, "The Medium and Message of the Maskilic Chapbook," Jewish Social Studies 41, no. 3-4 (1979), 275-290; Shmuel Werses, Hatirgumim leyidish shel 'Ahavat ziyon' le Avraham Mapu (Jerusalem: 1989); Tova Cohen, "Hatckhnikah halamdanit—zofen shel sifrut hahaskalah," Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature. 13 (1992), 137-169; Iris Parush, "Readers in Cameo: Women Readers in Jewish Society of Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe," Prooftexts 14 (1994), 1-23. 4. Anon. (I.M. Dik), Der yoyred (Warsaw: 1855); reprinted in Chulyot: Journal of Yiddish Research 1 (1993), 43-49. 5. Shmuel Kab (pseud, for I.M. Dik), Seyfer beys Avrom (Vilna: 1865), 7. 6. Anon. (I.M. Dik), Der siem hatoyre (Vilna: 1868). 7. Sir Walter Scott had distinguished between two kinds of romance narrative: "that which, being in itself possible, may be a matter of belief at any period; and that which, though held impossible by more enlightened ages, was yet consonant with the faith of earlier times." See his Miscellaneous Prose Works, vol. 3 (376), as quoted by Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverfy Novels (New York: 1968), 21-22. 8. See Dik's anonymously authored Sipurey mihagoen bal hamekhaber toysfes yontef zal (Vilna: 1864), 48. 9. See, for example, AMaD (pseud, for I.M. Dik), Der shivim moltsayt (Vilna: 1877), 46. The novel-romance includes a lengthy excursus on the economic and cultural woes of Polish Jewry in the pre-partition period. For another expression of Dik's pro-tsarist, antiPolish sentiment, see his Der soldatske sin (The Conscript's Son) (Vilna: 1876), also published under the AMaD trademark. 10. See Dik's "Mayse ger tsedek: di geshikhte fun vilner ger tsedek Graf Pototski," published from a manuscript in Di yidishe veil (Vilna), no. 6 (June 1913), 43-58. A German translation appears in Das Buch von den polnischen Juden, ed. S.J. Agnon and Ahron Eliasberg (Berlin: 1916), 61-79. 11. Yitzhak Leybush Peretz to Sholem Aleichem, 17 June, 4 and 18 July 1888, in Mikhtavim: kol kitvei Y.L. Perez, ed. Shimshon Meltzer, 10 vols. (Tel-Aviv: 1966), vol. 10B, 212-221. For a Yiddish translation of these important letters, see Briv un redes fun Y.L. Perets, ed. Nachman Meisel (New York: 1944), nos. 74-76. 12. On Heine's influence, see Peretz's letters to Pinsky and Yehoash, ca. 1907, in ibid., nos. 139-140. On Sheyndele the local rhymster, see Jacob Shatzky, "Perets-shtudyes," YlVO-bleter 28 (1946), 44. The father of modern Yiddish melodrama, Shloyme Ettingcr (1801-1856), was a native of Zamosc, as was Ephraim Fishlsohn, author of the antihasidic play Teyater fun khasidim. See Historishe shriftn fun YIVO 1 (1929), 623-693. 13. "Reb Khanine ben Dosa (a talmudishe zage)" (1891), in Peretz, Ale verk, vol. 1, Lider un poemen (New York: 1947-1948), 38-42. Only the Marxist critic D. Kurlyand seems to have recognized the parodic intent of this poem, as of "The Golem," discussed below. See "Tsu der frage vegn legendare syuzhetn in Peretses verk," Sovetishe literatur (Oct. 1940), 126-128.

74

David G. Roskies

14. "Der goylem" (1894), first published in Peretz, Dertseylungen, mayselekh, bilder: ale verkfun Y.L. Perets, vol. 2, 310-311. Quoted here in Ruth Wisse's translation from her The I.L. Peretz Reader (New York: 1990), 130-131. 15. See "Men hayah Gordon, balshan o meshorer?" (1896), reprinted in Kol kitvei Y.L. Peretz, vol. 10, 161-200, esp. 175. For a discussion of this essay, see Chone Shmeruk Peretses yiesh-vizye: interpretatsye fun Y.L. Peretes Bay nakht oyfn altn mark (New York: 1971), 101-106. For Peretz's later identification of poetry as prophecy, see Shmeruk's "Harkeriyah lenavi: Schneour, Bialik, Perez veNadson," Hasifrut 2 (1969), 241-244. 16. See "What Our Literature Needs" (1910), trans. by Nathan Halpcr in Voices from the Yiddish, ed. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (Ann Arbor: 1976), 25-31. 17. "Oyf der tshernovitser shprakh-konferents," Zikhroynes, briv un redes: ale verk fun Y.L. Perets, vol. 11, 295. 18. The quote is from Hirsh Dovid Nomberg's superb memoir, "Isaac Leibush Peretz As We Knew Him," trans. by Lucy S. Dawidowicz, in her The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe (Boston: 1968), 295. 19. I.L. Perets, "Dos yidishe lebn loyt di yidishe folkslider" (1901), in Literatur un lebn: ale verk, vol. 7, 129-157. On the provenance of this essay, see Shmuel Zanvl Pipe, "Di zamlungen yidishe folkslider fun Y.L. Perets," YlVO-bleter 12 (1937), 286-290; for an ethnographic critique, see Judah Loeb Cahan, Shtudyes vegn der yidisher folksshafung, ed. Max Weinreich (New York: 1952), 104-120. 20. See Jacob Shatzky, "Yehude Leyb Cahan (1881-1937): materyaln far a biografye," Yorbukh fun Amopteyl fun YIVO 1 (1938), 9-38. 21. See Nomberg, "Isaac Leibush Peretz as We Knew Him," 295-96. Also see Mark W. Kiel, "Vox Populi, Vox Dei: The Ccntrality of Peretz in Jewish Folkloristics," Polin 1 (1992), 88-120. 22. Nomberg, "Isaac Leibush Peretz as We Knew Him," 296. 23. Kiel, "Vox Populi." 24. Robert M. Seltzer, "The Secular Appropriation of Hasidism by an East European Jewish Intellectual: Dubnow, Renan, and the Besht," Polin 1 (1986), 151-162. On Dubnow in Polish, sec Shatzky, "Perets-shtudyes," 52. 25. Micah Joseph Berdichevsky, "Nishmat hasidim," first published in Mimizrah umima'arav 4 (1899), 55-64. Quoted here from David C. Jacobson, Modern Midrash: The Retelling of Traditional Jewish Narratives by Twentieth-Century Hebrew Writers (Albany: 1987), 23. For Berdichevsky's impact on Peretz's circle, see Nomberg, "Isaac Leibush Peretz as We Knew Him," 294-295. For a convenient summary of their mutual influence, see Nachman Meisel, Yitskhok Leybush Perets un zayn dor shrayber (New York: 1951), 338347. 26. See Peretz's autobiographical letter to Israel Zinberg, 3 Dec. 1911, in Meisel (ed.), Briv un redes, no. 259. For Peretz's reaction to real-life hasidim, sec Nokhem Oyslender, "Peretses 'Shtet un shtetlekh' [1902]," Tsaytshrift t (Minsk) 1 (1926), 69-70. 27. "Tsvishn tsvcy berg,"Deryid, no. 40-41 (1902); reprinted Khsidish: ale verk, vol. 4, 103-117; trans, by Goldie Morgentaler in Wisse (ed.), The I.L. Peretz Reader, 184-195. 28. See Yudl Mark's "An analiz fun Y.L. Peretses shprakh," YlVO-bleter 28 (1946), 342; "The Language of Y.L. Peretz," YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 4 (1949), 76-77. 29. H.D. Nomberg, "Di revizye fun Peretses shafn" in his Gezamlte verk, 9 vols. (Warsaw: 1930), vol. 8, 104-107. This "revisionist" essay by one of Peretz's closest associates was the point of departure for my own understanding of Peretz. 30. Y.L. Perets, "Di goldene keyt" (1907; 1912-1913), reprinted in Dramatishe verk: ale verk, vol. 6, 102-179. There is no translation into English of this enormously influential play. 31. Chone Shmeruk, Peretses yiesh-vizye, 39-40; Abraham Novershtern, "Moyshe Kulbaks 'Meshiekh ben Efrayim': a yidish-modernistish verk in zayn litararishn gerem," Di goldene keyt 126 (1989), 188. On the thorny question of whether or not modern Jewish messianism represents a radical break with the past, see Eli Lederhcndler, "Interpreting Messianic Rhetoric in the Russian Haskalah and Early Zionism," in his Jewish Responses to

Rabbis, Rebbes and Other Humanists

75

Modernity: New Voices in America and Eastern Europe (New York: 1994), ch. 2 (originally published in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 7, Jews and Messianism in the Modern Era: Metaphor and Meaning, ed. Jonathan Frankel [New York: 1991], 14-33). 32. See Arthur Green, Tormented Master: A Life of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav (University, Alabama: 1979). 33. See "Songs of Reb Leivi Itzchok Berditchever" in Chaim Kotlyansky, Folks-gezangen (New York: 1954), 15-43. Cf. Sefer kedushat levi hashalem (Jerusalem: 1964), and for the briefest of excerpts, Louis Jacobs, Hasidic Thought (New York: 1976), 116-121. 34. See Dan, Hasipur hahasidi, 195-220; Ada Rapoport-Albert, "Hagiography with Footnotes: Edifying Tales and the Writing of History in Hasidism," History and Theory Beiheft (1999), 119-159. 35. For a fuller interpretation of the play, see Ruth R. Wisse, "A Monument to Messianism," Commentary (March 1991), 37-42. 36. On S. Ansky and the making of The Dybbuk, see David G. Roskies's introduction to S. Ansky's The Dybbuk and Other Writings (New York: 1992) and idem, "S. Ansky and the Paradigm of Return," in The Uses of Tradition: Jewish Continuity in the Modern Era (New York and Cambridge, Mass.: 1992), ed. Jack Wertheimcr, 243-260. On The Dybbuk against the backdrop of Ansky's rehabilitation of the Haskalah, see idem, "The Maskil as Folk Hero," Prooftexts 10 (1990), 219-235. Also see the contributions of Corinne Ze'evi-Weil and Benjamin Lukin in Back to the Shtetl: An-Sky and the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, 1912-1914, ed. Rivka Gonen (Jerusalem: 1994), 13-40. 37. See Alter Katsizne, "Der dukes" (1925), in his Gezamlte shriftn, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: 1967), 16-114; Moyshe Kulbak, "Yankev Frank" (1923), in his Ale verk, 3 vols. (Vilna: 1929), vol. 3; Aaron Zeitlin, Yankev Frank (Vilna: 1929); Chone Shmeruk, The Esterke Story in Yiddish and Polish Literature: A Case Study in the Mutual Relations of Two Cultural Traditions (Jerusalem: 1985). 38. Mendele Mocher Sforim (pseud. of Sholem-Yankev Abramovitsh), "Petihtah" to Bayamim hahehm (1897), in Kol kitvei Mendele Mokher Sefarim (Tel Aviv: 1966):255; trans. Raymond P. Scheindlin as "Of Bygone Days," in A Shtetl and Other Yiddish Novellas, ed. Ruth R. Wisse, 2nd rev. ed. (Detroit: 1986), 262. I am indebted to Prof. Marcus Moseley for identifying the real-life counterparts in Reb Shloyme's fictional salon. For more on Abramovitsh's changing views on nationalism and history, see Dan Miron and Anita Norich, "The Politics of Benjamin III: Intellectual Significance and Its Formal Correlatives in Sh. Y. Abramovitsh's Masoes Benyomin Hashlishi," in The Field of Yiddish: Studies in Language, Folklore, and Literature, Fourth Collection, ed. Marvin I. Herzog, Barbara KirshenblattGimblett, et al. (Philadelphia: 1980), 1-115. 39. Abramovitsh, "Petihtah," 259; in English version, 272. 40. Ibid. 41. See the discussion of these works in David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: 1984), 167-183. 42. Compare Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd rev. ed. (London and New York: 1983). 43. Y. Opatoshu, In poylishe velder, 21st ed. (New York: 1947); In Polish Woods, trans. Isaac Goldberg (Philadelphia: 1938). 44. Opatoshu, In poylishe velder, 38; in English version, 37. 45. Ibid., 258; 299. 46. Ibid., 155; 179. 47. For partisan reactions to the novel's historicity, see Nachman Meisel, Yoysef Opatoshu: zayn lebn un shafn (Warsaw: 1937), ch. 4, and Pinkhes Zelig Gliksman, Der Kotsker rebe (Piotrkow: 1939; photo-offset ed., Israel: 1972), 68-72, 149-150. 48. On Peretz, see Magda Opalska and Israel Bartal, Poles and Jews: A Failed Brotherhood (Hanover and London: 1992), 114-115. Opalska and Bartal note "the complexity and outstanding artistic merits" of Opatoshu's work as compared to "earlier interpretations of the insurrectionist theme." See their discussion on pp. 9, 117-119. 49. I cite the data on the verso of the New York edition published by R.J. Novak in 1947.

76

David G. Roskies

For an exact publication history, including translations of the novel into several languages, see Jacob Shatzky, Opatoshu bibliografye (New York: 1937). Opatoshu's contemporary appropriation of the past was enthusiastically endorsed by historian Isaac Schipper in his review of "the newest Yiddish historical novels." See Schipper's "Oyfn veg tsu di urbilder fun der yidisher ncshome," Varshever shriftn (1926-27), 9 pp., separate pagination. For Mordecai's excurscs in comparative history and anthropology, see In poylishe velder, 203, 235. At other times, he is privy to elaborate historiosophical dreams. 50. Herein lies my fundamental disagreement with Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle, London and Philadelphia: 1982). For a fuller statement of my own position, see Against the Apocalypse, ch. 10. 51. Sholem Asch, Der tilim yid, serialized in the Jewish daily Forward, 1932-1933; first pub. Warsaw: 1934; cited here from New York: 1946; photo-offset ed., 1952; Der Trost des Volkes, trans. Siegfried Schmitz (Zurich: 1934); and Salvation, trans. Willa Muir and Edwin Muir (New York: 1951). My student Michael Krutikov has prepared a detailed comparison of the three editions. His findings do not corroborate Asch's claim, in the preface to the English edition of 1951, that "essential" chapters omitted back in 1934 "because of a conviction that at that time they would not be understood by the general reader" were restored in the new edition. In fact, there are only slight differences between the English and German versions, both of which expunge "earthy," supernatural and otherwise particularist elements of the Yiddish original. A complete translation of this important novel is in order. 52. In the German and English versions, Yechiel is not altogether certain whether he encountered Elijah at the fair. Similarly, both versions omit the whole episode with the derelict orphan-and-fool, Moyshe-khaver-nar. I am indebted to Ruth Wisse for her insights on the Christological thrust of the novel. 53. See Hannah Berliner Fischtal's "Sholem Asch and the Shift in His Reputation: The Nazarene as Culprit or Victim" (Ph.D. diss., the City University of New York, 1994), for a discussion of how Asch turned the hasidic-rebbe-as-Jesus into Jesus-as-Jew, and why the Yiddish establishment hailed the one while vilifying the other. 54. Asch, Tilim-yid, 458; in English version, 315. 55. Ibid., 472; 324. 56. Ibid., 241; cf. the English version, 169. 57. I.J. Singer, Yoshe Kalb: roman, 3rd ed., in his Geklibene verk (Warsaw: 1937); trans. Maurice Samuel as Yoshe Kalb with an introduction by Irving Howe (New York: 1988). Welcoming the publication of this novel as one "that appeals to the religious instinct," Aaron Zeitlin, in contrast, denied any intended slur on the contemporary Orthodox establishment. See Zeitlin's review of Yoshe Kalb in Globus 6 (Dec. 1932), 72-79. 58. Singer, Yoshe Kalb, 13; in English version, 10. 59. See Anita Norich, The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer (Bloomington and Indianapolis: 1991), 24-34, and Mordecai Strigler, "Yoshe Kalb der ershter," his introduction to Georemt mitn vint: historisher roman fun yidishn lebn in Poyln (Buenos Aires: 1955), 18-25. 60. For a more complete description of this turn in I.B. Singer's career, see David G. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge, Mass.: 1995), ch. 8. 61. Y. Bashevis, Der sotn in goray, serialized in Globus, Jan.-Sept. 1933; published with a foreword by Aaron Zeitlin (Warsaw: 1935); 2nd ed., Der sotn in goray a mayse fun fartsaytns un andere dertseylungen (New York: 1943); the latter reissued in a photo-offset edition (Jerusalem: 1972). The novel was superbly translated by Jacob Sloan as Satan in Goray (New York: 1955). 62. On the stylistic features of the novel, see Chone Shmeruk, "Monologue as Narrative Strategy in the Short Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer," in Recovering the Canon: Essays on Isaac Bashevis Singer, ed. David Neal Miller (Leiden: 1986), 99-101; Dan Miron, "Passivity and Narration: The Spell of Bashevis Singer," Judaism 41, no. 1 (1992), 14-16. On the grotesque aspect of this novel, see Maximillian E. Novak, "Moral Grotesque and Decorative Grotesque in Singer's Fiction," in The Achievement of Isaac Bashevis Singer, ed. Marcia

Rabbis, Rebbes and Other Humanists

77

Allentuk (Carbondalc: 1969), 44-63. For an interpretation of the novel against the backdrop of contemporary events in Poland, see Seth L. Wolitz, "Satan in Goray as Parable," Prooftexts 9 (1989), 13-25. See also Bashevis's comments on the dearth of historical novels in Yiddish in his review of Joseph Opatoshu's Pundeka retivta in Globus 15 (Sept. 1933), 8688. 63. For the Mayse fun a ruakh in korets, which served as Bashevis's source, see Max Weinreich, Bilder fun der yidisher literaturgeshikhte (Vilna: 1926), 254-261. Sec also Weinreich's chapter on Shabbetai Zvi in Shturemvint (Vilna: 1927), 79-161, and Avraham Rubinstein, "Goray and Bilgoraj: The Literary World of Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Historical-Social World of Polish Jewry," Ex Cathedra (Ramat Gan: 1982), 49-82. (Weinreich's role in reclaiming a usable past for the secular Yiddish intelligentsia has not been fully appreciated.) Abraham Novershtern reads this pietistic ending as Bashevis' way of repudiating Yiddish modernism, which from its very inception adopted an apocalyptic stance. See "Tsvishn morgnzun un akhris-hayomim: tsu der apokaliptisher tematik in der yidisher literatur," Di goldene keyt 135 (1993), 111-135. On the incompatibility of the novel with the ethos of storytelling, see Dan Miron, "Domesticating a Foreign Genre: Agnon's Transactions with the Novel," Prooftexts 1 (1987), 1-27. 64. Jacob Glatstein, "Rabbi Yussel Luksh of Chclm," trans. Nathan Halper, in A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry, ed. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (New York: 1969), 246-256; idem, "The Bratslaver to His Scribe," trans. Leonard Wolf, in The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse, ed. Irving Howe, Ruth R. Wisse and Chone Shmeruk (New York: 1987), 440457. For more on Glatstein, see Ruth R. Wisse's essay on pp. 129-147 of this volume. 65. Y. Bashevis, Mayn tatns bezdn-shtub (New York: 1956), originally serialized in the Forward. For an abridged translation, see In My Father's Court, trans. Channah KleinermanGoldstein, Elaine Gottlieb, and Joseph Singer (Philadelphia: 1966). Four additional chapters appear in An Isaac Bashevis Singer Reader (New York: 1971), 285-313. No detailed comparison has yet been done of the two editions. See, however, Norich, The Homeless Imagination, ch. 6. 66. Singer, Mayn tatns bezdn-shtub, preface. 67. Chaim Grade, Di agune: roman (New York and Los Angeles: 1961), 5-6. I cite two thirds of this important preface, as translated by Michael Stern, because it does not appear in the authorized translation by Curt Leviant of The Agunah (New York: 1974). No full account of Grade's radical years has yet been written. For now, the best sources are Ruth R. Wisse, "In Praise of Chaim Grade," Commentary (April 1977); and Abraham Novershtern, "Yung Vilne: The Political Dimension of Literature," in The Jews of Poland Between the Two World Wars, ed. Israel Gutman, Ezra Mendelsohn, et al. (Hanover and London: 1989), 393-398. For the historical background relevant to Grade's novels, see Emanuel Etkes, "The Relationship Between Talmudic Scholarship and the Institution of the Rabbinate in NineteenthCentury Lithuanian Jewry," in Scholars and Scholarship: The Interaction Between Judaism and Other Cultures, ed. Leo Landman (New York: 1990), 107-132. 68. Menahem Boraisha, Der geyer: kapitlenfun a lebn (New York: 1943); Borekh Hager, Malkhus khsides (Buenos Aires: 1955); idem, In geule umru (Tel Aviv: 1969); Abraham Joshua Heschel, Kotsk in geranglfar emesdikeyt, 2 vols. (Tel Aviv: 1973).

Between Memory and Forgetfulness: The Janus Face of Michah Yosef Berdichevsky Marcus Moseley (HARVARD UNIVERSITY)

Historical Memory: A Blessing or a Curse? Dubnov, Ahad Ha'am, Berdichevsky "Not to know history is always to remain as a child." Thus, citing Cicero, did Simon Dubnov preface his Russian article, "Concerning the Study of History,"1 which would serve as the prototype for the first programmatic summons for the cultivation of historical consciousness and the collection of historical material to be issued in Hebrew, Nahpesah venahkorah.2 Directing the Hebrew version of his Russian manifesto to a prospective audience of "rabbis and yeshivah bokhers,"^ upon whose ears Ciceronian rhetoric may well have fallen somewhat flat, Dubnov found an equivalent for the Ciceronian maxim in the classical enjoinder to remember in Deut. 32:7, "zekhor yemot 'olam, binu shenot dor vador; sheal avikha veyagedckha, zekeinekha veyomru lakh" ("Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations; ask thy father, and he will declare unto thee, thine elders and they will tell thee"). That Dubnov should have deemed it necessary to appeal to one prospective Jewish readership with a classical maxim and to another with a biblical prooftext testifies, in and of itself, to the fragmentation of the cultural memory of East European Jews in this period which, through cultivation of the historical sense, he sought to repair. In Odessa in 1890, at the very time when his "historist"4 creed was crystallizing, Dubnov, the acculturated Russian journalist, was to meet "a typical yeshivah bokher. ... At that time, he knew not one European language, aside from Yiddish in the Ukrainian dialect, and we were thus forced to converse in the language considered at that time beneath the dignity of the intelligentsia."5 Some ten years after this chance encounter, the same "bokher," now resident in Berlin, would, in an essay entitled "Hishtapekhut" ("Effusion," or "Overflow"), give vent to the following emotions: All the books written by Jews come row after row and drain me of energy, drain my strength, my very being, my integrity. . . . When I was still a child, old age came and struck me on the face. I have grown old. I was old the moment I was born.6 78

Between Memory and Forgetfulness

79

How could Michah Yosef Berdichevsky, the author of the above lines and precisely the type of maskil torani7 to whom Dubnov addressed himself in Nahpesah venahkorah, not only, by implication, have failed to heed Dubnov's summons to remembrance, but also, in effect, have turned the Ciceronian adage on its head by suggesting that an excess of history consigns the Jewish "child" to a premature dotage? It was the "untimely"—in both senses of the word—intervention of Friedrich Nietzsche that played no small part in nipping the embryonic "historist" tendencies of the young Berdichevsky in the bud.8 Oddly enough, it was Ahad Ha'am, the man who viewed himself as the Apollonian guardian of the Jewish "spirit" against the callow and delinquent Nietzscheanism of the ze'irim, or "young ones," who clustered around Berdichevsky in fin-de-siecle Berlin,9 who served, albeit unwittingly, as the vital intermediary link, via Nietzsche, between nahpesah venahkorah and the radically anti-"historist" pronouncements of Berdichevsky that reached a type of crescendo in the late 1890s. In "Past and Future," a critique of Dubnov's 1891 Russian essay, "Concerning the Study of History," Ahad Ha'am had covertly availed himself of Nietzsche's "untimely meditation" of 1874, "Of the Uses and Disadvantages of History," in cautioning against the potentially paralytic and mummifying effect of an excess of memory at the level of the individual, and of history—and here he specifically appealed to Nietzsche's negative example of "antiquarian history," whose practitioners he termed hokrei kadmoniyot—at the level of the collective.10 Several years later, in the essay "Ziknah uvaharut," written at the height of the Ahad Ha'am/ze'irim controversy in 1898, Berdichevsky effectively trumped Ahad Ha'am by unpacking the latent and unstated Nietzschean kernel that the latter had attempted in his irenic formulations to defuse and then allowing it to detonate with full force.11 Thus he cited Nietzsche, with approval, on the imperative of forgetting for the healthy organism: "There is a degree of sleeplessness, or rumination, of the historical sense, which is harmful and ultimately fatal to the living thing, whether this living thing be a man, or a people or a culture."12 Detecting the Nietzschean dynamic that Ahad Ha'am himself had implanted in the heart of his discourse, Berdichevsky argued, contra Ahad Ha'am, that to no national organism did Nietzsche's diagnosis of insomnia, and his prescription of forgetfulness as cure, so well apply as to the Jewish: We, children of Israel, are an ancient people, with a massive inheritance, a torrent of thoughts, feelings, values, handed down to us from time immemorial, to the extent that we are unable to lead an existence we can call our own, unable to be ourselves. We do not belong to ourselves: Our dreams are not our own, our thoughts are not our own, and our will is not that implanted within us. ... Those among us striving for selfknowledge find themselves at a loss to discover a "self" that they can call their own. . . . We do not stand in relation to the heritage of the past as to an ancient wisdom that still leaves room for autonomous activity and renewed life. We are slaves of our memories, slaves of our bequest; mummified by received and predetermined thoughts.13

With Berdichevsky, then, we appear to have reached the point of utter negation of the Dubnovian "historist" creed: whereas Dubnov's diagnosis in Nahpesah ve-

80

Marcus Moseley

nahkorah suggests that the most imminent danger facing the national organism is chronic amnesia, Berdichevsky prescribes radical forgetfulness as a countermeasure to a well-nigh crippling surfeit of anamnesis. Or so it would appear if Berdichevsky is taken at his most stridently Nietzschean, as he often—all too often—is, due in no small part to the sheer volume of those more Dionysian pronouncements that threaten to drown out the more subtle registers of his thought already apparent in his earliest literary productions.14 And yet while Berdichevsky, on the one hand, detects within himself that excess of memory which, qua Nietzschean, he abhors, he also seeks assiduously to cultivate this condition, to the point, as one of the most sympathetic of his commentators puts it, of a "fetishization" of memory.l5 Thus, in. the thoroughly cryptic preamble to the no less cryptic and elliptical 1903 piece "Bein hapatish vehasadan," it is precisely the attribute of forgetfulness that Berdichevsky excoriates: If God chastises a man and visits upon him the pain of life's isolation in all His fury, then He decrees upon him banishment and wandering far from the place of his birth, from the cradle of his youth: hence the land of the patriarchs, hence exile. The place where the infant first left his mother's womb and opened his eyes for the first time to perceive the surrounding world, he carries within him and within the innermost portals of his heart all of his days, just as he bears within him his father and his mother and all that is closest to him and to the root of his being . . . the air of his birthplace remains in the deepest recesses of his soul, like the light of the new moon, or as the purity of a maiden who has not known a man. And for whomsoever this is not so, he who betrays the aura of these feelings of childhood, desecrates them through forgetfulness, expunges them from his heart, his is surely a wicked soul, prompted by ungodly thoughts within. 16

In a later formulation, this near-apotheosis of memory is given more direct expression: Even though snares await us at every step of the way, the pastures of memory remain wide open. There we may walk, at the rising and setting of the sun. Even on our deathbed, the glowing embers of youth may still dispel the shades. 1 do not believe in the revival of the dead, but I do believe in the revival of that which has passed—even died—in the mind of a man. 17

There is no direct, teological progression from the clamorous advocacy of forgetfulness by the Nietzschean za'ir to the seeming apotheosis of memory, as cited above, from the late work Garei rehov. Berdichevsky's oeuvre, rather, in this aspect as in others, appears to be generated by a nucleus of paradoxes or polarities—"binary oppositions" in latter-day structuralese—that manifest themselves in the very earliest strata of his writings, and to which he is constantly driven back in a quasi-Nietzschean pattern of "eternal return": the individual versus the collective; Jews versus Judaism; fragmentation versus wholeness; intellect versus instinct, to cite but a few.18 Each of these paradoxes, 1 would argue, may be viewed from the aspect of the primary paradox of memory versus forgetfulness, the impossible dual imperative: "Remember, do not remember" that lay upon Berdichevsky from the onset as a curse, albeit one that would spur him to extraordinary creativity:

Between Memory and Forgetfulness

81

The pains of history, buried deep, deep in our souls, carrying us away whether we will it or not to distant days. . . . And how powerful is the feeling, how strong the memories. . . . How they live in our being. . . . How deep in our being—deep as the abyss!19 This is the immense historical anguish and these are the agonies of history, a pain that fills our spirit and being and fragments us: irreconcilable opposites; victories and groans of defeat, groans of death and victories. . . . When we conquer the past, we find ourselves defeated—On the other hand, if the past prevails, we and our sons are also d e f e a t e d . . . . An elixir of life and a deadly poison at one and the same time. Oh, who will clear the way for me? Who will clear the way for me? Who will clear the path?20

Berdichevsky is thus caught "between the hammer and the anvil" of memory and forgetfulness, or rather between two types of memory, each of which demands its portion of forgetfulness: autobiographical memory, by which the self is constituted, is contingent upon a degree of forgetting of the larger cultural memory that threatens to engulf the individual; anamnesis of the latter entails a degree of forgetting of the former. The oscillation between these two categories of memory, with their concomitant forgettings, may already be discerned in Berdichevsky's writings contemporaneous with his most uncompromisedly Nietzschean pronouncements. Hence in Berdichevsky's autobiographical neo-hasidic manifesto of 1898, "Nishmat hasidim,"21 we read the following: At times a man will forget his origin and, like any other species of life, he immerses himself in the deepest mire of material being. But this is not a permanent condition; for he cannot imprison indefinitely the spirit that brings to remembrance the true nature of his being. And then, at the prompting of this spirit, his entire spiritual world is subject to a supernal impulse. . . . And these spiritual impulses, how manifold they are. By their means man is sanctified and elevated, his spirituality and perception are elevated and they overflow their customary boundaries. By their means, man no longer relates to the outer world solely according to the gratification of his immediate requirements and objectives . . . they afford him deliverance from the restricted sphere of his myopic vision . . . thus he encompasses totality—the all is within his g r a s p . . . . I, for my part, view in all the strivings of mankind in his long history, the vying of the essential with the accidental, the sphere of restriction with that of expansion, the absolute unity with the individual monad separated from that unity to which, ultimately, after its separation and individualization, it still belongs in an eternal and unbreakable unity. 22

The type of remembering here prescribed by Berdichevsky amounts to a neoplatonic forgetting of the fallen, autobiographical self, a self-voiding, in order to attain that higher form of remembrance that is cosmic, supra-personal. Berdichevsky, it should be noted, specifically commends neoplatonism in this same essay as a "spiritual breakthrough" on a par with Hasidism itself.23 In alignment with this neoplatonic reversal of the process of individuation by means of erasure of memory of self in the recovery of a higher and prior level of remembrance, Berdichevsky closes his Sefer hasidim, to which "Nishmat hasidim" would serve as the introduction, with an ecstatic embrace of bitul hayesh—"self-extinction": "Nullify the self that is within you. . . . Depart from yourselves! Cease to be!"24 This thoroughly un-Nietzschean embrace of forgetfulness as a release from the bonds of selfhood, rather than as a premise for the strong individual's self-

82

Marcus Moseley

realization, finds echo in Berdichevsky's belletristic writings of the same period, which are generally considered, both by his critics and by Berdichevsky himself, as marking the most individualistic and unequivocally autobiographical stratum of his oeuvre.25 He appears to call, at one and the same time, for release of the individual from the restrictive compass of the collective, and for release of the self from the existential and temporal confines of the autobiographical. Thus the musings of the protagonist of "Bil'adeiha," subtitled the "memoirs of one who goes alone" ("Zikhronot boded"): Sometimes 1 forget everything, everything and I am like a child with no youth and a man in his dotage without the adornment of old age. . . . Not only have I forgotten distant events, but even yesterday, this very morning, and all that occurred prior to the present evening. Not only have I forgotten all those people from the more distant past, but also my own states of mind of yesterday, of today. 1 forget my dreams, my sufferings, from yesterday and today. . . . There arc moments in which I am immersed as if in an eternity, as if in that immense tranquillity that precedes suffering and follows upon its passing. . . . Then 1 feel as if I am distant from my self, distant from my own struggle for existence, distant from my burdens, from my poverty and from the bitter memories of times gone by. . . . All that remains forme is to seek extinction, extinction of my world of temporal existence, but the curse of existence is upon me and I cannot cease to be.26

Hence the "question," as posed by Hamlet, in whom he had found a kindred spirit as early as 1888—"I, like him, am of an extremely nervous and depressive condition"27—is tantamount, with Berdichevsky, to "To remember, or not to remember?" Actually, Berdichevsky, with his penchant for the simultaneous embrace of mutually incompatible alternatives, would probably prefer to rephrase matters thus: "To remember and not to remember, that is the problem."

Schopenhauer: Memory as Release from the Self There are two souls within us. We are Janus-faced: on the one hand, the individual visage; on the other, the collective. But who can explain to us how these two coincide within one being? We are of divided countenance, of divided spirit. In each and every bone of a man, in each and every sinew, in the innermost recesses of his soul, various forces reside. Man strives for unity, but different factors not of his own clash within him.

The above citations, judiciously selected by Aliza Klausner-Eshkol in her discussion of the "contradictions of the world-view of Berdichevsky and their source," are taken from essays written, respectively, at the onset of Berdichevsky's career and in the last year of his life.28 They are suggestive both of the lasting and generative force of those irreconciliable polarities formulated at the beginning of the way and of Berdichevsky's inability to bridge that chasm, or "split" (ker'a), that he had detected in the psyche of the individual Jew—that is, within himself—and thus, by a process of projection not atypical of this generation of East European Jewish intellectuals, within the heart of the Jewish collective.29

Between Memory and Forgetfulness

83

This collision of "two souls," of "different factors, not of his own," is already apparent in Berdichevsky's doctoral dissertation, completed in 1897 for the University of Berne, "Uber den Zusammenhang zwischen Ethik und Aesthetik," the summation of his intensive studies in Germany, whence, in the footsteps of the prototypical East European maskil Solomon Maimon, he had migrated in 1890.30 In this thesis, according to the summary of Nathan Rotenstreich, Berdichevsky set out to reconcile the Schopenhauerian negation of the "will" with the Nietzschean affirmation of the same.31 In this ambitious undertaking, he was not, apparently, entirely successful: as Fishel Lachover first noted in his classic essay of 1912 on Berdichevsky—and as is confirmed by Rotenstreich, writing some seventy years later—Berdichevsky constantly vacillates between these two radically divergent philosophical alternatives in his Hebrew writings, contemporaneous with and following upon the dissertation.32 "In one of his well-known essays on the transformation of values," writes Rotenstreich, "he speaks about ceasing to be and being. He implies the desire—or, let us say, the will—to partake of the two dimensions, along with the awareness of the distance between the two."33 This uneasy coexistence of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche within the torn soul of the young Berdichevsky is of profound and lasting consequence for his lifelong quest of some synthesis of, or at the least modus vivendi between, the dual prerogatives of remembrance and forgetfulness, the "two dimensions" of which he sought to partake in equal measure. If Nietzsche provided Berdichevsky with the intellectual arsenal by means of which he could lay claim to the "domain of the individual" (reshut hayahid), it was Schopenhauer who provided a measure of release of the straitened self from the latter domain. For Schopenhauer, memory stands on a par with aesthetic contemplation as the gateway par excellence to release of the self from the bonds of individuality, to that state when knowledge is snatched from the thraldom of the will, the attention is now no longer directed to the motives of willing, but contemplates things free from their relation to the will . . . then all at once peace comes to us of our own accord, and all is well within us. We celebrate the Sabbath of the penal servitude of willing; and the wheel of Ixion stands still.34

As Mary Warnock points out in her lucid exposition of this aspect of Schopenhauer's thought, memory thus affords passage from the subjectively determined "world of will" that Berdichevsky, qua Nietzschean, would extol, to the "world of representation" that, as "pure object," "has no element of the subject who represents in it."35 Hence, in the midst of the 1902 essay "On the Question of the Past," whose opening section is replete with Nietzschean bluster, Berdichevsky sees fit to append a caveat that effectively takes the wind out of the sails of all that has gone before: And nevertheless . . . when we position ourselves in the midst of things, I mean: when we position ourselves as a dissociated individual entity in opposition to the past, . . . since it lies in contradiction to life, to our life, then we view, nay, we are compelled to view this past, this section of the past, with hatred, anger and resistance. The matter is otherwise when we approach the past in the guise of neutral observers, not of opponents, when we relate to the past as something complete in itself, which is entirely independent of ourselves and places no burden upon us, as a pure object of natural

84

Marcus Moseley perception. Then we view the past under another aspect altogether and we relate to it in an entirely different way. Then the past is beautiful, the past is rich, exhalted is the past.36

It is this model of memory as detached, selfless contemplation of the past, conducing to a cleansing of a perception sullied by the assertive will of ego, that may explain the otherwise cryptic subtitle of the above-cited essay "Nishmat hasidim": "Histakelut," "Observation"/"Contemplation." In seeking to convey the impression that this subtitle derives from the hasidic ambience he would here evoke, Berdichevsky cites a hasidic dictum to the effect that "contemplation is a sort of influx emanating from the higher sphere to the lower." In view, however, of the extremely Schopenhauerian tenor of "Nishmat hasidim," with its advocacy of liberation of memory from the self, and of Sefer hasidim as a whole, with its heady embrace of nonbeing, it is probable that the subtitle "Histakelut" emanates from a more immediate sphere of influence than that of the supernal realm. For histakelut would be the most fitting Hebrew term for Schopenhauer's Anschauung—that detached Buddhistic contemplation37 afforded Western man only through the aesthetic sense and memory, by which he forgets "his individuality, his will, and only continues to exist as pure subject, as clear mirror of the object."38 Supporting the thesis of the Schopenhauerian underpinnings of "Nishmat hasidim" is the essay's own preamble, which immediately follows upon the hasidic citation, attributed to a HaBaD source, concerning histakelut. Here, Berdichevsky accords to the memory of "those halcyon days when I was yet a child, at one with myself and with my God, and together with His hasidim did I bestride the paths of life" the capacity of abolishing the distance of perceiver and percept, of "illuminating," in his own deliberately baroque formulation, "the gloom of the abyss that separates me from my Father in heaven, on account of my many sins."39 Under the twin aegis of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Berdichevsky's memory thus rushes simultaneously in contrary directions: from the collective to the autobiographical, on the one hand, and from the autobiographical to the "cloud of unknowing" of quasi-mystical self-forgetting, on the other. This polarity, or "split" in Berdichevsky's memory, is reflected in the literary productions of his annus mirabilis, 1899-1900, when he burst meteor-like upon the Hebrew literary scene with the almost simultaneous publication of no less than nine books of short stories and essays.40 In the four collections of imaginative prose, as opposed to the essayistic collections—Sefer hasidim stands somewhere midway between the two—a fundamental division may be observed between the thinly veiled autobiographical confessionals (the most significant sections of Mibayit umihutz and the novellas Mahanayim and 'Orva parah) and the sketches and portraits of life in the Jewish townlets of Russia, in which the matter-of-fact, quasi-documentary tone of the chronicler predominates.41 While it is the works in which autobiographical memory is paramount that have left the deepest impression on Hebrew literary-critical discourse to this day,42 the type of selfless memory implied by the majority of the sketches in Me'iri haketanah should, in light of later developments, be deemed equally crucial. Hillel Zeitlin, for one, in an early response to the 1899-1900

Between Memory and Forgetfulness

85

publications, professed amazement at the contrast between Berdichevsky in his autobiographical aspect and the Berdichevsky of Me'iri haketanah: That same Berdichevsky, the author of such pieces as "Me'ever lanahar," "Bil'adeiha" and so forth, is also the author of these many sketches, which resemble the clothes-lists we give to the laundry—I refer to the depictions in Me'iri haketanah. . . . This same Berdichevsky who depicts with such exemplary artistry such rich characters as "Nathan ben Nathan," "Menahem," "Yehonatan"43 etc., this very Berdichevsky descends at times to the level of a doltish, asinine yokel. . . . Shimeon, in Berdichevsky's "town," is different from Reuben. The former has three sons and two daughters, the latter the reverse, and so forth. But any Tom, Dick or Harry could tell you all this, who never so much as dreamt of being a creative artist. Just try asking any inhabitant of a small town about each and every one of his townsfolk and he will answer you in precisely this fashion: "Tall Reuben has a yellow beard, and his wife wears the trousers, but his daughters are lazy; short Shimeon is hen-pecked; Yossel the goy beats his wife, etc. etc."44

Any reader of Me'iri haketanah would be inclined to grant the above assessment a large measure of assent, even though Zeitlin remains impervious to the light humor and self-irony—qualities, not without reason, not generally associated with Berdichevsky45—that are chief among this collection's redeeming features. Yet the light humor, the seemingly picayune stature of these "depictions and sketches"— especially in comparison with the iconoclastic and metaphysically laden publications of the same year—should not deflect attention from the serious philosophic intent underlying Me'iri haketanah. For here, I would argue, we are witness to the first systematic application of the tenets of Schopenhauerian memory and aesthetics, which receive essayistic exposition in Sefer hasidim and elsewhere in Berdichevsky's contemporaneous publicistic writings, to the belletristic sphere. Memory serves as the source of Me'iri haketanah no less than it does that of the autobiographical confessionals of the "solitary young man":46 Rachel Bin Gorion reports that when she accompanied Berdichevsky in 1901 on her visit to his hometown, Dubova, whose purpose was to introduce her as his fiancee to his father's family, "the townsfolk bore him a grudge, for it was whispered that he had portrayed most, if not all of them, in his book Me'iri haketanah."47 A return visit to Dubova, after their marriage in 1902, yielded a list of "Dubova characters" that would later serve as raw material for literary productions in Hebrew, Yiddish and German.48 And yet the memory here at evidence is one from which the self has all but withdrawn, and thus markedly at variance with the solipsistic, effusive and highly charged memories of the protagonists of "Me'ever lanahar," Mahanayim and their ilk. Memory, in Me'iri haketanah, serves not as a mirror held before the self in the narcissistic mode of the autobiographical confessional, in which the external world is subsumed to a plenitude of subjectivity that has overflowed its boundaries, but rather as one obliquely placed to the perceiving subject that he may see all within his immediate ambience, and yet remain, in a manner thoroughly reminiscent of the "hunter" of Turgenev's Sketches of a Sportsman, as unseen to himself as he is to others. In measure, that is, as memory is purged of the willing ego, so the face of

86

Marcus Moscley

the mirror that Berdichevsky would hold up to the world of his childhood and youth in Eastern Europe is less clouded. Side by side with the purging of the subjective component of memory, there is to be noted in Me'iri haketanah, and in the later collections of the type this volume initiated, a deliberate renunciation of authorial role in any conventional sense of the term: Zeitlin's analogy of the laundry-list is not entirely inappropriate. Plot, intrigue, fabulistic structure, are often deliberately eschewed, as the narrator, or chronicler, appears to adopt a fairly strict policy of nonintervention, preferring the role of neutral witness to the world he memorializes.49 Hence the concluding paragraph of "A Vanishing World" (" 'Olam 'over"), subtitled appropriately, given the absence of any sense of narrative progression in the piece, "A Picture": This is the history of this house, upon whose plot now stands the town pharmacy. The reader expected some lengthy narrative development—but all has passed and perished: Is he who describes to be held responsible for this?50

This renunciation of the muse, albeit in itself highly stylized, is stated in a most outspoken manner in the prelude to a late sketch, "Ahinu atah," taken from the cycle Bemerhavei 'ir, a series in which the dissociation of self and memory as heralded in Me'iri haketanah reaches its apogee: "To me is not granted the poetic muse, I am but a scribe and recorder51 of prior events and I denote the personalities inscribed in my memory from distant days."52 As if parenthetically, at the end of this depiction, or calling to remembrance, of "Raphael, a very tall slender man with pinched features," Berdichevsky writes: "I was ten years old then."53 In truth, however, it matters little to whom this memory belongs or to whom the text—or rather scribal transcript—belongs; what matters, in order that the "world of will" may give way to that of "representation," is that each belongs to no one.54 That virtually nothing happens in these sketches of small-town life in Jewish Eastern Europe, whose principal axis of combination is spatial rather than temporal,55 is again consonant with the authorless and implicitly plotless model for memory provided by Schopenhauer. Plot and intrigue, according to Schopenhauer, cater to the appetites of the "will," while it is the purpose of genuine art to "eliminate . . . everything subjective and any appeal to mere plot or intrigue," to "repeat the eternal Ideas grasped through pure contemplation, the essential and abiding of all the phenomena of the world."56

Against Schopenhauer: Expansion versus Contraction of Autobiographical Memory Berdichevsky's passage from willful autobiographical memory to the impersonal contemplative memory, as prescribed by Schopenhauer—to which should be added, in the later years, the influence of the Goethean ideal of renunciation57—was by no means smoothly effected. Side by side with the emptying of memory of self, there is to be observed, in Berdichevsky's writings of the late nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth centuries, a countermovement whereby autobiographical memory is inflated to well-nigh cosmic dimensions. If the key term in the Berdichevskian vocabulary that corresponds to the diminution of autobiographical memory is hista-

Between Memory and Forgetfulness s

87

kelut, then that corresponding to the countermovement of expansion of the same is harhavah—"expansion," "magnification"—as well as other derivatives of the Hebrew root RHB—herhev, merhav, "wide," "large," etc. The term comes to prominence in Berdichevsky's fierce literary polemics with Ahad Ha'am concerning the role assigned to literature in the Jewish cultural renaissance; in the final redaction of his essays, Berdichevsky subsumed the pieces written in the heat of this controversy under the rubric, "Toward the Expansion of Literature" ("Leharhavat hasifrut").58 An essential aspect of this "expansion" is the affording of room to the hitherto repressed voice of the individual in Hebrew literature. Thus, in an utter reversal of the hierarchy of Schopenhauerian aesthetics he would later espouse, Berdichevsky offers, in his 1897 essay, "Zorekh viykholet besifrutenu hayafah," a spirited defense of lyrical poetry in its most subjective aspect: "We demand of the poet and seer that he view life according to the dictates of his own spirit, seeing the universe according to his own lights."59 Berdichevsky, however, bolsters his plea for the admittance of the subjective to the Hebrew literary fold by pushing the boundaries of subjectivity to their outer limits. He hints in this essay that the "lyric I" of the Jew is by no means delimited to the passing fancies of this or that empirical individual, but rather encapsulates archetypal and perennial aspects of the experience of the Jewish collective, most notably pain: In every Jewish man or Jewish woman, both those remaining within the fold and those who have left it—in all of them, beneath the veil spread over them and over their lives, a deep spiritual pain dwells hidden, a poetic pain.60

In the retrospective "general comments" that Berdichevsky placed at the head of the second cycle of his collected essays, Baderekh, he himself confesses to the overflow of subjectivity that characterizes his earlier publicistic sallies: My soul took flight and I sought breathing-space [merhav] by tearing aside the boundaries. Even scholarly analysis and matters pertaining to the philosophy of cognition were inextricably bound up with my own spiritual needs; I projected from myself and from my own life to the external world. ... I sought a disguise and a justification for the dreams of an individual within a philosophical and scholarly context.61

This "tearing aside of the boundaries" of subjectivity accorded previously undreamt-of lebensraum to autobiographical memory. Indeed, the spell of the midrashic angel, whose rap on the nose or upper lip of the newly emerged infant decrees forgetfulness of all the knowledge he has acquired in the celestial academies, is, for Berdichevsky, effectively broken: While still in my mother's womb I was taught the entire Torah. The candle of my soul had just alighted, but when I came forth to the light of the world, immediately an angel came and extinguished the candle, believing that he would thus cause all that 1 had learnt to be forgotten; little did he know that what I had learnt in my mother's womb would remain in my memory forever.62

As if by way of demonstration of the capaciousness of this memory, Berdichevsky continues in the same "Innermost Contemplations" ("Rahashei lev"): "I feel in my innermost being the burden of inheritance, the sufferings of my life, of my soul that was driven out of the Garden of Eden."63

88

Marcus Moseley

In the high-tide of Harhavah—approximately the mid- to late 1890s—Berdichevsky's lyric "I" overflows the generic boundaries of the publicistic essay to the imaginative variations upon recurring autobiographical themes that constitute the "stories." From a retrospective standpoint, some intimation of the expansion of autobiographical memory to archetypal, quasi-mythical dimensions may be discerned in one of his earliest pieces: the uncompleted autobiographical novella Germhayim: sipur ma'aseh shehayah.64 The title in itself is suggestive of the inflation of the experience of the individual to more cosmic dimensions, containing as it does triple reference to Berdichevsky's two early divorces and "expulsions" from in-laws' homes, and to the primal driving out, or gerush, of Adam from the Garden of Eden. In the tenth chapter of the novella, "A Hurried Exit," in which the forcible removal of the protagonist, "Mikhael," from his first in-laws' hometown is recounted, the narrative, which till then had proceeded in tolerably realistic manner, albeit spiked with a standard dose of maskilic satire, takes an unexpectedly mythic turn: There dwelt a man in Kedar of expansive girth, wide and lofty, who stood a good shoulder above everyone else, two cubits in length; his red beard flowed down to his stomach. He was red, his beard was red, even his eyes were red. . . . This was Rcb Lamckh, the coachman, but the inhabitants of Kedar called him the "Angel of Death". . . . "Hoy, Boy!" the Angel of Death raised his voice and the horses broke into a trot, and in a few moments they were already far from the townsfolk. . . . The horses galloped on, and as they galloped the coach hit against bumps on the road, rattling the travelers' backbones. And the winds blew. The cold was biting and the sky turned black and let forth hailstones. ... As the passengers converse with each other, Mikhael sits in a corner immersed in his thoughts. 65 The metamorphosis of the return journey of the frightened seventeen-year-old Berdichevsky from the household of his in-laws, the Weisses ("Lavan haarami" is the name of the father-in-law in the story) of Teplik, to that of his father, the Rabbi of Dubova, to the scene of a speeding carriage borne by the red-eyed Angel of Death beneath darkling skies intimates that autobiographical experience is a reexperience of primal scenes whose traces are preserved in the common fund of mythical imagination. Thus, the redness and hairiness of the coachman of Kedar, which calls to mind the awesome visage of Chagall's "Red Jew," is resonant of the perennial conflict between Jacob and Esau and, at a more archaic level, between the masculine and feminine principles—or, following Jung, to whose thought Berdichevsky's later work bears strong affinities, between the animus and the anima.66 All this is suggestive of a model of memory as palimpsest, a model that occurred, at a later stage, to Berdichevsky himself: Man's life is a written page, his soul is inscribed upon at birth, some would say, through the bequest of parents and ancestors; and life in the outside world, the events determined by fortune, also lend their inscription—an inscription upon an inscription.67 Scratch the surface of the autobiographical memory of the young "Mikhaels" in their various avatars68 in Berdichevsky's writings under the aspect of "expansion," and layer upon layer of generational memory is revealed, each layer partially occluding the one beneath, stretching back from the "torn" young Jewish extern, to the

Between Memory and Forgetfulness

89

world of the "fathers" in Eastern Europe, to the patriarchs, to the prepatriarchal wellsprings of pagan mythology. By sheer force of will, however, "Mikhael" sustains his autonomous identity, albeit at times with difficulty, in face of the massive weight of generational memory which, should it be unleashed in full force, poses the constant threat of total engulfment. He may contain within himself, that is, this generational memory, yet by contrast to the oddly spectral, mediumistic presence of the mazkir/remembrancer of Me'iri haketanah, and of Berdichevsky's Yiddish depictions of Jewish life in Eastern Europe,69 he is not contained by it. "For several days now," ponders the boded/"solitary one" of "Bil'adeiha": I hear another voice, a voice that hails from elsewhere: the Jewish people in distress! I recall my sin. For several days now 1 have not thought about the world of the Jews. I tried to ignore the subject, to turn my mind to other things. ... I, who already considered myself far, far away, on another plane altogether. But now, it is as if I have awoken from a long sleep. . . . And, behold, cries of distress I hear—my innermost soul is wracked by the pains of history. Suddenly all of our great past—its glory and its terror—lives within me, fills my being, alternately attracts and repels me. Everywhere I turn, in every hidden corner of my soul, I hear the voice of Jacob, the voice of the Jewish people. I experience the immense anguish, the hopes of the people, the suffering in these hopes. . . . And by the waters of Babylon, I also pluck my harp.70

As the diminution of autobiographical memory, heralded in Me'iri haketanah, reaches its ne plus ultra in Mimerhavei rehov, so autobiographical memory attains maximal limits of expansion in the above-cited "Bein hapatish vehasadan," a piece written, in contrast to the documentary precision of the faceless "recorder" of the former works, in the form of gnomic fragments and impressionistic notations. The autobiographical memory of the speaker of "Bein hapatish vehasadan," "Shimeon ben Mosheh," is sufficiently capacious to house the life-experiences of Aher/Elishah ben Abuyah, 71 Spinoza and Uriel d'Acosta—"It was I who gave my body to the blows, and my cheeks bore the humiliation. As I lay down on the threshhold of the synagogue and as the entire congregation walked over me, 1 vowed to take vengeance for myself and for them"72—and, less explicitly, the Ba'al Shem Tov.73 The assimilation of generational to autobiographical memory, to the point of an almost seamless conflation of the two, reaches consummate expression in the opening sentences of the second section of "Bein hapatish vehasadan": "Get thee out of thy land! And I went from Kiev to Brody, from Brody to Konigsberg (har hamelekh), whence I departed for Leipzig, whence to Basel."74 A hint at the more chthonic regions this autobiographical memory may plumb is provided in the musings of "Gabriel," the soliloquist of "Me'ever lanahar," a reworking of much the same autobiographical material as formed the nucleus for Gerushayim,75 and whose title itself is evocative of premonotheistic ancestral memory-traces:76 The moon alone do I love, the stars, the night and the pain of the night, then, only then, am I granted a moment of respite; only then is a measure of tranquility afforded me. And a sound as if of a distant voice do I hear in the murmur of the night, in the deeps of the night. . . . And then I also remember the days of the turning sword: the time of the expulsion from Eden, of the serpent and the God-like knowledge of good and evil.77

90

Marcus Moseley

Concomitant with the dual movement of the self or will toward Nietzschean expansion on the one hand, Schopenhauerian diminution on the other, Berdichevsky's memory thus appears to follow a diastolic/systolic rhythm of expansion/contraction, though the higher the tide of expansion, the stronger the undertow of contraction. This diastolic/systolic rhythm is reflected in Berdichev sky's various formulations of his poetics in the first decade of the twentieth century, the majority of which found their way into the two volumes 'Arbayim (1910) and Beshirah uvelashon (1911). Thus, in "Basifrut hayafah" and "Hameshorer," two essays written in the same year, 1907, and published in the same periodical, Brenner's Hame'orer, Berdichevsky recommends, on the one hand, a thoroughly Schopenhauerian "standing at a distance" (rihuk ha'amidah) as an essential condition of a mature poetics,78 and, on the other, he speaks with awe-struck rapture of the subjective excess of the lyric poet, the meshorer. The inner world of the poet contains all generations, all times, the outpourings of every heart and the unassimilated sorrow of every heart. His inner world is a mighty chasm for all that breathes, every sentient being. . . . Should thousands of oceans flood over all that has life, this is nothing compared to the horror of life and the pain in the poetry of life, his life. 79

The implicit duality evinced here becomes even more spectacularly apparent in another pair of essays, again written within a short time of each other, in 1909, "Kibush haruah" and "'Al havidui."80 If "Al havidui" marks the swansong of the period of autobiographical expansion, and one of the more blatant examples of that "projection from myself and from my own life . . . within a philosophical and scholarly context" of which Berdichevsky speaks in the above-cited introduction to Baderekh, "Kibush haruah" marks the earliest systematic formulation in Berdichevsky's poetics of the less spectacular but nonetheless insistent process of contraction that is now gaining the upper hand. "'Al havidui" should be seen as Berdichevsky's last critical word—dernier cri, perhaps is better, given the rapturous tone of the piece—on the metapoetics of autobiography; the essay, in a sense, thus closes the circle initiated by his early reflections on the topic in his first major publicistic piece, "Devarim ahadim 'al hatoladah vehaavtobiografiyah."81 " 'Al haavtobiografiyah" would actually have been a more fitting title for the essay than '"Al havidui," but as with the English equivalents, "autobiography" clearly lacks the generational resonance of "confession" that Berdichevsky seeks here to impart. Indeed, in the body of the essay, Berdichevsky hastens to distinguish the vidui he has in mind from its traditionally Jewish connotations of the death-bed confessional:82 For the most part, Judaism only knows of the death-bed confessional: Put your house in order, because you are on the point of expiration! With the last ounce of remaining strength, man has no option but to confess according to the book. Greater than this is the confession of the individual that man utters while still in command of mind and body. . . . Confession is not an ethical, but a poetic imperative toward vital and actual self-revelation. . . . Confession is the vocal expression of the soul, and the poetic structure of that same soul. . . . The past is indwelling in the heart and confession brings it to the light of day and renders it a visible presence: Life is released from its confinement . . . the heart is redeemed.83

Between Memory and Forgetfulness

91

As in "Hameshorer," Berdichevsky here avails himself of the maritime analogy for the "effusion" or "overflowing" (hishtapekhut) of the subjective lyrical voice characteristic of "confession": "The sea rises up and overflows its boundaries with the swelling of the waves."84 In this intensely hyperbolic essay, Berdichevsky effectively raises the status of the autobiographical confessional to that of a cosmic force of "self-revelation and self-perpetuation," presiding, inter alia, over poetry, architecture, prayer, love, justice and friendship: "Essentially, all human blossoming and creativity is a sort of confession."85 By the abstraction of the elemental force of "self-revelation" and "self-perpetuation" from "confession," Berdichevsky grants himself license to transcend the temporal confines of the delimited autobiographical memory of the contemporary Jewish individual: The Book of Psalms is a great confession. Deuteronomy is a confession. Ecclesiastes is a confession. From the three of them together, there is something in every man, in every suffering soul, in every poet.86

A beachhead to this "swelling" and "overflowing of the boundaries" of autobiographical memory is afforded in "Kibush haruah"—the "subdual of the spirit" or, to pursue the meteorological analogy to which Berdichevsky is partial when discussing lyrical hishtapekhut, "the quelling of the storm." Here, it is the still, small voice of selfless, detached contemplation that Berdichevsky prescribes as an antidote to the blind ragings of the spirit in the "storm" of lyrical effusion: Otherwise are the thoughts derived from careful study and reflection. God speaks in silence in opposition to the storm. . . . Who is the true poet? He who restrains the storm within, he who holds his identity, the pain of his inner being within him and speaks of others quietly with a still voice. . . . True poetry is metamorphosis or, rather, stepping out of ourselves, our egos to enter into the life of others—others quite unconnected to o u r s e l v e s . . . . The true artist does not create for himself according to his own inner compulsions and requirements; but rather he steps out of himself, restrains himself. . . ,87

Extremes, it is true, may meet. And in a sense, the counteracting spiritual movements of " 'Al havidui" and "Kibush haruah" are complementary: to contract selfhood to the point of becoming a drop in the ocean amounts, at the end of the day, to very much the same thing as expanding the self to the point of becoming the ocean. Nevertheless, the wish to expand and contract simultaneously, to perpetuate and to renounce the self at one and the same time, may conduce to paralysis. The final sentence of "Kibush haruah" is, not entirely surprisingly, suggestive of something of an impasse: "The true poet is not only Janus-faced but multifaced, and each of his faces stands in opposition to the other."88

From Berdichevsky to Bin Gorion: The Anthology as Resolution of the Tension Between Expansion and Contraction It was, I would argue, in no small part as a way out of this metaphysical impasse that Berdichevsky turned increasingly away from shirah, or belles-lettres, to the almost obsessive compilation and rendition of premodern Jewish texts that, from

92

Marcus Moseley

1906 on, became his major preoccupation. As a genre, or rather nongenre, the creative anthology provided Berdichevsky with a fitting arena for the difficult exercise of simultaneous expansion and contraction in line with the conflicting imperatives of autobiographical remembrance and self-forgetting as prescribed by " 'Al havidui"/"Kibush haruah." The requirement of "subdual of the spirit"/contraction is met insofar as the anthologist becomes the medium for the voices of "others— others quite unrelated to ourselves." And yet especially in an anthology, where texts are not merely reprinted but rendered anew by the compiler, considerable leeway is provided for the systolic countermovement of "self-revelation and selfperpetuation," albeit in a discreet and thereby effective manner. By appropriating, moreover, texts of the national past to his own mental universe, the natural memory of the compiler is, by implication, vastly augmented, again in line with the dictates of harhavah/expansion of the self. It is between the two poles of expansion of autobiographical memory to encompass a generational literary heritage and the contraction of the same in order to allow for the mediumistic transmission of a store or treasure house (thesaurus, ozar) of cultural knowledge whose realm is not of the self that Meozar haagadah, Berdichevsky's first collection of Jewish legend, comes into being. Berdichevsky prefaced each of the two volumes of this anthology (1912, 19J3) with an introduction. Taken together, these two introductions constitute a hermeneutical manifesto of primary significance in modern Jewish intellectual history, and—as with "Nishmat hasidim," which served likewise as an introduction, and to which they stand in direct relation—an important milestone in Berdichevsky's literary career. Berdichevsky's candor in these introductions is disarming; indeed, to disarm through preemption of potential criticism is no small part of their task. He makes no bones of the conflicting tendencies at play in his anthologizing activity. In laying them bare, he even implies a certain homology between the fragmented consciousness of the compiler and the necessarily fragmented nature of the material from which he draws: There is no one Jewish literature, reducible to any one category; rather, a myriad of different types, each of which arose at different times, under different circumstances. . . . The Jewish people is, likewise, not a monolithic entity of one heart and mind, for the forces of various tribes vie within it, each of very different temperament. 89 "He who compiles and redacts this material," Berdichevsky continues: will, of necessity, do his work day by day. The writer will naturally be affected by dayto-day circumstances, his work thus being rendered liable to manifold inconsistencies. For is there not a spirit in man, a spirit which is constantly in flux? Sometimes he [the compiler] will be completely enslaved to the source from which he draws and he will give a punctiliously accurate rendition of the text. At other times, the text serves as raw material in the hands of the artist, and he will fashion it according to his wishes and emotions. If these texts fall into no one category and if we adopt no predetermined stance toward them, who can prevent us from rendering them in one way one day and in another the next?90 The compilation itself is thus transmuted to a species of confessional—and vice versa—an indirect channel for "overflow of the spirit," serving as it does as a kind

Between Memory and Forgetfulness

93

of seismographic register of the shifting moods and various stimuli to which the consciousness of the redactor is subject. "Should anyone seek any academic method in these words of poetry and imagination," writes Berdichevsky: Clearly he will fall wide of the mark. Should he, however, seek to find the guiding principle in the writer and redactor himself, this much I can tell him: I found my way to these agadot in the reverse sequence from that in which they are presented in this collection. I began some time ago to render versions of hasidic tales, a task that took up a great deal of my time—but with a very different aim in mind. Then it was not the voice of the people that I sought in these texts but my own voice, and even where life was openly revealed to me I sought refuge in the shadows of fantasy. After a while, I was driven to the days of the Kabbalah and mystical vision, the cradle of Hasidism. Thence I came to the cramped life of the Middle Ages, the period of hope for messianic deliverance. . . . From the West I returned to Babylon, from Babylon to the land of the Patriarchs. . . . Then 1 made the leap to the literature of the Talmud and the midrash and the dreams and ways of thinking of childhood returned to me from Father's house and the beit midrash.91

There is an intimation in the above passage that Berdichevsky, who elsewhere in the 1912 introduction states that the notion of an anthology of Jewish legend first dawned upon him "with my arrival at the threshhold that separates temporal existence from the life of eternity, when the living give thought to their mortality,"92 seeks passage beyond the earthly father, the Rabbi of Dubova, to the Father. The anthologist is borne on a memory both personal and national along his counterchronological trajectory beyond the threshhold of his own becoming, to reemerge phoenix-like at the end of the 1912 introduction in the legendary or "agadic" guise of "Bin Gorion," which he would adopt as his legal surname shortly thereafter. Indeed, it is in terms suggestive of the relinquishment or renunciation of a prior self that Berdichevsky makes the first formal announcement of the coming-to-being of Bin Gorion in the final paragraph of this introduction: In view of the fact that these chapters of mine, whose source and origin is exclusively from the past, differ from all my previous works to date, or from what I sought to achieve when I mustered strength to forge my own path, to break out of the ghetto, I have arranged them under the name I chose for myself for the enquiries into ancient days.93

A degree of renunciation or "standing back" may be intimated here, but Berdichevsky's "spirit" was still by no means "quelled" or "subdued." Even if Bin Gorion in his embryonic stage is not "multifaced" as is the "true poet" of "Kibush haruah," he is, to adopt one of Berdichevsky's favorite epithets, "of dual countenance"/duparzufim; he hovers somewhat uneasily between the polar opposites of will-driven "expansion" and Buddhistic withdrawal of desire. Viewed from the aspect of confessional expansion, the appearance of Bin Gorion may be interpreted as Berdichevsky's giving birth to a monstrously inflated mythical avatar of himself: wilfullness surely reaches its zenith in the act of self-begetting and the arrogation of the right to bestow upon oneself a name of one's own choosing. But from the aspect of contraction/kibush haruah, the same phenomenon may be read as a supreme instance of renunciation: the dying of the self into the anonymity or pseudonymity

94

Marcus Moseley

of the faceless compiler of the legends of antiquity. Berdichevsky, it appears, was not entirely certain at this juncture of which direction Bin Gorion would lead him. "When I came to select the various legends from the days of dispersion in its various periods," he writes in the 1913 introduction to the second volume of Meozar haagadah, "my inner being was wracked by conflicting impulses."94 And with that disarming candor that marked the introduction to the first volume, he avers quite openly that his fluctuating "state of mind" contributed in no small part to the "selection of some things and the omission of others."95 Residues of the pronounced wilfullness and caprice of the 1912 introduction notwithstanding, the 1913 introduction does evince a discernable shift in Berdichevsky's, albeit wavering, "state of mind": It is the "still, small voice" ensuing upon the "storm" of lyrical/confessional overflow that now becomes increasingly audible: The whisperings of the Muse and the form that she takes, if we do not submit ourselves unconditionally to but one criterion and schema, are protean and in constant flux. The spirit blows from without and you find yourself driven, standing on the edge of your own abyss. In your distress you speak, even if you decide to use others to speak on your own behalf. . . . But suddenly we cease to listen to our inner fears and we pay heed only to what is said and received [in the text], especially the manner in which it is said and communicated. Then it is beyond our strength to swim against the current, and the ship will be cast to wherever it is driven by the waves. I too came initially to speak, but I found myself listening; the further I strayed from myself, the more I heard.96 It is not entirely clear from the above passage whether the renunciation of self of which Berdichevsky here speaks, in terms clearly evocative of "Kibush haruah," is the result of sheer fatigue, or is, so to speak, willed. That the draining energy of the redactor/swimmer, who strives in vain to sustain his momentum in the face of the countercurrent, may amount to more than rhetorical flourish, is attested to by a letter of January 8, 1912, to Shmuel Abba Horodetsky in which Berdichevsky confides his desire, now that he is settled in Berlin, to desert the realm of literature for the scholarly study of antiquity: Indeed, from the day of my arrival here, I find myself in a far better position to devote myself to scholarly pursuits, and I am afforded some measure of tranquillity. But I do not have the strength that I once enjoyed. It is not that I am ill, but my excessive industry in the last ten years on the one hand, my anxieties and constant struggle for existence on the other, have eaten into my flesh and I am exhausted, tired to the depth of my being.97 The passage from literature to compilation, from mehaber to sofer, or measef, as Berdichevsky refers to himself in the 1912 introduction—or, ultimately, from Berdichevsky to Bin Gorion—was clearly painful; Meozar haagadah bears all the marks of this rite de passage. In evidence in Meozar haagadah, which Berdichevsky himself later viewed as falling within the outer limit of his original literary productions,98 is a type of two-way osmosis, or "Hithalefut," as he puts it in "Kibbush haruah": On the one hand, the texts of antiquity (mini kedem), whose provenance is that internalized "other" against whom Berdichevsky waged some of his most spectacular and ultimately self-defeating early campaigns, are refracted through the

Between Memory and Forgetfulness

95

prism of autobiographical memory; on the other, Berdichevsky's autobiographical memory itself becomes increasingly woven of the texts of tradition in whose transmission he serves as steadily more passive, "listening" medium. The figure of "osmosis," while suggestive, actually provides too irenic an analogy for the violently contradictory hermeneutical principles at operation within Meozar haagadah: the implicit and ancient tension between memoria and inventio, as complementary components of classical rhetoric, is here raised to fever pitch." The anthology thus stands as a monumental testimony to what Berdichevsky, in an article of 1906, terms the "poetry of the divided heart": With one hand, the poet wishes to cast from his shoulder the burden of generations, with the other, he himself prolongs the chain, he himself is one more link in the chain he sought to tear asunder. . . . This is the poetry of the split in the heart: The heart is torn and at fever pitch, contradictory forces tug at it from all sides, and the poet stands at the crossroads.100

Meozar haagadah did indeed mark a crossroads for Berdichevsky/Bin Gorion. Bin Gorion, as sofer or measef, takes the route of increasingly Wissenschaft-oriented "aggadic" compilations, and quasi-scholarly studies of Jewish antiquity—all in his adopted language, German—in which the Schopenhauerian ideal of "subdual of the spirit" appears to be attained, at least provisionally.101 Berdichevsky, on the other hand, the will-driven confessional "poet" of autobiographical expansiveness, appears to walk away from the crossroads marked by Meozar haagadah into almost total obscurity.102

Berdichevsky Before the Speculum of Bin Gorion: The Collected Works as Encyclopaedia It is possible that Berdichevsky may never have emerged from the eclipse of some eight years' duration that followed upon this parting of the ways, had it not been for the intervention, in 1919, of the Berlin publisher Abraham Joseph Shtibel, whose covert aim in offering to publish Berdichevsky's collected works was to restore a writer he admired to the land of the living, to stimulate him to renewed creativity.103 In 1921, Shtibel summoned Fishel Lachover from Warsaw in order to expedite the preparation of the collected works for publication. Once arrived in Berlin, Lachover encountered an ailing Berdichevsky, one assailed, not unwarrantedly, by premonitions of national doom and by intimations of his own mortality.104 If the two introductions to Meozar haagadah marked the symbolic swan song of Berdichevsky as, standing on the threshhold "between this world and the next," he took his leave of literature and of his leading language of literary expression, Hebrew, now the bid to overtake the Reaper assumed pressing existential urgency. Emanuel Bin Gorion draws attention to the parallels obtaining between the liminal existential predicament of 1912-1913 and that of 1920-1921, adducing the fact that Berdichevsky, who left no stone unturned in the process of winnowing and sifting his earlier works for the Shtibel edition, nevertheless retained the introductions to Meozar haagadah in their entirety as a preface to the much altered final version of the work, now entitled Zefunot vaagadot.105 If, however, the crossroads of 1912-1913 marked the

96

Marcus Moseley

uneasy emergence of Bin Gorion from Berdichevsky, then that of 1920-1921 marked the no less uneasy reemergence of Berdichevsky from Bin Gorion. That Berdichevsky is as racked with inner contradictions now as he was when he wrote the 1912/1913 introductions is attested to by a letter of July 1,1921, again to Horodetsky, who appears to have become Berdichevsky's chief confidant in the Berlin years: I am extraordinarily tired, and [ have to rest two hours every midday in order to gather my strength. The preparation of my writings involves an awesome amount of labor— some twenty books in all—and, on top of this, new writings in the field of agadah, as well as poetry (shirah), literature, and the whole business of the publication. . . .But in the final reckoning, all that I have completed to date is but a husk for another fruit that has been coming to maturity within me for some time now. I am alienated, even from myself—torn apart by two conflicting tendencies at war within me: poetry (shirah) and scholarship—expression of universal, national and individual pain and a desire for a final realization, distilled from all the crises of religion, or rather, religions. . . . Suffering, fatigue of the body notwithstanding, there is a spirit alive within me that cries out for final expression—an all-inclusive and embracing summation. 106

This revealing passage provides an invaluable glimpse into the lair of the "solitary of the West," as Berdichevsky styled himself.107 Some idea of the "awesome amount of labor" involved in the preparation of the Shtibel edition of the collected works is provided by Lachover: When he came to collect all of his writings together, he broke them up again into fragments: he divided them into countless divisions; beneath the sections he put lines, roads, paths, and above them he set section-headings—each section heading comprising subheadings. He dispersed and gathered together, gathered together and dispersed. Sometimes he arranged things one way, sometimes another—and he found no resting place either for himself, or for them.108

That Berdichevsky who, now as ever, was torn between the poles of dispersion and fragmentation, on the one hand, and an almost manic desire for ordering and reordering on the other,109 should have experienced such extreme torment in the preparation for the Shtibel edition is understandable. For in breaking down, dissecting and reconjoining the dispersed fragments, or membra disecta of his previous writings, he was in effect fashioning a corpus to survive the physical body whose transience was becoming ever more apparent. "On occasion," writes Lachover, Berdichevsky's vacillations (shema') prevailed to such an extent that: the entire enterprise was called into question: "Is there any real justification for the Collected Works? Should one congeal what is in and of its nature fluid? Should one set before the face of eternity things borne of time and subsumed within its flux?"110

The above citation suggests that the aspiration toward immortality was accompanied by fear lest the corpus, whose tendency is to "congeal" the "fluid," become corpse. For Berdichevsky, who had early in his career raised the cudgels on behalf of "life" versus the deadening hand of the "book," for whom system and dogmatic abstraction were anathema, the sealing-up, or entombment of the self in a final multivolume edition was an inherently problematic enterprise. And yet the absence of such a corpus or canon would severely compromise the prospects of a literary afterlife, which had now, through the Shtibel/Lachover intervention, fallen within

Between Memory and Forgetfulness

97

his grasp. Berdichevsky sought to achieve in the Collected Works a book that would be anticanonical, a structure that would comprise antistructure, a unity that would encompass yet not compromise heterogeneity, a summation that would not, at the same time, be a sealing. In an aphoristic notation entitled "The Work as Polygraphy," Roland Barthes puts forward the encyclopaedia as the paradigm for a literary form that would go some way in satisfying such contradictory requirements: "L'oeuvre comme polygraphie": I can imagine an antistructural criticism; it would not look for the work's order but its disorder; for this it would suffice to consider any work an encyclopaedia: cannot each text be defined by the number of disparate objects (of knowledge, of sensuality) which it brings into view with the help of single figures of continuity (metonymies and asyndetons)? Like the encyclopaedia, the work exhausts a list of heterogenous objects and this list is the work's anti-structure, its obscure and irrational polygraphy.111

Berdichevsky, who sought "to enclose formlessness within form,"112 and for whom textual closure and artistic "completion" went as much against the grain as they did for Barthes, would have found much to commend in the Barthesian "oeuvre comme polygraphie," especially in 1921 when, as is clear from the letter to Horodetsky, the polygraphie urge jostles uneasily with the pressing demand for encyclopaedic summation. There is a significantly self-referential aspect to Barthes' observation: it occurs within the context of an experiment in autobiography that is also a commentary on his own works, as is indicated by the double-mirror of the title, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. In his Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait, Michel Beaujour poses an analogy between the literary self-portrait and the encyclopaedia: The self-portrait thinks of itself as the microcosm, written in the first person, of an encyclopaedia and, further, as the self-awareness of the attention 'I' pay to the things encountered in the process of scanning the encyclopaedia. Not a solipsistic—or narcissistic—portrait of an 'I' cut off from things, nor an objective description of things in themselves, independently of the attention that 'I' turns to them, the self-portrait, rather, is a sustained textual awareness of the interferences and homologies obtaining between the microcosmic 'I' and the macrocosmic encyclopaedia.113

Thus phrased, the encyclopaedia would appear an ideal prescription for the reconciliation of the antinomies so painfully bared in the 1921 communication with Horodetsky, and for the more longstanding schism between confessional and renunciatory memory. When Beaujour speaks of the encyclopaedia, he has in mind not so much the modern type, whose ordering is alphabetical, as the topically-arranged mediaeval speculum, on the model of Vincent de Beauvais' thirteenth-century Speculum Maius: The distinctive trait of this structure, which one might call a mirror, is that it has a topical dominant: It is entirely opposed to the narrative structure that comprises historiography, the novel, biography and autobiography. . . .The mirror. . . is governed by a spatial metaphor that sets the reader on a course . . . through the compartments of a "space" or a sequence of topics. The specula are groups of places arranged according to a topical metaphor (tree, macrocosm, house, garden, itinerary, and so forth); they

98

Marcus Moseley furnish (are furnished by) a taxonomy; and each of these places contains, in a virtual sense, the dialectic development of a descriptive or conceptual discourse accessorily susceptible to illustration with exemplary micro-narratives. The mirror, then, does not purport to narrate, but, rather, to deploy intelligibly a representation of things or of the self to whom these things are known, all the while preserving the possibility of crossreferences from place to place, of amplification in the places already seen along the way. 114

In the self-portrait, then, in contrast to the autobiography, in which personal memory traces the evolution of the self along a chronological route, the self is mapped out according to the topoi of an impersonal, archaic and macrocosmic "great memory," to resort to Yeatsian esoteric vocabulary.115 Since the encyclopaedic self-portrait is, as Beaujour demonstrates, nonnarrative and open-ended, it affords the self a seemingly limitless range of dialectical movement in and around the topoi, or places, thus preserving that fluid vitality that Berdichevsky feared may be lost in the process of self-canonization, as well as providing the self, or microcosm, with a window to eternity. The speculum/encyclopaedia/self-portrait nexus is considerably illuminating of the parting of the ways of Bin Gorion and Berdichevsky at the crossroads of Meozar haagadah and their reencounter in the last years of the author's life. Bin Gorion, the "aggadic" alter-ego, actually emerged simulaneously with Berdichevsky's first systematic attempt to produce a defininitive canon of his own Hebrew literary oeuvre, which he then saw as a closed episode; Meozar haagadah was originally intended to form the first two volumes of a projected ten-volume edition of the collected works whose appearance in 1915 was to coincide with Berdichevsky's fiftieth year. 116 Thus, Bin Gorion, the anthologist, compiler, medium of the literary bequest of antiquity, was at one and the same time the compiler and anthologist who would set the seal on the Hebrew works of Michah Yosef Berdichevsky. The hermeneutical principles governing the selection and rendition of material as laid forth in the introductions to Meozar haagadah thus bear with significant if not equal force upon the larger project of the collected works to which they likewise serve as preface. Of particular import is the evidence that the Meozar haagadah manifesto provides of Bin Gorion's grappling with the mutually exclusive alternatives of a historical/chronological rubric for the anthology versus a topical/synchronic mapping-out of the material on the model of the encyclopaedia/speculum: As stated earlier, the compiler adopted a system that would be faithful both to chronological order and to topical rapprochement. These two principles, however, exercise mutually restraining influences the one upon the other; to a degree, they cancel each other out. A topic, according to its content on the one hand, and the temporal process on the other! We follow one topic and seek to exhaust it by reference to many occasions and, willy nilly, we have made a historical leap, and then, when we turn our attention to the second topic, we are forced to go back in time once more and begin afresh. ... I should further note that several of the agadot, ascribed in the sources to named individuals, I have chosen to render anonymously; in so doing, I released them from the

Between Memory and Forgetfulness

99

narrow sphere of the individual occurrence, relocating them in a more universal design whose significance transcends the individual item. 117

While Bin Gorion does not come out unequivocally either on the side of "historical suture" (hahut hatoladi) or "topical rapprochement" (keruv ha'inyanim), his underlying preference, it would appear, is for the latter. The erring on the side of the topical is betrayed by the somewhat high-handed "release" of individuals from their historical Sitz in Leben, the better to accommodate them within the deindividualizing zone of the topos. While chronology does eventually serve as the formal backbone of Meozar haagadah, such clearly topical headings and subheadings as "Words of Vision," "Of Deliverance and of Redemption," "Events and Deeds," "From the World of the Spirits," etc., in making virtually no reference to specific time, person or place, establish a complex series of achronological interconnections between the passages selected "from post-talmudic times to the present day," which belies and ultimately subverts their chronological ordering. In the anthologizing or rendering encyclopaedic of his own writings, Bin Gorion's topical preference is, in any event, markedly to the fore. As early as 1912, in anticipation of the eventually aborted first edition of the collected works, Berdichevsky seems aware of the alchemical potential of plucking the disparate shards of his earlier writings from their original locus in quo and setting them within a larger topical constellation. Thus in the January 8, 1912, letter to Horodetsky, in the paragraph immediately succeeding that in which he announces his intention to desert the belletristic field in favor of the study of antiquity, to become, that is, Bin Gorion, Berdichevsky writes: My desire to see my literary works collected and arranged in their entirety—or, at the least, part of them—has led me to consider a complete edition of all my Hebrew books, poetic and publicistic. ... To this end, I have arranged my writings into two cycles, each cycle (ma'arakhah) containing three sections. The first section will contain poetic pieces: legends, stories from the life of the fathers, stories from the life of the sons; and the second, publicistic cycle will include matters pertaining to poetry, language and literature, culture and nation, scholarship and religion. . . . You will already observe, from this general arrangement, how a comprehensive edition will put things I wrote at various times with no overarching order to my work in an entirely different light. Then, and only then, will my contribution to the reading public, insofar as such a reading public exists for us, be perceived and recognized for what it is. 118

And in one of the draft introductions to the projected edition, Berdichevsky specifically eschews an arrangement of his writings according to temporal provenance: Here, the [stories] will be arranged again in a complete order, not according to their time of composition, but according to the life therein described. I thus divided this collection into different cycles, and I placed in each cycle all that pertained to the topic, section by section, according to their content and spirit.119

The essays, likewise, were to be arranged according to their "spiritual affinity," regardless of time of composition.120

100

Marcus Moseley

From Re-collection to Recollection: The "Great Memory" of Bin Gorion In a manuscript variant of the introduction cited immediately above, Berdichevsky asserts that the prime motivation behind the gathering together of his writings is memorial: In these stories of mine, earlier and later pieces are gathered together; while they follow no one road, the destination is one and the same: to erect a memorial (lehaziv ziyun) to days that have passed. 121 Paradoxically, to the extent that the memorial function in Berdichevsky's oeuvre comes to the fore—the phrase used here, lehaziv ziyun, "to erect a memorial," occurs repeatedly in the later works, notably Miriam and Mimerhavei 'ir122—it becomes increasingly unclear to whom, exactly, these memories belong. Certainly these are not the memories of the thinly veiled Berdichevskian autobiographical protagonist: side by side, indeed, with the ascendancy of the topical in Berdichevsky's scheme of things, there is a marked and progressive deflation of the voluminous—on occasion oceanic—ego of the confessing "Mikhaels" of the early period, as attested to by comparison of the successive redactions these pieces underwent.123 Besides, even those writings invested with maximal subjectivity and "will," when subsumed to the larger cycle or "constellation" (ma'arakhah) of an invisible hand, are by the very act divested of these qualities. Hence, in the plan for the 1915 edition, Berdichevsky assimilates the confessionals to the archetypal and perennial topos, "Fathers and Sons"—the title he selected for the first cycle. That this rubric bears more than local significance to the generational conflict in nineteenth-century Jewish Eastern Europe —as it does, for example, in Abramowitz/Mendele's 1867 novel of the same name— is further attested to by the title broached for the first volume of the "Fathers/Sons" cycle, which could have served equally well as a topical heading inMeozar haagadah, "From the Tents of Jacob."124 A memory larger than that of either "fathers" or "sons" is required to generate the topics by which the memories of these latter may be both deindividualized and contained. The encyclopaedic memory that is here setting in place the scaffolding for the "memorial of days gone by" is, by implication, as Berdichevsky puts it in the 1912 introduction to Meozar haagadah, "released from the narrow sphere of the individual," and thus, to quote one of Barthes' formulations, "a memory without person."125 Hence Beaujour, whose theoretical premises underlie the present discussion: A memory without a person—do not all self-portraits tend toward the paradoxical status that clearly opposes them to autobiographies? . . . What Barthes seeks to decipher in the haiku and the Japanese idea of the mirror is the very mirage that constantly leads the self-portrayer beyond narcissistic or dclphic self-knowledge, towards the places of a personless encyclopaedia through which his own death would no longer rise to taunt his vanity. . . . The empirical individual . . . matters much less . . . than the unstable places of an impersonal memory always exceeding, with its "wild polygraphy," the memories of the individual. . . . The memoria sui, which is implicitly identified through the mirror's mediation, does not deliver a sticky packet of predicates that paints

Between Memory and Forgetfulness

101

a constant "self," but, on the contrary, a series of discrete places—an immemorial and impersonal Grund, where an infinite regression begins—no being but passage. . . . 126 Is not this "paradoxical status" of "memory without person" precisely the end toward which Berdichevsky is tending? And does not Bin Gorion himself, whom Emanuel Bin Gorion, playing on Isa. 41:4, styles "the recaller of generations" (kore hadorot), bear all the characteristics, or rather noncharacteristics, of such a memory without a person? The function of Bin Gorion as "great memory" that would encompass the memories of others from previous generations and the autobiographical memories of the solitary self (as foreshadowed in the compilatory activity of the years 1912-1914) is revealed in its full force in the feverish literary activity that marked the last two years of Berdichevsky's life. In the period that intervenes between the completion of Meozar haagadah and the undertaking of the final editing of the collected works for the Shtibel edition, Bin Gorion had grown considerably in stature; indeed, it is as Bin Gorion, compiler of Jewish legend, that Berdichevsky secured for himself both a place in the German literary canon and a modest income, something he never derived from his Hebrew writings. 127 Socioeconomic status apart, Bin Gorion's memory is, by 1919, vastly augmented by comparison to that of the fledgling Bin Gorion of 1912-1914. Effectively withdrawing from society with his removal to the Berlin suburb of Friedenau,128 Berdichevsky immersed himself day and night in the premodern Jewish literary bequest. Manifesting all the symptoms of acute depression,129 he appears to have spent much, if not most, of his time in the years 19111919 in word-for-word handwritten transcription of a massive quantity of material, culled from the most diverse sources, for the anthologies Die Sagen der Juden and Der Bom Judas, several volumes of each series appearing at intervals over these years.130 In the midst of this awesome amount of scribal, or transcribal activity, it was precisely in the creative recombination of received materials under a vast array of topoi that Berdichevsky found some outlet for his stifled creativity. 131 A further outlet, in which Berdichevsky appears to have invested considerable energy over these years, was the building up of his library, which by the time of his death had expanded to some six thousand volumes, the most significant section being devoted to premodern Jewish literature in all its branches. 132 Aside from the labor, correspondence and expense involved in the acquisition of volumes, some extremely recondite, Berdichevsky devoted much effort to the actual arrangement of the library. Emanuel Bin Gorion sees in the construction of the library a "unique creation, in and of itself";133 and Ya'akov Fichman, having secured an audience with Berdichevsky in Berlin at the outbreak of the First World War, registered astonishment at both the order and the originality of order of the library "consisting largely of biblical commentaries and Jewish folk-tales": This order astonished me. From the hypertension of his writing and the daredevil anarchy that prevailed in the exposition of his thoughts, it was scarcely possible to deduce such rigorous file and order.134

The homology suggests itself between the expansion, ordering and reordering of the library and the expansion of the encyclopaedic memory of Bin Gorion, and the

102

Marcus Moseley

division of this memory into topical divisions in order to permit easy access and speedy cross-referencing. Besides its function as a scholarly resource, there is a significantly autobiographical aspect to Berdichevsky's library. It included a special section for all of his own published volumes; journal clippings representing ninety percent of the earliest writings that he chose to exclude from the final edition of the collected works; personal memorabilia, including the bag of tefillin that accompanied him on his fateful journey from Russia to the West in 1890;135 genealogical material pertaining to his father's family.136 Thus, the textual and reliquary deposits of Berdichevsky's selfhood are implicitly contained and caught up in the topical architectonics of the library. Hence, the microanalogy, taken from his 1909 essay, "The Mission of Our Lives"— The many incidents and deeds of all the days of a man in his allotted span comprise numerous letters scattered, with no order nor regimen, and the mission of our lives is but the combination of one complete word from this profusion. . . .137

—if magnified sufficiently to make of the "letter," book, and of the "word," library, is suggestive of the equation: librarian/rememberer; library/self. Indeed, the memory and selfhood of one who, as he wrote to Brenner in April 1913, had "immersed his entire being in the four ells of the dust of books—and how this dust suffocates!"138 must have become textualized and intertextualized to an extraordinary degree, thus lending credence to the claim, as expressed in one of the aphorisms to be found in Berdichevsky's diary: "For me, reading is the elevation of material from memory"139 —an adage that could be reversed to: "For me, memory is the elevation of material from reading." "The uniqueness of Berdichevsky's library," writes Bin Gorion, who discerns in its creation an unconscious "memorial impulse," "lies in this, that here we have a mirror of an extremely specific culture, which reflects, at the same time, the man who put it together."140 The library thus becomes a type of speculum: "A mirror of the 'I' that seeks itself through the mirror of the universe."141 The degree to which Berdichevsky's library functioned as a kind of sealed memory laboratory is indirectly attested to by the striking fact, as noted by Dan Almagor, that Berdichevsky's personal experiences and the tumultuous events in the Jewish street and the wider European arena from the time of his departure from Russia in 1896 to the year of his death, 1921, find virtually no echo in the creative writings he undertook in these years.142 When Berdichevsky emerges from this lengthy hibernatory immersion, on the summons of Lachover in the employ of Shtibel, it is as a changed man: he seems to have all but disappeared into the speculum of the memory of Bin Gorion, which has now expanded to almost cosmic dimensions.143 This slightly eerie transmutation is further attested to by the increased stringency with which Bin Gorion erases any autobiographical deposits of his prior self, which would betray the existence of an empirical or remembering self, behind the "memorial to days gone by" that it is the purpose of the collected works to erect.144 As Lachover noted: When he came at the end of his days to arrange his writings anew, he ordered them according to the topic, erasing from them inasmuch as possible the least trace of the 'I.'

Between Memory and Forgetfulness

103

When asked whether he did not thereby block the way for those who would later come to penetrate this 'I,' in order to discern its trajectory and development? he would answer: This 'I' of mine is of no consequence. All that counts is the topic. If that is there, then everything is there.145

In measure, it appears, as autobiographical memory is atrophied, the topical, "encyclopaedic" "memory without person" becomes enriched. Thus, in the final edition of the collected works, when Berdichevsky maps the "scattered letters" of his literary bequest onto the encyclopaedic speculum of the generational memory of Bin Gorion, the topical arrangement is infinitely more complex than the relatively straightforward and consistent "Fathers/Sons" polarity that was to serve as the backbone of the stories in the 1915 edition. Now there is an overall division of the stories into two ma'arakhot—"arrangements," or better, given the cosmic expanse of the memory from which these topics derive, "constellations."146 Each constellation is divided into three parts, yielding, by a profane correspondence to the mishnaic Shas, six groupings of stories, each grouping of which is broken down into an uneven number of topical subsections, sixteen in all, excluding those subsections whose title is identical with the story itself. The topical constellation of the essays in the final redaction is even more complex: divided into three ma'arakhot, each of which has three topical subgroupings with each subgrouping divided into an uneven number of subsections, the sum total yields no less than fifty-one topical headings.147 The network of topoi thereby established is of such exceeding complexity that even Emanuel Bin Gorion, who is in general faithful to a tee to his father's literary bequest, clearly finds the system somewhat baffling: in re-editing the Shtibel edition of the collected works, he feels constrained to revise the order of the topical groupings and to do away with the macroheadings, the ma'arakhot, in order to provide some semblance of thematic or chronological continuity.148 Likewise, Avner Holtzman, Emanuel Bin Gorion's heir as guardian of the Berdichevsky heritage, admits defeat when it comes to "clearing a path through this convoluted structure in which chronology is overturned."149 Not only is the labyrinthine structure of the ma'arakhot forbidding in itself, but it is also frequently unclear in indicating what, precisely, are the distinctions between the topoi therein included, as, for example, in the essays "Thoughts"/"Contemplations"; "On the Essence of Poetry"/"Poetry and Prose"; and perhaps most cryptically, "Inside and Outside'V'Outside and Inside." While the detailed inner workings of the ma'arakhah will in all probability remain forever shrouded in obscurity, certain admittedly rather general observations may be vouchsafed concerning the ground rules of its operation. First and foremost, this is a determinedly time-defying mechanism. Perhaps the most striking example of this seemingly deliberate achronology is Berdichevsky's relegation of the firstperson sketches that relate most directly to his own experiences as a child to the fourth volume of the first ma'arakhah in the projected 1915 edition,150 and the first section of the second ma'arakhah of the Shtibel edition, under the generic topos "From the Mists of Youth" (Emanuel Bin Gorion, working upon more conventional generic assumptions, places this section at the head of the revised printing of the collected stories).

104

Marcus Moseley

In absence of chronology as an axis of combination, Berdichevsky sought, it appears, to establish by means of allusions implanted within the titles of the ma' arakhot and of the microsystems they contain, a system, Swedenborgian in complexity, of cross-references and correspondences, whereby the generic classifications established by the collected works' tripartite division into essays, stories and agadot tend to dissolution. The implicit "anti-structure" of the encyclopaedia is here most at evidence, for by means of the correspondences and cross-references the topoi travel a criss-cross route in and between the various ma'arakhot; the "constellations" thus preside over a sort of controlled chaos. "Miymei hama'aseh," for example, a topos first broached in Meozar haagadah vol. 1, book I:C, subsection Ib, reappears in the Shtibel edition of the essays in ma'arakhah II, subsection 3b; " 'Olim veyoredim," from Meozar haagadah, vol. I, book I, subsection 2, reappears in mirror-image as "Yoredim ve'olim," in the stories in ma'arakhah I, section 2c; Divrei hazon, the title of book V in vol. II of Meozar haagadah, is the title of vol. I of ma'arakhah II of the essays. On occasion, the cross-reference between the topoi is even more elliptical: thus, Mimezar umimerhav, the title of book VI in vol. II of Meozar haagadah, is splintered in the stories to "Min hamezar," subsection 7 of ma'arakhah I: B and "Bemerhavei 'ir," subsection 2 of ma'arakhah I: A; "Me'arfilei hano'ar," in the stories, finds its analogue in " 'Arfilei kedem," ma'arakhah III: B, subsection 3, of the essays. Nor does this internal system of cross-references exhaust the potential of the ma'arakhot. There are at least three further constellations, each with its own complex alignments, to which the primary ma'arakhot point: the topical alignment of Berdichevsky's own previously published volumes; the biblical, talmudic and liturgical spheres evoked by linguistic resonance in the titles of the topoi; and the literary and intellectual discourse of Berdichevsky's contemporaries, or near-contemporaries, writing in Jewish and non-Jewish languages. Thus, "Mibayit umihuz," a topos evoked twice in the ma'arakhah of the essays (once in mirror-image), points to Berdichevsky's first volume of stories under the same name published in Piotrkow in 1899, carries biblical resonance (Gen. 6:14; Ex. 37:2; Lam. 1:20), and also, as Shmuel Werses has suggested, makes reference to Menahem Dolitsky's story "Mibayit umihuz" (Vilna, 1890).151 "Me'arfilei hano'ar" strikes a possible correspondence with the title of the first chapter of Y.L. Peretz's Zikhroynes, "Nepldike kinder yorn,"152 and resonates with the "'arfilei tohar" of "atah nigleita," one of the supplementary prayers for the New Year. "Shinui 'arakhin," the topos of ma'arakhah II: B of the essays, points, in contrast to this multilayeredness, unequivocally to Nietzsche's "transvaluation of values." A further aspect of Berdichevsky's topoi that leaps to the eye is the constant recourse to spatial analogy: "Roads," "Paths," "Beyond the Pale," "In the Field of the Book," "Inside and Outside," "Homes and Families," "Townlets," "In the Expanses of a City," "On the Road," "At the Crossroads," etc. It is noteworthy that none of these places refer to a particular place; they are, rather, ideational memoryplaces, wherein a host of specific places and individuals—or "People," to cite a topos from the stories—who occupy these spaces may be sorted and filed. The spatial preference underlines the fundamentally achronological principle of ordering of the encyclopaedic speculum;153 the collected works unfold before us as a map of

Between Memory and Forgetfulness

105

criss-crossing "roads" and "paths," each of which may be traversed and retraversed, crossed at various intersections, in the restless passage from place to place that the system sets in motion. This paramountcy of place as topical coordinate is again suggestive of a model for memory more archaic—and, as exemplified by Barthes, more modern—than that autobiographical memory which traces, via a linear series of temporal pointers, the becoming of a self that is "I." Place, the assignment of topoi to loci, serves, as Frances Yates has so amply demonstrated, as the foundation of the ancient ars memoria.154 Indeed, the ma'arakhah of the collected works leads one to wonder whether its assignation of places may not be the manifestation of an arcane mnemonic system, akin to those discussed by Yates, whose codes are now beyond retrieval.155

Miriam: The Summing Up The revision, editing and re-placement of his prior writings was not, however, what Berdichevsky had in mind, uppermost in mind at least, when he wrote to Horodetsky in the above-cited letter of July 1, 1921, of the "all-inclusive and embracing summation" that would reconcile the polarities of shirah and scholarship. Indeed, it is not entirely clear what he did have in mind in this letter; whatever it was, it seems dubious that he ever attained it, and more dubious yet that such a clavis universalis upon which he set his sights is at all within the bounds of mortal grasp.156 The work, however, in which Berdichevsky came closest to realizing his totalizing aspirations is, arguably, his novel Miriam: A Novel of Life in Two Townlets, which he wrote concurrently with the preparation of the collected works in the last year of his life, and whose final sections he dictated to his son on his deathbed.157 In Miriam, a work that he views as his father's "last testament" or zavaah, writes Emanuel Bin Gorion: The writer is revealed in his entirety, all of his worlds included. . . . The novel is the key to Berdichevsky's personality, to his art, his assessment of Judaism in all its various traditions and teachings and to his worldview . . . the quintessence of his writings. . . . I would venture to say that there is no aspect of the Jewish experience—historical phenomena, religious, communal, tribal, whether these are to be found on the high road, at the crossroads, or hidden by the wayside, which is not called to remembrance in Miriam. I58 Filial piety notwithstanding, Bin Gorion's assessment of Miriam is only slightly hyperbolic, as is well demonstrated by Zipporah Kagan's exhaustive survey of the biblical, talmudic and apocryphal "sediments" deposited throughout the text.159 It is, however, precisely this superabundance of material, this vast "list of heterogeneous objects," as Barthes puts it, that constitutes the work's "anti-structure, its obscure and irrational polygraphy." This anti-structure manifests itself in the novel's bewildering panorama of characters, events, plots, subplots, tales within tales, inexplicable eclipses of the supposed protagonist, bizarre variations in the narrator's—or narrators'—point of view, etc., in evidence within this "novel." Indeed, if laid on the procrustean bed of the nineteenth-century novel and measured according to criteria of chronology, sense of closure, "well-rounded characters,"

106

Marcus Moseley

narrative consistency and so forth, the work must, structurally at least, be deemed a total failure. 16° To use a play of words of which Berdichevsky was fond, this is more a rimon, "pomegranate," or even, as in modern usage, "grenade," than it is a roman, "novel."161 If measured, however, by the norms or non-norms of the speculum/self-portrait as explicated by Beaujour, Miriam presents an aspect that, if no less enigmatic, or even on occasion hermetic, is at least less generically aberrant.162 Viewed on the continuum of the encyclopaedia/speculum/self-portrait, it becomes apparent, notwithstanding the impression often gained that Berdichevsky's compilatory and editing activity for the collected works was a supererogatory chore that needed to be completed before his creativity, as manifest in Miriam, could come into second bloom,163 that there is an intimate connection between the two undertakings. Berdichevsky's avowed aim in Miriam, as it was in the Collected Works, is to erect a memorial, to perpetuate the perishable data of memory in writing. The memorial thereby erected bears witness not only to the Jewish townlets of Eastern Europe, frozen in the mind of the author but now poised on the brink of destruction; not only even to the prior Israelitic generations that Berdichevsky evokes repeatedly in the depictions of these townlets, beneath whose contemporary existence he perceives the eternal return of archaic and archetypal rhythms of Jewish history. In Miriam, Berdichevsky also effects a recapitulation of all the previous strata of his own literary bequest: from the early confessional stories to the quasi-feuilletonistic sketches of East European Jewish life, to the later depictions wherein this life is painted against an omnipresent—and ominous—backdrop of ancient myth. Miriam thus partakes both of the nature of the anthology, in the mode of Meozar haagadah, in which prior texts, written by others, are rendered and rearranged in accordance with the labile sensibility of the compiler, and of that of the revision, whereby prior texts, written by the author himself, are refiltered through the contemporary consciousness of their redactor and creator. The work is thus a speculum of specula, one that contains the collected works at the same time as it is contained by them. And no less than the collected works, Miriam follows the contours of the "fields and spacious palaces,"164 to use the famous Augustinian image, of the "great memory" of Bin Gorion. Like the collected works, that is, it is a composition whose structural orientation is spatial (as is implied by the subtitle, "A Novel of Two Townlets") and topical, thus offering a potentially limitless arena, as do the collected works, for cross-referential bifurcations, interconnections and recombinations. In a passage in the first part of Miriam, Berdichevsky, proceeding topographically over the memory loci of the Jewish Eastern Europe of his childhood and youth—"Let us pass on to Linitz,"—165 calls to remembrance the bookkeepers of this town: There was also another category of persons essential for the smooth functioning of the economy: Bookkeepers. In conducting the business of the factories, everything had to be noted down and calculated. . . . Particular accounts amounted to general accounts; there were fixed assets, surplusses and balances. All the ramifications of the figures and the columns of the accounts meshed together like small individual cogs into the functioning of a mighty machine. For quick reference each item was entered in a special ledger which referred to others. But if you wanted to locate a particular entry, there was

Between Memory and Forgetfulness

107

an index which would instantly find the information you required. . . . Anyone who was not an expert in these matters would have been driven out of his wits at the very sight of the multitude of figures; but the initiated grasped it easily; they worked it out at once with no need for a second or third look. It is not only for Talmudic argument that one needs quick grasp and ability; accounts too require a special type of mind.166

The metareflective dimension of the above passage is worthy of consideration. The ledgers (pinkasim) of the "bookkeepers" of Linitz, in which "everything" was "noted down and calculated," and each of which refers to other ledgers, may be construed as the microcosm of the great inter- and intratextual machine spun out in the memory of Bin Gorion, to which Berdichevsky aspired to give expression in the sikum kolel,167 "summing-up," or "final account" of Miriam. The "special type of mind" required for the lightning comprehension of these ledgers is not one adept at the linear reading required by the classic novel but rather one versed in the art of cross-referencing, interreferencing, lateral thinking. If Berdichevsky held before his eyes an "ideal reader" for Miriam (a work not lacking in the capacity to drive many a reader "out of his wits"), it would be one endowed with this "special type of mind." It is in the opening chapters of book XI of Miriam that narrative—or rather, given the pomegranate/grenade-like antistructure of Miriam, narratives—gives way to discursive meditation upon memory and the process of narration itself, in a manner strikingly reminiscent of the tenth book of Augustine's Confessions. At this crucial juncture of the work, a glimpse is provided of the "individual cogs" of the "mighty machine" that is the generational memory "without person," Bin Gorion. The chapters were written as Berdichevsky reels under the impact of news of the Ukrainian pogroms of 1919, in which his hometown was sacked, his father, brother and first father-in-law killed168—events that threatened to throw into disequilibrium the unflinching and Olympian purview of his East European past that he had achieved through the mediation of the "great memory" of Bin Gorion, kore hadorot:169 It once happened in a far-off land that recluses of one of the Israelite tribes swore vows to the House of God, on the Temple Mount. They travelled for a long time through desert lands to reach the City of Priests and offer sacrifices on the altar of the Almighty. They reached Mount Scopus and saw a pillar of smoke in the distance and thought it was smoke rising from the wood on the altar. Then came a messenger who said, "The sanctuary has been burnt, all the sons of the Levites have been slain, the city of the scribes is destroyed and its foundations utterly razed." They rent their garments and began to roll in the dust. An event such as this happened also to me. I am engaged in the birth-pangs of setting up a memorial for my generation, to inscribe thereupon the life of the townlets in which I was raised. Many are the thoughts within me, feelings of childhood rise up in me; in my heart are many faces, events and experiences, fleeting souls, shades of the tapestry of life but also the weave of distant days. I am a child of the children of the Exile and from an ancient cup I too have drunk my fill. And behold the destroyer came to all these townlets, descended upon their lives and their books; days of total destruction were visited upon all those places in which my hopes and the buddings of my poetry first emerged. My home-town was laid waste, the hand of the oppressor fell upon all that I held most dear. The God of righteousness devoured without respite all the habitations of His people. Even those who taught in His name, He did not spare.—My harp is turned

108

Marcus Moseley

to mourning, my soul knows no peace, my flesh and spirit consumed with sorrow, a lament is all I can muster. How shall I tell the tale of a young girl, of everyday incidents, snatches of the song of everyday life? In the lower part of the town, at the time I left it never again to cast my eyes upon the place, there lived a certain man called Reb Shlomo the Elder, a direct descendant of one of the martyrs of Nemirov, slaughtered in sanctification of the Name in the year 1648. This old man used to fast for a whole day on the twentieth of Sivan each year, and he used to recite the laments and memoirs from those terrible days, that have not ceased, and tears would come to his eyes upon seeing how the God of Jacob has no mercy upon the remnant of His people, how He leaves them each time to be destroyed at the hand of the oppressor. "Where is the Keeper of Israel?" he would ask over and over again. The assurances of the prophets and the seers have come to naught; God has reneged upon His Torah. This Hasid dozed off and he too saw the smoke of the altar pyre as it made its twisting ascent, and he looked around but there was no altar and no burnt offering. He sought to leap into the midst of the cloud, but an abyss opened up before his feet. And I also, as I go about my work, my spirit rages within me. The sword of the Almighty is upon my people and there is no hand of deliverance. The seat of judgment is overturned; "the Shekhinah is in shame and confusion"—stones are upon my shoulder, the heart breaks and I transcribe events from the past. 170

To tease out every single implicit, and often mordantly ironic, reference in the above passage would require more expertise in the entire spectrum of Jewish literature from biblical, apocryphal, medieval to Haskalah than that enjoyed by the present writer. Berdichevsky here shifts in and out of various premodern narrative modalities with dazzling rapidity; he invokes, inter alia, in the span of little more than one page, resonances of the medieval travel account, the communal record (pinkas), prose chronicles of Jewish suffering—most notably Hannover's Yeven mezulah—and the rhymed lament, or Klog-lid, on the model of Shabbethai Cohen's Megilat eyfah—not to mention the biblical and rabbinic references with which the text is packed. 171 Textual anamnesis and autobiographical memory here become conflated; re-collection of prior texts of others has become all but indistinguishable from recollections of the self. Thus, even though maddened by grief at the murder of his father, the virtual destruction of the townlet in which he had lived with his first wife and that is so frequently evoked in the stories172—events that might have been expected to release a flood of autobiographical memories, as apparently, they did in his personal conversations at the time of writing Miriam 173 —Bin Gorion gives no expression of personal pain, but rather persists in his "copying" or "transcription" (ma'atik) of "events of long ago." There remains, for all this, a jarring discordance between the archaic structure of this anamnesis and its quasi-scribal transcription and the decidedly antinomian sensibility that informs it: this is a thoroughly subversive form of "unforgetting" and the transcription is that of a decidedly heretical sofer. 174 With Miriam, the only one of his works to which Berdichevsky appended the word tam—"whole," or "complete"175—the circle is closed. From the Nietzschean thesis of deliberate cultural amnesia, the better the willing self may remember, to the antithesis of Schopenhauerian withdrawal of affect—whereby memory serves as alembic to the willing ego culminating in bitul hayesh, "self-extinction,"—is borne a memory larger than that of Berdichevsky, Nietzsche or Schopenhauer, large

Between Memory and Forgetfulness

109

enough indeed to accommodate these three and many others beside: Bin Gorion. Berdichevsky, who had initially sought in autobiographical memory a means of escape from a culture so all-engulfing as to rob the individual of the slightest autonomy or sense of self, finds release, ultimately, from the very existential condition of individualism he secured at so steep a price, in an ancient mode of memory of mythical dimensions. What Jean Pierre Vernant writes of this mythical construction of memory in Greek thought is so applicable to the memory of Bin Gorion that it may serve as conclusion to the present discussion: It is not a matter of the individual apprehending himself in his personal past and finding himself again within the continuity of an interior life that differentiates him from all other creatures. He must place himself within the framework of a general order, and reestablish on every level the continuity existing between himself and the world, systematically connecting the present life with time as a whole, human existence with all of nature, the destiny of the individual with the totality of being, the part with the whole. 176

The passage of Mikhael, the Bar bey rav of Dubova, to the fledgling Nietzschean za'ir aspiring to release himself of the insupportable burden of ancestral memories, to the spectral and somewhat demonic remembrancer, Bin Gorion of Berlin, may on the face of things appear quite egregious—even downright odd. And yet this grappling with the dilemmas posed by the impact of Western notions of individualism upon a traditional culture whose collective memorial base was implicitly threatened by the autobiographical memory that such individualism bears in its wake is not without parallel. Many of the leading figures of the Hebrew literary renaissance, it could be argued, found the imposition of the autobiographical, with the heavy yoke of individuality that this entailed, to be as oppressive as it was liberating. Berdichevsky was by no means alone of his generation of Hebrew writers in devoting much of his creative energy to writing his way out, paradoxically enough, of the existential condition of individualism without which his work could never have come into being. Generally viewed as the torchbearer of uncompromising individualism in Hebrew literature, Berdichevsky's significance resides no less in his pointing the way to the unmaking of the self. H.N. Bialik's autobiographical Safiah (completed in 1923), for example, attains its apocalyptic denouement with ecstatic consummation of the poet/prophet of Hebraic revival par excellence, in fire, as an ultimate release from the bonds of individuality.177 And S.Y. Agnon's so-called "mythical autobiography," Hadom vekhise to which reference has already been made, represents a deliberate attempt to dissolve the life history of the empirical individual in the timeless realm of midrash. Berdichevsky, Bialik and Agnon, each increasingly engaged, toward the latter years of their lives, in the program of kinus—"collection/ingathering," or, more apposite to the present context, "recollection"—seemed, at some level, to yearn for an exchange of the role of modem author for that of the anonymous scribe or sofer. 178 Bialik, in response to critics who discerned a lack of homogeneity in his Megilat haesh, called for a return to the ancient model of author as anonymous compiler of fragments in the creation of a mosaic, on the model of the Talmud and the authorless epics of ancient Greece and India. 179 "In artistic creation," Mordecai Ovadyahu

110

Marcus Moseley

recalls Bialik saying in a conversation of his later years, "one must never invent but only discover what is hidden in the space of experience; what was secreted, as it were, during the six days of creation and is waiting to be revealed and laid bare. . . ."18° Bialik's mature understanding of the creative process in terms of platonic anamnesis is thus fully in accord with that of his predecessor, Bin Gorion, the "recaller of generations." By a curious twist of intellectual history, it is precisely at this moment of teshuvah, recoil from the authorly conventions established by the European novel, in favor of the indigenous model of the scribe, that the path of Hebrew literature, a belated literature if there ever was one, intersects with that of high European modernism. Berdichevsky's Miriam, for example, is as exemplary of such high modernist tendencies as the "dehumanization of art";181 the substitution of "spatial form" for temporal sequence as a structuring principle for the modern novel;182 the effacement of the author, and so forth, as is Joyce's Ulysses, which was to appear a year after Berdichevsky's death. The example of Berdichevsky is indeed suggestive of a coincidence between the anamnesis of archaic, preautobiographical modes of remembering and the wider modernist enterprise. 183

Notes 1. As cited by Sophie Dubnov-Erlich in The Life and Work of Shimon Dubnov, trans. J. Vowles (Bloomington: 1990), 97. Also see Simon Dubnov's Kniga zhizni: vospominaniia i razmyshleniia, 3 vols. (Riga: 1934-1935; New York: 1957), trans. Y. Birnbaum as Dos bukh fun mayn lebn, 3 vols. (Buenos Aires: 1962-1963), vol. 1, 242f. All present citations are taken from the Yiddish translation. 2. Originally published in Pardes in 1892, and later in the same year as a separate pamphlet (Odessa: 1892), from which the present citations are taken. The title makes reference to Lam. 3:40. This essay is discussed in greater detail in Marcus Moseley, "Jewish Autobiography in Eastern Europe: The Prc-History of a Literary Genre" (D. Phil, thesis, Oxford University, 1990), 521-526. 3. Dubnov, Dos bukh, vol. 1, 253. 4. For the distinction between this rather awkward coinage of Dubnov's and the standard "historicism," sec Robert M. Seltzer, "Coming Home: The Personal Basis of Simon Dubnov's Ideology" in AJS Review 1 (1976), 294f (n. 31). 5. Dubnov, Dos bukh, vol. 1, 240f. 6. Michah Yosef Berdichevsky, Nemoshot: sheneym 'asar davar (Warsaw: 1899), 7f. 7. See Avner Holtzman, "Mimaskil torani lemahpckhan sifruti," an abstract for his doctoral dissertation for Tel-Aviv University, found in Ginzei Mikhah Yosef, vol. 4, ed. Avner Holtzman (Tel-Aviv: 1990), 108-111. 8. See the 1888 journal of which Berdichevsky was the editor and main contributor, Beit hamidrash: kovez mukdash latorah ulehokhmat yisrael, helek rishon (Cracow: 1888), esp. the section "He'avar vehahoveh" of the leading essay in this collection, "Lefanim vehayom: hashkafah kolelet bishmonah perakim" and "Divrei hayamim: petihah ketanah." 9. Ahad Ha'am adopted a relentlessly patronizing and condescending tone in his essayistic responses to Berdichevsky and the "young ones." See esp. his "Zorekh viykholet" (1897), '"Ezah tovah" (1897) and "Mahpekhah sifrutit" (1897), in Kol kitvei Ahad Ha'am (Jerusalem: 1953). For the opposing vision, see the invaluable collection of letters of these years from Mordechai Ehrenpreis to Berdichevsky, as published in Ginzei Mikhah Yosef, vol. 5, ed. A. Holtzman, (Tel-Aviv: 1992), 71-91. 10. See Ahad Ha'am's " 'Avar ve'atid," in which, it should be noted, neither the Dubnov essay nor the Nietzschean source are specifically cited, in Kol kitvei Ahad Ha'am (Tel-Aviv:

Between Memory and Forgetfulness

111

1947), 81-83; and Dubnov, Dos bukh, vol. 1, 266f., who characterizes his conflict with Ahad Ha'am on the relative value of the past in assuring the national future as one between "historism and practicism." On Dubnov's strong antipathy toward Nietzscheanism, which he later equated with Nazism, see esp. Dos bukh, vol. 3, 141; for passages closely parallel in Nietzsche's "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History" with the formulations in '"Avar ve'atid," sec Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, with an introduction by J.P. Stern (Cambridge: 1983), pp. 74f., 77, 83. 11. This is actually a familiar dynamic in the polemics between Berdichevsky and Ahad Ha'am. Cf. Menahem Brinker, 'Ad hasimtah hateveryanit: maamar 'al sippur umahashavah bizirat Brenner (Tel-Aviv: 1990), 162-167, 302f. (n. 127). See esp. Berdichevsky's open letter to Ahad Ha'am of 1898, in which he claims, with the aid of convincing prooftexts from Ahad Ha'am's own previous essays, that it was Ahad Ha'am himself who provided precedent for the "young ones"' Nietzschean rebellion against the deleterious effects of an excess of Jewish historical memory; the letter was published in Hashiloah 3 (1898), 184f. 12. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 62; Michah Yosef Berdichevsky, "Ziknah uvaharut," in Kol maamrei Mikhah Yosef Bin Gorion (Berdichevsky) (Tel-Aviv: 1952), 35. For further glosses on the Nietzschean theme of forgetfulness in Berdichevsky's writings, see Aliza Klausner-Eshkol, Hashpa'at Nietzsche veSchopenhauer 'al M.Y. Bin Gorion (Berdichevsky) (Tel-Aviv: 1954), 34f. 13. Berdichevsky, Kol maamrei, 35f; emphasis in original. 14. For Berdichevsky with the Nietzschean volume control turned to maximum, see his Reshut hayahid be ad harabim (Cracow: 1892), a thoroughly vituperative piece to which Dubnov, inter alios, reacted in an extremely negative fashion. See Dos bukh, vol. 1, 267. 15. See Shmuel Halkin, Zeramim vezurot basifrut haivrit hahadashah (Jerusalem: 1984), 227. 16. Michah Yosef Berdichevsky, Me'emek hahayim (Warsaw: 1912), p. 70; cf. idem, Reshut hayahid, 40. 17. See the preamble of Berdichevsky's novella of 1920, Garei rehov, in Kol sipurei Mikhah Yosef Bin Gorion (Berdichevsky) (Tel-Aviv: 1951), 260. 18. Compare Emanuel Bin Gorion's comments on the early collection of essays 'Al em haderekh (Warsaw: 1900) as foreshadowing the recurrent concerns of Berdichevsky's work as a whole, in his 'Olam ve'olamot bo (Tel-Aviv, 1986), 37ff. 19. From Berdichevsky's "'Al haahdut" in his 'Al em haderekh, 69. 20. Michah Yosef Berdichevsky, "Lisheelat he'avar" in his Din udevarim (Warsaw: 1902), 65. 21. While "Nishmat hasidim" was first published in 1898, appearing in the same volume of Reuben Brainin's Mimizrah umima'arav as did "Ziknah uvaharut," according to Avner Holtzman, the piece was written considerably earlier than this, at a time of maximal Nietzschean intoxication. See Holtzman, Hakarat panim: masot 'al Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky (Tel-Aviv: 1993), 33-36. 22. Michah Yosef Berdichevsky, Sefer hasidim (Warsaw: 1900), 9f. 23. Ibid., 10. 24. Ibid., 88; emphasis in the original. 25. Sec Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky, Yosef Hayim Brenner: halifat'igerot (1906-1921), ed. Shlomoh Bartonov, 95; Nurit Govrin's introductory essay to Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky: mivhar maamrei bikoret 'al yezirato hasipurit (Tel-Aviv: 1973), 19f., 38; and the essays by Klausner and Paperna in the same volume. 26. Michah Yosef Berdichevsky, Mibayit umihuz (Piotrkow: 1900), 86, 91. 27. Michah Yosef Berdichevsky, "Zeror mikhtavim meet bar-bey-rav" (1888), reprinted in Pirkei Volozhin, (Tel-Aviv: 1984), 56. The identification with Hamlet, which was not uncommon in the wider Russian intellectual ambience of the nineteenth century—see James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York: 1970), pp. 351-358—is further attested to by the titles of two of Berdichevsky's essays of the early 1890s: "Lihyot o lahdol" and "Lahdol velihyot." See also Berdichevsky's letter of 2 April 1891, to Yerahmiel Shakpeniuk, as cited by Holtzman, Hakarat panim, 72.

112

Marcus Moselcy

28. See Klausner-Eshkol, Hashpa'at Nietzsche veSchopenhauer, 102. The citations are taken from the essays "'Al harazon" (1900) and "Hadorot vehayahid," first published in the posthumous edition of the collected essays. 29. See Moseley, "Jewish Autobiography in Eastern Europe," 276-288. 30. On Berdichevsky's identification with Maimon see ibid., 82f. Solomon Maimon's Lebensgeschichte was apparently one of the first books that Berdichevsky read upon his arrival in Breslau on his first visit to Germany. See Holtzman, Hakarat panim, 194, n. 20. 31. Nathan Rotenstreich, Jews and German Philosophy: The Polemics of Emancipation (New York: 1984), 217-220. 32. Sec F. Lachover, "Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky: maamar rishon," in his Rishonim va'aharonim, 2 vols. (Tel-Aviv: 1935), vol. 2, 32 (n. 1), 38ff. On the place of this essay, first published in Netivot in 1913, in the history of critical response to Berdichevsky's writings, sec Govrin in Mivhar maamarei bikoret, 30f. 33. Rotenstreich, Jews and German Philosophy, 218. 34. As cited by Mary Warnock in her Memory (London: 1987), 39. 35. Ibid., 140; emphasis in the original; also see Patrick Gardiner, Schopenhauer (Harmondsworth: 1963), 195f. 36. Berdichevsky, "Lishealat he'avar," 62. It was Lachover (in his Rishonim veaharonim, 44f.) who alerted me both to the significance of this passage and to its Schopenhauerian aspect, an aspect overlooked by Klausner-Eshkol (Hashpa'at Nietzsche veSchopenhauer, 36f.) in her reading of the passage under entirely Nietzsehean auspices. 37. It is worthy of note that Berdichevsky makes favorable mention of Buddhism, as well as of nco-Platonism, in "Nishmat hasidim." See Berdichevsky, Sefer hasidim, 8. 38. Gardiner, Schopenhauer, 192f.; cf. Klausner-Eshkol, Hashpa'at Nietzsche veSchopenhauer, 103f., 127ff. 39. Berdichevsky, Sefer hasidim, 5. 40. For the publication data regarding these works, see Dan Almagor and Shmuel Fishman, Nahalat MYB: mafteah bibliyografi lizirot Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky (Bin Gorton) ulehiburim 'al odotav (Tel-Aviv: 1982), 22f. 41. See Dan Miron, "Mavo leMiriam," in his Kivun 'orot: tahanot basiporet ha'ivrit hamodernit (Tel-Aviv: 1979), 42-47; and Avner Holtzman's introduction to Michah Yosef Berdichevsky, Sipurei TaRaS (Tel-Aviv, 1991), 5-12. 42. See Govrin in Mivhar maamarei bikoret, 15ff; Holtzman, Hakarat panim, 227. 43. These character depictions are all to be found in "Mibayit umihuz." 44. Hillel Zeitlin, Mimikhtevei ahad haze'irim (TaV mikhtavim), first published in 1901 in the Cracow periodical Hador. See Almagor and Fishman (eds.), Nahalat MYB, entry 1451. Reprinted in Zeitlin's Ketavim nivharim (Warsaw: 1911), vol. 2 Mahashavah veshirah, part 1, from which the present citation is taken (p. 75). There is some parallel between Zeitlin's assessment of Me'iri haketanah and that of Y.L. Peretz on Berdichevsky's Yiddish stories. See Peretz's "In folk arayn" in his Ale verk (Vilna: 1929), 17 vols., vol. 16, 49ff. 45. Sec Emanuel Bin Gorion, Reshut hayahid: Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky be'esrim shenotav ha'ahanmot (Tel-Aviv: 1980), 181, 189. 46. The phrase is that of Yitzhak Bakon. See his Haza'ir haboded basifrut ha'ivrit (1899-1908) (Tel-Aviv: 1978). 47. See Rachel Bin Gorion's "Hayei MYB," in Kol sipurei Mikhah Yosef Bin Gorion (Berdichevsky) (Tel-Aviv: 1952), 10; idem, Dubova, 1901 (perek zikhronot), in Holtzman (ed.), Ginzei Mikhah Yosef, vol. 3 (Tel-Aviv: 1988), 63f. 48. See the extracts from Berdichevsky's diary, translated from German to Hebrew by Yitzhak Kafkafi, and superbly annotated by Avner Holtzman, in Ginzei Mikhah Yosef, vol. 4 (Tel-Aviv: 1990), 32ff. 49. Compare Miron, "Mavo leMiriam" 45f. 50. Michah Yosef Berdichevsky, Mehe'avar hakarov (Warsaw: 1909), 59. Cf. the closing paragraph of "Arba'ah dorot" in ibid., 45. 51. In Hebrew, rnazkir, lit. "one who calls to remembrance."

Between Memory and Forgetfulness

113

52. Berdichevsky, Kol sipurei, 119. 53. Ibid. 54. See Warnock, Memory, 140. 55. See Shmuel Werses' essay, "Batei MYB: liv'ayat hamerhav besipurav," in his MiMendele 'ad Hazaz: sugyot behitpathut hasiporet ha'ivrit (Jerusalem: 1987). 56. See Rene Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism (1750-1950), vol. 2, The Romantic Age (New Haven: 1955), 309, 311. 57. On the influence of Goethe upon Berdichevsky, see Moseley, "Jewish Autobiography in Eastern Europe," 313-317. 58. Berdichevsky, Kol maamrei, 153. The call for the "expansion" of Hebrew literature, it should be noted, well preceded the Ahad Ha'am/ze'i'rim debate. Thus in the 1888 Beit hamidrash, 10, Berdichevsky champions the hitrahavut of Hebrew literature. 59. Ibid., 154; for Schopenhauer on lyric poetry, see Wellek, History of Modern Criticism, 309ff. Noteworthy in this context is one of the aphorisms to be found in Berdichevsky's German diary: "One may claim that the difference between realistic poetry and romantic poetry is akin to that between the world as will and as imagination." See his Amarot, trans, and ed. Yosef Even (Tel-Aviv: 1982), 56. 60. Berdichevsky, Kol maamrei, p. 154. 61. Reprinted in ibid., 375; cf. Berdichevsky, 'At em haderekh, 1. 62. From "Rahashei lev" in Berdichevsky, Kol maamrei, 22. 63. Ibid. 64. For precise publication details of this piece, published in installments in the Galician journal, whose title alternated randomly between Ha'ivri and 'Ivri anokhi, see Almagor and Fishman (eds.), NahalatMYB, entry 94. For assessments of the significance of the piece, see Dan Almagor, "Arba' hashanim harishonot bizirotav shel MYB," inMivhar maamrei bikoret, ed. Nurit Govrin (Tel-Aviv: 1990); Dan Miron, "Reshito shel Berdichevsky hamesaper," in Kivun orot, esp. 19f. 65. Michah Yosef Berdichevsky, Gerushayim: sipur ma'aseh shehayah, Ha'ivri 34 (6 June 1890), 272. 66. For the development and ramifications of the "red" and "hirsute" anti-self, who here makes one of his first appearances in Berdichevksky's literary oeuvre, see Dan Almagor, "Demuyot-av umazavei mafteah besipurei MYB," in Govrin (ed.), Peles, esp. 239ff; A. Yoab-Elshtein, "Hametah bein yisrael veadom 'al pi yezirotav hameuharot shel MYB," in ibid., 196-204. The question of the influence of depth psychology on Berdichevsky remains largely unresolved. The fact that, already in 1891, a year after the composition of Gerushayim, Berdichevsky was planning to write a book on the neuroses of well-known Jews according to the method of Lombroso suggests that such influence was there from a very early stage. See Holtzman, Hakarat panim, 91. With respect to the Jungian connection, it is significant that one of the authors Berdichevsky recommended Ya'akov Fichman to read, at their meeting in the last year of his life, was Hermann Hesse. See Fichman's Ruhot menagenot (Jerusalem: 1952), p. 276. And for a more general assessment of Berdichevsky within the context of a wider study of echoes of Jung in Hebrew literature, see Israel Cohen, Behevyon hasifrut ha'ivrit (Tel-Aviv: 1981), esp. 44f. 67. Berdichevsky, "Hamazal," in Kol maamrei, 347, emphasis in original. 68. On the naming of the protagonists of the autobiographically based stories, see Almagor, "Demuyot av," 227f; Shmuel Werses, "Hasipur 'me'ever lanahar' shel MYB: 'iyun bimkorotav venushaotav," in MiMendele 'ad Hazaz, 173f. 69. For publication data on Berdichevsky's Yiddish pieces, written for the most part from 1902 to 1906, see Almagor and Fishman (eds.), Nahalat MYB, 48f. On the selfless, ventriloquistic and thus thoroughly Schopenhauerian aspect of many of the Yiddish stories, see Bin Gorion, Reshut hayahid, 191f.; Shmuel Werses' introduction to Berdichevsky, Yidishe kesovim fun a vaytn korev, ed. Werses (Jerusalem: 1981), esp. xxiv. 70. Berdichevsky, Mibayit umihuz, 81f.; emphasis in the original. 71. Berdichevsky, Me'emek hahayim, 77.

114

Marcus Moseley

72. I hid., 89. 73. Ibid., 82f. 74. Ibid., 77. 75. On the relation between Gerushayim and "Me'ever lanahar," sec Worses, "Hasipur 'me'ever lanahar,'" 170ff.; Almagor, "Dernuyot av," 241. 76. Fishel Lachover draws attention to the significance of Josh. 24:2-3 in interpretation of this story in his Toledot hasifrut ha'ivrit hahadashah, 4 vols. (combined as 2) (Tel-Aviv, 1966), vol. 3(2), 95f. 77. Berdichevsky, Mibayit umihuz, 49. Here, as in the previous citations, I have adhered by and large to Berdichevsky's own punctuation, which is frequently erratic, not to say downright erroneous, a problem of which he himself was aware—see Bin Gorion, Reshut hayahid, 94. 78. Berdichevsky, Beshirah uvelashon, 9ff; on Schopenhauer's essentially identical prescription of a measure of "standing back" as the condition of the successful lyric, sec Gardiner, Schopenhauer, 227f. 79. Berdichevsky, Kol maamrei, 340. 80. For full publication data, see Almagor and Fishman (eds.) Nahalat MYB, entries 348, 365. 81. Published in Ha'ivri 13 (27 Dec. 1889); see Moseley, "Jewish Autobiography in Eastern Europe," 290-295. 82. In a review essay titled "Bikurim," Berdichevsky ridicules the ritualized and pro forma aspect of the deathbed vidui. Sec Kol maamrei, 306.

83. 84. 85. 86.

Ibid., 347. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

87. Berdichevsky, Beshirah uvelashon, 24f.; cf. Gardiner, Schopenhauer, 228, on Schopenhauer with respect to the "self-transformation" of the writer in epic and dramatic writings. 88. Ibid., 25. 89. Berdichevsky, Meozar haagadah, 2 vols. (Berlin: 1914), vol. 1, xii. 90. Ibid., xiii. 91. Ibid., xvi. 92. Ibid., xv. The last phrase of this citation is a slight emendation of Eccl. 7:1. 93. Ibid., xvi. For details concerning the change of name, see Bin Gorion, Reshut hayahid, 25-28. 94. Berdichevsky, Meozar haagadah, vol. 2, xiv. 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid., xiv. 97. See Shmuel Abba Horodctsky, Lezurato haruhanit shel MYB, in his Zikhronot (TelAviv: 1957), 192. A fine 1902 photograph of the thirty-seven-year-old Berdichevsky, seated while his youthful-looking wife, Rachel, lays a protective hand on his left shoulder, reveals a man aged well beyond his years. See Holtzman (ed.), Ginzei Mikhah Yosef, vol. 4, cover page. Reuben Brainin, not, it should be noted, an impartial witness, perceived in 1907 in Berdichevsky's "thin, puckered, shaved countenance, the grey streaks in his well-barbered hair, the myopic gaze betokening cither genius or lunacy," and the chronic hardness of hearing, unmistakeable signs of "degeneracy" and "physical decadence." See Brainin, Kol kitvei, 3 vols. (New York: 1923-1940), vol. 3, 124. 98. See Bin Gorion, 'Olam ve'olamot bo, 33f, 93; Holtzman, Hakarat panim, 199f.; Lachover, Rishonim va'aharonim, 56. 99. See Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: 1966), 2-6, 45; David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: 1985), index under "invention." 100. Berdichevsky, Beshirah uvelashon, 33; emphasis in original. 101. See Bin Gorion, 'Olam ve'olamot bo, 28; idem, Kore hadorot, 19-35, passim. 102. See Holtzman, Hakarat panim, 100; Ycshurun Keshet, M.Y. Berdichevsky: hayav ufo'alo (Jerusalem: 1958), chs. 6-7, passim, esp. 167f.

Between Memory and Forgetfulness

115

103. See Keshet, Hayav ufo'alo, 176; Holtzman, Hakarat panim, 201; Bin Gorion, Reshut hayahid, 92-99, passim. 104. See Lachover, "Yemei Berdichevsky haaharonim, in his Rishonim vaaharonim, vol. 2, 70-78. 105. See Bin Gorion, Kore hadorot, 34f. 106. See Horodetsky, "Lezurato haruhanit shel MYB," 196f. 107. In Hebrew, haboded bemaaravo. Berdichevsky is punning here, of course, on maaravlma'arav—with an aleph, "lair," "lurking-place"; and with an "ayin, "West." See Horodetsky, "Lezurato haruhanit shel MYB," 171; Bin Gorion, 'Olam ve'olamot bo, 6. 108. See Lachover, Rishonim vaaharonim, vol. 2, 55; and for a reproduction of one of Berdichevsky's annotated pages, see Werses, MiMendele 'ad Hazaz, 184. 109. See ibid., 55, 60ff.; Holtzman, Hakarat panim, 87-98. 110. See Lachover, Rishonim vaaharonim, vol. 2, 70. 111. See Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: 1977), 148. 112. See Lachover, Rishonim vaaharonim, vol. 2, 66. 113. See Michel Beaujour, Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait, trans. Yara Milos (New York: 1991), 26. 114. Ibid., 27; cf. Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: 1953), 336; Emile Male, "The Four Mirrors of Vincent de Beauvais," in his Religious Art: From the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Centuries (New York: 1949), 61-100. 115. See W.B. Yeats, Autobiography (New York: 1953), 158-164; Douglas Archibald, Yeats (Syracuse: 1983), 180f. 116. On Berdichevsky's preparations toward this first edition of the collected works, and on the distress occasioned by the collapse of the project, see Bin Gorion, Reshut hayahid, 3640, 97-99; Holtzman, Hakarat panim, 199ff. 117. See Berdichevsky, Meozar haagadah, vol. 1, xv. 118. See Horodetsky, "Lezurato haruhanit shel MYB," 192f. 119. As cited by Holtzman in Hakarat panim, 200. 120. Ibid., 200f. 121. Ibid., cf. Bin Gorion, Reshut hayahid, 98. 122. See Almagor, "Demuyot av," 226. 123. See Holtzman, Hakarat panim, 200ff.; Werses, "Hasipur 'Me'ever lanahar,'" passim and especially the closing paragraphs. 124. See Holtzman, Hakarat panim, 200. 125. As cited by Beaujour, Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait, 32. 126. Ibid., 33f. 127. For the publication history of Berdichevsky's German editions of Agadot, new editions of which have continued to appear until recently, see Almagor and Fishman (eds.), Nahalat MYB, 53f. Thomas Mann drew extensively on Berdichevsky's compilations for his Joseph novel. See Scholem, MiBerlin lirushalayim: zikhronot ne'urim (Tel-Aviv: 1982), 119f; Keshet, Hayav ufo'alo, 173, 192; Bin Gorion, 'Olam ve'olamot bo, 11, 92ff.; idem, Reshut hayahid, 45, 60, 79f. 128. On Berdichevsky's reclusiveness in Friedenau, or Neveh shalom as he called it, which grew more pronounced as he advanced in years, see Bin Gorion, Reshut hayahid, 622664; Holtzman, Hakarat panim, 153f.; Fichman, Ruhot menagenot, 272f. 129. See the letters from these years in the published correspondence between Berdichevsky and Brenner and Horodetsky as cited above, passim; Keshet, Hayav ufo'alo, 166-173. 130. See Bin Gorion, 'Olam ve'olamot bo, 9f, 82; idem, Reshut hayahid, pp. 2281".; and see the brief survey of the Berdichevsky archives in Holtzman (ed.), Ginzei Mikhah Yosef, vol. 3, 12f. For full publication details of the German collections of Jewish legend, see Almagor and Fishman, Nahalat MYB, 53f. 131. See Bin Gorion, 'Olam ve'olamot bo, 9; idem, Reshut hayahid, 78f., 105ff.; idem, Kore hadorot, 24-27.

116

Marcus Moseley

132. See Bin Gorion, 'Olam ve'olamot bo, 80ff.; Holtzman (ed.), Ginzei Mikhah Yosef, vol. 3, 10. 133. Ibid., 82. 134. See Fichman, Ruhot menagenot, 274. 135. Sec the above-cited survey of Berdichevsky's library and archives in Holtzman (ed.), Ginzei Mikhah Yosef, vol. 3, esp. 10, 12, 14. 136. Sec ibid., 26-32; Bin Gorion, 'Olam ve'olamot bo, 20f. 137. See Berdichevsky, Kol maamrei, 345, emphasis in original. 138. Sec Berdichevsky and Brenner, Halifat igrot, 98. 139. See Berdichevsky, Amarot, 75; and on this aphorism, see Bin Gorion, Reshut hayafiid, 200. 140. Sec Bin Gorion, 'Olam ve'olamot bo, 82. 141. See Beaujour, Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait, 26. 142. See Almagor, "Demuyot av," 225f. 143. The expansion of Bin Gorion's memory is attested to by his anamnesis of the true pattern of events surrounding the creation of mankind, which he places at the head of the revised version of Meozar haagadah, Zefunot vaagadot, and attributtes to "words of vision of the author." Sec Bin Gorion, Kore hadorot, 35. 144. See Bin Gorion, Reshut hayahid, 97ff.; Holtzman, Hakarat panim, 201 ff. 145. Lachover, Rishonim vaaharonim, vol. 2, 68; emphasis in the original. 146. I am convinced that Berdichevsky, who delighted in word-play and double entendres, was aware of the dual signification of the word ma'arakhah, an eccentric choice, in and of itself, for the designation of a work into topical sections. 147. See Holtzman, Hakarat panim, 203f. 148. See his introduction to Berdichevsky, Kol maamrei, 7, and compare the topical alignment of the Shtibcl edition with that of the Tel-Aviv re-editions by referring to the bibliographies provided at the end of both Kol maamrei and Kol sipurei. 149. See Holtzman, Hakarat panim, 204. 150. See the notice, as published in Revivim (1913), for the forthcoming edition; reproduced in Holtzman (ed.), Ginzei Mikhah Yosef, vol. 5, 118. 151. See Shmuel Werses, "Halikud bein zelalci hahayim: 'al meor'a Berdichevsky bishenat TaRaS," in Ginzei Mikhah Yosef, vol. 6, ed. Avner Holtzman (Tel-Aviv: 1995), 115. 152. See Y.L. Perctz, Ale verk, vol. 12,5. Berdichevsky had a penchant for Peretz's titles: He adopted, or modified at least two of them for his own works, "Nishmat hasidim," from Peretz's "Mishnat hasidim"; "Heziz venifga,'" the title of his first story (1888), was in all probability lifted from Peretz's story of the same name that appeared two years earlier. See Holtzman, Hakarat panim, 34f., 98. 153. See Beaujour, Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait, 26ff. 154. See Yates, The Art of Memory, passim. 155. On the ancient memory treatise, Ad Herrenium, for example, see ibid., 1 If. 156. Berdichevsky was given, in his latter days, to muttering darkly about a "secret" or "mystery" revealed to him through his scholarly enquiries into Jewish and Christian antiquity, which in his published writings, at least, appears not to have been divulged. See, for example, Lachover, Rishonim vaaharonim, vol. 2, 74f; Bin Gorion, 'Olamot ve'olamot bo, 108f. 157. See Bin Gorion, Kore hadorot, 90. 158. Ibid., 85f. 159. See Z. Kagan, "Darkhei shiluvah shel haagadah beMiriam leMYB," in Hasifrut, 4, no. 3 (July 1973), 519-545. 160. See Miron, "Mavo leMiriam," passim; Fichman, Ruhot menagenot, 221-225; Kagan, "Darkhei shiluvah," 543, esp. n. 32. 161. See Berdichevsky's letter of 8 Aug. 1898 to David Neimark, as reprinted in Holtzman (ed.), Ginzei Mikhah Yosef, vol. 4, 62 and 63 (n. 1). 162. Compare Kagan, "Darkhei shiluvah," 543ff, esp. notes 32 and 33, who makes very much the same point in aligning Miriam with the "encyclopaedic," as this is understood by

Between Memory and Forgetfulness

117

Northrop Frye. See also Hillel Weiss on S.Y. Agnon's Hadom vekhi.se, a work that displays some remarkable analogies with Miriam, in his Kol haneshamah: heker Hadom vekhise, sefer divrei hayamim leSh.Y Agnon (Jerusalem: 1985), 13. 163. See Keshet, Hayav ufo'alo, 176; Lachover, Rishonim vaaharonim vol. 2, 74f. 164. See Yates' commentary on the passage from the tenth book of Augustine's Confessions, from which this citation is taken, pp. 46f. 165. See M.J. Bin Gorion (Berdyczewski), Miriam: A Novel about Life in Two Townships, trans. A.S. Super, with an introduction by Zipora Kagan (Tel-Aviv: 1983), 40. All references to the Hebrew text of Miriam are here taken from the Shtibel edition (Leipzig: 1923). 166. Miriam, 40f.; Hebrew version, 18. 167. See Horodetsky, "Lezurato haruhanit shel MYB," 197. 168. For a harrowing account of the ghastly circumstances surrounding Berdichevsky's father's death, see Rokhel Feigenberg, A pinkesfun a toyter shtot (Warsaw: 1926), 99-107. 169. See Lachover, Rishonim vaaharonim, vol. 2, 76; Berdichevsky/Brenner, Halijat igrot, 121-124. 170. Miriam, 259ff.; Hebrew version, 139f. The stylistic modifications to the Super translation are my own. 171. There is also here an invocation of one of Berdichevsky's own earlier pieces, "Ta'ut," written in 1910. See Bin Gorion, Kore hadomt, 187. 172. See Bin Gorion, "Hayei MYB," 8; Lachover, Rishonim vaaharonim, vol. 2, 71. 173. Ibid., 70, 74. 174. Cf. Bin Gorion on Berdichevsky's Kinim, written contemporaneously with Miriam, in his Kore hadomt, 91-94. 175. See Bin Gorion, Reshut hayahid, 105. 176. See Jean Pierre Vernant, "Mythical Aspects of Memory," in his Myth and Thought Among the Greeks (London: 1983), 91. 177. See Gershon Shaked's masterly explication of this text, "Hamareot harishonim: 'al 'safiah' meet H.N. Bialik," in Measef mukdash lizirat H.N. Bialik, ed. H. Barzel (Ramat Gan: 1975), 145-161, esp. 155f. 178. See esp. Hayim Nahman Bialik, Devarim shebe'alpeh, 2 vols. (Tel-Aviv: 1935), vol. 1, 62ff. 179. Ibid., vol. 2, 32ff. 180. See M. Ovadyahu, Bialik Speaks: Words from the Poet's Lips, Clues to the Man, trans. A. El-Dror (Ramat Gan: 1969), 56. 181. See Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture and Literature, trans. H. Weyl (Princeton: 1968), passim. 182. The term is, of course, that of Joseph Frank. See his The Idea of Spatial Form (New Brunswick and London: 1991), chs. 1-3, passim. See also Sharon Spencer, Space, Time and Structure in the Modern Novel (New York: 1971), esp. 142-146, 164. 183. The thesis is implicit throughout Beaujour's study of the literary self-portrait. For a more cautious assessment of the parallelism between medieval formulations of memoria and modernist and postmodernist literary concerns, see Mary Carruthers' "Afterword" to her The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Mediaeval Culture (Cambridge: 1990), 258-261.

The Frankist Novels of Isaac Bashevis Singer Chone Shmeruk (THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY)

Jewish works of fiction, in both Hebrew and Yiddish, have evinced considerable and continuous interest in the messianic hopes of the times of Shabbetai Zvi and Jacob Frank. Although the evaluations of these phenomena differ, as do the descriptions given and the literary genres used, the literary treatment of these hopes is worthy of close attention beyond the purely literary standpoint—for such works often reflect the subject's continuing relevance in relation to modern ideologies and processes of modernization within Jewish society. Until now, the topic as it appears in nineteenthcentury literature has been treated by Shmuel Werses,1 whereas a general overview for twentieth-century Hebrew and Yiddish literature has been little more than a research desideratum. Perhaps the following discussion of Isaac Bashevis Singer's two Frankist novels, which are largely unknown even to literary scholars, will make some contribution to a more comprehensive study of the subject. That Isaac Bashevis Singer was interested to the point of obsession in messianic movements in Jewish history is indicated by the words of the hero of Shosha, a young author whom many consider to embody transparent autobiographical elements of Isaac Bashevis himself. Even if one may question the absolute identification of the author of the novel with its literary hero, the obvious similarity of their literary aspirations cannot be denied. The hero of Shosha, who is publishing a biography of Jacob Frank in installments in a Warsaw newspaper in the 1930s, writes: "The story of the false messiah Jacob Frank and his disciples had to end, but I was ready with a list of other false messiahs—Reuveni, Shlomo Molkho, Sabatai Zevi."2 The order of Bashevis' own works was, of course, different. He began with a novel about the Sabbateans in Poland, Der sotn in Goray (Satan in Goray), published in Warsaw in the early 1930s. The next novel of this kind—about Jacob Frank—was written when Bashevis was already in the United States; and this was followed by a novel about the Frankists in Poland in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, it is clear that the plans delineated in Shosha roughly correspond to Bashevis' actual literary opus on Sabbateanism and Frankism, even though it is unclear whether he truly intended to write stories or novels about David Reuveni or Shlomo Molkho. 118

The Frankist Novels of Isaac Bashevis Singer

119

It is most instructive to consider the topical aspect that the hero of Shosha ascribes to the messianic novels that he is writing or intending to write: The new novel, about Sabatai Zevi, described with much detail the Jewish longing for redemption in an epoch that displayed many similarities to our own. What Hitler threatened to do to the Jews Bogdan Chmielnitsky had done some three hundred years earlier. From the time they were exiled from their land, Jews lived in anticipation of death or the coming of the Messiah.3

Shosha, of course, was written after the Holocaust. As noted, an earlier novel, Der sotn in Goray, was begun in the first half of the 1930s, while Bashevis was still living in Poland. In Der sotn in Goray, Bashevis skillfully portrays the messianic fervor that descends upon a remnant of Jews, living in a shtetl destroyed by Chmielnicki's hordes, upon their receiving the first news of Shabbetai Zvi. Unlike the novel-in-the-works described in Shosha, this historical novel has few, if any, topical references. More obvious analogies to Sabbateanism in Poland are to be found in Bashevis' The Slave, a novel about the Jews of Poland after the Chmielnicki massacres, which was written after the Holocaust. But even here, it is clear that the secret of the messianic movement's allure for Bashevis is probably not to be found in the subject's topical aspect. As early as Der sotn in Goray, Bashevis describes sexual license as a fundamental, immanent element of the messianic ecstasy that seized the Jews of Goray; erotic elements are also a major and everpresent constituent of the other books under discussion here. In the author's memoirs, published in 1964, he has given us a detailed account of the formation and publication of his biographical novel about Jacob Frank, Der zindiker moshiekh (The Sinning Messiah), which appeared in installments in the New York daily Forward during 1935-1936.4 Bashevis relates that, after his arrival in New York in 1935, "I kept on mulling over it in my mind" to write a novel about Jacob Frank, "a second edition, only worse, of Shabbetai Zevi."5 At the time, the young author first visited Abraham (Abe) Cahan, the famed, all-powerful editor of the Forward, in the newspaper's offices and told him that he was working on a novel about Frank, who "persuaded Jews to become apostates and engage in sexual orgies." Cahan asked for the name of the novel, and Bashevis answered promptly, "Der zindiker moshiekh."6 Both the main character of the novel and its title were to the editor's liking. One should remember that Bashevis was then known mainly as the younger brother of the novelist I.J. Singer, a regular contributor to the Forward who had just earned acclaim as the author of Yoshe Kalb, the greatest hit of that time both in Yiddish literature and in the theater.7 Cahan most probably knew of Bashevis as the author of Der sotn in Goray, which also had its full share of "sins" and "sinners." Hence the proposal was presumably quite promising as a novel in installments to titillate and attract his readers. Cahan immediately agreed to print the novel and began to promote the young author even before the first section had appeared. Uncharacteristically, he even published an introduction to the first installment, describing Frank and the author as follows: Many books and innumerable articles are scattered in different languages about Jacob Frank. The author Isaac Bashevis has made a thorough study of this material. He has

120

Chone Shmeruk

read much about this wild sect [di vilde sekte]. He has read almost everything that is available on the subject, and one must remark in this connection that Bashevis is an author with good instincts. He has the talent to draw a line between reality and empty imagination [puster fantazye]/ .8 The truth, however, was more complex—and catastrophic for the young author. At the time of his audience with Cahan, Bashevis had in fact written absolutely nothing, except perhaps the title of the novel. He now began feverishly reading the relevant literature at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, ordering books about Shabbetai Zvi and Jacob Frank in Polish, German, Hebrew and Yiddish.9 The completed novel contains obvious traces of a Polish book about Frank and the Frankists written by Alexander Kraushar, in addition to its drawing from Heinrich Graetz's account of Frank in German and even Meir Balaban's Hebrew book published in 1934 in Tel-Aviv, only a year prior to Bashevis' novel.10 It is quite possible that it was Balaban's book about Frank, including the Hebrew sources on which it relies, that inspired Bashevis to think of the novel in the first place. Bashevis' feverish reading about Frank and the Frankists was of little avail. The plethora of published documentary material merely confused the young author, as he described it some twenty years later in his memoirs: I was caught in a trap. Now I know what I should have done: write a biography rather than a novel. But the novel had already been advertised and I began to make efforts to write a work of fiction. 11 Der zindiker moshiekh opens with an exquisite description of the Ashkenazic synagogue in Bucharest, and with the theatrical appearance of an emissary of Shabbetai Zvi during a public fast occasioned by the Jews' distress. The rabbi of the community identifies the man and orders him flogged and expelled. A youth with a commanding appearance, Jacob by name, saves the unwanted visitor and takes him under his protection, and the two leave the synagogue together; thus Jacob Frank makes his first appearance. The novel essentially ends with the death of Frank's daughter Ewacza in Offenbach in 1816—the last year treated by Alexander Kraushar. The book is basically a pastiche, concocted at times with great skill, of the main published sources about Jacob Frank and his sect, combined with imaginary passages such as the description of the young Frank's appearance in the Bucharest synagogue. Throughout this historical novel, which Cahan in fact defined as "realistic-historical," Bashevis carefully adheres to actual historical names of people and places that are drawn from Polish, Frankist and Jewish sources. Yet he also makes a serious effort to achieve a living portrayal of the time and the events beyond the information that he found in his sources. In a good many cases, he succeeds in creating striking, even believable portraits of the period and of the protagonists. Of particular note is the relationship between the Jews (mainly the Frankist converts) and the Poles as portrayed in Der zindiker moshiekh. Describing the efforts of first-generation Frankists to keep apart from Polish society—despite their conversion—and maintain their special Jewish character and their contacts with their leader, Bashevis renders a believable and sometimes stunning description of their failure to fit into the accepted mold of

The Frankist Novels of Isaac Bashevis Singer

121

Christian society and customs, which they had embraced neither enthusiastically nor as a result of naive belief.12 Bashevis' creative methods in this novel are perhaps best illustrated by his broad reworking of a historical figure (mentioned only sparingly in the sources) into a well-rounded, vital character. Kraushar's Polish book refers to a "Mendel Moszkowicz of Satanow" as one of the participants in the 1757 disputation at Kamieniec.13 He appears in Balaban's book—which relies on Ber Bolechower and mainly on Jacob Emden's Sefer shimush—as a district rabbi, officiating in Satanow, named Menahem-Mendel son of Moses.14 Bashevis invariably calls him R. Mendele Satanover—the Yiddish diminutive form of the first name, later popular among hasidim as a familiar form of address for their leaders. Bashevis builds these crumbs of information into the full-fledged figure of a fanatical, vindictive investigator. Despite his rather ordinary external appearance, which Bashevis describes in minute detail, R. Mendele cuts an authoritative and impressively severe figure. He regularly appears at assemblies of the Council of the Four Lands and rebukes his hearers for various offenses—such as the baking at Lemberg of thin matzoes (which he considers to be ritually unclean) and the permission given to a certain deserted wife ('agunahj to remarry without proper proof of her first husband's death (in fact, he had still been alive). Since Landskron belongs to the Satanow15 district, it is R. Mendele, as president of the religious court, who conducts the inquiry and hears the testimonies of Jews who repented after the orgies at Sabbatean assemblies in Landskron, where the whole Frankist affair had originally begun. Some of these testimonies are indeed signed by the rabbi in question, as cited by Balaban in Ernden's name,16 and the relevant passages are quoted in Yiddish translation in Bashevis' novel. Bashevis, however, also paints a detailed picture of the meeting of the Council at Konstantynow in 1757, where the assembled Jews are presented with "Testimony delivered from the written text of the Av bet din of the Holy Community of Satanow and the court, may God protect and preserve it."17 As Bashevis tells the story, the rabbi's appearance there is most impressive. Even before actually reading out the testimony, he demands that forthright action be taken. His first words (in the novel) are: "'Gentlemen'—he cried—'a fire is burning! Hell-fire! A great danger is looming, heaven forfend, for all of Israel! Gevalt! We need divine mercy! We are in unprecedented trouble,'"18 and he goes on: "Jews, help!"—he screamed—"the world is being destroyed! A great fire has engulfed all of Poland! Satan the Destroyer is dancing in the streets! Let us rend our clothes! Let us gird our loins with sackcloth and pour ashes on our heads! We are all mourners! The Torah is grieving! . . ,"19

But the rabbi's outspoken position is not accepted unanimously, and the traditional camp is sharply divided. In Bashevis' tale, R. Mendele is already attacked on the way back from Kamieniec by the rabbi of Jagielnica, who had also taken part in the disputation on the same side as R. Mendele.20 He accuses the latter of unnecessarily stirring up conflict, at one point even railing at him in anger: "Sinner of Israel! You have forfeited your place in the World to Come!"21

122

Chone Shmcruk

R. Mendele remains unmoved and continues his attack on the sect. He travels to Lublin to meet certain well-known shtadlanim (interceders) and persuade them as well to take vigorous action. Despite their insistence that the affair is of minor importance, R. ]Mendele continues his efforts, which come to a climax with the sudden death of Bishop Dembowski—construed as divine punishment for the latter's part in the events associated with Frank and his circle, particularly the public burning of the Talmud. The last reference to R. Mendele in Bashevis' novel occurs in a long proclamation that is read out by the rabbi of Rohatyn to the Jews assembled in the local synagogue. The proclamation is signed by R. Mendele, together with "shtadlanim from Podolia who convened at Satanow." In the document, later quoted in full in a beautifully styled imitation of a Yiddish translation, the signatories declare that the time has come to take revenge on Frank and all the members of his sect. The bishop's death is reported at the beginning of the proclamation, in the spirit of the well-known legends that viewed his sudden decease22 as a portent sent from heaven. The text goes on to declare: Thanks be to God for the miracle he has wrought for us, just as in the time of Mordechai and Esther. Let it be recorded in the record-books of all the communities, and let a festival be celebrated this day. Tahanun [the supplicational section of the prayer service] should not be recited today. . . . And the time has come to take revenge on our foes as the Jews avenged themselves on Amalek in the capital city of Shushan. . . .

The proclamation goes on to list the retributive measures. The "wicked" are to be flogged and imprisoned, whether by the Jewish community or by the nobles and the city authorities; all their property and riches should be confiscated and they should be forced to divorce their wives. A warning is issued not to allow Frank himself to flee Poland unscathed. Toward the end of the proclamation the writers, to all intents and purposes, condemn the sectarians to death: "And although we are presently forbidden to adjudicate capital cases, we are nevertheless commanded that an informer and an inciter and seducer may be slain, many great sages having acted thus." This whole proclamation is a product of Bashevis' imagination. A further expression of the most fanatical, uncompromising position vis-a-vis Frank and the Frankists, it also provided a foil against which Bashevis could present the views of those traditionalists who were opposed to extreme action. The rabbi of Rohatyn, who reads the proclamation to his congregation, rejects its directives. When some people in his audience express readiness to set out immediately and take punitive action, the rabbi holds them back: "Yes, it is true," he cries, "that by law they are worthy of death! But as long as I live I shall not permit murder! I cannot!"23 The Rohatyn rabbi's conciliatory tone carries echoes of another source undoubtedly known to Bashevis—the well-known hasidic work Shivhei haBesht, a collection of stories about the Ba'al Shem Tov. The narrator of one of these stories recounts that: ] heard from the Rabbi of our community that concerning those who converted, the Bcsht said that the shekhinah [divine spirit] wailed and said: So long as the member is

The Frankist Novels of Isaac Bashevis Singer

123

connected, there is some hope that it will recover, but when the member is cut off there is no repair possible. Each person of Israel is a member of the shekhinah.

While undoubtedly aware of the Ba'al Shem TOV'S less punitive attitude toward the Frankists, Bashevis apparently decided to stress a harsher (and widely accepted) view as personified in the character of R. Mendele. Bashevis' R. Mendele, together with his opponents, constitute an interesting attempt on the author's part to reconstruct disputes within the Jewish community of the type that could accompany the Frank affair—which shook contemporary Jewry. From a purely literary point of view Bashevis is quite successful in creating a highly plausible picture. The character of R. Mendele, however, is drawn in somewhat blurred lines, perhaps inclining toward a rather hesitant caricature; and in general, the author does not seem to have felt comfortable with his creations. Most likely, the multiplicity of sources created limitations that were not at first clear to him. He therefore reached the conclusion that, in view of the large quantity of available information about the events, there was no room for the imaginary elements he tried to incorporate. It was impossible, for example, to shape the plot so as to realize the implications of R. Mendele's proclamation after Bishop Dembowski's death. Nonetheless, Bashevis was able to exercise his full talents at many points in the novel where the historical frame did not constrain him too rigorously. In this respect he certainly did not disappoint Abe Cahan and his readers, describing—sometimes at length and in bold detail—the sexual exploits (ritual and otherwise) of Frank and his cronies in orgies both public and private. The perfect stylizations of the written documents that he "cites," mostly simulated Yiddish translations from Hebrew, also attest to Bashevis' special talents in this direction—which were already demonstrated in Der sotn in Goray in the letter from Lublin to R. Beinush in Goray.24 (Noteworthy is the similarity between R. Beinush in Der sotn in Goray and R. Mendele in Der zindiker moshiekh.) A minute comparison of Isaac Bashevis' story Der zindiker moshiekh with the sources then at his disposal seems unwarranted, since as far as historical facts are concerned, it is most unlikely that Bashevis unearthed any sources not known to historians of the period. Nevertheless, here and there in the book, one can find interpretations of and attitudes toward both the events and the protagonists that merit the attention of professional historians who are themselves perplexed by the many questions posed by the Frank affair. In memoirs written much later, Bashevis admitted (though without explicitly naming Der zindiker moshiekh} that "the novel turned out badly, but the editor let it run to its conclusion and I managed to save up a thousand dollars. 1 had ceased writing fiction and supported myself from a short column . . . under the title 'It's Worthwhile Knowing'—'facts'culled from American magazines. . . ,"25 The feeling that he had failed miserably caused Bashevis to desist from writing fiction until 1943. In this year he again began to publish stories, this time in the New York monthly Svive, and a second, revised version of Der sotn in Goray appeared in New York. Seven years later the author made a fresh start, deliberately suppressing the memory of the unsuccessful earlier novel. Der zindiker moshiekh ends with a chapter called an "Epilogue,"26 in which the

124

Chone Shmeruk

narrative leaps from 1816 (the year of Ewacza Frank's death) to the Polish uprising of 1863. In this rather confused segment—it seems unnecessarily and artificially tacked on to the main plot—the author ponders the possibility of continuing to tell the Frankists' story in Poland following the death of Jacob Frank's daughter. Describing the depression in Poland after the failure of the uprising as the backdrop to the proliferation of mystical sentiments (the latter with no real historical foundation), Bashevis reports that: Secretly, a neo-Frankist lodge was even established. . . . The Frankist lodge secretly instituted customs that recalled the times of Jacob Frank. . . . [The Frankists] imposed severe punishments on those who revealed their secrets. . . . They taught the women the secret of the virgin who would save the world and forbade them to disobey the Great Brother, whose identity was known only to a select, privileged few. The direct source of this information is unknown. It may convey echoes of continuing suspicions aimed at the descendants of the Frankists in Poland, who were accused of isolationism and of Jewish conspiracies;27 though there are no known circles of descendants of Frankists in Poland by the last third of the nineteenth century. Bashevis' epilogue nevertheless indicates that the real—or imagined— sequel to the Frank affair still intrigued him. Here lay the inspiration for the other novel to be discussed here: Der man fun khaloymes {The Dreamer), also published in installments in the Forward, in 1970-1971.28 As will be seen, this novel also stemmed—though not entirely—from Bashevis' continued interest in the Frankist presence in nineteenth-century Poland. Der man fun khaloymes is written in the first person, in the form of memoirs. The narrator states that he wrote them in Polish—which is to say that the text is supposed to be a translation from Polish into Yiddish. There are indeed many deliberate indications of this rather curious linguistic situation—which is unique in general, not only in Isaac Bashevis' oeuvre. Be that as it may, the narrator goes on to explain that he was born in 1812 and is writing his memoirs at the age of seventy-four. His was a respected, traditional Jewish family, strictly observant, and his name at birth was Tuviah Yerachmeel Alter Ben-Zion Cohen. At the time of writing, however, he is a Catholic known as Adam Stanislaw Kordecki. Moreover, at another point in his life he had been a convert to Protestantism named Peter Morrison; and he had even masqueraded as an observant Jew named Borekh Levin. The main events of his life are as follows. As a youth in Lublin, Tuviah becomes acquainted with a neighboring family—the father, a wine merchant, and his beautiful young daughter Yentl. The family are crypto-Frankists, belonging to that group who had not converted to Christianity in the eighteenth century. After becoming quite close to these neighbors, Tuviah becomes a maskil, or enlightened Jew, and travels to Warsaw, bearing a letter of introduction from the father of the family to a descendant of the converted Frankists. However, before meeting the Warsaw Frankists, Tuviah meets an apostate—a Protestant missionary—who persuades him to convert. Tuviah thus becomes Peter Morrison and marries the missionary's daughter. But a short time later, Tuviah-Peter abandons the family of missionary converts and—letter of introduction in hand—finally reaches Mieczyslaw Majewski, one of the leading Frankists in Warsaw.

The Frankist Novels of Isaac Bashevis Singer

125

As related in the novel, this first meeting takes place in the early 1830s, around the time of the first Polish uprising. Majewski is an ardent Polish patriot29 who nevertheless remains loyal to the sect, even though he is three generations removed from the Frankist conversions. He is a relative of the Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz,30 whose mother was in fact a Majewski; and Bashevis' Majewski, a grandson of Frank's associates Elisha Shor and Judah Leib Krysa, is proud of his Jewish-Frankist roots. Under Majewski's influence, Tuviah-Peter joins a group of the remnants of the sect in Warsaw. In one of their secret rituals he once again meets Yentl, the beautiful daughter of his Frankist patron from Lublin. Her name is now Eva and she acts as "matron" in the group's erotically charged ceremonies. The spark of old love flares up into a protracted and torrid love affair. Moved by cynical, materialistic considerations and aided and abetted by his beloved, Tuviah-Peter becomes a Catholic so that he can marry a rich Catholic widow, Theresa Kordecka by name, whose family name he adopts. Throughout the memoirs the writer describes his simultaneous involvement with several women, only some with a Frankist background. These recurring affairs are the subject of Tuviah-Peter-StanislawBorekh's frank confession. It appears that Bashevis' fertile imagination seized upon certain historical allusions that the Frankists were still active and maintained contacts in Warsaw even after the death of Frank and his daughter, up until the 1880s. It is no accident that Bashevis' hero claims to be writing his memoirs in the 1880s; for this was when interest in the Frankists and their descendants reawakened in Warsaw, and doubts were again expressed both as to whether their conversion had been sincere from the start and whether they had completely assimilated into Polish society.31 The narrator frequently contemplates his shifting identity, admitting that "I was neither Christian nor Jew, but Frankist; and once that sect had fallen apart, I too fell apart."32 But even his "Frankism" is consciously different from that of the founders of the sect and their descendants. When one of the last Frankists died in the 1830s, the Frankist circle in Warsaw essentially disintegrated. If Bashevis is to be believed, persons of Frankist descent occasionally met here and there; but their meetings were exclusively "private." The third generation had passed away; the fourth generation was eager to forget Jacob Frank and his Jewish origins. And the narrator goes on to declare: I will not be exaggerating if I claim that Eva and I became almost the sole heirs of Frankism. Once and for all, I would like to clarify that I have never been a Frankist as was, say, the rabbi of Busk or Elisha Shor. For me, Jacob Frank was no idol. He made innumerable mistakes. He should never have made his disciples confirm the blood libel.33

After further criticism of Jacob Frank, he nevertheless ends with a declaration of faith in Frank as a profound person whose doctrines would be understood only in future generations. One principle of Frank's system that is religiously embraced by the narrator throughout his long life is a completely open attitude toward sexual relations in every possible sense. Bashevis' hero understands this aspect of Frankism in terms of modern permissiveness. In the section just quoted, he describes his temporary

126

Chone Shmeruk

parting from Eva before she leaves the husband she has just married: "We took leave of one another as befits Frankists: in bed."34 It seems quite probable that it was mainly this element of Frankism, as Bashevis presented it through his "dreamer," that inspired his interest in the remnants and descendants of the sect in Warsaw. Indeed, it is difficult to find a more natural basis for the full, reasoned and plausible literary realization of the ideal novel to which Bashevis aspired from the very start of his literary career. In Bashevis' autobiographical novel Der fartribener zun, a novel published in installments in the Forward in 1971, the first-person narrator—a young author—describes plans to write an innovative novel: In all the novels that I have read, the hero was always in love with one woman. But isn't this just a conventional lie, an author's trick? Or am I by nature different from all other men? Hasn't the time come to write a novel about a hero who is in love with a lot of women—the sufferings of a polygamous Werther?35 Indeed, the reader familiar with Isaac Bashevis' works will readily perceive the author's preoccupation, in several novels, with his "polygamous Werther" model. Suffice it here to mention two of his best-known novels, Shosha and Enemies: A Love Story. But it is perhaps only in the memoirs of Tuviah-Peter-Stanislaw-Borekh, in the personality of a character defining himself as a Frankist—in the sense in which Bashevis and his fictional hero understand and describe Frankism—that this model reached its full realization in the author's oeuvre. Paradoxically, the model of the polygamous Werther is balanced in Bashevis' works by a countermodel: these heroes of Bashevis' stories also long for absolute purity in marriage, generally in the traditional, Jewish sense. They seek a faithful, modest, pious wife like the author's or Tuviah's mother—the ideal of the Jewish woman in traditional society. In one chapter of his memoirs Bashevis writes: I wanted to sin myself, but I demanded purity from the woman. I well understood that such an approach was inconsistent. But just as I yielded to all my own desires, so a woman's unchastity angered and shocked me. I myself did not want to be like my father, but from women I demanded that they be exactly like my mother.36 It is most instructive that Bashevis placed a similar confession in the mouth of his dreamer-memoirist: The truth is that, however deep I sank in licentiousness and perversion, 1 longed for purity, for modesty, for a woman for whom there is one God and one man. I pined for the Sabbaths and the festivals. Dvoyrele reminded me of my mother, my sister, my aunts.37 The "Dvoyrele" referred to in this surprising passage is nothing but a personification of these longings. In parallel with the autobiographical hero of Shosha who finds what he wants in the eponymously named heroine, the dreamer Borekh Levin, impersonating as an observant Jew, "conquers" Dvoyrele, the daughter of the rabbi of Markov, while still married to Theresa Kordecka and conducting a love affair with Yentl-Eva. He marries the rabbi's daughter and lives a traditional married life with her; and she never doubts his loyalty. Moreover, they have a son who receives an education befitting the grandson of a hasidic rebbe. However, even in this

The Frankist Novels of Isaac Bashevis Singer

127

fantastic novel, Bashevis could find no more appropriate fate for his hero than the death of his pious wife in an accident and his Jewish son's denial of him after the hasidic family finds him out. Tuviah-Peter-Stanislaw-Borekh writes his memoirs as a lonely old man, still uncertain of the meaning of his identity. Isaac Bashevis' fascination with Jacob Frank and the Frankists produced two historical novels. The failure of Der zindiker moshiekh, he felt, was due to the rigid historical and documentary frame that blocked the play of imagination. The second novel, by contrast, was founded on a highly limited—perhaps even dubious— historical thesis. In this more flexible context the author felt free to give his fertile imagination full latitude, subordinating the supposed Frankist background to the novelistic model that guided him in other works. Although one could hardly consider Der man fun khaloymes one of Bashevis' greatest artistic achievements, it is a highly readable and interesting novel. Its Frankism, however, seems little more than a pretext allowing the author to give full reign to his erotic imagination.

Notes 1. See ShmucI Werscs, Haskalah veshabetaut: toledotav shel maavak (Jerusalem: 1988). 2. Quoted from the English translation of Shosha (New York: 1978), 229-230. The literature of the 1930s betrays a striking preoccupation with messianic movements; see Chone Shmeruk, "Yezirotav shel Uri Zvi Greenberg beyidish beerez yisrael bishnot ha'esrim ubishnot hasheloshim," Hasifrut 29 (1979), 28-91. At approximately the same time, Moshe Kulbak and Aharon Zeitlin wrote dramas about Jacob Frank. 3. Ibid., 232. 4. Y. Bashevis, Der zindiker moshiekh: historisher roman, published in installments in the Forward, 5 Oct. 1935-22 Feb. 1936. 5. Isaac Varshavsky (Isaac Bashevis), Fun der alter un nayer heym, Forward, 21 Nov. 1964.

6. Ibid. 7. See Anita Norich, The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer (Bloomington and Indianapolis: 1991). 8. Forward, 5 Oct. 1935. 9. Bashevis, Fun der alter un nayer heym, ibid., 27 Nov. 1964. 10. Alexander Kraushar, Frank i Frankisci polscy 1726-1816, 2 vols. (Cracow: 1895); Heinrich Graetz, Frank und die Frankisten (Breslau: 1868); Meir Balaban, Letoledot hatenu'ah haferankit, 2 vols. (Tel-Aviv: 1934). 11. Bashevis, Fun der alter un nayer heym, Forward, 21 Nov. 1964. 12. See Chone Shmeruk, "Hayahasim bein yehudim lepolanim baromanim hahistoriyim shel Yizhak Bashevis Singer," Yahadut zemanenu 2 (1985), 64-65. 13. Kraushar, Frank i Frankisci polscy, vol. 1, 82. 14. Balaban, Letoladot hatenu'ah haferankit, vol. 1, 116. 15. Der zindiker moshiekh, Forward, 23 Nov. 1935. 16. Balaban, Letoladot hatenu'ah haferankit, vol. 1, 124; Jacob Emden, Sefer shimush (Amsterdam: 1758-1762; rpt. Jerusalem: 1975), 10; Der zindiker moshiekh, Forward, 25 Nov. 1935. 17. On the council of Konstantynow, see Israel Heilperin (ed.), Pinkas va'ad arba arazot (Jerusalem: 1948), 416. 18. Bashevis, Der zindiker moshiekh, Forward, 25 Nov. 1935. 19. Ibid. 20. Balaban, Letoladot hatenu'ah haferankit, vol. 1, 137.

128

Chone Shmeruk

21. Bashevis, Der zindiker moshiekh, Forward, 11 Nov. 1935. 22. Balaban, Letoladot hatenu'ah haferankit, vol. 2, 191. 23. Bashevis, Der zindiker moshiekh, Forward, 23 Nov. 1935. 24. Y. Bashevis, Der sotn in Goray, (Warsaw: 1935), part 1, chap. 11. 25. Isaac Bashevis Singer, Love and Exile: The Early Years (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: 1986), 282. 26. Bashevis, Der zindiker moshiekh, Forward, 21-22 Feb. 1936. 27. See below, n. 31. 28. Y. Bashevis, Der man fun khaloymes, published in installments in the Forverts, 11 Sept. 1970-17 April 1971. 29. For Frankist participation in the Polish uprising, cf. Stefan Kieniewicz, "The Jews of Warsaw, Polish Society and the Partitioning Powers 1795-1861," Polin 3 (1988), 143. 30. On Mickiewicz's Frankist origins, cf. Jadwiga Maurer, Z matki obcej (London: 1990). 31. In 1882, Dr. A. Jellinek published an article in German entitled "Nachkommen von Frankisten in Warschau," Das Jiidische Literaturblatt, no. 27, 5 July 1882; in Russian, the article appeared as "Potomki frankistov v Varshave," Rassvet, no. 43, 24 Oct. 1883, 16591661. According to Jacob Shatzky, these and similar publications induced the descendants of the Frankists to support Kraushar's research; see Jacob Shatzky, "Alexander Kraushar's Road to Total Assimilation," YIVO Annual 1 (1953), 167-170. Several years before the publication of Bashevis' novel, an important article by Abraham Duker appeared, titled "Polish Frankism's Duration: From Cabbalistic Judaism to Roman Catholicism and from Jewishness to Polishness" (Jewish Social Studies 15 [ 1963J, 287-333). In this article the works of Jellinek and Shatsky are quoted: there is no doubt that Bashevis read it. At this point I consider it my duty to cite testimony by the poet Abraham Sutzkever of a Polish woman, Maria Fedecka by name, who claimed descent from the Frankists and who helped to save Jews from the Vilna Ghetto. She is described in Sutzkever's story "Yanina un di hayc" in his Griner akvaryum (Jerusalem: 1975), 79-93. 32. Bashevis, Der man fun khaloymes, Forward, 4 Dec. 1970. 33. Ibid., 13 Nov. 1970. 34. Ibid. 35. Y. Bashevis, Der fartribener zun, Forward, 9 July 1971. In this connection, see Chone Shmeruk, "Bashevis Singer—In Search of His Autobiography," The Jewish Quarterly 4 (108) (1981-1982), 28. 36. Bashevis, Fun der alter un nayer heym, Forward, 20 July 1964. Cf. Shmeruk, "Bein autobiografiyah leroman," 35. 37. Bashevis, Der man fun khaloymes, Forward, 2 Jan. 1971. In this context one should note the dreamer's unswerving loyalty to Yiddish. In his most intimate moments he speaks Yiddish with Eva (see the installment of 25 Dec. 1970; cf. that of 23 Jan. 1971).

Language as Fate: Reflections on Jewish Literature in America RuthR. Wisse (HARVARD UNIVERSITY)

One of the most celebrated poems of American Jewish literature, unpublished by its authors, has survived only in part and in oral tradition. 1 received the twenty-two lines that are in my possession from the historian Lucy S. Dawidowicz, who had it from the British writer Chaim Raphael, who had heard Daniel Bell recite it from memory. It is called "Der shir hashirim fun Mendl Pumshtok": Nu-zhe, kum-zhe, ikh un du, Ven der ovnt shteyt uf kegn dem himl Vi a leymener goylm af Tisha b'Av Lomir geyn zikh Durkh geselakh vos dreyen zikh Vi di bord fun dem rov Oy, Bashe, freg nisht keyn kashe, A dayge dir Oyf der vant fun dem koshern restorant Hengt a shmutsiker betgevant Un vantsn tantsn karahod In tsimer vu di vayber zenen Ret men fun Marx un Lenin Ikh ver alt ... ikh ver alt ... Es vert mir in pupik kalt

Zol ikh oyskemen di hor, meg ikh oyfesn a floym? Ikh vel tskatsheven di hoyzn un shpatsirn bay dem yam, Ikh vel hern di yam-moydn zingen khad gadyo Ikh vel zey entfern borukh-habo.1 129

130

Ruth R. Wisse

Alas, there is no effective way of offering up this Yiddish verse in English, for it is a rendition of T.S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "fartaytsht un farbesert" as they used to say of Shakespeare in the Yiddish theatre—translated and improved. Saul Bellow, who assisted Isaac Rosenfeld in its composition when they were graduate students at the University of Chicago in the 1930s, says that the two young men had also tried their hand at Milton, but did not do as well with the author of Paradise Lost. In addition to being simpler than Milton, T.S. Eliot, who was thought by at least one of their contemporaries, Delmore Schwartz, to be the finest poet of their generation, was probably the better send-up because of his publicized dislike for the Jews.2 How sweet it must have felt to mock the Anglo-American snob in the Jewish immigrant vernacular! A signature poem of twentieth-century modernism, Eliot's poem was itself a parody of the love song, echoing phrases and tag ends from the earlier English and European literary tradition to convey the bloodless condition of modern courtship. His erotic fire deadened by urban routine, the eponymous hero is no longer able to risk romantic love, let alone sing of it. The fragmented chronicle of his London day suggests the way Prufrock's world is in every way diminished, thinner in passion and powers of expression than the worlds of Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare and other lovers of yesteryear. Comes the Yiddish counterparody to puncture Eliot's ungenerous vision by reinflating all that the Anglo-American poet has brought low. As the Yiddish title heralds, Mendl Pumshtok sings the original love song from which all others may be considered derivative, the "Shir hashirim" (Song of Songs). The evening spread against the sky in Eliot's poem "like a patient etherised upon a table" looms in Pumshtok like a "clay golem on Tisha B'Av," the golem being the creature of Jewish folklore who, when animated by magical formula, is capable (in some versions of the legend) of physically defending the Jews from their Christian attackers. The Yiddish expression "leymener goylem" designates a clod, Man in his capacity of golem, rather than creature made superior Man; and since the ninth day of the midsummer month of Av commemorates the two destructions of the Temple in Jerusalem, by the Babylonians in 586 BCE and by the Romans in 70 CE, "a clay golem on Tisha B'av" is as dust-dried and witty an image of national impotence as one can imagine. Finally, the mermaids singing each to each at the end of the Prufrock poem sing out, in the Bellow-Rosenfeld version, the "Khad Gadyo," the concluding song of the Passover seder about a kid, bought by the father for two zuzim, that was eaten by the cat, that was then bitten by the dog, that was then beaten by the stick ... in a chain of crime and punishment that ends with the Almighty slaying the Angel of Death. The pairing of Eliot's mermaids with the goat-song seems a hilarious mismatch—except that the Passover seder recalls the mysterious parting of the waters during the Exodus, a sea legend quite as significant in Western civilization as the song of Odysseus' mermaids. In short (and it is short), the Yiddish parody is packed with enough Jewish national-religioushistorical imagery to remind the upstart Christian of what constitutes true cultural resonance. But cultural inflation accounts for less than half the wit of this parody. As the Jewish allusions pull rank on the English gentleman, pungent Yiddish also pulls the poem downward, into the colloquial vitality of the Jewish everyday. In contrast to

Language as Fate

131

the priggish J. Alfred, Jewish Mendl is lusty and tough. The curly beard of the rabbi, the kosher restaurant where roaches do a circle dance on dirty bed linen, the Jewish vayber—married women—talking about Marx and Lenin, breathe vigorous life into Eliot's languor. The Jewish version challenges simultaneously from above and below. As for the most famous image of the poem, "I grow old ... I grow old . . . /I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled," the Yiddish is plainer. It says, "my pupik grows cold"—a low blow to the belly of Eliot's masterpiece.3 More than half a century later another American Jewish writer, Philip Roth, would compose the definitive shpritz on the Jewish navel, in his usage, the pipik: the thing that for most children was neither here nor there, neither a part nor an orifice, somehow a concavity and a convexity both, something neither upper nor lower, neither lewd nor entirely respectable either, a short enough distance from the genitals to make it suspiciously intriguing and yet, despite this teasing proximity, this conspicuously puzzling centrality, as meaningless as it was without function—the sole archeological evidence of the fairy tale of one's origins, the lasting imprint of the fetus who was somehow oneself without actually being anyone at all, just about the silliest, blankest, stupidest watermark that could have been devised for a species with a brain like ours. It might as well have been the omphalos at Delphi given the enigma the pipik presented. Exactly what was your pipik trying to tell you? Nobody could ever really figure it out. You were left with only the word, the delightful play word itself, the sonic prankishness of the two syllabic pops and the closing click encasing those peepingly meekish, unobtrusively shlemiclish twin vowels. . . . 4

Roth's pipik was no longer the plain Jewish navel of the Rosenfeld-Bellow parody. The hyperbolic madcap runaway quality of his pipik routine shows how oddly the word reverberated in Roth's consciousness, the way Jewishness itself was never comfortably part of him but more of an appendage like the thing he speaks of, "meaningless as it was without function," that could be exploited as a result of its accidental quality for dozens of similarly dazzling passages of prose. Yiddish was almost as foreign to Philip Roth as it was to T.S. Eliot, but since he was reflexively associated with its culture whether or not he wanted to assume its "meekish," "shlemielish" properties, he made a literary career of probing these disjunctions. He found the Yiddish term humorous as a holdover from the immigrant past. For their part, the two Chicago Jews were perfectly at home in Yiddish; like Indian braves who still knew all the stages of the hunt, Bellow and Rosenfeld enjoyed a cultural confidence that was already rare among their contemporaries and almost extinct by the next generation. They entered American culture with the language that drew from the cumulative Jewish experience in Europe, and they valued their inheritance highly for the way it increased their cultural options. But no more than Roth would they have thought of translating modernist classics into their native language. Their idea of culture led from a European Yiddish-speaking past to their American English-speaking present. The Yiddish parody of the Anglo-American master was not intended for Yiddish readers, but for aspirants to high English culture like themselves who were proud of transcending the same immigrant background. The "Shir hashirim" of Mendl Pumshtok marks a rare moment in American Jewish history when writers poised between two languages, representing two cultural communities, could still move in either direction, ahead if they wished into

132

Ruth R. Wisse

English high culture, or back into the immigrant culture from which they had just emerged. Not that bilingualism among that generation of American Jews was surprising in itself. When the majority of American Jews still spoke Yiddish, it would have been odd had the children of Yiddish-speaking immigrants failed to know the language of their homes. In the group around Partisan Review and Commentary with which they were loosely associated, Jews like Lionel Trilling and Delmore Schwartz, who had English-speaking parents, were the exception rather than the rule. But implicit in the transitional bilingualism of first-generation American Jews, especially of its writers and intellectuals, was unilateral movement away from the European Jewish vernacular. So rapid and powerful was the changeover of Jews from Yiddish to English that failure to make the linguistic adjustment seemed funny in itself. That most popular comic novel of the late 1930s, The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N, depends for its humor almost exclusively on the Jewish hero's tenacity and deficiency in trying to master English.5 Kaplan encourages his classmates to follow his example—"Don' give up de sheep, Moskovitz!"— and the book rewarded a generation of greenhorns for having outdistanced Mr. Kaplan by at least enough to appreciate his lapses. Allusion to Yiddish was considered humorous quite apart from its semantic intention, as when a cartoon character heads mistakenly in the wrong direction, or perhaps thoughtlessly off the edge of a precipice.6 The fate of Yiddish in America points to an essential difference between Jewish experience in the new country and the old. Yiddish was the European Jewish vernacular, created in about the twelfth century to express and safeguard a distinctive Jewish way of life in the midst of surrounding peoples. Max Weinreich, renowned historian of Yiddish, called it the language of derekh haShas, the "way of the Talmud," to underscore the religio-national origins and function of the language in expressing and conserving the Jewish way of life; until the modern period, European Jews maintained their own languages as a corollary of distinctiveness, much as did the national groups among whom they settled. Weinreich also demonstrates the degree to which Yiddish continued to incorporate Jewish historical memory. (He might have used the Bellow-Rosenfeld parody as his prooftext.) When Jews in large numbers broke with the Jewish religious tradition toward the end of the nineteenth century, they no longer wished to remain culturally separate from their neighbors, but their adoption of continental languages was slowed by unfriendliness of the surrounding peoples, and occasionally, as in Hungary and Poland, by regenerative Jewish religious and national movements. As late as the 1930s, the critical mass of Yiddish-speakers in Poland and even Soviet Russia still generated a brandnew cohort of modern Yiddish writers. In contrast, Jews in America created no language of their own, and almost without exception, no Jewish writer born there ever wrote in a Jewish language.7 Cynthia Ozick's prediction in 1970 that there would arise a kind of distinctive cultural vocabulary among American Jews that she metaphorically called a "new Yiddish" seemed wildly improbable at the time, and did not prove characteristic of even her own work.8 Whereas in Europe many Jews were badly disappointed in their anticipation of civic equality and social toleration, and were provoked, or

Language as Fate

133

creatively inspired, by the exclusive nationalism of their neighbors to make an ideology out of Yiddish and to breathe new life into Hebrew, no parallel disappointment slowed Jewish linguistic integration into American society. Ideological Hebraism may have played a part in American Zionist circles around the time of the emergence of Israel, but children of that movement were simultaneously mastering English culture, determined to prove America compatible with Israel, by playing baseball in Hebrew, by comparing pioneering values of the two countries. All this is to say that the impulse of two aspiring American writers to aggress against T.S. Eliot in Yiddish was striking in its exceptionalism. That Isaac Rosenfeld published a number of stories in Yiddish and Saul Bellow continued to speak Yiddish with his siblings testifies to their creative possession of the language their parents had brought over with them from Europe. This possession, in turn, allowed them to give notice, at the point of their penetrating English culture, that they intended to enter it as Jews. The Yiddish parody, however, was to remain a coterie amusement, and possession did not imply perpetuation. If it mocked Eliot's attempt to keep Jews out of his cultural tradition, it made no less fun of bringing modernism into Yiddish. In the same way that so many German Jews of the previous century had proven their adoration of German culture by becoming its foremost critics, writers and purveyors, American Jews who came of age in the 1930s felt a possessive love for English literature, determined to make it their own. T.S. Eliot's challenge to the emerging American Jewish writers was actually of a different order than they were prepared to realize at the time. Distressing because it emanated from the highest reaches of American culture—not from the undereducated masses who could be expected to reduce their prejudice as they gained in knowledge, but from the elite that claimed to be perpetuating Anglo-American literary tradition—Eliot's exclusiveness seemed like a personal rebuff. Instead of meeting them halfway and overseeing their entry into American public culture (the way Alfred Kazin imagined the principal of his public school, a man named King, in the image of Jehovah), the great American poet threatened to disqualify them from full participation in American letters because they did not share his tradition. His provocative description of himself as "a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion" insulted not only Jews but every democratic American republican. Of course, the matter was wonderfully complicated by the poet's modernism, since this same confessed traditionalist also argued that every true creative artist creatively subverts the canon of great works and holy writ: his own poetry fractured the tradition he purported to uphold. But ideationally, ideologically, Eliot was assumed to be hankering for cultural time past. He did not share liberalism's optimistic view of a rationally improved future. Insofar as he remained hopeful, he believed that the cultural unification of Western civilization would be based on Christian faith and the classical sources that Europeans inherit in common.9 If one may be permitted the comparison, Eliot's defense of religion resembled the resistance of Orthodox Jews to the desacralization of modern culture. The difference in their traditionalism had to do with contrasting qualities of Jewish and Christian civilizations, the former tribally inward-looking, the latter seeking universal harmony—including through the eclipse of the Jews. For their part, the native-born American Jewish writers and intellectuals typified by Rosenfeld and Bellow and

134

Ruth R. Wisse

Kazin assumed as a matter of course that an altered and desacralized world could only be for the better, because it would no longer require the kinds of divisions that kept Jews and Christians apart. Attracted by the cosmopolitan features of modernism, they were threatened by the notion of an exclusive Christian tradition, just as they would have been by any Jewish "tradition" that tried to claim them in its name. In a sense, Eliot's antisemitism made it too easy for some of his Jewish critics. His mean-spiritedness let them bridle at the discriminatory features of his beliefs while ignoring the fact that any religious civilization assuredly did have something to fear from uprooted cosmopolitans who felt no loyalty to their own traditions and who dismissed religion as a matter of course. Moreover, there were irreducible differences between Christianity and Jewishness that had nothing to do with prejudice. It could be argued even by one wholly sympathetic to Jews that English was the repository of Christian culture, just as America, notwithstanding the judicial separation of church and state, had been founded as a Christian country. In Eliot, the American Jewish intellectuals came up against the unwelcome notion that although they might not want to remain true to their religious traditions, other makers of American culture might want to remain true to theirs. The cultural attitudes of American Jewish writers at mid-century are discussed in three symposia conducted by the Contemporary Jewish Record and its successor Commentary in 1944, 1948 and 1961. Typically limited in what they can tell us about the "generation" they presume to represent, these inquiries are nevertheless based on several general assumptions that remain uncontradicted by the participants: that "writers of Jewish descent are no longer spectators in the development of American letters but full participants in the cultural life of the country" (1944); that English is their sole language (there is no mention of Yiddish or Hebrew in any set of questions); that living as they are off the religious and cultural capital of the past, "their kind of Jewishness provides little hope for the survival of even those Jewish traditions which they admire" (1961).10 Each symposium registers a different social and political climate. The first studies the psychological comfort of its Jewish participants: do they have a conscious attitude toward their heritage or do they merely "reflect" it in an unconscious fashion? How are they affected by their minority status and by their awareness of antisemitism? The second symposium puts the question more bluntly. Leslie Fiedler, like Bellow and Rosenfeld from Chicago, and like them pugnaciously proud of his Jewish background, had published an essay in Commentary asking, "What are we going to do about Fagin?" and it was this question that touched off a major debate on the entry of Jews into the English literary tradition. The forum split along the lines of "assimilationists" and "antiassimilationists," the former prepared to ignore or to minimize anti-Jewishness in the English literary tradition, the latter intent on combating it or creating "alternative myths." Fiedler was convinced that Jews differed from other immigrant groups in the way they remained loyal to the heritage of their fathers: Certainly, the Jews were the only immigrant group which had brought with them a considerable Old World culture to which they clung, refusing to cast it into the melting pot with the same abandon with which southern European or Scandinavian peasants were willing to toss away their few scraps of spiritual goods.11

Language as Fate

135

His unsubstantiated claim about the cultural tenacity of Jews might have been more convincing had he thought to ask not only "What are we going to do about Fagin?" but also "What are we going to do about Moses?" Yet neither he nor any of the forum's other participants indicated any concern for the future of Jewishness or interest in transmitting it. Only in the third symposium, thirteen years after the establishment of the state of Israel, did attention begin to shift away from Christian antisemitism to Jewish selfperpetuation. Norman Podhoretz's editorial questions, omitting any reference to antisemitism, asked a new generation of intellectuals "under forty" whether they felt any obligation to extend the values inherent in Jewish tradition to the next generation; how they regarded the possibility of their children's conversion to another religion; and what loyalty, if any, they felt toward the new Jewish polity. This may have been the first time a member of this intellectual cohort assumed the public posture of Jewish parent rather than Jewish child. Tentatively, hedged by qualifiers, Podhoretz registered his conviction that although every person has an absolute moral right to choose his loyalties, Jews do neither themselves nor the world any great service by an indifference to the future of their people: "[One] ought to feel a sense of 'historic reverence' to Jewish tradition even, or perhaps especially, if one is convinced that the curtain is about to drop on the last act of a very long play." His prompting was hardly heeded. Most members of the younger generation he was addressing shared both their elders' indifference to the Jewish past and their investment in America's secular future. Although they were no longer preoccupied with the hatred directed against them, they remained as a group disdainful of what they considered parochial or chauvinistic limitations. Jason Epstein, who as editor of the New York Review of Books would become the most influential member of this group, wrote in from Lagos, the capital of Nigeria: I have the impression that the traditional human groupings are on the way out. As we hear of new cultures and watch new societies grow, the old ones seem less inevitable. We are all pretty much alone in the world and if we are honest with ourselves, there is little real comfort to be found in the conventional alignments. Perhaps it would be good to feel oneself engaged in a highly auspicious tradition. But 1 happen not to and don't feel at one with those who do. 12

A much more thoughtful response was that of Philip Roth, then known only as the author of Goodbye, Columbus. Roth understood that Jews could ultimately choose to be Jews solely on the basis of religious commitment, not ancestral piety: For myself, I cannot find a true and honest place in the history of believers that begins with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob on the basis of the heroism of these believers, or of their humiliation and anguish. I can only connect with them, and with their descendants, as 1 apprehend their God. And until such time as 1 do apprehend him, there will continue to exist between myself and those others who seek his presence, a question, sometimes spoken, sometimes not, which for all the pain and longing it may engender, for all the disappointment and bewilderment it may produce, cannot be swept away by nostalgia or sentimentality or even by a blind and valiant effort of the will: how are you connected to me as another man is not?13

136

Ruth R. Wisse

On these same religious grounds, Roth was prepared to define what set him apart from the Christian tradition, not on the basis of antisemitism, that is, the Christian's rejection of him, but on the basis of his Judaism, that is, his rejection of the myth of Jesus Christ. Roth felt that although the ancient and powerful Jewish disbelief in Jesus as the son of God was not enough to hold the Jews together as a people, "for the strength with which Jesus continues to be rejected is not equalled by the passion with which the God who gave the Law to Moses is embraced, or approached," it remained a powerful, if generally unacknowledged, affirmative Jewish bond. Roth's minimalism pointed Jews neither backward nor forward as a people, but recognized that only those who were prepared to follow the Jewish God would perpetuate the Jewish people. In this way, he too faced up to the challenge of T.S. Eliot's religious definition of English culture, not as a Jew being excluded from that tradition, but as a rival in the shaping of new American literary traditions. Roth's early story "The Conversion of the Jews" imperfectly expressed the other side of the same argument. It railed at liberal Judaism for its lack of real faith. The child hero of the story is so frustrated by the inadequacy of his religious instruction that he makes his rabbi-teacher agree that an omnipotent God would have been able to arrange for a virgin birth. The author wants to destroy at least the smugness of the faithless rabbi, even if he lacks the courage to take on, according to him, the greater falseness of Christianity. There was something puerile, unlettered, in Roth's grasp of the essential contest between Jews and Christians, as he must have intuited when he consigned his anger to a child hero. Over the years, he never struggled as did his beloved Kafka to apprehend the God he did not know. Nonetheless, Roth's art continued to resist "nostalgia or sentimentality" or the will to go along with social Jewishness as a substitute for following God. Possession of Yiddish still allowed Rosenfeld and Bellow to exploit artistically the richness of the Jewish traditions that the language contained within itself, including its religious resonance and its philosophical complexity. This possession was marvelously demonstrated in the translations they prepared for Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg's 1954 anthology A Treasury of Yiddish Stories that became classics in their own right. Philip Roth could not have translated from Yiddish. His third-generation Jewishness, stripped of cultural substantiveness, found its positive content in withstanding Christianity and antisemitism. All significant encounters with Jewishness in Roth's work are confrontations with such "counterselves" as a hasidic survivor of the Holocaust, Anne Frank, or an American Zionist who has moved to Israel. Jewishness is for him an artistic complication, not part of a cultural resolution. When the writer-protagonist of The Counterlife thinks of circumcising the son who may be born to him, the rite he imagines resembles less the mark of the Covenant than the mark of Cain. Across the street, so to speak, from Rosenfeld and Bellow's literary circle of mostly native-born American Jews was the somewhat larger literary community of Yiddish immigrant writers—writers launched between the world wars who had immigrated to America too late to adopt its common language, at least for the purposes of art. In most other respects, the American Yiddish writers initially shared the worldview of Jewish counterparts who wrote in English, including the same appreciation of

Language as Fate

137

English and American literature. Taking for granted that emancipation meant civic equality, and that Enlightenment required them to find secular alternatives to religious laws, the Yiddish writers considered themselves independent and individualistic, immigrant sons and daughters who had left their fathers far behind (in most cases literally far behind in "the Old Country") in a unidirectional passage from tradition to modernity. If anything, the Yiddish writers were much more radical in their political and literary experimentation than the generation that functioned in English. Most of them, having fled the tsarist empire, accepted the Russian Revolution as the dawn of a new progressive age, and whether or not they trusted the Bolsheviks, they took for granted that an irrevocable change had occurred in human affairs. Their links with Russia were personal and informed. The Yiddish literary community in New York included writers like H. Leivick who had escaped from a tsarist life sentence in Siberia, and the editors of the Communist Frayheyt who pretended to be nominally independent of Soviet directives as they spread the Soviet message. Leftist politics dominated Yiddish intellectual circles in America, with the difference that on this side of the ocean the opposition to Bolshevism remained relatively uncoerced and vocal. So long as immigration from Europe kept replacing the English-speaking children of immigrants with new Yiddish-speaking arrivals, Yiddish writers were surrounded by a vibrant, diversified audience that depended on the native language for anything it wished to know or to read. The avidity with which Jewish writers translated foreign literature into Yiddish shows how determined they were to merge their own culture with others. By the end of the First World War, American Yiddish writers also had two local literary generations to draw upon—the "Sweatshop Poets" of the turn of the century and "The Yunge" of 1907-1919. They felt themselves part of a solid and expanding literature in which they were free to experiment to their heart's content. About a decade before Rosenfeld and Bellow composed their spoof of T.S. Eliot, the Yiddish poet Jacob Glatstein published in Inzikh (Introspection), the magazine he then edited with Aaron Leyeles, a cutting parody entitled "If Joyce Wrote Yiddish," in which he mocked and celebrated literatuches, the assinine local Yiddish literary scene.14 Although the scope of a work like Finnegan's Wake was still beyond the ambitions of Yiddish prose, the fun-filled literary style that James Joyce pioneered in English perfectly suited Yiddish, a European language that had integrated at least as many linguistic strands as English, and could take at least equal delight in showing off its wit. Glatstein and Leyeles' coterie publication was struggling to uphold the standard of literary modernism within the assiduously pragmatic immigrant milieu. The program of Inzikh, first articulated in 1919, called for innovation and personalization of language and form as the essential ingredients of modern verse. Unlike Rosenfeld and Bellow, who were amused by the cultural gap between high English and low Yiddish, Glatstein adapted Joyce, endorsing the Joycean technique as a natural option for Yiddish. It is doubtful whether many readers could have appreciated Glatstein's sophisticated parody of the Yiddish kritiker (critic), whom he called krikgeyter, backslider, and of the Yiddish literary scene in New York. When Patriciano—the Patrician

138

Ruth R. Wisse

defender of aesthetic complexity—declares, "Mir brokhn voynen unter shklorenem umfarshtendakh," he is conflating combinations of the meanings "we have to (broykhn; Germanic) live under [what is] clear [and] comprehensive (klorenem farshtendlakh)" and "we brokenly (tsebrokhn) howl (voyen) under the shekel-clear (connotes also sheker, falsely clear) roof (dakh) of incomprehension (umfarshtendlakh)" alluding to the argument over competing aesthetic criteria of clarity and complexity among Yiddish poets of the time. The puns and word plays going off like firecrackers in this short spoof do not always serve a mature literary purpose, but Glatstein pushes linguistic experimentation about as far as Yiddish ever goes. The poets of Inzikh were uncompromising literary moderns. Mikhl Likht addressed a poem to "T.S.E." praising The Wasteland for its prophetic vision of a life without justice and without judgment. Upbraiding Eliot for his reductionist antihumanism and antisemitism, Likht also declares him better than any of his Yiddish rivals at catching the modern temper of khurbnland. At the same time, Leyeles and Glatstein identified modern Yiddish culture with political progressiveness, and modern poetry with revolutionary change. They tried to find a place for themselves in the Communist paper Frayheyt when it began publication in New York in 1922, and Leyeles retained his ties with the political left until the Second World War. Contributors to Inzikh maintained the Introspectivist custom, which was also the Communist custom, of dehebraizing the spelling of Yiddish words as a sign that Yiddish had neutralized its religious origins, or at least had subordinated the traditional function of the language to the aesthetic demand of "making it new."15 Glatstein regarded the introduction of free verse into Yiddish poetry not merely as a liberating expressive device for himself but as a necessary step forward, so that when certain Yiddish writers continued using or returned to stanzaic rhyme, he hectored them in language worthy of Trotsky: "they have forgotten that there is no way back and that tired steps must fall away and not be permitted to drag back the weaker marchers."16 On the whole, the Glatstein-Leyeles circle of the 1920s tried to sustain the same balance between independent Marxism and literary modernism that seemed so attractive to the Jewish intellectuals associated with Partisan Review and the Contemporary Jewish Record a decade later.17 However, the young English-speaking New York circles had no knowledge of their Yiddish precedecessors. They knew neither the poetry of the group nor the political arguments that had raged between Glatstein, the outright anti-Communist, and Leyeles, the Trotskyist and fellow traveler. Because they were ignorant of Yiddish except as a language of low culture, they assumed that English represented a cultural advancement over the language of their immigrant homes, and therefore took no interest in its writers.18 The intellectual crisis that overtook the American Yiddish literary community in the autumn of 1929 anticipated in almost every respect the shock of the Stalin-Hitler pact ten years later. At the very moment when the great stock market crash and the onset of a worldwide economic depression appeared to offer Marxist proof of the demise of American capitalism, the Communists took a political step so dramatically opposed to Jewish interests and Jewish safety that they provoked a conflict of loyalties in all but their strongest Jewish supporters. The Arab attacks in Palestine against defenseless yeshivah students, as devastating and violent as the worst Eu-

Language as Fate

139

ropean pogroms, were called by some "der driter khurbn."19 But the Communist response horrified American Jews more than the brutality itself. Stalin hailed the pogroms as the first necessary step of an Arab uprising against British and Zionist imperialists. And whether motivated by a desire to court the Arabs or out of hatred for the Jews, Stalin had to be defended by those within the party. Jews who had sought protection from antisemitism in the Socialist International now had to choose between loyalty to the left and loyalty to their people, creating fatal divisions among Jewish elites at the very point when Hitler was coming to power in Germany and opposition to the Jews was becoming a staple of nationalist politics throughout Central and Eastern Europe. In much the same way, but with little sense of precedent, the younger Jewish intellectuals were affected by the Stalin pact with Hitler in 1939. The rising danger to the Jews of Europe throughout the 1930s highlighted the contrast between Yiddish-speaking writers of the immigrant generation and nativeborn American Jews, a contrast so great that it finally turned them in opposite directions. Upon starting out, each new literary cohort had claimed freedom from the kind of communal obligations that traditionally united the Jewish people; certainly, Yiddish as well as English writers felt that in America they could indulge their individuality thanks to guaranteed freedom of expression and the absence of collective reprisal against the Jews. The sense of limits came from another source entirely: since only Jews spoke Yiddish, the fate of the language limited the prospects of the Yiddish writer. Literary theories of individualism, Introspectivism, futurism and modernism— in English, French, or even in minority languages like Czech—were all predicated on a certain level of stability within the language community as a whole. The case of Yiddish turned out to be different. In Europe, America and Palestine, the Jewish people transformed itself, and was forcibly transformed, more radically than literature could imagine. The degree to which literary experimentation depends on linguistic stability can only be grasped once a language is seriously threatened, and its experimenters turned into conservationists. This trend began to be apparent in Russia and America well before the destruction of European Jewry in the Second World War. Jewishness might or might not matter to the Jew who was writing in English, because with the English market expanding, he had a guaranteed artistic future. Even his occasional Jewish subject did not require an audience of Jews, especially as he was so rarely inclined to align it with specifically Jewish values. But "Jewishness" had to matter to the Yiddish writer, who depended on Jews to keep his language alive. The conditions of Yiddish publishing had in any event promoted interdependency between American Yiddish writers and their European counterparts in Poland and Russia (many a Soviet writer would later forfeit his life for these routine contacts with colleagues overseas). Yiddish writers got their books published in Warsaw and reviewed in Moscow, sometimes making their reputations on the basis of their European rather than American reception. At the same time, the major institutions of American Yiddish culture, notably the Yiddish press and the Yiddish theater, became more focused on Europe as Jewish immigration to America dwindled and as the American-oriented audiences moved into the English sector. In sum, the more

140

Ruth R. Wisse

Jewish immigrants passed into the American mainstream, the more Yiddish culture felt the strength of its ties to the home community. Forward and Future (Foverts and Tsukunft) were the names of the leading American Yiddish daily and monthly, founded at the turn of the century on socialist principles. Already implicit in the Enlightenment, let alone the Marxist, worldview of these publications was an orientation toward the future, not the past. Just as the need for Yiddish had once arisen from the strong attachment of Jews to their Godinspired way of life, so the need to abandon Yiddish arose when Jews transferred their allegiance to universalist philosophies of progress, and even more so to revolutions that would alter human behavior through force of will. Writers who had once insisted that the connection between Judaism and Yiddish had grown arbitrary, secularized along with its speakers, came to recognize the innate connection between language and the people whose language it is. As one sign of this recognition, American Yiddish writers began to reach back for historical subjects and characters. Sholem Asch, Joseph Opatoshu, H. Leivick, A. Leyeles, Jacob Glatstein, Menahem Boreisho, I.J. Singer, and later Isaac Bashevis Singer not only attempted but specialized in the historical subject. Bashevis Singer went so far as to argue that Yiddish virtually required American writers to write about the past, since their language had never successfully taken root in the new soil. The point was made with startling passion by Jacob Glatstein in what is probably the most famous American Yiddish poem, the only Yiddish poem of the century that approximates Hayim Nahman Bialik's "Be'ir Hahareigah" in its contemporary impact. About the time that Rosenfeld and Bellow were composing their jibe at Eliot, Glatstein's "A gute nakht, velt," dated by the author April 1938, reversed the direction of what had heretofore been considered the inevitable movement from a dim past to a brighter future: A gute nakht, breyte velt Groyse, shtinkentike velt. Nisht du, nor ikh farhak dem toyer. Mit dem langn khalat, Mit der fayerdiker, geler lat, Mit dem shtoltsn trot, Oyf mayn eygenem gebot— Gey ikh tsurik in geto. (Good night, wide world / Big stinking world! / Not you but I slam shut the gate. With my long gaberdine /My fiery, yellow patch / With proud step, / At my sole command / I go back into the ghetto.)20 The opening salvo is aimed at poetry itself. It is not merely rude in the way modern verse uses vulgar diction to sting art back to life. The lines "Good night, wide world / Big stinking world" resist poetry's essential requirement of organizing emotion and thought in a brand-new way. The second stanza, too, opens with coarse invective against the "Swinish German, hateful Polack / Thievish Amalekite—land of swill and guzzle." The poet who a decade earlier had promised to rescue poetry from all that is raw and flat now resorts to the raw, flat vocabulary of a fishmonger. He slams the gate on Western civilization by tearing up his own passport.

Language as Fate

141

This poem is strongly reminiscent of the moment at the Passover seder when the Jew recites the "Shfoykh khamoskho," inviting God to pour out His wrath on gentiles who do not recognize Him. Uncharacteristically aggressive, the Jew opens the door for just long enough to pronounce his curse. God would be perfectly capable of hearing the Jew's prayers from behind closed doors (as He presumably hears the psalms of the Hallel that follows), and were it possible to argue with the neighbors out in the open, the threat of God's vengeance would be quite unnecessary. Thus, the drama of resistance, though directed toward others, is enacted by the Jew for himself alone. In order to experience his moral freedom for once at the seder, he attacks his relentless enemies "in public." Adopting this same ambiguous posture, Glatstein's poet-Jew seizes the initiative from his tormentors to proclaim through the open gate that he is about to shut it. Since he speaks in his language, not theirs, the wit of his barbs cannot smite his enemies (the way David's pebble slew mighty Goliath) but only stir the Jews who are huddled behind him. The poet-Jew resembles his diaspora ancestor in having only words for weapons, but he is different in being already part of the gentile world. Having identified his future with gentile culture, he cannot call upon the God he abandoned. It was he who found the Jewish teachings insufficient, the Jewish street too narrow, the traditional Jewish outlook too slow and too dark; he can hardly blame the gentiles for having darkened his world, when he is the one who hailed them as bearers of the greater light. Whereas his ancestor had spoken out from within an interior of moral radiance, the modern Jew has behind him a denuded Jewish world of his own making. How then can he curse his enemies with both his dignity and honesty intact? The poem's raw opening lines introduce this great emotional and intellectual complication. To slam the gate on his deniers, the Jew must reverse the categories of modern history. He must set his future course backwards, "tsurik" into the ghetto. "Kheyrem," excommunication, is pronounced not on the Jew who goes to join the world but by the Jew on the world he once went to join. Direct speech must redirect language to its proper course: what once seemed obvious was obviously mistaken. Enlightenment was a journey into night. Progress unleashed barbarism. As in olden days, the Jew alone may escape the Flood—the moral contamination of the world— this time not because he was chosen by God, but because he was singled out for exclusion by the European hordes. Barred now from the civilization he was so desperate to enter, the Jew can quit Sodom by reaffirming his life as Jew. This painful reversal includes the sacrifice of aesthetic refinement. It requires a return from electricity to kerosene, cramped ghetto over continental expanse, dust over cleanliness. It requires the sacrifice of even what the Jews themselves contributed to Western civilization: A gute nakht. Kh'gib dir, velt, tsushtayer Ale mayne bafrayer. Nem tsu di yezusmarxes, verg zikh mit zeyer mut. Krapir iber a tropn fun undzer getoyft blut. (Good night. I give you in good measure / All my redeemers; / Take your Jesus Marxes; choke on their daring. / Croak on each drop of our baptized blood.)

142

Ruth R. Wisse

As in Bialik's poem, the speaker's rage helps to mask the deeper anxiety of his political helplessness and his renunciation—of residual religious faith in Bialik's case, of humanist faith in Glatstein's. As Noah withdrew into the lonely ark, the modern Jew reluctantly returns to "cankered Jewish life." Yet Glatstein's Jew purports to find in his return to the ghetto the ageless hope of regeneration that sustained Noah in his ark and the Jews in their centuries of anticipating the messiah. When he concludes, "S'veynt in mir di freyd fun kumen" ("The joy of homecoming weeps in me"), he is being not ironic but contradictory, yoking the pleasure and relief of his voluntary homecoming to the irremediable pain of denying Western progress. Glatstein's voyage back to his native Lublin in 1934 to visit his dying mother had exposed him to both the crisis of his declining family and to the desperate straits of local Jews. He concluded that Jewish life in Poland was virtually doomed, and consigned this informed perspective to the protagonist of his autobiographical novels, Ven Yash iz geforn, 1938, and Ven Yash iz gekumen, 1940, translated into English as Homeward Bound and Homecoming at Twilight, and to many of the poems of Gedenklider (Poems of Remembrance), published in 1943. Glatstein does not accept Sartre's proposition that the Jew must confront fate in the form of his enemy. He exhorts the Jew to beat a strategic retreat from the Wasteland of modern life, leaving the gentiles to choke on the world they have created. A year after his return from Poland, Glatstein published what may be considered a prefatory essay to "A gute nakht velt," about the attempt of Yiddish writers to "march to the gentiles" by getting themselves translated into English. He recalled that when the Yiddish novelist David Bergelson visited America in 1928, the first thing he said upon being introduced to Glatstein was: "They tell me you know your way around English books. So how can I get Midas hadin (By the Letter of the Law) translated into English?" Bergelson's recent conversion to Communist orthodoxy and his desire for English fame appeared to Glatstein as two sides of the same greedy ambition. Glatstein also accused Sholem Asch (at the opposite end of the political spectrum) of feeding his translator no more than eight hundred Yiddish words so that he could easily be rendered into basic English: Scratch any Jew and out leaps a vulgar assimilator. He is ready to give up everything he owns, his book, his newspaper, his language, all for the sake of Tatar, Albanian, Bulgarian, or, with due distinction, the Holy Tongue. Apart from being a born assimilator, the Yiddish writer is also a nervous perambulator; he never stops moving. He goes over to the Hebraists, to the Communists, to the IKOR [an acronym for Jewish Colonization in Russia, a Communist organization that supported settlement of Birobidzan], or else he goes right over to the gentiles.21

The anger of "Good Night, World" is here directed against Jewish writers for their undignified flight from Jewishness. Glatstein is contemptuous of colleagues who think they can transcend or deny the threatened world of Yiddish. He contrasts these "linguistic hermaphrodites" with artists of another sort, writers who chew their way into the language ("vos fresn zikh ayn direkt in der shprach"), making it difficult for anyone to translate the texts without tearing them straight from their mother's womb:

Language as Fate

143

If you will, this second kind of art is national art. If you will, it is Proust, Joyce, Pushkin, Gogol, Sholem Aleichem, Bialik . . . who sought their freedom in the nar rowest discipline of their own language, measuring out words like pharmacists, working within the possibilities or limits of their own tongue. And what difference does it make if Pushkin, Bialik, or Joyce cannot be easily transposed into foreign languages? . . . Who cares if a great Albanian or a great Rumanian poet remains unknown in Alaska? After all, what meaning can one claim for international ideals transmitted through literature in the light of a world literature that kept refining more and more until it produced Hitlerism and Mussolinism?22

Collapsing aesthetic and political arguments into one, this passage argues 1) that the greatest literature is essentially national, its greatness being that which is least translatable; 2) that this national aspect of literature is benign (when the content of its nationalism is benign); 3) that the idea of literature as an instrument of internationalism is as politically stupid as it is aesthetically misguided; 4) that the drive toward such universalist ideals as a "world literature"—a literature transcending national boundaries—has resulted not in international harmony but in megalomaniacal politics. Glatstein does not dismiss all literature on the grounds of political impotence. He says that while European culture bred German and Italian fascism, Jewish culture did not.23 The fullest realization of these arguments came in his poetry. By the time he wrote this essay, he had published Yidishtaytshn (translated by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav as Exegyiddish), poems that resist translation by seeking out the specificities of language in just the way he explains. Burrowing into Yiddish, Glatstein felt that he was not only closing the door on a potential international public but burying himself in the fate of the most threatened part of the Jewish people. In his immediate circle, where the association of nationalism with "bourgeois" had been as automatic as Russia with revolution, the increasing Jewishness of his work marginalized him even among the writers he knew best. Yet poetry required that he "seek his freedom in the narrowest discipline of his language," like Pushkin, who once flirted with high status French, but then "doomed himself in Russian and became Russia's national poet." The moral responsibility for the Jews followed from artistic responsibility to the Jewish language. Glatstein never abandoned personal poetry in favor of national poetry, as many of his critics charged. He continued to filter experience through the prism of the self, but his self had changed through the experience of being a Yiddish poet. The more inventively he used the Jewish language, the more Jewish he became. He came to believe that a master craftsman had to experience the fate of his language as his own. By the Second World War, the internal logic of Yiddish claimed even the most Americanized of Yiddish writers, Abraham Cahan. Less concerned than Glatstein with the aesthetics of language, Cahan was also drawn into Jewishness through association with Yiddish, and although his case is in no way typical, it is important by virtue of his importance. Cahan had begun his career as an apostle of socialism, and in one of his early books, Di neshome yeseyre, he attributed to socialism the qualities of the "supplementary soul" that Jews had traditionally associated with the

144

Ruth R. Wisse

Sabbath. Prolific in Russian, Yiddish and English, Cahan described (in a fivevolume autobiography written in Yiddish in the mid-1920s) how much he had enjoyed his early stint as an English journalist and writer of fiction, before he became permanent editor of the Forward in 1902. His first English sketches had won him high praise from William Dean Howells as a chronicler of the Jewish ghetto, and he was indirectly responsible for the classic Spirit of the Ghetto, having guided his journalist-colleague Hutchins Hapgood through the Jewish quarter of the Lower East Side. Cahan also enthusiastically promoted Russian literature, cultivating an appreciation for Russian socialism and Russian fiction among American writers much as Philip Rahv was to do in the 1940s. The complete cultural arbiter, Cahan introduced his fellow Americans to what he considered the best of the European spirit, and then taught his fellow Jews all about America, starting with its language. We await the biography of Abraham Cahan that will tell this story in all its complexity.24 For now, it is enough to know that Cahan mastered English well enough to earn his living in English journalism, that his English fiction included an American classic, The Rise of David Levinsky, and that he stepped into American culture with the confidence of a benefactor. Nevertheless, eschewing Levinsky's road to success, Cahan remained within the community of Yiddish-speakers, which meant that as the years passed, he shared more and more of their national perspective. Much as he tried to stay aloof from the political infighting of the immigrant groups, he was exposed to the worsening news that they received about the home communities in Europe, and he was forced to cast about as they did for national solutions. Cahan's visit to Palestine in September 1925, after which he opened the pages of the Forward to sympathetic discussions of Zionism, has been called "a decisive moment in the history of American Jewry's support for ... the Jewish homeland."25 And his intensifying identification with the national cause did not stop with reconciliation to Zionism. The very last book Cahan wrote, in 1941, opens and ends with this pronouncement: I am not religious. I am a thoroughgoing freethinker. But I respect the traditions of our people, and the attitude of Jewish freethinkers like myself to Sholem Asch's new road is essentially the attitude of religious Jews.26

Despite the fact that Cahan had championed Sholem Asch and had been publishing his work for almost forty years, he refused to serialize Der man fun natseret (The Nazarene) when he determined that Asch "accepted the New Testament on faith." According to Cahan, the New Testament was the book that divided the Christian religion from the Jewish; Asch transgressed Jewish boundaries when he suggested that this division (mekhitse) be erased, and more, when he placed Jesus above Moses and the Prophets. Cahan's publicized independence of Jewish public opinion makes it clear that he entered the melee over Asch's putative embrace of Christianity not on behalf of his readers, but on his own behalf, because of what he called his "respect for the traditions of our people." He could not accept the publication in Yiddish of a work that challenged Jewish historical memory at its most vulnerable point, and beyond denying its author publication in his newspaper, he found it

Language as Fate

145

necessary to polemicize against him. Asch was Glatstein's example of the aesthetic defector, Cahan's example of the religious defector. It is hard to imagine either of these two confirmed cosmopolitans identifying with the "attitude of religious Jews" had they been in the milieu of the English writer. America's hospitality is best represented by the hegemony of English that invites all newcomers to participate in civic debate and to help shape the culture. Desacralized English in America tempts the Jew into believing that a neutral language can be possessed and shaped by all its speakers alike. During the interwar period when immigration from Europe fell off to a trickle, the transition from Yiddish to English on the part of American Jews was so quick and thorough that language appeared to present no "problem" in the process of acculturation. Native-born Jews spoke and wrote English as a matter of course, while writers like Isaac Rosenfeld and Saul Bellow who knew Yiddish well enjoyed the added cultural advantage of drawing from Jewish sources and being able to mock the alienating features of English. The object of their parody, T.S. Eliot, regarded language as something more than an exchangeable vehicle of expression. He regretted and warned against the desacralization of English, seeing language as the repository of tradition in culture. For their part, the Jewish writers were prepared to compete with Eliot for the right to interpret and even to "represent" American culture. They did not appreciate his association of English with Christianity that would have placed them at the same disadvantage Jews were experiencing in Europe. Eliot's retirement to England allowed them to hope that the English "tradition" as he defined it did not relate to America at all. Even those Jewish writers who took Eliot most seriously as a poet and critic, and who considered the implication of becoming writers in an "antisemitic" tradition, did not take up the other side of the question, namely, the cultural and moral impoverishment they would experience with the loss of their own language tradition. They did not perceive the change of language as a necessary shift of loyalties. Yet it should be noted that some American Yiddish writers who were T.S. Eliot's contemporaries came to understand language just as he did, as the repository of their religious, cultural, and political Jewish values. At the basic level of self-interest, they realized that since the vitality of a language depends on the survival of its speakers, any threat to Yiddish threatened their own future. In crude terms, the use or non-use of Yiddish played a decisive role in determining the attitude of American Jewish writers to the fate of their coreligionists in Europe: American Yiddish writers cared obsessively about the war against the Jews in Europe while American Jewish writers ignored it almost completely. At a much deeper level, artistic considerations inspired the "resacralization" of Yiddish at its moment of trial. The literary theory of Introspectivism may have given the Yiddish writer leave to experience the world entirely in his own way, but it was precisely this exploration of personal origins and personal experience that led him to acknowledge his connection with Jewish destiny. Jacob Glatstein and T.S. Eliot came to similar conclusions within very different cultural traditions. Although their view of language as the crucible of national identity goes against the American

146

Ruth R. Wisse

grain, it still remains to be seen whether American English can become the repository of Jewishness in defiance of their predictions.

Notes 1. Saul Bellow discusses the text in his introduction to Isaac Rosenfeld, An Age of Enormity: Life and Writing in the Forties and Fifties, ed. Theodore Solotaroff (Cleveland: 1962), 12-13. See also Chaim Raphael, "Yiddish or Hebrew, a kasheh for Elijah," in the Jewish Chronicle Literary Supplement, 6 June 1980; and Gene Bluestein, "PrufrockShmufrock," in Yiddish 1, no. 1 (1987), 53-56. 2. From The Letters ofDelmore Schwartz , ed. Robert Phillips (Princeton: 1984), we see that Schwartz intended to write a book about Eliot, and that he defended him against criticism of his "reactionary" views. 3. Chaim Raphael, "Yiddish or Hebrew," compares the Yiddish translation with an unidentified Hebrew translation, and draws some general conclusions about the two Jewish languages: "In Yiddish, even as a joke, the writer carries in his mind a huge frame of reference to an unbroken past, half-remembered and ill-understood for much of the time but always evocative of the centuries of wandering." Raphael believes that as a European tongue, Yiddish can more readily capture the flavor of T.S. Eliot than modern Hebrew, which lacks the amalgam of the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds. Raphael's informative comparison does not take into account that the Rosenfeld-Bellow, precisely because it was a joke, felt free to parody rather than reproduce features of the original, without any sense of having to deliver its formal elegance. 4. Philip Roth, Operation Shylock (New York: 1993), 116. 5. Leonard Q. Ross [Leo C. Rosten] The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N (New York: 1937). 6. I recall that in 1971, at the third annual conference on the Association for Jewish Studies, when a professor of linguistics brought his first learned example in Yiddish, his audience of university professors broke into laughter. 7. When Heershadovid Menkes (Katz) began publishing his Yiddish fiction in Great Britain in 1992, he announced that he was probably the first American-born Yiddish writer. 8. Cynthia Ozick, "America: Toward Yavneh," Judaism 19, no. 3 (summer 1970), 264282. I took issue with this prediction (long since modified by Ozick) in "American Jewish Writing, Act II," Commentary 61, no. 6 (June 1976), 40-45. 9. T.S. Eliot, To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings (London: 1965), 15. With respect to the discussion that follows about modernism of American Yiddish writers, Mikhl Likht translated T.S. Eliot' s essay "The Complete Critic" in Undzer bukh 2, no. 3 (JulyAug. 1927), 241-251; and "Tradition and the Individual Talent" in Undzer bukh 2, no. 5 (Nov.-Dec.), 415-438. 10. "Under Forty: A Symposium on American Literature and the Younger Generation of American Jews," in Contemporary Jewish Record (Feb. 1944), 3-36; "The Jewish Writer and the English Literary Tradition," in Commentary (Sept. 1949), 209-219; (Oct. 1949), 361373; "Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals," in Commentary (April 1961), 306-359. I intend to take up this material in greater detail in a subsequent study of American Jewish intellectuals. The quotation is from the introductory comments by editor Norman Podhoretz on p. 310. 11. Leslie Fiedler, "'Partisan Review': Phoenix or Dodo?" Perspectives USA, no. 15 (spring 1956), 85. 12. Jason Epstein, "Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals," 319-320. 13. Philip Roth, "Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals," 350-351. 14. Jacob Glatstein, "Ven dzoys volt geshribn yidish," Inzikh, no. 5 (July 1928), 68-70. 15. "Make it New" was one of the artistic injunctions of Ezra Pound, the favorite of Mikhl Likht—one of the poets associated with Inzikh, who also translated T.S. Eliot's essays. 16. Jacob Glatstein, "Inzikh tsum dritn mol," Inzikh 3, no. 1 (March 1928), 4.

Language as Fate

147

17. I treat a related aspect of this subject in "Jewish Writers on the New Diaspora," in The Americanization of the Jews, ed. Robert M. Seltzer and Norman J. Cohen (New York and London: 1995), 60-78. 18. Through the Labor Zionist publication Jewish Frontier, Yiddish intellectuals did make contact with American-born Jewish college students; and Commentary published occasional translations from Yiddish. But I believe that Irving Howe's collaboration with Eliezer Greenberg on the Treasury of Yiddish Stories, published in 1954, marked the first literary cooperation between members of the two groups as equals. 19. Naomi W. Cohen, The Year after the Riots: American Responses to the Palestine Crisis of 1929-30 (Detroit: 1988), ii. 20. This passage and the following one are slightly modified versions of the translation by Marie Syrkin in Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (eds.), A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry (New York: 1969), 333-334. Copyright (c) 1969 by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg; reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Co., Inc. 21. Y.G-n. (Yankev Glatstein), "Der marsh tsu di goyim," Inzikh Third series, no. 14 (July 1935), 55-62. The quote here is from p. 57. 22. Ibid., 60. 23. In an article the previous year the writer Chaim Liberman had confessed his despair by saying farewell to literature on the grounds that it had become a handmaiden to tyrants in Russia, Germany and Italy. He was especially devastated by the failure of German literature to oppose Hitler. Taking for his motto the rhyme "Di literatur/iz a hur (whore)," he said that since his American gas oven did not allow him to burn his books, he would cut them up with scissors and throw them out the window. "A briv," in Oyfkum 9, no. 1-2 (Jan.-Feb. 1934), 18-24. 24. Moses Rischin, editor of Cahan's collected journalism, Grandma Never Slept Here, has made this his life's work. 25. Albert Waldinger, "Abraham Cahan and Palestine," Jewish Social Studies 39, no. 1-2 (1977), 75. 26. Abraham Cahan, Sholem ash's nayyer veg (New York: 1941).

The Grapes of Roth: "Diasporism' Between Portnoy and Shylock Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi (THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY)

When the European Jewish civilization that had accommodated galut, or exile, as a "provisional" but viable Jewish condition, suspended between memories of destruction and visions of redemption, was itself destroyed in the middle of this century, it appeared that outside of the religious imagination and a few nostalgic shudders, it could no longer furnish a normative model for the rehabilitation of Jewish life. A majority of Jews continued to live outside of the Holy Land even after the founding of the state of Israel, but the philosophical and cultural apparatus for validating life in exile had been shattered. Isaac Bashevis Singer, over decades of postwar writing, provided an imagined geography in Eastern Europe uncontaminated by foreshadowings of catastrophe; yet his was a unique, idiosyncratic presence in Jewish letters. The last decades of the century have witnessed a radical reshifting of centers of gravity. Primarily in France and in America, the existential virtues of life in exile and the essence of Judaism as a culture in exile have reconverged as a new philosophical-political platform. When "nomadism" competes with "nativism" not only in the academy at large but among Jews who are increasingly ambivalent and puzzled over the uses and abuses of Israeli power; when "narrativity" is the ascendant order of the imagination and the storyteller once again competes with the soldier for cultural privilege, "Diasporism," in its more sanitized versions, becomes as politically correct as Zionism was twenty-five years ago. In his novel Operation Shylock: A Confession,1 Philip Roth has added his voice to the growing chorus of "diasporists" in the academy and the arts. It is a cultural statement that not only finds value in recuperating discarded or defunct models, like crinolines crumbling in an old attic trunk; it is part of a postmodern search for value in the interstices, in the outskirts and peripheries of sacred centers and in the imagination of alternative worlds. Operation Shylock is rather surprising in its grimness. Roth's readers had gotten accustomed to that series of acrobatic feats by which he had helped to rescue Jewish humor from the dustbin of Jewish history. It didn't really matter all that much whether Alex Portnoy masturbated into a piece of liver or his sister's underclothes. What mattered then was that he did it on the pages of Jewish fiction, succeeded in 148

The Grapes of Roth

149

delighting many Jews and enraging many others—and their rabbis (defenders of the faith)—and, eventually, in changing the norms and the proprieties of American Jewish literature. This time, however, the stakes are even higher and hardly comic: nothing short of a global reshuffling of Jewish populations and a total redefinition of Jewish civilization. Operation Shy lock is a narrative that, by its own admission, aspires to be "something more drastic than a mere book."2 And if it turns out to be drastic as a book, that is, as an act of fiction whose conventional mandate and popular appeal lie in its potential for entertainment or edification, its main achievement lies in enacting some of the more ludicrous or lurid dimensions of a larger cultural agenda. In the process, it seems to lurch recklessly between the worlds we invent and the world we inhabit. The "real" world is Jerusalem of the Demjanjuk trial and the intifada. Connecting these two realms is the figure of a man who claims to be Philip Roth and who espouses the theory that in the late twentieth century, as for so many centuries before Hitler, the diaspora remains the only viable place for Jews and that the Jews of Israel, or at least the Ashkenazim among them, who face imminent destruction at the hands of the Arabs, should be dispatched back to Warsaw, Prague, Berlin and Kiev (after the remaining antisemites in those places have undergone a process of rehabilitation to rid them of their lingering prejudices): "'For the European Jews, Israel has been a ... temporary interlude in the European saga that it is time to resume.' "3 His encounters with the narrator, Philip Roth, and the latter's encounters with Hebrew writer Aharon Appelfeld, with a number of Palestinians and members of the Israeli Mossad, highlight a roster of characters who claim varying degrees of extratextual status and credibility. There are, then, as Hillel Halkin points out in his review of the book, three Philip Roths in Shy lock: Philip Roth the author of the novel, Philip Roth the authornarrator in the novel and "Philip Roth" the imposter—who comes to be referred to alternatively as "Moishe Pipik."4 "I've been putting myself in difficulties like this all my life," admits the narrator; "but, up till now, by and large in fiction. How exactly do I get out of this?"5 What it is that he is trying to "get out of" may be the clue to something quite extraordinary hidden beneath the refracted surface of interlocking mirrors. This struggle can be construed on one level as the attempt of an author—who as a young man seemed intent on writing the naughtiest page of the Jewish Story—to enter his seventh decade with less animosity and maybe even some plaudits from the other elders of the tribe. On another level, given the endless diatribes delivered by different characters representing interested parties, the struggle appears to be a contest between Zionism and Diasporism for priority in the late twentieth century. Both of these readings boil down to a choice that is at the heart of this novel and of nearly everything Roth has written in the last twenty-five years: between life as "fiction" and life as "fact," between fiction that is diasporic privilege, unmoored and fanciful, and fact as the ingathering of the material, obligatory world. Of course we have already crossed the great divide between Life and Fiction under the auspices of this author and have come to acknowledge its value as a postmodern credential: every astute reader of the Zuckerman series, of The Facts (1988) and The

150

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi

Counterlife (1986), has been subject to the vertigo of self-invention and the endless parade through the looking glass and back again. These last two novels were particularly dense experiments in trying on alternative destinies and rescuing one's dear ones from their mistakes and their coronaries through the power of the pen. The Counterlife is built on the idea of constructed lives and the divine power of the writer to imagine, simultaneously, the road taken and the roads not taken. What Nathan Zuckerman defines as his fabricated identity may capture the protean profile of the Jew in the twentieth century: Being Zuckerman is one long performance and the very opposite of what is thought of as being oneself. In fact, those who most seem to be themselves appear to me people impersonating what they think they might like to be, believe they ought to be, or wish to be taken to be by whoever is setting standards. So in earnest are they that being in earnest is the act. For certain self-aware people, however, this is not possible: to imagine themselves being themselves, living their own real, authentic, or genuine life, has for them all the aspects of a hallucination.6

Such an affirmation of fragmented or masked selves is also an assault on the modernist creation of a new Jewish subjectivity. The Zionist dream of transforming the Jewish self into something utterly other may have been the greatest act of impersonation in modern Jewish history; nonetheless, it is predicated on the return of ontology as Jewish reference, on the valorization of the here and now that signals the end of a sense of exile. That is why Shy lock could represent a watershed in popular Jewish self-representation: because it is there that the game of fact and fiction has found its objective correlative in the renewed struggle between Israel and diaspora for a place of privilege in the economy of the post-Holocaust Jewish imagination. In this narrative the struggle manifests itself as an act of poetic license; never in Roth's fiction has authorial intervention been so consequential. The fate of whole peoples now appears to lie in the balance. Shylock therefore represents a departure, but not so much because it signifies the author's return to the fold, or as Halkin puts it, a move from "me" to "us" that acknowledges the "authorial debt" to fathers, mothers, and the Jewish fraternity at large.7 Roth, after all, has been paying public penance for Portnoy for two and a half decades, going so far in his novel The Ghost Writer as to resurrect Anne Frank so that he could bring her as a prospective fiancee to every Jewish mother who personally identified with the long-suffering Sophie Portnoy ("Nathan, is she Jewish?" "Yes . . . [she's] Anne Frank.").8 The ultimate "authorial debt" that Roth pays for audacious acts of poetic license may lie rather in the temptation to relinquish authorship altogether by capitulating to a Hebrew space where devarim (words) are also things, an object-world that reifies our fictions. And even if he never fully capitulates, that pull bears the weight of gravity itself. It is a process that unfolds in stages over three decades. In Israel twenty-eight years ago, Portnoy found his sexual nemesis in the person of Naomi, the emasculating sabra: "Where other Jews find refuge, sanctuary and peace, Portnoy now perishes" wailed this latter-day Hamlet, impaled, as it were, on his own limp member.9 Portnoy's Complaint, published in 1967, ends with the protagonist singing desper-

The Grapes of Roth

151

ately, "'Im-po-tent in Is-rael, da da daaah,'" to the tune of "Lullaby in Birdland." Admitting to Naomi that he is the "epitome of what was most shameful in 'the culture of the Diaspora,'" this character, who has worked so hard to "put the id back in 'Yid,'" is sent skulkingly back home, "back into the exile" of the psychiatrist's couch.10 It was from that supine position, a few months later, that Alex Portnoy would have watched the Israeli soldiers on television as they enacted the spectacular military equivalent of the sexual victory of the re-embodied Jew in Israel over the disempowered diaspora Jew. It is the very moment when the shlemiel as cultural hero is superseded by what Paul Breines calls the "tough Jew," when "images of Jewish wimps and nerds are being supplanted by those of the hardy, bronzed kibbutznik, the Israeli paratrooper, and the Mossad agent."11 In spite of the author's deliberate disengagement from the pieties of selfrepresentation found in other Jewish writing of the 1950s and 1960s, Roth's impotent characters call to mind the fantasies of violence that characters like Bernard Malamud's "Fixer" and Saul Bellow's Herzog prove incapable of carrying out. They contrast markedly and dialectically with the violent fantasies that are realized, often but not exclusively in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, in Hebrew literature of those same years.12 "When I was younger my Jewish betters used to accuse me of writing short stories that endangered Jewish lives—would that I could! A narrative as deadly as a gun!" confesses the narrator of Operation Shylock.13 And yet when Roth himself returns to Israel in Operation Shylock, he encounters the self-identified, latter-day diasporist as a Jew for whom authenticity as a Jew means living in the Diaspora, for whom the Diaspora is the normal condition and Zionism is the abnormality—a Diasporist is a Jew who believes that the only Jews who matter are the Jews of the Diaspora, that the only Jews who will survive are the Jews of the Diaspora, that the only Jews who are Jews are the Jews of the Diaspora.14

What has happened to turn powerlessness into a competing cultural claim? Once again Roth's hero is defeated in Israel, but this time it is a different kind of battle fought with weapons—the pen and the sword—no less phallic but more consequential. Israel has become the place where Reality writ large has the same effect on the psyche as Naomi did on the libido. First the phallus and then the "fictus" of the diaspora Jew are blunted by the reality of Israel. "Exile," now redefined as "Diaspora," is no longer limited to the realm of therapy but extends to the much larger realm of fiction. There is in fact an immanent connection between the two. Israel, after all, was founded on the premise of a Jewish emergence from the state of dreaminess. The dream is necessary as blueprint but is superseded by the will ("im tirzu ein zu agadah"—"if you will it, it is not a dream"); its realization abolishes desire. (When the century was young, another Utopian enterprise was being launched on another continent, also founded on the unabashed principle of impersonation and dreamenactment: the Jewish empire in Hollywood and the images that came to be associated with its reproduction in the mass media. The difference between the two is that Hollywood's mandate is to continue to spin dreamscapes, while Israel as Utopia

152

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi

Realized is the place where dreams must be fulfilled—or abandoned. In the words of the commercial poster based on a common orthographic error: ISRAEL is REAL. . . .) With the physical dimensions of the Jewish story again confined to a single space, with the territorialization of the dreamscape, there is, officially, no more room for dreaminess. It is the dreamers, then, who continue to cause trouble by imagining alternative worlds and undermining the ontology of the created world. The writers of fictions, especially those who are not socialist realists, remain dreamers. So it is the authenticity of self-invention, the privilege to dream and to create counterlives, that both "Philip Roths" are defending in Operation Shy lock, and the diaspora is presented as the only place where that is still legitimate. Even if Diasporism is espoused by a madman and an impostor, he does bear the name of the author and the limited and retractable but nonetheless signficant claim to authorship. In its front-page review of Operation Shy lock, the New York Times Book Review portrayed Roth as a composite figure of Moses and Ahasver, holding tablets and a staff against an urban backdrop.15 The Wandering Jew is always a storyteller. Where Eastern Europe is the reference, antiquity and loquacity appear to be his primary characteristics. In "The Prague Orgy," which constitutes the epilogue to Roth's Zuckerman trilogy, the narrator describes Prague as the very place he had imagined the Jewish homeland to be when as a child he collected money for the Jewish National Fund: What I privately pictured the Jews able to afford with the nickels and dimes I collected was a used city, a broken city, a city so worn and grim that nobody else would even put in a bid. . . . In this used city, one would hear endless stories being told—on benches in the park, in kitchens at night, while waiting your turn at the grocery or over the clothesline in the yard, anxious tales of harassment and flight, stories of fantastic endurance and pitiful collapse. What was to betoken a Jewish homeland to an impressionable, emotional nine-year-old child . . . was, first, the overpowering oldness of the homes . . . ; second were the stories . . . the construction of narrative out of the exertions of survival. This process, long the burden and privilege of Jews, becomes the common lot under Communist and other repressive regimes: "where the literary culture is held hostage,. . . stories aren't simply stories; it's what they have instead of life. . . ,"16 So it is natural that Roth, for whom Eastern Europe is the place of alternative diasporic identity, would design a program to actually ship his people back there, after Communism, with the license to tell stories. It may be the ultimate expression of the nostalgic mode that both Hana Wirth-Nesher and Norman Finkelstein have identified in Roth's obsessive orientation toward Eastern Europe. The culture of nostalgia is manifest in American Jewish writing ranging from the more sentimental to the more ironic, eclectic efforts at recovery and projection. It informs Roth's editorial activities as initiator of the series "Writers from the Other Europe" and his fictional attempts to "retrieve" a lost writer who resembles Bruno Schulz or to reimagine the life of Franz Kafka or Anne Frank in America.17 Based on anachronism and on the impossibility of actual return, it is neither in "time" nor in "place," but in some acoustical space, that such stories unfold.

The Grapes of Roth

153

Shylock is, in fact, a very noisy novel. Words are flung like stones, done and undone like refugee bundles on an endless highway. Exile is the beginning of the narrative and diaspora is the place where people talk. It is also the place where people eat—just another form of orality, after all. Even the whitefish salad has a genealogy: in a "Jewish food store on Amsterdam Avenue ... the bitter fragrance of vinegar, of onions, of whitefish and red herring, of everything pickled, peppered, salted, smoked, soaked, stewed, marinated, and dried, smells with a lineage that. . . more than likely led straight back through the shtetl to the medieval ghetto."18 These are the passages we can sink our teeth into, words with the promise of a story. In the Middle East, however, where exile comes to an end, so too, it seems, do the stories and the compulsions of orality. Talk becomes consequential. Words can kill. Roth says of the Israeli Mossad agent, Louis B. Smilesburger: "He's swimming in the abrasive tragedies of life and I am only swimming in art."19 Each of these swimmers, each of the pale speakers in this series of endless monologues, presumably conceals a knife or an Uzzi (although a few of the non-Mediterranean types use weapons from Roth's more conventional arsenal . . . ). Though the names of some of the characters have been "changed" to protect their "identity," the Americaneducated Palestinian, who might still have been talking about Raskolnikov had he remained at the University of Chicago, is "actually" gunned down in the streets of Ramallah. The Mossad's secret weapon, "loshon hora" (slander), has the power to silence any potential defector. The American Jewish writer—or his double—is recruited by the PLO and the Mossad, invited to speak with Lech Walesa, the Pope and Arafat. His only shield is the thought that, when all this becomes too threatening, he at least can find some way out of the plot and return to New Jersey, to fiction that doesn't really count so much, to textuality that doesn't kill. For that is what Diasporism amounts to here, the privilege to "swim in art," to try out any role, any character, without paying the consequences of identity: This is the plot up to the moment when the writer leaves the woman still dolefully enmeshed in it, and, suitcase in hand, tiptoeing so as not to disturb her postcoital rest, he himself slips silently out of the plot on the grounds of its general implausibility. . . . The story so far is frivolously plotted, overplotted, for his taste altogether too freakishly plotted, with outlandish events so wildly careening around every corner that there is nowhere for intelligence to establish a foothold. . . .20

We can of course argue that just as he writes himself out of the plot, leaving the woman and slipping quietly back to Newark, so could Roth the author have saved the Palestinian by writing him out of his fateful connection with Ramallah and injecting him with some flu virus or academic conference that would have kept him in Chicago; it is, after all, the illusion of a loss of fictionality that he is perpetrating here: even the "real people" have ink running through their veins. "In War and Peace is Natasha less actual than Napoleon?" asks Thomas Pavel in his book Fictional Worlds.21 Of course not—but Roth in Operation Shylock is invoking that difference as a bifurcating quality of Jewish existence. Determined, as it were, not to become a latter-day Quixote unable to distinguish between actual and fictional worlds, Roth places them in different geographical locations. "A universe is composed of a base—an actual world—surrounded by a

154

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi

constellation of alternative worlds," argues Pavel; "taking the division of the ontological space into central and peripheral models as a very general formal organization of the beliefs of a community, we may localize fiction as a peripheral region used for ludic and instructional purposes."22 Accepting this geographic imaginary we can then explore the idea of diaspora as the "ludic" region, the region where experiments and games are still possible. Since in the Aristotelian scheme that Roth inherited, the poet's representation of "the kind of things that would happen" is superior to the historian's presentation of "what happened" (Poetics IX, 1), the diaspora option is the privileged one. This argument for fiction goes beyond the identification of exile with textuality that can be found in the writings of Edmond Jabes and George Steiner and in an increasing number of critical studies of contemporary Jewish culture.23 It is not just the fictional word as secular replacement for both sacred scriptures and sacred space that is being celebrated, but the freedom of invention in the face of or in place of history. The power of alternative fictions is most successfully challenged by the two events, one catastrophic and the other epic, that form the very center—as black hole and as magnet—of the Jewish twentieth century. Prague (and Eastern Europe in general) may be the marketplace of the Jewish story, but its destruction leaves as little tolerance for fiction as does the establishment of the Jewish state. In Roth's novel, Aharon Appelfeld represents both, in his person and in his writing. "Aharon and I each embody the reverse of the other's experience; . . . each recognizes in the other the Jewish man he is not... we are heirs jointly of a drastically bifurcated legacy," says the narrator of Operation Shylock.24 As the Jew in whom "fiction" as a ludic exercise is defeated by the two forms of inexorable reality—the Holocaust and Israel—Appelfeld's "authorizing" presence helps to ground the imaginative flights of the other characters. Appelfeld's own latest publication in English, Beyond Despair, is subtitled "Three Lectures and a Conversation with Philip Roth";25 parts of that "conversation" appear more or less verbatim in Roth's novel, functioning as an authenticating intertext that insists on the documentary status of its subject. That is, with all the proliferations of identity represented by the various Philip Roths, Appelfeld remains the static point of reference, much as Israel remains the nonnegotiable reality, the center of gravity for the diasporic imagination. So it is, once again, distance from that center and the trajectory of the journey that constitute the "new" coordinates in a global reconfiguration of post-Holocaust Jewish civilization. Dispersion as a dynamic that competes with rootedness and autochthony animates the diasporic aesthetic articulated by the British American painter R.B. Kitaj, Roth's friend and fellow (part-time) expatriate.26 The presence in his writing (and as subjects in his painting) of writers such as Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin renders his theories fairly predictable, but Kitaj's particular "obsession with the Jews" qua exiles is relevant to this discussion in its self-representation as an "art-obsession, an aesthetic."27 While the diasporist aesthetic he identifies is bleaker by far than Roth's, restless, uneasy, "depressive" and broken, based on Nietzsche's definition of art and on Gershom Scholem's definition of the Jewish

The Grapes of Roth

155

condition of '"being elsewhere combined with the desperate wish to 'be at home,'"28 it is also perceived as "magical" in its generative powers: [Diasporists are people who] have not taken Pascal's advice, which is something like: all the trouble in the world is caused by people who do not know how to stay in their own room. I'm glad they didn't because their dispersed lives have broken mediocre patterns and searched out cosmopolitan treasure. . . . Nietzsche defined art the way 1 really like it: "the desire to be different, the desire to be elsewhere". . . . So, I set sail, as Gauguin had done for Samoa, into the storm of Jewish dispensation, which felt like forbidden excitement feels—that's how I knew it was true for my art, or at least akin to Kafka's "rumour of true things."29

The image of diaspora as a theater invokes both the transcience and the makebelieve quality of the phenomenon Kitaj is trying to capture: as against the "primordial . . . human instincts for kin and home, ... the Diasporic condition presents itself as yet another theater in which human, artistic instinct comes into play, maybe not primordial (?) but a condition, a theater to be treasured." It is a travelling theater, embodying the "mystery of dispersion," the "illusion of truth" and the destabilization of meaning.30 In the ongoing differentiation between exilic and autochthonous forms, between Judaism as a mimetic culture, a masked ball in galut, and as a "genuine" or "real" culture in the sacred center, Philip Roth's novel, like Kitaj's paintings, becomes one of the popular enactments of the gaps and the bridges between them. Avoiding resolution, Roth (like his clones) evinces deference for and even submission to the "actual" world of generals and guns and bombs—to such an extent that he even "deletes" the "final chapter" of this narrative, in which certain secrets of the Israeli intelligence operation might have been "revealed." The discussion in which Smilesburger attempts to persuade the narrator to delete Chapter 11 invokes the apposition of "fiction" and "fact" as two inviolable spheres: "Calling fiction fact would undermine everything" [says the narrator]. "Then call it fiction instead. Append a note: 'I made this up.' Then you will be guilty of betraying no one—not yourself, your readers, or those whom, so far, you have served faultlessly." "Not possible. Not possible in any way." "Here's a better suggestion, then. Instead of replacing it with something imaginary, do yourself the biggest favor of your life and just lop off the chapter entirely."31

The final "Note to the Reader" asserts that "this book is a work of fiction" and concludes with "this confession is false."32 In the novel, unlike the polemical literature, the tension between Israel and diaspora, between real and imagined geographies, between the "true" and the "false," need never be resolved. In conclusion, I would argue that the present cultural moment invites the renegotiation of previously rigid epistemological categories. Recent discussions in intellectual journals in Europe, America and Israel, like recent fiction, poetry and cultural events in museums and galleries, have reopened a debate that had found, not so long ago, a political resolution in the wake of vast destruction.33 In the Israeli context, the attempt to redefine the Israeli "place" as detachable from Sacred Space34 has its

156

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi

counterpart in the philosophical argument of Amnon Karkotzkin-Raz on the value of exile or galut as the repressed function of the dialectic of homecoming that must be reintroduced in the late twentieth century: "How can we once again feel galut here in Israel . . . that is, [recognize that] the yearning for redemption is itself [a form of] redemption. . . . Galut signifies absence, the acknowledgment of the present as an imperfect time, of the world as a defective place."35 What Raz calls negating the negation—"shlilat shlilat hagalut"—or the recognition of galut as the repressed other which, by reintroducing it into our own realm allows us to be liberated from the very act of repression, signifies a postmodern cultural-social hermeneutics liberated from the dialectical thinking that has plagued the Zionist project and its detractors from the beginning. Such gestures provide not so much a historical option or a social contract as a valuable critical sensibility, the reintroduction of the suppressed sensibility and generative potential of galut. Whether or not this is a reflexive reaction to the realignment of Israel's geopolitical and psychosocial borders, it is the most recent stage in the ongoing dialectic between the spaces that form Jewish collective consciousness. There are border crossings that are possible, as Pavel demonstrates, between myth, fiction and actuality. If Israel becomes reconstituted as a state with open borders, we may begin to discern a renegotiation between these realms, a relinquishing of guardianship over the boundaries of the real and a new exploration of the no-man's-land of fiction at the margins, of alternative worlds, of counterlives.

Notes 1. Philip Roth, Operation Shy lock: A Confession (New York: 1993). 2. Ibid., 359. 3. Ibid., 42-43. 4. Hillel Halkin, "How to Read Philip Roth," Commentary 97, no. 2 (Feb. 1994), 46. 5. Roth, Operation Shylock, 142. 6. Philip Roth, The Counterlife (New York: 1986), 319-320. 7. Halkin, "How to Read Philip Roth," 48. 8. Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (New York: 1979), 195. In The Anatomy Lesson, Nathan feels guilty for the popularity of Carnovsky [= Portnoy], "for the family portrait the whole country had assumed to be his, for the tastelessness that had affronted millions and the shamelessness that had enraged his tribe." Philip Roth, Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue (New York: 1985), vol. 3, 440. 9. Philip Roth, Portnoy"'s Complaint (New York: 1969), 271. 10. Ibid., 268, 265, 124, 269. 11. Paul Breines, Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry (New York: 1990), 3. Ruth Wisse's The Schlemiel as Modern Hem (Chicago: 1971) and the discourse that it generated defined not only the place of a major Yiddish trope, but also the centrality of the shlemiel as radical diasporic alternative to the cultures of power in which Jews lived. 12. Compare, for example, the protagonist's heroic fantasy of killing the czar at the end of The Fixer and Herzog's vengeful fantasy of killing Gersbach in Herzog with the actual, gratuitous violence in such Hebrew narratives as A.B. Yehoshua's "Evening in Yatir Village" and Amos Oz's "Nomad and Viper" and My Michael. 13. Roth, Operation Shylock, 186.

14. Ibid., 170-171.

The Grapes of Roth

157

15. Illustration accompanying the review by D.M. Thomas, "Face to Face with His Double," New York Times Book Review, 1 March 1993. 16. Philip Roth, "The Prague Orgy" in Zuckerman Bound, pp. 761-762. 17. See Roth, "The Prague Orgy," "I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting; Or, Looking at Kafka," and The Ghost Writer. Hana Wirth-Nesher discusses Roth's search for "literary fathers" and for a connection, on his own terms, with the "more compelling drama of his fellow Jews in Europe." ("From Newark to Prague: Roth's Place in the American Jewish Literary Tradition," in What is Jewish Literature? ed. Hana Wirth-Nesher [Philadelphia: 1994], 216-229). Norman Finkelstein enlarges the discussion to delineate a "postEnlightenment metanarrative of nostalgia" that Roth both endorses and parodies. See his The Ritual of New Creation: Jewish Tradition and Contemporary Literature (Albany: 1992), 135. 18. Roth, Operation Shy lock, 378-379. 19. Ibid., 378. 20. Ibid., 245. 21. Thomas G. Pavel, Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, Mass.: 1986), 16. 22. Ibid., 64, 143. 23. See, for example, the interview with Edmond Jabes by Bracha Ettinger Lichtenberg in Routes of Wandering: Nomadism, Voyages and Transitions in Contemporary Israeli Art (catalogue of the exhibition at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem: 1991); George Steiner, "Our Homeland, the Text," Salmagundi 66 (winter-spring, 1985); Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, "Our Homeland, the Text . . . Our Text the Homeland: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination," Michigan Quarterly Review 31 (special issue on the Middle East) (fall 1992), 463-497; and Anne Golomb Hoffman, Between Exile and Return: S.Y. Agnon and the Drama of Writing (Albany: 1991). Perhaps the most persuasive discussion of the "wandering meanings and textual homelands" that form a postmodern "culture of exile" in America is Norman Finkelstein's The Ritual of New Creation, 138-140. 24. Roth, Operation Shy lock, 201. 25. Aharon Appelfeld, Beyond Despair: Three Lectures and a Conversation with Philip Roth, trans. Jeffrey M. Green (New York: 1994). 26. Roth figures prominently in Kitaj's First Diasporist Manifesto: Roth's portrait is accompanied by a quote from The Counterlife that serves as the epigraph for the prologue: "The poor bastard had Jew on the brain." Later in the essay, Kitaj refers to "my buddy Philip Roth" (First Diasporist Manifesto [London: 1989], 8-9, 79). 27. "Kitaj Interviewed by Richard Morphet," in R.B. Kitaj: A Retrospective, ed. Richard Morphet (London: 1994), 53. It should be stressed here that Kitaj's verbal articulation of his theories, especially in the First Diasporist Manifesto, does not have the immediacy and evocative power of his paintings. 28. See also the epigraph on the Jews quoted by Kitaj from Charles Peguy: '"Being elsewhere, the great vice of this race, the great secret virtue, the great vocation of this people'"(First Diaspora Manifesto, 73, 117, 113). 29. Kitaj, First Diasporist Manifesto, 27, 75; and "Kitaj Interviewed by Richard Morphet," 54. 30. Kitaj, First Diasporist Manifesto, 29, 33, 35. 31. Roth, Operation Shylock, 387. 32. Ibid., 399. 33. For years, the question of "recognition" was at the top of the political agenda while denied at the existential level in Israel; the Palestinian-Israeli conflict focused on the issue of mutual recognition so obsessively ("well, do we 'exist' or don't we?") that it looked at times as if Israel, like its namesake Jacob, was afraid that it would awaken in the morning and find that the whole enterprise was all (still) a dream. So, when the Arab states—and Arafat— officially recognized Israel, they opened the way to a renegotiation of borders from a new place of confidence in one's own ontology. 34. On this issue, see Zali Gurevitch and Gideon Aran, "Al hamakom" in Alpayim 4

158

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi

(1991). An English version of the article appeared as "The Land of Israel: Myth and Phenomenon," in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 10, Reshaping the Past: Jewish History and the Historians, ed. Jonathan Frankel (New York: 1994), 195-210. 35. Amnon Raz-Karkotzkin, "Galut betokh ribonut: levikoret 'shlilat hagalut' batarbut hayisreelit," Theoria uvikoret, no. 4 (fall 1993), 34-38.

Essays

This page intentionally left blank

Autonomy and Its Discontents: The Austrian Jewish Congress Movement, 1917-1918 David Rechter

(OXFORD CENTRE FOR HEBREW AND JEWISH STUDIES)

That the First World War was an agent of overwhelming change and dislocation is a truism particularly relevant for East Central Europe, where the impact of what has been called "total war" was incalculable.1 Similarly, the war shook the very foundations of Jewish society in this region. With the eastern front moving back and forth through some of the most densely populated Jewish areas in Europe, the infrastructures of Jewish life were devastated: mass expulsions, anti-Jewish violence, economic ruin and social upheaval were commonplace. In short, the Great War was an unprecedented hurbm (catastrophe) for the Jews of East Central Europe.2 This was also a period of prolonged crisis for the approximately 1.3 million Jews of the Austrian half of the Habsburg monarchy. From the early months of the war, Austrian Jewry faced the daunting task of mounting a vast relief effort for the hundreds of thousands of Galician and Bukovinian Jewish refugees fleeing the Russian army, a problem that persisted—with varying degrees of intensity—until 1918. Further, the alarming increase in both the volume and intensity of antisemitic agitation during the war years seemed to many Jewish leaders to represent a serious threat to Jewish interests.3 A more abstract challenge was posed by wartime discussion in Austria about structural reform of the empire. Much of this discussion focused on the possibility of self-determination for the monarchy's constituent Volker, of reorganizing the Habsburg domains along federal, democratic and national lines.4 Efforts during the war to form a united front of Austrian Jewry—initially by establishing a central representative body and subsequently by convening a Congress—were the primary Jewish political responses to the new situation brought about by the war: on the one hand, to the uncertainties about Jewish status should the monarchy undergo structural reform and, on the other, to an increasingly threatening antisemitism. Austrian Jewry was an amorphous entity, comprising a variety of disparate components divided along geographic, socioeconomic, religious, ideological and cultural lines. While there was a strong sense of dynastic loyalty among broad sectors of the monarchy's Jewish population, all prewar attempts to give this sentiment concrete form ran aground and cohesion of any sort was at a premium. Austrian Jewry 161

162

David Rechter

thus consisted of a number of overlapping communities (in locations as diverse as Italian Trieste, eastern Galicia and all points in between) rather than a single, coherent community. The Congress movement was a last attempt to bridge these divisions in the name of a broad, pan-Jewish solidarity.5 Underlying the drive for unity was a widely felt desire to project a Jewish voice in the public debates about reform of the monarchy and antisemitism. The bitter conflicts aroused by the idea of a Congress derived from disagreements over fundamental questions of identity. Were the Jews a religious community only, or could they be considered one of the monarchy's Volker alongside, for example, Germans, Czechs, Poles and Ukrainians? Or were they perhaps both, with "western" Jews qualifying as "Austrians of the Mosaic faith" and "eastern" Jews as a distinct Volk? To what degree, if at all, could it be admitted that uniquely Jewish political interests existed in Austria? While these were not new questions for Austrian Jews, the political turmoil generated by the war brought such issues into sharper focus and demanded a renewed reckoning. Austrian Jewish politics are at their most accessible for the historian during the First World War, when political activity was concentrated in Vienna as a consequence of the weakening of regional political organizations, both by the draft and by the flight of refugees from Galicia and Bukovina (Austria's primary Jewish population centers) to the capital. Jewish Vienna during the war was described by one contemporary observer as the central and focal point, where eastern essence and western culture flow into one another, where our forefathers' customs attempt to maintain themselves beside the demands of the new era, where assimilation, nationalism and Zionism collide with one another; in short, the scene ... of an infinite range of Jewish-religious and Jewishpolitical aspirations.6

Common to Austrian Jewish politics and that of other East Central European minorities during the war was the central role played by the increasingly powerful ideologies of nationalism and ethnic self-determination.7 An important corollary of this development was a resurgence of interest in establishing some form of corporate Jewish autonomy in the context of anticipated reform of the monarchy. The Austrian Jewish Congress movement became a battleground for competing visions of Jewish autonomy, illustrating the possibilities and perils of collective Jewish action in the multinational empire. At the outbreak of war in August 1914, the sole collective voice available to Austrian Jewry was the Allgemeine Osterreichische Israelitische Bund (AOIB), a rather ineffective umbrella organization of Kultusgemeinden, the state-sanctioned administrative organs responsible for Jewish religious and welfare needs. Established in 1898 both to coordinate defense against antisemitism and to deal with administrative matters that would overtax the resources of an individual community, the AOIB was conceived by its founders as a liaison between the government and the Jews, aspiring to official recognition from both sides as the representative institution of Austrian Jewry. The purview of its activities, however, was strictly circumscribed. The treatment of religious and political issues was explicitly pro-

Autonomy and Its Discontents

163

scribed, reflecting not only the objections of many Kultusgemeinden to any infringement of their administrative autonomy but also the reluctance of Orthodox groups to cooperate with non-Orthodox and lay leaders, whom they perceived as a threat to traditional Jewish values.8 During the first two years of the war, renewed efforts were made to expand the AOIB into a strong and unified Vienna-based central organization. This renewed impetus to unity derived much of its urgency from resurgent antisemitism. Early on in the war, it became clear that government restraints on antisemitism were limited at best—hence the appeal of a strong central body to coordinate Jewish defense. Further, as already noted, ideas about restructuring the monarchy were widespread, especially following the accession to the throne of the reform-minded Karl I in November 1916. Many thought that the Jews needed a voice in this process in order to guarantee their rights, however defined. Notwithstanding considerable support from across the political spectrum, Orthodox and regional (particularly Galician) rejectionism once more stymied these efforts. While many could agree that a united Jewish organization was needed, there was little or no agreement as to the nature of the proposed organization, the definition of Jewish interests, and how and by whom they should be presented.9 Attempts to enlarge and fortify the AOIB throughout 1917-1918 were subsumed in the campaign to organize a Jewish Congress, in which the disparate elements of Austrian Jewry would be drawn together into a broad, representative organization willing and able to vigorously engage in political action. Siegmund Kaznelson, who first raised the idea of an Austrian Jewish Congress and who became the Congress movement's central figure, indirectly acknowledged that efforts to expand the AOIB formed an important part of the immediate ideological and political background to his proposal. For Kaznelson, though, the AOIB—cautious and nonpolitical—was inadequate for the tasks he envisaged.10

December 1916-July 1917 Born in Warsaw and raised in Prague, Kaznelson (1893-1959) was in his final year of law studies when the war broke out; during the war years he managed with only minimal assistance to edit and publish the Zionist-oriented weekly Selbstwehr.11 In December 1916, Kaznelson suggested that an Austrian Jewish Congress, modeled on the American Jewish Congress movement (in which the diverse parties within American Jewry had apparently united to create a representative organization), might be a viable alternative to the moribund AOIB. He proposed a democratically elected assembly that would decide on a minimal program to which all Austrian Jews could subscribe, regardless of party or religious affiliation. Only a united representative body, Kaznelson believed, could provide both effective defense against antisemitism and a powerful political voice; only in this way could Austrian Jewry realize its political potential and become a "Machtfaktor." American Jewry, thought Kaznelson, was a potentially powerful influence in American politics because of the unity achieved by the Congress movement. If united, Austrian Jewry had a similar potential to exert its influence in Austrian politics and perhaps even at

164

David Rechter

a postwar peace conference. Kaznelson's insistence on a broad-based Congress, and on political flexibility and moderation as prerequisites for its success, remained characteristic of his approach throughout the course of the Congress movement over the next year and a half. 12 Early in 1917, Kaznelson sent a circular to "prominent personalities" of Austrian Jewry, requesting their response to a series of questions on a proposed Congress. Was closer cooperation and better organization necessary for Austrian Jewry and, if so, was the American Jewish Congress an appropriate model? What ought to be the tasks and program of a Congress and when should it be held? From March to November 1917 Kaznelson published in Selbstwehr the generally (but not uniformly) positive responses, representing a broad spectrum of opinion and interests in Austrian Jewish society. There was general consensus that Austrian Jews were indeed faced with severe and critical problems; most often mentioned were antisemitism and Jewish status in a reformed monarchy. While ideas concerning the timing, scope, program and composition of a Congress varied, the fact that Kaznelson's proposal had elicited such broad interest was in itself encouraging. With progress toward expanding the AOIB at a standstill, his timing had been auspicious. 13 A strikingly negative response to Kaznelson's initiative came from a perhaps surprising source—his ideological compatriots in the Zionist organization. Deriding the notion that such an important venture could be launched by a provincial newspaper, Rudolf Taussig, president of the Zionist Central Committee for Western Austria (ZCWA), scornfully pronounced the idea stillborn, given Kaznelson's failure to consult with either the Bohemian Zionist organization or the Central Committee in Vienna. The damage, he declared, was "simply irreparable." He suggested that the Zionists instead convene their own assembly (a Volkstag); otherwise, Austrian Jewry's inability to unite in its own defense would be exposed for all to see. l4 The local Zionists' disapproval was soon addressed by the Engere Aktionskomitee (EAC), the executive council of the World Zionist Organization. In mid-June 1917, Arthur Hantke (EAC member and president of the German Zionist Federation) urged Taussig and Viennese Zionist leader Robert Strieker to put aside their misgivings and take a leading role in the Congress movement. Focusing on tactics rather than principles, Hantke argued that while Kaznelson's initiative in the Selbstwehr was inopportune and contrary to party discipline, the Congress was a potentially important vehicle for the Zionist organization. The Congress idea appeared to be gaining momentum, drawing support from the increasingly influential democratic and nationalist tendencies in both general and Jewish politics in Austria, and it was vital that the Zionist organization be identified with precisely these notions. It was therefore necessary not only to be involved with the Congress at an early stage but to take a dominant role, or else face the "great danger" of being marginalized. The Congress movement, Hantke added, was international in scope, encompassing the United States, Russia and Germany.15 As noted, it was the American Jewish Congress that was promoted as a model for emulation by those favoring a broad-based Congress. Unity among the warring American Jewish parties had been at least temporarily achieved by December 1916, when the Austrian initiative was launched. By June 1917, elections for the Ameri-

Autonomy and Its Discontents

165

can Jewish Congress had produced a "clear-cut and decisive victory for the nationalist camp," (referring to those who viewed the Jews as more than merely members of the Jewish faith). 16 The potential political capital of an Austrian Jewish Congress thus seemed clear, notwithstanding the differences between the Austrian and American Jewish situations. The EAC felt the issue important enough to warrant the dispatch of an emissary to Vienna to examine the situation more closely.17 Taussig and Strieker remained skeptical, however, predicting a "fiasco." A formal decision on a Zionist stance regarding the Congress was left to the Executive Committee of United Austrian Zionists (ECAZ), the titular supreme council of Austrian Zionism during the war years. Taussig and Strieker promised that should a pro-Congress position be adopted there, they would raise no further objections.18 Led by the veteran Galician activist Adolf Stand, a majority within the ECAZ felt that a Congress was "necessary, desirable and feasible." But Strieker and Taussig held fast in their opposition, arguing that non-nationalist Jewish groups would agree to a Congress only if its program was limited to defense against antisemitism. Politics would be rigorously excluded and it could only damage Zionist credibility to assent to the role of junior partner in a nonpolitical Congress— where Zionism's minority status in Austrian Jewry (and its subordinate position in the hierarchy of Austrian Jewish organizations) would be made plain. Any real cooperation, they argued, was therefore both undesirable and impractical; better by far to hold a National or Zionistentag. Hantke, for his part, thought this inadvisable as it would be in effect preaching to the converted. In view of the divergent opinions within the ECAZ, it was decided to attempt to achieve consensus by putting the issue to a wider assembly of Zionist representatives in July 1917.19 Pro-Congress forces quickly recognized that one of the keys to the success of the Congress movement was the attitude of Robert Strieker.20 The Moravian-born Strieker—a state-employed railway engineer—had for some years been the dominant figure in Viennese Zionism. Uncompromisingly radical on the Zionist political spectrum (a longtime opponent of Chaim Weizmann in the World Zionist Organization, he broke with Revisionism to help found the Jewish State Party with Meir Grossman), Strieker was at the same time an outspoken liberal democrat and Habsburg loyalist in Austrian politics, a self-described moderate.21 Responding to Hantke's cajoling, Strieker began to work for the Congress, though he acted characteristically with little or no regard for his nominal partners in the enterprise. He remained committed throughout to a maximal nationalist program and was at all times prepared—indeed he preferred—to act without the cooperation of nonnationalist circles. If a Volkstag was not a viable option, he wanted to ensure that a Congress would adopt the recognition of Jewish nationality in Austria as one of its fundamental premises, or at the very least include in its program a demand that the government make provision for recognition of Jewish nationality in any reform of the monarchy. The debate at the mid-July meeting highlighted the division between the moderate and cautious approach of Kaznelson, supported both by Stand and the Prague writer and Zionist activist Max Brod, and the radical line taken by Strieker and his associates. This division was most clearly expressed in disagreements about the degree of emphasis to be placed on Jewish nationality in the Congress program.

166

David Rechter

Should acknowledgement of the existence of a Jewish nationality be required of those seeking to participate in the Congress'? Should the demand for government recognition of Jewish nationality be incorporated into the Congress program? For Strieker, these were the minimal requirements; save for Austria and Germany, he believed, all of Jewry was now "nationalized and Zionized." The American Jewish Congress movement represented a nationalist triumph and even the leadership of British Jewry ("Rothschild und die Kahile in England") had been won over to the cause. The non-nationalists, said Strieker, should not even be considered "equal partners" in Jewish affairs. For Kaznelson, in contrast, too pronounced an emphasis on Jewish nationality at such an early stage was bound to be rejected by important groups whom he wished to draw into the Congress—for example, the philanthropic organization B'nai B'rith, the Osterreichisch-Israelitische Union (devoted to Jewish defense against antisemitism and the fostering of Jewish pride), the Israelitische Allianz zu Wien (the Viennese counterpart to the Alliance Israelite Universelle) and the Kultusgemeinden. Better, thought Kaznelson, to downplay the contentious national issue while the Congress movement developed; only when the basic infrastructure was in place should it be tackled.22 Beyond this tactical disagreement was a deeper ideological conflict regarding the nature of Jewish autonomy. Insisting on the cultural and political divide between East and West European Jews, Kaznelson envisaged a limited cultural autonomy restricted almost exclusively to the realm of education, buttressed by state recognition of the existence of a Jewish nationality. Each individual must be free to declare him or herself a "Jewish national" without any consequent infringement of civic equality. Nobody, however, should be forced to do so. For Jews in the Czech lands—and by implication, in Vienna—political (as opposed to cultural) autonomy could lead to reghettoization; the introduction of national quotas (Czech, German and Jewish) could only redound to the Jews' social and economic disadvantage, forcibly reducing their numbers in the professions and in government service. In this Kaznelson echoed, as he was fully aware, the arguments of non-Zionists.23 To Strieker, the admission of any split between Eastern and Western Jewry, and the differentiation of treatment and policy that this implied, was anathema. The Jewish Volk was indivisible; this, to him, was the inviolable essence of Zionism. Further, the abstract theoretical nuances that Kaznelson wished to translate into a concrete political program were inappropriate to the harsh realities of national politics in the monarchy. Clear, sharply defined principles were more effective. A compromise was eventually struck, represented by the first point of a program—"recognition of the Jewish Volk and guarantee of its rights in the new Austrian constitution"—to be later presented by the nationalists as a basis for discussion with other parties. Strieker's concession lay in his acquiescence in the use of the (slightly) less charged term Volk rather than Nation. Elections to the Congress were to be democratic and open to all, irrespective of organizational affiliation. Relying once more on the American Jewish experience, the nationalists calculated that the broader the voting participation, the stronger their representation would be. The "masses," they hoped, were with them.24 For his part, Kaznelson later indicated that he regarded his concession as a "great sacrifice"; he would have preferred no mention of Volk or Nation at this stage and was only persuaded to agree

Autonomy and Its Discontents

167

by the persistent mediation efforts of Max Brod. The conceptual differences between the two camps, he wrote, had merely been "patched-up."25 In this he was correct—Point One of the Congress program later became the lightning rod for his conflict with Strieker. The remainder of the proposed program found broad agreement: the Congress would deal with economic reconstruction of war-ravaged Jewish communities, welfare problems, emigration and antisemitism. This was a minimal program on which the nationalists could agree. The next step, convincing nonnationalists to accept the explicit recognition of a Jewish Volk, posed a problem that bothered Kaznelson enormously but Strieker not at all.

August 1917-January 1918 Strieker's first action on the Congress front following the July meeting clearly indicated that he did not consider himself bound by the compromise achieved there. In a circular to regional Zionist organizations, Strieker, Taussig and Stand declared themselves to be provisionally in charge of Congress preparations. They substituted Nation for Volk in Point One, adding as well that participation in the Congress would be contingent on acceptance in full of the proposed program. Attracting support for the Congress in the current pro-Zionist atmosphere in Austrian Jewry, they wrote, would not be difficult.26 Kaznelson was furious, accusing Strieker and his colleagues of a "blatant breach" of the July compromise. The provisional Congress committee (set up following the July meeting) included himself, Brod and the Prague Zionist leader Ludwig Singer, none of whom had been informed about the circular. Further, it had been agreed to avoid any official Zionist organization involvement in the Congress movement until later, when the movement's success appeared more certain. Finally, the alteration of the all-important first point of the program, along with the demand for full acceptance of the program in this form as a prerequisite for Congress participation, represented not only a formal breach of the agreement but was also a move sure to alienate non-nationalist Jews. The Zionists, Kaznelson believed, were not strong enough to withstand concerted opposition from the Kultusgemeinden, the Union, B'nai B'rith and the Allianz, who together had a better claim than the nationalists to be representative of Austrian Jewry, both internally and in the eyes of the government and the public at large. From the Zionist movement's point of view, he wrote, the Congress could help attract support among the Jewish "masses," but if hobbled at the outset by false radicalism it would turn instead into a deplorable fiasco, inflicting in the process a "humiliation" on the movement. Patient and painstaking hard work was required, not empty rhetorical flourishes.27 During a visit to Prague and Vienna in September 1917, EAC secretary Leo Herrmann endeavored to mediate between Kaznelson and Strieker. Raising the possibility that it might be necessary for Arthur Hantke to travel to Vienna in order to effect a settlement, Herrmann stressed that without real agreement between the two main protagonists the Congress movement would fail at the outset.28 In the event, though, only a formal settlement was achieved: as Kaznelson prepared to go to Vienna to resolve the conflict, Strieker quickly convened an ECAZ meeting at

168

David Rechter

which the July compromise was reinstated as the Congress program. Although the main thrust of the Prague contingent's complaints was thereby neutralized, Strieker made clear to Herrmann that he felt no regret about his action: he did not "trust" the Prague tactics. Taussig, for his part, was scornful of the "paranoia" of the Prague Zionists, blithely dismissing the breach of compromise as "changes that the Executive Committee considered necessary." He paid little heed to Hantke's repeated pleas to take an active role in the Congress movement, remaining skeptical of the whole project.29 The legacy of this episode was Kaznelson's lingering mistrust of Strieker. Over and above personal differences, the conflict between Kaznelson and Strieker also reflected ideological and regional fault lines in Austrian Zionism: on the one hand, Viennese political intransigence and a commitment to strong central control of the Austrian movement; on the other, the (by and large) politically more moderate and flexible Zionists of the Czech lands, always aware of their delicate position between Czechs and Germans and strongly resistant to Viennese centralism.30 From the perspective of the EAC, the Congress movement in Austria was potentially a rich source of support for the Zionist organization, an important link in a movement now embracing the United States, Russia, Austria, Poland, Germany, Switzerland and Great Britain. 31 Herrmann and Hantke feared, however, that the Austrian Zionist organization would be unable to cope with the demands of a successful Congress. Stressing Vienna's potential role as a postwar Zionist center for Central and Eastern Europe, Hantke wrote that Austrian Zionism must "draw in new forces" to take advantage of the favorable circumstances for Zionist work.32 The EAC attitude was illustrated by its support for German Zionist involvement in the Congress-like body set up by German Jewish organizations in January 1918, the "Union of German Jewish Organizations for the Protection of the Rights of the Jews of the East." Responding to Viennese criticism—led by Strieker—that the Zionists would gain nothing by joining this apolitical, non-nationalist body, Hantke argued that as the organization was a fait accompli, it was surely better for the Zionists to participate than to face the danger of political irrelevancy outside its ranks. The Austrian Congress, thought Hantke, offered even greater political opportunities than did the German organization.33 Kaznelson now set to work on gathering support for the Congress, intending to establish as wide a base of support as possible prior to the convening of the "Congress Committee" in Vienna, at which a definitive program would be determined. At this stage, he and Strieker worked for the most part separately, with Kaznelson active in Prague and Strieker (much less intensively) in Vienna. Kaznelson planned to relocate to Vienna once the movement had gained momentum; the Congress Committee could then begin its deliberations in earnest. His move, however, was delayed by difficulties in obtaining permission to settle in the capital. Without at least the nominal protection afforded by legal residence in Vienna, Kaznelson—technically stateless—was reluctant to take a public role in a political movement that might well involve him in disagreements with the authorities.34 Kaznelson's most visible success in this period reflected the disparity between his and Strieker's respective conceptions of a Congress. At a mid-November 1917 meeting in Prague, attended by some fifty of the "leading Jewish personalities of the

Autonomy and Its Discontents

169

city" representing a range of Bohemian Jewish organizations, the Congress idea, Kaznelson wrote to Hantke, was "unanimously and enthusiastically" greeted. There was much opposition, however, to the wording of the first point of the July program—the subject of Kaznelson's strife with Strieker. Objections to the phrase "recognition of the rights of the Jewish Volk" came not only from non-nationalists at the meeting but also from Bohemian Zionists, whose leader, Ludw'ig Singer, commented that such a demand was inappropriate for Bohemian (i.e., "Western") Jews. In order to win the meeting's declaration of support, Kaznelson jettisoned his own compromise formula from July, substituting for "recognition of the rights of the Jewish Volk" the somewhat less provocative "the question of recognition of the rights of the Jewish Volk." Kaznelson anticipated a furious reaction from Strieker, but his rival maintained an indifferent silence, apparently paying little attention to Kaznelson's efforts in Prague.35 It was Hantke who reprimanded Kaznelson, insisting that Zionist interests could be served only if the Congress program included an explicit recognition of the existence of Jewish nationality. Kaznelson, in defense, responded that all such "agreements" were in any case provisional and nonbinding; only the not-yet-functioning Congress Committee could make Congress policy.36 Strieker was also active in the latter half of 1917 on behalf of the Congress, although for him this was merely one of many political activities rather than (as for Kaznelson) the almost exclusive focus of his work. At a meeting in late October, for example, he was successful in inducing Vienna Kultusgemeinde employees to declare their support for the Congress. In early November, he spoke out strongly for the Congress at a Prague Zionist meeting. On both these occasions, Strieker maintained his uncompromising stance on the national issue. The Congress must be a powerful "Volksorganisation," he proclaimed, whose task was to bring about the recognition of a Jewish Volk in Austria.37 In a newspaper article in January 1918, Strieker attacked in the sharpest terms the "Judenpolen," "Judendeutschen" and "Judenbohmen" who purported to be Jewish leaders but had attained their position only by dint of their fawning, greed and wealth, profiting handsomely from the "Protektions—und Schutzjuden system." They served foreign masters and therefore had no place in a Congress that must serve only the Jewish cause.38 Such stridency, which seemed designed to subvert any possible cooperation across party lines, was the antithesis of Kaznelson's careful bridge-building. Strieker also held crucial discussions in the summer of 1917 with Alfred Stern (1831-1918), a Viennese-born lawyer who enjoyed unchallenged preeminence on the liberal side of Jewish politics. A member of the Vienna Gemeinderat (municipal council) for more than a decade, vice-president of the Kultusgemeinde Vorstand since 1889, and president since 1904, he also served as the Allianz president during the war. Coming of age in the preemancipation period, Stern was derided by the Zionists as a relic of a bygone era, but he remained a formidable force in Viennese Jewish politics until his death in late 1918. At issue between Stern and the nationalists (inter alia) was the nature and extent of Jewish political interests—that there were in fact specifically Jewish political interests was a given for Stern. From his earliest days on the Vorstand, he commented in 1915, he had urged that the Kultusgemeinde, as the only authoritative representative of the Jewish community, "must also deal with those issues that to a greater or lesser degree reach into the

170

David Rechter

domain of politics."39 Stern's response to Strieker was noncommittal: if over the next few months the Congress appeared likely to succeed, he would consider giving it his backing. The pro-Congress forces were thus spared his active opposition, at least temporarily.40 Echoing Strieker's hard line but unconstrained by any agreements or compromises, Poale Zion—the "spearhead" of the American Congress movement—was vehement in its advocacy of a national and democratic Congress, unfettered and unsullied by the participation of the "plutocratic assimilationists." The Jews of Austria, wrote Max Rosenfeld (the chief theoretician of Austrian Poale Zion), were unorganized, isolated and defenseless, devoid of allies; a nationalist-led Congress movement would wake the masses from their lethargy. Unlike in the United States, where cooperation with the "geld un assimilatsiye yidn" had proven useful and necessary, in Austria such a partnership was neither possible nor desirable.41 The Jewish leadership, claimed Poale Zion, had corrupted the greater part of Austrian Jewry, reducing it to a state of political and moral degradation. It was rumored that the bourgeois Zionist leaders were negotiating in secret with this leadership—even with Rothschild. A Jewish Congress, however, must represent the "broad masses" of the Jewish Volk or it would be of no value whatsoever.42 Its focus should be on internal Austrian Jewish affairs: advocacy of equal rights for Jews in a reformed monarchy, the democratization of Jewish communal institutions (i.e., transforming the Kultusgemeinden into Volksgemeinden) and promotion of the economic and social reconstruction of war-devastated Jewish communities in Galicia. Matters of international import such as Palestine or emigration were to be left to other branches of the Congress movement, primarily the American Jewish Congress. In contrast to its leading role in the American movement, Poale Zion was at best a marginal player in Austria, its activity confined in the main to relentless and unrestrained criticism (mostly unheeded) from the periphery.43 Indications of a tentative willingness to explore the Congress idea came from a variety of sources. Kaznelson managed, for example, to attract the interest of a number of prominent rabbis, including David Feuchtwang and Israel Taglicht, the future chief rabbis of Vienna. Further, Joseph Samuel Bloch (editor and publisher of the weekly Osterreichische Wochenschrift and member of the Reichsrat [Austrian parliament] from 1883 to 1895), Armand Kaminka (secretary of the Allianz) and Salomon Ehrmann (president of B'nai B'rith) all expressed a degree of support. From Kaznelson's point of view, Allianz and B'nai B'rith backing was invaluable. These organizations represented a monarchy-wide, non-nationalist constituency with strong links to both government and influential Jewish circles—the Union and the Kultusgemeinden for example—and were thus an enormous potential reservoir of support.44 Some in the Orthodox camp also expressed interest, proposing a compromise Congress program between the "nationalist" and "assimilationist" positions. That the Jews constituted a Volk (a concept the Orthodox tied to religion and Torah rather than modern nationalism) was a given; accordingly, Kultusgemeinde activity should be expanded to incorporate the "complete spiritual and economic interests and needs of the Jews." By emphasizing a religious framework for Jewish demands in order to protect Jews from the "poison" of Western culture, this Orthodox program hoped to

Autonomy and Its Discontents

171

find acceptance from "all good Jews."45 Other proposals called for a Congress based on reformed and expanded Kultusgemeinden (but excluding women from active participation, as they would be mere "ballast") and, conversely, suggestions for a Congress from an explicitly women's perspective. (Women, it was argued in this case, remained aloof from party strife and were thus able to see the larger picture.)46 The variety of these proposals indicates not only that the Congress idea was attracting a good deal of interest but also that conceptions of what shape it ought to take diverged widely. Outside the Jewish domain, Congress activists made important contacts on the political level. Government approval would clearly be necessary to hold a Congress (the eleventh Zionist Congress in Vienna in 1913, for example, had been "tolerated" rather than officially sanctioned by the authorities). Moreover, support from government circles would provide a counterweight to the expected opposition of Galician Jewish "assimilationists," the same elements that had so strenuously objected to the expansion of the AOIB. Kaznelson also feared the specter of a parallel Congress initiated by Galician Jewish leaders and their allies in the Reichsrat's Polish Club (the Galician parliamentary delegation in Vienna); such a Congress—which would of course be fervently anti-Zionist—had the potential to attract precisely those nonnationalist Jewish groups whose support he was working so assiduously to win. Kaznelson hoped that government sanction of his Congress could also neutralize this threat.47 To this end, Hantke discussed the Congress idea with government officials on a visit to Vienna in November 1917, extracting expressions of support and cooperation from the Interior Ministry and the police and, most importantly, from the Austrian foreign minister, Ottakar Czernin.48 Congress advocates looked to the parliamentary representatives of other national groups for further political backing. A united front of support from the various nationalities offered the prospect of a degree of protection both from possible government disapproval (if overly radical nationalist demands or vigorous protests about the authorities' poor record in controlling antisemitism were voiced) and from the Polish Club and its Galician Jewish supporters. Contact was made with Czech, Romanian, Ukrainian and Italian representatives, and even (by Strieker) with German nationalists, in order to shore up potential support for Jewish demands for some form of autonomy. Herrmann and Kaznelson had meanwhile persuaded the prominent Jewish writer Felix Salten of the value of the Congress idea and through him hoped to reach wider circles—Jewish and non-Jewish—in the literary and journalistic worlds.49 With this promising basis of potential support on a variety of fronts, Kaznelson moved to Vienna in January 1918 in order to set up a Congress bureau to coordinate the movement.50 The notion underlying a Congress—that a forthright public display of Jewish will and solidarity was worthwhile—had the potential to unite, if only temporarily, the disparate Jewish factions in Austria. Many felt that the stakes were high: a time of unprecedented crisis demanded unusual and innovative action. The common denominator was a powerful desire for Jewish unity—or at the very least a voice that could both express Jewish wishes in the looming reorganization of the monarchy and demand protection from antisemitism. Clearly, the broader the support such a voice enjoyed, the greater its potential influence. Congress support-

172

David Rechter

ers hoped that the customary political disunity among Austrian Jews could be overcome in the light of the external pressures bearing down upon all of them, regardless of party or religious affiliation.51 The challenge was now to translate vague expressions of possible support or noninterference into more substantial collaboration. This would be the first and most pressing task of the Congress Committee, where negotiations between the parties were to take place.

February-May 1918 The first meeting of the Congress Committee, attended by some fifty delegates representing a cross-section of Austrian Jewry, took place in Vienna in late February 1918.52 For the Congress proponents, a central aim of this meeting was to elicit a public declaration of support from Alfred Stern and, if possible, to persuade him to participate in the planned Congress "Steering Committee." To this end, Strieker met with Stern on several occasions prior to the Congress Committee meeting. Admitting to Strieker that he was generally in agreement with the Congress program, Stern nonetheless asked to attend the meeting only as a "guest" and observer rather than as a full participant. Disregarding Kaznelson's wish to play down the implications of legal recognition of Jewish nationality (the controversial Point One of the program) in order to avoid alienating the non-nationalists, Strieker opened the meeting with a speech that emphasized the far-reaching nature and consequences of such recognition, including demands for a Jewish Affairs minister and a separate Jewish voting curia. Stern, ostensibly attending as a nonparticipating guest, reacted sharply to Strieker's provocative formulation, speaking out against the introduction of a Jewish curia as a voluntary return to the ghetto. Although he did not deny the existence of a Jewish Volk in Austria, he noted that "one could not publicly admit to this, as it would result in the greatest calamity for Austrian Jewry." Stern's outspoken opposition dissuaded several of his liberal colleagues from participating in the Steering Commitee. Orthodox delegates were similarly deterred; they would neither participate in a nationalist-dominated committee nor support a Congress that would function merely as a Zionist "party conference."53 Two days later, however, Stern had a change of heart. Informing Max Grunwald (a prominent communal rabbi and Congress supporter) that he had erred by adopting a rejectionist stance at the meeting, he asserted that he now accepted the Congress program and would welcome the opportunity to participate. Having long since retreated from his anti-Zionist stance of the Herzlian era, he was now, he affirmed, an "Oberzionist," though he retained grave doubts about the implications of a Jewish voting curia. Kaznelson, Grunwald and Strieker immediately drafted a statement designed to allay his misgivings on this score: recognition of Jewish nationality in Austria would not oblige anyone to identify as a "Jewish national" and measures would be taken to protect Jews in western Austria from the introduction of any form of numerus clausus. For Kaznelson, this was consistent with his beliefs in any case; for Strieker, or so he explained to Kaznelson, Point One was a framework

Autonomy and Its Discontents

173

that allowed for various interpretations. Only later would a more definitive version of Jewish autonomy need to be elaborated. Once more, however, Stern reversed himself, complaining that the issue was causing him sleepless nights. He did not deny the existence of a Jewish Volk, he averred, but he was against any constitutional recognition of Jewish nationality. In other words, while there was indeed a Jewish Volk in Austria, he would not admit to this in any public forum. It would be a misfortune, he said, should Jewish nationality be recognized by law. (A sentiment with which Kaznelson, an advocate of a strictly voluntary Jewish autonomy confined to the cultural sphere, could well empathize.)54 Despite the dichotomy between his private and public stances, Stern's admission of the existence of a Jewish Volk (if not nation) was important. It was a concrete expression of his broad conception of Jewish political interests, a vision clearly extending beyond the limited Kultusgemeinde realms of welfare, religion and education. As the leading representative of what has aptly been called the Austrian Jewish "Liberal establishment"—the "embodiment" of a half-century of Austrian Jewish history, as Kaznelson described him—Stern's agonizing over this issue suggests that during the war years the barriers between the liberal and nationalist poles of Jewish politics in Austria had become more fluid. 55 And it was precisely this fluidity that allowed for at least the possibility of pan-Jewish cooperation in the Congress movement. Strieker's intransigence not only disturbed Stern but also ran the risk of alienating other vitally needed allies, such as Ehrmann of B'nai B'rith, Kaminka of the Allianz and Siegfried Fleischer, the longtime secretary of the Union. Orthodox representatives stressed that a "general-Jewish Congress" could indeed be "of some real value" but wanted no part in a nationalist "Rump-Congress."56 Thus, Strieker's maximalism threatened to drive away the very support that Kaznelson was wooing, in addition to contributing to ideological and personal intranationalist tensions that debilitated the movement. These tensions were not mere surface phenomena but rather reflected real ideological and political differences within the nationalist camp. Still at issue was the interpretation of Point One of the program, with its demand for "guarantee of the rights of the Jewish Volk in Austria." What guarantees should be demanded? How were these rights to be defined? And if there was a Jewish Volk, who belonged to it? Previously, the Zionist organization had needed no definitive programmatic elaboration of the contours of Jewish autonomy, as constitutional reform had not been on the Austrian political agenda. Rather, a loose commitment to some form of Jewish autonomy, patterned on the theories elaborated by Simon Dubnow in Russia and the concept of nonterritorial, personal-national autonomy developed by Austrian Social Democrats Karl Renner and Otto Bauer (who denied that Jews constituted a nationality) had sufficed.57 Now, however, the situation demanded agreement on a more precise definition in order to be able to voice a concrete demand, both to the Austrian authorities in the case of constitutional reform and to the non-nationalist Jewish parties for the purposes of the Congress program.58 There was potentially more at stake here than internecine ideological conflicts: the government invited the Zionists to present their views and demands on Jewish

174

David Rechter

status in a reformed monarchy in December 1917 and March 1918.59 The nationalists' lack of consensus, Kaznelson feared, could enfeeble the Zionist movement and the Congress both internally and vis-a-vis the government. (Strieker, it will be recalled, preferred a degree of ambiguity in order to allow for political maneuvering.) Kaznelson thus pushed for the Zionist organization's highest executive authority, the ECAZ, to adopt an "authoritative interpretation" of Point One. He proposed to append to it a qualification almost identical to the one that he (along with Strieker and Granwald) had suggested to Stern, that is, a formula stressing the voluntary nature of Jewish national identification and conditioning acceptance of Jewish autonomy on the promise of legal safeguards that would preclude any infringement of Jewish rights. This proposal was modeled on the compromise adopted by the American Jewish Congress in its battles over a formula to express recognition of Jewish nationality. Common to both was the element of voluntarism.60 Kaznelson now believed that political autonomy for western Jews in Austria would signal disaster. He wrote to Hantke: "I came to the perhaps somewhat pessimistic conclusion already in November [1917] that constitutional recognition of Jewish nationality would lead to the almost total ruin of Austrian Jewry."61 Following the meeting of the Congress Committee and Stem's outburst, Strieker had indicated to Kaznelson his belief that flexibility might, after all, be called for: Point One should perhaps be regarded, for tactical purposes, as merely a broad statement of intent with no binding consequences (such as a Jewish voting curia). Kaznelson felt that a Parteitag—the most authoritative decision-making forum in west Austrian Zionism—might be necessary to decide the issue once and for all. He reasoned that if (as was clearly the case) the Congress was a nationalist-led enterprise (which in practice meant a leading role for the Zionist organization) and the nationalists could not agree among themselves on this fundamental plank of the Congress program, then they would not be able to successfully guide it to any concrete achievements. In any case, he wrote to Hankte, "[t]he cooperation of the non-Zionist Jews of the west depends on the interpretation of Point One."62 A victory for the "Jewish-national chauvinists," he predicted, would lead to "complete defeat" for Austrian Jewry. "Unfortunately, the conditions of Austrian Jewish existence do not permit maximalist politics in the style of the radical German, Polish and Czech nationalists, or the Russian Bolsheviks."63 In the event, the ECAZ, meeting at the end of February, adopted Kaznelson's proposal. Whether this would have the desired effect from Kaznelson's point of view depended primarily on how Strieker interpreted this resolution. Strieker's attitude became clear soon after the second Congress Commitee meeting in Vienna in early March 1918, at which it was decided to form an all-party, twenty-member "Program Commission" whose task was to prepare within one month as precise a program as possible to put before the Congress Committee. In the interim, no official programmatic or policy statements were to be issued. The Program Commission was suggested by Poale Zion representatives, led by Max Rosenfeld, who were dissatisfied with the current (insufficiently radical) program, particularly the diluted version of Point One advocated by Kaznelson. To Kaznelson, the Commission's establishment amounted to a "burial" of the existing program. If unity was unattainable in the Congress Committee, the same would

Autonomy and Its Discontents

175

prove true, he was certain, of the Program Commission. Indeed, with the Commission providing a focus for disagreements, the conflict between Strieker and Kaznelson and their respective camps intensified. In a series of meetings during March, the Commission was unable to arrive at any agreement. "The ideological differences," wrote Kaznelson, "were too great." Strieker and Rosenfeld, for example, continued to press for a Jewish Volkstag or Nationalkongress.64 In early March, Kaznelson for the first time started to entertain serious doubts about the viability of the Congress project. Impressed by Zionist successes outside Austria, Poale Zion and the "Strickerites" labored under the delusion that Zionism was sweeping all before it, that no opposition existed, that the "masses" were behind them. Their "mindless Party-demagogy" and "hullabaloo-politics," he believed, were bound to antagonize their supposed partners. Attacked by Poale Zion as "a representative of western-Jewish capitalist interests," Kaznelson regarded the politics of "mood and sentiment" as a poor substitute for "hard work." Alienated from Strieker, Kaznelson was becoming increasingly disillusioned. "It is only with difficulty that I can work with Strieker. . . . [H]is oktroy politics . . . poor tactics and tactless actions will surely bring about a grand coalition against us."65 This, he feared, would only serve to highlight the nationalists' minority status in Austrian Jewry, leading to a "colossal humiliation" for Austrian Zionism and destroying in the process its prospects for the foreseeable future. The situation, he wrote to Herrmann in late March, had become critical.66 Kaznelson and Strieker were by now working almost entirely separately, and generally at cross-purposes. With neither able to win majority support within nationalist ranks, Kaznelson toyed (not for the first time) with the idea of toppling Strieker in the ECAZ, if possible with EAC assistance.67 By early April he was despondent, demanding immediate EAC intervention and writing to Herrmann, "I can do absolutely nothing here."68 Help, though, was not forthcoming. Committed to the autonomy of regional organizations, the EAC lacked the requisite authority to dictate policy. While he wished he were in a position to intervene more forcefully, wrote Hantke to Kaznelson, he was in fact able only to counsel patience.69 While the Program Commission deliberated, Kaznelson planned a meeting of Kultusgemeinden and other "large Jewish corporations" to try once more to arrive at an agreement. He was prepared to accept, as an "absolute minimum," an even more diluted version of the compromise formula presented to Stern, this time merely demanding national minority rights for eastern Jews and guarantees of legal equality for western Jews. The constitutional recognition of Jewish nationality—a prerequisite for national rights in Galicia and Bukovina—would have no political consequences for Jews in western Austria. This, he declared, was as far as he could go.70 His non-nationalist interlocutors, however, were wary. Kaznelson presented his "absolute minimum demand" to B'nai B'rith's Ehrmann, who (according to Kaznelson) was "fully in agreement" but reluctant to commit B'nai B'rith—a nonpolitical body—to public support for a political venture. Ehrmann suggested instead that B'nai B'rith members of the Congress Committee should strive to forge a compromise combining Kaznelson's formula and B'nai B'rith's own formulation of Point One, a three-point proposal not unlike Kaznelson's but replacing recognition of Jewish nationality with a proposal for a government department for Jewish "reli-

176

David Rechter

gious affairs" (Kultusangelegenheiten).71 Kaznelson explained to Ehrmann that without unqualified B'nai B'rith support he would be unable to sell any compromise to his own nationalist opposition. B'nai B'rith was Kaznelson's final hope at this stage. Faced with caution and passivity from Stern, the Kultusgemeinden and the Allianz, outright opposition from the Union and the Orthodox, and a continuing fissure in nationalist ranks, the Congress project was poised at a delicate juncture. The initiative for further compromise clearly had to come from the nationalist side; the liberals had staked out their position and would respond accordingly.72 As noted, Kaznelson felt that the most effective means of clarifying Zionist policy on the issue was for a full party conference (what he called a Parteitag] to make a definitive decision; this would hopefully unify the nationalists and bring Strieker to heel, forcing him to obey party discipline. At such a meeting—attended if possible by an EAC member—the Strieker-inspired Viennese hard line would be balanced, so Kaznelson hoped, by the more moderate approach of the Bohemian and Moravian Zionists.73 In early April 1918, a Bohemian Zionist conference declared its unanimous support for a broad-based, inclusive Congress, adopted Kaznelson's minimal version of Point One and called for a Parteitag to resolve differences over the issue. 74 For technical reasons, it proved impossible to convene a full Parteitag; there would instead be a "conference of delegates" confined in essence to discussion and recommendation, without the authority to determine policy. Meeting on April 27-28 and attended by 106 delegates, this was the largest assembly of Austrian Zionists during the war.75 Two days prior to the conference, Kaznelson fell seriously ill. Very weak, with a high fever, he broke down completely and was hospitalized.76 In a preconference agreement reached with Bohemian leader Ludwig Singer, Stricker committed himself to accepting the Bohemian (and thus Kaznelson's) formula of early April. In addition, the assembly called for a Congress that would attract the widest possible Jewish participation. If accepted by the Galician and Bukovinian organizations, this program was to form the basis for future action.77 On the face of it, this was a victory for Kaznelson's moderation. But in the absence of a binding policy set by the Zionist organization, any compromise agreed to by Strieker was hardly a guarantee of his future cooperation.78 Kaznelson, by now "thoroughly disgusted," described the conference as a "comedy," arguing that Strieker had deceived the Bohemians and would pay no more than lip service to any agreement. Indicative of Strieker's attitude, feared Kaznelson, was the former's warning to Adolf Bohm, who had assumed Kaznelson's role as Strieker's opposition at the conference. Cautioning Bohm against taking on the Congress project, Strieker predicted that Kaznelson, now hospitalized, would soon be in the asylum, while Bohm could end up "unter die Erde."79 Indeed, very little had actually changed. Strieker had not been bound by official party policy; he had merely agreed to abide by what was in essence a milder version of existing policy, to which in any case he paid little or no attention. Disagreements about the implications for western Jews of recognition of Jewish nationality were too great, the issue too complex, for the conference to decide. The matter was thus referred back to the EAC for further clarification.80 Nationalist policy on the Congress, while formally set, was in practice suspended

Autonomy and Its Discontents

177

in limbo between two irreconcilable ideological positions. And with this, the Congress movement reached the end of the road. Under doctor's orders to refrain from any activity liable to upset or excite him, Kaznelson withdrew from Congress work at the end of April.81 Deprived of its prime mover, the Congress movement came to an abrupt halt and rapidly disintegrated. That Kaznelson's absence could be fatal to the movement indicates that the Congress idea had not penetrated beyond a limited stratum of leadership elites; it had by no means become a "mass" movement as its proponents had hoped. No one was prepared to assume Kaznelson's mantle and the liberals had no interest in the Volkstag advocated by Strieker and Poale Zion. By mid-May, the Congress movement had virtually collapsed.82 Despite failure to achieve its stated goals, the Congress movement was significant in a number of ways, leaving traces in the Jewish political landscape of the Habsburg successor states and beyond. Kaznelson, for example, believed that the movement's inclusive tendencies (at least in the Czech lands), and the practical political experience it had provided for the nationalists, laid the basis for the alljudisch politics of the Jewish National Councils that emerged at the end of the war in East Central Europe.83 With the collapse of political and social structures in late 1918, minorities in this area created National Councils as a form of "shadow government," institutions that played an important role in the transfer of power to the nationalities at the end of the war. Jewish counterparts to these councils were established at the same time—primarily by Zionists—in many parts of the former Austrian and Russian empires. These Zionist-dominated bodies became, for a very brief period, powerful organs of autonomous Jewish politics, assuming a leading role in the administration of internal Jewish affairs, representing Jews to the external authorities and organizing armed self-defense in the face of widespread anti-Jewish violence. The councils, like the Congress, were committed to pan-Jewish politics, striving to create inclusive, broad-based bodies that could credibly claim the role of a Jewish "government" in internal Jewish affairs.84 Jewish autonomy was predicated on the existence of pluralist, multinational and democratic states, within whose borders a number of nationalities could peacefully coexist. The successor states to the Habsburg and Russian empires, however, mostly came to see themselves as nation-states in which one national group was politically preeminent, a situation clearly inimical to the flourishing of autonomous ethnic politics, whether Jewish or otherwise. (Other difficulties peculiar to the Jewish case included being the only group in the area without a territorial base and the unresolved conflicts over basic issues of Jewish identity.) These obstacles notwithstanding, the flourishing of the Jewish National Councils may be considered a revolutionary development in the context of modern Jewish politics. Jonathan Frankel has argued that "internal revolution within the Jewish collectivity involved no bloodshed, no expropriation, not even in most cases any clear transfer of power, but rather the proliferation of rival power centers, movements, and ideologies," with a marked continuity between new and old.85 In this sense, although events on the Jewish street were mild indeed by the extraordinarily violent standards of the era, they were nonetheless revolutionary. And, as Kaznelson noted, the Congress movement played a central role in preparing the ideological and political ground for these developments.

178

David Rechter

Beyond this, the search for an acceptable formula (in Congress movements in Austria and elsewhere) to express demands for Jewish minority rights formed part of the background to the work of the Committee of Jewish Delegations at the Paris Peace Conference and to the minorities treaties drafted there.86 Finally, the Congress movements were the ideological precursors of the World Jewish Congress, established in 1936.87 While the forces animating the Austrian Jewish Congress movement—the desire for active defense against antisemitism and for a corporate voice in Austrian politics and society—were familiar in Austrian Jewish history, the Great War and its attendant crises gave these impulses to unity renewed urgency. If Austria's future was unclear in many respects, the consensus among Jewish activists was that antisemitism would be a prominent part of the postwar social and political landscape. The Congress represented the possibility of pan-Jewish cooperation in dealing with these problems. Its failure was due in large measure to the intractable fragmentation that beset Austrian Jewish political life. As in the politics of the monarchy at large, so too in Jewish politics centrifugal forces proved more powerful than centripetal. Paradoxically, despite the incessant discord that eventually overwhelmed it, the Congress movement was an example of the partial dissolving of barriers between the various poles of Jewish politics in the war. A large-scale political undertaking, the Congress necessitated at least some measure of cooperation and in fact revealed a good deal of common ground between nationalists, liberals and Orthodox. The limits to this cooperation, however, were clearly circumscribed and no side was able to muster sufficient strength or conviction to carry out such a project alone. The Congress campaign was evidence, too, of the dynamism of Austrian Jewish nationalism during the war years: it was the nationalists, after all, who created, propelled and ultimately destroyed the Congress movement. Underlying the seemingly interminable squabbles over the program of the Congress were important—and related—issues: the nature and definition of Jewish political interests and the contours of Jewish autonomy in a restructured monarchy. To be sure, there was more than a hint of optimism (if not outright suspension of disbelief) involved here; all plans regarding Jewish autonomy were predicated on the assumption that a reformed Austria would be democratic, pluralist and multinational. 88 This optimism perhaps derived from the fierce Habsburg patriotism that was one of the few unifying forces in Austrian Jewish political life. By and large, Habsburg Jews subscribed, as one Zionist writer noted in 1915, to Frantisek Palacky's dictum—"If the monarchy did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it."89 Unlike most other national or ethnic minorities, Jews—the sole nonterritorial minority in the Habsburg realm—at no time wished to define their political identity against or outside the monarchy but always and explicitly within it.90 The Congress movement, a valiant attempt to embrace the entirety of Austrian Jewry, is testimony to this enduring Jewish faith in the dual monarchy. It was, in fact, as Kaznelson wrote, the "last major act" of Austrian Jewry.91

Autonomy and Its Discontents

179

Notes 1. See, for example, Nandor F. Dreisziger, "The Dimensions of Total War in East Central Europe, 1914-18," in War and Society in East Central Europe, vol. 19, East Central European Society in World War I, ed. Bela Kiraly and Nandor F. Dreisziger (New York: 1985), 3-23; Immanuel Geiss, "World War One and East Central Europe: A Historical Assessment," in ibid., 27-42. More generally, see J.M. Winter, "Catastrophe and Culture: Recent Trends in the Historiography of the First World War," Journal of Modern History 64, no. 3 (1992), 525-532. 2. For an overview, see Jonathan Frankel, "The Paradoxical Politics of Marginality: Thoughts on the Jewish Situation During the Years 1914-21," Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 4, The Jews and the European Crisis, 1914-1921, ed. Jonathan Frankel (New York: 1988), 3-21. See also David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: 1984), 92-101, 115-121, 135138; Sh. An-ski, Der yidisher khurbm fun poyln, galitsiye, un bukovina, in his Gezamlte shriftn, vols. 4-6 (New York: 1922-1924). 3. On the refugees, whose numbers were estimated at up to 400,000 in early 1915, see David Rechter, "Neither East nor West: Viennese Jewish Politics in World War One" (Ph.D. diss., The Hebrew University, 1995), ch. 2. On wartime antisemitism, see also Bruce F. Pauley, From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (Chapel Hill: 1992), ch. 5. 4. On wartime plans for reform, see Robert A. Kann, The Multinational Empire, vol. 2 (New York: 1950), ch. 24. For Jewish views, see Rechter, "Neither East nor West," 32-37. 5. On Habsburg Jewish patriotism, see Rechter, "Neither East nor West," 25-37. On the difficulties of defining Jewish communities in multinational empires, see also Eli Lederhendler, "Did Russian Jewry Exist prior to 1917?" in Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union, ed. Yaacov Ro'i (Ilford: 1995), 15-27. 6. Die Wahrheit, 17 Dec. 1915, 6. 7. Geoff Eley has argued that the period 1914-1923 was a "consummation" of earlier periods of "nation-forming activity," an observation relevant also to the Jewish case. See Geoff Eley, "Remapping the Nation: War, Revolutionary Upheaval and State Formation in Eastern Europe, 1914-1923," in Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective, ed. Peter J. Potichnyj and Howard Aster (Edmonton: 1988), 212-213, 217. Sec also Walker Connor, "The Politics of Ethnonationalism," Journal of International Affairs 27 (1973), 910. 8. On the AOIB, see Rechter, "Neither East nor West," 193-198. On similar efforts to form a central organization of German Jews, see Jacob Toury, "Organizational Problems of German Jewry: Steps towards the Establishment of a Central Organization (1893-1920)," Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 13 (1968), 57-90. 9. On efforts to expand the AOIB, see Rechter, "Neither East nor West," 193-198. 10. Selbtswehr, 15 Dec. 1916, 1. 11. The editor of Selbstwehr from 1913, Kaznelson later became editor and publisher of the Berlin periodical Der Jude, the Judisches Lexikon, and director of the publishing firm (first in Berlin, subsequently in Jerusalem) Judischer Verlag. See Robert Weltsch's introduction to Das Judische Prag (Prague: 1917; Kronberg: 1978), v-vi; Hillel J. Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry: National Conflict and Jewish Society in Bohemia, 1870-1918 (New York: 1988), 126, 163-164, 170. 12. See Selbstwehr, 15 Dec. 1916, 1. Writing later under the pseudonym of Albrecht Hellmann, Kaznelson emphasized that the Congress initiative had been his alone. See Albrecht Hellmann, "Erinnerungen an gemeinsame Kampfjahre," in Dichter, Denker, Heifer: Max Brod mm 50. Geburtstag, ed. Felix Weltsch (Mahrisch-Ostrau: 1934), 51. On the American Jewish Congress, see Jonathan Frankel, "The Jewish Socialists and the American Jewish Congress Movement," YIVO Annual 16 (1976), 202-341. 13. See, for example, Selbstwehr, 12 April 1917, 2-3; 8 June 1917, 4; 29 June 1917, 1-

180

David Rechter

2; 31 Aug. 1917,2. On the AOIB during the war, sec Rechter, "Neither East nor West," 199205. 14. See Taussig to Kaznelson, 10 May 1917; ZCWA to Zionist Central Office, Berlin (ZCO), 11 May 1917, both in Central Zionist Archives (CZA), Z3/846. Taussig headed the Central Committee from early 1916 until the end of the war. A senior bureaucrat in the stenographic office of the Austrian parliament (and stenographer at World Zionist Organization congresses), he pressed for strict centralization of the movement's decision-making process, suggesting that all Zionist activity in the monarchy be subject to prior Viennese approval. See Meir Henisch, Mibayit umihuz (Tel-Aviv: 1961), 154; S. Wininger, Grosse Judische National-Biographie, vol. 6 (Vienna: 1927), 89. The ZCWA was the nominal supreme executive council for the Zionist organizations of the Czech lands and "Inner Austria," the latter coterminous in territory with the interwar Austrian republic. From 1907 until 1914, Austrian Zionism was operationally divided into three semi-independent regional organizations: Galicia, Western Austria and Bukovina. See Rechter, "Neither East nor West," 59-63. 15. ZCO to ZCWA, 14 June 1917, CZA Z3/846; Hantke to Taussig and Strieker, 26 June 1917, CZA Z3/847. On the EAC and its difficulties in functioning effectively during the war, see David Vital, Zionism: The Crucial Phase (Oxford: 1987), 129-136. 16. Frankel, "The Jewish Socialists," 271-302. The quotation is from p. 302. 17. EAC secretary Leo Herrmann wrote to his Prague colleague Robert Weltsch (then stationed on military duty in southern Bohemia) requesting that Weltsch spend a few days in Vienna for this purpose. See Herrmann to Weltsch, 26 June 1917, CZA Z3/847. In early June Herrmann had appealed to former Central Committee president Adolf Bohm to mediate between Kaznelson and the ZCWA, recommending that the Zionist organization take the Congress movement in hand to avoid the potential damage of a public display of discord. See ZCO to Bohm, 5 June 1917, CZA Z3/1003. 18. ZCWA to ZCO, 18 June 1917, CZA Z3/847. For Hantke, passivity was not enough; if the ECAZ adopted a positive stand, he wrote, they were obliged to take an active role. See Hantke to Taussig and Strieker, 26 June 1917, CZA Z3/847. The ECAZ, comprising local activists and Galician and Bukovinian leaders who had taken refuge in Vienna, was formed in Vienna in January 1915 in an attempt to "reunite" the three regional organizations of Austrian Zionism. Its success in this endeavor was constrained, inter alia, by tension between the "easterners" and the Viennese, and by the absence of any representatives from the Czech lands. See Rechter, "Neither East nor West," 64-65; Adolf Gaisbauer, Davidstern und Doppeladler: Zionismus und judischer Nationalismus in Osterreich 1882-1918 (Vienna: 1988), 134-135, 524; Henisch, Mibayit umihuz, 145, 151-155. 19. ZCWA to ZCO, 22 June 1917; ECAZ to EAC, 28 June 1917, both in CZA Z3/847. Some ECAZ members felt that although a Congress posed almost insurmountable difficulties in execution, it nevertheless afforded a good opportunity for Zionist agitation and propaganda work. For Hantke's view, see Hantke to Strieker, 3 July 1917, CZA Z3/847. 20. Sec Leo Herrmann to Robert Weltsch, 26 June 1917, CZA Z3/847. 21. A member of the Kultusgemeinde Vorstand (governing council) since 1912, Strieker was elected on a Jewish nationalist ticket to the Austrian parliament in 1919 but failed to win reelection the following year. He was editor of the Zionist weekly Judische Zeitung for a number of years prior to the First World War and later founded and edited the first Germanlanguage Jewish daily, the Wiener Morgenzeitung (1919-1927). See Josef Fraenkel (ed.), Robert Strieker (London: 1960); Harriet Pass Freidenreich, Jewish Politics in Vienna, 19181938 (Bloomington: 1991), 61-62; Henisch, Mibayit umihuz, 151-153. On his self-image as a "moderate," see Robert Strieker, Judische Politik in Osterreich (Vienna: 1920), 30. 22. Protocol of 15 July 1917 Vertrauensmannerversammlung, CZA L6/328. On B'nai B'rith in Vienna, see Denis B. Klein, Jewish Origins of the Psychoanalytic Movement (New York: 1981), 75-84. On the Union, see Robert Wistrich, The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (Oxford: 1989), ch. 10; Freidenreich, Jewish Politics, 23-36. On the Allianz, see Wistrich, The Jews of Vienna, 71-75. 23. Albrecht Hellmann, "Die Geschichte der osterreichischjudischen Kongress-

Autonomy and Its Discontents

181

bewegung," Der Jude 5 (1920-1921), 204-214, 389-395, 634-645, and 685-696; idem, "Ein judischer Kongress in Osterreich," Der Jude 2 (1917-1918), 269-270. 24. Protocol of 15 July 1917 Vertrauensmannerversammlung, CZA L6/328; Hellmann, "Erinnerungen," 52; idem, "Die Geschichte," 207-209. 25. Kaznelson to Strieker, 28 Aug. 1917; Kaznelson to Hantke, 15 Nov. 1917, both in CZA Z3/215. 26. See, for example, Strieker, etc., to Zionist District Committee for Bohemia, 15 Aug. 1917, CZA Z3/215. 27. Kaznelson to ECAZ and Judische Nationalverein, 29 Aug. 1917, CZA Z3/215. 28. For Herrmann's comments, see Herrmann to ZCO, 9 and 20 Sept. 1917, both in CZA Z3/1693. Adolf Stand, Adolf Bohm and Herrmann all agreed that Strieker was in the wrong but were reluctant to openly oppose him. Herrmann considered Stand "intellectually inferior to Strieker" and "lacking in political insight," while Bohm considered himself "not enough of a politician" to oppose Strieker. See Herrmann to ZCO, 20 and 28 Sept. 1917, both in CZA Z3/1693. 29. Hantke to Taussig, 16 Sept. 1917, CZA Z3/847; Taussig to Hantke, 24 Sept. 1917, CZA Z3/215. For Strieker's comments to Herrmann, see Herrmann to ZCO, 20 Sept. 1917, CZA Z3/1693. 30. In the Congress movement, Galician and Bukovinian Zionists generally supported Strieker but rejected Viennese centralism. See Kaznelson's introductory remarks to his series of articles "Die Geschichte": Albrecht Hellmann, "Nationale Minderheitsrechte der Juden," Der Jude 4 (1919-1920), 482; and "Erinnerungen," 52-53. 31. Herrmann wrote that the Congress was potentially of "enormous significance" for the Zionist organization in Austria. See Herrmann to ZCO, 28 Sept. 1917, CZA Z3/1693. See also Hantke to Taussig and Strieker, 16 Sept. 1917, CZA Z3/215. On Congress plans in other countries, see Oscar Janowsky, The Jews and Minority Rights (1898-1919) (New York: 1933), 192-194, 199; Ezra Mendelsohn, Zionism in Poland: The Formative Years, 19151926 (New Haven: 1981), 62; Mark Levene, War, Jews and the New Europe: The Diplomacy ofLucien Wolf 1914-1919 (Oxford: 1992), 130; Herrmann to ZCO, 20 Sept. 1917, CZA Z3/1693; Judische Zeitung, 1 Sept. 1917, 4; 30 Nov. 1917, 1. 32. Hantke to Taussig, 24 Oct. 1917; Hantke to Kaznelson, 27 Nov. 1917, both in CZA Z3/215; Herrmann to ZCO, 28 Sept. 1917, CZA Z3/1693. 33. See Hantke to Strieker, 14 Dec. 1917; Hantke to Kaznelson, 20 Dec. 1917; Hantke to ECAZ, 14 Feb. 1918, all in CZA Z3/215. For Austrian Zionist criticism, see Kaznelson to Hantke, 4 Feb. 1918, CZA Z3/215; ZCWA to ZCO, 19 Feb. 1918, CZA Z3/848. On the Vereinigung judischer Organisationen Deutschlands zur Wahrung der Rechte der Juden des Ostens, see Toury, "Organizational Problems," 81-84. 34. Kaznelson to Hantke, 17 Nov. 1917, CZA Z3/215. 35. This was certainly Kaznelson's impression. See Kaznelson to Hantke, 5 Dec. 1917, CZA Z3/215. 36. Kaznelson to Hantke, 15 Nov. and 5 Dec. 1917; Hantke to Kaznelson, 27 Nov. 1917, all in CZA Z3/215. The unresolved tensions and programmatic disagreements on the nationalist side were discussed in a series of joint ECAZ and ZCWA meetings in late 1917 and early 1918, with no concrete results. See Judische Zeitung, 30 Nov. 1917, 4; 14 Dec. 1917, 4; 25 Jan. 1918, 4. 37. Judische Zeitung, 9 Nov. 1917, 3; Dr. Bloch's Osterreichische Wochenschrift (hereafter Bloch's Wochenschrift), 16 Nov. 1917, 726; Taussig to Hantke, 24 Sept. 1917, CZA Z3/215. 38. Judische Zeitung, 18 Jan. 1918, 1. 39. Bloch's Wochenschrift, 22 Oct. 1915, 788. On Stern, see Freidenreich, Jewish Politics, 37-38; Joseph Samuel Bloch, Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben, vol. 3 (Vienna: 1933), 257-264. 40. Herrmann to ZCO, 28 Sept. 1917, CZA Z3/1693; Hellmann, "Die Geschichte," 209. 41. Der Yudishe Arbeter, 15 July 1917, 8-10. On the Poale Zion role in the American movement, see Frankel, "The Jewish Socialists," 208.

182

David Rechter

42. Der Yudishe Arbeter, Sept./Oct. 1917, 11-12. 43. Ibid., 15 July 1917, 8-10. More generally on the Poale Zion stance, sec Leo Chasanowitsch, "Der Judische Kongress," Der Jude 1 (1917-1918), 3-16. 44. Herrmann to ZCO, 28 Sept. 1917, CZA Z3/1693; Zweimonats-Bericht fur die Mitglieder der osterreichisch-israelitischen Humanitatsvereine "B'nai B'rith" (hereafter ZBB) 20 (1917), 162. The American B'nai B'rith maintained a scrupulous neutrality in the American Jewish Congress movement. See Frankel, "The Jewish Socialists," 227, 247. 45. Judische Korrespondenz, 24 Jan. 1918, 1-3; 10 Jan. 1918, 1. 46. On the first proposal, see Die Wahrheit, 6 Sept. 1917, 3; 21 Sept. 1917, 5-6; 16 Nov. 1917, 4-5. On the second, see Bloch's Wochenschrift, 24 Aug. 1917, 537-538. 47. Kaznelson to Hantke, 15 Nov. 1917, CZA Z3/215; Herrmann to ZCO, 28 Sept. 1917, CZA Z3/1693. Die Wahrheit, 24 Aug. 1917, 4-5, hints at the possibility of this antinationalist Congress. See also Der Yudishe Arbeter, Sept./Oct. 1917, 11-12. 48. On Czernin's support, and on Hantke's discussions with government officials, see Herrmann to ZCO, 20 Sept. 1917, CZA Z3/1693; Hantke to Kaznelson, 27 Nov. 1917, CZA Z3/215. 49. Herrmann to ZCO, 28 Sept. 1917, CZA Z3/1693; Hellmann, "Erinnerungen," 52. 50. Kaznelson to Hantke, 21 Dec. 1917 and 4 Feb. 1918; Hantke to Kaznelson, 16 Jan. 1918, all in CZA Z3/215. 51. See, for example, Die Wahrheit, 24 Aug. 1917, 4-5; 6 Sept. 1917, 3; Bloch's Wochenschrift, 24 Aug. 1917, 537-538; 19 Oct. 1917, 653-654; Judische Zeitung, 9 Nov. 1917, 3. This was in effect the same impulse that had driven the movement to expand the AOIB. SceZBB 21 (1918), 133-134. 52. Its full title was the "Wiener provisorischen Arbeitsausschusses des osterreichischjiidischen Kongress-komitees." See Kaznelson to Kaminka, 14 Feb. 1918, CZA A147/17/19. 53. Kaznelson to Hantke, 25 Feb. 1918, CZA Z3/215; Stern to Theodor Sonnenschein, 31 March 1918, Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP), AW 2805/19/211; Judische Korrespondenz, 14 March 1918, 2-3; Hellmann, "Die Geschichte," 210. Despite what Kaznelson called the "exceptionally great failure" of the meeting, a provisional Steering Committee was appointed. Its overwhelmingly Zionist composition indicated that active support for the Congress was still limited primarily (although not exclusively) to the nationalist-minded. See Kaznelson to Hantke, 25 Feb. 1918, CZA Z3/215. A list of members of the Steering Committee is in Kaznelson to Ignaz Ziegler, 1 March 1918, CZA Z3/215. 54. See Kaznelson to Hantke, 25 Feb. 1918; Kaznelson to Ignaz Ziegler, 1 March 1918, both in CZA Z3/215; Hellmann, "Die Geschichte," 209-210. 55. On the "Liberal Establishment," see Freidenreich, Jewish Politics, 28. For Kaznelson's description, sec Hellmann, "Die Geschichte," 210. 56. Strieker's January article in the Judische Zeitung (see n. 36 above) had infuriated Fleischer, who expressed support for the "fruitful idea" of a broad-based Congress. See Monatschrift der Osterreichisch-Israelitischen Union 30 (Jan.-Feb. 1918), 1-4; Kaznelson to Hantke, 25 and 27 Feb. 1918, both in CZA Z3/215. On the Orthodox, see Judische Korrespondenz, 14 March 1918, 2-3. 57. The most serious examination of Jewish autonomy in Austria was made by Poale Zion theoretician Max Rosenfeld. See his "Zur Frage der staatlichen Anerkennung der judischen Nationalitat in Osterreich," Neue Judische Monatshefte 1 (1916-1917), 664-671; idem, "Fur einc nationale Autonomie der Juden in Osterreich," Der Jude 1 (1916-1917), 290-297; idem, "Die judischen Gemeinden in Osterreich," Der Jude 2 (1917-1918), 152-162. In Hellmann, "Die Geschichte," Kaznelson presented his own theoretical exposition of the problem, intended as part of a larger study in which he planned to take issue with Renner's rejection of the principle of Jewish autonomy. See also Kurt Stillschweig, "Nationalism and Autonomy Among Eastern European Jewry: Origin and Historical Development up to 1939," Historica Judaica 6 (1944), 27-68. 58. This point is made, for example, by O(tto) A(beles), "Ein Kongress der Juden Oster-

Autonomy and Its Discontents

183

K\chs,"Neue Judische Monatshefte 2 (1917-1918), 287-288. See also Judische Zeitung, 27 March 1918, 4. 59. On the Zionists' proposals to the government, see Freidenreich, Jewish Politics, 5152. Although formally defined as a religious minority, Jews were on occasion categorized by Austrian officialdom as a Volk and even as a nationality. On this sometimes ambiguous status, see Gerald Stourzh, "Galten die Juden als Nationalitat Altosterreichs?" Studia Judaica Austriaca 10 (1984), 73-98; Kurt Stillschweig, "Die nationalitatenrechtliche Stellung der Juden im alten Osterreich," Monatsschrift fur Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 81 (1937), 321-340; idem, "Die nationalitatenrechtliche Stellung der Juden in den russischen und osterreichischen Nachfolgestaaten wahrend der Weltkriegsepoche," Monatsschrift fur Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 82 (1938), 217-248. 60. Kaznelson to Hantke, 15 Nov. 1917; 25, 26 and 27 Feb. 1918; Kaznelson to Ziegler, 1 March 1918, all in CZA Z3/215; Frankel, "The Jewish Socialists," 280. 61. Kaznelson to Hantke, 27 Feb. 1918, CZA Z3/215. Kaznelson claimed that he was supported in this unorthodox viewpoint by Bohm. 62. Kaznelson to Hantke, 26 Feb. 1918. See also Kaznelson to Hantke, 25 and 27 Feb. 1918; Kaznelson to Bohemian Zionist District Committee, 28 Feb. 1918; Kaznelson to Ziegler, 1 March 1918, all in CZA Z3/215. What Kaznelson referred to as a Parteitag was officially called the westosterreichische Zionistentag. See Gaisbauer, Davidstern und Doppeladler, 302-303. 63. Kaznelson to Ziegler, 1 March 1918, CZA Z3/215. 64. Hellmann, "Die Geschichte," 211-212; Kaznelson to Herrmann, 6 and 24 March, 3 April 1918, all in CZA Z3/215. 65. Kaznelson to Herrmann, 6 March 1918, CZA Z3/215. 66. Kaznelson to Herrmann, 6 and 24 March 1918, both in CZA Z3/215. 67. Kaznelson to Herrmann, 6 and 24 March, 3 April 1918; Kaznelson to Ziegler, 22 March 1918, all in CZA Z3/215. While much of the Zionist apparatus in Vienna, along with Poale Zion, backed Strieker, some important local figures nonetheless sided with Kaznelson, including Bohm, Robert Weltsch (now in the capital as secretary of the Zionist organization), youth movement leader Siegfried Bernfeld and welfare activist Anitta Muller. Outside the capital, too, both camps enjoyed considerable support. See Kaznelson to Herrmann, 6 and 24 March, 3 April 1918; Kaznelson to Hantke, 14 May 1918, all in CZA Z3/215; Judische Zeitung, 1 March 1918, 3. 68. Kaznelson to Herrmann, 3 April 1918, CZA Z3/215. 69. Hantke to Kaznelson, 8 May 1918, CZA Z3/215. 70. Kaznelson to Ziegler, 22 March 1918; Kaznelson to Ehrmann, 10 April 1918, both in CZA Z3/215. 71. ZBB 21 (1918), 103-105, 108-109; Kaznelson to Ehrmann, 10 April 1918, CZA Z3/215; Hellmann, "Die Geschichte," 213. Prominent Jewish Reichsrat members Julius Ofner and Camillo Kuranda, thought Ehrmann, would object even to a Congress based on the B'nai B'rith formula. See Kaznelson's handwritten note to Herrmann, in Kaznelson to Ehrmann, 10 April 1918, CZA Z3/215. 72. Kaznelson and Ehrmann both made this clear. See ZBB 21 (1918), 103-105, 108109; Kaznelson to Hantke, 14 May 1918, CZA Z3/215. 73. Kaznelson to Ziegler, 22 March 1918, CZA Z3/215. 74. Circular of Bohemian Zionist District Committee, 8 April 1918, CZA Z3/215; Hellmann, "Die Geschichte," 212. 75. ZCWA to ZCO, 2 April 1918, CZA Z3/849. The Congress was not the sole issue on the conference agenda. 76. Robert Weltsch to ZCO, 1 May 1918, CZA Z3/849. 77. ECAZ to ZCO, 1 May 1918; ZCWA to ZCO, 1 May 1918, both in CZA Z3/849. The conference decisions are referred to in veiled form in Judische Zeitung, 3 May 1918, 1-2. See also Der Yudishe Arbeter, 1 June 1918, 7-8, where the "bourgeois Zionists" are attacked by Poale Zion for "betraying the national cause." 78. As Strieker had already admitted, tactical freedom of maneuver was as important to

184

David Rechter

him as any nominal compromise. Kaznelson recalled that Strieker had broken their July 1917 agreement about the Congress program, reinstated the program following Kaznelson's protests and had then proceeded for the most part to ignore it. See Kaznelson to Hantke, 14 May 1918, CZA Z3/215. 79. Weltsch to ZCO, 1 May 1918, CZA Z3/849; Kaznelson to Hantke, 14 May 1918, CZA Z3/215. 80. ECAZ to ZCO, 1 May 1918, CZA Z3/849. See also Hellmann, "Die Geschichte," 214. 81. Kaznelson to Hantke, 30 April and 14 May 1918, both in CZA Z3/215. Kaznelson had also been ill in early March. See Kaznelson to Ziegler, 22 March 1918, CZA Z3/215. He seems to have suffered something akin to a nervous breakdown in late April. See the comments to that effect in Weltsch to ZCO, 1 May 1918, CZA Z3/849; Hantke to Kaznelson, 8 May 1918; Kaznelson to Hantke, 14 May 1918, both in CZA Z3/215. 82. Kaznelson to Hantke, 14 May 1918; Hantke to ZCWA, 16 May 1918, both in CZA Z3/215; Hellmann, "Die Geschichte," 214. Faint echoes reverberated through the summer of 1918, but these focused on convening a Galician, rather than Austrian, Congress. See JudischeZeitung, 31 May 1918, 1 -2; Der Yudishe Arbeter, 1 June 1918, 2-4, 11; 15 June 1918, 2-4; 1 July 1918, 3-4; 15 Aug. 1918, 3. In December 1918 the Zionist Federation of Germany launched a German Jewish Congress movement, which reached considerable proportions (if only briefly) in Germany but elicited no response in Vienna. See Toury, "Organizational Problems," 84-88; VolkundLand, 13 Feb. 1919, 211-214; 6-13 March 1919,329332. On his efforts to revive the Congress movement in Vienna, see Leo Herrmann's "Bericht ubcr meine Reise," Dec. 1918-Jan. 1919, CZA Z3/1696. 83. See Hellmann, "Die Gesehichte," 214; idem, "Erinnerungen," 53. 84. On the councils, see Ezra Mendelsohn, Zionism in Poland, 91-110; idem, "Zionist Success and Zionist Failure: The Case of East Central Europe between the Wars," in Vision Confronts Reality, ed. Ruth Kozody, David Sidorsky and Kalman Sultanik (London: 1989), 195-197; Shmuel Ettinger, "Jews and non-Jews in Eastern and Central Europe Between the Wars: An Outline," in Jews and Non-Jews in Eastern Europe, 1918-1945, ed. Bela Vago and George L. Mosse (Jerusalem: 1974), 8-10; Rechter, "Neither East nor West," 257-271. 85. Jonathan Frankel, "Crisis as a Factor in Jewish Politics, 1840 and 1881-82," in Living with Antisemitism, ed. Jehuda Reinharz (Hanover: 1987), 45. 86. See Kurt Stillschweig, Die Juden Osteuropas in den Minderheitenvertragen (Berlin: 1936), 21-38; Janowsky, The Jews and Minority Rights, 309-383.

87. See, for example, Volk undLand, 23 January 1919, 108; 6-13 March 1919, 327. See also Unity in Dispersion: A History of the World Jewish Congress (New York: 1948), 17-25, where this connection is made explicit. 88. On the conditions needed for successful Jewish autonomy—"consolidation of parliamentary democracy [and] a high degree of order, stability and liberalism," see Jonathan Frankel, "The Dilemmas of Jewish National Autonomism: the Case of Ukraine, 1917-1920," in Potichnyj and Aster (eds.), Ukrainian-Jewish Relations, 275. See also Paul Radensky, "Der ministeriyum far yidishe inyonim un di yidishe natsionale otonomiye in lite," YIVO Bleter, n. s. 2 (1994), 127-146. 89. Judische Zeitung, 30 July 1915, 1. 90. A similar claim is made for the Ukrainians in Paul Robert Magocsi, "A Subordinate or Submerged People: The Ukrainians of Galicia under Habsburg and Soviet Rule," in Nationalism and Empire: The Habsburg Monarchy and the Soviet Union, ed. Richard L. Rudolph and David F. Good (New York: 1992), 100. 91. Hellmann, "Die Geschichte," 207.

Jabotinsky's Use of National Myths in Political Struggles Joseph Heller (THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY)

Within the Revisionist Zionist movement, Zev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky was revered as both a statesman and a leader who not only proposed original nationalist solutions for the Jews but was also capable of implementing them. Yet at the same time, members of the movement were wont to cast their leader into two divergent heroic molds—one in the image of Giuseppe Garibaldi and the other as Camillo Cavour. The more militant "Garibaldi image" gained ascendance in the 1930s with the rise of maximalist elements in Revisionism such as Betar, the Revisionist youth movement, and the Irgun Zevai Leumi (IZL), the underground movement affiliated with the Revisionists. However, in the years following his death in 1940, the image of Jabotinsky as a contemporary Cavour—a rational as opposed to romantic leader— came to complement his more militant, Garibaldi-like persona. Rather than delve into the transformation of Jabotinsky's image after his death, the discussion here will focus on two other fundamental issues: the role of political romanticism and national myths in his youthful Weltanschauung (before he became the leader of a political movement); and his use of these elements later on, when the Revisionist movement found itself divided as to how best to wage the struggle for national liberation. In the summer of 1938, following the hanging of Betar member Shlomo BenYosef by British Mandate authorities after his unsuccessful attack on an Arab bus, Menachem Begin dramatically demanded of Jabotinsky that he choose once and for all between the models of Garibaldi and Cavour. Jabotinsky's response was an absolute refusal to express preference for the romantic Garibaldi paradigm over that of the rationalist Cavour. As will be shown, a duality had long been evident in Jabotinsky's Weltanschauung and operative ideology, and in terms of the latter, it was rationalism that tended to prevail. By 1938, however, the Arab revolt in Palestine was at its height and the credibility of Revisionist ideology was being put most severely to the test. More than ever, a definition of its operative parameters (rather than its ideological assumptions) had become an absolute necessity. As the person solely responsible for the final shape such parameters would take, Jabotinsky's immediate problem was how to reconcile present-day reality with liberal precepts he considered sacred. The Ben-Yosef affair threatened to create severe 185

186

Joseph Heller

cracks in the movement, which hitherto, despite its having three distinct components—the New Zionist Organization (NZO), the illegal IZL and Betar (which, while legal, served as a recruiting source for the underground movement)— was viewed by its adherents to be a unified whole. Now Revisionism was in crisis: would it be transformed from a national liberation movement using political means into one that would adopt terrorism and guerilla tactics to achieve its objectives? To appreciate Jabotinsky's dilemma and the way in which he responded, it is instructive to consider a number of previous issues and events in his life.

Early Influences on Jabotinsky's Political Thought The duality in Jabotinsky's thinking should not be attributed to the dynamics of historical developments alone. In his early years, particularly in the decade that preceded the First World War, Jabotinsky was greatly influenced by the spirit of European romantic nationalism in general and that of Italy in particular. It seems clear that the ground was laid for his absorption of national myths during his sojourn in Italy from 1898 to 1901. As a student at the University of Rome, Jabotinsky came under the influence of the Italian philosopher and historian Benedetto Croce, who found unacceptable those Marxist axioms concerning dialectical materialism.1 From him, one suspects, Jabotinsky derived his basic premise that it was the "spiritual psyche" of nations that shaped historical processes.2 Jabotinsky was exposed to Marxism, but in its special Italian guise. Thus his teacher Antonio Labriola, though a Marxist, was opposed to determinism. Jabotinsky rejected the more materialistic Marxism of a third teacher, Enrico Ferri.3 While studying in Rome, Jabotinsky also served as a correspondent for several Russian periodicals to which he sent some two hundred articles and works of reportage on various topics, running the gamut from current political events to the cultural milieu of Italy, its theater and music. In his autobiography, he confessed that "my entire outlook on issues concerning nation, state and society took shape during those years under Italian influence." He noted that he had "become as one" with Italian youth, and had come to admire the architecture, sculpture, painting and poetry of Italy. He pointed directly to "the myth of Garibaldi, the works of Mazzini, the poetry of Giacomo Leopardi and Giuseppe Giusti, (which] added depth to my shallow Zionism, transforming it from an instinctive sentiment into a concept." Above all, he wrote, he had become impressed by the fact that liberalism was an element common to "all" ideological political movements, defining its vision as "a dreamworld in which order and justice are achieved without coercion, a universal vision that is a combination of pity, patience and trust in the basic good and righteousness of man." The main exception to the prevalent liberal philosophy that Jabotinsky perceived in Italy was the futurism of Philippo Tomasso Marinetti, in which he later discerned the first signs of fascism. Italy, Jabotinsky realized, was not solely a museum or a sightseeing locale for idle tourists seeking aesthetic amusement. On the contrary, it was full of factories, and the new Italian was a "builder and conqueror, stubborn and cruel."

Jabotinsky's Use of National Myths in Political Struggles

187

In sum, as Jabotinsky noted in his autobiography, "all that I read then concerning the Italian [national] revival was combined in my mind, perhaps subconsciously, with the ideal of a Jewish state."4 Obviously, one who was so manifestly influenced by the spirit of Italian nationalism could not possibly differentiate between the romantic and mythological elements of that spirit and its more existential components: Jabotinsky was not the only one for whom the romantic image of Mazzini and Garibaldi overshadowed that of Cavour.5 The Russian-born Jabotinsky was also profoundly affected by the works of native authors, from Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky to Nikolai Gogol and Maxim Gorky. He tended to divide belles lettres into two categories: "literature of action" and "speculative literature." For the Jewish people, engaged as it was in a process of national revival, literature of the first type was more important, which explains Jabotinsky's great satisfaction at the appearance of Henryk Sienkiewicz's epic novel By Fire and Sword in a Hebrew translation. It would seem that he was greatly influenced by romantic literature in general—especially that which bore a nationalist flavor, such as the works of Adam Mickiewicz (Conrad Wallenrod), Lord Byron, Gabriele D'Annunzio and Esaias Tegner.6 Even Theodor Herzl may be placed on this list. Herzl's drama Solon in Ludia (1900), in which he justified the murder of Eukosmos (who had discovered a process by which flour could be effortlessly produced), led Jabotinsky to note that "there is no victory of justice over evil that is presented to its standard-bearers without murder, treachery or deceit—in other words, even for justice men have been forced to sully their hands, using means that are far from ethical." He also praised Ferdinand Lassalle, in whose play Franz von Sickingen the humanist and freedom fighter Ulrich von Hutten delivered "a most impressive sermon" proving that "all the good on the face of the earth was accomplished and captured at sword's point, in other words by strength of arms and bloodshed."7 Even in his youth, Jabotinsky did not consider social processes and the ideas that nurtured them to be the prime movers of human history. Rather, it was the leader, "the fly-wheel of the social machinery," that fulfilled this function. 8 It is thus not surprising that references to exemplary personalities and romantic historical models so frequently appear in Jabotinsky's early writings. Herzl, for example, was perceived by Jabotinsky as "a prototype around which a national myth could be woven," a "perfect example of a Hebrew ('ivri) from top to bottom, a Hebrew to the very marrow of his bones." As an antithesis to the ghetto, Herzl reminded Jabotinsky of biblical heroes, especially the kings. Eulogizing Herzl after his death in 1904, Jabotinsky wrote of the bond between the leader and the masses: The people had only to sec this man but once. At that moment a magic spell was cast, and it was inevitable, because with our own eyes we saw in him what we had yearned for, consciously or subconsciously, even those among us who are inclined to be suspicious or careful . . . above all and foremost, there was a magic charm, a primordial, unfettered charm, for it spoke to us primarily not in words but through invisible rays and currents, which in nature always connect charged, related elements. He was the best of our flesh and the best of our blood, the very essence of the best of our vitality.9

188

Joseph Heller

Not long after this eulogy appeared, Jabotinsky lavishly praised the myth of Karadjeordje, the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Serbian hero who killed the village head—in some versions of the story, he was also his father—when the latter tried to prevent him from fleeing to the hills to join the Serbian rebels. Jabotinsky made it clear that he was not suggesting that the Zionist movement follow the Serbian model of violent struggle. Rather, his intention was to affirm the importance of rebelling against the authority of elders. "Despite what they say," he wrote, "life today is no longer a desert, it is more like a beautiful landscape with dangerous mountaintops and rocky crevices leading down to the depths. These men, who were raised and educated in the desert, cannot be our guides through this new land." 10 It is difficult to believe that such statements were written simply as a literary device devoid of any political significance. In Serbia in 1903, the Obrenovic dynasty had been destroyed and replaced by that of Karadjeordjevic, an event that reminded Jabotinsky of the early days of the Serbian armed struggle for independence. Jabotinsky's legitimatization of the use of violence in political struggles, both in the case of Herzl and of Karadjeordje, should not be glossed over. Moreover, during the following year—against the background of events connected with the RussoJapanese War and the revolution of 1905—Jabotinsky wrote "Smite the Iron!" an article that became his political testament, and from which one can understand that he himself wished to assume the role of leader. Jabotinsky explained to his readers that he had no intention of remaining passive in the struggle for liberation in face of the "flash flood of history." His conclusion, aimed at the Zionist camp, was: "Smite the iron! Don't let go of the hammer, don't miss the opportunity presented by the moment. . . . Woe is he who goes among the living—as if he is a lifeless corpse. For whoever behaves thus, to quote Dante, there will be no room, neither in Hell nor in Paradise."11 Jabotinsky, as became clear in a later article, did not approve of the actions of Jewish revolutionaries in the Russian Revolution of 1905, since they not only supplied fuel for the revolution but, in so doing, incited antisemitic reaction.12 Nor did he advocate a venturesome policy for the Zionist movement prior to the First World War. 13 As rioted, his writings of this period tend to extol the crucial role played by individual leaders rather than that of revolutionary movements. In 1912, for example, he grouped Napoleon, Garibaldi and Rousseau together as a triad that had made an overwhelming impression upon the fate of Europe. Surprisingly enough, he considered Rousseau, more than anyone else, as representing the prototype of a leader who "ignites the revolution," as opposed to those who supply its ideological content: His influence is grounded not in intellect, not in knowledge, not in clear vision, but rather in a state of mind, in temperament, in the fire that burns within him. All the extreme heat of the age is concentrated within his soul; the man is aflame before the very eyes of his contemporaries, and he infects them. Then they are blinded and no longer perceive his mistakes . . . they feel only [the heat of] his flame, the divine flame, panton genetor, and it is this flame that gives birth to the revolution, this flame that leaves its mark upon history—and not those wise men who, with their sharp vision,

Jabotinsky's Use of National Myths in Political Struggles

189

knew so well how to perceive man's needs and how to express them so succinctly in their social and political ideals.14

Napoleon and Garibaldi, understandably, were lauded as unifiers and liberators. There were also other historical models for emulation, notably in ancient Rome. In this regard, the figure who most captivated Jabotinsky's imagination was Spartacus, leader of the slave insurrection—that same Spartacus whom both Garibaldi and Raffaele Giovanioli, the Risorgimento-period author, looked upon as a fighter for national liberation.15 No one, however, could compete with Garibaldi as the model for a potential "ignitor of the revolution." Jabotinsky considered him to be the decisive factor in the liberation and unification of Italy, a modern incarnation of Iliya Morumetz, the hero of a medieval Russian epos that dealt with the theme of national redemption.16 A final link in Jabotinsky's mythological ring of exemplary romantic figures was Charlotte Corday, who assassinated Marat during the French Revolution. In a poem written in 1902 that he dedicated to her memory, Jabotinsky portrayed her as a nonpolitical personality who had been raised on the writings of Pierre Corneille and Rousseau and had dreamt of "the majesty and splendor of heroic victory, of sacred sacrifices." Her own personal act of terror came as a result of too many Girondins being sent to the guillotine. She denied the claim that she had performed a brave deed that would set an example for others. Corday, therefore, lacked the dashing heroic stature of Garibaldi, yet still appealed to the romantic element in Jabotinsky's personality.17 Thus, as a young writer in the years preceding the First World War, the future leader of Revisionism was generous in his use of national myths to justify—to some extent—revolutionary activity. The romantic and myth-making dimension of Jabotinsky's work was partially moderated by a sense of rationalism and an appreciation of liberal democratic principles. Writing about "greater Albania" in 1913, for instance, Jabotinsky praised the way in which the country's independence had come about as the result of political compromise.18 Such articles, while fewer in number than those in which he lauded revolutionary personalities, indicate a certain dualism in Jabotinsky's thinking—which becomes especially apparent in his complex stand on issues involving Great Britain.

Limits of Romanticism: Jabotinsky and the Irish Rebellion of 1916 Over the years, Jabotinsky consistently aligned himself with an orientation that considered Britain to be the potential agent of Zionist aspirations. This being the case, his analysis of Irish nationalism was of necessity a multifaceted one. With one exception, all of Jabotinsky's writings concerning the Irish question were unmediated by romanticism or mythology. He denied the historical necessity of the Easter Rebellion of 1916 and made no secret of his admiration for the British imperial system, whose stability, he believed, resided in the mutual trust of all of its components. "So-called cures," he commented in his article "Ireland," "which help only momentarily but will have a deleterious effect upon the system as a whole, must not

190

Joseph Heller

be introduced into this organism." Yet Jabotinsky also refused to denounce the rebels as the worst of Ireland's sons, nor did he deny that Ireland's history was one long tale of oppression. Nonetheless, the proper solution was home rule rather than rebellion. "What is especially painful is not that these men died; what hurts is that they died for the wrong purpose," he wrote. "Ireland's past is horrible, but one does not resort to revolution simply in order to take revenge for the past." It was in "Ireland" that Jabotinsky first began to develop a principle he would hold sacred throughout his life, namely, that historical development or organic growth (later most often termed "positivism") was preferable to outright rebellion. The catastrophic Polish uprising of 1863 had taught him this lesson, Jabotinsky wrote. As for Ireland, rebellion was unnecessary precisely because the basic conditions for the nation's survival were good and constantly improving. Villages enjoyed local government, just as in England; the abominable serfdom of the past no longer existed; socioeconomic conditions had improved. Above all, Ireland was undergoing a process of normalization that would justify the granting of home rule after the war. According to Jabotinsky, England "has truly tried to pay her historical debt to Ireland and heal its wounds. Under these conditions, rebellion is unjustified. It has no foundation in the social conscience, and it looks as if no one really needs it."19 Jabotinsky had no hesitation in calling the rebellion (which "never turned into a revolution") a "false step." For one thing, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith had always strongly supported home rule. Second, the rebellion had been a stab in Britain's back while it was at war and as a result had served Germany's wartime propaganda. Third, it had put a stop to constructive activity in Ireland. The past few years, he argued, had seen a number of radical changes inaugurated, some of them by returned Irish emigrants from the United States. Sir John Plunkett, for example, had spent two decades in America and had returned to Ireland to introduce agricultural reforms. Many Irish tenants, meanwhile, had in practice become the owners of the land they worked. Despite mass emigration, Irish culture was flourishing in the realms of prose, poetry, folklore and the successful renascence of the Gaelic language. For Jabotinsky, such new cultural trends were "organic developments" (a term used by the Poles after the unsuccessful revolt of 1863), and such developments, or evolutionary change, were what shaped the national character.20 All this notwithstanding, and rather paradoxically, Jabotinsky the romanticist could not resist the temptation to praise Thomas MacDonagh's poem "The PoetCaptain," which portrayed the model figure of an ideal national leader. Moreover, MacDonagh's execution and subsequent glorification both as one of the leaders of the Easter Rebellion and as the mentor of Eamon De Valera (who later became head of the independent Irish state) was not without significance for Jabotinsky the romantic.21 A few weeks after the rebellion, however, Jabotinsky found himself deep in negotiations with the British government concerning his proposal to establish Jewish brigades within the British army. In a series of articles written for Russkaya viedomosti, Jabotinsky once again stated openly that he did not support the Easter Rebellion, even though he criticized its cruel suppression. Charles S. Parnell (the nineteenth-century champion of home rule) was his hero, Jabotinsky wrote. "Had

Jabotinsky's Use of National Myths in Political Struggles

191

you [the British] granted home rule forty years ago, or even two years ago, recourse to prophylactic medicine or surgery would have been unnecessary."22 At this point, Jabotinsky declared his support for the home rule compromise put forward by Prime Minister Lloyd George, though he acknowledged that "the fate of careful compromises is both strange and instructive: all agree to them, but no one fully supports them. It is imperative to achieve a balance of power, but not very popular."23 Similarly, he considered the partition of Ireland and the long-term autonomous status of Ulster to be acceptable from all points of view.24 Until his dying day, Jabotinsky (though not his disciples) would never look to the pattern of the Easter Rebellion as the model for a national liberation struggle against the British—or, for that matter, against an Arab government imposed upon the Yishuv by the British. This was the case even after he had met with Eamon De Valera in January 1938, at which time he sought the Irish leader's backing in opposing the partition proposal put forward by the Peel Commission.25 Jabotinsky's transformation into a Zionist leader during the course of the First World War essentially precluded his support of romantic nationalist rebellions, above all any that seemed foolhardy and harmful to British interests.

Romantic versus Pragmatic Nationalism Arab nationalism was another key element in the formulation of Jabotinsky's ideology of national liberation. Analyzing the Irish struggle, Jabotinsky had concluded that organic development was preferable to rebellion. With regard to the Arabs, the lesson was that true nationalism did not exist without a combination of modernization and national unity. Jabotinsky's first pronouncements on the Arab question were written on the eve of the Ottoman empire's collapse. At that time, it still seemed reasonable to assert, as he did, that "Arab aspirations for renascence and independence cannot be expressed in a clear plan of action. They are blurry, just as is the very definition of an Arab nation. . . ."26 Jabotinsky went on to term Negib Azoury, who in 1905 had called for pan-Arab independence, "a minor Machiavelli." In his view, a common language was not enough to create a united nation; what was required (which the Arabs lacked) was the consciousness of national unity. According to Jabotinsky, the very existence of all these tribes, and especially the fact that they inhabit a continuous territory from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean, may some day provide the basis for active agitation for national unity. But that day is still hidden in the far-distant future, and before it arrives some sons of that proposed pan-Arab nation will have to learn many things that comprise the borderline between primitive society and the first stages of civilization. In order to learn them, they will have to avail themselves of European mentors holding the necessary authority. . . .27

As far as he was concerned, only the Egyptian, Tunisian and Syrian nations were not "primitive" (the last because its urban population had been eugenically upgraded by an influx of European blood). Arab nationalism, he concluded, could develop beyond mere myth if the Arabs went through a process of general modernization and

192

Joseph Heller

divided themselves into distinct nations. Pan-Arabism, on the other hand, could never be more than a dangerous myth. Understandably, Zionist leaders were inclined to view with apprehension the possibility of a pan-Arab empire. Jabotinsky's fear of such "a terrible catastrophe" was undoubtedly rooted in his consciousness of the fact that such an empire would not look favorably upon a neighboring Jewish state. For this reason, he argued that Zionist objectives should be limited to a charter that would guarantee self rule and the right to settle on the land. What he viewed as a developing "alliance" with Great Britain, on the one hand, and his fear of the latent potential of Pan-Arabism, on the other, induced Jabotinsky to draft a clear definition of expedient nationalism—one that was constructive, not destructive, both with regard to internal factors and the web of relationships with neighboring nations. Such a definition necessarily checked the applicability of romantic (and thus unrealistic) myth-making in the Irish mold. In the decade following the issuance of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, Jabotinsky increasingly emphasized positivist criteria as the point of departure for all political action, while still preserving a romantic element in his thought and public proclamations. The Arab disturbances of 1929 marked a turning point: henceforth, the chief proponents of romantic nationalism were to be personalities within his own movement who both opposed and admired him. For Abba Ahimeir, Yehoshua H. Yeivin, Uri Zvi Greenberg and others who supported them, romantic nationalism was almost sacred, both as principle and as modus operandi. In this they were opposed to their far more pragmatic and liberal-rationalist leader. During the 1920s, the idea for which Jabotinsky held out greatest hope was the reestablishment of the First World War Jewish battalions that he had been so instrumental in founding. Jabotinsky himself had served in Galipolli28 and in Palestine as a front-line officer in the battalions, and he now argued the need for a regular army—not, be it noted, irregular partisan forces. Just before the March 1920 events of Tel Hai, for example, Jabotinsky expressed his skepticism that the Upper Galilee settlements, even if reinforced by 500 irregulars, could hold out against a sustained attack.29 This view was reinforced with the death of his comrade-in-arms, Yosef Trumpeldor, whom he subsequently eulogized in his memoirs in terms that fused the latter's image with that of Garibaldi.30 In the face of British opposition to the battalions' reestablishment, Jabotinsky argued that only a military Zionism could influence statesmen, diplomats and journalists. Within this myth was enfolded another one: it was true, he acknowledged, that the British army could have freed Palestine without the help of the Jews—but in fact it did benefit from Jewish aid. 31 The real lesson that Jabotinsky drew from Trumpeldor's death in battle was that Jewish settlement efforts were doomed to failure without the active support of European powers. Just prior to Tel Hai, after all, it was the labor movement—not Jabotinsky—that was criticized for trying to emulate the Italian romantic nationalist D'Annunzio's taking of Fiume.32 Only after the battle did the future head of Revisionism embrace Trumpeldor as his own: Were the necromancer of Ein Dor (I Sam. 28:7] alive, and were we to come to her on a stormy night and say: "Call up for us the one-armed hero," and we would ask that

Jabotinsky's Use of National Myths in Political Struggles

193

shadow: "What solution for our tragic condition? To where should we turn and what shall we do in this darkness?"—his answer would be that self-same smile and that very same rock-cleaving expression of faith, two words [ein davar—no matter, it is good to die for one's country]—words that comfort but are also expressive of an outlook on life and a plan. That is our way, that is the path we shall follow.33

Subsequently, Trumpeldor—a Labor Zionist—was adopted as a hero by both Betar34 and the New Zionist Organization, and the defeat at Tel Hai took on mythical dimensions: "Tel Hai is like Port Arthur and Sevastopol to the Russians, or like Verdun to the French: a citadel besieged by the armed enemy and defended by the Jew, likewise bearing weapons."35 Notwithstanding, the Revisionist platform bore the imprint of Jabotinsky's realpolitik. Despite criticism of England, it declared that the relationship between Zionism and Great Britain was grounded in "mutual loyalty" that flowed from "joint interests" and a recognition of the "honest and just character" of the British nation.36 At about the same time, however, Jabotinsky published his best-known novel, Samson (1926-1927)—as if bent upon recompensing himself and his followers for the lack of romanticism in the movement's platform. Samson was a paean of praise to Jewish power that only treachery could defeat. "Nothing is more precious than iron [arms],"37 Jabotinsky declared in Samson, and after his death the phrase was elevated to the status of a sacred testament in both Betar and the IZL.

Jabotinsky and the Maximalists As noted, it was in the wake of the Arab riots of 1929 and the White Paper of 1930 that more militant voices began to emerge among the Revisionists. Until that time, Jabotinsky's remarkable blend of romanticism and rationalism had essentially been the expression of a leader whose worldview was grounded in liberal-democratic values. Now, however, there were those in the movement who did not share such views. Aware of the danger of schism, Jabotinsky was increasingly forced to navigate between placating the maximalists and drawing clear ideological limits to their militancy. "Adventurism" is a key word of this period. As first articulated in an article published in March 1932, adventurism connoted the (generally positive) defiance of accepted standards of behavior. Although Jabotinsky used the term with regard to such historical figures as Herzl, Garibaldi, Washington and Columbus, his main concern was with the maximalists in his own movement, notably Ahimeir. Jabotinsky wished to give the militants a certain legitimacy while at the same time reining them in. Thus, when discussing adventurism, Jabotinsky noted that "the defining limits of this term are so blurred that I cannot always defend it ... everything depends on the circumstances, the general atmosphere, the time, the conjecture—and above all, the character of the specific adventure."38 As the influence of the maximalist Revisionists grew, Jabotinsky took ever greater pains to lay down those lines that must not be crossed. His basic stance was that adventurism was a legitimate means, but must not become an end in itself.

194

Joseph Heller

Wishing to teach his disciples why realism was preferable to romanticism, he pointed to the case of Adam Mickiewicz, the Polish poet and adventurer who had attempted to create a Jewish legion. Jabotinsky contrasted Mickiewicz's failed romanticism with his own perseverance—and ultimate success—in negotiating with Britain for the establishment of the Jewish Legion.39 Similarly, Jabotinsky opposed the militant notion that "England must be coerced on the barricades," arguing that "only one unique force can 'coerce' England to act on behalf of Zionism: England's moral sense of its own interests, or the both of them together."40 Instead of violent confrontation, Jabotinsky advocated actions that would place accumulative pressure on Britain. These included illegal immigration; protest rallies against Hebrew University president Judah L. Magnes and Norman Bentwich (who, as supporters of the Brit Shalom movement, backed an agreement with the Arabs to be based on parity); and the defense of individuals such as Ahimeir who had been arrested for boycotting the census (out of fear that the results would be used to perpetuate the Jews' minority status in Palestine). Although Jabotinsky at times voiced sharp criticism of England—even hinting that the Zionists might look for an alternative patron, Fascist Italy being the most likely surrogate—he consistently stood against the notion of a complete break of ties with the British government.41 In sum, as an effective antidote to the romantic element within his movement, Jabotinsky sought to harness maximalist mysticism to the wagon of "the colonization regime," by which he meant fulfillment of the Zionist ideal through the sole agency of England. This explains why he preferred to foster the image of Trumpeldor, since that hero was not connected in any way with opposition to the British. Referring to the myth of Prometheus, who was punished for giving fire to mankind, Jabotinsky rhetorically asked: "Is there yet fire in the world?" and, replying in the affirmative, maintained that this fire was presented to the Jewish people by Trumpeldor.42 Interestingly, Jabotinsky also linked Trumpeldor with the Polish ruler Marshall Jozef Pilsudski. At a memorial ceremony sponsored by Betar in Cracow in 1935, a small bag of earth in the form of a "cannon ball" was brought from Trumpeldor's grave to that of Pilsudski; according to some, at Jabotinsky's initiative. Yet Jabotinsky did not generally stress the romantic aspect of Pilsudski's leadership (though he did eulogize his life as being "most romantic, infinitely more dynamic than that of Mussolini or Hitler"). Jabotinsky preferred to focus on Pilsudski's singular humanity, self-control and restraint. Unlike other dictators, he argued, Pilsudski did not create doctrines; what characterized him was pragmatic intelligence of the kind associated with the English, and his major achievement was the transformation of Poland into a Western state. In brief, it was not Pilsudski the pre-1920 revolutionary who gained Jabotinsky's esteem but rather Pilsudski the builder of the new Polish state—Pilsudski the positivist, not the revolutionary.43

Reworking a Myth With the establishment of the Irgun Zevai Leumi in April 1937, Jabotinsky was faced with a new challenge to his doctrine of political evolution. The IZL's founding

Jabotinsky's Use of National Myths in Political Struggles

195

proclamation stressed the necessity of the Jews' gaining control of Eretz Israel. Militant as it was, such language was far milder than a call for outright conquest. Yet Jabotinsky's position was still eroded. Although he was named supreme commander of the IZL the title was an honorary one, since he was now based in London and had little direct contact with the movement. By this time, moreover, a majority of the Revisionists in Palestine identified themselves with the maximalist wing. A conference of the NZO had been scheduled to take place in Prague in early 1938, and it seemed clear that a collision was imminent between Jabotinsky and some of his supporters. The first to challenge Jabotinsky's ideology, in addition to Ahimeir, was Uriel Heilperin (who later adopted the name of Yonatan Ratosh). He was one of the drafters of the founding proclamation of the IZL in April 1937, which stressed the necessity of gaining control of Eretz Israel. Heilperin's model was the Hungarian national hero, Lajos Kossuth. However, in order not to anger Jabotinsky, Heilperin refrained from calling for conquest of the country by force, demanding rather that the government of Palestine be entrusted into Jewish hands, since the Peel Commission had maintained that the Jewish minority was capable of ruling the country. By the end of 1937, Heilperin had gained the support of the majority of Revisionist members in Palestine, this in anticipation of the NZO conference.44 In an article written on the eve of the conference, Jabotinsky sought to defuse his opposition with a clear statement of principles. "From its very earliest existence," he declared, [the Revisionist movement] has been characterized by dualism: most of its aspirations are of a revolutionary nature, and most of its members are revolutionaries at heart—but, on the other hand, a dispersed nation does not have at its command the weapon of revolution, its major arms being those of the spirit. The painfulness of such a contradiction is dearer to us than a royal writ. . . .45

"Arms of the spirits," however, were not sufficient for the Polish "ActivistRevisionist Front" who arrived at the conference. Headed by Menachem Begin and Nathan Friedman-Yellin, this group demanded an end to British-oriented policy and the support of "fighting groups" within the Revisionist movement.46 In his opening address, Jabotinsky launched an attack on the activist position, categorically rejecting the possibility that armed conquest of Palestine could be a viable alternative to partition—"only idiots could believe that"—though he was careful to include militarism as one of the three objectives of Betar (the others being a Jewish state and a Jewish majority in Palestine). Militarism, however, was to be limited for the present to undermining the policy of havlagah (restraint) as practiced by the Haganah underground. Jabotinsky's own program reflected his continuing belief in evolutionary development. Rather than armed struggle, he reiterated his call for a "Ten-Year Plan" to settle 1.5 million Jews on both sides of the Jordan River under the aegis of Great Britain; ideally, after its establishment, the Jewish state would become a "seventh dominion." Jabotinsky did not consider British opposition to such an arrangement to be irreconcilable: "We are convinced that from among the British nation there shall arise a national moral indignation against the tendency to renege on sacred obligations."47 He realized, however, that members of Betar, especially

196

Joseph Heller

those influenced by the Begin-Friedman-Yellin group, found it difficult to accept the plan, even though it had become a central element in the NZO program. In view of the unrest caused by Begin and his group, Jabotinsky decided several days into the conference to devote a special lecture to the youth.48 This speech was a significant one, for in it, Jabotinsky returned to one of the myths that had so profoundly affected him as a young man. In 1905, it will be recalled, Jabotinsky had written an article in praise of the Serbian youth Karadjeordje. In the story, the village elder threatens to turn Karadjeordje over to the Ottoman pasha for hanging. The elder recalls for the youth the story of the Serbs' defeat in 1389 at Kossovo, arguing that henceforth, it is their fate to be a subjugated people—only the Russian tsar might release them from their bonds. Karadjeordje, however, does not agree: his response is to kill the village head and go off to join the Serbian rebels. In Jabotinsky's 1905 telling of the tale, the salient point was not the legitimacy of armed struggle but rather the need to rebel, if necessary, against the overly cautious outlook of elderly authority. Now, however, Jabotinsky himself was advocating evolution rather than revolution. How could this myth be used to rein in the restive Betar youth? To start, Jabotinsky made it clear that the true model for Revisionism was not Karadjeordje but Tomas G. Masaryk, the founder of modern Czechoslovakia. People ridiculed Masaryk as an idealist and dreamer, Jabotinsky reminded his audience, but in fact he had named his movement the "Party of Realists"—and had succeeded in bringing about his goal. Second, Jabotinsky defused the destructive revolutionary potential of the Serbian myth by equating Betar members to the Serbian youth while assigning the role of village head to Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency for Palestine. Weizmann had agreed to accept "the little corner" proposed by the Peel Commission in which to preserve the Jews' national culture, instead of pressing for enough territory to house the entire Jewish people. Weizmann, in short, advocated accepting what Britain (the pasha) had offered. And in so doing, Jabotinsky argued, he had turned a deaf ear to the realism expressed by Karadjeordje. The obvious conclusion was that "the village head must not go to the pasha!" With this, Jabotinsky sought to neutralize the true ideological and operative significance of Karadjeordje, turning the story practically inside out in order to link it to his evolutionary "Ten-Year Plan." He then brought in a different analogy, that of the orphanage (based on Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist) whose inmates do not simply demand more food, but food enough to satisfy their appetites. Jabotinsky's point was that enough territory must be granted to settle six to eight million Jews. His main message, however, was that the Revisionist demand for a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan within ten years was revolutionary enough in itself: there was no need for violence. In other words, Jabotinsky demystified the Serbian myth, changing completely its original significance by stripping it of the romanticism connected with the struggle for national liberation. His message now was that "young Betar must always hold that what the village head claims to be impossible, is possible."

Jabotinsky's Use of National Myths in Political Struggles

197

This evolutionist interpretation of a basically revolutionary national myth might have served as a beacon for Betar had not the historical situation changed a few months later. But with the execution by British authorities of Shlomo Ben-Yosef, a member of Betar, came the inevitable confrontation between the evolutionary and revolutionary dimensions of Revisionism. Jabotinsky at first may have thought it sufficient to add Ben-Yosef to the pantheon of the movement: "We shall make a citadel of his scaffold, a temple of his grave, and a civil religion of his memory."49 However, at the third Betar convention, held a few months after the hanging, Begin declared that "our symbols are Cavour and Garibaldi. Cavour would never have achieved the independence of Italy without Garibaldi"50—and Jabotinsky was forced to make his stand far more explicit. In his response, Jabotinsky argued that there was justification for the "spirit" of Garibaldi, not his "system." Not violence, but "world conscience" would decide the fate of Zionism: "The issue of [our] entry into Eretz Israel precedes an outburst of heroism. We came to Eretz Israel by virtue of the conscience of humanity. . . ."But here Jabotinsky had to deal with Ben-Yosef's actual violent attack. He chose to define it as "a spontaneous act of Jewish heroism in Eretz Israel" that would be "considerably helpful ... in awakening that predominating element, the conscience . . . of the world, which is a conscience . . . that I respect. We must not jeer at it and besmirch it."51 And he continued, "Ben-Yosef is our representative ... he showed the whole world the character of our movement. . . ." Jabotinsky's rhetoric soared to unprecedented heights at this point when he issued a retroactive order authorizing the dead Ben-Yosef to carry out his deed. However, he followed this in a distinctly unromantic vein—maintaining that the scaffold was "a place of sacrifice, not a site of victory."52 Interestingly, Jabotinsky in this speech turned once again to the Serbian model. This time, however, he chose a different aspect of the story, that of the myth that had developed around the defeat at Kossovo. As with Tel Hai, the paradoxical moral to be drawn was that of a "memory of victory," wherein the valor of the dead was a constant inspiration to those struggling for national liberation. Kossovo, not Karadjeordie, better served Jabotinsky's rhetorical purposes at this point, as it would be too easy—and too dangerous—to equate Ben-Yosef with the Serbian youth's violent and revolutionary side. Thus he explained how, deprived not only of independence but also of "writers and leaders," Serbs were left with "a song"—a reference to the epic Fields of Kossovo—and the legend of heroism that would fuel their revolt four centuries later.53 At this point in his address, Jabotinsky brought in Tel Hai, which he linked with Ben-Yosef's execution. "The lesson of Tel Hai and the scaffold," he declared, "is victory, independence, reawakening. . . . The nation will be built with blood ... for blood is the dew that makes the land fertile."54 Jabotinsky's response to Ben-Yosef's execution indicated just how great was his dilemma vis-a-vis the maximalists. By now he was well aware that he was no longer the absolute leader of his movement. Growing in numbers and influence, the maximalists were pressing to transform Revisionism into a full-fledged revolutionary movement. Still seeking to rein them in, Jabotinsky was forced to make compromises, at least on the rhetorical level. At this Betar convention, for example, he

198

Joseph Heller

gave his reluctant approval for a change in the Betar oath, from "I shall not raise my arm except in defense" to "I shall make ready my arm for the defense of my people and the conquest of my homeland."55

Conclusion While still a young man, Jabotinsky was able to discern the foggy area that divides political romanticism from political foolhardiness. In this context, he once quoted "a distinguished personage": "First I will tame my country, suppress every rebellious sentiment, and then give it happiness of which it had never dreamt."56 Jabotinsky never called for actual rebellion against England—not even in late 1938, when he began to refer to the "Nordau Plan" for the immediate immigration of half a million Jews, in addition to those to be brought under the "Ten-Year Plan"; or in the summer of 1939, when he broached a plan for a pro forma revolt in which key government buildings in Palestine would be seized and occupied for twenty-four hours. The latter engendered angry reactions, especially from the 1ZL high command;57 even Jabotinsky soon realized that it would have solely romantic significance and would likely be a catastrophic debacle. The plan itself, however, testifies to Jabotinsky's lingering attachment to political romanticism and national myths, which he still viewed as part of the "spiritual psyche" of every nation. Once he had assumed leadership of a political movement that strove to establish a Jewish state by legitimate means, Jabotinsky refused to grant romanticism and mythological symbols the same importance they had assumed for him in the past. Yet his attempts to limit romanticism to the realm of indoctrination and mobilization of supporters were doomed to failure, since his activist disciples realized that two such different outlooks could not coexist. When Menachem Begin called for the Revisionist movement to replace political Zionism with militant Zionism, Jabotinsky denounced the suggestion as political foolhardiness: for as long as he lived and was the leader par excellence, he would oppose such a move. In fact, the revolutionary change in Revisionist policy came only in 1944, four years after Jabotinsky's death, when Begin proclaimed his "revolt" against England—invoking the name of Jabotinsky while completely overlooking their fierce confrontation over which principles should guide the national struggle. Launching his revolt, Begin did not turn to the well-known Serbian model. Perhaps he knew that its basis was entirely legendary; possibly it reminded him of bitter arguments with his great teacher. In any case, the models chosen by Begin were the romantic Polish rebellions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (which had a greater appeal to his emotions) and the negotiations between Lloyd George and Michael Collins that had brought the Irish rebellion to an end.58 The Serbian model was no longer relevant in 1944. Neither its beginnings in Kossovo, where it signified nothing but disaster, nor its final state—the killing of the village head— could serve the objectives of Jabotinsky's "heir," as he came to be known. For Jabotinsky, models of romantic nationalism could not be, and indeed were not objectives per se from the moment he devoted himself to the unsuccessful task of

Jabotinsky's Use of National Myths in Political Struggles

199

replacing Chaim Weizmann as the leading Zionist statesman. He realized that they were a first-rate means of ensuring the unity of his movement, and he recognized their value as an instrument of controlled indoctrination on the theme of selfsacrifice. Never, however, did he accord them the status of a political program. As it transpired, the martyrdom of Ben-Yosef brought to light the limits of Jabotinsky's strategy and tactics. After his death, a turnover was inevitable: what had been but a means to the charismatic founding father became an objective per se for "the heir."

Notes 1. Joseph B. Schechtman, The Life and Times of Vladimir Jabotinsky, vol. 1, Rebel and Statesman: the Early Years (Silver Spring: rpt. 1986), 52-53. Also see Yaacov Shavit, Hamitologiyot shel hayamin (Beit Berl: 1986), 220. Shavit claims that there was no room in Jabotinsky's Weltanschauung for symbols that refer to wars of national liberation. According to Jabotinsky (cited by Shlomo Avineri in his The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State [New York: 1981], 167): If the types of the economy and its specific ingredient, its social organization, et cetera, are necessarily imprinted by the racial psychology of the community—this is true a fortiori with regard to religion, philosophy, literature and even legislation, in short—with regard to all of spiritual culture, whose immediate nexus with the national psyche is even more clear and evident. Jabotinsky remained faithful to this view as late as 1932: Every race possessing a definite uniqueness seeks to become a nation, i.e., to create for itself an economic, political and intellectual environment, which will also relate to its specific taste. Such an environment a specific race can establish only in its own country, where it is the master. For this reason, every race seeks to become a state . . . because only in its state will it feel comfortable (cited in ibid., 168). 2. See Zeev Zhabotinski, "Ziyonut veerez yisrael," in his Ketavim ziyoniyim rishonim (Jerusalem: 1949), 121-122; originally appeared in Yevreiskaya zhizn, no. 2 (Feb. 1904), 203-221; " 'Al hateritoriyalizm," ibid., 153-156. In 1936, Jabotinsky wrote that "Croce was perhaps the first who taught me to discern the vibrations of the aesthetic nervous system that activates the clockwork that drives the wheels of history" (from "Mered hazekenim," in his Uma vehevrah [Jerusalem: 1953], 231).

3. Schechtman, Rebel and Statesman, 50-53. 4. Zeev Zhabotinski, Sipur yamai, in his Autobiyografiyah (Jerusalem: 1957), 27-34. 5. Cf. Joseph B. Schechtman, Life and Times of Vladimir Jabotinsky, vol. 2,Fighter and Prophet: The Later Years (Silver Spring: rpt. 1986), 578. For the historiographical controversy concerning the unification of Italy, see Dennis Mack Smith, Cavour and Garibaldi, \ 860, 2nd. ed. (Cambridge: 1985), esp. the preface, ix-xvi. 6. Zeev Zhabotinski, "Sinkiewicz," Hadashot haarez, 8 Oct. 1919, reprinted in his 'Al sifrut veomanut (Jerusalem: 1948), 163-165. For the influence of Mickiewicz and Tegner upon Jabotinsky, see Schechtman, Rebel and Statesman, 40-41. Conrad Wallenrod, unlike Pan Tadeusz, was a negative figure; see Schechtman, Fighter and Prophet, 448. 7. Zeev Zhabotinski, "Dr. Herzl," Ketavim ziyoniyim rishonim, 87-88. The original article appeared in Yevreiskaya zhizn, no. 8 (April 1904), 1-27. 8. Zeev Zhabotinski, "Hamav'ir," in his Reshimot (Jerusalem: n.d.), 13-17. The original article appeared in Odeskaya novesty, 15 June 1912. 9. Zhabotinski, "Dr. Herzl," 100. 10. Zeev Zhabotinski, " 'Alim porhim 4," Hazofe (Warsaw daily), no. 30 (Oct. 1904), 997-998. The article is dated 29 Sept.

200

Joseph Heller

11. Zeev Zhabotinski, "Rak'u et habarzel!" in Reshimot, 183-186. The article originally appeared in Chronika yevreiskaya zhizn, no. 14 (10 April 1905), 6-8. 12. Zeev Zhabotinski, "Hamardut hayehudit," in his Filitonim (Jerusalem: 1954), 43-51. The article originally appeared in Yevreiskaya zhizn, no. 1 (5 Oct. 1906). 13. In 1909, for example, Jabotinsky criticized Jacobus Kahn, a representative of the Zionist Executive who had written a book calling for the establishment of a Jewish state. Jabotinsky at the time was a member of the Zionist Executive in Constantinople, and he feared that Kahn's book could damage the Zionists' relationship with Ottoman authorities. 14. Zhabotinski, "Hamav'ir." 15. R. Giovanioli, Spartacus, trans, and adapted by Vladimir Zhabotinskii (Odessa: 1913), 50. Garibaldi's letter to Giovanioli (1870), is found in ibid., 12. For a myth of Jabotinsky as a reincarnation of Spartacus, sec Yerahmiel Wiernik's Spartacus: Kavim lidmuto shel Zeev Zhabotinski (Tel-Aviv: 1947). 16. Zeev Zhabotinski, "Mored or" (1913) in his Uma vehevrah (Jerusalem: 1953), 101110. 17. "Charlota haumlalah," (1902) in Zeev Zhabotinski, Shirim (Jerusalem: 1947), 275289, 313-314; Schectman, Rebel and Statesman, 67. Unlike Jabotinsky, Abba Ahimeir dedicated his Megilat hasikarikin to Charlotte Corday in admiration of her act of terror. 18. Zeev Zhabotinski, "Albania hagedolah," (1913) in Uma vehevrah, 113-122. 19. Vladimir Zhabotinskii, "Irlandia," Russkaya viedomosti, 15 May 1916, 3. 20. Ibid. 21. See Zeev Zhabotinski, "Haemet," in Filitonim, 204-205 (original article appeared in Russkaya viedomosti, 26 May 1916); Thomas MacDonagh, "The Poet Captain," in The 1916 Poets, ed. D. Ryan (Westport: 1963), 87-89. 22. Vladimir Zhabotinskii, "Dublin," Russkaya viedomosti, 27 July 1916, 1. On more intense negotiations with the British government concerning the establishment of the Jewish battalions, see Schechtman, Rebel and Statesman, 206-207, 228-229. 23. Sec Russkaya viedomosti, 19 August 1916, 2. 24. Ibid., 27 Aug. 1916, 5. 25. The intermediary who arranged the meeting between Jabotinsky and De Valera was Robert Briscoe, a Jewish member of the Irish parliament, who was also a member of the Revisionist movement executive in Ireland. In his memoirs, Briscoe maintains that he taught Jabotinsky the methods of fighting adopted by the IRA and Fianna Eireann in anticipation of the establishment of a similar militant movement in Palestine, as well as pointing out England's weaknesses and advantages in guerilla warfare. This section of Briscoc's book is unconvincing, and we lack other sources to verify it. However, his report of the De ValeraJabotinsky meeting—at which the Irish leader cast doubts on the Jews' historical right to Palestine because they had abandoned it—does sound reliable. Jabotinsky, for his part, countered that even one Jew remaining in Palestine (like one Irishman remaining in Ireland) was enough to uphold the Jews' right to the land. See Briscoe's For the Life of Me (Boston and Toronto: 1958), 264-265. 26. Zeev Zhabotinski, "Turkiya vehamilhamah" (1917), in his Zikhronot ben dori (TelAviv: n.d.), 167, 195-196. 27. Ibid., 168, 189-191. 28. Zeev Zhabotinski, "Hamefaked Patterson" (1929), in ibid., 113-116. 29. Zeev Zhabotinski, Neumim, 1905-1926 (Jerusalem: 1947), 148. 30. Zeev Zhabotinski, "Megilat hagedud" (1926), in Zikhronot ben dori, 284; idem, "Sippur yamai—helek II" (1936), 133. 31. Zhabotinski, "Megilat hagedud," 300. 32. Shulamit Laskov, "Hava'ad hazemani vchaganat hagalil ha'elyon bishnat 1920," Haziyonut 8 (1983), 379. 33. Zeev Zhabotinski, "Tel Hai," Haaretz, 8 March 1920; repr. in his Baderekh lamdinah (Tel Aviv: 1950), 15-17. 34. Zeev Zhabotinski, "Ma rozim haziyonim hareviziyonistim?" (1926), in ibid., 204205; see also his "Ra'ayon Betar" (1934), ibid., 318-319.

Jabotinsky's Use of National Myths in Political Struggles

201

35. Zeev Zhabotinski, "Yortsayt fun Trumpeldor," Haynt (Warsaw), 2 March 1928; Hebrew version in his Zikhronot ben dori, 109. The crucial difference between Tel Hai and the battles of Port Arthur, Sevastopol and Verdun was that Tel Hai ended in defeat. 36. Zhabotinski, "Ma rozim haziyonim hareviziyonistim?" 297-298. 37. Vladimir Zhabotinskii, "Samson," Rassvyet (Paris), 31 Jan. 1926-17 July 1927. 38. Zeev Zhabotinski, "'Al haaventurism," Hazit ha'am, 11 March 1932; also see his " 'Al mahut haadventurism," ibid., 5 Aug. 19. 39. Zeev Zhabotinski, "Haligyon hayehudi shel Mickiewicz," in his Harevizyonism haziyoni likrat mifneh (Tel-Aviv: 1968); originally appeared in Rasvyet, 11 Aug. 1932. 40. Zeev Zhabotinski, "'Al hamaksimalizm," Hayarden, 1 Feb. 1935. 41. Zeev Zhabotinski, "Orientatziye," Haynt, 18 March 1932; Hebrew version appears in Hazit ha'am, 1 April 1932. 42. "Zhabotinski noem lifnei hano'ar haleumi," Hayarden, 25 Aug. 1935 (originally appeared in Unzer welt, [Warsaw], 16 Aug. 1935); cf. Yaacov Shavit, "Bein Pilsudski leMickiewicz: mediniyut umeshihiyut bareviziyonism haziyoni," in his Hamitologiyot shel hayamin, 15-62. 43. Altalena [Zeev Zhabotinski], "Jozef Pilsudski," Hayarden, 22 May 1936. 44. Joseph Heller, The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror, 1940-1949 (London: 1995), 34-37; Yehoshua Porath, Shelah ve'et beyado: hayav shel Yonatan Ratosh (Tel-Aviv: 1989), 80-118. 45. Zeev Zhabotinski, "Shenei kinuseinu," in Bema arakhot ha'oved haleumi, ed. E. Shostak, 20 Dec. 1937. The article appeared several days earlier in Unzer welt (17 Dec. 1937). 46. Declaration of the Revisionist activist front, found in Lema'an hamoledet (formerly Hayarden), 14 Jan. 1938. 47. Zeev Zhabotinski, "Mul tokhnit hahalukah—tokhnit ha'asor," in his Neumim 19271940, 291-302; originally appeared in Medina [writ (Prague), 2 Feb. 1938. 48. "Devar Zhabotinski lano'ar hayehudi: neum hamanhig biprag beyom 5 befebruar 1938," Medina Iwrit, 18 Feb. 1938. 49. Joseph B. Schechtman, Zeev Zhabotinski: parashat hayav, (Tel-Aviv: 1959), vol. 3, 254. This speech, as well as Jabotinsky's "retroactive order" to Ben-Yosef, was not included in the English version of Schechtman's biography. 50. Protokol hakinus ha'olami hashelishi shel Betar, Warsaw, 11-16 Sept. 1938 (Bucharest: 1940), 60. 51. Ibid., 62-63. 52. Ibid., 72, 74-75. 53. See Thomas A. Emmet, "Kossovo: Development and Impact of a National Ethic," in Essays in Honor of Wayne S. Vucinich, ed. J.S. Ackerman and R. Szporluk (Boulder and New York: 1989), 61-86. 54. Protokol hakinus, 15. 55. "Hahlatot hakinus," ibid., 103. 56. Zeev Zhabotinski, " 'Aseret hasefarim" (1905) in 'Al sifrut veomanut, 41. 57. Schechtman, Fighter and Prophet, 482-484; Yehudah Slutsky, Sefer toledot hahaganah, (Tel-Aviv: 1972), vol. 3, 1615; Yaacov Shavit, " 'Avi hamered': livhinat hatoar, toldotav vetifkudo bamasoret hareviziyonistit, haezel utenuat haherut," in Hamitologiyot shel hayamin, 106-109. 58. Menachem Begin, "Arm mered nikra," May 1944; idem, "Lekah hameridah hapolanit mishnat 1863," Baherev, June 1944, 17-19; idem, "Meridat yanuar 1863 shel ha'am hapolani," ibid., April 1944. Yitzhak Shamir, a junior commander in the IZL until 1941 and thereafter a member of the Lehi Central Committee, took the underground pseudonym "Michael" from Michael Collins.

Pageants of Sorrow, Celebration and Protest: The Public Culture of American Jews Arthur Aryeh Goren

(COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY—THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY)

Over a span of eight days during late November and early December 1905, three mass events took place in which hundreds of thousand of Jews participated and millions more read about in the general and Jewish press. Two of these events were commemorated throughout the United States; the third occurred in New York City alone. The first in time was the funeral of the popular Yiddish novelist and dramatist, Nahum Meyer Shaikevich (better known by his pseudonym, Shomer), which was held on November 26. Nearly 100,000 turned out to honor the writer, lining the funeral route and following the hearse through the streets of New York's Lower East Side and across the Williamsburgh Bridge to Union Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn. Four days later, on Thanksgiving Day, in scores of public meetings and synagogues across the land, American Jews celebrated the 250th anniversary of Jewish settlement in America. Governors, mayors and former U.S. president Grover Cleveland participated in the festivities. The celebrations were followed on December 4 with protest demonstrations mourning the victims of the October pogroms in tsarist Russia. Two hundred thousand participated in the New York protest march, with more modest demonstrations occurring in other cities and special memorial services conducted in Jewish communities throughout the U.S. Taken together, these three episodes offer a paradigm of the public culture of American Jews. They were communal observances that were in part civic rituals of affirmation and self-definition and in part ideological and political statements in the guise of ethnic pageantry. These pageants of commemoration, celebration and protest provided opportunities for transcending cultural and class disparities and enmities. For the medium and the message of these public events—crafted with due deliberation—endeavored to embrace great numbers, new immigrants no less than old settlers, the religious and the secular. They were appeals to "the community" in its totality even though their sponsors were often party people with partisan designs. They took place, furthermore, in the city's main streets, public squares, concert halls and sports arenas so that the general public and the press would also take notice. 1 202

Pageants of Sorrow, Celebration and Protest

203

The Jews who gathered to mourn their luminaries, demand redress for brethren in peril, and invent an American Jewish past were creating a public culture that exists to this day, although the form and idiom have changed. American Jews continue to resort to similar devices and tactics as a means of providing some sense of collective identity. For an ethnoreligious community whose sense of self is increasingly marked by ambiguity if not vacuity, the incentive to nurture a Jewish public culture is compelling. The year-long tercentary celebration beginning in the fall of 1954 of the first Jewish settlement in America, the Israel Independence Day festivities with the parade up New York's Fifth Avenue as its centerpiece, the great 1987 "March on Washington" on behalf of Soviet Jewry, the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993, and the memorial meetings on the thirtieth day of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's death are some well-known instances of this process. This study examines the three 1905 episodes that exemplify the early makings of this public culture, the separate strands that shaped it, and the collective memories that legitimized it. Of the three events, the funeral of Shaikevich (Shomer) represented the most venerable expression of communal celebration. One can indeed argue that in traditional European Jewish society the public funeral of an illustrious scholar or communal leader was the most significant event in the life of the community. It was a time not only of mourning but of rededication, uplift and communal solidarity. All who could, accompanied the remains of the revered figure to the cemetery. Each detail of the ritual was charged with meaning: those chosen to maintain the final vigil, carry the coffin and deliver the eulogies; the public places where the procession paused for prayers; and at the cemetery, the location of the grave itself. The orchestration of the funeral ranked and classified the deceased among the community's worthies who had gone to their reward. In the popular mind, the ultimate indicator of esteem was the size of the crowd that accompanied the deceased to the grave. Though secularization breached the walls of the traditional, organic Jewish community of Eastern Europe, and the passage to America reduced them further, the need to rally forth on the death of a distinguished person in a communal act of solidarity and contrition remained intact. Time-honored religious custom still resonated in freethinking America.2 Shomer, who came to the United States in 1889 with a considerable reputation, had made his name as the most prolific writer of his time. The author of more than two hundred novels and scores of plays (many of both genres adapted and popularized from the works of others), Shomer was the master of what we would call today low-brow literature. (His critics, among them Sholom Aleichem, called him the "father of shund," literary trash.) His was a popular, accessible literature, and the masses soaked up its social messages and stirring historical tales of Jewish heroism. Typical of the former was Der yidisher poritz (The Jewish Mogul), a novel Shomer later adapted for the stage, which was a devastating portrayal of the fanaticism, imperiousness and arid piety of the shtetl autocracy. An example of the latter was Der letzer yidisher kenig (The Last Jewish King), a drama of the Bar Kochbaled revolt against the Romans. His collaboration with the pioneers of the Yiddish theater began in Europe and continued in New York, where his plays on immigrant

204

Arthur Aryeh Goren

life and current affairs became staples of the Yiddish stage. His novels were serialized in the Morgn zhurnal and Tageblat. David Blaustein, the director of the Educational Alliance, recalled reading Shomer's novels as a young boy: "1 was one of many who was started on the road to culture (bildung) by Shomer's writings." When Shomer died, the Jewish immigrant quarter responded in the traditional way to the call to honor an important figure—a writer and teacher of the people, or a great maggid, a beloved preacher.3 Yet who in fact determined the degree of honors Shomer should receive?—Who planned the funeral—chose the honorees, the eulogists, the order of march, the procession's route? In a word, who defined the community's character and its selfimage? In those towns the immigrants came from where the traditional community (the kehillah) was still in place the kehillah leadership, including its rabbis and learned men, made these determinations. Where the traditional leadership was challenged, an unresolved struggle for hegemony ensued. In New York, the Yiddish press decided, a press that spoke for distinct ideological camps. The day of Shomer's death (a Friday, which allowed more time for preparations, since the funeral could not be held until after the Sabbath), the publishers of the Yiddish dailies met at the Educational Alliance, the uptown-supported social and cultural center of the immigrant quarter. All Yiddish journalists, artists and intellectuals (maskilim), the publishers resolved, should join in making the funeral a "general one," that is, nonpartisan, and urge all Jews of New York to take part. Jacob Saphirstein, the publisher of the politically conservative and religiously Orthodox Morgn zhurnal, and David Blaustein of the Educational Alliance were charged with making the arrangements. To advise them, an executive committee of two representatives of each paper was appointed. The Educational Alliance was chosen for the memorial meeting. The proprietors of the Yiddish theaters, the various actors' unions and their chorus, and the typesetters union announced that they would come in organized contingents, and the choristers volunteered to sing at the services.4 For three days, the conservative Tageblatt and Morgn zhurnal and the socialist Varhayt and Forward sang Shomer's praises. The Forward, a harsh critic of Shomer in the past, remarked: "Whatever one might say of the literary worth of his works, they were of great value for a large part of the Jewish people. Through Shomer's novels many thousands learned to read." Furthermore, he had embued them with a thirst for bildung—education, culture, self-improvement. The Forward, like the other papers, urged all classes to attend and outlined the funeral route.5 In reporting the funeral, the Yiddish press struck an inspirational and ecumenical note. The Tageblat began its account: "Where else can one find a city like New York and where else can one find such Jews as in New York. In no country, and in no city, and at no time in history has one witnessed such an exalted expression of Judenthum (Jewishness) as at Shomer's funeral." The Forward proclaimed: "Young and old, religious and freethinkers, Jews of all hues and types came to honor and accompany the deceased to the grave." The Tageblat estimated that at least a hundred thousand crowded into the side streets near the Educational Alliance and along the route of the cortege.6 As the hearse traversed the East Side, the New York Times reported, "Jacob P. Adler, the tragedian," walked to the left of the hearse and by his side Saphirstein of the Morgn zhurnal. At each synagogue along the way

Pageants of Sorrow, Celebration and Protest

205

"the procession stopped and the rabbi and congregants came out and sang a hymn for the dead."7 Traditional in form, the funeral was arranged with great care. The planners stressed inclusiveness and aesthetics, taking into account both the sensibilities of the acculturating, "modern" Jews and the curiosity of non-Jewish observers. The arrangements commmittee announced through the Yiddish press that notables and family friends wishing to pay their respects prior to the funeral should appear at the Educational Alliance for an identity button allowing them into the Shomer home. At the appointed time, writers, actors and representatives of the theater and typsetters unions carried the coffin to the hearse, and a combined choir of the Yiddish theaters, chanting psalms, marched before the hearse over the short distance to the Educational Alliance. Admission to the memorial service was by invitation only. The list of eulogists representated the range of Jewish political and cultural life: Adolf Radin, rabbi of the Alliance's People's Synagogue (who spoke in German), David Blaustein, the Alliance's director, socialist Abe Cahan of the Forward, John Paley of the Tageblat, Joseph Barondess, Zionist leader and radical, Boris Thomashafsky, the actor and stage director, and the Orthodox preacher Hirsh Tsvi Masliansky. Between speeches the theater choristers alternated with the downtown cantors' choir in chanting psalms from the funeral service. Downtown's renowned cantor, Pinkhas Minkovsy, concluded the service with the memorial prayer El male rahamim. All of the accounts stressed the sense of exaltation that permeated the meeting and the perfect order that marked the procession.8 In its editorial the day of the funeral, the Tageblat offered some interesting reflections on the event's wider significance. The column was subtitled: "The Future City of Historical Jewish Funerals." Shomer's funeral, the paper predicted, would be the third funeral of historic proportions that New York Jews had participated in, if size and feelings were the criteria. First had come the unforgettable mass funeral in 1902 of Jacob Joseph, the eminent Vilna preacher who was invited to serve as "chief rabbi" in the abortive experiment to strengthen the communal life of New York's Orthodox Jews. At least 100,000 took part. And in January 1905, Kasriel Sarasohn, publisher of the Tageblat and patron of downtown charities, was similarly honored. In both cases, not only the Yiddish but the general press gave detailed coverage in laudatory, even reverential, terms. And now, all within a mere three years, the third historic funeral was about to begin. "In no other city in the world," the Tageblat declared, have there been such grand funerals. Our generation and the next to come will have the task of rendering final tributes to the illustrious figures of the Jewish world when their time will come to take leave. New York is at present the greatest Jewish center in the world. Within the next five years all the distinguished Jews in Russia will have settled among us. 9

During the lifetime of the immigrant generation, religious, cultural and political associations organized funeral pageants for their luminaries, providing the Jewish public for a moment with a sense of uplift and communal solidarity. For instance, the funeral of the great Yiddish humorist, Sholom Aleichem, in May 1916 brought 250,000 Jews into the streets, with the New York Kehillah (aspiring to be the

206

Arthur Aryeh Goren

coordinating agency of the Jewish community) planning and directing the ceremony with the essential help of the Yiddish press. Conducted with the grandeur of a Jewish state funeral, the procession passed through three New York boroughs, pausing before representative Jewish institutions for memorial prayers and eulogies, and attracting Jews from all ranks and circles. In expressing their affection for their beloved cultural hero, Jews were also demonstrating their solidarity with the "old home" Sholom Aleichem wrote about, which was now ravaged by war.10 A commemorative event of a different order was the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the first Jewish settlement on the North American continent. In 1654, twenty-three Jews had arrived in New Amsterdam aboard the Sainte Catherine, expelled from the Dutch colony of Recife in Brazil after its conquest by the Portugese. The proposal to commemorate the establishment of the first settlement originated among the elitist circles of the established Jewish community. Their intention was to enshrine the event—heretofore hardly noticed, let alone celebrated—in the nation's pantheon of founding myths. Turning the anniversary into a nationwide commemoration offered a superb opportunity to achieve several goals: prove the venerable lineage of America's Jews; reiterate once more the presumed affinity of Americanism and Judaism; and have others—mainly the nonJewish notables and newspaper editorialists—praise both the rectitude and civic virtues of the Jews and their material and cultural contributions to the nation. 11 Historians have explained the mind-set of the planners as stemming from the conflicted soul of the ambitious and insecure. Eminently successful in business and the professions (their success achieved in a single generation), fervently American and craving for acceptance, they faced the social impediments of a pervasive antisemitism. They were barred from the proper clubs, boards of trustees, and philanthropies; their children were blocked from attending the desired private schools; their sons and daughters were excluded from some colleges and from the better fraternities; and they suffered from the intellectual antisemitism common in literary and academic circles. To add to their disquiet, like a plague from Egypt came the Jews from Russia. Their correligionists' startling distinctiveness (Jewish but so alien) and their utter poverty made the responsibilities that kinship imposed especially burdensome—an obstacle in the pursuit of social inclusion. Understandably, the Jewish elite became preoccupied with a dignified refutation of those antisemitic canards of parasitism, duplicity and disloyalty that were cast at them.12 There was also a more sanguine face to the importance assigned by Americanized Jews to the 250th anniversary. An authentic interest in historical roots and processes was astir in America. Kindled by an energetic secularizing nationalism sometime in the 1870s, Americans began celebrating their past with unprecedented zeal. History became the medium for defining their national identity and glorifying what they perceived to be the moral superiority of the republic. On a local level, commemoration of the anniversaries of Revolutionary War battles, Civil War heroes and pioneer settlements became widespread. Cities observed the bicentennial or centennial of their founding in festivities that sometimes lasted as long as a week. Nationwide, the Centennial Exposition of American Independence held at Philadelphia in 1876 and the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago stand out. A patrician expression of

Pageants of Sorrow, Celebration and Protest

207

this phenomenon, initiated by the first professionally trained historians (the new guardians of the past), was the formation of the American Historical Association in 1884. Dedicated to a "scientific" reconstruction of the past, the association drew to its ranks Brahman amateur practitioners as well as the new breed of academic historian.13 Six years later the American Jewish Historical Society was established for some of the same reasons by a similar mix of professionals and interested patricians. At the first "scientific meeting" of the society, founding president Oscar Straus, scion of the great mercantile family and author of a book on Old Testament influences on the origins of republican government in America, declared: "The objects of our Society ... are not sectarian, but American—to throw an additional ray of light upon the discovery, colonization, and history of our country." For Straus, that "additional ray of light"—the exploration of the part Jews played in the early settlement of the colonies—was a way not only of contributing "to the general history of our country" but of uncovering for Americans and Jews the authentic identity of American Jewry. Straus and others of the founders would play a central role in the 250th anniversary celebration.14 Among America's ethnic groups, Jews were not alone in displaying a selfconsciousness and assertivenesss that developed in tandem with the nation's intensified reverence for its past. Ethnic associations participated in the local celebrations, marching in the parades dressed in their ethnic costumes and often mounting historical floats. At the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, six ethnic and religious groups had their "days"—a parade culminating in the unveiling of a monument on the fairground. The Jewish monument, commissioned by the B'nai B'rith and executed by the American Jewish sculptor Moses Ezekiel, represented "religious freedom": "The statue of a woman, symbolizing religious liberty, dominates the monument, her right arm sheltering a boy holding a flaming lamp representing faith in a higher power, her left arm pointing to the scroll of the constitution." Interestingly, the German, Irish, Italian and African American monuments depicted ethnic heroes: Wilhelm Humboldt, Father Matthew (an Irish temperance advocate), Christopher Columbus and Richard Allen (an ex-slave who founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church).15 Perhaps the most impressive event of the sort anticipating the 250th American Jewish celebration was the German American celebrations of 1883. Marking the bicenntennial of the founding of Germantown, Pennsylvannia, by thirteen families from the Rheinish town of Krefeld, German cultural and social associations staged impressive pageants in the major centers of German American population. The central feature of the day was the parade, which included floats depicting the history of German Americans—the founding of Germantown, German participation in America's wars, and German American economic contributions—in addition to marching rifle companies and bands. (In a number of cities, the 1883 bicentennial inaugurated an annual "German Day.") Five years later Swedes, concentrated in the Midwest, celebrated the 250th anniversary of the founding of the first Swedish settlement at Fort Christina on the Delaware River. In both cases, tentative steps were taken to establish historical societies. Thus ethnic Americans promoted their own founding myths, insisting on equality of place.16

208

Arthur Aryeh Goren

In February 1905, the proposal to observe the 250th anniversary of Jewish settlement on a nationwide scale was broached by two separate bodies: New York's Congregation Shearith Israel (the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States) and the American Jewish Historical Society at its annual conference. By spring, a joint ad hoc committee had appointed an executive committee to direct "the Committees in Charge of the General Celebration"—which gives one a notion of the scope of the planning. The executive committee, a mix of wealth and intellect, was headed by the bankers Jacob Schiff (chairman) and Isaac N. Seligman (treasurer) and included other leading establishment personages such as Cyrus Adler, Daniel Guggenheim, Adolph Lewisohn, Louis Marshall, Oscar Straus and Judge Mayer Sulzberger. All of the states as well as Alaska, Puerto Rico and the Indian Territory were represented on the two-hundred member general committee, which was apparently a purely honorary body. No Russian Jews served on the executive committee, though eight Russian Jews, including the editors of the Yiddish dailies and several prominent rabbis, were appointed to the general committee. 17 The executive committee chose Thanksgiving Day as the appropriate occasion for the celebration, and launched an educational campaign to make Jews conscious of their American origins. Lecturers spoke on the topic and lengthy articles appeared with regularity in the Anglo-Jewish press. In early May the Anglo-Jewish press published long excerpts from papers delivered at a meeting of the "Judaeans," a social-literary society of the New York Jewish elite. In June, the Boston [Jewish] Advocate reported on the first of a series of celebrations that would continue until the "general celebration" on Thanksgiving Day. In the issue of the Advocate that appeared following the 4th of July, the lead banner read: "On Thanksgiving-Day next, the Hebrew Communities of the United States will commemorate fittingly the 250th anniversary of the arrival of their Pilgrim Fathers," and readers were informed that the Boston committee had chosen Faneuil Hall, "the cradle of liberty," as the site of the Thanksgiving Day convocation.18 In a widely reprinted lecture, Louis Marshall captured the mixture of apologetics and self-assertiveness that became the leitmotif of the anniversary: It has been a popular fallacy, that the Jew has been a latecomer on American soil; that he has been unwilling to undergo the hardships of the pioneer, or to create new paths for industry and commerce; that his admittance within our gates has been a matter of grace and bounty, and that his rights are inferior in antiquity to those of our population who have other racial and religious affinities. But when we remember that the settlement at Jamestown, Virigina, was in 1607, that of the Dutch at New Amsterdam in 1614, that of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock in 1620 and that the first settlement of the Jews in New York occurred in 1655, the latter are to be regarded as of equal rank with the most ancient American settlers.19

In October, the committee distributed a pamphlet, "Notes Relating to the Celebration," which included guidelines for observing the approaching jubilee. Congregations were instructed to hold special services on the Saturday or Sunday preceding Thanksgiving Day, and an "Order of Service" for that Sabbath was attached. The service was prepared by a committee of eminent rabbis representing the various denominations that included the Orthodox Dr. H. Pereira Mendes, the Conservative Professor Solomon Schechter, head of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Re-

Pageants of Sorrow, Celebration and Protest

209

form's Dr. Kaufman Kohler, head of the Hebrew Union College. A reprint of Cyrus Adler's history of the Jews in America from the recently published Jewish Encylopedia and an annotated bibliography were included. In addition, long accounts of the history of American Jews were featured in major newspapers and periodicals.20 November was not a good month for festivities. Details of the death and devastation of the October pogroms (400 Jews were killed in Odessa alone) and further outbreaks in the first week of November galvanized the established community as well as the immigrant community to an unprecedented outburst of activity. Relief committees were formed, protest meetings held, and memorial services called. Under these circumstances, some communities—Chicago, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Philadelphia—abandoned plans for mass celebrations and held their anniversary meetings in the larger synagogues. The national anniversary committee announced that the subscriptions it had solicited for a memorial statue to mark the 250th anniversary would be directed "to the immediate relief of the distress of our unfortunate brethren there." However, despite the pall of the pogroms, the national committee went ahead with the central event of the country-wide celebration, which took place in New York's Carnegie Hall.21 The "great celebration" in Carnegie Hall, the Times reported, "resolved itself into a demonstration likely to become historic in the annals of that famous meeting place." The setting was indeed an august one. The exercises began with the honored guests and members of the executive committee, led by Jacob Schiff, marching into the hall single file to the strains of Mendelsohn's "March of the Priests" from Athalie, played by the New York Symphony Orchestra. To the thunderous applause of a packed house of 5,000, the dignitaries took their places on a stage already crowded with the People's Choral Union and the Downtown Cantors' Association. The lavish decor of the hall added to the majesty of the occasion. The lower boxes were draped in bright red decorated with the coats of arms of the different states; green hangings "embosed with golden bucklers emblematic of Jerusalem," according to the Times, adorned the second tier; and "festoons of American flags" bedecked the galleries and stage. Befitting the aura of an affair of state, the speakers included ex-president Grover Cleveland, Governor Frank Higgins of New York, and New York City's mayor, George B. McClellan; and a letter from President Theodore Roosevelt was read. The committee had chosen the other speakers with a shrewd diplomatic eye. Temple Emanu-el's rabbi opened the meeting and Shearith Israel's rabbi closed it; the Episcopal Bishop of New York spoke; and the "oration" was delivered by Judge Mayer Sulzberger of Philadelphia, a rising figure in Jewish communal life and a Jewish scholar of some breadth. The capstone of the musical program—the program itself included choruses from Mendelssohn's Elijah and Bruch's Kol Nidre—was the singing of Adon 'olam by the Downtown Cantors. "The solemn hymn," the Times remarked, "was beautifully sung. . . . Their voices would have done credit to the Metropolitan Opera House." For the planners, the cantors symbolized the Jewish immigrant presence in the ecumenical homage to the Jews of America.22 Two of the recurring themes in the anniversary addresses deserve special attention. The first linked the twenty-three Jews who had landed in New Amsterdam in

210

Arthur Aryeh Goren

1654 on the Sainte Catherine with the band of Pilgrims who had arrived at Plymouth Rock on the Mayflower thirty-four years earlier. In impressive historical detail, speaker after speaker spun out the remarkable interlocking fate of Pilgrim and Jew. Persecuted and hunted because of their religious faith, both had found haven in tolerant Holland. Soon after the Pilgrims left for the New World, the Jews left Holland for the Dutch colonies in Brazil and, when expelled by the Portugese, found refuge in New Amsterdam. Philadelphia's Rabbi Joseph Krauskopf declared (in words echoed by other orators): "Within the cabins of the Mayflower and the Sainte Catherina were those principles conceived that gave birth to the battle cry of 1776." Oscar Straus embellished the Pilgrim/Puritan-Jewish-Dutch connection by pointing out that at the very time that the Dutch West Indies Company deliberated over the petition to grant Jews leave to remain in New Amsterdam, Rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel of Amsterdam met with Oliver Cromwell to negotiate the resettlement of the Jews in England. Among the supporters of readmission was Roger Williams, founder of the colony of Rhode Island and defender of religious liberty ("Soulfreedom"), who was completing a stay in London on the eve of the negotiations. Thus, Straus and his fellow speakers stressed, from America's earliest history, the Jews were linked with the champions of religious liberty.23 "Columbus," the other motif, provided two inspiring images. Speakers cited historians and quoted sources that coupled the launching of Columbus' expedition with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. As Columbus sailed out of the harbor of Palos with his little fleet to discover the New World, the audiences were told, he passed ships laden with Jews being expelled from Spain: as one great center of Jewish life lay in ruins, another was being prepared to replace it. Providentially, the passing of the ships occurred on the Ninth Day of Av, the day of fasting and lamentations over the destruction of the Temple and the day, according to Jewish legend, that the Messiah would come.24 There was also a more direct tie between the end of Spanish Jewry and the discovery of America. To escape from the Inquisition, some Jews had joined Columbus' expedition. The physician, the overseer of the crew and the translator, it was claimed, were of Jewish origin. Moreover, Isabella's financial advisers, who made the expedition possible, were of Jewish lineage. These conclusions were based on the latest research on Columbus by the Budapest Jewish historian Meyer Kayserling. Commissioned by Oscar Straus in 1891, Kayserling's Christopher Columbus and the Participation of the Jews in the Spanish and Portugese Discoveries appeared in 1894. By 1905, its findings were accepted in Jewish circles as historical truth. When, for example, Rabbi Krauskopf of Philadelphia addressed the New York 92nd Street YMHA on the occasion of the 250th anniversary, the Times carried this banner-line: "A Jew First to Land of Columbus's Party."25 The Tageblat presented the same "historical facts" to the Yiddish-reading public: "In the archives of Seville are listed, black on white, the sums of money that the Jew, Luis de Santangel, gave for Columbus' expedition." Probably "half a minyan of Jews" were in the discoverer's crew—including the first white man, Luis de Torres, to step on the shores of the New World. "Consequently," the Tageblat concluded, "we Jews have a full claim to America and we should not be ashamed to call America our home. . . . We have an [American] ancestry older than all other nationalities, even antedating

Pageants of Sorrow, Celebration and Protest

211

the English and Dutch."26 Partaking in the very discovery of America, the Jews were indeed "present at the creation." The Yiddish press split along class lines in reporting the Carnegie Hall meeting. For the Tageblat, "the jubilee celebration was the most magnificent and radiant gathering ever held by Jews in America." All sections and strata of Jewry were present in the packed hall—bankers, merchants, workers, craftsmen, rabbis, statesmen—"and all united in giving thanks for this place of refuge for our homeless and plundered nation." The Tageblat in fact printed the texts of the main addresses in the "English Department" of the paper.27 In contrast, the Forward concluded its account with this observation: "The festivities did not impress one as a people's celebration; besides the wealthy Jewish classes no other class was present. It was a festival for wealthy Jews who gathered to praise God for his benevolence to them." In a long essay, Benjamin Feigenbaum, the socialist firebrand, elaborated on the class theme, turning on end the compliments that Grover Cleveland and others had showered upon the Jews. "The Jewish contributions so praised by the speakers [their enriching of the American economy, their individual success and their respect for the law] had served to strengthen an unjust order that benefited the millionaires." He continued, "A time will come in America when in speaking of what Jews have accomplished, people will no longer have in mind the great Jewish merchants and bankers but the Jewish masses, the tailors and operators who played a critical role in freeing America from the capitalist yoke." The Varhayts's editorial, "Jubilee of the Jewish Bankers," was written the same vein. It attacked "the people from Wall Street, Madison Avenue, Lexington Avenue, Fifth Avenue, West End Avenue and Riverside Drive" for declaring their celebration "a holiday of the Jewish people" while ignoring the "Jews of Hester Street, Norfolk Street, Ridge Street, Houston Street and East Broadway." More grevious was the festive character of the exercises: "The Jewish masses are not actors. They cannot go out one day with trumpets, cymbals and dance, give thanks to God, and then the next day march in the streets bemoaning the victims of the pogroms." In fact, the Tageblat and the Anglo-Jewish press did report those anniversary celebrations held in the more established, immigrant synagogues. The Times described an anniversary meeting at the Rumanian congregation Shaarei Shamayim on Eldgridge Street, which featured festive speeches and 800 Talmud Torah children carrying American flags marching in a procession led by the band of the Hebrew Sheltering Orphan Asylum. 28 For days the Yiddish press prepared the public for "der groyser troyer marsh" (the great mourning march) to be held on December 4. Shomer's funeral was a street pageant in the tradition of an East European Jewish community honoring a great personage; the 250th anniversary was held in elegant halls and imposing temples, an American creation; and the "troyer marsh," a mass demonstration of unity drawing on modern politics and Jewish religious ritual, returned the act of communal bonding to the city's streets. In fact, in early November, the Forward set the tone for what would become repeated calls for popular activism. In a front-page banner headline the paper called, "To Washington! Thousands to Washington! March to the White House! Let the Blood of Our Dead Be Heard." "The greatest catastrophe in Jewish history" had taken place, the Forward editorialized. "If [President] Roose-

212

Arthur Aryeh Goren

velt so wished, America could help. How can we make the Jewish voice heard? Demonstrate in Washington." Little came of Cahan's call, though later in November several mass marches did take place. In one case, it was the theater unions that organized the demonstration, which concluded with a benefit performance of the play Khurbn Kishinev (The Destruction of Kishinev). In the other instance, the Odessa landsmanshaft (hometown) associations sponsored the march, and in Philadelphia there were organized street demonstrations.29 The principal demonstration took place in New York, planned and directed by the newly established Jewish Defense Association. Founded in the beginning of November with the purpose of raising funds to buy arms for clandestine Jewish selfdefense groups being formed in Russia, the Association succeeded in gaining the participation of broad segments of the downtown Jewish political spectrum. It also had the support of some establishment leaders. From the start of the preparations, the Association spoke in the name of Jewish pride, "manhood" and unity. In addition to protest and fund-raising, the Association provided the means for fulfilling the mitzvah of remembering and honoring the dead—sisters, brothers, parents— and to shed tears over graves they could not visit.30 Critical to the success of the undertaking was the collaboration of the Yiddish press. For six continuous days preceding the march, the Yiddish newspapers published what were in effect "orders of the day," long columns of notices from societies to their members and from the arrangements committee to the societies. All organizations—lodges, labor unions, political parties, landsmanshaftn associations and synagogues—intending to participate were instructed to designate an assembly point for their members and to inform the arrangements committee. Musicians and choral groups wishing to offer their services were to contact the committee. Owners of halls and meeting rooms were asked by the arrangements committee to provide them gratis; businesses were ordered to close on the day of the march, and workers were urged to leave their shops and take part. On the morning of the "troyer marsh," the papers published final instructions informing the participating groups where each would gather before joining the march.31 The several hundred participating organizations were divided into eight divisions to assure order and efficiency, each headed by a "marshal" who was subordinate to the parade's "grand marshal." The march began at Rutgers Square, facing newspaper row in the heart of the Lower East Side, followed a familiar route through the Jewish quarter and then turned north on Broadway to Union Square. Residents were urged to hang black bunting from windows and fire-escapes along the line of march. The Yiddish press also announced that meetings would be held at eight designated theaters at the conclusion of the march. The published list of speakers, as one would expect, reflected the spectrum of downtown ideologies.32 The Times called the march "one of the largest parades this city has ever seen." Thirteen hundred policemen were required to keep order, although all observers emphasized the decorum of the crowd. According to the Times, 125,000 were in the line of march, and a similar number crowded the sidewalks. What stands out in the press descriptions and photographs is the mix of bereavement and protest—of a "phantom funeral" and a military formation—that was symbolized by the flags carried at the head of the parade. The Forward described the red and black banners

Pageants of Sorrow, Celebration and Protest

213

waving in the wind, the workers' flag and the flag of mourning. (The Times' account differed on the last point: "A corps of men carried black banners, American flags and what has become known as the Jewish flag—the banner of Zion—with the blue, six-pointed star of David in the centre." Where the Forward saw red, the Times reported blue and white.) Behind the flagbearers came a fifty-person band. Other marching bands were placed at intervals in the line of march. Those who marched in the procession wore black or a crepe around their sleeve or hat, except for the detachments of the Zion Guards from New York and New Haven and the Manhattan Rifles. Banners identified organizations, and large placards in Yiddish—"Mourn Our Dead," or slogans denouncing the tsar—were held aloft.33 The general press coverage expressed empathy for the demonstration, as the following quote from a Times report indicates: The bands between the sections rang out in funeral strains the note of grief [which were] accentuated by similar strains further down the line. Men and women burst into tears, some moved by their losses, others by the dramatic intensity of sound and scene. Occasionally, at a concerted signal, the bands would stop playing. Above the murmur of the moving throng would arise softly at first then swelling to full tone, the voices of the synagogue boy choirs in a hymn for the peace of the dead.34

And when the main column approached the synagogues on Norfolk and Rivington Streets, "the procession halted. Bearded rabbis appeared in the little alcoves under the lights and the strangely carved doorways, clasped their hands, prayed for a moment, and then chanted a solemn dirge." When the first division reached Union Square, it filled the park, and it became necessary to proceed with reading the resolutions before all the demonstrators had arrived. One of the resolutions (which carries an uncanny contemporaneity) reads: We call upon the Government of the United States and upon all the Governments of enlightened lands to enter their protest against the criminal slaughter of innocent persons, against the brutal massacres which violate all laws of humanity. ... In the present state of chaos [in Russia] ... it is the duty of a power like that of the United States to put a halt to the fiendish atrocities.35

None of the establishment leaders took part in the "troyer marsh." A letter to the editor of the American Hebrew, the weekly they all subscribed to, deplored the absence of uptown Jews in the line of march. Their presence "would have gone far to break down the barriers of caste and class." It was regrettable, the writer stated, that her fellow Jews were unable to overcome those constraints of their middle class mores that found street demonstrations repugnant and dangerous.36 However, the "uptowners" sought other ways of identifying with the protest. Across the land they gathered in their temples on December 4 for memorial services, addresses and condemnations, and calls for extending ever more aid to the afflicted. Furthermore, the Schiffs, Marshalls and Strauses were working diligently to alleviate the suffering of Russian Jews—lobbying in Washington for diplomatic intervention or sanctions, raising large funds for relief, and coordinating their efforts with world Jewish leaders. Tacitly, the establishment leaders approved of the "troyer marsh" as the justifiable "manly" expression of anger of Russian immigrants for kin fallen victim to tsarist hooligans or in imminent danger of new excesses.

214

Arthur Aryeh Goren

Moreover, the demonstration was a "success"—massive and orderly—winning the approbation of the general press. In fact, the "troyer marsh" complemented the establishment's political and financial efforts.37 One should take note that the "troyer marsh" borrowed much from its American setting. True, the parade had a distinctive Russian Jewish texture. In one respect, it recalled the European funeral procession of a famous personage with eulogies and pauses at synagogues along the route of the procession. In another respect, the flags, slogans and speeches reminded some spectators of the radical rallies (such as the May Day demonstrations) that, by the late 1890s, were taking place—clandestinely to be sure—in the centers of Jewish socialist activity in the Pale of Settlement. However, the arrangements, structure and pace of the 1905 "troyer marsh" derived from American practice. The "divisions" and "marshals," the marching bands and flags, the holiday dress of the participants, and the culminating speeches and resolutions in the public square were borrowed from the recently invented May First demonstration, which leaned on the German American flair for pageantry. In the first May Day labor demonstration in 1890 (part of the eight-hour day movement), 9,000 Jewish workers participated in the New York parade in what became an annual event. At preliminary meetings in Lower East Side halls, the Jewish cloakmakers, dressed in their finest, listened to speeches and to bands playing revolutionary songs before joining the German and American contingents in the march to Union Square. At the square, separate speaker's stands for the German, English and Yiddish-speaking orators were set up in different areas to enable the demonstrators to hear the addresses in their own language. By 1903, the United Hebrew Trades had organized its own supplementary march on the day following the general demonstration, with marshals heading divisions and the parade ending at Hamilton Fish Park to hear a battery of Yiddish speeches. Two and a half years later, the experience gained by Jewish radicals in celebrating the international workers' May Day would be added to the experience of the religiously traditional immigrants who mounted the great public funerals in 1902 and 1905 of "Chief Rabbi" Jacob Joseph and the Tageblat's Kasriel Sarasohn.38 How shall we understand these communal rites that encompassed hundreds of thousands of Jews? In the first place, a handful of notables and communal functionaries and, concurrently, the editors of the Yiddish dailies, orchestrated the commemorative events to meet the needs and sentiments of the Jewish multitudes. At a time when a diffuse and divided American Jewry had no organizational core and informal committees of the wealthy and well connected filled the vacuum in times of crisis, the dimension and scope of the 1905 celebrations of solidarity advanced the belief in a holistic community. Moreover, it promoted the movement for communal collaboration and the related demand for a publicly recognized leadership.39 A second, crucial revelation of the 1905 events deserves notice. However dissimilar the public commemorations and demonstrations were—reflecting cultural, ideological, regional and class differences and disparate goals—they demonstrated a degree of collective self-assurance that was remarkable. The organizers staged their pageants in the public place in order to activate, uplift and educate maximum numbers of Jews; and they paraded Jewish culture, Jewish accomplishments and Jewish

Pageants of Sorrow, Celebration and Protest

215

remonstrations before the American people to win its sympathy and respect. This was true even in the most parochial of the three events described above, Shomer's funeral. The immigrant community united in order to display for all the cultural values it honored. In fact, the Times remarked that the immigrant Jews lamented the passing of one of its literary heroes with the same passion and in the same numbers that it had the victims of the pogroms in a protest march only days earlier.40 Taken together, these pageants of celebration, protest and sorrow formed overlapping orbits. Made up of Jews with varied pasts who had come at different times to so singular a nation, these overlapping orbits constituted the building blocks of the public culture of American Jews. Public culture is no substitute for the communal web of religious observance, institutional loyalty, ideological commitment and ethnic fellowship. At best, it supplements a sense of community through participation in the occasional rites of community. But where the community's institutional life often produced more divisiveness than solidarity, the triad of communal observances that took place in late November and early December 1905 disclosed the unifying quality of a public culture in the making. The communal rites and civic pageants considered here, arranged and directed by communal powers, brought American Jewry together, bound it with its past and defined its collective identity at least for the moment. Fragile and fluid as it has been, the public culture of American Jews has provided an important arena for self-definition. Since 1905, there have been highs and lows in this process that have paralleled the complex interweaving of social and cultural change. Uncovering this history, which requires looking beyond the conventional boundaries of institutional life, should contribute to our perspective on the dynamics of the communal life of American Jews.

Notes This article is adapted from the Morris B. Gelb Memorial Lecture, "The Rites of Community, The Public Culture of American Jews," presented at the conference "From Ghetto to Emancipation? Historical and Contemporary Considerations of the Jewish Community," University of Scran ton, March 26-27, 1995. I am beholden to David Myers, who organized the conference, for permission to publish part of the conference paper. I also want to thank him, along with Ezra Mendelsohn and Deborah Dash Moore, for their valuable comments, Arthur Kiron for his research gifts, and Ayalah Goren-Kadman for her archival assistance. 1. For an exemplary study of the phenomenon discussed here, see Kathleen Conzen, "Ethnicity as Festive Culture: Nineteenth Century German America on Parade," in The Invention of Ethnicity, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: 1989), 44-76. For important conceptual insights, see Susan G. David, Parades and Power: Street Theater in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Berkeley: 1986), 1-22, 67-72, 166-173. 2. Arthur A. Goren, "Sacred and Secular: The Place of Public Funerals in the Immigrant Life of American Jews," Jewish History 8, nos. 1-2 (1994), 269-273. 3. Leksikon fun yidishn tiater, ed. Zalmen Zylbercweig (New York: 1959), vol. 3, 20782104; Rose Shomer-Bachelis, Unzer Foter Shomer (first part written by Miriam ShomerZunzer) (New York: 1950), 122-186; Tageblat, 27 Nov. 1905 (p. 1). 4. Tageblat, 26 Nov. 1905, (p. 1); Forward, 26 Nov. 1905 (p. 1). For an account of the "elaborate precautions to prevent trouble" see the New York Times, 26 Nov. 1905 (p. 12). 5. See Forward and Varheyt for 24, 25, 26 and 27 Nov. 1905; and the Tageblat for 24, 26 and 27 Nov. 1905.

216

Arthur Aryeh Goren

6. Tageblat, 27 Nov. 1905 (pp. 1, 8); Forward, 27 Nov. 1905 (p. 1). 7. New York Times, 27 Nov. 1905 (p. 9). 8. Tageblat, 27 Nov. 1905 (pp. 1, 8); Shomer-Bachelis and Shomer-Zunzer, Unzer foter Shomer, 188; New York Times, 27 Nov. 1905 (p. 6). 9. Tageblat, 4 Nov. 1905 (p. 4); Goren, "Sacred and Secular," 272-278. 10. Ellen Kellman, "Sholom Aleichem's Funeral (New York, 1916): The Making of a National Pageant," YIVO Annual 20 (1991), 277-304. On the secularization and politicization of the public funeral, see Goren, "Sacred and Secular," 290-297, where the funerals of the Jewish socialist leaders Meyer London (1926), Morris Hillquit (1933) and Baruch Vladeck (1938) are discussed. 11. The Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Jews in the United States (published as Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 14 [1906]), v-x. 12. See Nathan M. Kaganoff, "AJHS at 90: Reflections on the History of the Oldest Ethnic Historical Society in America," American Jewish History 91, no. 4 (June 1982), 467472; Jeffrey S. Gurock, "From Publications to American Jewish History, The Journal of the American Jewish Historical Society and the Writing of American Jewish History," American Jewish History 81, no. 2 (winter 1993-1994), 158-162, 167-171; Naomi Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation: The German Jews in the United States, 1830-1914 (Philadelphia: 1984), 249-85. 13. See Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: 1991), 93-162, 194-227; John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: 1992), 33-35; David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: 1990), 9-34; John Higham, History (Englewood Cliffs: 1965), 6-25. 14. Oscar S. Straus, "Address of the President," Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, no. 1 (Papers Presented at the First Scientific Meeting, Philadelphia, December 15, 1892), 1-4; idem, The Origin of Republican Form of Government in the United States of America (New York: 1885). On Straus' historical writings, see Naomi Cohen, A Dual Heritage: The Public Career of Oscar S. Straus (Philadelphia: 1969), 15, 7173. For interpretations of the origins of the Society that emphasize the American historiographical context, see Ira Robinson, "The Invention of American Jewish History,'Mmencan Jewish History, 81 nos. 3-4 (spring-summer 1994), 309-320; and Robert Liberles, "Postemancipation Historiography and the Jewish Historical Societies of America and England," Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 10, Reshaping the Past: Jewish History and the Historians, ed. Jonathan Frankel (New York: 1994), 45-65. 15. See Kammen, Mystic: Chords of Memory, 134-145; Hasia R. Diner, A Time for Gathering: the Second Migration, 1820-1880 (Baltimore: 1992), 201-202; Barbara Kirshenlatt-Gimblett, "From Cult to Culture: Jews on Display at World's Fairs," in Tradition and Modernization (N1F Publications 25 [Turku: 1992]), 80-81; Joseph Guttman, "Jewish Participation in the Visual Arts of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century America," American Jewish Archives 15, no. 1 (April 1963), 44; Richard B. Nicolai, Centennial Philadelphia (Bryn Mawr: 1976), 69, 81; Jonathan Sarna, "Columbus and the Jews," Commentary 94 (Nov. 1992), 38. 16. Conzen, "Ethnicity as Festive Culture" 66-69, wherein she cites the New York Times, 8 Oct. 1883 (p. 5), and 9 Oct. (p. 2), for accounts of the parades; Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh (eds.), America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three-Hundred Year History (Philadelphia: 1985), vol. 1, xi-xiv; H. Arnorld Barton, "Swedish-American Historiography," Immigration History Newsletter 15, no. 1 (May 1983), 2; Thomas J. Schlereth, "Columbia, Columbus, and Columbianism," Journal of American History 79, no. 3 (Dec. 1992), 995-960; John Appel, "Immigrant Historical Societies in the United States, 1880-1950" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvannia, 1960), 277-88, 329-34. 17. The Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Jews in the United States, v-x, 258-261. Although the first twenty-three Jews arrived in New Amsterdam in September 1654, the following year was chosen as the anniversary year, as it was then that

Pageants of Sorrow, Celebration and Protest

217

the Dutch West India Company overruled Governor Peter Stuyvesant and granted "a leave of settlement" to the Jews. For an example of the broad support for holding an anniversary celebration, see Jewish Exponent, 14 April 1905 (p. 7), and 21 April 1905 (p. 4.). For criticism that no Russian Jews were appointed to the executive committee, see Jewish Criterion, 19 May 1905 (p. 12); Hebrew Standard, 5 May 1905 (p. 8), and 12 May (p. 9); The American Israelite, 16 Nov. 1905 (p. 4); Jewish Exponent, 24 Nov. 1905 (pp. 3, 4). 18. American Hebrew, 5 May 1905 (pp. 725-731); Boston [Jewish] Advocate, 19 May 1905 (p. 1), 2 June (p. 1) and 7 July (p. 1). 19. American Hebrew, 5 May 1905 (p. 725). 20. American Hebrew, 6 Oct. 1905 (p. 517); The Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Jews in the United States, v-x, 242-258. See ibid., 199-232, where excerpts from eleven newspapers appear, and the listing in American Jewish Year Book 8 (5667-1906/7), 148-166. 21. American Israelite, 16 Nov. 1905 (p. 3); 30 Nov. (p. 6); Reform Advocate, 2 Dec. 1905 (p. 2); Jewish Exponent, 3 Nov. 1905 (pp. 3, 4), 24 Nov. 1905 (pp. 3, 4), 1 Dec. (pp. 4, 8). 22. Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary, ix. For general accounts, see the New York Times, 1 Dec. 1905 (pp. 1, 4), Jewish Exponent, 8 Dec. 1905 (p. 9). 23. Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary, 34-35, 72-73, 96, 122-123, 127; Emil Hirsh, "Concordance of Judaism and Americanism," Reform Advocate, 9 Dec. 1905 (pp. 471-474). In his study Roger Williams, The Pioneer of Religious Liberty (New York: 1894), Straus presented the historical case for Williams' support for the readmission of the Jews to England; see 3rd ed. (New York: 1936), 174-178. Letters of congratulations were exchanged between Jacob Schiff and H. Gollancz, president of the Jewish Historical Society of England, on the simultaneous celebrations of 250 years of the Whitehall Conference (where the legal basis for the readmission of Jews to England was established) and the 250th anniversary of the New Amsterdam settlement. See American Hebrew, 1 Dec. 1905 (p. 13). 24. New York Times, 17 Nov. 1905 (p. 6). 25. The Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary, 107-108, 122-127; New York Times, 27 Nov. 1905 (p. 6). On Kayserling, see Sarna, "Columbus and the Jews," 38-41. 26. Tageblat, 19 Nov. 1905 (p. 4). 27. Tageblat, "English Department," 1 Dec. 1905 (p. 1). 28. Forward, 1 Dec. 1905 (pp. 1, 4); Varheyt, 1 Dec. 1904 (pp. 1, 4); Tageblat, 27 Nov. 1905 (pp. 1, 4); New York Times, 27 Nov. 1905 (p. 6). 29. Forward, 7 Nov. 1905 (pp. 1, 4), 23 Nov. (p. 1); Varheyt, 23 Nov. (p. 1). 30. See Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862-1817 (Cambridge: 1981), 487-492. 31. Forward, 2, 3, 4 Dec. 1905. See also Tageblat 29, 30 Nov. (p. 1); New York Times, 29 Nov. (p. 6). 32. Varheyt, 4 Dec. 1905 (p. 1); Forward, 4 Dec. (p. 1). 33. New York Times, 5 Dec. 1905 (p. 6); Forward, 5 Dec. 1906 (p. 1). 34. New York Times, 5 Dec. 1905 (p. 6). 35. Ibid. 36. American Hebrew, 15 Dec. 1905 (p. 136). 37. See New York Times, 5 Dec. 1905 (p. 7) for an account of the Temple Emanu-el meeting, and ibid. (p. 6) for a report of the National Committee for Russian Relief's second million-dollar campaign and the report of Jacob Schiff on his diplomatic efforts. 38. Aaron Antonovsky and Elias Tcherikower (eds.), The Early Jewish Labor Movement in the United States (New York: 1961), 322-327; N. Goldberg, "Amerikes beytrog zum ershtn mai," Zukunft 49 no. 5 (May 1944), 270-271; Forward, 2 May 1903 (p. 1); Ezra Mendelsohn, Class Struggle in the Pale: The Formative Years of the Jewish Workers Movement in Tsarist Russia (Cambridge: 1970), 137-140. 39. A close examination of the American Jewish public response to the Kishinev pogrom in late April and May of 1903 brings into sharper relief the new phase of collaboration that characterizes the 1905 commemorations. In 1903, the notables of the established community

218

Arthur Aryeh Goren

initiated seventy-seven protest meetings in fifty cities across the nation. They were nominally sponsored by "general" committees and featured non-Jewish public figures. (See Cyrus Adler, The Voice of America on Kishineff [Philadelphia: 1904], xvii.) But the Jewish immigrant public failed to unite in organizing protest meetings, marches and fund-raising drives. See the Forward, 28 April 1903 (p. 1); 30 April (p. 1); 9 May 9 (p. 4). 40. New York Times, 27 Nov. 1905 (p. 7).

Review Essays

This page intentionally left blank

Literary Representations of "the Jew'

John Gross, Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend. London: Chatto & Windus, 1992. 355 pp. S.S. Prawer, Israel at Vanity Fair: Jews and Judaism in the Writings of W.M. Thackeray. Leiden, New York, Copenhagen, Koln: E.J. Brill, 1992. 439 pp. Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of "the Jew" in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 301 pp.

The unflattering portrayal of Jews in literary texts almost invariably touches the exposed nerve of Jewish sensibilities. In our own times the knowledge of what hostile representations of Jews can lead to may prompt the kind of reaction that led New York Jews to demonstrate violently outside the theater that was presenting a musical adaptation of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, with its Jewish criminal, Fagin. But long before the Holocaust, Jewish sensitivities to Fagin were brought home to Dickens himself. Some twenty-five years after the publication of Oliver Twist, Eliza Davis, the wife of a banker who had bought Dickens' London home, wrote him that he had "encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew": "Fagin I fear admits only of one interpretation; but while Charles Dickens lives the author can justify himself or atone for a great wrong." Dickens may well have been taken aback by Davis' presumption, but he hastened to point out to her that "all the rest of the wicked dramatis personae are Christians," and that he had "no feeling towards the Jews but a friendly one." The accusation, however, must have rankled because in Our Mutual Friend, the novel he was working on at the time, Dickens counters Fagin with the presentation of Riah, a good Jew, even though he is a little too good to be true. Davis, however, was certainly gratified. She gave Dickens a copy of a Hebrew-English Bible, which she inscribed as follows: "Presented to Charles Dickens, in grateful and admiring recognition of his having exercised the noblest quality man can possess—that of atoning for an injury as soon as conscious of having inflicted it." Dickens is only mentioned in passing in the books under review, but S.S. Prawer records a similar reaction by W.M. Thackeray in response to a contemporary complaint about his portrayal of "Miss Lowe": "If I say that an individual Christian is a rogue, do I impugn the professors of the whole Christian religion? ... I never wished to attack the Jewish nation, far from it." Shakespeare's Shylock, who appears in only five scenes of The Merchant of Venice, is by far the most famous—or notorious—representation of a Jew in literature. In his Shylock, John Gross maintains that "it would be an unusual, some would 221

222

Review Essays

say an unnatural, Jew who could regard Shylock with complete detachment" (p. 234). He himself musters a commendable degree of that desirable critical quality in his wide-ranging study. Gross writes both clearly and eloquently, is penetrating and illuminating in his criticism and is notably learned and scholarly in his approach. He presumably would not regard praise of his scholarship as a compliment since he seems to be the last to want to draw attention to it: he provides "Source Notes" at the end of his book that are listed by page numbers relating to his text— but the notes are not referred to in any way in the text itself. Perhaps this is expressive of a wish to distance himself from the "academic," a wish some may find understandable in view of the nature of much current academic writing. At all events, Gross' book is much the best of the three under review. Gross covers manifold aspects of the Shylock story. He starts by considering possible sources Shakespeare may have drawn on in his presentation of Shylock, notably Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, and also the medieval stereotypes of the Jew that Shakespeare was heir to. He places The Merchant of Venice in relation to the historical position of Jews at the time of its composition—and also, fascinatingly, to Shakespeare's personal history. Shakespeare's father was a moneylender "on the side," and was accused in court of charging well beyond the legal percentage of interest on loans he had made. The Shakespeare scholar E.A.J. Honigmann has shown that Shakespeare himself was associated with moneylenders, and Gross concludes that at the least he "understood the usurer from the inside" (p. 49). Gross does not attempt a full-scale commentary on the play, but he leaves us wishing he had. His critical comments on details of the text are always rewarding, as when he relates, for instance, to an image used in the initial description of Portia. Her "sunny locks" are said to "hang on her temples like a golden fleece"; and Gross states that wealth is bound up with her attraction: "she positively glows with it," for it is "part of her natural colouring" (p. 39). He is equally perceptive with regard to larger issues: the court scene suggests that the concept of mercy is alien to Judaism, but Gross insists this is "a travesty": "The word for mercy, rachamim, carries tremendous resonance in the Hebrew liturgy (it is related to rechem, the word for a womb), and endless exhortations to deal mercifully can be found in the writings of the Rabbis." Indeed, Portia's famous "quality of mercy" speech may derive from Ben Sira (c. 200 B.C.): "Oh how fair a thing is mercy in the time of anguish and trouble! It is like a cloud of rain, that cometh in a time of drought" (p. 81). The central section of Gross' book, entitled "Interpretations (1600-1939)," is devoted to an account of productions of The Merchant of Venice and to the ways in which actors renowned for their performances as Shylock interpreted their roles. Some of the famous actors he deals with are Charles Macklin, a major eighteenthcentury interpreter; George Frederick Cooke; Edmund Kean, whose first appearance as Shylock became "one of the great theatrical legends of the [nineteenth] century" (p. 109); William Charles Macready; and Henry Irving, who is said to have acted as Shylock more than a thousand times, though Henry James was not impressed: "Mr Irving's Shylock is neither excited nor exciting," he remarked. Gross carries his description of various productions of the play in English down to the Second World War; and thereafter discusses performances outside the English-speaking world,

Literary Representations of "the Jew"

223

most particularly in German and French. The sheer accumulation of material in Gross' worldwide account is most impressive, but the other side of this coin is that the proliferation of detail, the description of performance after performance and of one actor's interpretation of the role as against that of another becomes wearisome. The narrative, however, is enlivened with some delightful anecdotes, though I can retell only a few of these. Matheson Lang's 1915 Shy lock was influenced by the exhortations of Israel Zangwill, who forced himself on the actor in his dressing room. To register the full effect of this, one should bear in mind Beerbohm Tree's description of Zangwill: "his face shining like Moses, his teeth like the Ten Commandments, all broken." Zangwill himself liked to recount how a Victorian matron confided in him that "of course Shylock is the only Jew most of us know personally." Gross judges the actor Malcolm Keen to have been "a competent conventional Shylock"—even though he "slightly spoiled things on the first night" by saying, "If you tickle us, do we not bleed?" The German Jewish actor Rudolf Schildkraut emigrated to America, where he became prominent in New York's Yiddish theatre. He insisted, however, on acting Shylock and Lear in German—even though the rest of the cast spoke Yiddish in these productions. These anecdotes may fittingly be capped with the account by Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) of her Somali steward's reaction to her summary of the plot of the play: "What?" said he. "Did the Jew give up his claim? The flesh was due to him, it was little enough for him to get for all that money." "But what else could he do," I asked, "when he must not take one drop of blood?" "Memsahib," said Farah, "he could have used a redhot knife. That brings out no blood."

Farah would have made an original critic. Gross deals with more conventional opinions of the play, discussing the work of well-known twentieth-century critics, such as (among others) A.C. Bradley, Harley Granville-Barker, G. Wilson Knight, Dover Wilson, and Mark Van Doren. He comments cuttingly on critics who, writing during the Nazi period, could talk of Shylock and ignore contemporary reality: "There are times . . . when single-mindedness in a critic becomes indistinguishable from a failure of imagination" (p. 184). Another kind of evasion is exemplified by Freud, who wrote about "the theme of the three caskets" but did not discuss Shylock: "It is tantalising, for anyone aware of how deep Freud's Jewish roots ran, that he should have come as close to writing about Shylock as he did and then said nothing" (p. 277). Gross' final presentation of his own view of Shylock is typical of the solid, down-to-earth quality of the book as a whole. Shylock, he says, is meant to be a villain, specifically a Jewish villain, "Jewishness" being "one of his primary characteristics." Accordingly, he is inevitably part of "the history of anti-Semitism," though Shakespeare magically individualized him, and he is "a big character, like Falstaff—someone who bursts the bounds of the play in which he appears" (pp. 321-322). At the same time, no one in the play distinguishes between his Jewishness and his personal obnoxiousness. "The result is ugly, whether Shakespeare himself saw it that way or not" (p. 325). In Israel at Vanity Fair, S.S. Prawer deals exhaustively—and exhaustingly—

224

Review Essays

with the representation of Jews in Thackeray's writings. This includes all the writings, not only the author's many published books but also his manifold work as a journalist and his private letters. In addition, since Thackeray was a considerable illustrator and illustrated many of his own writings—not to mention the sketches that he included in many of his letters—Prawer provides numerous reproductions of his drawings of Jews. (These, incidentally, present two of Thackeray's impressions of Ludwig Devrient performing as Shylock at Weimar; they would interest Gross.) The result of this multifaceted description is a weighty account of Jews in Thackeray—it is a heavy book—a kind of biography with blinkers, since Prawer deals chronologically with Thackeray's life and writings and the Jewish question, breaking the story up into short periods of time from 1811 to 1863, from the author's birth to his death. He quotes copiously, and leaves us feeling reasonably certain that there is no mention of a Jew or an allusion to anything Jewish, no matter how recondite, that has escaped his capacious net. Indeed, even non-mentions, as it were, are recorded: Thackeray is said to have liked the wit of Heine, "whose Jewish origins were no secret in Paris although Thackeray does not allude to them" (p. 32). Similarly, in Thackeray's first journalistic reference to Disraeli's novels, which is quoted at some length, "nothing is made of Disraeli's Jewish origin" (p. 26). (When Thackeray later parodied Jewish aspects in Disraeli's work in a piece in Punch, Disraeli was so offended he broke off relations with him.) The overall effect of Prawer's book is curious. The amount of material accumulated is so overwhelming that one might be led to suppose that Thackeray was obsessed with Jews; in fact most of the references, especially in the novels, are incidental, and when one comes across them in context, they do not draw quite the same attention to themselves. Prawer's scholarship is notable. His research for the book covered not only all of Thackeray's published work and illustrations but also manuscript materials in libraries in both England and the United States; and his bibliography indicates that he read widely around his subject, studying critical, historical and textual aspects related to it. He is particularly good on the historical background, both as this pertains to the times in which Thackeray lived and to his life. One of Thackeray's characters, for instance, is called Dr. Solomon Pacifico, and he refers to his "celebrated namesake." Prawer points out that the reference is to David Pacifico (17841854), a Jew whose house had been destroyed in an anti-Jewish riot in Athens in 1847. The British government under Palmerston held the Greek government responsible for compensation, and when it refused to comply, a British fleet blockaded Piraeus, captured some 200 Greek ships, and kept them until Pacifico received his due. In Parliament, Palmerston later justified his action, declaring that no British subject, even "of Jewish persuasion," should (in Prawer's words) "suffer outrage without being avenged" (p. 273). Prawer also explains a recurrent symbolism in Thackeray's drawings: three hats piled on top of one another on a man's head and a sack over his shoulder are "the paraphernalia of the Jewish old-clothesman" (p. 292). Events in Thackeray's personal experience are shown on occasion to be behind his unfavorable portrayal of Jews, as when his encounter with Jews who kept their hats on at a sale in an aristocratic mansion is reflected in The Newcomes. Prawer also believes that Thackeray's "revulsion against the Old Testament is bound up with attempts to free himself from the influence of his mother's overpowering

Literary Representations of "the Jew"

225

personality" (p. 341), though, as he shows, references to the Bible play an important part in Thackeray's art. The negative side of Prawer's erudition is his heavy-handedness, a compulsion to dot every i and cross every t, which makes for a pronouncedly plodding effect. A Jewish bailiff is called Mr. Nabb—"with obvious reference," Prawer informs us, "to his prescribed task" (p. 46). One of Thackeray's narrators writes from Cold Bath Fields, "where the Middlesex House of Correction" was located; a footnote in the narrative tells the reader that he "has his lodgings and food provided for him by the government of his country"—which, Prawer says, is "a polite way of indicating that he is in prison" (p. 50). When reference is made to a Jewish boxer and to the possibility of his opponent's "[beating] the Jew's nose to a jelly," we are told that "it is no accident, of course, that a nose is mentioned when a Jewish boxer comes into view; a long caricature tradition had made that feature a prime distinguishing mark, and that gives a sadistic relish to the prospect of seeing it pounded to jelly" (p. 296). Prawer insists that it is "an essential feature of Thackeray's art to scatter hints, to work in halftones and tiny suggestive brush strokes, rather than spell everything out" (p. 235); but as these examples—and indeed the following one (on a page just prior to this statement)—indicate, he himself adheres to a rather different prescription: "Whether the 'Mr Polonius of Coventry Street,' from whom Becky pretends she has hired jewels given to her by Lord Steyne, is meant to be Jewish we never find out; his name derives from Hamlet, of course, but may also hint at Polish origins" (p. 234). He is also surprisingly careless, getting the famous ending of Thackeray's most famous novel quite wrong: "Jos Sedley," he says, "takes [Becky] back to England, where (it would appear) she speedily helps him to his grave" (p. 234). Jos is not capable of taking Becky anywhere at the end and he dies in fact "at Aix-la-Chapelle"; it is strongly intimated, despite Prawer's coy parenthesis and euphemism, that she has murdered him. The euphemism is symptomatic of a tendency throughout the book to palliate Thackeray's undoubted antisemitism on numerous occasions by assertions that Jewish characters who are vilified are no worse than some Christians in the same narrative. Prawer's conclusion is that Thackeray is "by no means the 'racialist' anti-Semite as some of his modern critics have depicted him. He finds much to laugh at in the Jews he portrayed with pen and pencil, and much to deplore; but he also finds a good deal of cheerfulness, useful service, and fair dealing" (p. 422). Bryan Cheyette is a critic in a fashionable mold. In Constructions of "the Jew" in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875-1945, he announces at the outset that he is discarding the terms "antisemitism" and "philosemitism" in favor of his own coinage, "Semitic discourse," though it never really becomes clear what the advantage of this procedure is. He also states, thus aligning himself with much postmodern critical dogma, that the "slipperiness"—or, as he elsewhere repeatedly maintains, the "indeterminacy"—of literary constructions of the Jew in realist fiction "fatally undermines" the "supposed certainty that an author . . . might have in their ability to represent 'reality'" (pp. 8-9). Leaving aside Cheyette's grammar (and Cambridge's notable lack of a copy editor), it is a moot question whether this thesis is ever substantiated in the book. Early on, for instance, he takes Anthony Trollope to exemplify the point: "That Jews [in Trollope] might

226

Review Essays

successfully 'pass' as 'English gentlemen' challenges and qualifies the power of Trollope's 'realist' narrative to 'know' its subjects" (p. 28); it would seem, rather, that it is precisely the "knowing" that is established. In modernist texts, "the very incoherence of 'the Jew'" is "a potent expression of the impossibility of fully 'knowing' anything" (p. 9). James Joyce's Bloom is Cheyette's prime example of this view—he makes the strongest case for this aspect of his argument with his analysis of the presentation of Bloom—but even here the supposed "incoherence" (read indeterminacy) may well be regarded as the achievement of a fine complexity. Cheyette's critical equipment is thus a handicap, if anything, and detracts from the real value of his book, which is to challenge the way in which representations of Jews have been "written out of literary-historical studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers" (p. xi). His study forcefully reveals how large Jews bulk in the literature of this period and the various ways in which they are depicted. He overstates in claiming that "a dominant racialized discourse" is "at the heart" of the "literary 'culture'" of this time (p. 4), but his book does help to redress the balance. Cheyette uses Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, with its central opposition between "Hebraism" and "Hellenism," as a springboard to his study of selected writers of the period under discussion. These he groups in pairs: Anthony Trollope and George Eliot; John Buchan and Rudyard Kipling; George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells; Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton; and James Joyce and T.S. Eliot. The pairing of these writers is an effective procedure, serving to bring out similarities and differences. The trouble with this selection, however, is that it leaves out too much. Cheyette is well aware that his study is "by no means comprehensive," but he confines the details of some striking lacunae to a footnote: "Obvious omissions from a detailed analysis are Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson. Other writers, such as Ezra Pound, Graham Greene, Wyndham Lewis and Charles Williams have been the subject of recently published full-length studies" (p. 11). This won't do. The first-named group of writers are major figures, and it makes no sense both to claim to be establishing a new view of what is at the heart of the literary culture of the period and to leave them out. As for the full-length studies of the other writers who are named, that should not have deterred Cheyette. The major writers among those he does consider have been written about voluminously, and he shows he is familiar with a good deal of this material. Indeed his familiarity serves to vitiate his own criticism; the sections on the major writers are extremely derivative, and page after page is littered with "as so-and-so has said," "as so-and-so has acutely pointed out," and so on. Nor is his own unaided commentary always illuminating, tending as in the following instance, both to state the obvious and contrive to inflate it: a character in a Trollope novel opposes his daughter's choice of husband (who is "not the son of an English gentleman") in these terms: I have always been for absolute toleration in matters of religion,—have always advocated admission of Roman Catholics and Jews into Parliament, and even to the Bench. In ordinary life I never question a man's religion. It is nothing to me whether he believes in Mahomet, or has no belief at all. But when a man comes to me for my daughter—.

Literary Representations of "the Jew"

221

Cheyette's comment is that this "distinguishes between the accommodation of religious or racial minorities into the universalist state and the private assimilation of these minorities into the particularist 'family' of England" (p. 37). Cheyette is much better in his discussion of minor writers, the section on Belloc and Chesterton, for instance, being one of the strongest in the book. Here he takes an independent line and challenges existing critical opinion in a manner that is not evident in his treatment, say, of T.S. Eliot. He is excellent in exposing a clear antisemitic tendency in both Belloc and Chesterton. And throughout he does convincingly support his central claim that "the racial construction of 'the Jew' in English literature and society is far from being a fixed, mythic stereotype as is commonly thought" (p. 268). Instead his study brings out "the radically imprecise character of 'the Jew'" as this is "constructed within a Semitic discourse" (p. 270). H.M. DALESKI The Hebrew University

The Perils of Translation: Isaac Bashevis Singer in English and Hebrew

Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Certificate. Trans, by Leonard Wolf. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992. (Hebrew version: Hasertifikat, trans, by Ofrah Ofer. Tel-Aviv: Sifriyat Ma'ariv, 1993). Isaac Bashevis Singer, Meshuga. Trans, by the author and Nili Wachtel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.

Isaac Bashevis Singer, one of Yiddish literature's greatest figures and the winner of the Nobel prize, died in Miami, Florida, in 1991. Since then two of his novels have appeared in English translation—The Certificate and Meshuga. Both of them appeared as well in a Hebrew translation based on the English version. 1 The Certificate was translated into English in 1992. It is clearly autobiographical. Bashevis' family left Warsaw during the First World War, and in 1922 the young author succeeded in returning to the city. He was then eighteen years old, still garbed in traditional clothing and long sidecurls. Bashevis' last thirteen years in Warsaw—he emigrated to New York in 1935—are justly considered the crucial period in his artistic development. His first conspicuous success was the novel Satan in Goray, published in 1932. It was to these years that Bashevis devoted the middle part of his famous autobiography, to which he gave the title A Young Man in Search of Love. Here he tells the story of his own self-doubts, of his path to literature and of his encounters with Jewish writers and with the Jewish Writers' Club, where he became a member in good standing. With a surprising degree of exhibitionism, Bashevis discusses his "search for love." This was a stormy period in the life of the son of a pious rabbinical judge (dayan) who had only recently abandoned both his religious appearance and, after much hesitation, religious orthodoxy. Bashevis was consequently thrust into the whirlpool of modern, materialistic life in the big city. It is hardly surprising that Bashevis repeatedly returned to this period in his life in autobiographical novels—at least five—published between 1956 and 1974, all of them serialized in the New York daily Forward. Despite the alterations in the names of the hero and his lovers, there appears in each of them the character of a young writer and the women whom he encounters. The background is always Warsaw between the two world wars, whose diverse population and Jewish quarters are described in great detail. An important portion of each novel is devoted to the Jewish Writers' Club and to its visitors, who despite their fictional names can be clearly identified. The self-doubts of the young writer, son of an Orthodox family, 228

The Perils of Translation: Isaac Bashevis Singer in English and Hebrew

229

constitutes a recurring leitmotif, with Bashevis offering his own "portrait of the artist as a young man." The Certificate appeared in installments in the Forward between January and May of 1967. It is not clear why this book was chosen to be Bashevis' first posthumously translated novel. In his afterword to the English translation, Leonard Wolf offers no clarification of this point, even though The Certificate raises in a particularly sharp manner the whole issue of how best to deal with Bashevis' considerable body of untranslated works. Bashevis' output for the Forward alone consisted of material published four times a week, consistently, from the mid-1930s to the 1980s. Many novels "buried" in the Forward's pages have never been published in book form in Yiddish, much less translated. In addition, there are hundreds of stories, articles of literary criticism, articles of more general interest and memoirs that appeared in the Forward and in other publications in Yiddish, but that remain unknown and untranslated. Only a small portion of this literary production was even noted in bibliographies up to 1951. Was it a wise decision to select The Certificate to be Bashevis' first posthumously translated novel? The story deals with a well-known incident from the life of the author: the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to arrange a fictitious wedding with a young woman who possessed a certificate for immigration to Palestine. The whole affair is related in detail (with the characters bearing different names) in the middle sections of both Love and Exile and Shosha. Although Bashevis' well-known opposition to Communism and to literary modernism comes across with particular force in The Certificate, it is doubtful if any new material exists here for those readers familiar with his work, even if only in translation. The only innovation in this novel derives from the figure of the poet Ziskind Eychel, in whom it is not difficult to detect a wicked caricature of the expressionist poet Peretz Markish. In the novel Ziskind is the friend of the young novelist's elder brother; in reality, Markish was the friend of I.J. Singer, Bashevis' elder brother. Had the translation into English been free of inexcusable blunders, we might have come into possession of a highly readable novel that does no damage to the author's memory. As noted, Bashevis collaborated in the translation of his work into English, undoubtedly in part because he did not trust the Yiddish-language skills of at least some of his translators. Moreover, he also tended not only to shorten his texts but to alter them, sometimes quite dramatically. Thus his demand, in the last years of his life, to have his novels translated from the English, rather than from the original Yiddish version. In the case of The Certificate, however, the English version was prepared posthumously. Why, then, give in to the publisher's demand that any other translations be done from the English and not from Yiddish? Despite its stylistic fluency, The Certificate has serious flaws. It is clear that, the translator's knowledge of Yiddish is limited. He even has difficulty distinguishing among similar-looking Hebrew letters: the name of the hero of the novel is David Bendiner, but in the English version he appears under the name Bendiger, and so he appears in Hebrew as well. Various first names and names of streets in Warsaw are rendered inaccurately. The translator could understand neither the quotations in the book nor the Hebraisms and Slavisms. Sometimes he skips whole sentences, some-

230

Review Essays

times he misunderstands them. He translates, for example, the Russian expression "lyubov ne kartoshka" as "love has a way of growing" (in fact it means "love is not a potato"—that is, it is no simple matter). The translator also does not understand German components in Yiddish. Thus the word "farhern," which in this context means "to examine" becomes "he once listened to me recite." In another instance the Yiddish text describes Polish officers who were in the habit of "tsunoyfklapn di knaflen," that is, clicking their heels. But in the English text, the Polish officers are "continually buttoning their buttons"?! Naturally, the Hebrew translator, knowing only this text, repeats most of these errors in her Hebrew version. Two other examples of mistranslation will suffice. On p. 56 of the English version we read: "I had read Tolstoy, Forster, Hogdehn." Who could this Hogdehn be? Only in the Yiddish original is it possible to discover that what the author meant was Gandhi. And if this could happen to Gandhi, it is hardly surprising that the appelation "Kidushei Hari" (p. 13) is revealed, in the Yiddish original, to be "Khidushei haRiM," the acronym of Rabbi Yitzhak Meir Alter, the founder of the hasidic dynasty of Gur. In both cases, no dictionary or lexicon can come to the aid of perplexed readers who have no access to the Yiddish text. The title given to Meshuga when it was first serialized in the pages of the Forward in 1981-1982 was Lost Souls. Such a title fits the novel's substance and character more than its present name, which according to the translator was suggested by Bashevis himself during the process of translation. The phrase "lost souls" appears in the text itself (p. 178), where it is explained as referring to a group of Jews during the Holocaust who were transferred by the Germans from camp to camp until they arrived in Riga and, eventually, in the Stutthof concentration camp. The novel's heroine, Miriam Zelkind, was in this camp. And indeed, many such lost souls populate Bashevis' novel. The story itself, however, deals not with the period of the Second World War but with a group of Polish Jewish survivors, most of them from Warsaw, who live in New York in the early 1950s on Manhattan's Upper West Side in the area between 70th and 80th streets, between Central Park and Broadway. Their livelihood is based upon speculation in Wall Street, which they carry out through one of their members, an agent to a bold businessman. The novel's protagonist is a forty-eight-year-old Yiddish writer who had arrived in New York from Poland in the mid-1930s. He is a permanent employee of the Forward, supplying the paper with serialized novels and articles on a wide range of topics. In addition, he serves as an adviser to readers with a variety of problems. This writer is the axis around which the other characters revolve. Most of them are avid readers of his serialized novels; Miriam Zelkind, a twenty-seven-year-old woman, is even writing a doctoral dissertation on his works. The love that develops between the two forms the novel's central theme. The writer's name is Aaron Graydinger, the name of the hero of Bashevis' novel Shosha. And as in Shosha, Bashevis takes care to provide Graydinger with much of his own biographical data. In Meshuga, however, the Shosha episode in the author's life is essentially nonexistent. Shosha is mentioned only once, and then only in passing (p. 176), as Aaron's childhood playmate on Krochmalna Street in Warsaw. Meshuga is filled with memories of Aaron Graydinger's past that are identical

The Perils of Translation: Isaac Bashevis Singer in English and Hebrew

231

with those of Bashevis. His maternal grandfather, the rabbi of Bilgoraj, is mentioned, as are his father, his brother—the author I.J. Singer—his younger brother Moshe, and his sister Hinda. His mother is mentioned a number of times, and the author goes so far as to note her burial place in Dzhambul, Kazakhstan (pp. 155— 156). Even the name Didi, a nickname used for Bashevis' son Isaac Zamir during his childhood in Warsaw, appears in Meshuga as the name of a baby in New York. Bashevis uses Aaron Graydinger's dreams to return him to Bashevis' own past, his family in Warsaw and in Bilgoraj. Another Bashevis novel directly related to Meshuga is Enemies: A Love Story, known also in its cinematic version. The affinity between the two novels is revealed not only in the similar characters of Holocaust survivors living in New York, but in the nearly identical fates of their central female characters. The burden of the past weighs heavy on Miriam Zelkind in Meshuga, as it does on Masha in Enemies. They both served in the cruel role of Kapos in German concentration camps, and the two of them even had Nazi lovers. Meshuga, however, could not have been written after Shosha, and certainly not after Enemies, as one might assume from its publication date of 1981-1982. Although Enemies first appeared in the Forward in 1966, there is no doubt that Meshuga is an earlier and less assured version. Shosha was also serialized in the Forward, in 1974, under the title Neshome expeditsiyes (Travels of the Soul). Nevertheless, it is also difficult to accept this work as an earlier version of Meshuga; it is far more plausible to assume that Meshuga was written prior to the other two novels, despite its later publication. The period in which Meshuga was written can be discerned from the text itself. For instance, one of the characters, Aaron Graydinger's reader, attempts to understand the characters in one of his novels: I want to know what happened next. But then again, in your novel, how could a man such as Caiman—prosperous, wise, a clever merchant—allow himself to be so deceived by that Clara? Couldn't he see that she wanted his money, not himself? (p. 81).

These characters are in fact from Bashevis' novel Der hoyf (The Manor), which was serialized in the Forward in 1952-1955. It thus seems clear that Meshuga was written in the 1950s, concurrently with The Manor. It is probable that it was completed in 1955, following Bashevis' first visit to Israel in the fall of that year, as is indicated by the section in Meshuga (pp. 187212) that takes place in Tel-Aviv. I have not been able to find any mention of an event in the Bashevis/Graydinger biography that would compel one to date the completion of the novel later than 1955. It follows, therefore, that Bashevis must have removed the manuscript of Lost Souls, which had been written in 1955, from his personal archive and given it to the Forward in 1981 to be serialized. And indeed, at a number of points in the novel, Aaron Graydinger mentions "suitcases packed with manuscripts" (p. 127) that have not been published and that have moved with the author from apartment to apartment. Moreover, over the years the real-life author frequently chose to have the Forward print previously published stories and novels, such as his first novel, Satan in Goray.

232

Review Essays

Meshuga, then, is a book that preceded Bashevis' two better-known novels. There is no doubt that Enemies, written later, presents a more complex and mature picture of the problems of Holocaust survivors in New York.2 It is possible that the change in the novel's title is meant to divert the reader's attention from the "lost souls" in the book and toward Aaron Graydinger. In fact, Bashevis' double in this novel is its most interesting character. We have here a remarkable presentation of a New York Yiddish writer who expresses unconventional views regarding Yiddish and Yiddish literature. We witness the extreme mental pressure to which the writer is subjected as a result of his need to provide the weekly portion of his serialized novel, which is being written as it appears in press. We see the writer's anxiety that he may not have time to remove a grave error from the novel after it has been typeset. We learn, moreover, of his objection to the editor's intervention while the novel is being printed in the Forward. The real-life Bashevis was aware of the criticism directed against him by Yiddish critics. In the words of his fictional double: There was no end to the complaints lodged against me. I was too pessimistic, too superstitious, too skeptical of humanity's progress, not devoted enough to socialism, Zionism, Americanism, the struggle against anti-Semitism, the activities of the Yiddishists, the problems of women's rights. Some critics complained that a Jewish state had sprung up before my eyes while I busied myself with the cobwebs of folklore. They accused me of dragging the reader back to the dark Middle Ages. Nu, and why such interest in sex? Sex is not in the tradition of Yiddish literature (p. 114).

All of these complaints, of course, were forgotten when Bashevis was awarded the Nobel prize. As stated on the front page of the English translation, Bashevis took part in the translation of the book—at its end, Nili Wachtel writes of his involvement. It is difficult to determine precisely what the collaboration between the author and the translator meant in practice. A comparison of the Yiddish text with the English translation clearly reveals the usual work of editing that an author performs when transforming his work from a serialized to a completed novel. He seems to have been involved primarily in abbreviating the text considerably, with mimimal interest in editing what remained. The reasons for omission are not always clear, and it is not always certain that the text was thereby improved. Bashevis' editorial work on his own novels in preparation for English publication has not yet been closely investigated. It is therefore difficult to determine whether Bashevis and his English publisher were correct in their determination to make the English version the authoritative text. The fact that the author was not involved in the actual process of translation is borne out by a number of grave errors and corruptions in the final text that Bashevis would surely have noticed. I will indicate a number of them: • • • •

p. p. p. p.

5: "Rasha" instead of "Rashba" 14: "Lessing or Natan the Wise" instead of "Nathan the Wise by Lessing" 24: "Gemara Berachot, Chapter Ha-Rokh" instead of "Haroeh" 36: "Shmalouvik" instead of "Shmaltsovnik"

The Perils of Translation: Isaac Bashevis Singer in English and Hebrew

233

• p. 94: "Tagelekh" instead of "tsigele" (see the Forward of Aug. 31, 1981—in context, there is an intentional connection between the kid ["tsigele" in the song| and the donkey sent by Judah to Tamar in the biblical account of Gen. 38) • p. 115: "Volks-Zeitung"—what is referred to in the text is not a Germanlanguage newspaper but rather the well-known Bundist Yiddish paper Folkstsaytung • pp. 116, 191: "Izevice" instead of "Izbice" • p. 172: "Ruva-Ruska" instead of "Rawa-Ruska" It is unlikely that Bashevis would have skipped over such errors without correction, and it is a pity that this very readable translation is marred by errors that could easily have been eliminated. An examination of the two books discussed here leaves one with the impression that Bashevis' English-language publisher does not treat with sufficient respect those works that have been published after their author's death. This is not merely a case of random selection of Bashevis Singer's rich posthumous legacy, but outright editorial negligence that could have been prevented had the translations been subjected to an appropriate inspection prior to publication. CHONE SHMERUK The Hebrew University

Notes 1. The reviews of Hasertificat and Meshuga that appear here are based on articles by Chone Shmeruk published in the Ha'aretz literary supplement of 16 June 1993 (p. 3) and 12 April 1995 (p. 6), reprinted here courtesy of the newspaper. 2. It is worth taking note, in this context, of Dorothy Seidman Bilik's book Immigrant Survivors: Post-Holocaust Consciousness in Recent Jewish American Fiction (Middletown: 1981). The chapter devoted to Enemies is worthy of special attention.

Democracy in Israel: Proven Yet Precarious

Myron Aronoff, Power and Ritual in the Israel Labor Party: A Study in Political Anthropology. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1993. 267 pp. Edy Kaufman, S.B. Abed and R.L. Rothstein (eds.), Democracy, Peace, and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1993. 319 pp. Keith Kyle and Joel Peters (eds.), Whither Israeli London and New York: I.B. Tauris and Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1993. 292 pp. Ian Lustick, Unsettled States, Disputed Lands. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993. 576 pp. Yochanan Peres and Ephraim Yuchtman-Yaar, Trends in Israeli Democracy. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1992. 59 pp. Ehud Sprinzak and Larry Diamond (eds.), Israeli Democracy Under Stress. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1993. 385 pp. Avner Yaniv (ed.), National Security and Democracy in Israel. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1993. 257 pp.

Israeli democracy has survived two major transfers of power, in 1977 and 1992, and has thereby passed the conventional test of a system's democratic vigor. This is a remarkable performance, considering that the population of the country is of diverse immigrant origin whose only uniformity of political background is its common roots in more or less autocratic political cultures, whether of Eastern Europe or the Middle East. However, though apparently robust, Israel's democratic system is precarious—just how precarious was tragically revealed by the shock of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's assassination in November 1995. There are two sources of powerful pressure testing the democratic system to the limit: first, the tremendous strain imposed by the fundamental nature of the political conflict pervading Israeli society; and second, the inadequacy of its antiquated electoral machinery and the difficulty of reforming it. The results of the 1996 elections, conducted for the first time under the new rules providing for the separate but simultaneous election of the prime minister and the Knesset, give some small reassurance that the center may be strengthening with regard to the territorial issue, though there is cause for anxiety that the religious-secular polarization may well have become more pronounced. The conundrum of Israel's democratic vitality has become the subject of a veritable literature. A stream of recent substantial books includes those that focus on mechanical aspects of the system, and others that are more concerned with the 234

Democracy in Israel: Proven Yet Precarious

235

effects of ideological and political polarization related to the shaping of national identity (which in turn is affected by the delineation of state boundaries) on democracy and the rule of law. Some of these books are original monographs based on individual research; others are the collective products of conferences and discussions specifically concerned with the issues of democracy. With the exception of Whither Israel? which is an easily read panoramic survey that can engage the lay reader, the works under review are fairly dense and technical, addressed in the main to political scientists. They are all products of solid academic virtue, and as such may interest graduate students of democratic theory in general, as well as those concerned only with Israeli history, society and politics. In his tour de force Unsettled States, Disputed Lands, Ian Lustick develops an overarching political theory that advances the understanding of state formation while at the same time addressing through comparison the specific Israeli dilemmas arising from ideological and political polarization. The cultural patterns and roots of Israeli democracy are explored by Myron Aronoff in a revised edition of his classic study Power and Ritual in the Israel Labor Party, which sheds much light on current concerns. Lynne Rienner augments its already considerable Israel list with the publication of Israeli Democracy Under Stress, edited by Ehud Sprinzak and Larry Diamond, National Security and Democracy in Israel, edited by Avner Yaniv, and Trends in Israeli Democracy, edited by Yochanan Peres and Ephraim YuchtmanYaar—all three works put out in conjunction with the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI)—and Democracy, Peace, and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, edited by Edy Kaufman, S.B. Abed and R.L. Rothstein and sponsored by the United States Institute of Peace. The three IDI works are focused mainly on institutional processes and tensions, while the last concentrates on the effects of fundamental stresses occurring in connection with the issue of relations with the Palestinians. Apart from Peres and Yuchtman-Yaar's volume, which offers the findings of a survey and analysis of public opinion in relation to democracy, the Lynne Rienner titles are collections of articles arising from international conferences. Additionally, the Israel Diaspora Institute (apparently a precursor of the Israel Democracy Institute) has published expository materials that provide substantial data and analysis for the study of the mechanical aspects of the political system. 1 Finally, Whither Israel? edited by Keith Kyle and Joel Peters, is a compendium of expert soundings delivered at a conference held at Chatham House on the institutional state of health of Israel's political economy and its capacity to withstand the major pressures to which it is now subjected. Aronoff adds no less than four full chapters to bring Power and Ritual up to date. These may profitably be read in conjunction with Peter Medding's recent pioneering work, The Founding of Israeli Democracy, 1948-1967,,2 since both scholars have arrived at their wider understanding of Israeli politics through the initial deep investigation of the old Labor party, bringing to bear the differential perspectives of anthropology and historical political science. In his new chapters, Aronoff mercilessly analyzes the multitude of errors committed by Labor in its election campaign of 1977. He finds that the Likud party understood much better how to use well-chosen rhetoric and religious symbolism to tap the electoral strength of a

236

Review Essays

sleeping giant in Israeli politics—the mass of voters of North African and Middle Eastern origin. Aronoff argues that only radical reform throughout every aspect of the Labor party's political culture could bring it back into a position of trust within the electorate. He affirms the efficacy of the new primary system introduced for the election of 1992, which indeed Labor won, and sees the spirit of reform within the party beginning to yield results. However, he finds that the election results of 1992 reflected primarily the rejection of Likud rather than the affirmation of Labor. The 1996 elections appear to have validated Aronoff's insight, and also his view that Labor's main need is to generate a quality of leadership capable of carrying the people through challenging change. In focusing on Labor, Aronoff has in a way provided a microstudy of deterioration and reform, which can be taken as a metaphor for the Israeli polity as a whole. Space does not permit an appraisal of Aronoff's strong conviction that political anthropology, as he has pioneered it, is a potentially fertile but sadly neglected tool for understanding. However, readers of this work will be easily enough persuaded. According to Lustick, "the territorial shape of any state reveals itself as contingent on as well as constitutive of political, technological, economic, cultural and social processes" (p. 2). He notes further that "the peaceful separation of territories from existing states is possible, that conquest of territories does not necessarily mean their political integration, and that acquisition of a territory in war does not necessarily mean its permanent separation from rival claimants" (p. 3). In a telling observation, Lustick also avers (p. 4) that the prevalent metaphor of state-building tends to generate the assumption that, once built, a state has arrived at its final form—a conclusion that has hitherto inhibited scholarly exploration of the conditions of state expansion and contraction. Lustick has developed a theory of this latter phenomenon, which may be applied to an understanding of the Israeli case based on a comparison between the British relationship to Ireland from the 1830s to 1922, France and Algeria from the 1930s to 1962, and Israel's relation to the West Bank and Gaza Strip since 1967. In Lustick's formidable analysis, the issues of identity—conceptual and actual— that are at the heart of the delineation of boundaries are seen as determined dialectically through the political process. Lustick employs the detailed historical record to discern patterns of stress that can be located within a given range or order of conflict, and that have prognostic potential. Regarding Israel, he argues that the opposing options of remaining in control of the occupied territories or ceding them—or, put in terms of national identity, the policy of either seeking the boundaries of "Greater Israel" or else confining itself to the "Green Line"—are both fraught with the potential for violence and the disintegration of democratic institutions. The ultimate underlying question is whether a democracy can peaceably make decisions as basic as determining the contours of national identity with the support of a majority of no more than, say, 51 percent. This question must now be faced, since maintenance of the status quo has become intolerably expensive, both in terms of money and morale, in the wake of the intifada. According to Lustick, the issue of Israel's relationship with the territories occupied since 1967 has assumed ever more profound political implications. By the time the Shamir government took office in 1990, the political divide had ceased to be

Democracy in Israel: Proven Yet Precarious

237

merely a contest between the political parties about who should rule (in other words, an issue of incumbency). It had become instead a fundamental division about the very legitimacy of either of the options: remaining in the territories or withdrawing from them. Resolution of an issue so basic, without consensus, could involve changing the essential character of the regime. As in his earlier work, For the Land and the Lord,3 Lustick adopts a somewhat apocalyptic tone, which has not so far been shown by political developments to be inappropriate. Can the mechanics of Israel's democracy continue to operate effectively in a period of rapid social change, in which the state undergoes contraction or expansion vis-a-vis the West Bank and the Golan Heights, without incurring irreparable damage resulting from stresses on its democratic fabric? The upshot, from the point of view of the viability of Israel's democratic culture and institutions, is that the withdrawal of Israel from the occupied territories could be achieved with less stress on the regime than would be generated by the attempt to retain the territories, since the former choice requires a regression into familiar political ground—through a threshold that has been crossed before—while the latter choice would necessitate going forward through the uncharted territory of a new ideological threshold, as the Shamir government of 19901992 tried but failed to do. Lustick concludes his analysis with the proposition that Israel will not be able to institutionalize its control of the territories, and predicts that Israel will not stabilize its relationship to the territories without disengaging from them, that it will not disengage from them without managing threats of regime disruption, and that the decisive stage in the process will not be the negotiation or implementation of an agreement with the Arabs, but an outcome in the struggle among Jews—the rescaling of the problem inside Israel from one that can threaten the regime to one that can threaten only incumbents (p. 437).

Drawing largely on the press, Lustick's historical narrative of Israeli politics is told so felicitously and with such illuminating detail that it could usefully be detached from the accompanying comparative cases and theoretical analysis, and republished separately (with some of the theoretical jargon edited out) as a smaller book for the general reader whose specific interest is Israel. At the same time, his theoretical overview provides a valid framework in which to ground the normative analysis of possibilities for reform. Sprinzak and Diamond's Israeli Democracy Under Stress is the final product, updated and revised to 1992, of a conference sponsored in 1990 by the Israel Democracy Institute. Its approaches and ideas for reform are within a perspective and on a scale that is happily compatible with the prognostic guidelines that may be derived from Lustick's study. Moreover, given that the issues of democracy are a powerful heuristic key to the Israeli system, this book may well be the best extant introduction to the advanced study of the Israeli polity. The Israel Democracy Institute is "the first action-oriented policy center" in Israel. It provides policymakers with data and technical services, hoping thereby to influence constitutional evolution in a benign way for the benefit of democratic functioning. In his foreword to this volume, the institute's president, Arye Carmon, declares that Israel has crossed a threshold into an "Age of Reform." He sees a tide,

238

Review Essays

originating in the last weeks of the Twelfth Knesset, that is sweeping the public to favor greater participation in and greater democratization of political life. The "Age of Reform," writes Cannon, has become a metaphor for describing the substance and intentions of IDI's Political Reform Program. This is both a descriptive and a normative term. Descriptively, it implies a series of structural reforms that touch upon every important sphere of the country's public life. Normatively, it expresses the desire and hope that the limited institutional reforms currently being discussed in Israel should create momentum for a comprehensive rcexamination of Israel's entire public domain (p. xi). Carmen's claim is echoed by Sprinzak and Diamond in their own introduction. The IDI sees the absence of an inherited political tradition, which compels the new state to forge its own norms and traditions from scratch, as the defining characteristic of the Israeli polity. In view of the public's noted propensity to favor populistic leadership by a "man on horseback"—as reconfirmed by Yuchtman-Yaar and Peres both in their chapter in this volume and in their larger study Trends in Israeli Democracy from which the chapter is drawn—it is considered all the more vital to improve, revitalize and reinforce the democratic functioning by means of various reform measures. The editors point out in their introduction that the government crisis of 1990 (in which the Likud was able to put together a majority only after Labor tried but failed over the course of several weeks to cobble together a coalition) starkly revealed the weaknesses of the system: "Israelis who first wondered about the narrow issues of distorted coalition politics started to ask harder questions about their system of government and its ability to make rational decisions on critical questions such as peace, security, and the economy" (p. 4). The problems addressed in the discussion are summarized by the editors as "a fragmented party system, a deeply divided society, an unsuitable electoral system, an overgrown state sector, unstable and ineffective government, insecure liberty, an ambivalent political culture" (p. 5). Part 1 of the volume examines the roots of Israeli political culture. Myron Aronoff brilliantly opens the discussion with an essay exploring its historical origins. He shows how the consideration of democracy was a less influential impulse among the founding fathers of the state than was Zionism, which functioned as a normative ideology essential to maintaining continuity with the Jewish past. Aronoff adduces convincing anthropological evidence and analysis to support this understanding (which of course could also, and has also, been arrived at by other routes). The implication of his finding is that the political culture is deeply embedded in nationalistic rather than democratic frames of reference. Yonathan Shapiro's chapter follows with added support for this conclusion, showing that the Russian-socialist influence prevalent among the founding fathers resulted in a formalistic-procedural form of democracy (reminiscent of democratic centralism) taking root, rather than a genuinely liberal version attentive to minority rights and conducive to the growth of institutional structures to represent opposition to the dominant majority. Opening Part 2 on the all-important institutional legacy, Vernon Bogdanor, the preeminent British authority on electoral systems and constitutional issues (who is also familiar with Israeli politics) assesses Israel's obsolete electoral machinery and

Democracy in Israel: Proven Yet Precarious

239

finds it wanting with respect to the constitutional weakness of the prime minister; the rigidity of its extreme proportionalism with its total lack of geographic representation; and the low threshold of 1.5 percent of votes for election to the Knesset, which gives tiny parties excessive leverage in coalition bargaining whenever the major parties are evenly matched, as they have been for several years. Bogdanor appears to agree with the majority of reformers that the Knesset election threshold should be raised to 3 or 3.5 percent (note that a one-and-a-half percent threshold applied in 1996); he makes a totally convincing case for the introduction of multimember territorial constituencies to achieve accountability of individual members; and he argues strongly in favor of direct election of the prime minister. Surprisingly, while pointing out some of its faults, Bogdanor on balance approves of the extraordinarily quirky reform legislated in 1992. He considers that, "to win in the second ballot, a candidate [would] appeal to the floating vote in the center; therefore, a successful candidate [would] probably come from the moderate, rather than the extreme left or right, as is the case in France, where the presidential system has contributed to a considerable lowering of political tensions" (p. 98). This view may be based on an illusion that the center ground in politics still holds, rather as the bemused followers of the SDP and Liberals in Britain in the 1980s sought to build a constructive politics based on the center in order to replace the costly adversarial system that had prevailed for so long—possibly failing to notice that polarization, especially after Margaret Thatcher's election, had practically demolished the center ground. Before 1967, and to a lesser extent between 1967 and 1977, Israel's dominant-party system was based on the strong center. Labor excluded left and right from its coalitions, and could form adequate majorities working with allies to its immediate center-left and center-right. However, with the polarization that has occurred since Menachem Begin's election, it is doubtful whether anything remains of the center, except Shas. Since the 1980s, the basic issue of expansion or contraction, tied in with all the poignant issues of national identity, offers no middle ground: the Palestinians, first with the intifada and then with the interim peace agreements, have rendered immobilisme, as in the unity-government formula of 1984-1990, untenable. The Knesset elections may continue to give appropriate expression to the consociational factor, as in accommodating the Third Way party and making room for pluralism—which may help to mitigate the conflict. However, a race for top power between personalities on the issues of life or death may well exacerbate and sharpen the bitterness of division. Bogdanor is persuasive in arguing that a referendum may be a useful tool to deal with constitutional issues, but is less convincing that it could be beneficial as a means of resolving vital conflicts. He suggests that, "were Israel to withdraw from some or all of the territories, a referendum would be needed to isolate extremists who opposed the decision, and to show that those extremists did not enjoy the support of Israeli public opinion as a whole" (p. 103). But what if "extremists" of left or right did enjoy public support? From the perspective of polarization, withdrawal or non-withdrawal are both extremist. Once again, Bogdanor assumes the strong center, and does not address the problem of an evenly divided society: how a 51 percent majority verdict on a basic national issue such as state-expansion or contraction would or should be more authoritative if delivered by referendum than

240

Review Essays

by a general election. The question remains whether a society so evenly divided can make such basic decisions by democratic procedures, whether total immobilisme remains available as an option, or whether breakdown of democracy is the only alternative. The time of apocalyptic rather than bland politics may have arrived. Arendt Lijphart, the doyen of theorists, disagrees with Bogdanor's sanguine view of direct election of the prime minister, and he arrives, through comparative analysis, at a preference for a more modest refinement of the system to enhance the prime minister's position by introducing the "constructive vote of no confidence." This is a device (favored by the IDI in an earlier think-tank analysis, 4 but dismissed by Bogdanor as illusory) that would require the opposition to find an alternative prime minister who could command a vote of confidence before firing the one in office. Pnina Lahav gives a somewhat ambivalent evaluation of the Supreme Court's role. While the Court is a bastion of strength for the protection of individual liberty, it faces an uphill struggle in the absence of a bill of rights. It remains to be seen whether the recent elevation to the chief-justiceship of Aharon Barak, known as a liberal activist (at least west of the Green Line), may lead to a breakthrough for enrichment of democratic practice. Ira Sharkansky closes this section with an interesting evaluation of the effects of the state's deep reach into economic life, although to do justice to this topic in the light of democratic concerns really requires a whole section on economics. In Part 3, Ehud Sprinzak, Gadi Wolfsfeld, Ephraim Yuchtman-Yaar and Yohanan Peres deal with political behavior and attitudes, offering perhaps less innovative material than that found in the following section, in which Yaron Ezrahi, Charles Liebman, Arye Carmon, Sammy Smooha and Yoram Peri dwell on political culture and social cleavages. Without exception, all the chapters in this rich volume are of high quality and all contribute effectively to the call for extensive political, and especially electoral, reform. There is no complete agreement among the experts on the finer technicalities, but there is a near consensus that modifying the rigid proportionality of representation that contributes to a proliferation of parties is vital, as is the strengthening of the prime minister's hand, especially in the process of forming a government. Similarly, there is agreement that the Knesset needs strengthening in its ability to hold ministers accountable, while the members of the Knesset themselves need to be held more accountable to the people through an element of geographic constituency representation. If the absence of consensus on the basic national-territorial identity of the state and the lack of deep liberal-democratic traditions render the democratic system fragile under stress, the pervasive impingement of national security values on daily political practice inevitably and constantly subverts its precarious growth. So much is this the case that until ideological polarization became constant in the 1980s, the security complex in all its ramifications was widely regarded as the primary threat to democratic politics. Yaniv's posthumous volume draws together some searching articles focused on "the persisting, disturbing, and often enormously complex tension between Israel's struggle for security and its equally important commitment to democracy" (p. xii). An article by the late Dan Horowitz hones and brings up to date his well-known

Democracy in Israel: Proven Yet Precarious

241

"Israeli concept of national security"; this is followed by Moshe Lissak's equally well-known analysis of civilian components in Israeli national security doctrine. Both are subtle essays, in which Horowitz conveys the heightened level of tension between the military and political spheres that accompanies displacement of the interstate conflict by greater concern with the communal (that is, the JewishPalestinian conflict west of the Jordan River), while Lissak establishes the crucial interplay between civilian and military components of national security doctrine as a factor influencing the quality of civilian control of the military in accordance with democratic norms. Both authors note that one of the great risks associated with the increased play of ideological division is increased politicization of the military, as political considerations enter increasingly (and necessarily) into the balance of military judgement. One puzzling thread in Horowitz's powerful analysis is his assignment of a kind of abstract primacy to security considerations rather than to ideological polarization on territorial issues. Horowitz sees political and ideological assumptions as increasingly entering and impinging on military-security policy choices. At least to this reader, it appears as though the ideological perspective is primary, the very starting point of military-security analysis by the civilian decisionmakers, both before and after polarization. It is not that ideology played a lesser part in the pre-1977 period, which was marked by broad ideological consensus: just that, with the breakdown of consensus, the ideological perspective adopted reflects a conspicuous choice, which previously, with consensus, was achieved more quietly— almost by assumption. Yaniv's own chapter sketches the historical development of civil-military relations through many vicissitudes, from the days of the Haganah until the early 1980s, when civilian control of the military survived its severest test in the Lebanon War; and in its aftermath, as the military leadership, although much out of sympathy with the government's policies, obeyed the elected leaders. Sammy Smooha looks forward to the impact of peace on the status of Israel's Arab citizens and foresees their eventual induction into the army and their acceptance into society on a more equal basis, as the shadow of suspicion that they might threaten security as a "fifth column" is removed. Asher Arian's analysis of changes in public attitudes to the various ideological and practical issues is itself a summary of complex data, which does not therefore lend itself to concise restatement. Suffice it to say that he confirms both the underlying strength of democratic commitment and its fragility, as they are revealed in times of crisis. Mordechai Kremnitzer, in a searing critique of the permissive tendency of the Landau Commission's report on acceptable interrogation procedures, delivers a powerful case for the supremacy of human dignity and freedom over security, except in the rare and dire limiting case where greater security is necessary to achieve greater freedom. Pnina Lahav's following chapter analyzing censorship of the press shares with Kremnitzer not only the passion for liberty but also the gift of expository elegance, which all too rarely characterizes technical constitutional-legal texts. Avner Cohen presents a valuable historical sketch of Israel's nuclear armament policy, and then examines it in the light of democratic values. Cohen draws attention to the anomalous absence of public acknowledgement of the existence of nuclear weaponry, its extreme opacity, and the consequent absence of the issue from public

242

Review Essays

and indeed private debate. The paradox is that the public, lively as is its habit of questioning everything done by the government, nevertheless apparently consents to being prevented from discussing matters nuclear, such that there is little need for coercive banning of debate on the issue. The four books discussed above demand of the student a considerable prior knowledge of Israeli politics and history. Whither Israeli is an introductory treatment, which could benefit undergraduates approaching the subject with less mastery. The book as a whole may be read easily from beginning to end as an expert assessment of the capacity of Israel's domestic institutions and the prospects for their reform. Mordecai Bar-On sees the country undergoing a profound ideological transformation, in which Zionist mission is being displaced in the struggle to formulate a new Middle Eastern identity. Itzhak Galnoor, Emanuel Guttman and Ehud Sprinzak give a magisterial profile of the political system, while Majid Al-Haj and Sammy Smooha traverse the issues of both intra-Jewish and Jewish-Arab ethnic cleavage. Menahem Friedman foresees the decline of ultra-Orthodox political fortunes, while Yehuda Ben-Meir is confident that civilian control of the military is well entrenched. The book is refreshingly optimistic in a literature in which the tendency is for apocalyptic realists to vie with pessimistic idealists. The most ambitious and difficult of the works here discussed is the Kaufman/ Abed/Rothstein volume. While Kyle and Peters' Whither Israel? will help undergraduates, and postgraduates may profitably cut their teeth on the Aronoff and on the Sprinzak/Diamond and Yaniv collections, Democracy, Peace, and the IsraeliPalestinian Conflict may intimidate all but the most dedicated professionals. The book is the product of years of intensive collaborative research governed by the assumption that democracies do not wage war on each other. In this work, Palestinian, Israeli and American scholars labor together to explore two basic questions: Can Israel remain democratic while constantly at war and exercising military rule over a large disenfranchised people? And can the Palestinians construct a democratic polity, given the enormous historical, religious and cultural obstacles they confront? Robert Rothstein, the U.S. editor who participates as a theorist of international relations (rather than being an engage scholar of the Middle East, as are his coeditors) opens by drawing attention to the problems surrounding the proposition that democracies do not make war on each other, and provides guidance on the conceptual and definitional basis for coherent collaborative research. Kaufman and Abed coauthor the next chapter, in which they seek to test the relevance of the universal theory to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Alon Pinkas shows that the occupation and its influence on security values combine to undermine the civil rights of the Israelis; Kaufman follows with an investigation of the extent to which war and colonial rule erode pluralistic values in segments of Israeli society, while Charles Liebman once again portrays the tension between democratic and Jewish religious values. The analysis of the Israeli dimension is followed by several chapters exploring the possibilities for democratic growth in the Arab world and within Palestinian society. Through theoretical analysis the participants seek to synthesize the converging aspects of peace and democracy, hoping at the same time that their intellectual

Democracy in Israel: Proven Yet Precarious

243

efforts may contribute to the furtherance of both democracy and peace: a precise note that resonates for this entire body of academic work. NOAH LUCAS Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies

Notes 1. See Yoram Peri (ed.), Electoral Reform in Israel, the report of a working session of an international forum on electoral systems (Ramat Aviv: 1989), and Electoral Reform in Israel: An Abstract (Tel-Aviv: 1990). 2. Peter Medding, The Founding of Israeli Democracy, 1948-1967 (New York: 1990). Aronoff recommends consulting Modeling's earlier work on Mapai, but just as Aronoff has updated his own book, so Medding in his new work has generalized his treatment beyond Mapai, to encompass the whole political system. To adjudicate the differences between the two is perhaps otiose. In any case, Medding's new work is a model text in the derivation of middle-level political theory from institutional analysis. 3. Ian Lustick, The Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (New York: 1988). 4. See Electoral Reform Abstract, 19-25.

"Fantasy" and "Reality" in Modern Antisemitism

Albert S. Lindemann, The Jew Accused: Three Anti-Semitic Affairs (Dreyfus, Beilis, Frank, 1894-1915). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. x + 301 pp.

In Albert S. Lindemann's recent study of the Dreyfus, Beilis, and Leo Frank affairs (1894 to 1915), the definition of the topic appears at times to be as elusive as the quest to ground it in the conditions of "reality." The trials themselves and the controversies that they engendered clearly occupy the book's central narrative concerns, but lurking in the background—and periodically made explicit—is a set of arguments about modern antisemitism: what accounts for it, how it is best to be studied, and its impact on political events. Although Lindemann sprinkles the text with a number of propositions on the subject of antisemitism, he never combines them logically to form a consistent theory. Nor does he set out seriously to define the term (notwithstanding indications to the contrary in the index). For the time being, I shall rest content with the terminological gloss that he provides early on in the book: antisemitism simply as "hostility to" or "hatred of" Jews (pp. 15,16). Though Lindemann suggests on more than one occasion that the book ultimately is about antisemitism (see, for example, p. 2), I have found myself left mainly to my own devices in construing precisely what it wants to say on the subject.' One of the book's goals, Lindemann explains, is the demystification of the topic itself. Antisemitism is to be studied like any other "ism"; it is neither inexplicable nor unpredictable; it must not be placed beyond the scope of analysis but, on the contrary, brought within the sights of dispassionate study.2 So far so good; no historian can argue with the efforts of another scholar to rescue the study of antisemitism from the clutches of the theologians and the special pleaders. But Lindemann goes on to say that among the "mystifiers" he counts those who argue that antisemitism "is fundamentally irrational, a fantasy of twisted minds": Its deepest causes cannot be found in the activities of real Jews but only in baseless fantasies about them. Insofar as anti-Semitism is to be comprehended, it must be through an analysis of the Gentile mind, a dissection of the pathologies of western Christian thought that have over the ages powerfully conditioned non-Jews to hate Jews (pp. 7-8).

This approach—let's call it the "twisted minds" theory—fails as an explanation because it is "one-sided" and "simplistic." Lindemann also takes issue with what he 244

"Fantasy" and "Reality" in Modern Antisemitism

245

perceives to be a related, though more sophisticated argument. We might call it the "structural pathology" argument, since it seeks to relate antisemitism to pathological tendencies at work in the economy, society and state of late-nineteenth century Europe and America. According to this theory, people who felt themselves to be threatened by the often radical changes wrought by industrial capitalism "began to act 'hysterically,' in the process refashioning centuries-old religious fantasies about Jews into a more modern secular language" (p. 8). The main problem with this explanation, he points out, is the presumption that the "grievances of the losers" in modern economic development are "irrational." There is a pattern to what Lindemann finds objectionable in the explanations that he represents as being typical of a good deal of writing on the subject. Apart from the special pleading and mystification, what he does not like are (1) efforts to banish antisemitism to the confines of the imaginary world of the people who hold such views and (2) the a priori attribution of irrationality to antisemitic attitudes and fears. The grievances of the losers, in other words, might well reflect reasonable responses born of "real" social, economic and political encounters. The images of Jews expressed in antisemitic complaint cannot be dismissed automatically as products of a self-contained, and overly active, imagination. In considering, however, only a very narrow rendition of the view that antisemitism is best understood as a cultural artifact, Lindemann also engages in some historical reductionism of his own. He sees his task as one of unraveling "fantasy" and "reality." But it quickly becomes clear that "unraveling" here does not refer to an analysis that lays bare the interplay—and interconnectedness—of image and reality, experience and memory, act and interpretation, but rather a kind of absolute separation. "I do not belittle the role of irrational hatred," Lindemann writes, but I will also explore the degree to which hostility to Jews was related to more mundane factors. These are factors that led to tension and hostility among other groups in society, without their being qualified as irrational, fundamentally incomprehensible, or primarily the product of a powerful and autonomous ideology (pp. 8-9).

The goal, then, is to separate the imaginary and irrational from the real and not to consider how they inevitably connect. The linguistic imprecision in the sentence quoted is, I think, significant: hostility based on "mundane factors" is set off as the opposite of irrational hatred, even though one could argue that all cultural attitudes, including irrational expressions, are based in some way on a particular reading of the world around one. Irrationality is not only to be found between the padded walls of a psychiatric ward. Lindemann's readiness to separate the "real" from the "imagined" may rest on an implicit, everyman's phenomenology according to which the world presents us with facts that are apprehended directly. Judgments that derive from the experiences that the phenomenological world offers are rational; those that do not emerge from experience are irrational. This type of epistemology, while plausible in part, allows one to dismiss explorations of the imaginative, constructed nature of antisemitism as ignoring the realm of social facts; at the same time it tends to bestow upon those facts a singular explanatory power as the autonomous agents of cultural judgments.

246

Review Essays

In other words, social facts can both "create" and "explain" hostility. What this approach to knowledge plays down, or even ignores, is the proposition that the "facts" themselves may be subject to heated contestation. Experience of the world is mediated through complex webs of cultural and psychological expectation, and appeals to social context avail little if they do not start by acknowledging the contested nature of social meaning and the relationship between "facts" and their interpretation.3 It is precisely with those parts of the book devoted to "mundane reality," or the "empirical" background to specific cases, that I have the most difficulty. The chapter on the so-called "rise of the Jews," for example, serenely offers an undifferentiated mix of selected empirical data, historical interpretations and contemporary rhetoric—all presented as "measurable, ordinary" phenomena. One finds little acknowledgement that the very characterization of Jewish collective experience in the nineteenth century as some sort of "rise" emerges from a particular reading of that experience and is not identical to it. Instead, this interpretation is presented as the obvious reading of the historical record: It is clear that in the long history of the Jews, the rise of the Jews in the nineteenth century has few parallels in terms of the rapid transformation of the condition of Jews— in absolute and relative numbers, in wealth, in fame, in power, and in influence. . . . The extraordinary energy emanating from the Jewish people as a whole, and, more palpably, from countless prominent individuals of Jewish background, is one of the most important and often overlooked phenomena of modern times (p. 10). And, we are told, without the "rise of the Jews," "there would not have been modern anti-Semitism in the specific forms it assumed from country to country in the last decades of the nineteenth century." Admittedly, Lindemann adds that neither would there have been modern philosemitism ("the sense that Jews were a force for good in the modern world"). But this qualification is beside the point. To bestow the whole range of Jewish change and development in the nineteenth century with the marker "rise" is itself a (not at all obvious) construction of that group's past. To then present this reading as "empirical" background to other cultural constructions about the Jews is seriously misleading. Lindemann justifies his exploration of the theme of the rise of the Jews as a heuristic exercise, in order to combat the notion that modern antisemitism had "nothing to do" with "a Jewish reality," that it was "based entirely on Gentile fantasy" (p. 11). Monsieur X, in other words, may not have been mad to have hated or feared the Jews ("many Gentiles felt threatened by the rise of the Jews, and some had good reason to feel threatened"). But of course he may have been mad; the issue is not whether Jews as a group experienced changing standards of living or greater occupational mobility at a given place and moment in time, but whether our Monsieur X chose to view them as his mortal enemies.4 Lindemann tries to solve the problem of the relationship between phenomena and perception by claiming that antisemitism combines "fantasy" and "reality," offering up crude caricatures and stereotypes of Jews that are "constantly nourished by daily perceptions and often accurate portrayals of them" (pp. 11-12). Perceptions and portrayals now occupy the place of "reality"; the circle is complete.

"Fantasy" and "Reality" in Modern Antisemitism

247

When Lindemann does finally qualify his image of the "rise" of the Jews, he offers enough counterevidence to the overall thesis that one begins to doubt whether this "rise" ever took place.5 If it did not occur, what is the "reality" with which one is left as a factor in modern antisemitism? To begin with it is complex, differentiated and subject to multiple interpretations; in my view, "reality" can never function neatly as a causal factor. One inevitably is forced to consider discrete "readings" of the phenomenological world as both agents of change and as context, as prescriptive statements and as battleground. In all fairness, one cannot fully judge Lindemann's effort to "naturalize" the study of modern antisemitism without considering those parts of the book in which specific antisemitic affairs are contextualized. Let us take, as an example, his presentation of the Tiszaeszlar ritual murder trial of 1883. Hungary would appear to provide a perfect example of the "rise" of the Jews in the nineteenth century: extraordinary population increase; a growing urbanization and professionalization of the Jewish population; dominance in the liberal professions; and power incommensurate with the numbers of Jews in the country.6 Lindemann begins to establish the empirical background to Tiszaeszlar by offering a reasonable explanation of the Magyar-Jewish alliance. And while he demonstrates in bold strokes the ways in which Jews became implicated in the politics of Magyar hegemony over other ethnic populations, he at times also allows himself the luxury of tendentiousness. It is unnecessarily argumentative—and in fact misleading—to write, for example, that "paradoxically, Jews in central Europe, who would later suffer so much at the hands of racists, were themselves often perceived as racist defenders of Magyar and German superiority" (p. 45). What has happened in this sentence is that the author has inserted (apparently gratuitously) two adjectives, which not only have nothing to do with the preceding description of Jewish cultural politics in Hungary, but when combined, are highly inflammatory: "German" and "racist." As "racist" defenders? Of Magyar and German superiority? To touch on last things first, it is obvious enough that the adoption by Jews of the Magyar language and of Magyar political loyalties in the second half of the nineteenth century required a concomitant distancing from German claims to hegemony (and many Hungarian Jews in fact had not even been acculturated to German). The larger point is that the identification of Central European Jews with either Magyar or German power comprised an exercise in the linguistic and cultural politics of mid-century, liberal nationalism. The Jewish identification with the idea of a Magyar nation could not be undertaken in the context of racial discourse, as became painfully apparent in the interwar period. It bears repeating that Lindemann's strategy for presenting the "real" context that lies behind an antisemitic event involves a questionable mixing of empirical observation and characterizations of Jewish behavior by interested, contemporary parties. The guiding assumption in this practice appears to consist of the question of whether the Jews engaged in behavior that led, regrettably though understandably, to expressions of resentment and hostility. I will ignore for the moment the issue of whether this is an interesting question to ask. Let me point out instead that in pursuing this line of investigation, Lindemann is leading us to suspect that the Tiszaeszlar affair may have been an expression of resentment by non-Magyar ethnic elites toward the cultural politics of Hungarian Jews.

248

Review Essays

In fact, Szabolcs County, where the investigation into the murder of Eszter Solymosi and the subsequent trial took place, was an ethnically homogeneous region in which the local Jewish population spoke both Magyar and Yiddish. The suppression of non-Magyar ethnic groups had no bearing on local culture. What is more interesting about this particular line of explanation is that I know of no modern ritual murder trial that occurred in those parts of Hungary in which there was a nonMagyar majority, such as Slovakia or Croatia, and in which Jewish loyalties were often the object of intense criticism. In any event Lindemann seems at times to have rendered the contextual discussion largely "irrelevant," since the dominant picture that results is one of tolerance, acceptance, and success, rather than tension and imminent danger: These aspects of the Hungarian scene make it initially puzzling that Hungary should be the site of a major anti-Semitic affair, one involving a charge of ritual murder at that. But such apparent incongruities arc to be found in each of the Three Affairs (p. 46).

Lindemann next considers the role that the Russian pogroms of 1881 and the immigration to Hungary of Jews from Galicia might have played in the controversy surrounding Tiszaeszlar. Although the two "events" (Russian pogrom and Galician emigration) were not directly related, they become so in his narrative. He claims that Jews were buying up "at a very rapid rate, land previously held by the gentry and aristocracy" but offers no statistics or evidence (not even a source). He portrays a situation in which "Ostjuden" "threatened to pour into the country," an assessment that ultimately is based on the rhetoric of petitioners to parliament from Hungary's northern counties. In this crucial contextual reconstruction, Lindemann makes no distinction between "facts" on the ground and the rhetorical statements of interested parties at the time. It is not that he demonstrates skepticism about the ability of the historian to get to the bottom of the matter—he never acknowledges the problem, and instead presents the verbal images of "invasion" as though they represent a "neutral" reflection of a social situation. I am not asking that he discount context or give up on the quest of relating rhetoric to experience. What I would like to see is some appreciation for the ways in which constructed realities color and even determine experience. He could have produced a statistical survey of Galician Jewish immigration to Hungary to juxtapose with contemporary debates about the issue. In his determination to discount the imaginative, constructed nature of antisemitism, however, he has managed to collapse all distinctions, blithely accepting engaged interpretations of the present as factual statements of that situation. Finally, while the contextual work in this section remains on the whole unconvincing, the recapitulation of the trial and police investigations works well as historical narrative. Still, it is not clear what Lindemann thinks needs to be explained concerning the case; he does not set forth any questions. Ultimately the relationship between the affair itself and the contextual preliminaries is obscure. Lindemann's goal in the end to assess the relative importance of antisemitism as a causal factor in the Dreyfus, Bcilis, and Frank cases is both hindered and realized according to predetermined lines. It is met by acknowledging a role for antisemitism that is much more limited than that which has emerged from conventional under-

"Fantasy" and "Reality" in Modern Antisemitism

249

standings of the affairs. On the one hand, Jews found that they had as many friends as they had enemies in the decades immediately preceding the First World War. On the other hand, the arrest and conviction of at least some of the accused (Dreyfus and Frank, according to Lindemann) could be explained independent of "antiSemitic ideology [and] prejudice against Jews" (p. 276). But this is a straightjacketed answer, hemmed in by limitations imposed a priori on the original question. One concludes that the role of antisemitism in these affairs is limited because the question asks whether other factors could have accounted for the targeting of these specific individuals for arrest. The narrowness of the question itself is curious given the fact that Lindemann had taken pains in the introduction to explain that what makes these events "affairs" is that they transcended the realm of "mere" criminal trial proceedings to become the focus of intense debates on the direction of political culture, the nature of collective identity, and the position of Jews in the larger society. Why, then, limit the question of antisemitism to a narrowly causal one involving what essentially are the preliminaries of the cases? Why, indeed. The book is a puzzle: admirable in many respects, but lacking in precisely that arena in which it was to make its most important contribution—method. HILLEL J. KIEVAL University of Washington

Notes 1. He writes, for example: "I am most of all concerned to explore the elusive qualities of modern anti-Semitism and to suggest some revisions of both popular and scholarly beliefs about it" (p. 2). 2. Lindemann characterizes his own approach in this vein, as "a calm, balanced, and unflinching effort to understand anti-Semitism and anti-Semites" (p. 7). 3. I do not disagree in principle with the statement that "developments in the material world have a decisive impact on the ways. . . images and myths are refashioned and thus on the nature of anti-Semitism" (p. 9). But 1 would challenge certain inferences that appear to be drawn in Lindemann's study: for example, that a material or social fact creates a single result or calls for a single interpretation; or that if one can locate a Jewish behavior that corresponds in some way to an anti-Jewish attitude, one has thereby explained that attitude. 4. While Lindemann debunks the claims of the racial antisemites that theirs was a "scientific" reading of the world based on biological knowledge, he nevertheless implicates himself in the implicit value system of antisemitism when he writes: But many Gentiles felt threatened by the rise of the Jews, and some had good reason to feel threatened, for Jews were in truth encroaching on areas that had previously been exclusively Gentile, and Jews were helping to make life as those Gentiles had traditionally experienced it difficult or impossible (pp. 11-12). In this sentence he is trading rhetoric for fact based on the presumption of a "zero-sum" situation: one in which there cannot be gain for one party without corresponding loss for another. But this, among other assumptions, is never tested; there are at least two other possibilities that are not considered: (1) that Jews competed mainly among themselves, rather than with outsiders, for a share of the economic pie; (2) that the white-collar jobs and professions into which they moved were new to the economy of the cities, hence they were not displacing former occupants. The notion that "many Gentiles felt threatened by the rise of the Jews" also suggests that those who produced or applied antisemitic understandings were themselves the "victims" of

250

Review Essays

these economic developments. Finally, it presumes that one is more likely to discover antisemitism in areas of increased Jewish wealth and power than in cases of Jewish "decline" or impoverishment. Does the historical record bear this out? If it docs not, what does one make of the explanatory value of the whole notion of a Jewish "rise"? 5. For example, he notes that It [the rise of the Jews] had many ambiguous or contradictory aspects, also in general ways paralleling trends in modern history. One such aspect was that while a significant minority of Jews became richer, more educated, and more powerful, a significant minority became poorer, more vulnerable, and more desperate. To an important degree, the astonishing rate of Jewish population growth underlay both the rise of the Jews and their pauperization—and even the special extremes of richness and poverty, power and powerlessness. The existing structures of state and society in Europe, especially in eastern Europe, where the population increase was the most marked, were unable to absorb these new Jewish multitudes, their energies, hopes and ambitions. But at the same time, the two-sided fortune was typical of the age, when populations almost everywhere began to mushroom. Non-Jews also experienced unprecedented wealth and disastrous pauperization. In their case, too, existing structures were simply overwhelmed. The new age posed unprecedented problems for almost all members of society (pp. 13-14). 6. Interestingly, Lindemann uses France as the point of contrast for nearly all of these measurements. France and Hungary, then, stand virtually as diametrical oppositcs in terms of Jewish power and influence in the second half of the nineteenth century; yet each country produces a major anti-Jewish affair.

Imaginary Jews and Jewish Imagination Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew. Trans, by Kevin O'Neill and David Suchoff. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. 201 pp.

Virtually all discussion of the Jewish condition among postwar French intellectuals has, at least implicitly, engaged Sartre's Reflexions sur la question juive. This slim, vigorous essay of 1944, with its influential contention that "the Jew" is constituted as an "Other" by the "Look," or "Gaze" of the antisemite, resonated in the aftermath of the Nazi pursuit of European Jewry. Sartre, whose ontology postulated conflict to be the original meaning of interhuman relations, scrutinized antisemitic consciousness with trenchancy and acclaimed the "authentic" Jew who, when faced with the antisemite's Look, refused to flee himself in bad faith. There was a potent reproach to Sartre, and he later acknowledged its force: his portrait precluded Jewish self-constitution. An external factor, the antisemite's consciousness defined Jewry, not any lived Jewish culture or relation to Jewish history. Consequently, both Jewish authenticity and particularity appeared contentless. In The Imaginary Jew, written some three and a half decades after Sartre's effort, the French Jewish critic Alain Finkielkraut asks what content in, what dimension of his own life makes him a Jew. "The word Jew," he resolves, "is no longer a mirror in which I seek my self-portrait, but where I look for everything I'm not, everything I'll never be able to glimpse by taking myself as a point of reference" (p. 179). The son of Polish immigrants to France, Finkielkraut was a youthful radical in the 1960s. He gradually became disconcerted by left-wing insensitivity to Jewish concerns and by attacks on Israel. He did not turn to Zionism; instead he was attracted to the neo-Bundist orientation of the Cercle Gaston Cremieux in Paris. Eventually he found its diaspora nationalism unsatisfying, and himself in a quandary. He explains that Imaginary Jew, which first appeared in French in 1980 and has now been translated into English, was conceived when he asked "how Judaism, that land where I believed I was born, came to be something I lacked" (p. 173). His book is a self-accounting that, in retrospect, can be seen as a step toward the radically assimilationist principles of his much-discussed La Defaite de la pensee of 1987. This anti-multiculturalist tract is structured ultimately by an extreme, indeed simplistic, opposition of Group Culture to its victim, The Individual. The former is presented as all-suffocating, the latter is conceived abstractly: "It was at the expense of his culture that the European individual conquered, one by one, all his freedoms [ses libertes] "1 Yet Finkielkraut's passage from imaginary Jew to French assimilationist was— and remains—complicated, uneasy, tortuously incomplete. Perhaps this is because 251

252

Review Essays

it was a passage, not a flight, and seems to have been tempered (restrained?) by Emmanuel Levinas, the Lithuanian-born French Jewish philosopher. Levinas argued, in opposition to Sartre, that ethics is prior to ontology, and that one's relation to Others is, first of all, one of responsibility, not conflict. So in L'Avenir d'une negation (1982), Finkielkraut indicted Holocaust revisionism; in Le Reprobation d'Israe'l (1983), he pilloried French journalists who pilloried Israel dishonestly during the Lebanon War (without championing the war himself); in the press and in La Memoirs vaine (1989) he deployed his critical tools against Klaus Barbie's "radical" lawyers, who exploited the trial of their Nazi client to promote a perverse Third Worldism. A Jewish Other always seems to be with Finkielkraut—but also other Others. Responsibility, in Levinas' philosophy, is radical. It is responsibility for the Other who is "the stranger or sojourner"; it is the responsibility for a hostage "which can be carried to the point of being substituted for the other person. . . ."2 Possibly it is with such claims in mind that Finkielkraut became especially vocal about the destruction of Yugoslavia, championing Croatia in Comment peut-on etre croatel (1992) with some arguments in defense of small peoples oddly reminiscent of Zionism. Imaginary Jew is a book of troubling and occasionally perspicacious insight. It touches the raw, exposed nerves of a modern, secular Jew, and then presses hard. These are, of course, Finkielkraut's nerves as he struggles with an Other who turns out repeatedly to be himself, but whom he cannot pin down. So "Jew" is what he is not, by his own account, in the mirror, but the absence of "Jew" is powerfully present to him. And "Jew" must be absent because of Finkielkraut's critique of himself for bad faith—it is more a self-condemnation—both as a New Leftist and as a Jew. The New Left, as he presents it, indulged in "armchair journeys," assuming one pseudo-identity after another. First Frantz Fanon, after that Che, next Ho, then Malcolm X. And so on. The '68ers were, so to speak, imaginary revolutionaries in that their anti-imperial warfare was conducted safely (most of the time) in Paris or in other Western capitals. Only in the mind was revolutionism acted out; only the exception went to Third World jungles and suffered consequences.3 The post-Holocaust Jew is a similar creature. "The Judaism I had received," writes Finkielkraut, was the most beautiful present a post-genocide child could imagine. I inherited a suffering to which I had not been subjected, for without having to endure oppressions, the identity of the victim was mine, I could savor an exceptional destiny while remaining completely at ease. Without exposure to real dangers, I had heroic stature (p. 7, translation slightly amended).

He was an "imaginary Jew," thanks to "history" and to a protective mother. Members of the "brotherhood of Portnoys," Finkielkraut contends, in a strikingly sexist formulation, are easily recognized—egocentric and infantile, the sons of Jewish mothers. Yet this is a postmodern Portnoy, not because feminism has taught Finkielkraut that Jewish daughters also struggle with many of his concerns, but because "Portnoy cannot be reduced to the sum of his complaints" (p. 112). One would, I suppose, prefer never to be reduced at all. In any event, Fin-

Imaginary Jews and Jewish Imagination

253

kielkraut's issue is not reduction but absence. It reminds one of the notion of negatite (a "concrete nothing") in Being and Nothingness. Imagine that a fellow— let's call him Alain—comes to a cafe in Montparnasse. He expects to meet an old friend—let's call the latter Moishe. Alain enters and the cafe presents itself in its fullness: odors of tobacco and coffee in the air, people chattering at tables, waiters scurrying about, a maitre d' scowling over it all. Moishe is not present—though he is there as an absence, as a negatite brought in by Alain, who looks for him. Finkielkraut's Jewishness is like Moishe in the cafe. He is not to be found, but he is there nonetheless, even though Finkielkraut refuses to fake an incarnation. The theme returns: "What makes me a Jew is the acute consciousness of a lack, of a continuous absence: my exile from a civilization which, for 'my own good,' my parents didn't want me to keep in trust" (p. 114). This civilization, this negatite, is murdered Moishe; it is slain Yidishkeyt. The Holocaust makes the Ashkenazic Finkielkraut "a Jew without substance, a Luftmensch" (p. 38). As Being and Nothingness announced that Man, a being who one day must die and who has no transcendental meaning, is a "useless passion," so Finkielkraut's "memory" is declared by him to be "the useless passion a vanished civilization stirs in me" (p. 39). Now there is this important difference between Sartre's categories and Finkielkraut's contentions. The former aim to tease out philosophically the structure of consciousness and existence, and for Sartre time is a horizon for the future. The past alone marks the horizon of imagination in Finkielkraut's book. For Sartre, the negatite of Moishe in the cafe is ontological. For Finkielkraut, Moishe is at best a ghostly presence, a negatite because gassed in a historical event called Auschwitz: "I call that part of myself Jewish that remains at odds with life in its time. . ." (p. 38). Certainly in Finkielkraut's time. And it is a matter of place too. Not only is Eastern and Central European Jewish life gone, it is evident, from the entirety of his book, that France offers Finkielkraut no possibility for a substantive Jewish future. This is not because of France's (Republican) tradition of cultural absorption, for Finkielkraut asserts that Jews, along with the rest of the French, are "abandoning the majoritarian model that hails from the days of assimilation. Nation, Republic— these words have the scent of the past" (p. 85). Might a decline in French majoritarianism enhance pluralism and tolerance, and thereby nourish a Jewish subculture? "No," it would seem, is—and must be—Finkielkraut's answer, but for postmodern and not specifically Jewish reasons. On the one hand, "society's paradigms are multiple, shifting and contradictory" (p. 89); on the other, life in his "time" is paradoxical: "People holding quite different beliefs act in an increasingly identical fashion." Just when assimilationism is rejected "we're helpless to resist the standardization of the self" (p.84). Postmodern Jew wrestles with postmodern man, perhaps in the same skin, perhaps getting under each Other's skin: A Jew within, a man without: This, you will recall, was the slogan of the first assimilation. Without admitting it to ourselves, we practice the same principle in reverse: we're Jews without, for our friends, for the public, for the outside world, while within, in the intimacy of our daily lives, we're just like everybody else, followers of the same styles and prey to the same fascinations, without any cultural specificity all our own (p. 96).

254

Review Essays

Finkielkraut is describing himself, the intellectual activist who is Jewishly empty, yet a public scourge of antisemitism and anti-Zionism (and culturally French, though the above passage does not say it). This is a distinctly recognizable figure in recent years, the Western Jew who lacks the cultural substructure once provided by Yiddish, who cannot be a religious believer, yet who is impelled to Jewish assertiveness (and who is reminiscent of Sartre's contentless though authentic Jew). The assertiveness, most frequently, has been tied to the Jewish state. Israel's successes, especially in 1967, gave diaspora Jewry a new fortitude, notes Finkielkraut, the strength to be Jews outside. But Israel's role was more complicated, for it also stepped into the empty space within: "For the Diaspora, this far away nation is like an inner kingdom, providing its subjects of anxiety, pride and conversation. A Diaspora of dreams" (p. 117). Does Israel function for many diaspora Jews as the Holocaust once functioned for Finkielkraut? Writing in the Begin era, he avows that, To be a hero by proxy, to ritualize the present, to need the insecurity of Israel to remain Jewish: each of these things explains why many in the Diaspora confusedly punish themselves through an unqualified solidarity with every decision that Jerusalem takes (p. 132).

Is "Israel" then "imaginary"? Finkielkraut might have quoted Theodor Adorno who, linking Alban Berg's imagination to its musical expression, told the composer: You are the foreign minister of the land of your dreams. Diaspora Jewry, or at least many vocal diaspora Jews, have imagined and presented themselves as emissaries of an Israel in which they will never live—even if they identify as Zionists—yet which is largely a Jewish state of their dreams, a realm of besieged perfection. It is not a land of real lives, real politics, real triumphs, sorrows, tragedies. Not to mention errors and flaws—a foreign minister out in the world does not dwell on the blemishes of his own country. Yet a real foreign minister, after sallying abroad, does return home, where he lives amid and within the cultures that grow there, speaking their tongue—speaking his mind with his language. This is hardly the case for imaginary foreign ministers whose ardent defense of the Jewish state abroad composes the primary stuff of their Jewish life. They are at best nurtured culturally by Israel from afar, while being unable to generate Jewish substance in the diaspora. For Finkielkraut, our age is both post-Zionist and postassimilationist, so the notion of Israel's "centrality" for diaspora Jewry is problematic: Jew designates the vacant space of a past that has become a tabula rasa. That's why we must free Israel of its charge. Not contest its legitimacy, of course, but refuse the position of monopoly. Our Jewishness is so weak that the obsession with Israel imprisons us: it shapes our viewpoint and dictates our past. We are burdened by a forged memory that is nothing more than the Israeli present in disguise (pp. 145-146).

Thus, Zionism provides no answer for Finkielkraut. His treatment of it is multidimensional but ambivalent; his empty Jewish self seems torn by Zionism in many directions. Finkielkraut knows that there has been more than one Zionism, and he differentiates the "lofty ideal of a Jewish state" from "the willing agreement to become a world ghetto" (p. 149). He asserts—nobody can honestly declare him wrong—that Zionism "has conquered its opponents" within Jewry, but "inertia has

Imaginary Jews and Jewish Imagination

255

conquered Zionism" (p. 121). And his words thrust rapier-like at left-wing antiZionism, exposing, then shredding, the mauvaise foi that blames every act of a Palestinian on an Israeli. Yet he contends that the existence of the Jewish state, because threatened since birth, doesn't solve the Jewish question; rather, it is "the central site where Jewish existence continues to be a problem" (p. 129). This is, frankly, a somewhat tired idea with origins in diaspora nationalism, and the ripostes are obvious if just as tiring: statehood and an army make Israel not the most vulnerable site of Jewish life, but the most dangerous place to lift a hand against a Jew; other settings, in the Eastern or Central European diasporas, for instance, are not problematic simply because their Jewish populations were annihilated; peace between Israel and the Arabs would make claims like Finkielkraut's irrelevant; and finally, the entire argument of Finkielkraut's book demonstrates that in terms of positive Jewish life, the diaspora—certainly his own France—remains a "central site where Jewish existence continues to be a problem." So when Finkielkraut readily admits that "the centrality of Israel has had beneficial and liberating effects" on Jewish life, only to warn that "if we aren't careful of its perverse results, our own history will gradually be lost" (p. 146), one wonders: who is the "we" of "our own history"? If he means to argue against crude Zionist teleology, against the notion that all dimensions of diaspora life were, for two thousand years, nothing save deformed preludes to May 1948, then none but a blind ideologue could disagree. Yet there is no reason to hope, on the basis of Imaginary Jew, that a diaspora "freed" of Israel's centrality would provide much that is culturally worthy. Of course this should not matter much for Finkielkraut by the time he becomes the author of La Defaite de la pensee, with its opposition of group culture to an esperanto citizen, with its claim, articulated in vigorous French, that individuals obtain rights only at the expense of "their culture." After all, if this is so, why care about the future of Jewish culture? In any event, a future Jewish culture must be linked to the Jewish past and Imaginary Jew isn't a work of history; it is about Finkielkraut's present (in 1980), a present whose link to the past is deeply problematic. This, indeed, is why he found himself in bad faith: he was an "imaginary Jew" because he "inherited" suffering, because he was a "victim" with an "exceptional destiny" and "heroic stature" while never, himself, having been endangered. Still, unless we accept Sartre's assertion that the Jew is constituted by the Look of the Other, must we not recognize that all forms of self-identification—including that which allows someone to speak of "our" history—require acts of imagination? And then, given Finkielkraut's mode of thinking, must we not conclude that the imaginary Jew is guilty not of false consciousness but rather of false imagination? Now I must admit that I am not at all sure what it means to have a false imagination. Is Mitchell Cohen, born in 1952 and now living in New York City, an imaginary Jew if he, though thoroughly secular, ascribes liberating value to the historical imagination that, annually at Passover in the company of a community, bids each Jew to regard himself personally as having been a slave in Egypt? Such an act of imagination is culture-constituting; and the constitution of culture is always transindividual. Do I obtain my "freedoms" as an individual by "liberating" myself

256

Review Essays

from such acts? Finkielkraut, in bad faith, may have once imagined himself a Holocaust victim, yet is it wrongheaded if a Jewish imagination says: save for contingencies of time and place, 1 too would have been in Auschwitz? Indeed, such an act of imagination seems to drive on Finkielkraut despite himself. My point is that there is, in principle, nothing objectionable about this. Can one conceive of a post-Holocaust Jew who wrestles with Jewish identity but who doesn't imagine its consequences half a century ago? Finkielkraut might well protest: "That's not quite what I mean. Look at the abuses of the Holocaust, psychologically, politically, indeed culturally, by many Jews today—especially by many who are active publicly as Jews." He would be right to point this out, for it is a real and obnoxious phenomenon. But the substantive challenge is to fashion a nuanced, sensitive, appropriate differentiation between the legitimate use and the abuse of the Holocaust, in both politics and Jewish cultural life. That hard work is untouched in Imaginary Jew. There is a parallel problem when Finkielkraut speaks of the possibly "perverse results" of Israel's "centrality" in Jewish life. Once again, he points but does not inquire: What exactly should centrality be? Does it always mean the same thing? The real problem, it seems to me, is not centrality but rather reified centrality, one that sees diaspora Jews solely as tools to be deployed on behalf of the Jewish state. In this context, it might be well to distinguish the mere fact of centrality from estimable centrality. We must, at least in principle, allow the possibility that the dominant values of Israelis could become (to take an extreme example) those of a Baruch Goldstein. Or they may simply mimic the worst in Western materialism. If so, there is little reason why Israel should be central to diaspora lives. The perversity of centrality, depends, in the final analysis, on what centrality means and what type of Israel—but no less what type of diaspora—we are talking about. Moreover, the very notion of centrality must be redefined in complex ways: Israel is not singular, nor is the diaspora. It seems to me, however, that no redefinition of Israeli centrality can resolve the predicament of Finkielkraut's diaspora. The very existence of Israel as a living, developing, Hebrew-speaking national society establishes conditions for a vibrant, open, modern Jewish culture—even more so with an Arab-Israeli peace. True, the opposite is also possible; a Jewish state can devolve into a ghetto with an army. In either event, if Alain enters a Tel-Aviv cafe, Moishe will not be there as a negatite; Moshe will be present in the flesh. For Finkielkraut has mis-imagined Moishe; he has mis-imagined what isn't there for him in Paris. The Jewish history Finkielkraut embraces, that of secular Yidishkeyt, was only a moment, albeit culturally resplendent, in Jewish annals. He speaks of it as if it were the entirety of Jewish history. Consequently, he mistakes the crisis of today's secular diaspora Jew for diaspora Judaism in general. Two hundred years ago, Yiddish-speaking secular Moishes, not to mention Alains, were scarce in Poland or Russia. Jewish civilization there rested, first and foremost, on religious community; its secular flowering was relatively brief and then it was ripped out. Finkielkraut's nostalgic crisis is only that of a secular Jewish intellectual, his negatites are solely secular Jews, for "Jew" still has content for the religious diaspora

Imaginary Jews and Jewish Imagination

257

Jew. The latter finds no absence in the mirror as long as he believes, as long as theology speaks to him. It doesn't speak to Finkielkraut, a modern secular man. So his loss, finally, is not just Yidishkeyt; his losses are those brought by modernity (and by now, I suppose, by "postmodernity")—which are by no means exclusively Jewish. At their center is this: you need meaning but you cannot believe.4 One option might be the secular appropriation of Emmanuel Levinas, for whom intellectual engagement with classical Jewish texts provides both Jewish substance and self-constitution, pace Sartre. It is difficult to imagine Finkielkraut satisfied by this, certainly not the Finkielkraut of La Defaite de la pensee, since Levinas seeks out Jewish universalism in Jewish particularism, especially in universalist imperatives he finds in the Torah. Israel provides another possibility, for Israelis live in and have the conditions for a secular Jewish culture. Yet living in Israel, like becoming religious, is clearly no option for Finkielkraut. Nor, finally, is re-inventing an assassinated civilization, which simply is not possible. (It is worth noting, however, that Israeli culture was shaped profoundly by Finkielkraut's passion—the vanished world of East European Jewry. Of course, it is not the same as that culture; but had it not been extinguished, East European Jewish culture, at the turn of the millennium, would have become something other than it was a century before.) But what, then, have we? If religion or its secular appropriation are ruled out; if an attractive and secular diaspora culture is deemed improbable and in any event likely to be unsatisfying; if Zionism provides no answers but more problems; what, then, is left? Perhaps the compulsion to write a book like Imaginary Jew. Or, I imagine, a rather lonely act, or ongoing lonely acts, of existential identification as a Jew, and a willingness to live out a modern form—or postmodern forms—of Jewish ambiguity. Yet one senses that this too would provide just another impasse for Finkielkraut. For all his guises in two decades—young radical, diaspora nationalist, anti-multicultural liberal—this is a man who finds ambivalence intolerable; indeed, it is evident in his restless, driven prose style—a style that masks a stuttering imagination. He recoils before ambiguity and enigma in Jewish modernity, which is to say that he resists Jewish modernity itself. But he cannot escape it, and at least in Imaginary Jew he seems to know that he cannot. This is what troubles him, I suspect, at the same time as it supplies the strained force of his book. MITCHELL COHEN Baruch College The Graduate School, City University of New York

Notes 1. Alain Finkielkraut, La Defaite de la pensee (Paris: 1987), 143. 2. Emmanuel Levinas, "Ethics as First Philosophy," in The Levinas Reader, ed. S. Hand (Oxford: 1989), 84. 3. This is, of course, something of a caricature. But Finkielkraut, notably, is just as contemptuous of those '68ers who, in the 1970s, transformed themselves into indignant anticommunists, the so-called "New Philosophers," for examples. "Resistance to the gulag,

258

Review Essays

today's buzzword," he writes in Imaginary Jew, "means just about the opposite of what the term revolution meant but the attraction is the same" (p. 22). 4. That I pose the question of meaning and belief here implies no identification with the so-called "Politics of Meaning" of Tikkun magazine in the United States, which threatens to make the word "meaning" meaningless.

American Antisemitism, Black/Jewish Relations: A Matter of Perspective

Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. xxviii + 369 pp. Frederic Cople Jaher, A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness: The Origins and Rise of Anti-Semitism in America. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1994. viii + 339 pp. Murray Friedman, What Went Wrong? The Creation and Collapse of the BlackJewish Alliance. New York: The Free Press, 1995. vi + 423 pp. "We shall never fully understand anti-Semitism."1 Thus begins historian David Berger's lucid introduction to his edited collection of essays on the topic.2 Whether or not one concurs with this apodictic declaration, the unprecedented proliferation of scholarly and popular works on this subject over the last half century, spurred in large measure by the Holocaust and emanating from academic, journalistic and institutional sources, reflects the desire to do just that: "to fully understand antiSemitism"—and not only Nazism, but all the diverse anti-Jewish manifestations spanning two millennia. The rise of a significant body of historical scholarship on specifically American antisemitism during these last four decades is also a noteworthy development, not least as a reflection of Jews' evolving perceptions of America and their revised assessments of historic American receptivity to them. Despite the presence of antiJewish ideas and activities in America from colonial days to contemporary times and of equally vigorous Jewish protests against public slights to Jewish reputation, beliefs and equality—varying in style from the vitriolic bombast of Isaac M. Wise to the political finesse of Louis Marshall—American Jews avoided writing reflective, searching studies about American antisemitic tendencies prior to the 1950s. Indeed, despite the nativism and anti-immigrant sentiments and persistent Protestant triumphalism at the turn of the century, as well as the socioeconomic prejudices, educational quotas and racist excrescences between the two world wars, most American Jews tended to construe the United States as a hospitable land, however imperfect. Perhaps, as some have suggested, this disinclination to write about American antisemitism was due to Jewish insecurity and the enduring desire of Jews to fit into the melting pot, or to the Jewish perception that American antisemitism was qualitatively different from the malevolent brutality of Europe. Or perhaps this reticence can be attributed to the fact that a critical historiographical tradition among Ameri259

260

Review Essays

can Jewry, free from the filiopietism that had long characterized it, had yet to be born. Whatever the reasons, Jews did not write histories of American antisemitism: it was almost as if the phrase constituted an oxymoron, or at least a flat contradiction to American Jewish self-understanding. Viewed from this perspective, the upsurge in interest in this subject is notable. But even more striking is the broad range of interpretation of American antisemitism, from the earliest analyses suggesting its marginality in American culture to the more recent evaluations of its pervasiveness in all sectors of American society. The first serious academic analyses of the phenomenon, by Americanists Oscar Handlin and Richard Hofstadter in the 1950s, judged antisemitism to be but a temporary social expression linked both to economic stress at the end of the nineteenth century and (by Hofstadter in particular) to agrarian populism.3 John Higham's trenchant research from the late 1950s through the 1970s asserted that the scapegoating of Jews revealed a deep-seated nativism and socioeconomic discontent during the last third of the nineteenth century into the first decades of the twentieth; but he too was loath to view American antisemitism as an overriding issue in the larger context of American Jewish history. By the 1970s and into the 1980s, however, works by Morris Schappes, Naomi Cohen, Michael Dobkowski and Leonard Dinnerstein, among others—introducing data not previously considered as well as reinterpreting known data—averred that antisemitism was not an aberrant phenomenon restricted in time and scope to particular periods of socioeconomic disaffection in American history but was far more pervasive in America than heretofore imagined. Such disparate historical assessments have led one scholar to propose the need for a more centrist approach to the understanding of American antisemitism, and have caused him and others to favor ongoing "ambivalence" as the defining interpretive metaphor of the phenomenon.4 Both Frederic C. Jaher's A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness: The Origins and Rise of Anti-Semitism in America and Leonard Dinnerstein's Antisemitism in America espouse the maximalist position on American antisemitism. Originally collaborators intent on coauthoring one text on the topic, the two men have written books fundamentally different in historical scope. Whereas Dinnerstein examines antisemitism from the colonial era to the 1990s, Jaher begins with an extensive two-chapter analysis of pagan and Christian antisemitism that constitutes almost one third of the book before taking up the story of American antisemitism from the colonial period to the end of the Civil War. Despite the obvious contrasts, however, the two books share technical and substantive similarities. Both are about 250 pages in length accompanied by approximately seventy-five pages of notes. Both are primarily historical syntheses rather than works of archival research, although select chapters in each show control of much primary material. The two authors concur on assessments of the nature and degree of antisemitism in given periods, especially with respect to the colonial era. And, most significantly, they share the overarching thesis that historic Christian antisemitism bears ultimate responsibility for American antisemitism. Problematic in both books, this thesis is integrated differently in their respective histories. Jaher's protracted investigation of historical antisemitism concludes that there is a

American Antisemitism, Black/Jewish Relations: A Matter of Perspective

261

global continuity in the heritage of hate between European Christian and American antisemitism, transported as it was by the immigrants to the New World. In order to understand the latter, he insists, one must perforce confront the former. Revealing conceptual sophistication and methodological rigor, Jaher's overview of Western antisemitism raises potent historiographical questions that it tries to address. His prose is taut and precise, and he summarizes complex material clearly and succinctly (though these chapters read somewhat like the survey section of a dissertation). His main contention is that Christian animosity is the preeminent source and cause of antisemitism, that Christology's anti-Judaism and anti-Jewishness exerted primary influence in the hostility toward the Jews "even in an era when religious anti-Semitism was supposedly declining," and that if America is a Christian country, which he assumes a priori, then its antisemitism must derive from Christian doctrine and its difference from European antisemitism must be one of degree, not of substance (p. 19). It is this last point—initially raised logically, not empirically— that his subsequent three chapters on American antisemitism attempt to document historically. The first of his three American chapters depicts the attitudes of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Americans to Jews, which Jaher characterizes as ambivalent. To be sure, Jaher notes, Jews in America enjoyed de facto and de jure economic and civic equality and religious rights, and more legal and political privileges than their correligionists across the ocean. Indeed, American Catholics and dissenters fared considerably less well than did the Jews. At the same time, however, he observes that Jews were subject to verbal taunts and theological harassment, especially following the religious revival of the first half of the eighteenth century known as the "Great Awakening," and that they found themselves accused of being Christ-killers and thieves, with their Judaism disparaged as no longer effective in the divine scheme. Given this material, Jaher declares that "anti-Semitism was conspicuous in eighteenth century America" (p. 109). In his evaluation of the "progress and problems of the young Republic" during the period between 1780 and 1840, Jaher devotes ten pages to illustrate Jewish social, economic and political advances: Jews served in the armed forces; entered the Ivy Leagues; gained social respectability; and were limned positively in American belles lettres. But he then dedicates thirty-nine pages to the difficult problems Jews faced in politics, law and religion, vividly highlighting the various slurs cast on their character in religious sermons and texts, in secular textbooks like the everpopular McGuffey Readers, and in such popular cultural outlets as journalism, folklore, novels and plays. The final chapter, "Mid-Century Crisis," investigates antebellum American antisemitism and covers the late 1830s to the end of the Civil War. Jaher argues that the American Jewish position worsened considerably at this time, that in this interval new stereotypes of the Jews as parvenus, social climbers, and seekers of opulence emerged; in fact, he declares that "modern American anti-Semitism" was forged "in the crucible of sectional conflict"—a patently unsubstantiable hyperbole, given that nasty social discrimination, racism targeting Jews and charges of a Jewish communist conspiracy appear only decades later. As in his previous chapter, Jaher briefly

262

Review Essays

points to areas of civic, political, economic and educational progress for the Jews, but then pays much more attention to the horribly antisemitic public images of Jews present in all sectors of American society. For example, he outlines the antisemitic tendencies of the Christian-dominated abolitionist movement and adduces several egregious examples of antisemitism that were experienced, both individually and collectively, by northern and southern Jews during the Civil War—a time when "desultory prejudice became habitual" (p. 196). Thinking he has proven his thesis about widespread Christian antisemitism in America, Jaher ends his book with an astounding, historically simplistic syllogism: "Christianity has a powerful anti-Semitic impulse, America is a Christian country, and America is anti-Semitic" (p. 249). But has he really demonstrated his case? Hardly. That Christianity bears responsibility for certain manifestations of American antisemitism, that there existed general American anti-Jewish feelings and writings in the time periods Jaher considers, is indisputable. But Jaher does not sustain his claim that Christianity is at the root of all American antisemitism, nor should the impression one gets of the overwhelming bleakness and enormity of American antisemitism be accepted at face value. For not all evidence of what Jaher takes to be antisemitism can be traced to Christianity, especially given the secular sources that he cites. More important, by affirming a straight-line causal nexus between European Christian and American antisemitism and by seeking to maximize the account of American hostility to Jews, Jaher has let his historical perspective on Christian responsibility for Jew-hatred skew his interpretation of American social reality. Much of the material is presented almost like a laundry list of anti-Jewish jibes and manifestations, which fails to properly contextualize the sources and reflect on what they actually mean. First, Jaher does not adequately consider the distinction between image and reality. If American Catholics and blacks were far more negatively cast and practically disadvantaged than Jews, and if, as he himself asserts, European Jews suffered more, then what meaning does the negative imagery of Jews have? Indeed, one might ask Jaher whether his criticism of other historians for underestimating antisemitism is reasonable, and whether his own blanket conclusion about the conspicuous nature of American antisemitism in the eighteenth century is the most appropriate generalization to make, given his account that Jews had acquired respectability and nearly total economic and religious freedom, experienced no particular difficulties in law courts by 1700 (p. 103) and enjoyed great political power and prestige by the Revolution (p. 104). Second, because Jaher never clearly defines antisemitism, there is a distinct lack of conceptual clarity when he adopts the term to label particular phenomena. This results in the wrongful categorizing of some situations in which Jews were adversely affected as antisemitic, as well as the use of the term in vague, unhelpful ways. Thus, Sunday Sabbath legislation—which certainly was detrimental to Jewish interests—should not be described as a "relatively mild display of anti-Semitism" because the object was Christian self-affirmation in society, not a desire to target the Jews. Similarly, Jaher's use of phrases like "marginally anti-Semitic" to portray a book by Henry Ruffler or "casually anti-Semitic" to identify a play by Nathaniel Willis is imprecise and conveys little meaning.

American Antisemitism, Black/Jewish Relations: A Matter of Perspective

263

Third, driven by the need to tabulate the magnitude of antisemitic impulses in American life, Jaher sometimes unwittingly undercuts his own argument. Thus, after having provided a seeming endless litany of awful images of Jews in belles lettres, as in such plays as The Algerine Captive and Modern Chivalry, Jaher, amazingly, writes, "Jews were not regular subjects in American literature, an indifference suggesting their relatively calm reception in the young nation." If so, why then spend numerous pages cataloguing the slanderous portrayal of Jews in American literature? The chapter entitled "Progress and Problems" concludes that "the era from 1780-1840 was a halcyon interval for Jews in America" (p. 169)—and yet devotes almost four times as much space to problems as to progress. Similarly, the problem of one-sided selection of sources and a lack of perspective is even more acutely felt in the final chapter on the period of 1840-1865, in which Jaher devotes seven pages to positive developments for Jews and fifty-five to meticulously detailing a worsening situation. Certainly, Jaher is right to point to a general increase in verbal intolerance during this period, the Protestant quest for religious hegemony and new anti-Jewish images, as well as heightened degrees of discrimination against Jews. But Catholics suffered more—there was no Know Nothing movement directed against Jews—and the Protestants were rebuffed in their attempt to Christianize the Constitution. Moreover, in choosing his material, Jaher does not include enough data from Louise Mayo's work on positive images of the Jews for this period, nor does he make adequate use of Hasia Diner's insightful references to Jews' socioeconomic visibility and active participation in civic and communal affairs.5 The very last paragraph of Jaher's brief epilogue exhibits the same conflicting interpretive perspective that plagues the book as a whole. As noted, he proclaims America to be antisemitic because it is Christian. And yet, incredibly, in the same paragraph he drastically changes intellectual direction, pointing to the benign attitude American Christianity has shown Jews and the fact that, in the United States, Christian ideology has been subdued by secular factors. Because Christianity was shaped by unique American and religious and secular circumstances, Jaher avers, Jews have been treated better here than in any other Western Christian land. Precisely! And had Jaher been guided by this point of view from the outset, he would have produced a more judicious and balanced work. Rather than declare America antisemitic because it is Christian, Jaher might have more appropriately argued that Christianity has substantially contributed to the history of antisemitism by leaving a mental legacy of how to think about Jews and Judaism—which could still be implemented or transmuted, reshaped, supplemented, or ignored by any society because of inner forces unique to it. That perspective would have elicited a far more historically accurate and satisfying portrait of the evolution of American antisemitism. What explains Jaher's insistence on Christian responsibility for American antisemitism and his desire to magnify its presence? It seems to me that the author offers a transparent signal in the opening lines of his preface. Seldom if ever does one encounter a historian of American antisemitism who publicly links his interest in that subject to the Holocaust. Jaher, however, does so explicitly, underscoring the "immense rage and sadness" and the resurgent proud Jewish identity that the Holo-

264

Review Essays

caust evoked in him, and expressly tying the writing of this book to his quest to "comprehend that cataclysm intellectually and emotionally." It is not unreasonable, perhaps, to suggest that Jaher's overwhelming anger with historical Christianity for contributing to the Holocaust has clouded his interpretive perspective on the subject of American antisemitism. In Antisemitism in America, Leonard Dinnerstein comes as close as possible to Jaher's syllogism coupling Christianity to American antisemitism without actually repeating it. Believing that "antisemitism has always been a problem for Jews in a Christian society," he asserts, Simply put, Christian viewpoints underlie all American antisemitism. No matter what other factors or forces may have been in play at any given time, the basis for prejudice toward Jews in the United States, and in the colonial era before it, must be Christian teachings (p. ix). It cannot be emphasized too strongly that all aspects of American antisemitism are built on this foundation of Christian hostility toward Jews. To argue otherwise is to misread history. I have found no other explanation for the causes of antisemitism satisfactory (p. xiii).

Significantly, despite these comments in the preface, Dinnerstein's actual narrative is less relentless than that of Jaher in trying to demonstrate ultimate Christian responsibility for all expressions of American antisemitism. Nevertheless, it too overstates the relationship and does not sustain this thesis, certainly not in the chapters on racism and the post-Second World War period. Quite obviously, Dinnerstein knows that America is different, that it is not merely a "Christian society," but a very special "Christian society" rooted in democracy, pluralism and church/ state separation. As he writes, "for reasons unique to the history of the United States . . . this (Christian] nation evolved differently" (p. xxviii). But in failing to pay equal attention to the differences and how they deflected and parried antisemitism, his comprehensive story of American antisemitism is missing a vital countervailing perspective. Nonetheless, Dinnerstein's narrative constitutes a solid and richly informative historical survey of some of the key ideas, actions, people, movements and forces that shaped American antisemitism. Pointedly rejecting any claim to definitiveness, disinterested in the lunatic fringes among antisemites, and refraining from socioand psychopathological analyses of the phenomenon, the book concentrates on what its author calls "mainstream antisemitism." Unlike Jaher, Dinnerstein does offer a definition of antisemitism, denoting it as "hostile expressions toward, or negative behavior against, individuals or groups because of their Jewish faith or heritage." Whatever one thinks of the definition, Dinnerstein is consistent in applying it. Following his brief prologue on the history of Christian antisemitism, Dinnerstein relates his story in chronological sequence, periodizing discrete time frames along thematic lines. His presentation of antisemitism in the colonial era differs little from that of Jaher, and also reflects a standard interpretation focusing on ambivalence toward Jews. His chapter "Developing Patterns, 1790-1865" reviews the religious and economic stereotypes of Jews, but acknowledges examples of Jewish social

American Antisemitism, Black!Jewish Relations: A Matter of Perspective

265

acceptance as well. Not exploited like the Irish, Catholics or the Indians, not enslaved like the blacks, Jews in this era, Dinnerstein stresses (in contrast to Jaher), experienced significant tolerance and social interaction as well as rejection and religious prejudice, and hence there was little overall change in the ambivalent reactions of non-Jews to them. In distinction to Jaher, who maintains that modern antisemitism gestated in the antebellum period, Dinnerstein locates drastic changes in attitudes toward the Jews in the decades between 1865 and 1900. It was then, he argues, that a society rife with antisemitism in all its social strata emerged. He carefully illuminates the serious cases of social discrimination, Protestant triumphalism, anti-immigration nativism, populism and urban competition with Catholics that punctuated Jewish life. This chapter is followed by others that trace the crest of antisemitic fervor into the Second World War: the racism in the progressive era (1900-1919), with its Anglo-Saxon sense of superiority and the appearance in public discourse of racist epithets such as "cripples" and "sheenies"; the social, economic and educational barriers established in order to block Jewish advances between the 1920s to 1933, highlighted by the Red Scare, Henry Ford's publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Massena blood libel in 1928; the general viciousness of Protestant, Catholic and racist demagogues during the 1930s; and the slanders against Jews arising from government and popular sources during the Second World War, including the charge that they were pushing the country into a war no one wanted. Following a chapter focusing on the postwar ebb of antisemitism (1945-1969), Dinnerstein interrupts the chronological narrative and incorporates two chapters of broad thematic relevance, "Antisemitism and Jewish Anxieties in the South, 18651980s," and "African American Attitudes, 1830s-1990s" (despite the title, the latter focuses mostly on the 1960s). He concludes with "At Home in America, 1969-1992," in which he outlines the ironic situation of a real decline in antisemitism that is inversely related to increasing Jewish fears about it. Dinnerstein's book reflects wide reading and masterful control of the literature. Although considerable portions of the material are familiar to students of American antisemitism, his deft narrative touch, gift for synthesis, incorporation of engrossing citations and ability to tell a good story render this a valuable study. His chapters on the depression era and on America during the Second World War are especially revealing and well done. And few can take issue with his general observation that oftentimes, in the midst of American crises, Jews were seen as outsiders and suffered as a result—although their "outsiderness" would have to be compared to that of others before one could properly gauge its force and significance. For all its virtues, the book is not above criticism. It frequently lacks conceptual depth, desisting from asking probing questions about historical events and patterns. For example, how does one square American racism in the progressive era with the fact of Jewish socioeconomic upward mobility during this time? What fully accounts for the decline in antisemitism following the Second World War? Despite the distinctiveness of social context, what is qualitatively different about southern Jews' concerns with how their gentile neighbors view them, compared with those of northern Jews?

266

Review Essays

Dinnerstein's periodization can also be called into question. What sense does the 1865-1900 time frame make with respect to antisemitism? The 1860s and early 1870s saw heady Jewish communal construction, rapid rise of Jewish newspapers and a general Jewish cultural elan, while the ugly public manifestations of social discrimination only occurred during the second half of the 1870s. By the same token, what does the 1900 cutoff date signify? Surely not the end of populism, nor of the anti-immigration movement, nor of Protestant triumphalism. And why is 1900 meaningful as the starting year for racism? Why end the postwar period at 1969, rather than 1967, which at least has the virtue of relating to the Six-Day War and its profound influence on American Jewish life and on American political support for Israel? Dinnerstein's text also pays insufficient attention to Jewish reactions to antisemitism. Only in the chapter on the Second World War, in which he depicts some Jewish organizational responses, does the book begin seriously to broach this theme. One index of the Jews' comfort level in a society is how they react to attacks on them, and it would have been instructive to carry this theme forward for each time period reviewed. It would also have been useful to discuss non-Jewish reactions against antisemitism in particular periods when it was organizationally defined, such as the interwar interfaith movement (which resulted in, among other things, the National Conference of Christians and Jews). There is a Christian philosemitic tradition in this country, not only an antisemitic one, and that too is relevant to the history of antisemitism. Finally, among the missing or significantly understated antisemitic trends are post-1967 anti-Zionism, Holocaust denial, and rightwing political and-Jewish biases and hatred. Both Jaher and Dinnerstein confirm that anti-Jewish feelings and attitudes were present and fairly extensive in virtually all periods of American history, their intensity and nastiness varying from one period to another. To the degree that antisemitism constitutes an index by which to measure a society's hospitality to its Jews, one might conclude that America was not nearly as hospitable as most Jews would like to think. But questions must be asked to understand more fully the meaning and significance of American antisemitism: What impact has it had on American Jewish life? Is the real story of American antisemitism its widespread presence, its social strength, or—in light of persistent Jewish communal and individual success—its apparent lack of cultural and political force? When Dinnerstein observes that one cannot truly understand American Jewish history without regard to the critical impact of antisemitism on American Jews, in effect justifying his book, he is absolutely correct. But a history of antisemitic hostility is incomplete without a detailed analysis of how Jews overcame it; a complete analysis of American antisemitism must include both aspects of the story. Reviewing Murray Friedman's What Went Wrong? The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance in conjunction with two books on antisemitism makes contextual and conceptual sense. According to almost every major poll over the last fifteen years, the only population sector in which antisemitism is rising is the African American community, and contrary to standard social science expectations, this rise correlates positively to the young and to the better educated. Moreover, this

American Antisemitism, Black/Jewish Relations: A Matter of Perspective

267

antisemitism translates at times into a virulent, gut-wrenching animus specifically singling Jews out from the rest of the white population. Hence Jews have been charged with conspiring to destroy the black community by infecting its children with the AIDS virus; of utilizing their national power to restrict blacks to the ghettos and undermine black progress by opposing affirmative action; of thwarting a black international agenda by directing American foreign policies in support of an alleged colonial racist Israel over and against legitimate Third World interests (especially Palestinian nationalism); and of practicing a "gutter religion," in the words of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, which legitimates cheating and theft. As Henry Feingold notes,6 black antisemitism should be considered an indigenous form of American antisemitism because, among other features, it represents a classic American example of groups vying with each other for this country's social, economic and political spoils. Friedman's book, moreover, is intrinsically relevant to a discussion of the appropriate perspective by which to interpret American antisemitism. Most African Americans, I suspect, would respond derisively to Jaher and Dinnerstein's assessment of the historical pervasiveness of American antisemitism. This difference in perception of Jewish suffering in America is one among many core issues that have seriously split blacks and Jews in recent decades. The rhetoric of Jewish empathy for African Americans based on common suffering has increasingly rung hollow; citations by Jews of the group prejudice to which they were subject have been regarded by many educated blacks as whining self-pity, a facile self-serving story of victimization that does not correspond to the facts. Given the horrors of African American history, one wonders how blacks would react to the title of Jaher's book, A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness. To label Jews as "scapegoats" in America, in light of their group mobility and socioeconomic power, would in all likelihood strike blacks as absurd. This motif is illustrative of one of the broader contemporary problems in black/ Jewish communication: each group rejects one aspect of the other's self-image and self-understanding. To blacks, Jews are not victims but a powerful elite, which is not the way Jews portray themselves to the outside world; to Jews, the separatist agenda of increasingly influential black nationalists is a retrogressive phenomenon that undermines their ideal of integration. Coupled with fundamental black/Jewish disagreements over a variety of other critical social and political policies these last two decades, such difficulties in coming to terms with the other group's selfperception have led to a serious rift between the communities and a revaluation among some black intellectuals of the whole history of black/Jewish relations. Beginning with Harold Cruse in his influential The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967) and more recently with David L. Lewis and Clayborne Carson in their writings—not to speak of outright bigots like Haki Madhubuti, Kwame Toure (formerly Stokely Carmichael), Leonard Jeffries and Farrakhan and his minions, black thinkers have developed an entirely different interpretation of the history of black/Jewish relations at variance with the traditional liberal Jewish perception still prevailing in the American Jewish community. This relatively recent interpretive perspective—which Friedman labels black revisionism—serves as the animating force driving his book. .

268

Review Essays

Unlike the Jaher and Dinnerstein volumes, whose depictions of the unfolding of American antisemitism do not specifically target other interpretations, Friedman seeks to disprove what he regards to be the revisionists' inaccurate perceptions. Hence, the book operates on two levels. On the one hand, it provides a narrative of the entire history of American black/Jewish relations from the first recorded interactions in colonial times to the present day, based largely on standard secondary sources, but supplemented in several chapters on more recent times by information gleaned from personal interviews and Friedman's own personal experiences. On the other hand, the book furnishes a running dialogue (in reality a monologue, since the interlocutors are not there to defend their views) with the revisionists and Jewhaters, in which Friedman sets out to counter what he considers to be their incorrect rereading of black/Jewish history. Collectively, Friedman asserts, the revisionists argue one or more of these propositions: • No real black/Jewish alliance or special relationship between blacks and Jews ever existed; this is but a figment of the Jewish imagination; • To whatever extent there may have been such an alliance, it was— 1. restricted to a narrow segment of Jewry and not reflective of broad mass support; 2. born out of Jewish self-interest and the desire for social respectability; 3. indicative of generic liberal social politics rather than any passionate religious idealism grounded in Judaism; 4. never allowed to jeopardize Jewish group needs, which always took precedence. • Jewish activity on behalf of blacks was ultimately dysfunctional for blacks, channeling them into jobs and social positions that thwarted their independence and development. At best, Friedman avers, the revisionists seek to diminish the role and contribution of Jews to the whole civil rights movement, or even to dismiss them from the story altogether; at worst, they not only dismiss them, but blame the Jews specifically for retarding black progress. Deeply involved in civil rights activities for more than thirty years, first as head of the Virginia-North Carolina office of the Anti-Defamation League, Friedman subsequently served as the Middle Atlantic States Director of the American Jewish Committee (a position he still holds) and for a time vice-chair of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. Not surprisingly, he finds this revisionist perspective historically infuriating and personally insulting, and has written this book to set the record straight. At stake is nothing less than the shape of historical memory—who will control the public image of historic black/Jewish relations, and from what historical perspective. Friedman writes passionately and eloquently—if not always persuasively—in defense of his interpretation of black/Jewish relations. His own thesis is straightforward. Contra some of the revisionists, there was indeed a black/Jewish alliance, a profound cooperative venture that shared a common vision, that was institutionalized initially with Jewish involvement and leadership in the NAACP in the early twentieth century, that persisted through the interwar

American Antisemitism, Black/Jewish Relations: A Matter of Perspective

269

years abetted by the presence of Jewish lawyers and the availability of Jewish money, and that was cemented in the heyday of the civil rights movement in the 1950s through the mid-1960s in the circle led by the charismatic Martin Luther King, Jr. Contrary to the mythic image still regnant in some Jewish quarters, however, this alliance was never without problems and tensions: there were always black/Jewish disputes over leadership, strategies and policies and personalities. Indeed, throughout the twentieth century, black/Jewish cooperation was to some degree offset by periodic conflicts between the groups, especially between the two world wars. While black and Jewish elites devised NAACP legal strategies in the 1930s, riots broke out against Jewish stores in Harlem, social unrest erupted over the "Bronx Slave Market," and outrageous antisemitic rhetoric emanated from street corners in the black ghettos. To his credit, Friedman depicts these strained relations fairly and in some detail. But he is adamant that the reality of contentious disagreements and flagrant social tensions between blacks and Jews does not controvert the fact of real, abiding and deeply felt Jewish support for the black cause, nor does it deny the concrete social, political and economic alliance that was forged between Jews and blacks around the ideal of integration. As a chronological narrative of black/Jewish relations, this book provides a very useful and lucid description of black/Jewish relations, the only one of its kind with such a sweeping scope. Drawing upon the established work of Jacob Marcus, David Brion Davis, Bertram Korn, Seymour Drescher and Eli Evans, Friedman does a fine job tracing black/Jewish relations in the South through the nineteenth century, repudiating the distorted charges of the Nation of Islam of the Jews' preponderance in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and highlighting to some degree black/Jewish interactions in the South and the ambivalent black perceptions of Jews, which alternated between respect and hostility. He correctly observes that no formal black/ Jewish alliance existed in the post-Civil War era, and then documents its gradual evolution as Jewish elites began to support Booker T. Washington, the NAACP and the Urban League. Friedman's chapters highlight the central social processes and key players that dramatically affected the intergroup relationship: the mass migration of southern blacks to northern cities and its impact on changing neighborhoods; blacks and Jews in Harlem of the 1920s; the nationalism of Marcus Garvey; the cooperative ventures of the Jewish and black labor movements; the civil rights movement and the deepening of the black/Jewish alliance; and the crucial role played by individual Jews in Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The chapters on King and his Jewish advisers and friends, notably Stanley Levison, are by far the most riveting, original and exquisitely nuanced sections of the book. His material on the 1970s and 1980s, while simple and accurate, is concurrent with previous scholarship and journalistic accounts. Friedman asserts that the black/Jewish alliance began to collapse in the mid- to late 1960s, with the advent of what he calls the black "racial revolution" sparked by local and national leftist and nationalist groups who redirected black energies from integration to black separatism, and who seemed to enjoy dcmonizing Jews and Jewish causes (particularly Israel) in ever more strident rhetoric. These developments, coupled with the pursuit by more mainstream black organizations of policies such as affirmative action that were frequently at odds with perceived Jewish inter-

270

Review Essays

ests, hastened the erosion of the black/Jewish alliance into the 1970s. Subsequent rancor between blacks and Jews over the celebrated Bakke and DeFunis court cases, the Andrew Young affair, Jesse Jackson's embrace of PLO leader Yasir Arafat and his "hymietown" remark, and the antisemitic oratory of Louis Farrakhan buried the alliance in the 1980s. Friedman's is a sobering conclusion: while there once was a vigorous black/Jewish alliance in the past, it does not exist in the present, and it is much too soon to tell whether it can and will reappear in the future. Friedman rightly scores black revisionists' frequent tendentious and retroactive injection of contemporary moral idealism into past black/Jewish history in order to indict Jewish behavior. Hence he correctly takes issue with Cruse's excoriation of Jews for not having promoted black economic and nationalist autonomy decades ago, an absurd charge given the fact that blacks themselves generally did not take such a lead, and one requiring of Jews that they be more responsible for blacks than blacks themselves. Friedman appropriately also objects to the claims of David Levering Lewis that, for self-serving motives, Jewish money encouraged blacks to go into the entertainment industry rather than teaching, law or business—as if blacks did not value the entertainment field, as if Jews had the ability to channel black interests, and as if blacks themselves did not value Jews as intermediaries to the general public. And Friedman properly dismisses the contention of black writers who charge that the Jews' presumptive social idealism on behalf of African Americans was actuated by self-interest. First, with respect to some Jews this attack is simply libelous. Second, this assessment implies that mixed motives somehow automatically taint Jewish efforts on behalf of blacks, as if bona fide Jewish group self-interests vitiate moral idealism and genuine empathy for black suffering. Friedman might have pointed out that this kind of logic puts Jews in a double bind: either they are angels, promoting the black cause with utter selfless idealism, or blackguards if they gain in any way from an improved, less bigoted American social climate. Contrary to black radicals, judging the virtue of Jewish assistance to blacks need not be done from this either/or posture: there is moral value in the intermediate situation as well, when one group's aid to another also benefits itself. Friedman's counterarguments regarding the reality of black/Jewish relations, however, are not always convincing. For example, how Jewishly representative were the Spingarn brothers, so instrumental in the life of the NAACP in the 1920s and 1930s? Were they really motivated by a Jewish conscience? This question assumes symptomatic importance, since it can be asked of Friedman's presentation generally. The author constantly makes unsubstantiated claims for Judaism's moral fervor undergirding Jewish involvement in civil rights. In speculating about the motivation of Jews involved with the NAACP, he surmises that perhaps because Jews were pariahs themselves they sympathized with other outsiders; or "they were no doubt also encouraged by the implicit moral imperatives of Judaism" (p. 58). But Friedman is historian enough to know that a claim is no proof, yet he provides none himself. Similarly, responding to Clayborne Carson's marginalization of Jewish ethical idealism as the motive for Jews' participation in southern integration battles in the early 1960s, Friedman proclaims that "an extremely high proportion of whites involved in the freedom rides and other protest activities were Jews, undoubtedly because of the egalitarian strains within Judaism, as well as the entire historical

American Antisemitism, Black/Jewish Relations: A Matter of Perspective

271

experience as an oppressed minority group" (pp. 189-190). Many Jews, 1 am sure, would like to believe that to be true, but in fact this is liberal Jewish rhetoric devoid of supporting evidence in the book. Friedman's comment, indeed, appears immediately following his account of the deaths of Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner alongside the black youth James Chaney in Mississippi in 1964—an episode that has achieved mythic grandeur in the Jewish retelling of how Jews and blacks fought alongside each other, even at the cost of martyrdom. But as Friedman's own narrative makes clear, Jewish idealism did not inspire these two secular youths. Finally, Friedman furnishes no real data to sustain yet another global generalization, that "Jews all across the political spectrum struggled to keep their commitment [to black equality] alive and to maintain their own sense as liberals or progressives at the close of the '60s" (p. 273). This statement, too, reflects classic Jewish liberal self-understanding, and it may or may not be true; regrettably, Friedman adduces no documentation to prove it. On some really difficult issues over which Jewish and black revisionist (and even mainstream black) perceptions radically diverge, Friedman's position can be characterized as evasive. Discussing the urban riots between 1964 and 1968 and the burning of Harlem in the summer of 1965, he observes that Jewish shopkeepers and landlords seemed to have been especial targets of black fury, unfair targets, he implies, because they were assumed to be "price and rent gouging." But rather than either refute this claim with hard data or otherwise critically engage this core belief about Jews held by many in the ghetto to this day, Friedman tepidly remarks that while some exploitation might have occurred, slum conditions are difficult for cashand-carry stores and the "economics of the ghetto business were and are far more complex than is generally noted" (p. 214). This weak rejoinder, however, does not sufficiently address a crucial basis of black antagonism toward Jews. In an earlier passage, Friedman notes that since "Jews were seen to profit from black patronage of Jewish stores and businesses in Harlem, the idea took hold among some blacks that Jews were responsible for their problems in the first place and only posed as friends" (p. 81). By couching this sentence in the passive voice, Friedman blurs the distinction between perception and reality and fails to courageously meet the critical issue: Did these perceptions in fact mirror reality? Did Jews actually behave in such a way as to justify these black perceptions? On this issue, whose image of the Jews is accurate? At times, when Friedman does defend Jews against revisionist charges, he engages in a literal "whitewash"—pun intended. Thus, in deflecting the recent criticism of Spike Lee and Leonard Jeffries that Jews in the entertainment industry exploited blacks, Friedman (relying on the work by Neal Gabler) argues that Jews acted no worse than comparable gentile executives and were no more guilty of racism than they were. In other words, when Jews act in morally questionable ways vis-a-vis blacks, they should be categorized as whites, not Jews. Many blacks, however, would prefer to remind Jews of their rhetoric of special empathy for African Americans and to insist on their failures as Jews. Both perspectives are understandable, though which possesses greater historical and/or moral weight is by no means self-evident. The social dynamic at work in this example, however, is clear: fundamental differences in group assumptions and perspectives about the

272

Review Essays

same reality may prove deeply divisive. These examples just reinforce the pivotal issue: to fully grasp the historical tensions of the black/Jewish alliance, to propose who and/or what may have been responsible for its dissolution, it is imperative, first, to distinguish each group's understanding of its own reality in relation to the perception of its reality by the other group, and then to systematically and clinically evaluate whose perceptions more closely appoximate fact and whose distort it. Unfortunately, often Friedman does not do this, and the cogency of his story suffers as a result. Finally, in a book that purports to offer a comprehensive look at black/Jewish relations, a more probing analysis of the reasons for the emotional depth of black animosity to Jews would have been in order. Friedman does suggest in one context that social anger is sometimes channelled against one's closest allies and friends (p. 81). But is black hostility rooted in feelings of resentment against another minority, ostensibly sharing a history of victimization, that essentially made it in America? Is it best understood in the psychological pathology of "the hatred of the almost-the-same"? Or is it grounded in black Protestant traditions, as Dinnerstein, Jahcr and others contend? Or perhaps, is it explained by the fact that blacks, in expressing anti-Jewish feelings, can finally find a common cause with the majority white population? All of these have been proposed by one observer or another. As a learned and astute student of black/Jewish relations, Friedman might have more seriously attempted to deepen our understanding of a crucial aspect of the larger phenomenon about which he writes. On a theoretical level, deciding which perspectives of black/Jewish relations are the more accurate should not be more or less difficult than assessing the true measure of American antisemitism, or any historical phenomenon about which there exists contrary points of view. But black/Jewish relations is no mere academic topic; it is also a compelling social dynamic entangled in an intricate web of contrary perceptions. Certain black and Jewish group perceptions have become so entrenched, so essential to each group's sociocultural self-understanding and to its understanding of the other, that on some issues it becomes almost impossible to discriminate between perception and reality; indeed, perception is reality. And as revisionist perspectives on black/Jewish relations percolate in the African American community, becoming established as legitimate interpretations of black history, the communication gap between blacks and Jews will undoubtedly continue to widen. Still, if there is ever again to be a black/Jewish alliance, if in the future some blacks and some Jews express mutual interest in reviving such an alliance, Murray Friedman's book, notwithstanding the above criticisms, will be required reading as a basis for deliberations, regardless of where they lead the discussants. BENNY KRAUT University of Cincinnati

Notes 1. David Berger, "Anti-Semitism: An Overview," in History and Hate: The Dimensions of Anti-Semitism, ed. David Berger (Philadelphia: 1986), 3. 2. Not only has the phenomenon of anti-Jewishness been the subject of much disagree-

American Antisemitism, Black/Jewish Relations: A Matter of Perspective

273

ment, but so too has the term and actual spelling of the terra used to denote it. Coined by Wilhelm Marr in 1879 with an explicit racial connotation, anti-Semitism was popularized in the post-Second World War era and employed by writers retroactively as a label for all forms of anti-Jewish expressions and behavior in past history. Gradually, the hyphen was deleted and a new word, "antisemitism," gained currency. Not only was the original racial flavor of the hyphenated term lost, but the differentiated motivations and forms of hostility—antiJudaism as distinct from anti-Jewishness—were also lost. For better or worse, antisemitism has now become the more popular designation, and so for convenience I use it in this essay. See Steven Bowman, "Anti-Semitism and Antisemitism: A Review Essay," American Jewish History 79, no. 4 (summer 1990), 553-564. Interestingly, Dinnerstein and Jaher have each chosen one of the two variations, with Dinnerstein electing the nonhyphenated spelling of antisemitism and Jaher opting for anti-Semitism. 3. See Oscar Handlin, Adventure in Freedom: 300 Years of Jewish Life in America (Cambridge: 1954); Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: 1955); Jonathan D. Sarna, "American Anti-Semitism," in Berger (ed.), History and Hate, 115-128; David A. Gerber, "Introduction," in Anti-Semitism in American History, ed. David A. Gerber (Urbana: 1986), 3-54; Henry L. Feingold, "Finding a Conceptual Framework for the Study of American Antisemitism," Jewish Social Studies 47, nos. 3-4 (fall 1985), 313-326; Leonard Dinnerstein, "The Historiography of American Anti-Semitism," in his Uneasy at Home: Antisemitism and the American Jewish Experience (New York: 1987), 257-267. 4. See Sarna, "American Anti-Semitism," 120; Gerber, "Introduction," 4; Feingold, "Finding a Conceptual Framework," 4; Louise A. Mayo, The Ambivalent Image: Nineteenth Century America's Perception of the Jew (Rutherford: 1988). 5. Mayo, Ambivalent Image', Hasia R. Diner, A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820-1880 (Baltimore: 1992). 6. Feingold, "Finding a Conceptual Framework," 317.

This page intentionally left blank

Book Reviews

This page intentionally left blank

Antisemitism, Holocaust and Genocide

Mitchell G. Bard, Forgotten Victims: The Abandonment of Americans in Hitler's Camps. Boulder: Westview Press, 1994. xv + 171 pp.

Jewish recruits in the American army may recall a received wisdom passed down from previous basic training cycles. It warned us of the danger of having the tell-tale "H" (Hebrew) stamped on our metal dog tags. The story was that during the Second World War such identification meant almost certain death for Jewish G.I.s captured by the Germans. Though we had the choice of leaving religion blank, which was in fact an accurate description of the state of faith of many of us, most pridefully insisted that the "H" be placed where it belonged. Now we are presented with a study that uncovers the historic roots of that fear. Forgotten Victims is the story of the abuse of American citizens and American POWs, some Jewish, who were caught in the German net. There were at least 30,000 American civilians remaining in Europe after America entered the war, though the precise number of American Jewish civilians and POWs in German hands is difficult to determine, as is the number who succumbed or suffered serious injury. In 1940, the notorious Breckinridge Long was placed in charge of the "Special Problems" division that was to bring home State Department personnel and American citizens who wanted to return. His diary is full of concern regarding these Americans. The Nazis established a special camp at Vittel for those having diplomatic protection, and in 1942 there was an exchange of German and British internees that gave the Yishuv the first hard news of the Holocaust. But aside from such occasional stories little was known of the fate of those who fell into Nazi hands. Germany's poor treatment of some prisoners was later overshadowed by the horrendous stories leaking out of occupied Europe regarding the treatment of the Jews. And yet American and British public opinion still admired Rommel, the "Desert Fox," for waging a sportsmanlike war in North Africa. What was happening on the eastern front, where thousands of Soviet prisoners became the first victims of Nazi vernichtungskrieg policy, was not well known. The earliest inmates of Auschwitz were clothed in the uniforms of these victims. Now we learn that gratuitous cruelty was often extended to Allied prisoners, especially if they were Jewish or terror fliers, escapees or "agents" caught wearing civilian clothes behind the lines. One of the excuses given regarding Allied reluctance to intercede on behalf of Holocaust victims was that these people were not their citizens, and thus not their legal responsibility. Now it turns out, according to Bard, that even when the government had a direct legal responsibility, little was done. But such a claim raises serious questions about the researcher's underlying as277

278

Book Reviews

sumption regarding the power of governments involved in total wars. The fact that such governments are far less able to protect their own than is generally believed needs to be factored into the researcher's historic equation. This is especially necessary when the enemy is ideologically driven, as the Germans were during the Second World War. Not only do such opponents ignore international rules of warfare, but they are also comparatively immune from moral suasion. Had they been moral, such atrocities would not have been part of their public policy in the first place. The British found a more effective way to confront the problem of mistreatment of POWs after Berlin disregarded their protests about shackling prisoners: they showed films of German POWs being similarly shackled, and the chaining of British prisoners soon stopped. Apparently, to deal effectively with criminal regimes one must first understand the values that govern their behavior. Yet even had the Allies spoken their language, it is doubtful whether Berlin's lynching order (pertaining to shot-down flyers) would have been countermanded. Those who contend that Washington's indifference to the rescue of Jewish victims of the Holocaust was rooted in antisemitism will now have to consider the fact that the administration also seemed to be indifferent to the fate of its own citizens who fell afoul of the Germans. This throws a different light on the Roosevelt administration's inaction regarding the rescue of Jews, as raised by David Wyman and others. A more reasonable contention might now be that Roosevelt's possibilities for intercession were limited in both cases. It is this reality that historians, anxious to compose a retroactive indictment, need to be very careful about. This overheated study fails to take such necessary care. Bard utilizes some archival research in the early chapters, but the actual stories of brutal treatment are retrieved from survivors and frequently repeated. The picture that emerges concerning the mistreatment of Jewish war prisoners is confusing and fails to establish a systemic policy. Sometimes Christian prisoners were also treated cruelly, and there were those who were "shot while trying to escape." Berga, the worst of these POW camps—where eighty Jewish prisoners were sent and segregated— is described, as is the killing or disappearance of individual Jewish POWs. The conditions in which segregated Jewish prisoners were compelled to live were sometimes harsher than were those of non-Jewish prisoners. Yet many Jewish POWs avoided such treatment by not identifying themselves as Jews. Dog tags or rosaries of buddies were borrowed for that purpose. In other cases, after the initial segregation, Jewish prisoners were not treated differently. In some cases Jewish POWs were not segregated at all. Apparently much depended on the camp and the "Kommandant." Nonetheless, being held prisoner by the Germans was no picnic, especially as the war neared its end. It often meant short rations and malnutrition, poor medical attention, and in some cases back-breaking labor that many did not survive. There were also "death marches" that many surviving prisoners experienced. Jewish prisoners and other "undesirables" such as terror fliers, recaptured escapees or prisoners who were troublemakers were sometimes signaled out for such "special treatment." They were literally worked to death. The High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW) was deeply involved in the gratuitous cruelty and mistreatment of certain prisoners whom it was their responsibility to protect under the Geneva Convention.

Antisemitism, Holocaust and Genocide

279

It happens at times that a researcher is energetic in digging up information but then fails to synthesize and weave his material into comprehensible narrative history. Forgotten Victims is a poorly organized and episodic book. The author's narrative voice is often lost beneath poorly integrated quotations. And there are too few transitions to guide the reader from one aspect of the story to another, resulting in one's getting lost in a sea of disconnected sentences and paragraphs. What does come through is a picture of Nazi Germany's gratuitous cruelty to those under its total power. The descriptions of the mistreatment of POWs working underground are all too familiar to students of the Holocaust. There was everywhere in the Reich a devaluation of life to which German camp commanders and guards seem to have been particularly prone. We learn that cruelty and sadism was not confined to the treatment of Jews or Sinti and Roma or gays, but had different degrees of intent on different levels. For Jewish prisoners it could involve a regulation from Berlin that called for their segregation and a prohibition against their holding a leadership position as a "person of confidence." On an individual level, it could be a faceless guard beating a helpless prisoner or a camp commander who withheld Red Cross packages as a form of punishment. Could the American government have done something about such excesses? Undoubtedly Washington knew that such mistreatment of its nationals and soldiers was occurring in Germany and Japan. But its options for counteraction were limited by the war and the character of the enemy. The charge that the government chose to do little or failed to do what could be done against such opponents lacks balance and fairness. Although Bard implicitly overestimates the recourses available to the Allied governments during the war, he is probably on target when he notes their failure, after war's end, to publicize the POWs' treatment under the Nazis. Subject to the euphoria of victory, Americans were probably no longer very interested in this story. Moreover, the emerging Cold War converted former enemies into friends. In hindsight, we were probably too lenient in the punishment meted out to the tormentors of Berga and other POW camps. But in the end, perhaps a too forgiving America is preferable to one that nurses its hatred and preoccupies itself with vengeance. That America can be a terrible enemy. Ask the survivors of Hiroshima. HENRY FEINGOLD Baruch College

Richard Bolchover, British Jewry and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 203 pp.

This book is a noteworthy addition to the genre of studies that seek to explain the response to the Holocaust of Jewish communities that did not come under Nazi occupation. Whereas earlier studies concerning Britain have examined mainly the responses of the British government and press, Bolchover focuses solely on the Jewish community's response. Sadly, it is an indisputable fact that the response of

280

Book Reviews

this community, no less than others, proved to be hopelessly inadequate. In common with some other recent studies on American Jewry and on the Jewish community in Palestine (the Yishuv), British Jewry and the Holocaust is prompted by a hindsight perspective suggesting that Jews could somehow have been more successful in rescuing their brethren from the Nazis and their collaborators throughout Europe. However, in Bolchover's case it is commendable that we are spared retrospective judgmental condemnations of one or another of the Jewish leaders or organizations under discussion. Rather, he sets out to explain the contextual reality of Anglo-Jewry's self-conceptions and communal dynamics prior to and during the Second World War. Focusing on the perceptions the Jews had of their own status in British society and of the dangers stemming from domestic antisemitism, he examines the normative sociopolitical outlooks that informed the actions of various communal leaders and organizations, along with the internal issues and conflicts that occupied their attention in this period. In the first part of the book, Bolchover succinctly traces how and to what extent British Jewry learned about the Nazi program of persecution leading to annihilation. Their knowledge, he shows, was considerable. Bulchover also perceptively surveys the existing literature on the gap between "knowing" what was happening and the all too human inability to actually "believe" it; a phenomenon stressed by leading researchers into the experience of Holocaust bystanders and victims alike. He proceeds to analyze the domestic priorities that engaged the communal institutions during the war years and sums up the nature and extent of the institutional response to the unfolding tragedy. Given the enormity of the catastrophe that had befallen their brethren in Europe, it is certainly disturbing to read Bolchover's record of the continued, indeed intensified, divisiveness and conflict (much of it involving matters of koved, or honor, rather than substance) that plagued the community. The campaign of the Zionists to gain hegemony in the community was a major cause of dissension. Yet one should not lose sight of the fact that there also were considerable coordinated efforts dating back to the founding of the Central British Fund for Jewish Relief and Rehabilitation in 1933, and that in comparison with U.S. Jewry, the institutional structure of British Jewry was inherently more centralized. Although Bolchover points to some instances where intracommunal conflict frustrated certain sectional initiatives, it is not at all certain that a more unified stand would have made a substantial difference in rescuing Jews from the Nazi inferno. Bolchover's main contribution to the subject is the analysis he offers of the "social and political philosophies" that prevailed in Anglo-Jewry during this time. The main thesis of this book is that British Jewry was severely constrained in both word and deed by its own peculiar mode of Jewishness and the community's perceived status in British society. The author argues that this "attitudinal landscape" was formed out of the liberal conviction prevalent in Anglo-Jewry, that the moral spirit of mankind was invincible and would therefore ultimately stem not only the spread of antisemitism in general but even its particularly vicious Nazi brand. This deeply ingrained outlook limited the capacity of the Anglo-Jewish leadership to anticipate and respond to the incredible enormity and horror of the Nazi program. By the time British Jews had finally bridged the gap between knowing and believing, it was too late for them to launch any widescale rescue efforts.

Antisemitism, Holocaust and Genocide

281

Bolchover goes on to argue that Anglo-Jewry's emancipatory political culture, or "politics of hope," as he labels it, coexisted simultaneously with a contradictory conception that engendered what he terms a "politics of fear." This fear was rooted, on the one hand, in the objective reality of considerable homegrown antisemitism in Britain and, on the other hand, in the subjective notion prevalent in Anglo-Jewry that the civic equality it enjoyed in British society was dependent on the observance of an implicit "emancipation contract" obliging it to assume the form of a purely religious denomination devoid of any suggestion of Jewish nationality. Hence the Anglo-Jewish leadership felt the need scrupulously to avoid any pleading on behalf of Jews that might lend credence to the charge that Jews cultivated selfish interests that were incongruent with, or sought precedence over, the interests of the British state or society. It is Bolchover's contention that these two attitudinal characteristics, the legacy of Anglo-Jewry's passage to civic emancipation and social integration, determined the boundaries of what the Anglo-Jewish leadership felt willing, or able, to do. Viewed in this light, one may better understand the self-imposed restraints on its actions and the acceptance of its government's claim that, barring some essentially declarative actions, the only realistic way to save Europe's Jews was to win the war as speedily and effectively as possible. By and large, Bolchover presents an illuminating analysis and fulfills his objective of making "a contribution to the understanding of Anglo-Jewry, not the Holocaust" (p. 1). However, since he chose not to examine in any detail the contemporary Yiddish sources that might reflect the attitudes of the less indigenous segment of Anglo-Jewry, this study falls short of comprehending the entirety of AngloJewish attitudinal responses to the Holocaust. In addition, the central thesis of the work tends to be overstretched insofar as his treatment of the Zionists is concerned. After all, the essence of the Zionist outlook in Britain, as in the rest of the world, was its challenging of the suppositions underlying both the "politics of hope" and the "politics of fear." Zionist leaders rejected the belief in liberal emancipation as a universal panacea for the problem of the Jews. Moreover, the putative "emancipation contract" was one of the most profound issues dividing them from the antiZionist or non-Zionist elite that headed the major communal institutions at least until 1939. Bolchover himself makes mention of Harry Sacher's instructive Zionist tract, "Jewish Emancipation: The Contract Myth" (1916), in which he justified the Zionists' affirmation of a broader Jewish peoplehood and the need for a national home in Palestine. Furthermore, at several critical points both before and after the Second World War, Zionists in Britain demonstrated considerable assertiveness in their cause, not shrinking from protests against the policy of their own government. Bolchover generalizes that "British Jews took civic loyalty to mean conformity" (p. 71). But he must be aware that Zionists such as Selig Brodetsky specifically rejected this conception when defending their right to protest against British governmental policy with regard to Palestine. It must also be recalled that the Zionist ideological factor in Anglo-Jewry encompassed as well the British section of the World Jewish Congress, which was the most intensely active of all the organizations concerned with the European catastrophe. Bolchover, in sum, not only all but dismisses the ideological dimension of British Zionism but also goes too far in reducing this Zionist factor to a contest for communal control and power between

282

Book Reviews

the offspring of the post-1880s waves of immigrants on the one hand and the "Cousinhood" elite, on the other. True, the debate over Zionism was not wholly a matter of ideology—it certainly involved a contest for communal authority—but neither was it devoid of a serious ideological core. This does not preclude the possibility that the Zionists' fixation on assuring the attainment of a Jewish state in an anticipated postwar settlement might have vitiated communal unity with regard to the crisis of European Jewry. But it does suggest that, in the final analysis, the manifest failure of British Jews to muster anything approaching an adequate response must surely lie less with the conceptual constraints highlighted by Bolchover than with the fundamental inability of all Jewry, whether Zionist or not and whether united or not, to influence the Allied powers to make the rescue of Jews a commanding imperative—or even a serious priority. GIDEON SHIMONI The Hebrew University

Saul S. Friedman (ed.), The Terezin Diary of Gonda Redlich. Trans. Laurence Kutler. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1992. 173 pp.

The diary of "Gonda"—Egon Redlich—hailed as a sensational discovery when unearthed in 1967 on the premises of the former ghetto of Terezin (Theresienstadt), was first published in its entirety in 1985, in a Hebrew edition. Ironically, selected entries quoted out of context had appeared in the Czech Communist press in the 1970s, as part of an attempt to slander Zionism and the state of Israel. This new English version should make the diary known to a much wider audience. Terezin, a walled fortress town forty miles from Prague, "a gift the Fuhrer gave to the Jews," originally served as a garrison. After Reinhard Heydrich's arrival in Prague in the fall of 1941, it was designated a transit camp or "model" ghetto for the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia (the Protectorate). In reality, it became a gateway to death for many thousands of Czech, German, Austrian, Danish and Dutch Jews on their road to Auschwitz and other death camps in occupied Polish territory. Fifty years after the war's end, we are still baffled by the creativity and spiritual resilience of children and adults on the threshold of death. Redlich's diary offers clues to that resilience. Born in Olomouc, Moravia, in 1916, Redlich was a Zionist and educator. After his deportation to Terezin in December 1941, he became head of the Youth Welfare Department (Jugendfursorge) and a member of the Council of Jewish Elders (Altestenrat). It was his department that took care of the housing, education and spiritual needs of about 15,000 children who passed in various stages through the ghetto. Redlich's diary, which spans almost three years—from January 1, 1942, to October 6, 1944—is thus an important insider's account. Among other things, it provides insights into the "rescue through work" scheme and delaying tactics of Jacob Edelstein, the first head of the Altestenrat. Also described in detail are the educational and cultural programs organized by the Freizeitgestaltung, which were designed to maintain the spirit and self-esteem of the inmates. Friends

Antisemitism, Holocaust and Genocide

283

who survived the war stress Redlich's literary talent, his clarity of thinking, and his combination of shyness and sharp wit—all of which are evident in his journal. During the weekdays, Redlich penned his entries in "basic" Hebrew (he had been a teacher of Hebrew and Jewish history) and on the Sabbath, a day of rest, he wrote in his native Czech. Initially, he notes, he planned the diary as a way of recording "how I have lived and what has happened to me here" (p. 3). The entries were made for "Beczulkah" (a diminutive of the family name of his girl friend, Gertruda [Gerti] Beckova) with whom he had an otherwise laconic correspondence. Gerti joined him in the ghetto a year after his arrival and married him there; on March 16, 1944, she gave birth to his son, Dan. Alongside Redlich's last entries is a separate "yoman leDan" ("Diary for Dan") in which Redlich wrote of his dream that his son would grow up as a free man, never having to encounter degradation and insults, "the weakness of a people on foreign soil, a people without a homeland" (p. 152). His last entry for Dan ends on October 6, 1944, the day of their deportation to Auschwitz. Redlich's diary touches on every aspect of life in what H.G. Adler has termed the Zwangsgemeinschaft, or enforced coercive society: burning psychological problems and questions of ethics and religion, as well as social breakdown in the maelstrom of terror and deportation. An acute observer, Redlich also comments on petty politics and quarrels within the ghetto leadership. Nothing escapes his "gazing grey eyes": the suffering of individuals and, most wretched of all, the aged people crowded in the dirty attics and the underground cells. Redlich reflects on national, class and cultural conflicts amid the various social strata of the population. He mentions events such as the "beautification campaign," the potemkinization of the ghetto prior to the visit of the International Committee of the Red Cross in June 1944, which was undertaken by the Nazis in order to dispel disquieting rumors in the free world concerning the annihilation process. As a member of the Council of Elders, Redlich also officiated on the so-called "transport and appeals committee," the task of which was to approve the quota of individuals selected by the Nazis for deportation (eventually they were also able to exempt various individuals from transport by substituting others). It was this assignment that most haunted his conscience. Nevertheless, as transports came and left Terezin, he made this remark: "We live in a depressed mood and each piece of news is received with great faith. Frequently great disappointment comes upon us. But we always hope anew" (p. 7). Obviously it was the diarist's acumen and his relentless hope in the future of the Jewish people that maintained his morale. On November 8, 1942, Redlich jotted in his diary this prophesy: "a new Eretz Yisrael will emerge from the crisis, stronger internally and externally. . ." (p. 83). He and his associates—teachers, artists, psychologists, pediatricians, day nurses and madrikhim (counselors)—lived with the youngsters and supervised them in creative "children's homes." The fruit of their labor is documented in prose, poetry and paintings, in the precious spiritual legacy of the doomed children of Terezin. Both the editor, Saul S. Friedman, and the translator, Laurence Kutler, should be commended for making this unique diary accessible in English. The solid apparatus of annotations and the editor's postscript provide a wealth of information on the

284

Book Reviews

history of the ghetto from its establishment on November 24, 1941, until its liberation by the Red Army on May 8, 1945. LlVIA ROTHKIRCHEN

Yad Vashem

Mordecai Paldiel, The Path of the Righteous: Gentile Rescuers During the Holocaust. Hoboken: Ktav, 1993. 401 pp.

As director of Yad Vashem's department to honor the "righteous among the nations of the world," those men and women who risked their lives in order to save Jews during the Holocaust, Mordecai Paldiel's daily lot is to encounter stories of goodness. His experience is rare among those who spend their lives in the study of the Holocaust— but no less important. In The Path of the Righteous, Paldiel provides his readers with sharply drawn portraits of the hundreds of individuals who put their lives on the line to save Jews when almost all the citizens of Europe were either perpetrators (including accomplices or collaborators) or bystanders. "Neutrality" during the Holocaust was hardly neutral; it aided the killers and doomed the victims. But the men and women portrayed here did what had to be done, and often more than one might imagine could have been done, to save the victims. A generation later, they face the rewards of their efforts. At least some of those Jews they saved became grateful survivors, and the state of Israel has bestowed high honor upon them. The format that Paldiel has chosen is simple. He tells the story of the Holocaust in each of sixteen countries, followed by individual accounts of rescuers in each of them. And the stories that he tells are often quite simple—ordinary men and women who "naturally," almost without thinking, did what they knew they should do: oppose the Nazis and save the Jews. Yet the simplicity of the format and the innocence, the goodness, of the tales reveals a complex history of moral resistance and courage among a small minority of the European population under Nazi occupation. Paldiel's task is not easy as he condenses entire lives into two or three pages. By coincidence, I began to read this work just after finishing Felix Zandman's fine memoir Never the Last Journey (1995), which describes the author's life as a teenage boy hidden with three other people by Jan Puchalski, a Polish innkeeper. While Paldiel's two-page description cannot match in detail or passion Zandman's hundredpage narrative of a life in hiding, he does capture the essence and magnitude of Puchalski's deed. So too, his description of Halina Wind's life in hiding cannot equal the many articles written by her son, the skilled journalist David Preston; yet Paldiel's craftsmanship and sensitivity to the story prove equal to the task at hand. I have written elsewhere of the power of the "mystification of goodness." We confer mysterious, and thus disproportionate, weight to the behavior of the rescuer simply because acts of goodness were so few in the unrelenting story of evil and despair. The very terminology of the Yad Vashem department headed by Paldiel is an indication of this need to mystify. The "righteous among the nations of the

Antisemitism, Holocaust and Genocide

285

world" is an honor the Jewish people and the state of Israel bestow upon those who risked their lives to save the Jews. "Righteousness" was the word chosen. Yet can we apply righteousness to Oscar Schindler, a tough-minded businessman who lived hard and loved hard, whose main goal was to earn money, yet who saved his Jewish workers? And what do we say of a country such as Bulgaria, whose government willingly deported foreign Jews but saved close to fifty thousand of its own? Exaggerated language is a reflection of our exaggerated needs, which are genuine, appropriate and all too human. Paldiel speaks of goodness and of righteousness, but again and again, if we heed the words of those who saved Jewish lives as carefully as Paldiel does, we hear a very different story. Father Louis Celis, a Roman Catholic priest who saved the Rotenberg children in Belgium, said of himself that you insist on considering me a saint because I was unfortunately able to save only a few Jewish lives. But was this not an urgent and serious obligation of every person, Jew, Christian, or atheist, still worthy to be considered human? (pp. 76-77).

Eva Hermann, a German woman who hid a Jewish couple, wrote that "I am fully conscious of the fact that my late husband and I did nothing special; we simply tried to remain human in the midst of inhumanity." Righteousness, she said, "can have no other meaning than the attempt to do what is right and to live humanly even during times of inhumanity" (p. 155). We overstress the word righteousness as we mystify goodness, for we hesitate to speak of banality, the terminology of Hannah Arendt, when describing the opposite of evil. Yet with fear and trembling, I suggest that we look at the banality of the good. Anyone who has read Paldiel's important book will hear time and again that "we did nothing special. We merely treated our neighbors the way that one treats a neighbor when an occupying enemy comes to deport them." The good was natural, routine, commonplace. But given the dialectic of the Holocaust, the good was ordinary, commonplace behavior—except that the ordinary was nothing less than extraordinary. In this instance, the sum total of banal deeds was not banality but rather nobility. We must maintain the dialectic: we cannot let singularity of the circumstance obscure the banality of the deed, nor can we allow the banality of the deed to obscure its nobility. Paldiel helps us to see goodness in a new light, that of its ordinariness and its potential. And thus by indirection his work indicts those who did so little as against those who did what was so essential. MICHAEL BERENBAUM U.S. Holocaust Research Institute

Carol Rittner and John K. Roth (eds.), Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust. New York: Paragon House, 1993. 435 pp. This volume is a collection of twenty-six articles, all but two of which have previously appeared in print. Each of these selections makes for interesting reading, and

286

Book Reviews

each contains some important materials. By bringing them together, Rittner and Roth have performed an important service for those who want to learn about the fate of women during the Holocaust. This relatively new area of study was pioneered by Joan Ringelheim, a philosopher, feminist and a contributor to this volume. As a new perspective of study, women during the Holocaust promises to provide a new body of knowledge and new insights. When pursuing this path of research, however, we would do well to anticipate a number of potential difficulties. The most important among them is how to define what we wish to study. Do we want, for example, to examine all women's experiences during the German occupation—or do we wish to know only what happened to Jewish women? Clearly, the experiences of Jewish and Christian women were very different. We know, of course, that many Christian women suffered and perished. But the path to death was different for Jews and Christians. By blurring the distinctions between different victims, we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to collect more precise data. Each group deserves careful study, and only once this has been accomplished should the differences and similarities among Christian and Jewish victims, men and women, be compared and examined. In the case of concentration camps, there were significant differences in the experiences of Jewish and Christian inmates. Except for the very early phases of Hitler's rule, Jewish inmates had no contact with the outside world, whereas Christians could receive both letters and packages. The Jewish and Christian camp inmates were also treated very differently. Special death camps were built for Jews. When spared from immediate death, Jews were assigned to the hardest and most degrading jobs—jobs that were designed to kill. Jews received less food and of poorer quality. And when the war finally ended, Jewish inmates, having in most cases lost their families and homes, had nothing to come back to. The Christian inmates had homes to come to, families with whom to be reunited. Each of these facts has important consequences that ought to be studied. As in the study of any other aspect of the Holocaust, we must recognize the qualitative nature of the data regarding women's experiences in the Holocaust. When interpreting data, researchers are often tempted to apply quantitative and statistical measures. Although such measures may seem to add respectability to the findings, they are usually inappropriate, promising something the researcher cannot deliver. The inductive research method, in which the data is basically left to speak for itself, seems more appropriate to this field of study. Another caveat pertains to the avoidance of special agendas, particularly those of a political nature. Perhaps more than in other fields, political agendas in the area of Holocaust studies interfere with proper research and reduce the possibility of valid and significant findings. Notwithstanding, some researchers seem determined to show that women during the Holocaust were even more oppressed than men, that more women died than men. Actually the data to support or dispute these conclusions are simply not there. Selective figures that apply to a few deportations and to a few mass killings do not tell if women or men were more likely to survive. At best, they show that for some specific places and specific times men or women were more likely to be deported, and that in some selective environments men or women had a better chance to make it through the war. Evidence about the death rates of men and women is so scattered

Antisemitism, Holocaust and Genocide

287

and so incomplete that we cannot arrive at general and definitive answers. The most honest and correct statement would be that we do not know, that exact figures are unavailable. Moreover, I am convinced that knowing if more men or women died is much less important than knowing how men and women reacted, in different social contexts, to their surrounding conditions and to each other. I disagree with Ringelheim about the centrality of her question whether "more Jewish women than men [were] actually killed during the Holocaust" (p. 391). As far as the Germans were concerned, all Jews were destined to die, regardless of any other attributes—including gender. Here and there the Germans would give a respite to men and women, as when they needed specific slave laborers. But such occasional moves did not affect the overall Nazi goal. Nor did it affect a policy that aimed at humiliating and degrading the Jews before putting them to death. Rather than concentrating on elusive figures, we might examine the various roads that Jewish men and women took during the Holocaust, either to destruction or survival. To what extent did men's and women's behaviors and experiences differ, and in what ways were they similar? Sociologists view an individual in terms of his or her associations. A person is a Jew, a mother, a professional, a lover, and many other things. Each of these associations, or statuses, are then ranked in terms of their relative importance. Under the German occupation, the most important status was an individual's ethnic and "race" status. This was the master status, which determined the nature of all other associations. In some special situations and times, being a man as opposed to a woman might have been important—but it was never as important as being a Jew as opposed to an "Aryan." The centrality of ethnicity and race when compared to gender is emphasized by several of the contributors to Different Voices. Gisela Bock and Marion A. Kaplan stand out among them. In general, the quality of most of the articles is consistently high. Coming from a variety of disciplines they help broaden our perspective. In short, the editors of this volume have taken an important step in the right direction. NECHAMA TEC University of Connecticut

Teresa Swiebocka (ed.), Auschwitz: A History in Photographs. English version, ed. Jonathan Webber and Connie Wilsak. Bloomfield: Indiana University Press, 1993. 294pp.

To review Auschwitz: A History in Photographs is to be aware of the problem of photography's outer limits: its ability to communicate the true dimensions of ultimate extermination. True, the photographs assembled in this volume do provide the strongest possible evidence of Auschwitz's history. But this is one case in which, contrary to the well-known adage, one word, Auschwitz, is worth a thousand pictures. Take "Auschwitz" away, and the photographs reveal little about their subject's real nature. For what happened there, as a whole, is beyond the reach of

288

Book Reviews

normative reporting, information or realism. Moreover, even if a complete photographic report existed, it would be insupportable to viewers. A recent incident that occurred at Yad Vashem illustrates this point. Some local Orthodox circles protested against the display of photographs of naked Jewish women on the point of being murdered, defending the victims' posthumous right to dignity. How do you show in photographs—without extending viewers' sensibilities beyond their capacity—that "Auschwitz" means the transgression of all human codes? In part, this book succeeds in coping with its enormous task. It opens with photographic documentation of prisoners who are building some barracks, ovens and sewage lines: mater-of-fact information presented with German orderliness. However, nothing in the photographs tells you that these people are knowingly preparing gallows and graves for themselves and their loved ones. It is only this fact, only this knowledge that moves you while looking at these pictures. Interspersed both in this section and later, one sees civilians in front of boxcars; heaps of dead bodies; sick, wounded and emaciated people. To be sure, these are pictures of horror and death that cannot fail to evoke the reader's strongest emotions. But again (except for photographs of children in prison garb), such images by themselves, without prior knowledge or an accompanying text, could be depicting any war, deportation or famine. The text here fills the gap. Moreover, the juxtaposition of two sets of photographs—one documenting seemingly ordinary construction and the other a record of massacre—begins to tell the reader what Auschwitz was, specifically and uniquely: a thoroughly planned and cost-efficient mechanism of mass murder. The photographic discourse thus constructed does give the viewer a hint of reality. Something specific is still missing, as the editors themselves apparently realized, since they included as well a number of stills from a documentary film and a selection of artistic depictions. The latter show what photographs have omitted, namely humiliation and torture; but similar disasters of war and slavery have been with us before, and there was no Goya among the Auschwitz prisoners. A close examination of some of the photographs, moreover, reveals something that no Goya (or Wiesel or Spielberg) could have transmitted. On page 138, for example, two photographs show the arrival of a train of deportees: women and children stand on the platform in front of boxcars. Most show exhaustion and mistrust. But on the faces of two women, close to the right edge of one of the pictures, one can notice something resembling a smile. A smile, here? Yes—nothing in the journey prepared them for a photographer at its end, and they reacted to his camera with an almost universal human response. Obviously they took it as a sign of normality, a good omen. One might assume that this particular photograph was serendipitous in capturing a particularly surreal moment. It was not. The famous album of Auschwitz photographs taken by SS photographers from which this picture was chosen includes many more clearly smiling faces of new arrivals. To a historian, precisely the authenticity of these photographs, these smiles, constitutes evidence for the degree of perfection reached by German disinformation. A second (or is it a third?) photograph on the same page shows another aspect of the German strategy deployed toward newcomers. On the left side of the picture, an SS officer speaks to two Jewish women out of the crowd that has just descended

Antisemitism, Holocaust and Genocide

289

from the boxcars. Although his back partially obscures the women's faces, one can see that the two parties are standing calmly and close to one another. The officer's right hand is raised in what appears to be a gesture of reassurance; it even seems to lightly touch one of the women's shoulders. Here on the platform, the SS were trying both to maintain order and to induce self-confidence, since this was a sine qua non of Auschwitz's rapid and smooth functioning. I know what I am talking about; a few months after this picture was taken, I stood on the same platform. On the right edge of this photograph, an SS officer is seen holding a cane. It is an ordinary cane known in German as a Spazier'stock, or walking stick, usually used either by older people or as a sign of bourgeois dignity. Two other photographs, reproduced on page 143, show SS officers holding these canes. At a less extraordinary site, law enforcement officers would be equipped with sticks. But nothing was ordinary at Auschwitz. Canes could and were used to savagely beat people—but were also used as a piece of ingenious camouflage. This is the essence of photography: closely read, these pictures tell us even more than the photographer intended. No artist could have conceived the scenes just described, or considered them worthwhile to paint. Another revelation unintended by the photographer is found in the first of these pictures, which depicts Blockfuehrer Baretzky, an SS officer who later denied being in Auschwitz. Years after the war, this very photograph was used in court to refute his claim; no court would have relied on a drawn or painted portrait of Baretzky. Sometimes one is surprised that such people could have names like other humans. In other instances, one would like to know the name of the SS photographer—who, for example, took photograph no. 155 on page 147? It shows an old woman walking with four little children along a railroad track. She is bent with age or exhaustion, or else is simply leaning toward the children. Their faces remain hidden; all are seen walking away from the camera at a three-quarter profile. No other figures are in the frame. In the best tradition of documentary photography, such a picture could just as well be depicting migrant workers during the Depression, or a working-class grandmother calmly taking her little ones for a walk. But it doesn't. In the background, there is an electrified fence. This remarkable photograph also reveals its photographer: an SS officer with human feelings. Confronting the scene, he was suddenly more a photographer and less an SS soldier. There is no way he could have missed his own photograph's meaning. He knew in what direction that family was moving, just as the old woman knew. One photograph out of thousands, one SS soldier out of thousands—this is the most outstanding photograph in the book, along with two others taken clandestinely by Sonderkommando prisoners, which show them burning dead bodies in an open field. Also included in this volume are a number of head shots of Polish and Russian political prisoners that were taken by Gestapo photographers. Used in the book to illustrate chapter headings, these tripartate photographs—full-face, profile and three-quarter profile—are both further evidence of the camp administration's thoroughness and a powerful depiction of these prisoners' character, personality and dignity. These are strong and beautiful faces, and one wishes that more of them had been included and prominently displayed. Only the immensity of the racist genocide perpetrated by the Nazis pushes these heroes, political prisoners, to a minor place in

290

Book Reviews

this narrative. It should not. Their faces, too, are part of Auschwitz's history in photographs. YESHAYAHU NIR The Hebrew University

Erno Szep, The Smell of Humans: A Memoir of the Holocaust in Hungary. Budapest: Central European University, 1994. 173 pp.

In the midst of his tribulations as an elderly conscript into the Hungarian labor service system, Erno Szep promised himself that he would write about his experiences when he returned home. Szep, one of twentieth-century Hungary's foremost poets and writers of fiction and plays, made good on his promise. The resulting short memoir about his conscription into forced labor following the Nazi occupation of Budapest in March 1944 was first published in Hungarian in 1945. This memoir, titled Emberszag, was Szep's last major work before his death in Budapest in October 1953 at the age of 69. It has been said that the difference between the perspective of the historian and that of the witness is that the former, from his temporally removed vantage point, sees much of the forest spread out before him, whereas the latter primarily sees those trees that are directly in his path. Because Szep is a masterful writer who is able to articulate his thoughts and experience with great facility, his memoir allows the student of the Holocaust almost to feel what the author felt as he was undergoing the pain and myriad indignities of being a forced laborer for German-dominated Hungary in the autumn of 1944. Szep's book reads like a series of vignettes of the events and the people he encountered during this short, but telling, period in his life. He begins his story with the day he was conscripted, October 20, 1944, then flashes back to the period of Budapest under German occupation between March 19, 1944, and October 15, 1944. Szep's descriptions of what are usually the very human aspects of his travails are often written in muted tones, but they resonate with his penetrating, ironic and sometimes even humorous insights. Written with the eye of a poet, they are often punctuated by barbs that unerringly cut through the air to hit their mark. Describing how the mostly sixtyish men in his building were rounded up for forced labor, for example, Szep recounts the way in which one of the young members of the fascist Arrow Cross screams at a man who has put on his gloves because the strings of his packages are cutting into his fingers. "That boy was quite handsome," Szep notes, he wore his long hair slickly plastered down. In civilian life he could have passed for an art student. I think he must have worked in a factory; he was probably someone who yelled himself hoarse at a soccer game. Perhaps he was not a bad fellow, and it was only the revolver, the bayonet, and the ideology, of course, that had turned him into a wild beast (pp. 5-6).

Antisemitism, Holocaust and Genocide

291

And in a later passage, he again addresses the subject of the bestiality of his persecutors—this time the German SS men who could be found walking the streets of Budapest: Our executioners, the SS boys dressed in black, strutted our streets free and easy, eyeing the women and the merchandise in the shop windows, meanwhile completely ignoring or simply laughing at us. Some of them were handsome, seemingly clean-cut young men. In general, many of the Germans look remarkably like ordinary human beings created in God's image (p. 38).

Describing the Jews' rush to obtain Swedish protective papers during the summer of 1944, Szep writes that "the whole neighborhood was off and running." But not all. A certain Mr. T. did not join this rush, instead putting his faith in fate as determined both by God and his own analysis of the situation. Mr. T. was certain that, owing to internal SS and Wehrmacht squabbling, the Germans would lose control and the Jews would be reprieved. This, of course, did not occur, and Szep drives home the tragedy of those who put their trust in fate or their own wishful thinking in a compassionate, parenthetical remark ("later in the autumn Mr. T. was deported to Germany, where this wonderful, kind man perished") (p. 35). For his part, Szep acquired Swedish papers, and then attempted to obtain a letter of exemption from forced labor from the Hungarian Regent Miklos Horthy, despite his moral dilemma regarding the letter. Szep felt uneasy separating himself from the fate of his fellow Jews, but was persuaded to exploit his status as a well-known literary figure because he felt the exemption might help him obtain more food for those close to him. In the end it was the Swedish papers that led to his release from forced labor. Despite his efforts, Szep could not really believe that he, like the rest of Hungarian Jewry, was slated to be murdered by the Nazi extermination machine. He writes of the murder of a 12-year-old boy who had lived in his building: "It was not the first time that I heard about Jews being taken to the gas chambers in Germany. But I did not believe it. And I still cannot believe it. Deep down I cannot believe it. I just cannot" (p. 45). At times, Szep's descriptions of the petty cruelty and indignities suffered by his elderly fellow forced laborers are satirically rendered in a manner reminiscent of The Good Soldier Schweik. Other passages, however, are much more consonant with the tragedy of which he was part. At one point during a march, an elderly man with diabetes collapses. When he "refuses" to stand up, he is shot to death by a guard. After this, Szep writes: "We marched on in silence. This was how a life was extinguished now: no announcement, no glass hearse with wreaths, no high-flown funeral orations, no family members in mourning, no old friends around to cast a lump of earth into your grave" (p. 83). Szep himself describes being hit on the head by a guard (luckily, the blow only glances him and does not cause him real injury). In his words—revealing both his strong sense of human dignity and his precious sense of the ironic—"it seemed so comical to be hit on the head at the age of sixty by a dumb boy that I was at pains not to laugh out loud. Imagine what would have happened if he had caught me laughing at him" (p. 120).

292

Book Reviews

Along with the cruelties he describes, Szep mentions instances of more humane behavior among the Hungarian soldiers whom he encountered. As they pass the small village of Fot and reach a tavern where they stop to rest, a lieutenant orders the waitress to bring out beer mugs full of water for hundreds of parched throats, then makes a toast for a better future. But when an Arrow Cross man passes by, the lieutenant calls out to the Jewish laborers to be quiet and orderly (pp. 86-87). Back at the labor camp, another soldier, a gentile named Szep, decides that he is the author's relative, and thus frequently brings him extra food and other items. Szep tries to keep an open mind regarding the Germans as well, but ultimately he has much less sympathy for them than for the Hungarians. With elegance and wit, he expresses his disgust at Nazi German culture, using the metaphor of a man of letters: "Myself, I look for the exceptions among the Germans, those who are innocent. But I must admit that I can no longer stand the sight of Gothic script. It bristles with bayonets" (p. 165). The events that Szep describes in his memoir do not lie at the heart of the Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry. He was not a witness to the unspeakable barbarity of Auschwitz or the mass murder Aktionen by the Arrow Cross thugs on the banks of the Danube in the autumn of 1944. His experience was not as awful as that of other Hungarian Jews. Yet his experience was awful, it was tragic, and it was even ludicrous. The very idea of taking men of sixty some years of age to a work camp to dig trenches is absurd. Like so much of the suffering of the Holocaust years, it is offensive to the human spirit. Szep's ability to convey his story, to let loose his barbs and to harness his wit, is a tribute to that very spirit. ROBERT ROZETT Yad Vashem

History and the Social Sciences

Gary A. Abraham, Max Weber and the Jewish Question: A Study of the Social Outlook of His Sociology. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992. xii + 317 pp.

With several hundred books devoted in their entirety to an analysis of Max Weber's work (the University of Pennsylvania library contains 226 of them) plus several thousand articles and chapters in books (see Kivisto's Max Weber, A BioBibliography [1988]) a doctoral candidate might be forgiven some trepidation about how to produce a "new contribution to scholarly knowledge." Yet Gary Abraham's contribution goes beyond his predecessors. His secret is context, context and context. Abraham details the impact of Weber's social philosophy, and that regnant in liberal German circles, on Weber's methodological categories generally and on his attitudes toward the place of Jews in Germany in particular. As a sociology of cognitive knowledge, this work complements Arthur Mitzman's two works, The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber (1970) and Sociology and Estrangement: Three Sociologists in Germany: Tonnies, Sombart, and Michels (1973). As a sociology of Jewry, it parallels Freddy Raphael's Judaisme et Captalisme: essai sur la controverse entre Weber et Sombart (1982). Abraham does not refer to my own favorite discussion of Weber's methodology in Talcott Parsons' The Structure of Social Action (1938). Parsons, who studied with Alfred Weber, was responsible, more than anyone else, for bringing Weber to the attention of the English-speaking world, especially to the social science community. Abraham had an excellent guide to Weber's political and academic speeches and correspondence in Marianne Weber's Max Weber: A Biography (1975). Using this work, he tracks Weber's associations with Rickert, Schmoller, Troeltsch and Harnack, and documents his role in the Verein fur Sozialpolitik und Sozialwissenschaft and other associations. For a background on liberal social philosophy and its bearers and opponents in Wilhelmian Germany, the author draws upon Wolfgang Mommsen's Max Weber and German Politics (1890-1920) (published in 1985), and with respect to Jews, he consults Uriel Tal's Christians and Jews in Germany: Religion, Politics and Ideology in the Second Reich, 1870-1914 (1975). Beyond some footnotes in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber did not develop his thoughts on the Jewry of his time. Ancient Judaism represents his most sustained effort to link the Jews to the evolution of rational thought. Abraham suggests that his neglect of post-talmudic Jewry did not matter to Weber, since he was persuaded that the Jews were and had been a "pariah people" 293

294

Book Reviews

since the Babylonian exile. Modeling this concept after the Indian caste, he defined pariahs as being "characterized by political and social disprivilege and a farreaching distinctiveness in economic functioning" (p. 8). For Weber, Jewish pariah status is rooted in aspects of religious ideology that did not change from the period of Ezra to the present. Drawing upon Max Scheler's idea of ressentiment, Weber argued that pariahs make a virtue of suffering and anticipate a final cosmic vengeance wreaked upon their oppressors. As a liberal in Wilhelmian Germany, Weber sought the resolution of the Jewish question in the "radical effacement of Jewish identity, the assimilation of the Jews into German society without remainder" (p. x). This attitude was tied to a more general antipluralism. As modernity replaced traditional society, there was no longer a place for subnational units within the German Kulturstaat. A national German culture had no place for minority cultures. This applied equally to German Catholics and ethnic Poles resident in Germany (recall that the area of Posen/Poznan was German at this time). The conservatives of the German majority—those such as Heinrich Treitschke, Adolphe Stoecker and Wilhelm Marr—formulated a theory of German national culture based on a biological concept of race. For them, assimilation of the minorities was not possible; emigration from Germany was the only solution. Weber sympathized with Treitschke's "secular integral nationalism," but along with other liberals, he preferred a model of race based on culture or "ethnic mentality rooted in common memory. ... To the degree that they could not or would not identify with a common historical memory of the German nation, Jews were . . . characterized as a 'foreign racial tribe'" (p. 89). In Weber's view, religious conversion and intermarriage demonstrated that the Jews could successfully assimilate. It was Werner Sombart, Weber's colleague on the editorial board of the Archive fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, who brought the Jews front and center in his The Jews and Modern Capitalism—a challenge to Weber's The Protestant Ethic. Abraham, comparing the two, concludes that Weber's position differed little from that of Sombart. The latter traced the historical effects of "Jewish rationalism" on modern capitalism, arguing that Jews brought a spirit of enterprise to the economy and developed financial instruments that were standardized across numerous transactions. Weber was concerned with rational "motive" or ethic and the personality type it promoted, and with the rationalization of human behavior in bureaucratic economic organizations. Abraham could have argued that Weber and Sombart differed methodologically. Weber, as a "methodological individualist," examined the impact of religious doctrine on the personality of the individual, whereas Sombart took the collective as his analytic focus. The dynamic was the Hegelian Geist, objectified differently for different national cultures. Like Durkheim's "collective consciousness," the Jewish collective spirit worked through individual personalities to manifest itself in enterprise and rational behavior. Weber, Abraham points out, tended to ignore Jews both because they were numerically marginal to European society and because he was primarily interested in the shift from traditional to modern social organization among Christian groups. As noted, he was critical of Jews who would maintain a distinct ethnic community

History and the Social Sciences

295

in Germany but not unfriendly to Jews who would assimilate. Abraham has Sombart, on the other hand, giving antisemitic lectures and recommending the exclusion of Jews from key German occupations such as government and the military. He cites Sombart's The Future of the Jews (1912) as excerpted in Jehuda Reinharz' Fatherland or Promised Land: The Dilemma of the German Jew, 1893-1914 (1975, p. 224). The original work, Die Zukunft der Juden, currently available in its original in American libraries, seems never to have been translated into English in its entirety.1 However, Sombart also lent his weight and prestige to the hope for Jewish self-realization in Palestine; whereas Weber, in a letter to E.J. Lesser, was dismissive of secular Zionist aspirations that neglected the rebuilding of the Temple—a requirement for the reestablishment of Jewish dignity and solidarity (p. 270 ff). Weber's work, especially his sociology of religion, is sometimes thought of as a demonstration of the functionally independent role of ideas in shaping social action, a response to Marx' materialist conception of history. Abraham concludes that, more fundamentally, Weber was in agreement with Marx that a sociological analysis should concentrate on class analysis, and that status groups would disappear in modern society. Jews qua Jews were an anachronism. That Weber was critical of the social policies of certain status groups such as the Junkers is clear. That he believed the continued existence of the Junkers to be an impediment to the evolution of the German Kulturstaat and the Nationalokonomie is less evident. Weber's relation to Sombart and the place he assigns to class analysis merits more discussion. Abraham has made a major contribution to Weber studies by placing this politically active intellectual in his Wilhelmian context. He demonstrates that social context does influence not only the substance of social theories but also the very conceptual framework in which theories are formulated. SAMUEL Z. KLAUSNER University of Pennsylvania

Note 1. An interesting footnote, which may have eluded Abraham, is that a Hebrew translation appeared in 1912 in Kiev as 'Atidot 'am yisrael. Zionist circles there saw Sombart as a major intellectual figure and were not displeased with the notion that the Jews had their own peculiar Geist paralleling that of the Germans.

Shmuel Almog, Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira (eds.), Ziyonut vedat (Zionism and Religion). Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 1994. 416 pp.

This volume, so the editors inform us, is the outcome of a conference on the topic of Zionism and religion held at Brandeis University in 1990 (an English version has more recently appeared). The topic is treated historically. None of the essays is devoted to Zionism and religion following the establishment of the state, much less

296

Book Reviews

the current period, although there are a few passing references to the contemporary scene. Following a general introduction by Shlomo Avineri—the only author to try and place the subject matter in a general context of religion and nationalism—the remaining twenty papers are divided into four sections. With the exception of two articles, the division is based on different geographic areas where Zionism developed. The first section contains five papers on modernity and tradition in Eastern Europe during the early Zionist period. This is followed by five papers on religious Orthodoxy, liberalism and Zionism in Western Europe during that same period. The third section contains five papers on Zionism in the United States, focusing on the religious movements (Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Judaism) and their attitudes toward Zionism, mostly before 1930. The final five papers appear in a section titled "the place of the tradition in Zionism and in the Yishuv." The last two articles in this section, however, are a bit out of place. One, by Haim Shatzker, deals with religion in Zionist youth groups in Germany; and a final article by Yaron Tzur recounts the efforts of a Zionist shaliah among the Atlas mountain Jewry, where religion plays a prominent role. The volume follows the unfortunate custom of Israeli publications of not providing any biographical information about the authors: we are not even told their institutional affiliation. Only a few papers are synthetic in nature and seek to draw some general conclusions. What we have, for better or for worse, are a set of scholarly papers written by authorities in specific areas who rely on their previous scholarship, sometimes on their previously published books and articles, to present papers on fairly narrow topics. There are a few exceptions. I think that Anita Shapira's article on religious currents in Labor Zionism is one such exception. But for the most part, one has the feeling that the authors either were not challenged or did not trouble themselves to think about the answers to broad questions that a thoughtful person might raise about Zionism and religion. Stated somewhat differently, upon finishing the book I asked myself what I now knew about Zionism and religion that I didn't know before; and the answer was practically nothing. Notwithstanding, I certainly learned a great deal about aspects, personalities and incidents in modern Jewish history in which Zionism and religion played some role. This is standard fare for volumes based on conference papers; it is true for other volumes of essays as well, and one must be grateful that the papers are of a generally high quality. The authors are all eminent authorities in their fields, and only two papers (in my judgement) do not merit publication. Nineteen out of twenty-one is an excellent record. As far as I can tell, the only paper to challenge conventional wisdom is Jeffrey Gurock's well-documented paper on American Orthodoxy and Zionism. Gurock demonstrates, contrary to what a number of scholars have claimed, that the rabbinical elite of American Orthodoxy was sympathetic to Zionism until the late 1930s and 1940s, when the divisions within Orthodoxy—symbolized after the 1930s by Mizrachi and Agudat Yisrael—were sharpened. Without detracting in any way from Gurock's fine paper, 1 find it disturbing that any scholar ever thought otherwise. This reflects more than an ignorance of American Orthodox Judaism, it also betrays an insensitivity to the nature of American as opposed to European Zionism.

History and the Social Sciences

297

In the case of Eastern Europe, Zionism was an ideological alternative to the Orthodox conception of Judaism and had to be either reinterpreted or opposed. In the United States, Zionism—which is to say, support for the Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel—was not viewed, certainly not by the masses, as an ideology, but rather as an expression of yidishkeyt. Committed Jews supported it. In general, the more committed one was, the greater was one's support. What does the topic "Zionism and religion" mean? Possibly many things. Attitudes of Zionist leaders and/or the Zionist masses toward the Jewish religion and attitudes of the religious elite and/or the religious masses toward Zionism come to mind first. This is the standard form in which the topic is treated, with an emphasis on elites rather than masses (masses are generally ignored by classical historical scholarship, and it is classical historical scholarship that dominates the field of Zionist studies). Most of the essays in the volume treat the topic in this fashion. A more subtle approach to the topic is to ask what impact Zionism had on Judaism and what impact Judaism had on Zionism. This is a far more difficult question with which to deal. To answer the question requires the combined skills of a sociologist of religion, a student of intellectual history and a historian. Avineri's general introduction makes a stab in this direction, and I find it reflected in articles by Anita Shapira and Shmuel Almog as well. Shapira's distinction between the Jewish religion proper (halakhah), the Jewish tradition and yidishkeyt seems to me very useful. Both Shapira and Almog go one step further by discussing not only the impact of Judaism on Zionism, but the place of religion, broadly defined as a spiritual quest, within the Yishuv. It would be unfortunate to leave the reader with a sense that the essays that comprise this volume are not good. Almost all are good and some are very good. But it would be misleading to leave anybody, least of all the editors, with the impression that they have offered us a volume of significance. CHARLES S. LIEBMAN Bar-Ilan University

Alan Astro (ed.), Discourses of Jewish Identity in Twentieth-Century France. Yale French Studies 85. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. 265 pp.

A number of recent studies of French Jewry have emphasized its growing similarity to the American Jewish community. Nowhere is this more evident than in the obsession of French Jews with defining their own identity in the diaspora. Like American Jews, Jews in France often find themselves caught between conflicting loyalties and constantly need to assess the boundaries between their commitments to Jewish and general concerns. Like their American counterparts, they face the challenge of both assimilation and antisemitism. Yet there are at least two aspects of the French Jewish experience that distinguish it from American Jewish life. In France, social and political pressures to assimilate have been far greater than in the United States and thus the dilemma of dual loyalties

298

Book Reviews

has been particularly pointed and acute. Second unlike American Jewry, the French Jews' experience with antisemitism has been a direct and painful one, culminating in the deportation of tens of thousands of men, women and children to their deaths in the Second World War. As a result, French Jewish consciousness has been marked by, on the one hand, a desperate desire to belong and, on the other, the bitter memory of persecution. As one of the contributors to the volume under review poignantly notes, Jews in contemporary France find themselves trapped "somewhere between La Place de 1'Etoile and la place de 1'etoile" (p. 244)—the latter "place of the star" referring to the yellow patch worn by Jews during the Nazi era. This special edition of Yale French Studies seeks to examine the myriad ways in which both French Jewish intellectuals have defined their own identity and French culture has viewed the Jew in the twentieth century. The work is divided into two sections—"Literary Texts" and "Cultural Contexts"—that reflect this dual concern. Of the twenty-four contributions, a number of selections stand out, including an enchanting excerpt from Paula Jacques' novel, Aunt Carlotta's Legacy, which reveals the attitudes of Egyptian Jews in France; Armand Lunel's fictional account of the response of the Jews of Carpentras to the arrival of Alfred Dreyfus; Seth Wolitz's essay on how the Jew has been perceived in French intellectual circles since Emancipation; and Annette Wieviorka's insightful study of Jewish identity in the first accounts of Holocaust survivors in France. On the whole, however, the collection is an uneven effort that suffers from the lack of a clearly articulated unifying theme. The volume would have benefited greatly from a foreword or an afterword that explained the reasons for and the major components of the present-day search for an intellectually consistent and emotionally satisfying French Jewish identity. Unfortunately, the introductory essay by the editor, Alan Astro, is little more than an excursion into postmodernist literary analysis, filled with wordplay, kabbalistic musings and fanciful leaps of imagination. If the eclectic collection has a central concern, it is the manner in which both Jewish and French intellectuals concerned about Jews have been influenced by JeanPaul Sartre's work "Reflexions sur la question juive." In many ways, the struggle to define a distinctive Jewish identity in France over the past thirty years has involved the effort to demonstrate that the Jew is more than a negativity, i.e. the paradigmatic Other, but a self-directed and self-sustaining group, which as Elisabeth de Fontenay argues in her essay, is comfortable with its "quant a soi" (pp. 217-223)—a term that can be defined as "keeping to oneself," as well as "dignity and integrity." The result, as the majority of the selections in the volume suggest, has often been less than successful, involving masking, self-deception and despair. Yet not all efforts by Jews to define their own raison d'etre in French society have been problematic. Indeed, recent historical and sociological works by such scholars as Pierre Birnbaum, Michael Graetz and Paula Hyman strongly suggest that French Jews in the postemancipation era have often proudly and openly displayed their commitment to their religious tradition and ethnic heritage. It is therefore unfortunate that the editor did not choose to include in the collection the writings of modern Jewish writers who claim to have successfully surmounted the difficulties of self-definition in France. One thinks immediately of writers such as Shmuel Trigano and members of the Centre Bernard Lecache who, albeit in de-

History and the Social Sciences

299

cidedly different ways, have attempted to forge a distinct Jewish identity that transcends the boundaries of the traditional definition of "francais israelite." One might also have included selections from or at least detailed analyses of the writings of Edmond Fleg, Andre Spire and Manes Sperber. Noticeably missing as well are expressions of traditional observance and belief, which have gained a significant following among a small but dedicated group of young French Jews over the past decade. 1 am especially surprised that there is no essay devoted to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, who has become the most influential French Jewish thinker in the contemporary world. The only clear defense of Orthodoxy in the volume is an essay by Rabbi Mayer Jais of the Consistoire—a piece whose call for a return to religious sources seems ironic given the fact that this spiritually weak and unimaginative central religious body has often been accused of being largely responsible for the vapidness of French Jewish religious life and for the alienation of many French Jews from their spiritual roots. Despite its many limitations, the Yale volume does serve an extremely valuable purpose in introducing the English-speaking reader to the complex discussion of identity among a select group of French Jewish intellectuals, many of whom are little known outside of their country. It speaks volumes about the nature of that discussion that the book was produced at an American university and not in France itself. DAVID WEINBERG Wayne State University

Avraham Barkai, Branching Out: German-Jewish Immigration to the United States, 1820-1914. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1994. 269 pp.

German Jews hold a notable place in American Jewish history and in American Jewish popular consciousness. The prevailing paradigm of American Jewish history places the narrative of German Jewish immigration at the center of a communal morality tale. The usual rendition begins with the penniless young peddlers from Bavaria and elsewhere in "Germany" in the early nineteenth century who, after lonely years of privation on the road, catapult themselves from poverty into the ranks of the American middle class—and indeed, into the loftier zones of the elite. They brought with them a devotion to things German, the story continues, viewed themselves as Germans as much as they identified with their Jewishness and, in America, became part of a German social world. Moreover, these highly successful (and very Reform) Jews stood arrogantly at the gates of the American Jewish world in the 1880s, when the massive flow of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe commenced. The ensuing tense and tendentious interchange between these two "groups" of Jews provided the leitmotif for almost all narratives of twentiethcentury American Jewry. Avraham Barkai's Branching Out promises to be an antidote to this less than accurate telling. Barkai questions many of the specific details of the grand narrative:

300

Book Reviews

How many of these immigrants really did make a living as peddlers? How many indeed rose to spectacular wealth? How intensely did they forge a common bond with non-Jewish German immigrants in America? Barkai answers all these questions in such a way as to dismiss much of what has heretofore been written on the subject. 1 Instead, he argues that up to the 1880s, American Jewry functioned as a branch of German Jewry—hence the book's title—and that the German Jews, whether in Germany or on the western side of the Atlantic, behaved in similar ways. In terms of occupation, demographics and culture, German Jews in Germany and those in America resembled each other and, as such, American Jewish life functioned as a German outpost. German Jews in the United States, like all immigrants— a point never alluded to by Barkai, who seems to assert that this characteristic was somehow peculiarly Jewish or German—maintained close ties with friends and relatives back home. They facilitated the continuous migration of kin to the United States, contributed money to Jewish institutions in the towns and regions of origin, and kept abreast of political developments there. German Jews on either side of the ocean also made a living in strikingly similar ways, with commerce, ranging from peddling (which he claims to have been less important than other historians have maintained) to petty merchandising and manufacturing of clothing, functioning as the backbone of both economies. Barkai seeks to debunk several of the other "myths" of German Jewish immigration. He notes that it did not end in 1871 with the unification of Germany and the final emancipation of the Jews. Rather, he tracks a fairly large flow after 1871 that extended until 1914. In these four decades a substantial number of German Jewish immigrants, some 70,000, made their way to America alongside the larger influx of East European coreligionists. According to Barkai, these German Jewish immigrants differed from their predecessors. By and large, they were better off and migrated not for economic reasons, as had those who preceded them, but in order to flee antisemitism and military conscription. Barkai indicates that many also chose to relocate in the United States because they had family awaiting them there. Barkai deserves thanks for extending the dates of the German Jewish immigration and for presenting fine comparative information about the pre- and post-1871 German Jewish immigrants. However, his book leaves much material unexamined and unanalyzed. Branching Out abounds with loose ends, unsubstantiated assertions and ideas that are thrown out without being developed or linked to the book's central thesis. In general, Barkai presents information without much analysis, often without any. In other places, sweeping generalizations lack a rich base of data. Barkai's lack of familiarity with American history also deprives the material of a needed dense contextualization. This last point is perhaps excusable, given that Barkai makes no claims to being an American historian, although perhaps he should have availed himself of additional immersion in the subject before venturing to deal with this topic. Yet even from the point of view of material that falls squarely into Barkai's domain—German Jewish history—much more could have been accomplished here. For example, Barkai asserts that the pre-1871 migration (sometimes he dates it as being that of 1860) stemmed primarily from Bavaria, Franconia and Bohemia. However, he then proceeds to present impressive, detailed statistical material from Bavaria alone.

History and the Social Sciences

301

Bohemia, part of the Austrian empire, gets utterly lost in Barkai's analysis. Did the processes of emancipation and integration there proceed exactly the same as they did in Bavaria? Did the Jews from Bohemia so thoroughly resemble those from Bavaria that they deserved no analysis in their own name? By conflating the various locations and using Bavaria as the stand-in for all that was "German," Barkai not only belies his expertise in German Jewish history but also adds to one of the longstanding myths of this field: the myth of the singular "German" Jew. Barkai's treatment of the later wave, the post-1871 group, is static and confused. He repeatedly asserts that these Jews were better off than those who went before them. Yet he also notes that they were more likely to come from the former Polish duchy of Posen than from Bavaria. The Jews of Posen probably resembled those of Eastern Europe more closely than they did those of the western parts of Germany, and their economic development stood at a much lower level. By and large they did not speak German, and their cultural outlook could be described as more traditional, less Western. Barkai neglects to analyze the cultural situation of these immigrants and he fails to come to terms with what made them different. Absent in this book is modernization as an ongoing process in the lives of German Jews. The German Jews who migrated in this period did not, as presented by Barkai, undergo assimilation, modernization or integration into German culture. Indeed they seem to be merely more affluent versions of the German Jews who migrated earlier in the century. The dynamic of this revolutionary period in the history of German Jewry is utterly lost in the statistical details of occupation and demography. The contribution that Barkai claims to be making and that he offers as "innovative" involves the presentation of new facts. His book, however, ploughs no new conceptual ground, and its thorough reliance on standard secondary sources detracts from the author's worthy goal of reexamining well-worn and flat portrayals. HASIA DINER New York University

Note 1. Barkai does not, however, note the publication of my book A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820-1880, the second volume in the five-volume series by Johns Hopkins University Press, The Jewish People in America (Baltimore and London: 1992), where I deal with all of these issues and offer a very different counternarrative.

David Cesarani, The "Jewish Chronicle" and Anglo-Jewry, 1841-1991. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. xiv + 329 pp.

No one would question that the Jewish Chronicle of London stands unique among the world's weekly Jewish newspapers. After once suspending publication between 1842 and 1844 it has never missed an issue, even when its headquarters and records

302

Book Reviews

were annihilated during the German bombing of London. The newspaper has been independent, never under outside control, and it has regularly taken controversial positions. While focusing on Anglo-Jewry, the JC's news coverage has been worldwide. Aside from being the indispensable source for 150 years of Anglo-Jewish history, it also ranks as an important source for modern Jewish history. Although the ownership of the JC has often been complex and divided, there has usually been a single forceful and determined editor. Men like Abraham Benisch in the nineteenth century, Leopold Greenberg in the early decades of this century and William Frankel in the recent past have placed on the JC their respective stamps of comprehensive Jewish interests, Zionism, and religious pluralism and moderation. Its editors' positions have aroused furious controversy, even within the newspaper's board of directors and its editorial office. As to the JC's influence, it may suffice to say that the issuance of the Balfour Declaration was held up to allow "The Organ of Anglo-Jewry" to be the first to announce it. A journal with so long a history, such wealth of information and vigorous viewpoints obviously merits a history. The JC itself wrote much of its history at various anniversaries. David Cesarani's work supersedes a predecessor, The Jewish Chronicle: A Century of Newspaper History (1949), that was written but not signed by Cecil Roth. Cesarani pays a degree of attention to British newspaper history but almost none to the history of the Jewish press except for the JC's many rivals. He concentrates on the JC's intimate connection with the history of Jewish life in Britain at all its social levels. He is attentive to the economic history of the newspaper and even more so to the complexities of its ownership and management, especially after the death of Greenberg in 1931. Cesarani makes the best of the handicap that the records of the newspaper were reduced to ashes during the air raid of December 29, 1940. He has successfully written a century of JC history before that disaster by working from the internal evidence of the newspaper itself and from extensive secondary literature. The backbone of his history is the JC's editorial policies relating to the events of Anglo-Jewish history that it narrated in its news columns. Deprived of archival records, Cesarani relies on his own fine understanding of Anglo-Jewish and modern Jewish history, and writes independently and with critical sympathy. Perhaps he is a bit coy whether this is an "authorized" history or not, but he acknowledges extensive help from leading JC figures of its recent past. The outcome is a thoroughly admirable historical work. I could call it a model of the way to write the history of a periodical, except that no Jewish publication exists that is comparable to the JC. Rather than mention the extremely few slips in his book I would rather commend to the reader Cesarani's sensitive account of the JC's reporting of the Holocaust while it happened. Early caution over repeating anything resembling the "atrocity stories" of the First World War was followed by accurate reporting—but in a minor key—and from late 1942, by full, prominent coverage and editorial fury. Such writing testifies "like a hundred witnesses" to the superior quality of Cesarani's work. LLOYD P. GARTNER Tel-Aviv University

History and the Social Sciences

303

Christopher Clark, The Politics of Conversion: Missionary Protestantism and the Jews in Prussia 1728-1941. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. 340 pp.

In the beginning was Luther, who called upon Jews (unsuccessfully) to convert to Christianity. In the end was Hitler, who did not distinguish between Jews and "Jewish Christians." The Politics of Conversion is not a book about the German Sonderweg. It is a well-researched institutional study on the policy of a number of Prussian institutions toward "Protestant Jews," those Jews who were converted to Christianity. Its main focus is the Institutum Judaicum in Halle, the Berlin Missionary Society and other missionary societies in Prussia, as well as those Prussian authorities who dealt with the "Jewish Question" from the eighteenth century until the Third Reich. The book's main thesis is that Jews who converted to Protestantism, and the missions who encouraged them, made it through the nineteenth century and the Weimar period, but could not survive the "racial state" of the Nazis. Regarding the first half of this thesis, the author shows how the low profile of antisemitism in most Prussian state institutions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries enabled both the converted Jews and their "friends" to operate almost without obstacles. Converted Jews, known as "Friends of Israel," were allied with the Prussian Protestant Church until well into the Weimar period. To date, the study of Jewish missions in Prussia has been the domain of theologians and church historians,1 with most works attempting to rebut charges that missionary work among the German Jews led, directly or indirectly, to the terrible consequences of the Nazi era. Moral and sociopolitical motives thus underlie most of the literature; scant attention has been paid to the converted Jews themselves. Clark's book also does not deal with this issue, perhaps because only a small fraction of German Jews converted to Christianity, such that it is hard to come to any conclusions concerning their social and cultural profile. Avoiding this topic, then, Clark chooses to focus on the politics of conversion and the Prussian church and state, analyzing numerous unpublished printed reports of various missionary societies— including the Berlin Society records, which had been taken by the Gestapo after 1941 and presumed by many scholars to have been destroyed. Clark's main interest is in depicting the ways in which missionaries, and the many Christians who helped and sustained them, imagined and depicted the act of conversion. Chapters 1 and 2 consider the theological and social context in which the Institutum Judaicum was established. Clark stresses an interesting connection between pietism and conversion. He argues that pietist missionaries expected the Jew to move out of the "Jewish" sectors of economy (small trades, begging) and to adopt one of the guild-controlled trades. Thus, social motives played an important role in encouraging Jews to convert; religion emerged as a central motive only in the following century. Chapters 3 and 4 argue that missionary activity benefited from the convergence of religious revival and the Prussian confessionalized policy. The legal emancipation of the Jews in 1869 encouraged missionary activity, though the author also examines the ways in which missions made contact with the Jewish population before emanci-

304

Book Reviews

pation (ch. 5). Clark shows how missionary activity was a volunteer effort before the 1850s, not becoming mainstream church policy until the 1860s (ch. 6). In chapter 7, Clark deals with an interesting problem: the missionaries' responses to the new form of racial antisemitism. They adopted an ambivalent attitude toward antisemitism, he argues, going along with many social arguments but rejecting race as the decisive factor in Christian-Jewish relations. Defending their work, the missionaries at the same time would often employ antisemitic rhetoric; though officially (together with the Church of Prussia), they rejected antisemitism. The political upheavals of the post-First World War years and increased Jewish social emancipation intensified the missionaries' dilemma vis-a-vis antisemitism. Although they stood firmly against the volkisch antisemitism, and even against the German Protestant Church and Union—which became more and more radically anti-Jewish—they felt increasingly isolated. After the Nazi Machtergreifung, the missions were more than ever the objects of hostile attention. After 1935, the Berlin Society was the only mission to the Jews still operating in Germany. It was attacked during the Kristalnacht of November 1938, though it was not forced to close until 1941. As noted, Clark does not investigate the Christian Jews themselves. We do not know who they were in the nineteenth century and what happened to their descendants in 1941. This is a major missing piece in Clark's overall story, one that must await a future researcher. Until then, however, we must admire Clark's study, and his use of hitherto unutilized sources, to explore a little-known episode of ChristianJewish relations over the past two centuries. ODED HEILBRONNER The Hebrew University

Note 1. The most important article to date on Jewish missions in Prussia is Martin Schmidt's article, ".Judentum und Christentum im Pietismus des 17. und 18. Jahrhundert," in Kirche und Synagog. Eine Handbuch zur Geschichte von Christen und Juden, 2 vols., ed. K.H. Rengstorff and S. V. Kortzfleich (Stuttgart: 1968-1970). The most recent volume of the Leo Baeck Year Book (vol. 40), published in 1995, contains four new articles on the converted Jews.

David Englander (ed.), A Documentary History of Jewish Immigrants in Britain 1840-1920. London: Leicester University Press/Pinter Publishers, 1994. xv + 380 pp. The expansion of Jewish studies as a discipline on American campuses over the past thirty years has brought in its wake a proliferation of English-language historical "source books." Perhaps the most well known and widely used of the genre is The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, which was first published in 1980.

History and the Social Sciences

305

David Englander, a lecturer at the Open University in Britain, has at last produced a long overdue source book for students of Anglo-Jewish history. Perhaps he is being overly optimistic. Precious few formal courses on Anglo-Jewish history are available at British universities, let alone anywhere else in the world. The subject is still struggling for legitimacy in the eyes of British academia, having to vie for attention amid the welter of fashionable courses on ethnic minority studies and race relations. Nevertheless, interest in the history of Britain's oldest ethnic minority is growing— and not only among Jews themselves. Englander's book makes accessible much material of interest to the general reader as well as to undergraduates obliged to study what used to be affectionately termed "gobbets" by their predecessors. Englander arranges the documents he has chosen around nine self-explanatory themes. He opens with "The Jewish Immigrant," which examines the Russian background to the immigration. This is followed by "Anglo-Jewry: Status and Institutions," a glimpse of the receiving community. Social and economic issues are dealt with in "The Jewish Quarter" and "Making a Living," politics in "Protest and Politics," while cultural factors figure in "Religion" and "Education and Improvement." "The Jewish Question"—the longest chapter—focuses on the reaction of the host society to the immigrants, and documents the growth of anti-alien and antisemitic sentiment in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. Finally, a short chapter, "Jews at War 1914-1918," is devoted to the neglected First World War period and to the domestic tensions generated by that conflict. Englander has written a brief, cogent and readable introduction to each chapter, as well as a general introduction to the whole book. He successfully places his material in context, and the student is further assisted by a chronology, glossary and useful bibliographical essay on the state of Anglo-Jewish historiography today, all grouped at the end of the work. Undoubtedly, Englander has done a great service to the teaching of Anglo-Jewish history. However, his selection is not without its omissions and shortcomings. It draws disproportionately on published primary material, especially parliamentary reports and papers—the most famous of these dealing with the Sweating System (1888-1889) and Alien Immigration (1903). Those two great Victorian social investigators, Henry Mayhew and Charles Booth, are extensively mined—especially Booth and his research assistant Beatrice Potter (later Webb)—subjects familiar to Englander as coauthor of Mr. Charles Booth's Inquiry: Life and Labour of the People in London Reconsidered (1993). The Toynbee Hall Inquiry of 1900, popularly known as Russell and Lewis, is also extensively cited. More obscure extracts come from Victorian periodicals such as Nineteenth Century, Contemporary Review, The Sunday Magazine and the medical journal The Lancet, whose reports did much to focus public attention on social conditions in the immigrant quarters in the 1880s. Englander's favorite unpublished sources are Home Office and Metropolitan Police files held at the Public Record Office. Police reports are employed especially in the final chapter, which deals in part with the controversy over Russian Jewish conscription during the First World War. The present reviewer, as someone who has researched this rich but little-known material, is gratified to see some of it being disseminated more widely through the medium of Englander's anthology.

306

Book Reviews

In the end, though, the reader is left with a picture of the immigrant community as painted by outsiders—mostly non-Jews or Jews, such as Harry S. Lewis, belonging to the native Jewish establishment. Englander acknowledges the existence of "an extravagant Yiddish culture at the heart of the Empire" (p. 64), but he publishes not a single document directly from a Yiddish source. The nearest he gets is a translation of the original manifesto of the Hebrew Socialist Union taken from Bill Fishman's classic East End Jewish Radicals (1975). A review of "Rigoletto in Whitechapel"—performed in Yiddish—from the Jewish Chronicle of 1912 barely fills the gap. Long extracts from the late Bernard Homa's A Fortress in Anglo-Jewry (1954), a history of the strictly Orthodox Machzike Hadath synagogue in Spitalfields written in English, merely suggests the depth of religious life that existed in the East End of London. The problem, one suspects, is linguistic. No attempt has been made to comb the Yiddish press for revealing insights. Quotes from The Times and the Jewish Chroni-. cle are nowhere counterbalanced by the immigrant perspective as reflected in Di tsayt or Der yidisher ekspres. Likewise, potentially useful Hebrew sources such as teshuvot or pesakei din (rabbinical responsa or legal rulings) have been completely passed over—a serious omission, considering that Rabbi A.I. Kook was rav of Machzike Hadath between 1916 and 1919, before becoming Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi under the British Mandate in Palestine. Moreover, the sole reference to a Hebrew periodical in London (Hayehudi)—admittedly very much a minority organ— is taken from an English translation already published by Risa Domb in 1988. If the chief justification for a source book is to make obscure documents available to nonspecialists, then surely important material written in a foreign language must receive priority attention. Englander's book entirely fails its English-only readers on this score. Many of the English-language sources themselves lack sufficient annotation. For example, the uninitiated reader is left to guess what LGB (Local Government Board) stands for (p. 58), and mistakes or inaccuracies found in the original, often connected with the spelling of Hebrew names or the description of religious rituals, are left uncorrected by a footnote. There are a number of other minor errors such as the persistent misspelling of Samuel Montagu with a final "e." A fascinating visual source, previously unfamiliar to this reviewer, is used by Englander to illustrate his book. It is a pity that the evocative photographs culled from G.R. Sims' Living London (1901) are so poorly reproduced. SHARMAN KADISH The Hebrew University

Catherine Epstein, A Past Renewed: A Catalog of German-Speaking Refugee Historians in the United States after 1933. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 386 pp. Hartmut Lehmann and James Van Horn Meltons (eds.), Paths of Continuity: Central European Historiography from the 1930s to the 1950s. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 406 pp.

History and the Social Sciences

307

German historical scholarship in the postwar era was shaped to a significant degree by those who had left after 1933—and profoundly influenced by those who stayed behind. These two categories of historians are dealt with, respectively, in A Past Renewed and Paths of Continuity. A Past Renewed is a valuable reference book for scholars interested in the academic emigration from the Third Reich to the United States. The main feature of the book is its bibliographical entries on eighty-eight of these refugees, describing their historical works and interests, their personal curriculum vitae (for example, who lost or retained his German citizenship, who was granted British or American citizenship) and their academic careers (I did not know, for example, that Hans Kohn lived in Jerusalem before 1933, or that Hans Rosenberg, the guru of the Bielefeld School, wrote his dissertation on the beginning of German Liberalism). Albeit a valuable reference book, A Past Renewed serves more as a personal tribute to German-speaking refugee historians in the United States than as a research study (it is not clear why the editor chose to focus only on the U.S.; the inclusion of England and Palestine would have made a valuable contribution). It should be read alongside H. Lehmann and J. Sheehan's edited volume, An Interrupted Past: GermanSpeaking Historians in the United States after 1933 (1991), which was sponsored, as are these two works, by the German Historical Institute of Washington, D.C. Such a verdict leads me to those who stayed behind and to the important and valuable collection of essays that originated at a conference organized by the German Historical Institute. "What did you do in the Third Reich, dear historian?" is undoubtedly the motto of this book, as indicated by James Melton's quote of a statement made by Karl Alexander von Mueller, the editor of the Historische Zeitschrift during the Third Reich: "The [German] historical discipline does not come empty-handed to the new German state and its youth" (p. 5). Although not a single full professor had been a member of the Nazi party before 1933, relatively few historians lost their chairs or resigned after the Nazi seizure of power. Friedrich Meinecke, Gerhard Ritter, Hans Rothfelds, Heinrich Ritter von Srbik, Hans Freyer, Hermann Aubin, Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, Theodor Schieder and Franz Schnabel are the "heroes" of the book. All of them, except for Schnabel, were rightist in outlook and did little or nothing to resist the Nazi party. (Schnabel, the only Catholic, was also the only one who refused to accommodate the Nazis—as a result, he lost his position.) There is no doubt that their political outlook fit in well with the nationalist-racist ideology that prevailed during the Third Reich: they were practitioners of the new methods of "folk history" (Volksgeschichte), which was characterized by overt racism and antisemitism. Most of the essays in the volume focus on Hermann Aubin, Werner Conze, Otto Brunner and Hans Freyer. Although they were not antisemites, Gerhard Ritter's secret Denkschrift (memorandum) of 1943 ("Jews must not be restored to their old place in the post-Hitler world" [p. 44]) represented the opinions of most of his colleagues. Their dubious role during the Third Reich is the main theme of the essays in this volume, with "folk history" serving as the missing link between the historian's scientific method and the political direction. The first section of most essays is devoted to each historian's role during the Third Reich, and the second to his role after 1945 (in the Federal Republic of

308

Book Reviews

Germany only). Important changes are apparent in the later period. Klaus Schwabe, for example, notes the presence of pan-European ideas in Gerhard Ritter's 1946 statement concerning the "new epoch of Europeanism." Similarly, Meinecke's "United States of Europe" in his German Catastrophe (1946), Hans Freyer's World History of Europe (1948) and Otto Brunner's Noble Rural Life and European Civilization (1949) reflect a shift from a pan-German to pan-European tendencies. This, in turn, had political as well as methodological implications, reflecting not only the hope that Germany could shed its pariah status and win acceptance in postwar Europe and in NATO but also that Ostforschung (the study of German communities in the east) could be rehabilitated. On the latter issue, Marc Raeff examines Hermann Aubin's argument that the new Ostforschung could help West German politicians make a distinction between Europe (including Germany) and Soviet-dominated countries. More positively, as James Melton argues, the Europeanization of German history by (West) German historians led to the reemergence of social history in the late 1950s. "Structural history" (Strukturgeschichte), a term coined by Werner Conze in 1957, concerns the role of structures and processes in history. Nineteenth-century European structures such as "industrial society" (versus "peasant societies") and, even more so, "modernization"—a key word in the works of many German historians from Conze and Schieder to Wehler and Kocka—served to locate "the German problem," mainly National Socialism, within a European context. This in turn served as a useful starting point for the Sonderweg thesis of the 1960s and the 1970s. Although some groups of historians are missing, namely those who left in 1933 and never returned; those who joined the Nazi Party or who were offered a chair after 1933; and those who lived after 1945 in East Germany, Paths of Continuity contains some important studies that serve as a valuable tool to examine not only the historiography of Central Europe between the 1930s and the 1950s but that of twentieth-century German history in general. ODED HEILBRONNER The Hebrew University

Immanuel Etkes (ed.), Hadat vehahayim: tenu'at hahaskalah hayehudit bemizrah eiropah (The East European Jewish Enlightenment). Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 1993. 488 pp.

This collection of sixteen studies, all of them (with one exception) previously published, presents the achievements of Israeli and American scholarly work on the Haskalah in Eastern Europe during the last generation. By carefully balancing the treatment of different regions, periods, trends and personalities over a hundred-year period (1780-1880), the volume's editor, Immanuel Etkes of the Hebrew University, has come close to producing a new composite history of the East European Haskalah.

History and the Social Sciences

309

The new scholarship has enriched—but also complicated—our view of what was once considered a rather straightforward phenomenon. If earlier scholars stressed the Haskalah's rebellion against Jewish religious tradition, several of the studies in this volume draw attention to the moderately reformist trend that championed "Torah and Wisdom" and "purified faith" (Etkes' study of Haskalah "forerunners," for example, Israel Bartal's portrait of Mordechai Aaron Guenzburg and Shmuel Feiner's of Eliezer Zvi Zweifel). Whereas the classical scholarship considered the Haskalah primarily as a literary and intellectual trend—Joseph Klausner's and Israel Zinberg's literary histories come to mind—the newer studies have focused on its political and educational activities (Michael Stanislawski's treatment of Max Lilienthal and the "official Haskalah" of the 1840s and the studies by Yehuda Slutsky and Azriel Shochat on the Vilna State Rabbinical Seminary). There has also been much greater attention given to the impact of local social conditions and Russian cultural forces on maskilim in various times and places (Steven Zipperstein's study of Odessa and the articles by Zvia Nardi and Bartal, respectively, on Russian radicalism and the radical Haskalah of the 1860s and 1870s). And, finally, in an effort to place the subject in its correct context, the recent historiography has examined the relations between maskilim and traditionalists and between maskilim and the Russified Jewish intelligentsia (the studies by Etkes and Slutsky). If this volume is used as a measurement of the state of contemporary scholarship, it is clear that we now have a much more subtle and nuanced understanding of those phenomena grouped together under the rubric of "Haskalah" than did scholars thirty or forty years ago. It is understandable for a volume published in Israel to conclude with contributions (by Yosef Salmon and Shlomo Breiman) on the nationalist tendency in the late Haskalah, which paved the way to Zionism. Nonetheless, it seems that Bartal is more on the mark when he comments (on p. 328) that the maskilim of the 1870s, as their biographies demonstrate, went in three different directions: to Zionism, to Jewish socialism, and to the abandonment of separate Jewish activity in favor of integration into Russian political and cultural life. This in itself is testimony to the Haskalah's complex and ambivalent historical legacy, and also helps explain why it continues to be a subject of intense interest to many scholars. This volume will long stand as a basic reference work and textbook, and its lacunae are therefore all the more lamentable. One of them is the absence of independent treatments of the Russian Jewish press (in Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian), and of the Hevrat mefizei haskalah (The Society for the Dissemination of Enlightenment Among the Jews in Russia). The press and mefizei haskalah were the primary vehicles of maskilic expression and organized activity in the 1860s and 1870s. Whereas there has been some recent work on the press (Alexander Orbach's New Voices of Russian Jewry [19801), it is striking that no one has undertaken a serious study of the mefizei haskalah since Elias Tcherikower's Russian-language history of the society, published in 1913! Another shortcoming relates to Shmuel Feiner's fine annotated bibliography on the Haskalah in Eastern Europe, which restricts itself to sources and scholarly literature in Hebrew and English. After all that has been written about the bilingual

310

Book Reviews

nature of Haskalah literature, it is unfortunate that the Yiddish works of Perl, Aksenfeld, Dik, Mendele, and Linetski are not included in this bibliography. DAVID E. FISHMAN Jewish Theological Seminary of America Yivo Institute for Jewish Research

Marko M. Feingold (ed.), Ein ewiges Dennoch. 125 Jahre Juden in Salzburg. Vienna: Bohlau Verlag, 1993. 588 pp.

Publications on the history of Jews in Austria—that is, the Jews of Vienna and the Habsburg empire's East European provinces—have appeared in remarkable numbers in recent years. At first almost exclusively dominated by American and Israeli historians, the field has more recently received important contributions by young Austrian historians. None of these works, however, have gone much beyond the history of Vienna, Budapest, Prague and Galicia. All the more reason to welcome the fact that the history of Jews in western Austria is now recalled as well. The collection at hand gives an account of Salzburg's Jews from their settlement in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, through their increasing exclusion from society due to antisemitism, to the Holocaust and up until the postwar period. Important though such research is, particularly in view of contemporary political developments, it still raises the question: how can one write 588 pages about the Jews of Salzburg—whose influence on local cultural life was insignificant, whose small number (157 Jews in 1890; 285 in 1910) did not allow for any considerable community life, and who lived "nearly like strangers" and "did not even know each other personally"? The question's significance becomes even more evident upon reading the publication, which suffers from a certain lack of documentation. A chapter on the Zionist movement among the Salzburg Jews, for example, would have benefited from accounts taken from central Zionist newspapers, which would, at least occasionally, have carried notes on events in Salzburg. Furthermore, it might have been useful to provide a wider historical context so as to embed the few "signs of life" of Salzburg's Jews in a better explanatory framework. Some chapters are in fact constructed in this way, such as the one concerning conservative cultural societies and their attitude toward Jews who were identified with modernism. Such chapters are not only the best in the book but may indeed be termed brilliant for the conclusive manner in which they sketch the roots of an antisemitic mentality that doomed Jewish integration to failure. A crucial part of the book consists in the description—based on an interview—of the fate of its editor, Marko Feingold. It is a vivid account of his life during the Second World War in the camps of Auschwitz, Neuengamme, Dachau and Buchenwald, one that traces with intensity the ghastly horrors of the Nazi regime. In a sense, a summary judgement cannot but conclude that this book, rather than being a satisfactory work about the history of Jews in Salzburg, is more instructive as a volume on the Holocaust and Austria's way of dealing with the past. It is

History and the Social Sciences

311

certainly not only because of the collection's contributors that the project failed to achieve its stated aim, but also because of the lack of sources, though this shortcoming might have been compensated for by supplying a wider context. Notwithstanding, the book has filled a void in Austrian historical research, and this is what constitutes its value. KLAUS HODL University of Graz

Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993. x + 286 pp.

No theme in the history of diaspora Jewry is more central or more dramatic than that of the relationship between Jews and the states in which they have found themselves. Diaspora Jewries have achieved positions of great influence and prominence within gentile societies but have discovered, sometimes in brutal fashion, that this happy relationship has been nothing more than a veneer concealing deep hatred, which their enemies have exploited mercilessly. The rabbinic sage Shemaya counseled, "seek no intimacy with the ruling power." But for a people who have historically provided the state with some of its most fundamental needs (such as finance) in return for their relative safety, this advice has been impossible to follow. As a consequence, Jews have found themselves honored as leading citizens, only to be vilified and cast out—or worse—often within a single generation. One has only to look at the history of Jews in nineteenth-twentieth century Vienna to appreciate the awesome truth of this statement: in no West European city were Jews more deeply embedded in the cultural polity, and at the same time more despised and hated. The subject matter of Benjamin Ginsberg's monography is not anti-Jewish prejudice per se, but "the conditions under which such sentiment is likely to be used in the political arena." He seeks specifically to explore the rise, fall and resurgence of anti-Jewish feeling in the U.S. The phenomenon of a politicized anti-Jewish prejudice in Europe and Asia might be explained by the persistence of conservative and reactionary polities, often theocratic or semitheocratic in nature. In such states, Jews were bound to occupy the peripheries, no matter how useful were their talents and their services. But in the U.S., matters ought to have been very different. A nation of immigrants, the United States was founded within a liberal political tradition. Yet historically, and contemporaneously, Jews have found themselves the targets of anti-Jewish politics often cynically exploited by opposing political forces: yesterday's friend becomes today's enemy. The November 1992 presidential election, to cite one example, was marked by a number of extremely crude anti-Jewish outbursts by respected and senior American politicians, among them former Secretary of State James Baker. Much of Ginsberg's volume is devoted to a historical account of the use made of anti-Jewish prejudice by politicians throughout U.S. history. The narrative is ex-

312

Book Reviews

haustive and compelling. What it lacks, however, is any substantive comparative dimension. That is to say, the reader is left in comparative ignorance of the political uses to which anti-Catholic prejudices have been put—to say nothing of anti-black sentiments. More seriously, the difficulties generated for diaspora Jews by the growth and triumph of Zionism are not discussed. There is a sense in which Jews have always harbored a "dual loyalty," to their Judaism or Jewishness, and to their place of residence. Zionism—Jewish nationalism— has bolstered this duality. This is why some of the most determined antisemites have also proven themselves enthusiastic Zionists—for instance, the British statesman Arthur J. Balfour (of Balfour Declaration fame), who did not want large numbers of Jews in Britain but who did his utmost to ensure that they had a land of their own in which to dwell. Of course, many modern states recognize dual citizenship. But in the popular mind, one cannot be equally loyal to two separate states, Israel and, say, the United States. Zionists have sought to reconcile this conflict by arguing that support for Israel is in the strategic interest of the U.S. (the equivalent of what was called "patriotic Zionism" by British Zionists between the two world wars). This may or may not be the case. But Jews can hardly complain if an American administration decides that its interests may not be those of the state of Israel. It does not surprise me that there is still a politicized anti-Jewish discourse to be found in American politics. I would in fact be astonished if this were not the case. What matters, surely, is that this discourse has so far been contained, as it has been in modern Britain and in a number of other English-speaking liberal democracies. Perhaps Ginsberg could explain to us why this should be the case. GEOFFREY ALDERMAN Middlesex University

Michael John and Albert Lichtblau, Schmelztiegel Wien—Einst und Jetzt: Zur Geschichte und Gegenwart von Zuwanderung undMinderheiten. 2nd ed. Vienna, Cologne and Weimar: Bohlau Verlag, 1993. x + 487 pp.

Vienna has long been the home of large numbers of immigrants. In the nineteenth century, men and women flocked to Vienna from other parts of the multinational Habsburg Monarchy, escaping rural poverty to find work in the capital. Czech and Hungarian workers and Jewish traders and peddlers provided Vienna with a multilingual and multicultural complexion not typical of German-speaking Central Europe. In the second half of the twentieth century, large numbers of foreign "guest" workers, mostly from rural Yugoslavia and Turkey, have settled in Vienna. In both periods, however, immigrants in Vienna have encountered a great deal of animosity. Such hatred has not only complicated integration but has also had fatal consequences. Melting Pot Vienna, Then and Now is a book designed with the express purpose of educating Austrians about the dangers of ethnic and racial prejudice. Responding to a request by teachers for materials to use in teaching tolerance for foreigners,

History and the Social Sciences

313

Austrian historians Michael John and Albert Lichtblau of the University of Salzburg assembled this extremely interesting, lively, thought-provoking, and important study. John and Lichtblau present a narrative describing the situation of every immigrant group in Vienna during the past two centuries and the prejudice they encountered, placing both immigrant experience and hostility to the minority groups within the context of sociological theory. They intersperse this narrative with hundreds of selections from primary sources: memoirs, interviews, testimony, newspaper reports, statistical tables and photographs attesting to the experience of immigrants and the attitudes of the local population. A popular book solidly based on scholarly literature, Schmelztiegel Wien succeeds in presenting the immigrants as real people. Thus it should certainly help dispel anti-immigrant myths prevalent in Austria. John and Lichtblau want to do more than humanize immigrants and dispel myths about them. Melting Pot Vienna contains a very powerful message about the dangers of racial prejudice. After all, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the most despised immigrant group was the Jews, and in the mid-twentieth century the Nazis—including large numbers of Austrian Nazis—persecuted and murdered them. Prejudice can lead to murder. It is therefore incumbent upon Austrians to learn to live with their minorities. Without such tolerance, the authors fear dire consequences for the future of democracy in Austria. Despite the avowedly didactic purpose of the book, John and Lichtblau present well-balanced, objective descriptions of the various immigrant groups in Vienna. Dependent on the work of previous scholarship, including their own, they have done an excellent job describing the Czechs and the Jews who came to the city in the half century before the First World War, but they have not presented as full a picture of the Turks and Yugoslavs who have arrived since the 1960s. They do detail the terrible housing conditions of these "guest" workers and the family and social problems they face in Vienna. But while they clearly indicate that many Viennese evince a high level of hostility against Turks and Yugoslavs, they do not provide a full-blown discussion (or primary sources) documenting this hostility, presumably because no scholarly literature, other than survey research, exists on the subject. Similarly, although there are more people from the former Yugoslavia than Turks in Vienna, most of the information provided about "guest" workers is about the latter, presumably because the sociologists have devoted more attention to them than to the Yugoslavs. This reviewer was particularly gratified to read John and Lichtblau's treatment of Jewish immigrants and the antisemitism they encountered. The authors quickly point out that most Jewish immigrants were not rich as antisemitic myth would have it, but rather lower-middle-class or poor. They write sensitively about the causes for Jewish migration to the capital and the experience of the Jews once there, and they present wonderful selections from Jewish memoirs to attest to the nature of Jewish experiences in Vienna. They are also honest about Austrian antisemitism, describing its arguments and its activities in great detail, and providing a very large number of antisemitic tracts and cartoons. They also discuss the Holocaust, especially the role of Austrians in the eruption of violence against Jews in March 1938 and again during Kristallnacht. Perhaps even more important, they discuss the persistence of antisemitism in postwar Austria, a country with only a tiny Jewish community. The

314

Book Reviews

authors insist that despite the Waldheim affair, antisemitic invective has been taboo in Austrian political discourse since the Second World War. Nevertheless, they are upset by the fact that antisemitic attitudes are shockingly prevalent in private. Melting Pot Vienna does contain some minor mistakes. The authors, for example, assume that Galician Jews were all poor and Orthodox, but such was certainly not the case. Similarly, despite their insistence that most Jews in Vienna were not rich, they overemphasize the significance of the liberal, assimilated group within Viennese Jewish society. They also artificially divide Jewish society into Ashkenazic, Sephardic and hasidic groups, misunderstanding the significance of Sephardic usages in Hasidism. In addition, this reviewer would have liked to see a discussion of where the immigrants actually lived in Vienna. The authors do a marvelous job describing the terrible housing conditions immigrants have had to endure, and the immigrant social networks they create, but a discussion of the significance of immigrant neighborhoods would have added to our understanding of immigrant culture in Vienna. The issue remains, of course, to what degree Vienna was a "melting pot." Certainly the Viennese exerted pressure on nineteenth-century immigrants to learn German and assimilate, and this in fact did happen. After all, with the exception of ubiquitous Czech family names, "Czech Vienna" no longer exists. Jews also acculturated, although before the Holocaust they succeeded in preserving group identity. Interestingly, both Jews and Czechs felt that their acculturation made them Viennese or Austrian, but not German in a volkisch or racial sense. Today, of course, there is both pressure on "guest" workers to Germanize and horror at that prospect. Viennese culture and society has certainly benefited from generations of immigrants who enriched the city with their food, music, languages and style. This book appeals to all Viennese to appreciate those contributions and to allow minorities to live in peace, developing their own cultures as they see fit. MARSHA L. ROZENBLIT University of Maryland, College Park John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza (eds.), Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. xx + 393 pp. The idea for a conference on the topic of this volume was conceived in 1984; it is a pity that the resulting articles could not have been published sooner. They not only include valuable material—some from Russian government archives documenting the attitudes and conduct of government officials faced with anti-Jewish pogroms— but also articulate an important insight: contrary to traditional Jewish historiography on pogroms in Imperial Russia, the authors make a strong case against the belief that the murderous riots were instigated and/or directed by government authorities. In fact, as is shown here, the central authorities were quite clear in their condemnation of all popular violence and criticized their local agents for letting things get out of hand.

History and the Social Sciences

315

While it is undeniable that many civil and military officials were basically Judeophobic and are to be blamed for not handling pogroms rapidly and firmly—such was especially the case in Kishinev in 1903 and Odessa in 1905—it is also true that local authorities had very inadequate means to enforce law and order against unruly mobs. Police forces were very small, and appeals to the military to restore public peace took time and were frequently ineffective, given the army command's objection to being involved in police duties. Nonetheless, how is one to explain the ever-increasing magnitude and murderousness of the pogroms, from the "mild" affairs before 1881 and the short and relatively "modest" pogroms of 1881 to 1903 to the massive and bloody outbursts of 19051906? The authors' consensus is that a combination of socioeconomic factors, associated with post-Emancipation "modernization," resulted in a psychological predisposition toward violence and Judeophobia on the part of an urban proletariat, poorly adjusted to city conditions, that was experiencing serious material deprivation. All this led them to blame the Jews for being competitors on the job market and carriers of a new culture inimical to their own traditional, frequently rural, religious and social values. The Judeophobia of government officials, in contrast, expressed a subconscious loss of confidence in their traditional political and hierarchical norms, as these were more and more effectively challenged by revolutionary and social ferment. Thus, for example, the Manifesto of October 1905 promising constitutional reforms seemed to signal the end of age-old stability and order. The manifesto triggered panicky forebodings that were translated into hysterical anti-Jewish paranoia, which in turn served to condone violence. The pogroms of the 1880s raise the question of socialist-populist attitudes. As both Moshe Mishkinsky ('"Black Repartition' and the Pogroms of 1881-1882") and Erich Haberer ("Cosmopolitanism, Antisemitism, and Populism: A Reappraisal of the Russian and Jewish-Socialist Response to the Pogroms of 1881-1882") show, there was much ambivalence on the part of the radicals toward the sociocultural conditions of the Jews and their traditional economic role in the Pale of Settlement. It surely would be stretching the point to claim, as some historians have done in the past, that the populists condoned—let alone approved—the violence against the Jews. However, these pogroms and subsequent restrictive government measures brought about the transformation of the Jewish community in Russia, as described by Alexander Orbach in an interesting chapter ("The Development of the Russian Jewish Community 1881-1903"). The erosion of the traditional kahal authority, and the Jews' movement into cities and industrial employment, reduced their isolation from the rest of the population and paradoxically made them vulnerable to the latter's frustrations and sense of sociocultural disorientation in the face of industrialization and "modernization." The interesting article by M. Ochs ("Tsarist Officialdom and Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Poland") explains the complicated and ambivalent attitudes of Russian imperial officials in Poland: the main concern was to prevent repetition of a national revolt, such as had been witnessed in 1863. To this end it seemed important to curb open rioting and violence immediately, even if it meant giving special protection to the Jewish population. At the same time, discriminatory legislation, by prodding the Jews into moving out of the countryside and taking up urban occupations, created

316

Book Reviews

the conditions that resulted in the formation of labor unions and parties, as, for example, the Bund. Unions and the Bund proceeded to organize units for Jewish self-protection and resistance during the pogroms. This explains the particular physiognomy taken by the pogroms of 1903-1906, outside the boundaries of the Polish provinces as well. All of the worst traits of Judeophobia—and the most murderous pogroms—came out into the open at the time of Russian society's disintegration during the civil war of 1919-1921. Peter Kenez ("Pogroms and White Ideology in the Russian Civil War") depicts how the various anti-Jewish attitudes, combined with the frustrated desperation that stemmed from the collapse of the old regime to create the mental set of the White army command, its officer corps and Cossack troops, led to the large-scale atrocities against the Jews in 1919-1921. Belated efforts, more or less sincere, to curb the worst excesses had no success in the areas controlled by the White armies; whereas the Bolsheviks did finally manage to curb Red army behavior and virtually stop anti-Jewish rioting. In his elegant and insightful "Conclusion and Overview," Hans Rogger gives comparative illustrations from the history of anti-Jewish pogroms in Central and Western Europe in the nineteenth century. But even more interesting are his analytical sketches of well-known anti-black riots in the United States before the Civil War and in its aftermath, as well as in very recent decades. Rogger points out the sociocultural-psychological frustration of urban whites, triggered by rapid demographic and economic changes, that produced pogrom-like patterns of mob violence against the blacks—violence that local authorities were helpless and ineffective in stopping. In both the American and the Russian cases, local civil and military authorities displayed a psychological predisposition for negative notions about the victimized minority, and this proved a serious impediment to taking swift and efficacious action on their behalf. Rogger concludes with a statement that at first glance seems almost perversely paradoxical, but one we should not ignore if we want to understand the phenomenon of anti-minority violence: More clearly still than docs the history of West European Jewry, the melancholy record of race relations in America confirms that popular antagonism toward a feared or despised out-group could turn violent as easily in a liberal polity professing egalitarian values as under a centralized, reactionary regime that rested on a hierarchy of status and ethnics. To be sure, codes and customs hemmed in Russian Jews almost as tightly as American Negroes, and there is much in the treatment and perception of the former, who were, with few exceptions, a distinct and peculiar presence in the Russian setting, that can only be called racist. Yet in neither country, and least of all in Western Europe, can the state's laws or actions be seen as the root cause of collective acts of persecution. If anything, official discrimination, the legal definition and strict maintenance of inferiority—although taken or invoked by their perpetrators as justifying such acts— more often than not served to prevent them. For it was usually when long-standing relations of sub- and superordination were in dispute, when the existing barriers of exclusion were breached or relaxed, when the state was no longer felt to be their enforcer, that its aggrieved subjects took matters into their own hands. It was after they had done so that the governments were persuaded to impose or tighten legal disabilities (p. 358).

History and the Social Sciences

317

The volume includes a valuable critical bibliography of recent historiography on anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia by Avraham Greenbaum, and it is illustrated with some quite gruesome contemporary photographs. All in all a most interesting and useful book, it deserves wide distribution in a paperback edition and a prominent place on the reading lists of college courses dealing with Jewish, Russian and multiethnic history. MARC RAEFF Columbia University Eli Lederhendler, Jewish Responses to Modernity: New Voices in America and Eastern Europe. New York and London: New York University Press, 1994. ix + 232 pp. Jewish historians of the modern age generally see the Jewish transition to modernity, today a central theme in their writing, in terms of communal and cultural change. Thus they investigate the changes in the books that Jews wrote and read, their clothing and the education of their children. Less noticed and studied has been the Jewish linguistic transition on the road to modernity. It usually passed from Yiddish to German, Russian or another non-Jewish language of the environment. The most drastic modernization was probably emigration, meaning the physical departure from traditional society. It too has been little noticed. Modernization by emigration has generally been left to historians of migration, who have seen it in terms of entry into a new society. They have often perceived the traditional society left by the migrants not as an active force but as an inert "background." Eli Lederhendler's handsomely produced book has much to say about Jewish linguistic change as an aspect of modernity. He emphasizes that for East European Jews and their American offshoots, language represented a choice dictated by religious and political ideologies. One may observe this best in the United States, where English dominated the affairs of life and the education of the young. Loyalty to an ethnic language had to be inculcated against heavy odds. A chapter on the nine Hebrew volumes of Sefer hashanah liyhudei amerikah, the "American Hebrew Yearbook," which appeared between 1930 and 1949, admirably shows the ideology of Americanized Hebraism. Yiddishism does not receive quite comparable treatment from Lederhendler, being represented only by the statements of its ideologists. Language is not the only aspect of modernity presented here. A group of letters from Rabbi Moses Nahum Yerashalimsky (b. 1855), a traditional talmudist and community rabbi in central Poland, show that even a rabbi of his type acquired a grasp of modern politics and employed a contemporary Hebrew style. Rabbi Yerushalimsky's modest degree of modernity may be contrasted with the wholehearted modernity of Ben-Zion Liber, who wrote explicit sex guides in Yiddish and pioneered in the promotion of birth control. The uses of traditional rhetoric for modern purposes is another theme in Lederhendler's version of modernization. A chapter on "Intepreting Messianic Rhetoric in

318

Book Reviews

the Russian Haskalah and Early Zionism" (originally published in vol. VII of this journal) demonstrates that modernization could extend to modern ideas that were cloaked in resonant traditional rhetoric. Perhaps the most polished chapter in the book is "America: A Vision in a Jewish Mirror," in which the author examines what living in America meant to the East European Jewish immigrant. Across the board, immigrants were in agreement on the need to adapt in some degree to America, "a grand experiment in human and social relations." This was a land where Jews could stand erect at last and defend their rights whenever necessary. The author shows himself technically masterful. In a book of separate studies, unified in its broad theme but diverse in its genres and subjects, Lederhendler succeeds in bending to his conception of "responses to modernity" the letters of a rabbi and the memoirs of a youthful maskil (both of them nicely translated from manuscript), a sex manual in Yiddish, American Hebrew yearbooks and other material. Lederhendler handles each of his topics with confidence and sensitivity. Here is a book that supports the social science concept of modernization with the solid data and historical analysis that historians, including this reviewer, appreciate. LLOYD P. GARTNER Tel-Aviv University

Carolyn Gray LeMaster, A Corner of the Tapestry: A History of the Jewish Experience in Arkansas 1820s-1990s. Fayetteville, Arkansas: University of Arkansas Press, 1994. xxiii + 622 pp.

"The present work is a mitzvah—a good deed—that I offer as a Christian to the Jewish community in hopes that this effort will, in some minuscule way, help show true Christian love." So begins this first-ever history of the Jews in the state of Arkansas, which starts with the arrival of Abraham Block early in the 1820s. Carolyn LeMaster has amassed a wealth of detail concerning Jews scattered in small communities across Arkansas, and her narrative is enlivened with piquant details concerning, for example, the synagogue that was led by the Rev. Charles Goldberg, a convert to Christianity and pastor of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, or Harold Hart, who was so well accepted in Eudora, Arkansas, that he was invited to join the Ku Klux Klan. LeMaster chooses to emphasize individual contributions rather than communal institutions, and she pays particular attention to Jewish economic life; in contrast, social and religious life, education, culture and internal group politics are given short shrift. Larger comparative and analytical questions are also sidestepped. How, for example, is the Arkansas experience like and unlike the Jewish story elsewhere in the South and in the United States as a whole? How does it shed light on the Jewish "small town" experience? What does the statewide focus of Arkansas Jewry tell us about the community's "sense of place"? Occasionally, LeMaster herself admits frustration at her inability to understand a particular turning point. While she

History and the Social Sciences

319

devotes a full chapter to the statewide Arkansas Jewish Assembly (1932-1951), for example, there is a great deal about the creation, activities and demise of this unusual, kehillah-likz organization that she characterizes as "difficult to determine." She is similarly hard-pressed to explain the eruption of extreme right-wing antisemitism in Arkansas (connected with Gerald L.K. Smith), given her depiction of minimal antisemitism and close Jewish-Christian relationships for most of the book. What LeMaster does do is make available a wealth of new data on a wide range of formerly anonymous (and mostly male) Jewish individuals settled far from the mainstream of American Jewish life. Whether this "mitzvah" will serve to promote greater love, or even greater understanding, of the American Jewish experience remains to be seen. JONATHAN D. SARNA Brandeis University

Robert M. Levine, Tropical Diaspora: The Jewish Experience in Cuba. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993. 398 pp.

Cuba is unlike other Latin American republics in a variety of ways. It is an island nation, and it attained its independence about eight decades later than most of the continent. Moreover, until 1959 it was strongly influenced by the United States: affluent neighborhoods in Havana had more than a touch of their Miami counterparts, merchants imported all manner of American goods, and the children of the well-to-do were sent to colleges and professional schools in the U.S. The United States was mirrored in almost every aspect of Cuban life—culture, folklore, architecture, food, home furnishings and cars. Likewise, gambling casinos and prostitution were promoted by American interests. But when Fidel Castro's 26th of July movement took control of Havana on January 1, 1959, Cuba entered into the Soviet sphere of influence. Those Cubans who had been excluded from the earlier system were promised new hope and pride by the revolution, though at the cost of political isolation and economic malaise; whereas those who had something to lose left Cuba in large numbers. Jewish life in Cuba in modern times also differed from all other diasporas, including those in Latin America. A Jewish presence was barely visible during and immediately after the conflict with Spain. Some Jews in Tampa, Key West and even Caracas did help the hero of Cuban independence, Jose Marti, to raise funds for the enterprise. There were also Jews among the American troops during the War of 1898 and the subsequent occupation of the island from 1902 to 1909. Other Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire settled in Havana and elsewhere in Cuba before the First World War. But it was only during the 1920s, after immigration quotas were established in the U.S., that Cuba became an attractive option for Jews, especially those who intended to reemigrate to the United States. Thus an atmosphere of constant flux was created in the neighborhoods where

320

Book Reviews

Jews settled. In the early 1920s, though the total Jewish population in Cuba remained about 5,000, some 7,000 Jews entered per annum between 1921 and 1923, and 20,000 in 1924 alone. Emigration continued even after the U.S. closed its doors, with some Jews entering America during the 1930s and 1940s as Cuban nationals. This unstable atmosphere negatively affected Jewish life in Cuba, eroding the efforts of community leaders to provide social services and institutional continuity. No less than five synagogues, along with several schools, cultural centers and service agencies, were founded by the different sectors within the small Jewish community. By the 1950s most Cuban Jews considered themselves Cuban and had no desire to leave. Those born and educated on the island spoke Spanish perfectly and had become deeply rooted in the culture and the ethos of the country. Even those Jews who later gained material success in the U.S. retained a warm feeling for Cuba, considering life there to be better than elsewhere. As one respondent testified, We liked living in Cuba. I had already traced my whole future, even into my retirement and as an old person. . . . Whether religious or not, I thought of myself as a Jew. And I am sure that most of the young generation there felt the same way. We did not look for anything better, because we thought we had found paradise there (pp. 247-248).

Ironically, as Levine notes, the descendants of those Jews barred from entering the U.S. as undesirable aliens by the quotas of the 1920s were welcomed as refugees from Castro's Cuba. But now, "Cuban Jews came to Miami and New York as Cubans, not as Jews" (p. 305). Although few Jews in the 1950s took a personal interest in politics, usually trying to accommodate to the factions or parties in power, they appreciated Fulgencio Batista's public condemnation of Soviet persecution of Jews and the Prague trials. Under Batista, however, graft in Cuba rose to new levels, with U.S. gangsters vying for control of the brothels, drug houses, casinos and hotels along the Cuban coastline—a major attraction for tourists. The local elite as well as most Americans and Jews accepted these sordid aspects of reality as facts of life, and profited economically from them; directly or indirectly, they supported the Batista regime. Following the revolution, when Cuba and the U.S. broke off relations in 1961, most of the Jews who had prospered in previous decades were labeled as international capitalists and enemies of the revolution. Together with the upper strata in business, Jews left Cuba, mainly heading to the U.S. or other Latin American countries. To be sure, not all of the Jews had been happy with Batista. Some had supported Castro early in his career. Several Jewish students, for example, were among those taking part in the attack on Cuba's second-largest military installation on July 26, 1953. Ricardo Subirana y Lobo (Wolf) helped finance Granma, the ship that transported Castro and his followers from Mexican exile to Cuba (later he became the Cuban ambassador to Israel, a position he held until 1973, when Cuba severed relations). Two Jews, Enrique Oltuski Osachki and Maximo Bergman, held ministerial positions and other Jews attained lower levels of influence. These were described as "non-Jewish Jews" by community leaders because they denied their Jewishness and avoided attempts to link them with the Jewish community. Based mainly on secondary sources and an impressive array of interviews, Le-

History and the Social Sciences

321

vine's engaging narrative explores in some detail the major aspects of the Jewish experience in Cuba up until the present. Levine is aware of the contrasts with other Latin American diasporas and at times makes interesting comparisons with Mexican and Argentinian Jewries. He is particularly vivid in describing the way in which the small Jewish minority was affected by major issues in Cuban history. Important chapters are devoted to the St. Louis incident, the question of refugees during the Nazi period and the way in which Cuban Jewry weathered the Second World War. Internal Jewish matters, such as the tensions between religion and secularism and between Zionism and socialism, are also discussed. Finally, the question of antisemitism and reactions to the revolution and its aftermath is dealt with in some detail. Perhaps a word should be said regarding the experience of this minority within the context of Jewish history. Cuban Jewry's response to Castro—as a decade later Chilean Jewry's response to Salvador Allende—is often cited as an example of Jewish proclivity toward capitalism. However, a case could, and should, be made for Jewish aversion to totalitarianism, something Levine fails to do. A second criticism relates to the numerous errors in details regarding events in Jewish history, specifically the identification of people, places, organizations and religious movements that played a role in contemporary Jewry. Some examples include the locations of the sinking of the Altalena and of Leib Jaffe's assassination, the identification of the Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemet), the antiquity of the Beth Israel Reform synagogue and the relative scale of Latin American aliyah. Such errors, however, do not greatly detract from what is a most valuable contribution to our knowledge of Cuban Jewry. VICTOR A. MIRELMAN West Suburban Temple Har Zion

Robert Liberles, Salo Wittmayer Baron: Architect of Jewish History. Modern Jewish Masters Series 5. New York and London: New York University Press, 1995. xiii + 425 pp.

Superficially, it might seem that Salo Wittmayer Baron would hardly constitute the subject of an absorbing biographical study. Baron was a stable and noncontroversial figure who exhibited none of the flamboyance of some of his fellow giants of Jewish studies; his work in many ways reflected his personal solidity, ultimately overwhelming by virtue of its comprehensiveness rather than by illuminating strokes of insight. Notwithstanding, Robert Liberles has produced a rich and stimulating study that demonstrates the ways in which Baron's life and work cut across the central issues of twentieth-century Jewish life. The story is particularly fascinating to those concerned with the development of Jewish history as a discipline and the remarkable recent absorption of Jewish studies into the American university system. Liberles announces at the outset that his work "represents a study of Baron's life and an introduction to his historical thought" (p. 14). The reconstruction of Baron's

322

Book Reviews

life, in particular those segments of it amenable to archival research, is extremely well done. There is only limited source material available for Baron's early years, most of it consisting of his own recollections supplemented by material provided to the author by Baron's niece, Shoshana Eytan, and by his student, the Israeli historian Zvi Ankori. But with the move to America, much of Baron's life becomes documented in archival sources, and here Liberles' reconstruction is superb. He has gathered extensive materials from a variety of archives and uses these materials judiciously. The portrait of the complex maneuvering around the appointment of Baron to the Miller Chair at Columbia University, for example, is well grounded and illuminating. It serves to remind us how recent the enterprise of university Jewish studies is. Liberles also uses his archival materials to debunk carefully cultivated legends. For instance, his documents show that Baron was not (as regularly claimed by Baron himself) invited back to Breslau to occupy the Graetz chair. Similarly, Baron's recurrent suggestion of reluctance on the part of Columbia University's Department of History to offer him a place evaporates before the evidence of his own vacillation on where he fit in. The reconstruction of Baron's life involves almost the totality of twentiethcentury Jewish experience. Liberles regularly portrays his subject as emblematic of twentieth-century change in the Jewish world. Examples of this include a broad consideration of migratory patterns, for which Baron's own experience offers an interesting specific case, and the rise of American Jewry to leadership on the world Jewish scene, a development to which Baron was highly sensitive. Liberles also devotes considerable attention to Baron's leadership role on the American Jewish and world Jewish scene. Here the picture is unusually complex, with considerable evidence of devoted and insightful actions placed in counterpoint to Baron's early and ill-conceived statements about Nazism and European Jewry. Baron's mixed record as a leader on the political scene should probably be taken both as a reminder of how unanticipated and unprecedented the developments of the 1930s were and as a warning against academic hubris. There was surely no one in the world with a fuller grasp of world Jewish history than Salo Baron. That he could miss the mark badly on so many occasions should serve as warning to us all. Perhaps not surprisingly, Liberles' portrait of Baron's historical thought is less innovative and revealing. Baron's works have been widely available and read. To be sure, Liberles effectively places Baron within the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish historiography and usefully collects some of the major critiques of Baron's key works. Striking, however, is the absence of evidence for any impact of Columbia University's history department on Baron's historical thinking. This may not represent a shortcoming on the part of Liberles; it is equally plausible that his location in one of America's premier centers of historical study in fact had little or no impact on Baron's thinking. The latter alternative is in fact bolstered by the convincing case made by Liberles for the adumbration of Baron's central historical views early in his career, with these views then maintained throughout the rest of his long life. Baron's failure to immerse himself in the American university is ironic, given that his impact on the acceptance of Jewish studies on the American university

History and the Social Sciences

323

campus is beyond dispute. Baron's aloofness from the American campus and its twentieth-century dynamism is further reflected in the type of historical writing to which he remained devoted. The broad-stroke history to which Baron committed himself during the 1930s, while widely respected at Columbia and elsewhere, was increasingly out of touch with the university environment of empirical monographic study. The end result is a lifelong enterprise by a singularly gifted historian that resulted in a set of books that are regularly venerated but little utilized. A second interesting and unfortunate reflection of Baron's ultimate isolation from American academia involves the remarkable proliferation of Jewish studies during the 1960s. Baron did not understand the movement he so inspired; and while he continued to lead the American Academy for Jewish Research along highly traditional lines, the field of Jewish studies organized itself in more contemporary and democratic form into the Association for Jewish Studies, over which Baron exercised little or no influence. On occasion, one has the impression that Liberles loses control in his attempt to illuminate so many diverse perspectives of Baron's multifaceted career. The organizational pattern of this book is somewhat erratic, with disproportionate emphasis— sometimes too much and sometimes too little—placed on various aspects of the subject. The real virtues of this work, however, far outweigh its flaws. Especially praiseworthy is the stance that Liberles adopts for his study. He indicates his personal albeit not intimate connection with Baron, arguing that this personal experience put him in the enviable position of being able to write an account at once warm and objective. This in fact is precisely what Liberles has produced. To portray Baron with affectionate respect, while at the same time examining and illuminating weaknesses and flaws, is a significant achievement, and Liberles is to be congratulated and thanked for undertaking and carrying out such a major desideratum in such stimulating fashion. ROBERT CHAZAN New York University

Paul Robert Magocsi, Historical Atlas of East Central Europe. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1993. 218 pp. Paul Robert Magocsi is a well-known scholar of East European history, a specialist on Ukraine and the author of an important study on the obscure but interesting people known as the Rusyns (the inhabitants of Carpathian Rus). This indefatigable polyglot and polymath has recently turned his hand to the making of historical atlases. His first was devoted to the history of Ukraine (reviewed in vol. V of this journal). Now, in a far more ambitious vein, he has produced a remarkable atlas of the history of East Central Europe, which is to serve as the first volume of the indispensable series on the history of that region that is being published by the University of Washington Press. What is meant by the term East Central Europe? It was invented, presumably, to avoid the overly simplistic division of the continent into East and West, but it raises

324

Book Reviews

as many problems as it solves. The editors of the series have defined the region as lying to the east of German- and Italian-speakers and to the west of the borders of the former Soviet Union. Magocsi has added pieces of Germany, Austria, Italy (Venice), Turkey (including Istanbul) and the former U.S.S.R. (Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine up to the Dnieper). The Ukrainian case is rather peculiar; Western Ukraine is included, but the vast eastern part is not. Latvia and Estonia are also missing. The beautiful and sophisticated maps, designed by Geoffrey J. Matthews, are cut off somewhere around the area of Courland. The countries that receive the most detailed attention are Hungary, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia), Romania, Poland, the various components of the former Yugoslavia, Greece and Albania. The maps in this volume are of two kinds: some present the political borders at a particular time, beginning in 400 C.E. Others are devoted to such topics as economic development, religion, culture and demography. Magocsi excels in demonstrating cartographically the most important characteristics of the region: its everchanging borders, its relative economic and cultural backwardness, and of course its remarkable ethnic and religious diversity that has resulted, all too frequently, in horrific conflicts. The maps are accompanied by brief summaries that provide the necessary background information. Those with a special interest in the interwar period (like this reviewer) will find maps of each independent country, detailed population data, and an especially useful map that depicts and names all the provincial borders. The final map illustrates the situation in 1992—given the volatile political situation in the region it may not be relevant for long, but that is hardly the fault of the author. The area covered by this atlas includes the old Russian Pale of Settlement, Galicia and other great centers of Jewish life. How does Magocsi cope with the Jewish dimension of East European history? In his previous writings he has displayed his considerable knowledge of Jewish history, and he uses it here to good effect. Throughout, an effort is made to integrate the Jewish story into the general one. For examples, map no. 17, covering the subject of education and culture up to the eighteenth century, illustrates among other things the spread of Hebrew printshops in the region. Map no. 31, also devoted to cultural developments, includes yeshivahs and other Jewish cultural institutions alongside universities. The background material accompanying the map on "population movements, 1944-1948," includes statistics on the destruction of the Jewish communities of the region as well as data on the various population transfers that occurred after the war. The most detailed references to the Jewish situation are presented (reasonably enough) within the broader context of the discussion of the region's nonterritorial ethnic minorities. Thus a map illustrating the presence of the German minorities (the so-called Volksdeutsche) is followed by a map on the Jewish and Armenian diasporas. A remarkable feature of this map and of Magocsi's accompanying text is a list of the fifty largest "Jewish cities" of the region that includes the Yiddish forms of some of these place names. Thus "Cracow-Kroke-Kruke," "Brest-Brisk," and so forth. This is quite unusual, perhaps even a first in the history of East European cartography. It is a moving affirmation of the fact that Yiddish, no less than Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian and others, was a legitimate East European language, and that the Jews, though stateless, possessed a "geography" all their own.

History and the Social Sciences

325

In order to gain credibility, reviewers must point out a few shortcomings. In his Jewish map, Magocsi introduces a border between zones of Ashkenazic and Sephardic influence, a border that for some reason cuts through Bosnia, placing Sarajevo on one side and Travnik on the other. This does not seem to make much sense. More important, when perusing the ethnic statistics on the various countries of interwar Eastern Europe the reader will learn that there were 2.7 million Jews in Poland, 180,000 in Czechoslovakia and 17,000 in Yugoslavia. In fact, these numbers relate to Jews by language or by nationality, and not to Jews by religion. To be fair, Magocsi indicates this, but since the Jewish case is rather special he should have listed the number of Jews by religion as well (which in the latter two cases yields dramatically higher figures). Finally, it is a pity that there is no map illustrating emigration from the region, a subject vitally important from the Jewish point of view. The fact that Magocsi is alive to the importance of the Jewish role in the history of East Central Europe renders his atlas particularly attractive to Jewish scholars. Beyond that, his book is an invaluable resource for all those interested in this region; given the present crises in Bosnia and in the western successor states of the Soviet Union, that should include just about everyone concerned with what is going on in the world today. EZRA MENDELSOHN The Hebrew University

Henri Minczeles, Vilna, Wilno, Vilnius: La Jerusalem de Lituanie. Paris: Editions de la Decouverte, 1993. 485 pp.

The great Jewish cities of East Central Europe are no more. Indeed, even the memory of Vilne, Varshe, Berdichev, Minsk—not to mention more modest centers—fades away with the passing of the older generation. A visitor in present-day Warsaw, Krakow or Vilnius hears no Yiddish, sees no yarmulkes and would hardly guess that earlier in our century these cities were host to some of the most vibrant Jewish communities on earth. Henri Minczeles' book is an attempt to recover the historical memory of one of these cities, the present Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, known for centuries by the Poles as Wilno, by the Russians as Vil'na, and by the Jews as Vilne. This book is important not only as a work of scholarship but as a historical reconstruction of a time and a community that is no more. Today's Vilnius, a beautiful town where one may still see the remnants of a rich Polish and Jewish culture, is an almost totally Lithuanian city. Minczeles's object is to describe the multinational and multireligious city that has passed into historical memory with the Shoah. Thus his work should elicit the interest not only of specialists in East European Jewry, but of anyone concerned with Jewish history and culture and, indeed, the history of Eastern Europe. The importance of Vilna (using Minczeles's Yiddish transliteration) need hardly be emphasized: the "Jerusalem of Lithuania," the capital of the stern and scholarly

326

Book Reviews

mitnagdim who looked askance at the religious enthusiasm of the hasidim who thrived mainly to the south, in Ukraine, and to the west, in Poland. At the end of the nineteenth century Vilna was a key center for the development of Jewish socialism and the early Zionist movement. In the interwar period Jewish culture thrived in Vilna, and it was not by accident that YIVO chose that city for the establishment of its scientific institute. After the Second World War, the newly Sovietized and Lithuanianized Vilnius avoided references to the city's multicultural past, a tendency that is only now breaking down. Minczeles, by training a historian of the turn-of-the-century Jewish labor movement, divides his work into four nearly equal sections. The first deals with the history of Vilna from its founding to 1914, covering the earliest period in a minimal outline and offering more detail as the Jewish community in the city grew and gained in importance. Part 2 deals with "Judaism in Vilna" between the wars, describing the effects of the First World War, the Vilna pogrom of April 1919, attempts at polonization, the Jews as a "national minority" in interwar Poland, the antisemitic movement, and the worsening economic situation of Vilna's Jews in the 1920s and 1930s. The third and longest section recounts the rather happier story of the "cultural golden age" of Jewish Vilna, describing the town's Jewish intelligentsia, the school systems, YIVO, Yiddish publishers, writers, films and Yiddish literary movements in Vilna in the interwar period. The Soviet, then Nazi, invasion and the destruction of Vilna's Jewish community form the subject of the book's final section. This work's strengths are many. Minczeles has drawn on sources ranging from the memoirs of Czeslaw Milosz and Lucy Dawidowicz to numerous contemporary Yiddish journals and newspapers to personal interviews with men and women who lived during the interwar years in Vilna. The bibliography of works in Yiddish, Polish and Western languages could (and hopefully will) serve as a point of departure for further research and study. The book is written in lively, inviting prose that should appeal to a broad audience. Perhaps the main weakness of this work is also its greatest strength: covering several centuries of history in one single volume necessarily means condensing, summarizing and dealing with certain issues in a cursory or superficial manner. This is particularly evident for the period before 1914. To name one example, Minczeles' assertion that the Russian government set up the Pale of Settlement in an effort to make the Jews into agents of russification cannot be borne out by available archival evidence. Minczeles' treatment of Polish antisemitism as a political movement is similarly unsatisfying, relying as it does almost entirely on secondary works. In general the work is strongest where it goes into greatest detail, as it does on the interwar period. Here, and particularly as regards the cultural and linguistic sphere, Minczeles makes his greatest contribution—though certain interpretations and the lack of archival references will no doubt disturb some scholars. On the whole, however, this is a fine and important work. Minczeles has given us a capsule history of the Jews in one of the most important Jewish centers of Eastern Europe. Not only scholars of Jewish history, but perhaps even more so those working in Lithuanian, Polish, Russian and general European studies would benefit from reading this volume. In setting down the history of Jewish Vilna, the author

History and the Social Sciences

327

reminds us of a world that we have lost, and this may be his work's greatest contribution. THEODORE R. WEEKS Southern Illinois University

George L. Mosse, Confronting the Nation: Jewish and Western Nationalism. Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press, 1993. 220 pp.

In this series of articles, written mainly in the last decade, George Mosse enlarges upon various aspects of the themes that have preoccupied him for the last quarter of a century. Fundamentally he is concerned with the nature of what he calls the "civic religion" of nationalism, a mass cult with its own liturgy, rites and ceremonies. Mosse emphasizes throughout both the importance of nationalism as a political style and symbolic language of mass incorporation and the way in which it evolved to meet the needs of a mass industrial society in Europe and in the United States. A second theme is the relationship of that style to fascism and Nazism. Though he is critical of the "totalitarian democracy" thesis of Jacob Talmon, Mosse is concerned with tracing the links between the mass politics of the French Revolution and fascism; and he finds, once again, that despite Nazism's violent repudiation of the Enlightenment and the Revolution, there are important continuities between Nazism and these two movements in terms of symbolism (often Christian) and ritual (cults of the martyrs and of youth), and above all in their common need to find appropriate means of mobilizing the masses and ending the alienation of individuals in modern society. A third theme is the conversion of liberal into integral nationalism, as the masses enter the political arena and the old middle-class values of respectability derived from Protestantism and of individual self-development (Bildung) are transformed into markers of social and ethnic exclusiveness. The nature of nationalism as a civic religion helped to smooth this transition, and it serves to explain in large part why the radical right was able to subvert the liberalism with which nationalism had been so closely allied in the early nineteenth century. Finally, Mosse explores some aspects of the consequences of this change for the Jews and for Zionism. The Jews were perhaps the last defenders of liberalism in fascist Europe, but their emphasis on Bildung and Sittlichkeit (morals) proved their undoing, as the Germans in particular abandoned the first of these ideals and reinterpreted the second to exclude the Jews, along with other "social undesirables," from the new mass ethnic nation. Mosse has given us another rich and thought-provoking set of analyses of the often subtle relationships between different strands of European thought and practice. The fact that these are separate essays loosely strung together does not detract from the overall structure of the argument or the richness of its content. Yet there are problems. The first is the title. If Mosse holds a mirror up to the concept of the nation, he confronts only a restricted, if important, segment of the phenomenon of Western nationalism. Moreover, his subtitle is somewhat misleading. He is really

328

Book Reviews

concerned with German nationalism—although he has interesting things to say about Italian, French and American nationalisms—and only at the very end does he confront Zionism through an analysis of two German Jewish thinkers, Max Nordau and Gershom Scholem. Mosse's main interest here is the impact of earlier German ideals on German Jewish intellectuals. A further problem is that the analyses tend to focus on concepts and intellectual responses, and the reader must fill in the social and political background. But thought is rarely so divorced from political and social realities; the German concepts of respectability and self-cultivation, for example, need to be analyzed in the context of their changing social meanings and political contexts from the late eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. A third problem concerns Mosse's conception of nationalism as a "civic religion." This is undoubtedly a suggestive concept, and it has had important exemplifications. But the "civic" was always shadowed by the "ethnic"— indeed the two were often interwoven, or else ethnic nationalism subverted the earlier civic religion, as happened in nineteenth-century French nationalism. Mosse may be right that nationalism's emphasis on style aided this subversion, but since he fails to spell out in detail the ethnic version of nationalism, a certain vagueness surrounds this aspect of his discussion. Finally, Mosse tends to elide nationalism into fascism, dwelling on those elements of style and symbolism common to both without spelling out the many important differences between them. The suggestion is that the "integral" nationalism of the fin-de-siecle gave birth to fascism and Nazism. But fascists and Nazis were often contemptuous of old-style nationalists, and their world of brutal nihilism, instinct and militaristic state worship was far removed from so many of the nationalisms they supplanted. We need sharper markers and more sociological analysis to explain why some nationalisms were subverted by fascism and others were not. The limitations of Mosse's approach are perhaps most apparent with respect to the Jewish responses. The Jewish concern with "degeneration" (Nordau) was only one of many important elements in Zionism, and Scholem's concern with an openended Jewish history, while salutary, was rather tangential to its development. Mosse's emphasis on a single milieu, the German Jewish, as marking the final dissolution of liberal nationalism in Europe may be justified, though we can find similar subversions in France and Austro-Hungary. But to understand Zionism, and wider Jewish responses, we have to focus on East European Jewry and the ways in which the myth of Herzl and the program of political Zionism meshed with much older dreams of restoration to Eretz Israel. Mosse appears here as a committed "modernist": the nation is seen as a purely modern phenomenon and the product of modern conditions. Despite the interest in symbols and ritual, there is hardly a mention of the longue duree or the premodern ethnic roots and symbolism of so many European nationalisms. In the case of the Jews, this entails a remarkable foreshortening of the development of Zionism. This is an important book, with perceptive analyses of some European, especially German, nationalisms. However, its argument would have been more compelling had it related modern developments—especially those concerning ethnic nationalism— to the nationalist rediscovery and reinterpretation of myths, symbols and memories

History and the Social Sciences

329

of premodern ethnic communities, and to the popular resonances of such reinterpretations. ANTHONY D. SMITH London School of Economics

Faith Rogow, Gone to Another Meeting: The National Council of Jewish Women, 1893-1993. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993. xiii + 300pp. The first generation of women's historians embraced the task of resurrecting female experience, uncovering new information about women, and recovering the female past for the historical record. Early works of women's history generally set out to supplement the traditional male historical narrative. Most recent studies not only present new information about women, but also use gender as an analytical tool to reevaluate historical experience. Faith Rogow's Gone to Another Meeting belongs to the genre of early feminist writing, recovering and presenting the story of one of the most influential and important organizations of American Jewish women. Rogow chronicles the evolution of the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) from its creation in 1893 through its present-day activities. The strength of the book lies in its careful attention to the formation and early focus of the Council. Rogow faithfully recounts the sense of purpose shared by the middle-class founders of the NCJW, their commitment to the maintenance of Judaism and Jewish identity, and their construction of an organization specifically devoted to shaping an educated and committed cadre of American Jewish women. An organization originally designed to preserve Judaism by celebrating Jewish women's role as the transmitters of religious values and identity, the Council shifted its focus to social welfare and philanthropy by the second decade of the twentieth century. Responding to the influx of East European immigrants, the NCJW emerged as a key agent of immigrant aid and resettlement. While the efforts of middle-class Jewish women are often portrayed merely as patronizing and condescending, Rogow offers a more nuanced interpretation, demonstrating the extensive contributions of Council women in helping immigrants adjust to American society and their particular efforts in keeping single young women from being lured into prostitution. Rogow also notes the ways in which the language of motherhood and family remained constant in Council rhetoric, even as its work evolved from religion to philanthropy to social work and social justice movements. Gone to Another Meeting presents new information and raises some provocative issues. Rogow has collected useful statistics about the age, marital and class status, educational achievements and synagogue affiliations of NCJW members that provide insights into the character of the organization. She also offers rich portraits of individual Council leaders and elucidates the political wrangling within the movement. Indeed, Rogow suggests that women's organizations like the NCJW are best interpreted not as parallels to men's fraternal lodges but rather as analogs to men's

330

Book Reviews

paid labor. In other words, Council work served as a career for many of its members, requiring significant commitment of time and energy and eliciting strong and sometimes divisive political positions. Unfortunately, Rogow's work falls short of providing a thorough gender analysis of the NCJW or fully exploring the intriguing aspects of this organization. While she raises some interesting questions about the intersection of gender, religion, philanthropy and politics, Rogow seems satisfied to recount episodes of NCJW history rather than to examine their consequences for the construction of Jewish women's identity. Her final chapter, which follows the Council's history to the present day, is more of a laundry-list of activities than a balanced interpretation of the organization's evolution. Most problematically, the book ends without a real conclusion, once again allowing a description of the Council's work to substitute for a thoughtful consideration of its role in the formation of gender expectations, religious identity and political power within the Jewish community. Rogow has indeed resurrected a crucial chapter in Jewish women's history and presented a detailed account of the activities and leadership of the National Council of Jewish Women. In the introduction, she indicates her hope that her study will provide a starting point and a stimulus for future works of gender analysis. Rogow herself suggests some possibilities for a conceptual framework at the outset of the book, but she ultimately leaves the reader without a clear analytical foundation for interpreting the multifaceted history of the Council. Nevertheless, her work does succeed as a source for later historians willing to engage in a more penetrating exploration of the NCJW as an organization that constructed and reconstructed Jewish women's behavior within the complex maze of Judaism, Jewish communal organization, and politics. BETH S. WENGER University of Pennsylvania

Marshall Sklare, Observing America's Jews. Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1993. xi + 302 pp.

This collection from Marshall Sklare's writings includes chapters from his books, articles from collective volumes and journals, mainly Commentary and Midstream, and a memorial lecture that he gave in 1988. Sklare had been working on a volume of his published essays with new chapter introductions prior to his death in 1992, but unhappily the project was not sufficiently advanced for it to appear in its intended form. The absence of chapter introductions is a problem because, apart from the memorial lecture, there is no item that was published later than 1978. It would have been interesting to have had Sklare's later reflections on such subjects as developments in American Judaism and intermarriage. My justification for writing this review, even though American Jewry is not one of my major areas of study, is that the idea of writing my doctoral thesis on the sociology of religious change among English Jews was stimulated by reading Con-

History and the Social Sciences

331

servative Judaism, Sklare's doctoral thesis and first book. As Seymour Martin Lipset said at the memorial service for Sklare, "What can you say about a man whose doctoral dissertation became a classic in the field?" In his assessment, included in the volume, Charles Liebman writes that Conservative Judaism is the best book ever written on American Jewry. I am inclined to agree with him, but as the statement implies, if no other sociologist has written a better book on American Jewry, neither did Sklare himself. As we are reminded in this volume, Sklare's subsequent writings included books and articles of the highest standards; the "Lakeville" books stand out as a superb study of a Jewish community, and many of the articles are thought-provoking and provocative. However, nothing quite approaches the pathbreaking originality of Conservative Judaism. Sklare received a professorship in the department of Jewish studies at Brandeis in 1969, and notes in his "autobiographical remarks" that the original idea was to hold a joint appointment with the department of sociology. However, the radical politics of the time foiled this plan. One consequence of this, noted by Liebman, was that Sklare was never under pressure to publish in general (that is, "non-Jewish") sociological journals—indeed, only one article in this collection was published in a general sociological journal, Ethnicity—and he was not required to justify his topics in terms of their applicability to non-Jewish groups. Liebman writes that the research produced by other sociologists of American Jewry, who have felt constraints to publish in general journals, is less valuable than anything Sklare wrote, but one is left wondering what Sklare might have produced had he widened his area of research. Sklare's value orientation in his studies of American Jewry were clearly expressed in his article "The Jew in American Sociological Thought," published in 1973 and reprinted here. In this article, Sklare explained why most prominent American Jewish sociologists had not studied American Jewry. Many saw themselves as universalist-oriented intellectuals who eschewed parochial loyalties, felt alienated from fellow Jews, and portrayed America as the great society in which Jews could comfortably assimilate—as they themselves did in the intellectual subsociety. Others felt alienated from American culture as well as Jewishness, and thus criticized American Jews for their conformity to American society. In contrast to these sociologists, Sklare lined himself up with the "survivalists" who portrayed American Jewry as insufficiently self-segregated and excessively cosmopolitan. Sklare occasionally compared Jews with other ethnic groups in America: his 1988 memorial lecture, in which he contrasted Jews and other ethnic groups with respect to the bicentennial spirit in Boston, stands out in this respect. However, he never attempted a large-scale comparative study with other groups, and his theoretical and methodological perspectives were grounded in his concerns with Judaism and Jewish survival, especially the survival of the American Jewish community. The most prominent sociologists of American Jewry today follow Sklare in these concerns, and like Sklare, they tend both to publish in journals under Jewish sponsorship and to write books directed principally at a Jewish readership. The debates between the "optimists" and the "pessimists" regarding the future of American Jewry can sometimes take an acrimonious tone, but their relevance for other ethnic and religious groups is only rarely considered. These debates may appear too parochial to such

332

Book Reviews

"outsiders" as sociologists of ethnicity, religion, and even of other Jewish communities, even though many of the studies provide rich data that could be used in comparative work. In many ways, Sklare drew the boundaries within which the sociology of American Jewry has been conducted. Perhaps it is now time for sociologists of American Jewry to widen or break out of those boundaries. STEPHEN SHAROT Ben-Gurion University

Shelly Tenenbaum, A Credit to Their Community: Jewish Loan Societies in the United States, 1880-1945. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993. 204 pp.

Shelly Tenenbaum's study of Jewish free-loan societies and credit associations in America is an extremely useful and welcome addition to the literature on immigration history. Not only is this the first scholarly treatment of an all but overlooked aspect of Jewish social history; it also makes a significant theoretical contribution to our understanding of acculturation processes in immigrant communities. The thesis presented in this study may be summarized as follows: The behavior patterns of immigrant groups are typically explained by one of two types of factors: cultural (the heritage brought from the old country) or contextual (the conditions created in the new country). But because social phenomena are amenable to different causal explanations, we sometimes find that neither the cultural nor the contextual argument alone suffices to explain complex behavior. Moreover, time and other changes may alter immigrant culture in dynamic ways. Specifically, in the case under study here, neither the Jews' religious and cultural heritage nor the American socioeconomic context alone can satisfactorily explain the development and diversification of free-loan societies and other forms of intracommunal credit assistance among immigrant Jews in the United States. The timehonored Jewish tradition of extending assistance to those in need, the established and sanctioned practice of creating local gemilas hesed associations (free-loan societies), and the difficulties Jews faced in gaining access to capital or credit from sources outside the community were all features of the East European mother culture that Jewish immigrants to the United States brought with them. These factors alone, however, do not account for the ways in which such institutions were reshaped on American soil. For that matter, the cultural argument alone does not help us to understand why certain aspects of the traditional culture were reestablished on the new soil, but not others. To the cultural argument, Tenenbaum explains, we must add the contextual one: Jews in the United States faced credit needs that were group-specific. Compared with other immigrant groups, Jews (as well as Chinese and Japanese) were more extensively involved in entrepreneurial activities. At the time, general banking institutions did not maintain personal loan departments for the small borrower, leaving some 85 percent of the American public without access to credit. Small business in the immigrant community (from peddling to shopkeep-

History and the Social Sciences

333

ing) depended on someone filling the credit gap. Immigrants were able to support small lending institutions of their own, whose funds were continually recycled among a pool of borrowers (unlike philanthropy or charity proper, cash loaned by free-loan societies was repaid within several months). This was clearly a case of collective self-help, as important to our understanding of American Jewish social development as are the other cases of collective Jewish self-help models from that era, namely Jewish hometown societies (landsmanshaftn) and labor unionism. The availability of the free-loan model in the immigrants' cultural "tool chest," Tenenbaum writes, may have prompted them to utilize the idea in their new environment. The point, however, is that here was a tool that was functional, whereas other aspects of European culture, deemed less functional, were dropped. Innovations in the culture of loan societies in America—such as the charging of low-interest fees by certain types of loan associations, or the opening of loan facilities to non-Jews by some of the Hebrew loan societies and credit unions—illustrates how changes were made in the original model. Free-loan societies, credit associations and remedial loan associations answered the needs of people who were not destitute, were able to repay modest sums within a short period of time, and were able to sign up reliable guarantors. Charity and other forms of assistance were available on other terms to the truly poor, whereas the free-loan societies functioned to foster an emergent Jewish entrepreneurial class. We also learn about the decline of these ethnic institutions. Here again, culture and context are both involved. American banking had changed by the 1940s, making personal loans available to a much wider sector of American society. Banks, moreover, were able to support small businesses with sums that were beyond the usual limits of the free-loan societies. As Jews as a group climbed the socioeconomic ladder, their needs outgrew the resources available through credit unions and free-loan societies. And as Jews integrated themselves more deeply in American culture, they began to prefer the nonethnic banking institutions. This is an admirable study. Its specificity is not a limitation: it simply roots the theoretical discussion in concrete historical data. Although (as Tenenbaum points out) far more funds were distributed in the immigrant community by unlicensed credit unions (aktsiyes) than by the chartered free-loan societies dealt with in this work, the author gives us an invaluable inside view of institutions that were crucial to the welfare of many immigrant Jewish families. ELI LEDERHENDLER The Hebrew University

Gerald Tulchinsky, Taking Root: The Origins of the Canadian Jewish Community. Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1993. xxvii + 341 pp.

Canada's Jewish community is now the fifth largest in the world, after Israel, the United States, France and Russia. Although its origins date back more than two

334

Book Reviews

centuries, virtually all of its growth has taken place over the past hundred years, fueled by waves of immigration—including refugees from tsarist pogroms, the Nazis, and then the Communists, more recently from North Africa and now again from Russia, with a measure of Israelis in the mix. It is a community worthy of the high level of scholarship that Gerald Tulchinsky has produced in this excellent and comprehensive book, which covers the period from the arrival of the first Jews in New France in the 1760s until the end of the First World War. In so many matters involving Canada, there is a tendency on the part of outsiders to lump it with the United States into a generalized North America, ignoring the substantial differences between the Canadian and American societies. The differences go much deeper than the significant French presence in Canada, and are easily traceable to the distinct experiences of the two countries from the time of the American Revolution onwards. This fact also applies to the two Jewish communities; despite all the communication and interaction across the border, Canadian Jewry is hardly a carbon copy of its more southerly counterpart. During the period that Tulchinsky covers, the contrasting patterns of development were even more evident. As a relatively small Jewish community but in many ways a very successful one, Canadian Jewry has much to teach the rest of world Jewry. Tulchinsky's theme, reiterated throughout his book, is that "Canadian Jewish history . . . was shaped by a set of co-ordinates which were unique to the northern half of this continent, and which resulted in the evolution of a distinctive community" (p. 279). He identifies several factors, some of them characteristic of Canadian society in general and others specific to Canadian Jewry, that helped to shape the nature of Canadian Jewish life. The first of these is the duality of Canada, the fact that the country represents a partnership between French and English Canadians. Jews, who first settled among the French Canadians, have related differently to the two founding groups, with the nature of their integration affecting the way in which the community developed. For example, ambiguities regarding access to confessional schools in Quebec required the Jews of Montreal to organize early in the twentieth century in order to guarantee their educational rights. Another example is the inability of the Jews to share in the development and expression of Quebec nationalism, a phenomenon that persists to the present. As the nationalist movement in Quebec again asserts itself and tries to gain independence for the province, the Jews (and other minorities as well) generally remain outside the boundaries of the Quebecois, the French-speaking Quebec ethnic group, and are adamantly opposed to the so-called sovereignist project. At times the inability of French Canadians to integrate Jews into their society fully has resulted in deeply troubling (albeit mostly nonviolent) manifestations of antisemitism. There are certainly plenty of examples of antisemitism in other parts of the country as well, but the Quebec experience has undoubtedly shaped Canadian Jews' relationships to the larger society in profound ways. Moreover, during the period covered in the book, Canada's largest Jewish community was based in Montreal. A second factor shaping Canadian Jewry was demographic in nature. Jews tended to cluster primarily in large cities. At first, as noted, the destination of choice was Montreal; more recently, it has become Toronto. Other communities (such as Winnipeg) operated on a much smaller scale. This concentration of the Jewish popula-

History and the Social Sciences

335

tion, which persists to the present, facilitated the leading role of national organizations. In contrast, the U.S. Jewish population has long been dispersed in a number of centers apart from New York, and the resultant competition has prevented national organizations from achieving the leading role they attained in Canada. The Canadian pattern enabled the Jews there to achieve an enviable status in the international Jewish world as one of the best-organized diaspora communities. Another important factor in Canadian Jewish development is the lack of pressure to "melt" into an all-encompassing Canadian identity. The duality of the country precluded such pressure, thus enabling minorities to retain their own identities. For the Jews this has resulted in a more confident ethnicity and more evidence of traditional religious practices. It has also exempted them from the kind of soulsearching that many American Jews had to go through before identifying themselves as Zionists: dual loyalty has not been an issue in Canada. Consequently, Zionism has been a normal part of Canadian Jewish life since early in the century and has commanded widespread support within the community. One manifestation of this phenomenon is that substantial numbers of Canadian Jews have visited Israel, perhaps as many as 70 percent, compared to perhaps 30 percent in the U.S. The process of building a viable community was not easy for the early Canadian Jews. The sheer size and diversity of the country, its relatively small population, the unforgiving climate, and recurrent antisemitism, not to mention economic challenges, forced the early Canadian Jews to struggle hard to establish themselves. But they did so and built strong communal institutions in the process. Synagogues, schools, libraries, hospitals, social service agencies, summer camps, cultural groups—indeed the whole panoply of what a Jewish community can offer—were created despite the small absolute size of the community. Tulchinsky only touches on the founding of the Canadian Jewish Congress, which came at the end of the period covered. But the Congress, a distinctively Canadian body, and later the federations (admittedly the result of American influences) have provided a framework for a well-organized and effective self-government that is very much synchronized with the rhythms of Canadian life while remaining firmly anchored in a strong sense of Jewish identity and purpose. Tulchinsky manages to bring the early period of the community's history to life with a broad command of the material and a graceful writing style. Moreover, the continuities between his period and the subsequent ones are clearly delineated, giving his work an unusual degree of contemporary relevance. HAROLD M. WALLER McGill University

Piotr S. Wandycz, The Price of Freedom: A History of East Central Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present. London and New York: Routledge: 1993. 330 pp. Piotr Wandycz is a well-known specialist on modern Poland. His latest book surveys East Central European history from the tenth century to the present (the book was

336

Book Reviews

first published in 1992 and does not take into account the recent divorce between Czechs and Slovaks and the total collapse of Yugoslavia). By "East Central Europe," a problematic term of fairly recent vintage, Wandycz means Poland, the Czech lands (and later Czechoslovakia) and Hungary; Slovakia, Croatia and Lithuania get some mention, but the book concentrates on the history of the Polish, Czech and Hungarian nations and states. This is a rather narrow definition of what one scholar has called "the lands between," signifying the region to the west of Russia and to the east of Germany. Thus Joseph Rothschild's book on East Central Europe during the interwar period includes Romania, Bulgaria and the three Baltic states, while Paul Robert Magocsi's remarkable historical atlas of the region is even more inclusive. Wandycz justifies his choice in an interesting introductory chapter. He claims that the three nations he deals with clearly belong to "Western civilization" since "they differed drastically from the East, as embodied by Muscovy-Russia, or the Ottoman Empire that ruled the Balkans for several centuries" (p. 3). The main factor, of course, is that the Poles, Czechs and Hungarians (along with the Slovaks, Croats and Lithuanians) are predominantly Roman Catholic, as opposed to the mostly Orthodox Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Romanians and Bulgarians. On the other hand, Wandycz emphasizes that the Czech lands, Poland and Hungary do differ from the "core region" of the West by virtue of their special economic, social and political development, namely their relative "backwardness" and their failure to preserve their political independence throughout the period under consideration. They should be seen as constituting the "semi-periphery" of Europe, thus occupying middle ground between Russia and the Balkans and the advanced nation-states of the West such as England, France and the Netherlands. To cover virtually the entire course of Polish, Czech and Hungarian history in less than 300 pages is a Herculean task performed by the author with considerable success. He has produced a lucid and dispassionate book. His approach is rather traditional—there is little to be found here on such fashionable subjects as women, the family and the "other." Nor is there any effort to enliven the text by the use of artistic material (except for the cover, which features the famous painting by Jan Matejko portraying the battle of Grunwald). The opinions of various historians on controversial issues are presented in an even-handed matter by this impartial author. The book is written well, although it does not entirely avoid cliches. Thus: "In 1848 a revolutionary tide swept across Europe" (p. 156); "the Crusades, that great movement of the early Middle Ages . . . " (p. 28); and "by the time of the waning of the Middle Ages East Central Europe had come a long way since the acceptance of Christianity five centuries earlier" (p. 47). In short, this volume can be warmly recommended as an introductory textbook for university students. Its treatment of the emergence of modern nationalism is particularly good. Of special interest is the author's insistence on the distinction between the liberal nationalism of the first half of the nineteenth century and the later rise of "integral nationalism," which, to his mind, "found the hatred of other people more attractive than the love of one's own" (p. 167). His concise treatment of the post-First World War territorial settlements (which lasted only a generation) is a model of clarity. In his discussion of interwar Poland, Wandycz emphasizes the

History and the Social Sciences

337

difference between Pilsudski's variety of nationalism ("ardent patriotism") and Dmowski's variety ("doctrinaire nationalism"). "The difference was basic," he affirms, and found expression in the different attitudes of these two leaders toward the national minorities (p. 215). In keeping with his balanced approach, Wandycz regards the interwar years as neither a great triumph nor an unmitigated disaster. His judgement is that the "spiritual and moral value of independence was great for peoples who had been deprived of it. If excessive nationalism was the price, it still allowed them to survive the trials of the Second World War and of forty-five years of communism that followed" (p. 227). After two generations of alien, Eastern-inspired (i.e., Russian) Communist rale the region is now reclaiming its rightful place as an integral part of the West. Wandycz concludes by voicing the hope that the new East Central Europe will take as its model the democratic West and that the region will work together in the spirit of democracy and of the variety of Catholicism represented by the present pope. "Once again, the East Central European region will have to catch up with and learn from the West" (p. 270). And it will be truly free only when its freedom does not imply limiting the freedoms of others. And now, briefly, to the "Jewish question." On the whole the author's scattered comments on the important Jewish presence in the region, while not particularly analytical and certainly not innovative, are judicious and fair. He distinguishes (following Arno Mayer) between traditional Judeophobia, always present in Europe, and the more virulent racist antisemitism of the late nineteenth century that was associated with integral nationalism. He points out, accurately enough, that in the Middle Ages "opportunities and living conditions for Jews were better in East Central Europe than in the West" (p. 26). There is no effort to trivialize or explain away the rise of anti-Jewish hostility in the modern period, but neither does Wandycz make any effort to deal in any depth with internal Jewish developments. Given the size of the volume, and the hugeness of its subject, this is hardly surprising. Readers of this book may be moved to regret the demise of pre-First World War Austria-Hungary and the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, since the nationstates that eventually emerged in their wake tended to be less tolerant and less pluralistic. The modern history of this region is above all the history of the triumph of nationalism, a phenomenon toward which Wandycz harbors ambivalent sentiments. A similar ambivalence might well be adopted by Jewish historians of Eastern Europe; if modern nationalism led inevitably to extreme antisemitism, it also provided a useful model for the most successful of all modern East European Jewish movements, namely Zionism. EZRA MENDELSOHN The Hebrew University Jonathan Webber (ed.), Jewish Identities in the New Europe. London and Washington, D.C.: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1994. 307 pp. This volume is the product of a conference on Jewish identities held at Oxford University in 1992, whose principal focus was East and West European Jewry in the

338

Book Reviews

wake of the collapse of Communist rule. The main interest of the book resides in the manner in which it discusses its main theme—which in itself is a subject for debate. Throughout the book, Jewish identity is confused with the Jewish condition. The latter, as we know, refers to the Jews' distribution in society among social classes, socioprofessional activities or generational categories, as well as to the characteristics of their community life and their relations with non-Jews. These are the topics abundantly discussed in this book. What is widely neglected is the topic indicated by its title, that is, European Jewish identities. What is (or should be) meant by this, is (1) how far people commit themselves to fellow members of the collective; (2) what values or symbols they attach to this affiliation; and (3) how they define their particular historical and social plight.1 These issues are rarely considered in Webber's book, with a few notable exceptions—Norman Solomon, for instance, who emphasizes the phenomenological meaning of Jewishness as a construction of reality; and Norman Lamm, who focuses in a similar vein on the role of religiosity. In his introduction, which is the principal chapter of the book, Webber attempts to tackle the distinction between identity and condition. His text, however, remains unclear. We learn that Jewish ideals are unrecognizable in the "Jewishness" of today, but this does not mean that they are gone. Yet we also learn that ideals may disappear but that this does not determine the disappearance of a Jewish identity. Webber asserts: "The critical mode in which identities are fashioned and refashioned depends on the degree to which the old assumptions are given precedence over the new evidence, or vice versa" (p. 3). In fact, diaspora Jewishness, Webber contends, is mainly held together by a notion of voluntary involvement in the Jewish community. Diaspora Jews who have become members of wider nations both define their Jewish identity and practice it on an individual and personal basis. This implies, to be sure, endemic uncertainties and weaknesses—as expressed by the embourgeoisement of Jews and their eventual assimilatory tendencies. Webber, in the final analysis, hangs his hope on cooperation with the Christian churches in validating a positive environment for the development or retention of a Jewishness that, he seems to assert, will be sustained by its respectability in society. Webber's analysis concurs with several contributors to the book, who make do with descriptions of particular circumstances. Geoffrey Alderman speaks of the development of British Jewry as an ethnic group, and Stephen Miller elaborates on religious practices in London. Shmuel Trigano contributes a piece on the variety of French forms of Jewish attitudes and activities. Community institutions and their vicissitudes are the subject of chapters by Mikhail Chlenov and Igor Krupnick (on Russian Jewry) and Andras Kovacs (on Hungarian Jewry). Julius Carlebach details the problems of German Jews today—quite superficially, however, and without addressing the difficult questions that inevitably arise concerning this community. Evyator Friesel and Elisabeth Maxwell both predicate the survival of Judaism on the support of other religious groups. The more interesting chapters in this book include Konstanty Gebert's description of the return to Judaism of former Polish Communists, Robert Wistrich's pessimistic description of the renewed threat of antisemitism in Europe and Lord Beloff's analysis of the emergence of European radical nationalisms.

History and the Social Sciences

339

The Israel-diaspora dialogue is also represented here. The main spokesman for the Israeli side is Eliezer Schweid, who is the only contributor on this topic to focus on identity more than on condition. Jews, he argues, quarrel over contradictory demands, and their various Jewish identities may widely diverge from each other— Jewishness is a national identity for the Israelis and as such is of permanent existential significance; whereas for diaspora Jews, it is but a partial ethnic identity variously emphasized by individuals at their personal convenience. Thus for Schweid, all versions of Jewishness belong to a common arena with unifying boundaries, with the state of Israel constituting the center of world Jewry. Webber, for his part, presents a radical diaspora point of view. He describes the creation of Israel as a reaction to the past hostility of the gentiles, and Israeli Jewishness as the expression of a residual historical consciousness and a quasibiblical mythology. In his second essay, Webber contrasts the voluntary character of Jewish involvement in the diaspora community with Israeli Jewishness, which is imposed on citizens as a political reality. He thus dissociates Israeli Jewishness from all others. What transpires from Webber's argument is that he, as a Jewish diaspora intellectual, has what may be termed an "Israel problem." It is unfortunate that this problem is not analyzed in depth. Nonetheless, Webber's position merits an answer. In his avoidance of any discussion of the substantive tenets of Jewish identity, Webber totally ignores the fact that the Israeli experience cannot be isolated from the rest of Judaism, precisely because it touches upon the very heart of Judaism's preoccupations. In contrast to any other form of modern and secular Jewishness, Israel both implements its collective nature and addresses the existential problem set down—but unresolved—by traditional Judaism, that is, the return from what the latter defines as galut (exile). Hence, Israel is both a drastic transformation and a continuation of Jewish history, and it is as such that it dichotomizes Jews between those of the diaspora and those who have "returned" out of exile. This point is confirmed by a couple of chapters in the book, such as Jonathan Sacks' discussion of the impact of the Six-Day War on U. S. Jewry. This war, says Sacks, thrust American Jews out of their dream of assimilation and pushed them to renew their Jewish solidarity, making the physical survival of Israel a reason for the social and cultural survival of the diaspora. Similarly, Dominque Schnapper demonstrates that for decades numerous French Jews were tempted by the assimilation urged upon them by official policy. Today, however, they have rediscovered Jewish solidarity—in the form of support for Israel—both in the aftermath of the Six-Day War and under the impetus of the large immigration of traditional or quasi-traditional North African Jews. ELIEZER BEN-RAFAEL Tel-Aviv University

Note 1. See Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Language, Identity and Social Cleavage: The Case of Israel (Oxford: 1994).

340

Book Reviews

Jack Wertheimer (ed.), The Modern Jewish Experience: A Reader's Guide. New York and London: New York University Press, 1993. 392 pp.

This book is basically a compilation of twenty-nine short chapters dealing with aspects of the "modern Jewish experience" broadly defined. The target audience, however, is not the student but rather the professor working up courses and needing subject overviews and bibliographies for topics about which he or she knows little or nothing. Wertheimer's introduction points out the proliferation of Jewish studies courses at colleges and universities, which in North America alone are said to employ a thousand instructors. Not all of them, it is implied, are qualified to teach courses on Judaic topics—or if they are, they may have to go well beyond their specialty. The International Center for the University Teaching of Jewish Civilization in Jerusalem and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York joined forces to produce this guidebook for them. The brief chapters (ca. 10 pages each) are followed by "an annotated guide to major reference sources" (mostly English-language or accessible to the English reader) by the editor, and also sample syllabi for various countries with bibliographies as much as possible in the relevant language. The countries are the U.S., South Africa, France, Germany, Russia and Argentina. The overall impression is that Wertheimer and his twenty-three coauthors have tried hard and with considerable success to give a multiplicity of approaches. Three quarters of the book consist of the above-mentioned short chapters. The authors were evidently told to present an overview of their subject, an annotated bibliography of English-language books and a syllabus for a concentrated course of three class sessions. The early chapters adopt a geographic approach (for instance, "Polish Jewry to the Partitions"), followed by others with a subject approach (for instance, "Hasidism and its Opponents"). There is in the nature of the case considerable overlap, and in the bibliographic paragraphs some books appear over and over again. This reviewer feels that Jewish thought is scattered through too many overlapping units, and that some topics are omitted—one example being post-partition Poland—because no scholar was available to write them up. We conclude with some specific comments. In this kind of publication, being up to date is important, and some of the bibliography on the most dynamic groups (Russian and Israeli Jews) is out of date. In his essay "Soviet Jewry" (p. 25), Eli Lederhendler gives up too easily in referring the user to the daily newspaper for recent developments. Chaim I. Waxman's "Israeli Society and Culture" should have given more attention to the growing crisis in the kibbutz movement (p. 75). David Weinberg's excellent "Jewish Emancipation" (pp. 95-101) is followed by his less successful essay "Secular Jewish Culture" (pp. 102-108), where he has difficulty both in defining the topic and in finding relevant material. Jack Wertheimer's "The Mass Migrations of East European Jews" (pp. 123-132) should have had something to say about emigration and its problems in addition to the immigrant experience, on which material is much easier to find. Well handled are "Hasidism and its Opponents" by David E. Fishman (pp. 151-157) and "Modern Jewish Literature" by David G. Roskies (pp. 213-227), although Roskies, in trying to be interesting, is

History and the Social Sciences

341

sometimes too subjective. Sergio DellaPergola, in "Modern Jewish Demography" (pp. 275-290) asks the inevitable question "Who is a Jew"; in his answer he distinguishes core from enlarged populations, with the latter seen largely as nonJewish members of Jewish households. The last essay, overlong in terms of the editor's scheme, is "American and Canadian Jewish Sociology" by Stuart Schoenfeld (pp. 291-312). The author makes the interesting point that what used to be called the problem of assimilation is now called, in public discourse, "Jewish continuity." AVRAHAM GREENBAUM University of Haifa

Language, Literature and the Arts

Robert Alter, Hebrew and Modernity. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994. 192 pp. Robert Alter dedicates this volume to Benjamin Harshav, "who shares these exotic enthusiasms." Modern Hebrew literature, alas, is indeed still an exotic topic for most of the English-speaking world. However, thanks to his many informed and intelligent discussions, Robert Alter has succeeded more than anyone else in opening gateways to this literature. The present volume, consisting of essays written between 1981 and 1993, continues that work and explains clearly the enthusiasm this literature arouses. In an ever elegant, never condescending prose, Alter presents a range of topics—the fiction of David Fogel, the poetry of Yehuda Amichai, Hebrew prose in America, a comparison of the family as theme in the narratives of Franz Kafka, Saul Bellow and S. Y. Agnon, literary responses to the Holocaust and more. That a number of these essays originally appeared in nonacademic publications (the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Commentary, an afterword to Agnon's novel Shira) is indicative of this critic's remarkable ability to convey an understanding of often unfamiliar material to a discerning general audience. An emphasis on the anomalies of Hebrew writing in the modern era binds the essays loosely together. Alter stresses this point in his preface, noting that even as more and more of this literature becomes available in English translation, and even as it garners enthusiastic readers, few people appreciate the distinctiveness and "abiding oddness" (p. x) of modern Hebrew literature. The essays are arranged roughly in chronological order, giving a sense of the scope of cultural change that has produced this literature. In addition to essays on individual writers, Alter sketches here the challenges faced by an ancient language reborn as a medium for modern fiction, the migration of literary centers in the formative years of modem Hebrew writing, and the development of the Israeli novel. Of special interest is Alter's opening essay, "Hebrew and Modernity," which has not been published before. The discussion discerns three factors that set modern Hebrew writing apart from other literatures. First are the polyglot contexts that have had a direct impact not only on the early authors (as in the well-known case of S. Y. Abramowitz) but also on contemporary figures such as David Grossman, Yehudit Katzir and Yoel Hoffman, all of whom incorporate Yiddish into their Hebrew prose. Second, the longevity of Hebrew—a language that has been in continuous literary use over millenia—endows this literature with extraordinary allusive possibilities. Third, the unusual historical circumstances that fostered the revival of Hebrew 342

Language, Literature and the Arts

343

imbued the new literature with ideological qualities that continue to shape literary endeavors to this day. The essay concludes with a discussion of recent novels (Yizhak Ben-Ner's Protocol [1983J; David Grossman's See Under: Love [1986] and A.B. Yehoshua's Mr. Mani [1990]) that dramatize multiple layers of Hebrew and demonstrate connections between language and ideology. The first two authors under discussion turn to period language (Hebrew of the 1920s and Hebrew of the Haskalah), whereas Yehoshua creates Hebrew equivalents to Ladino in order to convey a nineteenth-century Sephardic milieu. Observing how various strata of the Hebrew language have been incorporated into or represented in these novels, Alter explores the ideological valence of these unusual narrative choices. Alter is at his best explaining capacious ideas through close readings of individual texts. (See, for example, the essay on Agnon's psychological realism.) He also demonstrates a keen sense of the ways in which cultural contexts intersect to make possible the production of particular texts. Writing of Shimon Halkin's 1945 novel 'Ad mashber, he notes that this celebration of New York and the Jewish immigrant experience came about thanks to Halkin's ability to combine a knowledge of rabbinic and biblical texts, familiarity with Uri Nissan Gnessin's narrative technique, and an equally strong familiarity with Walt Whitman and other American writers— even as personal circumstances found the author in New York rather than Palestine during the Second World War. Alter's ability to paint the big picture and to demonstrate how cultural forces intersect is also a strength in "Secularity and the Tradition of Hebrew Verse," which appeared originally as a review of and a response to two anthologies, The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse (1981), edited by T. Carmi; and Voices Within the Ark (1980), edited by Howard Schwartz and Anthony Rudolf. More than an ordinary review, this essay surveys centuries of Hebrew tradition, showing how secular and religious poetry have overlapped, intertwined and left their traces on one another. The evidence, Alter concludes, suggests that Jewish experience from the tenth to the eighteenth centuries was far more various than contemporary readers usually realize, and thus modern perceptions of the Jewish past have erred by greatly underestimating the complex interactions and accommodations of secular and religious life. Specialists and serious researchers will be disappointed that this book makes only scattered references to previous scholarship in the field. In addition, a firm editorial hand or some simple updating might have prevented a few glaring awkwardnesses in this collection. "Vistas of Annihilation," in which Alter reviews Alan Mintz's Hurban and David Roskies' Against the Apocalypse, refers to these volumes as "two new books" (p. 105) even though both were published in 1984 and have since been much discussed in the field of Holocaust studies. Similarly, nowhere is it stated when "Secularity and the Tradition of Hebrew Verse" first came out (1981), nor when Carmi's anthology of Hebrew verse was published (also 1981). This information, basic in any event, is necessary for the reader to grasp what The Penguin Book added to previously available materials. The date becomes particularly interesting in view of the fact that a number of other publications over the past ten years have created new opportunities to read medieval Hebrew verse in English translation. For example, Ray Scheindlin's books Wine, Women and Death (1986) and The Gazelle

344

Book Reviews

(1990) have made a range of Golden Age poetry accessible to nonspecialists in attractive bilingual editions, which provide graceful explanations of the poems, engaging background essays, and a different approach to translation than the one Carmi adopted. It is important for readers to know that Carmi's book does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, it has been part of a recent burgeoning of Jewish studies in English, a phenomenon well worth documenting because of the potential it holds for precisely the kind of increased appreciation of Hebrew literature that Alter so ably promotes in Hebrew and Modernity. NAOMI SOKOLOFF University of Washington

Ziva Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation: The Influence of the Holocaust on the Visual Arts. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1993. 567 pp.

Even those who have never heard of the Frankfurt School have heard of Theodor Adorno's decree that after the Holocaust it would be barbaric to write poetry—and by extension, to paint or make sculpture. I heard it myself as a student, and foraged widely in seeking a riposte. I soon found Sartre's unforgettable essay, in which he said, For a self-willed man in a room with windows overlooking a concentration camp to paint a compote is not serious; his sin is one of negligence. The real crime would be painting the concentration camp as if it was a compote—in the same spirit of research and experimentation.

But not even Sartre could find a satisfactory position on what the author of this book calls the "influence" of the Holocaust on the arts. In the face of an enormous body of work alluding to the Holocaust, Ziva Amishai-Maisels has taken the only honorable position, that there can be no position. With a scholar's patience, she has sifted the evidence, finding innumerable paths through the mass of Holocaust references in the visual arts. Mindful of the emotional traps hidden everywhere in her subject, Amishai-Maisels has taken a sensible approach bordering on scientific method: she teases out dominant motifs and symbols, seeks commonalities and differences, discerns groupings as if they were genuses and species, and proffers as much data as possible for other researchers to verify. Her book is divided into two sections, the first dealing with "depiction," in which are included sketches by inmates of the camps who attempted to bear witness to Nazi atrocities, as well as by noninmates who felt compelled to alert others to the ultimate debacle. Since the issue of documentation is prominent in this first half of the book, Amishai-Maisels offers a wealth of corollary material, ranging from quotations of survivor-artists to biographical details of dramatic import. Sometimes small details are dropped into the narrative to startling effect, such as when she discusses Auschwitz and reminds her readers that "flowers were forbidden in the camp" (p. 8). The moral issues raised by Adorno and Sartre are addressed, wisely, mainly through extensive quotations of the artists who attempted to explain, or

Language, Literature and the Arts

345

justify, their obsessions. As long as the author remains on documentary grounds, she is spared the far more difficult issue that a cursory glance at the nearly 700 illustrations instantly presents: who, among these many earnest reporters and interpreters, is really an outstanding artist? In the second part, "interpretation," Amishai-Maisels is relieved of the necessity of respecting the inmate artists merely for having been inmates. She now undertakes to speak of those who tried to come to grips with the meaning of the events, mostly through symbolism and what she calls distancing. Here there are more probing accounts that measure the degree of artistic commitment, the linkages among artists of various centuries (Goya, Callot, Giacometti), the relevance of traditional iconographies and the situation of abstract art vis-a-vis the putatively unspeakable. Taking on the largest figures in twentieth-century art, Amishai-Maisels advances boldly into the interpretive realm, offering close studies and original interpretations of the works of Max Beckmann, Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko and even Alberto Giacometti. Here scientific or art historical method is forced to give way. At every turn the author is obliged to confront the evidence that the most forceful artists discussed in her book go beyond the strict boundary of her topic. The question of evil itself on a universal or even metaphysical plane supersedes the Holocaust. In the case of Beckmann, for instance, she is able to pin down a few specific allusions to the Holocaust (as it is perceived by the Jews) in cryptic diary entries. But the wily old allegorist would never have been constrained by the historic facts of the Holocaust. With Giacometti, whom she rightly honors as an artist keenly aware of public events, and whom she obviously recognizes as a superior artist, it is more of a strain to insist on the "influence" of the Holocaust. Still more, the issue of abstraction is vexing and almost impossible to circumscribe in a book avowedly limited to Holocaust responses. No amount of rigorous method can pry out the specific subject in an abstraction by Mark Rothko, nor can an author ever claim to descry the precise emotion that incited a work of visual art. Still, Rothko must be dealt with by whatever means possible for he was, as is verifiable (if only indirectly), profoundly affected by world events both as a Jew and as an artist. It is to the author's credit that she braves criticism by acknowledging both the good faith of abstract artists and their necessary connections with some of the most atrocious events of their lifetime. It is true that Amishai-Maisels stresses the idea of "safe distance" when she deals with artists less interested in depiction than interpretation. In certain instances, such as in the work of Jozef Szajna—a survivor of hideous experiences in several camps— that idea is hardly useful. Szajna's paintings and installations are strikingly unsafe both for him and his viewers, who cannot fail to be moved by their theatrical excessiveness, their articulated horror. (In this instance, Amishai-Maisels' discussion would have been enhanced had she sketched the theater events in Cracow, and the equally searing work of Tadeusz Kantor.) As Amishai-Maisels appears to have noticed in the course of her many years' work on her subject, more thoughtful artists often veered away from the historicizing tasks of depiction toward universal observations. The inmate-artist Zoran Music, whose recent works are both tremulously general and of great artistic merit, increasingly equated his personal experience in the camps with twentieth-century outrages even after the camps. Indeed, one of the most shocking quotations offered by Amishai-Maisels is Music's:

346

Book Reviews

How often did we say in Dachau that such things would never be repeated in this world! They are being repeated. This means that the horrible is in Man himself and not only in a specific society (p. 353).

Out of the immense amount of information, visual imagery, testimony and discussion in this major book, the author, with laudable rectitude, draws no conclusions, regards her book as "an interim report" and may very well have carried in her heart a poem by Dan Pagis, "Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car," which has always seemed to me to be the only poem that successfully answered Adorno: here in this carload i am eve with abel my son if you see my other son cain son of man tell him that i1 DORE ASHTON The Cooper Union

Note 1. The poem, which is found in Poems by Dan Pagis (Oxford: 1972), is reprinted here with the courteous permission of the translator, Stephen Mitchell.

Sarah Blacher Cohen, Cynthia Ozick's Comic Art: From Levity to Liturgy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. 193 pp. Sarah Blacher Cohen begins with a question Cynthia Ozick asked her in a letter: "Can one write comically without knowing one is doing it?" For Cohen, it seems, this "rhetorical question" misses the point: Ozick's art is comic (consciously or not) because "in her originally clever fashion, she tells the whole embarrassing truth, which the art of comedy is dedicated to telling" (p. 2). Of course, "the whole embarrassing truth" is not always funny, especially in an imaginative world such as Ozick's, which ranges from genocide and suicide to intellectual bitterness, emotional isolation and spiritual inanition. Moreover, Ozick claims to have been genuinely surprised to discover, at least in the case of her story "Envy; or, Yiddish in America," that people have found humor in her writing. In this, Ozick has reversed the pattern set by Franz Kafka, whose works were received with hilarity by his own circle but now evoke somber mystification in modern readers. Ozick, by contrast, has at times anticipated seriousness, only to experience "a curious bewilderment" as her audience reacts with mirth. Cohen's challenge, then, is to provide a reading of Ozick's fiction that is both consistently and meaningfully comic; and in this she succeeds well enough to provide a valuable addition to Ozick criticism. If comedy is embarrassing truths, Cohen searches for the embarrassment (if not the truth) in obvious places: in the absurdity of Ozick's stories and situations, in the

Language, Literature and the Arts

347

irony and satire of her language, and particularly in the clever deficiencies of her characters. "The most conspicuous comic element of Ozick's fiction," according to Cohen, is "comedy of character which exposes the tainted nature of her protagonists" (pp. 4-5). As one might expect, Ozick's early stories provide the most fertile ground for such an exposition, and the three middle chapters of the study covering those fictions are the most successful. The first of these is devoted solely to "Envy; or, Yiddish in America," a special favorite of Ozick enthusiasts in part because its two main characters are thinly veiled caricatures of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Jacob Glatstein. Cohen may agree with Jacob Lowin that "Envy" can be read as both "the story of an individual's pathos and the epic of a people's history" (quoted, p. 61), but its humor comes largely from the characterizations of well-known individuals and the absurdity of Yiddish as a literary industry in postwar America. As a result, Ozick's purported surprise at the story's humorous reception seems rather disingenuous, though Cohen is too politic to say so. In the next chapter, entitled "The Pagan Rabbi,' 'Levitation,' and 'Usurpation': Wry Jokes on Realism," Cohen's discussion of midrashic models and liturgical purposes brings up one of the central inconsistencies of Ozick's art: according to Cohen, Ozick the fictionist "preaches a higher truth" by maintaining that "Jewish writers fashioning a make-believe reality through words are committing idolatrous acts in direct violation of the Second Commandment," and that "authors are usurpers, since they appropriate from God the role of the creator" (p. 80). Ozick's own shorthand formulation of this apparent attack on her own vocation comes near the end of "Usurpation": "All that is not Law is levity." That dictum seems ideally suited for Cohen's purposes, because none of Ozick's writing is Law; and Cohen returns to a similar theme in her concluding chapter, where she utilizes the traditional distinction between halakhah and aggadah. But having identified Ozick's apparently contradictory impulses, Cohen retreats, saying simply that Ozick writes "about levity and law," and that her stories "keep her readers awake and amused." The chapters on Ozick's longer fictions are more problematic. Ozick herself once termed her first novel, Trust, "unreadable," and while Cohen dismisses this as "a moment of harsh self-rebuke," my own copy of Trust bears the following inscription from its author: "David Mesher, with gratitude for expecting he will be able (since no one else has) to get through" and an arrow pointing to the title. Some readers find James unbearable as well, of course, so that the density of Trust may be considered part of its success as a Jamesian comedy of manners. Cohen's close reading of the fiction, here and elsewhere, is generally both sound and enlightening, but even her sense of humor seems stymied by Trust, and there is only cursory discussion of its comic elements. Cohen insists more on the comedy of The Cannibal Galaxy and The Messiah of Stockholm, Ozick's later novels, but the levity of all three works is overshadowed, to some extent, by their connection with the Holocaust, and Cohen's discussion of humor in the wake of genocide finally takes center stage in her penultimate chapter on The Shawl. Though Cohen terms The Shawl a "novel," it is more accurately a collection of two short related fictions, "The Shawl" and "Rosa." The former is much shorter, set amid the horrors of a death camp; the latter is set in the present-day Miami Beach of impoverished Jewish retirees. Cohen attempts to discover humor in this unpromis-

348

Book Reviews

ing material while recognizing what she calls the "two unspoken commandments" for those who write about the Holocaust: Thou shall respect the monumental nature of this unique catastrophe and faithfully represent the barbarous events without manipulating the facts for artistic effect. Thou shall in no way whimsically treat or mockingly undermine the serious nature of Ihis subject matter which would diminish its importance or detract from its gravity (p. 146).

It is a delicate maneuver. Cohen, for example, recounts Ozick's response to the letter from a Holocaust survivor who objected to "The Shawl." Citing the Hagadah's injunction to make the Exodus a personal event, Ozick asks the survivor, "Well, if I am enjoined to belong to an event that occurred 4000 years ago, how much more strongly am I obliged to belong to an event that occurred only 40 years ago" (quoted, p. 148). The answer accords well with Cohen's own liturgical approach to Ozick's fiction, but also exposes its weaknesses, for the two events—though both formative nationally—are nothing alike theologically. Cohen's own solution, that in The Shawl Ozick has created a "Holocaust Haggadah," misses the more interesting possibility that the author's comedy may well violate Cohen's own commandments. Cohen is also the author of a 1974 study entitled Saul Bellow's Enigmatic Laughter, a fact that helps to explain the frequent quotations from Bellow that dot the current volume's first and last chapters. Cohen quotes Bellow on characterization, on humor, on "ideal constructions," on disintegration of the self, and so on. Indeed, when Cohen draws a distinction between Ozick's characters and Leopold Bloom, it's not Joyce's prose she quotes, but Bellow's description of it. Curiously, however, all of these Bellow citations are from works published prior to 1966—the year Ozick's first novel appeared. And there are other peculiarities in Cohen's study that, while not damaging, are nonetheless distracting: striking typos (Robert M. Polhemus is once cited, for example, as "Polyphemus"), vague constructions (Cohen mentions an "exhortative kind of satire and irony" that is "unique to the Prophets" and "unique to the parables of Rabbi Akiva") (pp. 14-15), and especially her habit of quoting primary works from secondary sources (and especially their epigraphs), as if she were unfamiliar with the full text of the original. This indirect and dated aspect of the study emerges in other ways as well. In comparing Ozick's Jamesian novel Trust to Henry James's own fiction, for example, Cohen never quotes from a James work directly, and the secondary sources she utilizes for this purpose were published between 1969 and 1972. The main question here is not so much whether Cohen has done her research, but whether her arguments would have benefited from a fuller or more recent acquaintance with her sources. Inevitably, Sarah Blacher Cohen's Cynthia Ozick's Comic Art will be compared to Elaine M. Kauvar's Cynthia Ozick's Fiction: Tradition and Invention, published a year earlier by the same press. And just as certainly, Cohen's study will be found wanting—not because Cynthia Ozick's Comic Art is bad, but because Kauvar's book is that good. It is so good that Victor Strandberg, whose own study Greek Mind/Jewish Soul: The Conflicted Art of Cynthia Ozick also appeared in 1994, wrote the following in a late note to his text: "Kauvar's fusion of brilliant critical intelligence with a rich knowledge of Jewish and classical lore figures to render her critique permanently unsurpassed in the shelf of Ozick criticism." Certainly Kau-

Language, Literature and the Arts

349

var's study is indispensable in its erudition and its insights, and Strandberg's book also has its strengths, especially in his review of criticism, his placement of Ozick within a variety of cultural and intellectual traditions, and his willingness to deal directly with her essays as more than just a gloss on her fiction. But there is much to recommend Cohen's comic approach as well—enough, at least, to make one begin to doubt Bertolt Brecht's adage that he who is smiling has yet to hear the terrible news. D. MESHER San Jose State University

Gila Flam, Singing for Survival: Songs of the Lodz Ghetto 1940-45. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992. 207 pp. Contrary to what might be thought, scholarly research on the folk songs of East European Jews still lags well behind that of other aspects of their cultural heritage. With few exceptions (e.g., Ruth Rubin's Voices of a People [1963J), most sources available on the subject are popular anthologies. Many of these collections lack the most basic documentation concerning their sources and the social context or meaning of the songs included in them. Given this reality, Gila Flam's book represents a most welcome and innovative departure. The work is based on original and systematic field work carried out in the 1980s among survivors of the Lodz ghetto in Israel and the United States. Apart from this detailed ethnography, the book draws on library and rare archival materials. Until now, the category of "Holocaust songs" within the Yiddish repertory referred to songs composed in the ghettos whose lyric content related to the particular historical period in which they were composed. Flam expands the term by considering as well the songs' context, going beyond the temporal, spatial and personal frames of the ghetto songs. Following this basic methodological approach, the classification of the songs— and indeed the structure of the book—is governed by contexts of performance and not by the content of the lyrics. The picture that emerges from Flam's research is that of an eclectic repertory of songs that, apart from some original material, also includes prewar popular ditties, Zionist patriotic hymns and even Polish children's songs. The book thus tells us "the story of the Lodz ghetto in song" (p. 4-5). After setting up the general historical context of the Lodz ghetto in the first chapter, Flam deals with "street songs," "domestic songs," and "theatre songs, youth organizations and workplace songs." Chapter 6 is devoted to those ghetto songs performed in ceremonies and gatherings of survivors in the contemporary period. Flam stresses the role of individual singers and musicians, both professional and non-professional, in the creative process. A particular technique of composition discussed is "contrafact," the composition of new lyrics to extant, well-known melodies. The poignancy of this technique in the ghetto setting is clear: by recalling

350

Book Reviews

the original content and performance context of songs in the prewar period, the new lyrics composed in the ghetto capitalized on the associations of the listeners by sharply contrasting them. Such is song no. 22 (in Polish), which is based on a Polish children's song. The original refrain, "what a wonderful world" becomes "what a nasty world"; for those who know the original, the comforting prewar world survives in the melody while the turbulent present dominates the new lyrics. Of particular interest are the variety of functions that the songs filled in the ghetto: as social and political protest (much of it against the Jewish authorities appointed by the Nazis), as a source of information on current affairs, and as an expression of solidarity and comfort in a time of despair. In short, song and singing operated in the ghetto as a strategy of survival under desperate, brutal conditions. Apart from its novel interpretation, Flam's book is valuable as an insightful ethnography of the East European Jewish song as it survives in the present, in the memory of members of the last generation of transmitters. The complete transliterated texts and English translations of thirty-six songs (most of them with musical transcriptions) are included in this book. Some songs incorporate textual variants. A few of these songs are published here for the first time in their entirety and with their music. Rooted in the medieval period, the Yiddish folk song was already under an accelerated process of change by the second half of the nineteenth century. Popular songs of the Yiddish theatre and artistic arrangements of old songs superseded the old shtetl songs in the predominant urban settings of the Jewish population in Eastern Europe and America. The Holocaust was thus the last period in which the Yiddish song functioned, for a brief instant, as a true folk song—as a voice of the people. In this touching book Flam proves once again that music and song are powerful symbolic tools of remembrance. The fate of the East European Jewish song toward the end of the twentieth century relies on studies such as this, on interpretations that attempt to unravel the meanings of the songs in their original context of performance as well as their relevance to our age. EDWIN SEROUSSI Bar-Ilan University

Neal Gabler, Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity. New York: Knopf, 1995. xvi + 681 pp.

Walter Winchell was a bullhorn, a streetwise scrapper who at his peak—which lasted three decades—captured (and captivated) a bigger audience than probably any journalist in American history. Based in the New York Mirror, his gossip column was syndicated in more than two thousand newspapers. His nightly broadcasts, breathlessly delivered at two hundred words a minute, garnered the highest ratings the medium could attract. An estimated two out of three adults either read his column or listened to his radio program. He helped invent the image of the urban

Language, Literature and the Arts

351

(but hardly urbane) reporter, chain-smoking and frenetic, wearing a snap-brim fedora and ever ready with a pencil and pad. Actor James Cagney may have modeled his screen persona on Winchell, who engineered the surrender of the notorious "Lepke" Buchalter of Murder, Inc. in 1939 and helped make the Lindbergh kidnapping trial the precedent for all the other sordid media circuses. Winchell also enlarged, enlivened and debased the American vernacular. (His prose reminded Ben Hecht of "a man honking in a traffic jam.") Winchell's sources of information were so extensive that, despite his friendliness with Director J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI apparently found it advantageous to bug him. Moving nonstop in a whirl of popping flashbulbs, Winchell was addicted to the frenzy of renown, dominating the eighteen-mile-long boulevard named Broadway from his headquarters—a table at the Stork Club. Yet far from glorifying the "swells" of cafe society, his column specialized in smudging their reputations. Winchell was a plebeian, a raucous voice of ressentiment who dragged his victims into what he himself (in a typical slang neologism) termed "the slimelight." His career constituted a remorseless effort to violate what Louis D. Brandeis had in 1890 called the right that civilized people most cherished, "the right to be left alone." But Winchell became a one-man Department of Energy in the service of a meretricious supply of malicious "news." In the stupefying emptiness of his achievements and in the poisonous legacy of the reduction of privacy, he personified the banalities as well as the dynamism of popular journalism and mass culture. Democracy he defined as the right of anybody "to kick everybody else's ass. But you can't kick Winchell's." Indeed he was a vengeful bully whom virtually no one dared to cross; and the few who criticized him had to brace themselves for his ugly aspersions on their manhood or their patriotism, or both. His personality, which could be labeled "manic-impressive," attracted and repelled. So intense and thorough was his egocentricity that he managed to estrange two wives, help wreck the lives of his children, exploit with callousness and cruelty his employees and his mistresses and top it off by losing virtually every friend he had. Relationships he could neither sustain nor make intimate; they were merely transactions that he saw as useful to the gossip column that consumed him. When Winchell lost his column, he lost his reason for living. When the cantankerous old buzzard died just short of his seventy-fifth birthday in 1972, his daughter was the only mourner at the funeral, which was conducted by a rabbi who barely knew him. The deceased was consigned to the oblivion that he had spent a lifetime trying to elude. The trajectory from have-not to has-been—the terrifyingly lonely flame-out from the pinnacles of sudden but fragile wealth and glory—represent a supremely American story; and Neal Gabler has told it brilliantly. He depicts success as the reward of a relentless ambition and aggressiveness, cursed by the nemesis of self-destructiveness. Winchell is so fetchingly told, so utterly absorbing, that the pages virtually turn themselves. Based on tenacious research, this biography does not condescend to its subject, whose incorrigible vulgarity and vindictiveness are nevertheless made salient to the history of mass taste. It should be noted that this keyhole-peeping career was redeemed in the 1930s and early 1940s by a political campaign. The grandson of a hazan from Bialystok, Winchell called himself an "intuitive" Jew, which meant that, though bereft of any

352

Book Reviews

religious or cultural commitments to Judaism, he was quick to spot danger. The wrenching poverty and desperation of a Harlem childhood had taught him distrust. Virtually no American journalist was therefore quicker to spot the menace of Nazism, and no pundit was more strident in opposing the Third Reich—which Winchell did, with his characteristic virulence, beginning in 1933. To have been called, even then, "the most rabid anti-Hitlerite in America" was not a sign of political prescience but rather of special sensitivity to a perilous environment in which Winchell had, in a sense, been living all his life. Though Gabler documents Winchell's close association with Arnold Foster, the general counsel of the Anti-Defamation League, the book somehow misses an incident in 1944, when the leading bigot on Capitol Hill, Mississippi's John Rankin, described Winchell as a "little kike" with an "alias no telling what" (Weinschel had in fact been the family name). When none of Rankin's fellow Congressmen rose from the floor to object, journalist Laura Z. Hobson was inspired to write what is still the most famous literary attack on American antisemitism, Gentleman's Agreement (1947). It was an inadvertent but not inappropriate tribute to a man who had blasted American Nazis and their sympathizers with the same fervor that he would soon lavish upon Communists and "Communists" during the Red Scare, when he became a rancid McCarthyite and soon made himself vulnerable to those who deployed the sorts of caustic ad hominem techniques that Winchell had largely invented. No wonder then that Gabler's summation of his subject's significance merits quotation: [He] helped inaugurate a new mass culture of celebrity . . . dedicated to the ephemeral and grounded on the principle that notoriety confers power. . . . This culture would bind an increasingly diverse, mobile and atomized nation until it became, in many respects, America's dominant ethos, celebrity-consciousness our new common denominator.

To seek Winchell's monument, look around. STEPHEN J. WIIITFIELD Brandeis University

Menachem Mor (ed.), Jewish Sects, Religious Movements, and Political Parties. Proceedings of the Third Annual Symposium of the Philip M. and Ethel Klutznick Chair in Jewish Civilization. Omaha: Creighton University Press, 1992. xxiii + 426 pp. The proceedings collected in this volume cover an extraordinary range of subjects and approaches. Three papers on Samaritanism are followed by papers on JewishChristian sects in the early centuries of the common era, the Sabbatean movement, Jewish radicalism in Russia, Jewish youth movements, the Lubavitch hasidim during the Second World War, feminism in American Jewry, Holocaust theology, changes in the thinking of Reform leaders, the response of traditionalist rabbis to nonobservers of the Sabbath, and a number of papers on politics in Israel. The authors belong to the disciplines of classics, history, political science, religious

Language, Literature and the Arts

353

studies, philosophy and sociology. Papers range widely in level of scholarship and length; a richly documented sixty-two-page paper on Israel's Communist movement is found alongside a pedestrian seven-page summary of differences between the political right and left in Israel. The volume ends with a panel discussion on American Jewry by representatives of the four denominations of American Judaism. In short, this is quite a hodgepodge, and in our age of specialization most scholars are likely to look into this volume for the article or two that may interest them. In his introduction, Menachem Mor makes a brief stab at finding a basic theme for the collection. According to him, the focus is on "the dualistic phenomena characterizing Judaism throughout the ages—pluralism versus sectarianism, religiosity versus secularity, universalism versus separatism—the issues challenging Jewish groups, religious movements and political parties today" (p. xiii). If one looks hard enough one might find these dualistic themes in the articles, but I suspect that one could find them equally well in any collection of papers on Judaism. In accord with my own interests in religious movements and trends, I found three papers of particular interest. The paper by Jacob Barnai on the social background of the Sabbatean movement in Smyrna shows how the Portuguese Marrano background of many of Shabbetai Zvi's close friends, plus the rivalry within the community, were conducive to his activities. Gerson Greenberg gives an account of the messianic response within Lubavitch to the Holocaust during the time of the war; it would be interesting to compare that phase with the recent messianic beliefs and activities within the movement. Stuart Schoenfeld's paper on the adult bat mitzvah shows how feminist elements are incorporated into a ritual that also has strong congregational and familial themes. The juxtaposition of these and other papers from the proceedings demonstrates the amazing variety of social and cultural expressions that can be collected under the heading "Jewish civilization." Most readers are likely to be interested in particular expressions rather than others, and given the uneven quality of the papers, only some scholars will find papers of interest in their areas of study. STEPHEN SHAROT Ben-Gurion University

Religion, Thought and Education

David R. Blumenthal, Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest. Louisville: Westminister/John Knox Press, 1993. xxiv + 318 pp.

In the late 1960s I formulated a "614th commandment," the fourth and climactic component of which read in part as follows: Jews are forbidden to despair of the God of Israel lest Judaism perish. ... A religious Jew who has stayed with his God may be forced into a new, possible revolutionary relationship with Him. One possibility, however, is wholly unthinkable. A Jew may not respond to Hitler's attempt to destroy Judaism by himself cooperating in its destruction. In ancient times the unthinkable sin was idolatry. Today, it is to respond to Hitler by doing his work. 1

I did not then try to spell out what the "new, revolutionary relationship" might be: I would have thought it much too soon. Now David R. Blumenthal, in Facing the Abusing God, has done the spelling out, with great and—one is tempted to say— merciless thoroughness. Blumenthal "stays with" his God, his primary way of doing so being a thorough recourse to the sources of Judaism; yet his "theology of protest" breaks the limits of what may be found in these sources: it is revolutionary. Even in the most authoritative document of Judaism—the Tanakh, of course— God "sleeps" when He should be awake (Ps. 44:24), and is an "enemy" when, even in His severest of judgments, He should remain a friend (Lam. 2:5). However, unlike the figure in these "protests," Blumenthal's "abusing" God has hitherto, in Judaism, been unthinkable. Must the concept of an abusing God remain unthinkable after Auschwitz? Or does Auschwitz, shocking without precedent, require a "theology of protest" that is itself shocking without precedent? This is the question Blumenthal not only asks but veritably hurls at Jewish theology. His question is best approached through, first of all, the liberating of whatever protest there is in the sources from theological pieties that are most characteristically but not exclusively Christian. To stay with psalm 44, Martin Luther skips verse 24 on the God who sleeps;2 and Mitchell Dahood notes in the Anchor Bible Psalms that Mythical formulas must be interpreted in light of the dominating Hebrew concept of history, and vivid poetic images can scarcely be made the basis for a serious theological discussion. The sleep of God, who really does not and cannot sleep (Ps. 121:4), simply means that by remaining inattentive to the prayers of his people He gives the impression of being asleep.3 354

Religion, Thought and Education

355

Why should one important biblical text determine what deserves "serious theological discussion" in another no less important one? Even scholarship, it seems, is no guarantee against bias, in this case a theological seminary piety quite at odds with biblical realism. With this and other biblical texts Blumenthal succeeds admirably in recovering the realism. A God asleep has abandoned His worshipers, and a divine enemy, in turning against them, turns against justice and mercy as well. Neither the sleeping nor the hostile God, however, robs His worshipers of their dignity. (This is not so with instances of divine abuse in the Pentateuch cited by Blumenthal, for in these cases God castigates sinners. He does not abuse the innocent.) If an "abusing God" who does just that is "faced" by Blumenthal's "theology of protest," it is in consequence of two fundamental policy decisions. One is to link the Holocaust then and there in Europe, with child (and other) abuse, here and now in America. The other is to have protest culminate not in an indirect expression about God—theology, midrash, biblical commentary—but in the most direct way possible. It "faces" the abusing God in prayer. The linkage between Holocaust and child (and other) abuse commends itself for several reasons, the most important of which is innocence. What victim of abuse is as innocent as a child? The answer is, even criminals among Jews at Auschwitz, for what brought them there was not actions but birth—and birth, even if Jewish, is innocent. But this identity in innocence cannot give rise to an identity of theological protest, for while the one innocent victim is abused as John or Jane, the other is abused as a Jew. In the first case the meaning of "why did You do this to me?" is clear. But is it clear in the second? Or does it mean "why didn't You get me to America, while other Jews were abused in Auschwitz?" 1 am not sure what an authentic protest theology might be for victims of rape or child abuse. I am sure that Holocaust protest theology is authentic only if it is on behalf of kelal yisrael. "Do not separate yourself from the community" (Pirkei Avot 4:7) is an injunction that not only survives the Holocaust, but is given a heightened validity by it. What, next, of Blumenthal's second policy decision? The child is abused by a relative, supposedly a lover. Is the Jewish Holocaust victim abused by the ultimate Lover, so that it may be warranted to "face" Him as such in prayer? In a sermon preached in the Warsaw ghetto, a certain Rabbi Kalonymos Shapiro taught the exact opposite: Just as God is infinite so is His capacity for suffering, and since caused by the Holocaust, it would destroy us if it touched us, His very love forces Him into withdrawal from us. Can the withdrawn God still be "faced" in prayer? Unsure of this, Shapiro knew why he wanted to face Him: to share His lonely suffering, even at the risk of being destroyed.4 Such a stance could not be further removed from protest against an abusing God. Blumenthal's protest theology climaxes in Yom Kippur prayer, for in it—an unprecedented step!—he demands forgiveness from God even as he seeks forgiveness by Him. I think—on this I follow Franz Rosenzweig, as I did forty years ago— that such practice destroys Yom Kippur, that to destroy Yom Kippur is to destroy Judaism, and that this is not permitted. On Yom Kippur Jews find supreme selfexpression by surrendering their every claim to merit; and precisely through the

356

Book Reviews

radicalism of this ein banu ma'asim—"we have no deeds"—they, on that day, transcend time and touch eternity. Hence it was perhaps, religiously speaking, the ultimate catastrophe when such as Dr. Mengele used Yom Kippur as a preferred date for deciding which Jews would live and which would die. What is there to say, other than that the Auschwitz doctor's Yom Kippur severed Jews from eternity? And, following this line of thought, what if the deepest Jewish theology of protest had the task, still ahead of us, of recovering Yom Kippur and, with this recovery, mending the breach between time and eternity in the midst of our very much unredeemed time? EMIL L. FACKENHEIM The Hebrew University

Notes 1. Sec my God's Presence in History (New York: 1972), 84. 2. Luther's Works, vol. 10 (St. Louis: 1974), 204-207. 3. The Anchor Bible, Psalms, vol. I, ed. Mitchell Dahood (New York: 1965), 268. 4. Rabbi Shapiro's teaching is more fully described in my What is Judaism? (New York: 1988), 290 if. When writing that book, I left "God in the Age of Auschwitz and the Rebuilt Jerusalem" as the most difficult subject for the very last chapter. I knew how to end that chapter only when 1 came upon Shapiro's teaching.

Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture. Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1993. xii + 272 pp. Daniel Boyarin has chosen a tantalizing topic—sex in talmudic culture. Such a subject can lead one to extreme positions, especially concerning the talmudic perception of male and female roles and the attitude toward sexuality. Boyarin has not fallen into the trap: his presentation is scholarly, evenhanded, unapologetic and understanding of the culture of the Jews in the Hellenistic period. The author is well versed both in talmudic and nontalmudic sources and in the secondary literature written about this period. The book should be of interest to talmudic scholars, social and cultural anthropologists, scholars of early Christianity and the Hellenistic world, and feminist thinkers. This is only a partial list—one that immediately comes to mind. Carnal Israel is full of insights not only of the author but also of others who are given full credit for their ideas. In fact, it seems as though everyone with whom the author has spoken—and of course whose works he has read—is acknowledged for some idea or insight he made to the author. I note this point not to criticize but to compliment Boyarin's habit of giving credit in a most generous manner. Some of the major theses of the book are the following: there is a manifold difference between the Rabbis' view of sexuality and that of Hellenistic Jewry, as represented by such figures as Philo and the ideologue of early Christianity, Paul. The former looked upon the body favorably, seeing it as being animated by a soul,

Religion, Thought and Education

357

whereas the latter saw the soul as the essence of a human being either housed or entrapped in a body. These differing conceptions led to differences in the attitude toward sexuality—positive, in the Rabbis' view and negative in the Hellenistic Paulian view. While the Rabbis were endocentric, viewing woman as man's enabler, they were clearly not misogynists. There seems to have been an undercurrent in talmudic culture of those who were not pleased with such a male-oriented society: Boyarian looks for and finds such currents. In his view, the asymmetry between male and female in the talmudic literature is not monolithic, although the notion of the inferior status of the woman was undoubtedly the dominant one. Boyarin points out that while in Palestine this undercurrent was felt, albeit not very strongly, in Babylonia it was suppressed completely or almost completely. The author's hypothesis is that the practice of marrying and leaving one's wife for extended periods— one mentioned many times in talmudic literature—was more heavily stigmatized in Palestine than in Babylon. As a minor but significant part of this volume, one finds detailed discussions of early Christianity, mainly in the person of Paul. (The author has just published a book on Paul.) For example, Boyarin maintains that Paul's understanding of circumcision is a vital clue to his general views about Jews, Judaism and the new Christianity. Seeing circumcision as allegorical—spiritual and not corporeal—Paul made it possible for Judaism (in his interpretation of it) to become a world religion. In its corporeal sense, the rite "symbolized the genetic, the geneological moment of Judaism as the religion of a particular tribe of people. . . . Israel 'according to the Flesh' is not the ultimate Israel; there is an 'Israel of the spirit.' It was Paul's genius to transcend 'Israel in the flesh.'" All serious studies of talmudic culture must take a stand on a number of questions of methodology. Boyarin does so, at least in part. Following Frenkel and others, Boyarin prefers the view that the agadot in the Talmud are nothing more than literary fiction composed for a purpose, without any necessary historical significance. (According to Boyarin, there does not have to be even a kernel of historical truth in these stories.) Boyarin also agrees with the view—still debated today—that the Tosefta was redacted slightly later than the Mishnah. Of course, in a book of this sort the author is not obligated to explain why he chooses one methodological view over another, something that Boyarin in fact refrains from doing. Many aggadic passages in talmudic literature are discussed and illuminated by the author. An outstanding example is the famous story of Rabbi Akiva's leaving his wife Rachel for an extended period of time to learn Torah, with her happy acquiescence (in the story, she is actually the prime mover behind his decision). Boyarin analyzes the romanticism of the story and its significance, and explains as well the "gender code" and linguistic subtleties. But he has a number of other points worth mentioning here, in order to give readers a real sense of what Carnal Israel is about: • There is no historical truth to the tale; • In effect, the story is an attempt to justify the much later Babylonian Amoraitic practice of husbands spending enormous quantities of time away from their wives studying Torah. Such deportment by the Rabbis was in contradiction to some important Babylonian authority, so it had to somehow be given legitimacy;

358

Book Reviews

• An attempt is made in this tale to create a system of values and norms wherein women are encouraged to "voluntarily" give up their conjugal rights for the esteemed purpose of intensive Torah study; • The narrative performs its ideological function of portraying female cultural subjugation. • The name Rachel ("ewe") is of great significance. Boyarin amasses ewe stories in biblical and postbiblical literature in order to illustrate the manifest and hidden eroticism of this story—the husband, for example, being seen as the shepherd to his ewe; • Finally, the story encodes Rachel as the model and ideal for women's behavior. Carnal Israel is highly recommended reading. The topic itself is fascinating and the intellectual breadth of the author is impressive and occasionally dazzling. I am sure that there is much room for debate about specific interpretations of the talmudic material referred to in this volume—but isn't this what scholarship is all about? SHMUEL SHILO The Hebrew University

Gershon Greenberg, The Holy Land in American Religious Thought, 1628-1948: The Symbiosis of American Religious Approaches to Scripture's Sacred Territory. Lanham: University Press of America, 1994. 370 pp.

In July 1790, Jacob Cohen, president of the Bet Elohim Congregation of Charleston, South Carolina, wrote to the new president of the United States, George Washington. While others might compare Washington's accomplishments to those of the great and noble heroes of Greek and Roman antiquity and of more recent times, he wrote, "we and our posterity" would compare him with Moses, Joshua, Othniel, Gideon, Samuel, David and the Maccabees. Cohen went on to assure President Washington of the loyal support of the Jews of Charleston and their prayers for his well-being and the prosperity of the nation. In response to a similar letter from the Hebrew congregation of Savannah, Georgia, the president wrote: "May the same wonder-working deity, who long since delivered the Hebrews from their Egyptian oppressors, planted them in a promised land, whose providential agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States as an independent nation, still to continue to water them with the dews of heaven. . . . " This is one small illustration of the wealth of information found in this wide-ranging book. The Holy Land in American Religious Thought is a series of studies, sponsored by the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, of different aspects of the Holy Land in American religious consciousness. The term "Holy Land" is used very broadly to refer to the many ways in which the land of the Bible (and biblical history) have kindled the imagination of American

Religion, Thought and Education

359

believers—not just Jews and mainstream Christians but also such new groups as the Mormons. The breadth of topics is large and diverse: there are chapters on the Puritans, Sephardic Jews, American Indians (seen by some as the lost tribes of Israel), Christian pilgrims to Palestine in the nineteenth century, Christian missionary efforts among Jews in Palestine, Christian millennialists, political relations between the United States and local authorities, the spiritual holy land among black American Christians (a religious concept unlike that of white Christians, which transcended geographic America as well as geographic Palestine), the Mormons, Reform Jews and the land of Israel in the nineteenth century, Catholics and the Holy Land and Protestant liberalism. The material is so vast and diffuse that it is hard to discern a unifying theme or argument. For example, there is a fascinating discussion of Protestant pilgrims to Palestine in the nineteenth century, among them William Prime, Herman Melville (particularly as revealed in his poem Clarel), Mark Twain and John Fulton. Prime had traveled there in 1855-1856 and Twain—who followed in 1868—could not resist making sport of Prime's maudlin and sentimental account. According to Twain, "Whenever he [Prime] found a holy place that was well authenticated, he cried; whenever he found one that was not well authenticated, he cried anyhow. . . . How his horse ever kept his health, being exposed to these periodical showers all the time, is a wonder." In another essay we learn that Harry Pereira Mendes composed a Jewish version of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee," with words for Jews living in the diaspora who could not return to the Land of Israel: Now bid her weep no more, Do Thou her sons restore— love-gift from Thee! Make those who still would stay In other lands obey Thy holy law, that they World-priests may be! And in yet another essay, Greenberg cites an editorial from the Catholic journal America in 1948: "Nationally, the case for Arab sovereignty seems clear; internationally, the need for a Jewish homeland in Palestine is imperative. And may God have mercy on our souls." The book is more successful as a collection of information than as a work of interpretation. As a somewhat idiosyncratic encyclopedia, however, it is unique and invaluable. Based on wide reading in many recondite sources, Greenberg's many citations from books and articles and his extensive bibliography will make this book an indispensable tool for anyone interested in the Holy Land and American religious thought. ROBERT L. WILKEN University of Virginia

360

Book Reviews

David Novak, Jewish Social Ethics. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. 252 pp.

This volume consists of ten essays on a variety of issues relating to the ethical theory of Judaism. The approach is essentially philosophical and the perspective is one that, sadly, has few practitioners today. That is to say, the author is a believing and committed Jew who recognizes that Jewish ethics is essentially theological and who is looking out into the larger world from within the tradition, and is eager to bring the tradition into a dialogue with the general philosophical community even if it means "speaking the often strange language of the larger world" (p. 3). By its very nature, this sort of activity is creative in terms of its understanding of the Jewish tradition, inasmuch as the term "Jewish social ethics" does not designate "any specific category of thought delimited in classical Jewish literature" (p. 3). The author, a professor of modern Judaic studies at the University of Virginia who is affiliated with the Institute of Traditional Judaism in Mount Vernon, has set two tasks for himself: (1) to analyze the ethical teachings of Judaism to reveal their theological foundations and (2) to describe the contribution the tradition can make to some of the agonizing moral issues in the world today, such as the problem of AIDS, the proper use of technology, violence and economic justice. Novak's scholarship and respect for the tradition enable him to make an impressive presentation in both areas. In an essay relating to the first task ("Natural Law, Halakhah and the Covenant"), Novak argues, contrary to Marvin Fox, Jose Fauer and Leo Strauss, that "natural law theory is necessary for an adequate essential characterization of Halakhah" (p. 24). The discussion is conducted within the framework of the two main approaches to philosophy of law: legal positivism versus natural law theory. The former, according to Novak, maintains that authority is prior to right, while the latter holds that right is prior to authority. Novak makes his point by showing that if Halakhah stands for "law" in Judaism, one cannot escape questions such as "Why ought a Jew today enter into a covenant with God?" Going beyond philosophy of law issues, Novak makes it clear by referring to biblical and rabbinic sources that prior to the Covenant and to halakhah, Judaism presupposes a set of moral principles self-evident to God and man. In another chapter ("Theonomous Ethics") Novak discusses the inadequacies inherent in the ethical theories of autonomy and heteronomy and goes on to defend Paul Tillich's view of ethics as theonomy. According to this view, the moral imperative is not a strange law imposed from the outside but is the law of our own essential being from which we have become estranged. But the ground of being in general and of human existence in particular is God—so that the impetus for morality is the desire for reunion with one's essential self, which is actually a desire for reunion with God. This desire is fundamentally a response to the love and goodness of God manifest in existence. Novak suggests that this view of ethics as theonomy is helpful in explicating the Jewish concept of ethics and enables Judaism to overcome the straightjacket of the autonomy-heteronomy dichotomy.

Religion, Thought and Education

361

In his chapter on technology and the nuclear threat, Novak traces the attitude of philosophers, from Aristotle to Hegel and from Marx to Whitehead, toward the relationship of man to nature and to his own labor. In terms of Judaism, Novak is prepared to confront the often-heard claim that the Hebrew Bible (with its call for man to "have dominion and subdue" all things upon the earth) has encouraged the despoiling of the planet. In response, Novak presents what he calls a "contemporary hermeneutic" by analyzing the significance of the Shabbat as a "different way of constituting the relationship with God, with other humans and with the non-hurnan environment." The Shabbat is a mixture of the theoretical and the bodily, whose "rest" prescribed for all—men, women, laborers, intellectuals, servants and slaves— limits the dominance of each one by the other. By prohibiting the use of animals, planting and reaping, production and commerce, the Shabbat acts "as a limit on our construction of the purposes whereby we technically order both time and space" (p. 145). While it is clear from the Bible that creativity is an imitation of God, we are given different models of that creativity. The first chapter of Genesis presents creativity as essentially "conquest and dominance," while the second chapter sees man as given a task and a destiny in which his area of activity is definitely limited. Novak perceptively points out that man's creative uniqueness is to be directly related to God "not as creator" but in transcendence of creation. What the Shabbat does for creation, both divine and human, is to provide a limiting purpose for both. Since the climax of creation is not the human person but the Shabbat, we can infer that God created the universe in order to have a relationship with human beings and that human beings create their own microcosmic environment in order to have a relationship with God. Novak concludes that Judaism demands neither the renunciation of technology nor that technology rest on the Shabbat, but only that it serve humans on the Shabbat. In discussing the Jewish perspective on the problem of AIDS, Novak notes that more than any other modern health problem, AIDS involves religious issues in a very immediate way by raising three important questions: • Contrary to what had been widely believed, is it possible that we cannot use our bodies however we will? Does our body have an integrity of its own that we ignore at our peril? • Is there any connection between the disease and the sinful acts of the patient? • Since children can be born with AIDS as a result of the actions of their parents, does this suggest that "God punishes the children for the sins of the parents"? Since homosexuality and intravenous drug use are forbidden in Judaism for both Jews and non-Jews, the majority of AIDS sufferers are considered in the category of sinners. Therefore, "sympathy for their plight must never lead to approval of their way of life" (p. 107). Novak argues that homosexuality must be considered "provocative sin" since the situation is not that the homosexual has succumbed to "appetite" but rather he "has constituted his very identity on it" (p. 110). Nevertheless, Novak finds that the halakhah obliges the physician to treat the AIDS patient even though, as of now, one's efforts are only palliative and not curative. In sum, David Novak has produced a book of importance to those interested in

362

Book Reviews

the connection between Jewish theology and the world outside, both philosophical and practical. SHUBERT SPERO Bar-Han University

Emanuel Rackman, Modem Halakhah for Our Time. Hoboken: Ktav, 1995. ix 195 pp.

Modern Halakhah for Our Time is a collection of fourteen essays written over a number of years by one of Orthodoxy's leading figures, Emanuel Rackman. Rackman was rabbi of two prestigious synagogues, Sha'are Tefila in Far Rockaway, New York, and Manhattan's Fifth Avenue Synagogue. His second career was (and is) connected with Bar-Han University, where he has served as president and chancellor. All of the essays are on some aspect of Judaism, mainly halakhic topics analyzed in a wider perspective, as befits someone with Rackman's background and intellectual and ethical caliber. Not one of the essays is esoteric or geared solely to the halakhic scholar. They are meant to be read both by scholar and intelligent layman, and both groups of potential readers have very much to learn from what the author has penned. Without being apologetic and at times being quite critical, Rackman's love of Judaism, joined to his didactic talents, make this volume a powerful exposition of the halakhah. The author's interests range from the philosophical, theological and ethical to the practical, historical and legal. Besides his rabbinical background, Rackman also holds a doctoral degree in law and has taught political science and jurisprudence in institutions of higher learning. This specialized academic training and teaching pervades the entire volume, in spite of its diversification of topics. The essays in the volume range from theocentricity in Jewish law to Modern Orthodoxy and the status of the Jewish woman; from the halakhic view of violence and the value of life to Jewish law in the state of Israel; from a Jewish philosophy of property to the U.S. federal constitution and the Jewish heritage. Because Rackman more than once treads on the thin line separating Modern Orthodoxy from Conservative Judaism, some may feel that he oversteps the boundary into Orthodox "heresy." I, for one, think that he correctly interprets halakhic Judaism and is part of the stream—if not always the mainstream—of historical halakhic thought. The following are examples of Rackman's "problematic" statements. In an essay on man's partnership with God in revelation, Rackman asks a provocative question in the context of his no less provocative statement that the Rabbis are permitted to "tamper with Law"—"Why did God reveal a Law which is less than perfect and inadequate for eternity without man's participation in its development?" (p. 32— italics added). In another essay, Rackman compares the Rabbis' right to take into account social and economic needs when making halakhic decisions to Moses'

Religion, Thought and Education

363

breaking of the tablets. "They may also follow Moses' pattern," Rackman declares here, "and in an emergency break the Law as he broke the tablets" (p. 107). Finally, in his essay on Jewish law in the state of Israel, which is mainly a review essay on Menahem Elon's Jewish Law, Rackman tackles the problem of the halakhah as practiced being opposed to "one's sense of the right" and lists specific examples of this dichotomy (pp. 134-135). Perhaps Rackman's basic outlook on the halakhah and its development can be summed up in the following quote, taken from his essay on a Jewish philosophy of property: What the Rabbis did in the last two thousand years is indeed proof of the fact that Jewish law is by no means rigid. It has always been amended, and resistance to change today is due to the intransigence of those who are presently the oracles of the law and not the fault of the Halakhah itself (p. 191).

Over the past sixty years, Rackman has been one of the most eloquent spokesmen of Modern Orthodoxy. Although his views have at times been controversial, this reviewer agrees with his general theses. They are both historically and philosophically sound, and are a legitimate exposition of the halakhic process. The volume before us adds much insight to our understanding of halakhah and is undoubtedly loyal to Orthodoxy both historically and in its modern garb. SHMUEL SHILO The Hebrew University

Zionism, Israel and the Middle East

Isaac Alteras, Eisenhower and Israel: U.S.-Israeli Relations, 1953-1960. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1993. 387 pp.

Isaac Alteras' Eisenhower and Israel is a detailed analysis of U.S. policy toward Israel during the years 1953-1957, augmented by a much briefer account of the years 1958-1960. The author argues that despite the introduction of an "evenhanded" approach toward the Arab-Israeli conflict—which Israel considered highly dangerous to its security—President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, never wavered in their basic commitment to the survival of the Jewish state. The United States distanced itself from Israel in the hope that it might succeed in rallying the Arab states against the Soviet Union. This policy, from that administration's point of view, was "worth trying in its cold war against Russia" (p. 81). According to Alteras, it was Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser's developing pro-Soviet attitude and his rejection of the Eisenhower Doctrine in 1957 that brought the United States to the view that Israel was an asset rather than an impediment to Western interests in the region. The strength of Alteras' work is his very thorough documentation of U.S. policy toward Israel from the advent of the Eisenhower administration in 1953 to Israel's post-Sinai war withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip in March 1957. The author makes extensive use of American (and to a lesser extent Israeli) archival material in order to demonstrate that Eisenhower and Dulles intended the secret Alpha Plan (which envisioned Israeli territorial concessions), Eric Johnston's Unified Development Plan (which Israel feared might compromise its sovereignty over the Sea of Galilee) and the proposals of the Anderson mission of early 1956 to be components of an equitable Arab-Israeli settlement and not, as Israel feared, formulae for its dismemberment. Malice toward Israel motivated neither president nor secretary of state. Both wished to direct American policies toward a middle ground between Israel and the Arab states that would be both "morally right and in the U.S. national interest" (p. 125). Alteras' attempt to encompass nearly all aspects of Israeli as well as American diplomacy compromises the quality of an analysis whose major attraction is a fresh view of U.S. foreign policy during this period. Thus, the author devotes several paragraphs to a less-than-relevant review of Franco-Israeli relations from 1949 to 1955 based on outdated sources. Alteras writes that the arms that France sold to Israel went beyond the type envisioned in the Tripartite Declaration of 1950, an arrangement that suited the United States, "for it could now turn down repeated Israeli requests for weapons without endangering Israeli security" (p. 146). 364

365

Book Reviews

In fact, prior to 1956 France sold Israel only a few of the planes, tanks and artillery pieces that were part of the July 1954 agreement between the two countries that Alteras cites. Moreover, despite Prime Minister Edgar Faure's promise in October 1955 to sell Israel jet aircraft, Israeli efforts that year to obtain either the French Mystere-2 or Mystere-4A came to naught. France delivered the first three Mystere-4A aircraft to Israel only on April 11, 1956. Thus, although the CzechEgyptian arms deal was announced in September 1955, several months passed during which the Israelis had no answer to Egypt's Soviet-supplied Migs. The Americans knew that Israel had not received Mystere jets, but Washington nevertheless refused increasingly urgent Israeli requests for arms in late 1955 and early 1956. Alteras' research of the period between the Sinai Campaign and Israel's March 1957 withdrawal is a heavily documented, almost day-by-day account of AmericanIsraeli relations during those four months. There follows a chapter dealing with the role of U.S. Jewry during and after the Sinai Campaign that constitutes a welcome addition to the literature on this period. However, in effect, Eisenhower and Israel comes to a rather abrupt end at this point. For although this book purports to deal with U.S.-Israeli relations from 1953 to 1960, the author devotes more than three hundred pages to the period ending with March 1957 but only fifteen, including the conclusion, to the remainder of Eisenhower's tenure in otfice. The rather cursory treatment that Alteras accords the later period of his research results in a simplistic and in some respects even inaccurate view of American-Israeli relations during the years 1957-1960. The picture he draws of those relations is too rosy. For while it is true that there was a notable improvement in the tone of the relationship, in substance there was in fact little change during the Eisenhower period. Thus, for example, Alteras correctly points out that the United States helped finance Israel's 1958 purchase of (Centurion) tanks from Britain. Yet Ben-Gurion viewed the United States as more of a hindrance than a help to Israeli arms procurement in Europe. For whereas the Americans encouraged the British transfer of tanks, they objected both to the sale of British submarines and additional French jets to Israel. Moreover, the 100 (and not 1,000, as the author cites) 106rnm recoilless rifles that the United States sold Israel in 1958 were a relatively insignificant and entirely defensive military item, hardly a reward commensurate with what Alteras terms the U.S. "sense of Israel's strategic importance to the West" (p. 312). Alteras also exaggerates American enthusiasm for Israel's proposed "alliance of the periphery" with neighboring non-Arab states and non-Muslim communities. Despite expressions of support and limited intelligence-sharing, the United States would not extend military aid to Israel on the basis of the concern that the Jewish state shared with others (mainly Turkey) over the threat from Nasser. Alteras' surprising neglect of several important secondary sources detracts (somewhat) from a work that makes such extensive and effective use of primary sources. Thus, he cites Uri Bialer's Between East and West: Israel's Foreign Policy Orientation, 1948-1956 (1990) in his bibliography but nowhere in the endnotes. He ignores altogether Mordechai Bar-On's Gates of Gaza, published in 1992 but available before that time in dissertation form. The above criticism notwithstanding, Eisenhower and Israel makes a valuable

Zionism, Israel and the Middle East

366

and well-researched contribution to the literature based on hitherto declassified documents of the 1950s. The strongest chapters of this book are those that present a thorough treatment of U.S. policy toward Israel from 1953 to 1957. ZACH LEVEY University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Michael B. Oren, The Origins of the Second Arab-Israeli War: Egypt, Israel and the Great Powers, 1952-56. London: Frank Cass, 1992. xxii + 199 pp.

The opening of national archives in Jerusalem, London and Washington, D.C., on the period of the 1950s has resulted in a virtual deluge of books dealing with the background and events of the 1956 Suez episode. The present work, however, represents the first monographic study to use this archival material as the basis for a discussion of the factors that led Israel to become involved in the conflict. Michael Oren follows a topical rather than chronological framework in analyzing the developments that led Israel's leaders to conclude that there was no alternative to preempting Egypt before the latter assimilated a massive quantity of Soviet weaponry and proceeded to attack the Jewish state. In some Israeli circles, the Suez Campaign has been referred to as a "war of choice." Oren's study demonstrates that this claim has no basis in fact. Those who describe Israel's 1956 conflict with Egypt in these terms have not scoured the archival sources and have not sought to place themselves in the shoes of Israeli decision-makers in the critical months extending from the Czech-Egyptian arms deal of July 1955 to October 1956. Nor have they examined the record of the vain attempts by various American emissaries to resolve the differences between Cairo and Jerusalem—such attempts being thwarted by Gamal Abdel Nasser's absolute determination to resolve matters on the battlefield. In particular, they have not reviewed the conclusions of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's close friend and secret emissary, Robert B. Anderson, that Nasser was not interested in coming to terms with Israel. All of this documentation is now available in the Foreign Relations of the United States series, and Oren has made good use of it in depicting the cascade of events that led to war. The chapter titles tell the story: "The Border"; "Boycott and Blockade"; "The Struggle for Regional Defence"; "The Arms Race"; "Secret Efforts for Peace"; "Descent to War." Although the book does not purport to present a definitive account of those factors that prompted the British and French to wage war against Nasser, it does reveal how the Egyptian-Israeli confrontation steadily intensified and became intertwined with the Anglo-French campaign against Egypt. This is a very good book; it could easily have been an outstanding one. In the opinion of this reviewer, its main shortcoming is its extreme pithiness—something that in other contexts is a virtue. In particular, there is a lack of direct quotation in those instances where a verbatim statement would help confirm the argument being made. To offer a few illustrations: on p. 15 we read that "Ben Gurion argued against

367

Book Reviews

putting any trust in the Egyptian regime. . . . [It] understood only power and most likely interpreted Israel's peace-feelers as a sign of weakness." There is a citation referring one to the Israeli archives but no direct quotation, or even paraphrasing, of what David Ben-Gurion actually said. Since the book relates in a major way to the policy of armed retaliation instituted by Ben-Gurion, it would have been helpful to provide a substantive quote explaining the reasons behind this policy—if possible, one in which he discounted the broader consequences. A one-line comment about a policy that was to serve as the guideline for Israeli conduct for several decades only whets the appetite; it does not satisfy. To present a further, rather lengthy illustration, on p. 140 we read: By the middle of the month [October 1956] British and Israeli leaders, communicating via the French, began coordinating plans for the attack on Egypt. Though still aware of the dangers of such co-operation on Britain's position in the Middle East, Eden justified the risk by noting that Israel would no doubt exploit Musketeer [the Suez expedition] to strike either Egypt or Jordan, thus giving the impression of collusion. Condemned in any event, it was therefore preferable to reap the benefits of Israeli involvement, for example by drawing Egyptian troops away from the Canal. The citation refers to documentation from the British Cabinet and the British Ministry of Defence. Yet not a single direct quote to substantiate the thesis is presented. One must take it on the author's word that this was the analysis that induced Prime Minister Anthony Eden, after considerable soul-searching, to throw in his lot with the Israelis. Oddly enough, on the very last page of this work we are presented with the type of quotation that should have studded the book throughout. It cites Viscount Hood, Britain's minister in Washington, discussing in retrospect the implications of Alpha, the secret Anglo-American scheme for settling the Arab-Israeli dispute: It was common ground that the heat should be turned on the Israelis only when we had brought the Egyptians to the point where the Arab agreement on Alpha terms seemed possible. The Alpha operation collapsed when the United States emissary [Anderson] reported that there was no hope of moving Nasser to the required point. Our guess is that Mr. Dulles would have been prepared to be very tough indeed [on Israel] if he had seen a chance of pushing the settlement through. The Origins of the Second Arab-Israeli War contains a valuable chronological chart that begins in 1949, citing each of the major events bearing on the IsraeliEgyptian relationship up until the outbreak of war in October 1956. This is an important feature in a work that seeks to unravel the connection between one episode and the next in the rush of events. Another feature, for which the publisher rather than the author is responsible, is the form of the footnotes. Even if notes cannot be placed at the foot of each relevant page, being condemned to the back of the book—something most scholars regret—at least a running head should be provided to indicate the pages in the text to which the notes refer. One might have thought that an experienced publisher like Frank Cass would take care to enhance a good book with footnotes set in a more accessible format. SHLOMO SLONIM The Hebrew University

Recently Completed Doctoral Dissertations

Oz Almog University of Haifa, 1995 "'Hazabar': diyokan soziyologi" ("The Sabras: A Sociological Profile")' Lois C. Ambash The Union Institute, 1995 "Holocaust Shards, Holocaust Shreds: American Meanings of the Holocaust" Heike Kristina Behl University of California, San Diego, 1995 "'Ohne Zahl sind die Strassen': Wege in die Dichtung Paul Celans" Ilan Ben-Ami City University of New York, 1994 "State Patronage or State Control? The Israeli Case of Government Involvement in the Arts" Sara Bender The Hebrew University, 1995 "Yehudei bialistok bemilhemet ha'olam hasheniyah 1939-1943: hatekufah hasoviyetit utekufat hakibush hagermani vehageto" ("The Jews of Bialystok During the Second World War 1939-1943, the Soviet Period and the German Period") Joel Baruch Berkowitz City University of New York, 1995 "Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage" Kathrin Maria Bower University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1994 "In the Name of the (M)other? Articulating an Ethics of Memory in the PostHolocaust Poetry of Nelly Sachs and Rose Auslander" David Bukay University of Haifa, 1995 "Hamedinah ha'aravit, hayahasim habein'araviyim, vehakonflikt ha'araviyisreeli, 1937-1985: hapolitikah shel maazan hakohot" ("The Arab State, Inter-Arab Relations and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1937-1985: The Politics of the Balance of Power") Amos Carmel University of Haifa, 1995 "Tenu'at hano'ar 'Hashomer haza'ir' beerez yisrael 1938-1948" ("The Youth Movement Hashomer Hatzair in Eretz Israel, 1938-1948") Steven Alan Carr University of Texas, Austin, 1994 "The Hollywood Question: America and the Belief in Jewish Control over Motion Pictures Before 1941" Stevin Mark Chevrin Stanford University, 1994 "The Transformation of Personal Orientation to Pedagogical Orientation of Torah Teachers in Jewish Schools: Six Case Studies" 368

Recently Completed Doctoral Dissertations

369

Asher Cohen Bar-Han University, 1995 "Medinat hatorah—hazon umeziyut: temurot behityahasutah shel hatenu'ah haziyonit datit lera'ayon medinat hatorah vedarkhei hagshamato bitkufat ha'izuv 1947-1953" ("The Torah State—Vision and Reality: Changes in the Attitude of the Religious Zionist Movement to the Concept of a Torah State and its Implementation in the Formative Period 1947-1953") Elan Ezrachi Jewish Theological Seminary, 1994 "Encounters Between American Jews and Israelis in American Jewish Summer Camps" Katharina Sabine Feil Jewish Theological Seminary, 1994 "A Scholar's Life: Rachel Wischnitzer and the Development of Jewish Art Scholarship in the 20th Century" Petra S. Fiero University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 1994 "Schreien gegen Schweigen: Grenzerfahrungen in Jean Amerys autobiographischen Werk" Anat First The Hebrew University, 1995 "Tafkidah shel heteleviziyah hayisreelit befituah 'amadot shel mitbagerim yehudim kelapei ha'aravim vehasikhsukh hayisreeli-'aravi" ("The Role of Israeli Television in Developing Attitudes of Jewish Adolescents Toward Arabs and the Israeli-Arab Conflict") Karen Friedman University of Illinois, Chicago, 1994 "German-Lithuanian Collaboration in the Final Solution, 1941-1944" Andrew Scott Furman Pennsylvania State University, 1995 "Israel Through the Eyes of Jewish-American Imagination: A Survey of Jewish-American Literature on Israel, 1928-1993" Michael Scott Galchinsky University of California, Berkeley, 1994 "Romance, Reform and the Women of Israel: Women's Contribution to the Jewish Enlightenment in England, 1830-1880" Abigail Esther Gillman Harvard University, 1994 " 'Die Musik des Verfessens': Memory and Identity in the Work of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Beer-Hoffmann" Joseph (Jorge) Goldstein The Hebrew University, 1995 "Hashpa'at medinat yisrael vehasokhnut hayehudit 'al hahayim hayehudiyim beargentina uveuroguai: 1948-1958" ("The Influence of the State of Israel and the Jewish Agency on Community Life in Argentina and Uruguay Between 1948-1958") Varda Granot Bar-Ilan University, 1995 "Kavei yesod lizirotav shel Yisrael Aksenfeld, basipur uvaderama" ("The Narrative and Dramatic Works of Israel Axenfeld") Michael B. Greenbaum Columbia University, Teachers College, 1994 "Mission Conflict in Religiously Affiliated Institutions of Higher Education: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America During the Presidency of Louis Finkelstein, 1940-1945" Jayne Kravetz Guberman University of Pennsylvania, 1994 "Transformations of a Traditional Folk Art: The Revival of Jewish Papercutting"

370

Recently Completed Doctoral Dissertations

Mitchell Bryan Hart University of California, Los Angeles, 1994 "Social Science and National Identity: A History of Jewish Statistics, 18801930" Richard Lawrence Hoch University of California, Santa Barbara, 1994 "The Politics of Redemption: Rabbi Zvi Yehudah ha-Kohen Kook and the Origins of Gush Emunim" Amy Horowitz University of Pennsylvania, 1994 "Musikah yamtikhonit yisreelit" ("Israeli Mediterranean Music: Cultural Boundaries and Disputed Territories") Elliot Jager New York University, 1994 "Activities in the Organized American Jewish Community with Regard to the Decision by the U.S. to Enter into a Diplomatic Dialogue with the Palestine Liberation Organization (1967-1988)" Vimala Jayanti University of California, Los Angeles, 1995 "From Russia to Fairfax Avenue: The Integration of Soviet Jewish Immigrants in Los Angeles" Ilan Kaisar The Hebrew University, 1995 "Tenu'at ha'avodah haziyonit bearazot haberit: po'alei ziyon—ze'irei ziyon" ("Labor Zionism in the U.S.: Poale Zion—Zeire Zion 1931-1947") Haim Kaufman University of Haifa, 1995 "'Hapo'el' bitkufat hamandat, 1923-1936" ("Hapoel in the Mandate Period, 1923-1936") Irit Keinan Tel-Aviv University, 1995 "Hamifgash bein hashelihim haerez-yisreeliyim levein sheerit hapeleitah bamahanot ha'akurim begermaniyah, 1945-1948" ("The Encounter Between Israeli Emissaries and the 'Saving Remnant' of the D.P. Camps in Germany, 1945-1948") Judith Apter Klinghoffer Rutgers University, 1994 "The Johnson Administration, Israel and American Jewry: Linkages to the Vietnam War" Semion Kraiz The Hebrew University, 1995 "Batei sefer yehudiyim basafah harusit baempiriyah hazarit" ("Russian Language Jewish Schools in Czarist Russia") Edna Lamsky-Feder The Hebrew University, 1995 "Defusei hishtatefut bemilhamah vehashpa'atam 'al tefisat hamilhamah utefisat mahalakh hahayim: nituah hamikreh shel 'bogerei' milhemet yom kippur" ("Patterns of Participation in War and their Influence on Daily Living and in the Life Stories of Veterans of the Yom Kippur War") Daniel Saul Lefkowitz University of Texas, Austin, 1995 "Language and the Negotiation of Social Identities in an Israeli City" Eric Michael Levine Yeshiva University, 1994 "Communities in Conflict: Social and Religious Movements in Jewish Life" Dov Levitan Bar-Han University, 1995 "Pe'iluto hamedinit vehahumanitarit shel harozen Folke Bernadotte, bemisgeret hashinuyim shehalu bimdiniyut hahuz shel shvediyah bemilhemet

Recently Completed Doctoral Dissertations

371

ha'olam hasheniyah" ("The Political and Humanitarian Activities of Count Folke Bernadotte, Within the Framework of Modifications that Occurred in Swedish Foreign Policy During the Second World War") Margot Lifman Bar-Ilan University, 1995 "Mediniyut hakibush hanazi beholand bashanim 1940-1945: hishtakefut vehashpa'at mediniyut zo 'al gishot ve'amadot kelapei hakibush 'al pi hadivuhim hagermaniyim (Stimmungs veLageberichte) veha'itonut haholandit" ("The Policy of the German Occupation in Holland During 1940-1945: Impact on Dutch Attitudes as Reflected in German Reports and Dutch Newspapers") Darrell Brian Lockhart Arizona State University, 1995 "Argentine-Jewish Essayists: Writing on Both Sides of the Hyphen" Bobbie Malone Tulane University, 1994 "Standing 'Unswayed in the Storm': Rabbi Max Heller, Reform and Zionism in the American South, 1860-1929" Moshe Marks Bar-Ilan University, 1995 "Ezel veLehi beerez-yisrael: pe'ilutam lehasagat mimun veemze'im kalkaliyim" ("I.Z.L. and Lehi in Palestine: The Recruitment of Funds and Economic Means") Janet Schenk McCord Boston University, 1995 "A Study of the Suicides of Eight Holocaust Survivor/Writers" Zev Milach Tel-Aviv University, 1995 "Hamiflagot beyisrael veha'aliyah hahamonit 1948-1951" ("Israeli Political Parties and the Mass Immigration of 1948-1951") Jud Newborn University of Chicago, 1994 "'Work Makes Free': The Hidden Cultural Meaning of the Holocaust" Limor Peer Northwestern University, 1994 "Communicating the Meaning of Public Opinion: A Comparison of American and Israeli Newspapers" Linda Louise Petrou University of Maryland, College Park, 1994 "U.S. Foreign Policy Attitudes Towards Soviet Participation in the ArabIsraeli Peace Process"

Nirit Reichel

Tel-Aviv University, 1995

"Bein 'kartanut' le'ofek tarbut': mekomah shel hahaskalah hakelalit bahinukh ha'ivri beerez yisrael 1882-1935" ("Between 'Provincialism' and 'Cosmopolitanism': The Role of General Secular Education in Hebrew Education in Eretz Israel, 1882-1935") Norman 0 University of Toronto, 1994 "Countering the Concentration Camp World: Ethical Responses to the Holocaust in Canadian and American Fiction" Lucia Meta Ruedenberg New York University, 1994 "'Remember 6,000,000': Civic Commemoration of the Holocaust in New York City" Jonna Maura Saidel University of New Hampshire, 1994 "Revisionist Zionism in America: The Campaign to Win American Public Support, 1939-1948"

372

Recently Completed Doctoral Dissertations

Doris B. Schmidt New York University, 1993 "Reception of Literature by German-Jewish Immigrants to the U.S. as Exemplified in Aufbau: 1934-1944" Alexander Shlomo Schneider Jewish Theological Seminary, 1994 "Educational Technology Applied to Jewish Education" Shoshana (Anish) Schtiptel Tel-Aviv University, 1995 "Darko shel Nahum Sokolov min hapositivizm hayehudi-polani el hatenu'ah haziyonit" ("Nahum Sokolov's Path from Jewish-Polish Positivism to the Zionist Movement") Fruma Schwartz The Hebrew University, 1995 "Y.L. Perez kemisaper du-leshoni" ("Y.L. Peretz as a Bilingual Author") Israel Sela Fordham University, 1992 "The Interfaith Marriage Conflict: Arabs and Jews in Israel" Hanan Shai-Schwartz The Hebrew University, 1995 "Hahakhsharah lefikud operativi bezahal" ("Training for Generalship in the I.D.F.") Jeffrey Alan Shandler Columbia University, 1995 "While America Watches: Television and the Holocaust in the United States, 1945—Present" Naomi Sheffi Tel-Aviv University, 1995 "Siporet germanit betarbut ha'ivrit, 1882-1948: tirgum vehitkabelut" ("German Fiction in the Hebrew Culture of 1882-1948: Translation and Reception") Nancy Shiffrin Union Institute, 1994 "The Everchanging and the Everlasting One: Jewish Awakening in the Culture of Multiculturalism" Penina Shirav The Hebrew University, 1995 "Zehut nashim uvituyeihah hatematiyim vehatavnitiyim baperoza shel mesaperot yisreeliyot mishnot ha50 vc'ad shenot ha80" ("Female Identity and its Thematic and Structural Expressions in the Fiction of Israeli Women Writers from the 1950s to the 1980s") Robin Sloane Silver University of California, Berkeley, 1993 "Immigrant Settlement in Israel and France: An Integrated Approach to Autonomy, Organizational Performance and the Political System" Albert Isaac Slomovitz Loyola University of Chicago, 1995 "The Fighting Rabbis: A History of Jewish Military Chaplains, 18601945" Sandra Dawn Spingarn SUNY, Binghamton, 1994 "Trade Unionism Among the Jewish Workers in the Fur Manufacturing Industry in New York City, 1912-4929" Joseph M. Stern New York University, 1995 "The Relationship Between Jewish Cultural Intensity, Orthodoxy and Brand Loyalty" H. Bruce Stokes University of California, Riverside, 1994 "Messianic Judaism: Ethnicity in Revitalization"

Recently Completed Doctoral Dissertations

373

Jeffrey Arnold Summit Tufts University, 1995 "Melodic Choice in Contemporary Jewish Worship: A Cross-Denominational Study of the Kabbalat Shabbat Service" Stuart G. Svonkin Columbia University, 1995 "Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Intergroup Relations Movement from World War to Cold War" Gretchen Sims Sween University of Texas, Dallas, 1994 "Dramatic Anguish: Aesthetics and Ethical Tension in Theatre of the Holocaust" David Tal Tel-Aviv University, 1995 "Hitpathutah shel tefisat habitahon hashotef shel yisrael 1949-1956" ("Development of Israel's Ongoing Security Policy, 1949-1956") Frank Joseph Trapp Florida State University, 1994 "Does a Repressive Counterterrorist Strategy Reduce Terrorism? An Empirical Study of Israel's Iron Fist Policy in the Period 1968 to 1987" Saul Bernard Troen New York University, 1995 "Science Fiction and the Reemergence of Jewish Mythology in a Contemporary Literary Genre" Aviva Ufaz Bar-Han University, 1994 "Te'udah vizirah: bein yomanim kevuzatiyim vesiporet hityashvut shel ha'aliyah hashelishit" ("Document and Fiction: Group Diaries and Hityashvut Narrative of the Third Aliyah") Susan Segal Wall Jewish Theological Seminary, 1994 "Parents of Pre-Schoolers: Their Jewish Identity and its Implications for Jewish Education" Robert Harvey Wolf Columbia University, 1994 "A Yiddish Manichaean: The Dualistic Fiction of Lamed Shapiro" Davida Rachel Wood Princeton University, 1994 "The Boundless Courtyard: Palestinian Israelis and the Politics of Uncertainty" Catherine Anne Woodman University of Alberta, 1993 "Secular and Sacred in the Art of Chaim Potok" Eliyahu Yones The Hebrew University, 1995 "Yehudim bilvov bitkufat milhemet ha'olam hasheniyah uvashoah" ("Jews in Lvov During World War II and the Holocaust, 1939-1944") Rafael Youngmann The Hebrew University, 1995 "Tahalikhei hitmodedut shel studentim yehudim meetiyopiyah beyisrael" ("Coping Processes Among Jewish Ethiopian Students in Israel") Zvi Zameret The Hebrew University, 1995 "'Izuv ma'arekhet hahinukh bimei ha'aliyah hagedolah (1948-1951)" ("Shaping the Israeli Educational System During the Great Wave of Immigration 1948-1951") Idit Zartal Tel-Aviv University, 1995 "'Zahavam shel hayehudim': hamosad le'aliyah bet ve'ha'aliyah ha'bilti legalit,' 1945-1948" ('"Jewish Gold': The Mosad le'aliyah bet and 'Illegal Immigration,' 1945-1948")

374

Recently Completed Doctoral Dissertations

Wendy Ilene Zieler Princeton University, 1995 "Border Crossings: The Emergence of Jewish Women's Writing in Israel and America and the Immigrant Experience" Janet Yael Zupnik Boston University, 1995 "Analysis of Conflict Discourse: Evidence from Israeli-Palestinian 'Dialogue' Events"

Obituaries Moshe Davis Moshe Davis, founder and for many years head of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University, died on April 10 (21 Nisan) 1996 after a long cardiac illness. He had been a dynamic figure in the communal and cultural life of American and Israeli Jewry for sixty years, and was also an important historian. Davis was born on June 12, 1916, to immigrant parents in what was then the working-class Jewish neighborhood of Brownsville, in Brooklyn, New York. He attended the public schools as well as the excellent local Hebraic Talmud Torah of Stone Avenue, and he even won a local reputation as a boy hazan. He became an enthusiastic Hebraist at an early age, and was a founder and leading figure of Hanoar Haivri, the Hebrew youth organization. In Davis' youth, to speak and write Hebrew was an ideal for a limited number of young American Jews who were avidly following the renaissance of Jewish culture in Eretz Israel. The members of Hanoar Haivri continued their own Hebrew studies and concentrated on Hebrew publications, dramatics, summer camping and other educational programs. Davis, their dynamic leader, overflowed with ideas and projects, many of which he brought to fruition in later years. He enrolled in the Teachers Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he came under the enduring influence of its founder and dean, Mordecai M. Kaplan. Although Davis did not adopt Kaplan's religious philosophy, he was profoundly influenced by Kaplan's conception of a Hebraized American Jewry cultivating Jewish art, music, dance and theater—with all of these radiating from Eretz Israel. Davis earned bachelor's degrees from Columbia University and the Teachers Institute, and he won a scholarship for a year's study at the Hebrew University in 1937-1938. En route to Eretz Israel, he attended a Zionist congress and became acquainted with Polish Jewry shortly before its destruction. Upon his return to New York, Davis began studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary's rabbinical school, from which he graduated in 1942. A second personal milestone, in 1939, was his marriage to Lottie Keiser, who in the decades that followed became an invaluable partner in all of Davis' professional work. The couple had two children, a son and a daughter. Davis never served as a congregational rabbi. Instead he taught at the Seminary and later succeeded Mordecai Kaplan as dean of the Teachers Institute. In 1950, he became the Seminary's provost, in which position he served until his move to Israel in 1959. During his tenure as dean and provost, Camp Ramah (the Seminary's network of Hebrew educational camps) was founded under his guidance, and the Leaders Training Fellowship and the joint undergraduate degree program of Columbia University and the Seminary originated. Davis demonstrated great skill in con375

376

Obituaries

ducting the affairs of the institution and the rapidly growing Conservative religious movement that was linked to it. He also showed unusual resourcefulness in spreading the spiritual message of Judaism to the Jewish and general public. The brilliant messages that were published annually just before the major Jewish holidays in leading American newspapers are one example. A selection of these messages was gathered in The Birthday of the World, edited by Davis and Victor Ratner, with etchings by Marc Chagall (1950). Another example was the long-running radio program "The Eternal Light" and the television program "Frontiers of Faith." Davis did not merely sketch his ideas for writers and public relations people but guided, wrote and edited them. Davis' scholarly interests concentrated on American Jewish history, at that time a little regarded field of Jewish historiography. His personal contribution to American Jewish history was his Hebrew University doctorate—the first earned there by an American—Yahadut amerika behitpathutah: The Shaping of American Judaism. This work appeared in a revised version in English as The Emergence of Conservative Judaism: The Historical School in Nineteenth Century America. Davis injected much needed vitality into the American Jewish Historical Society, organizing notable scholarly conferences. Their stimulating proceedings were published as The Writing of American Jewish History (1957), which Davis coedited with Isidore S. Meyer. Between 1954 and 1970, Davis directed the American Jewish History Center at the Seminary, where a number of notable local histories of American Jewish communities were produced by the present author and local collaborators. Davis' own scholarly efforts were brought together in Beit yIsrael beamerika (1970). He also published many Hebrew essays in the Israeli press and in the American Hebrew weekly Hadoar. (A bibliography of Davis' writings, compiled by Rivka Demsky, appeared in his festschrift, Studies in Contemporary Jewry, edited by Geoffrey Wigoder [1984].) Editing was Davis' particular forte. He had an unerring sense for style and a subtle eye for inconsistency and redundancy. Apart from editing the works mentioned above, Davis edited the Mordecai M. Kaplan Jubilee Volume (1953) and he played a significant role in preparing the massive work edited by Louis Finkelstein, The Jews: Their History, Culture and Religion. For the latter he also wrote a sizable chapter, "Jewish Religious Life and Institutions in America," which appeared in Hebrew as Shevilei hayahadut beamerika (1954). At the age of forty-three, after twenty-five years at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Davis began a second career in Israel that essentially grew out of the first. The capstone of his life's work is the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which he established when he came to Israel in 1959. Years later, he recalled that he had been growing restless at the Seminary, and the urge to live in Israel had always been stirring with him. (For years, however, he remained officially "on leave" from the Seminary, retaining close ties with the institution upon which he had made an indelible mark.) Establishing the Institute was no simple matter, since several academic departments considered they were being poached on, and some scholars had little use for contemporary Jewish studies or, for that matter, anything to do with sociology. Years passed until the Institute, as

Obituaries

377

a department of graduate studies and as a research center, became firmly anchored at the university. This standing was achieved primarily because of the outstanding accomplishments of the Institute's staff. Davis drew scholars both from Israel and abroad who specialized in psychology, statistics, political science, demography and—predominantly—history. The further development of the Institute for Contemporary Jewry (named posthumously after Avraham Harman, the university's president and one of its strong supporters) constitutes a chapter of university and intellectual history. The Institute of Contemporary Jewry, where Davis occupied the Stephen S. Wise chair in American Jewish history and institutions, was by no means the sum of Davis' activities in Israel. Much of his energy also went into the America-Holy Land project: to date, four volumes of studies and documents, With Eyes Toward Zion, have been published, along with the four-volume Guide to America-Holy Land Studies 1620-1948. The program was eventually expanded by Davis to include Western Europe, such that the project is now known as Western societies and the Holy Land. Central to Davis' entire outlook was the interdependence (the term he preferred) of Israel and the diaspora. Five presidents of the state of Israel served as hosts of his study circle on world Jewry, which met for lectures and discussion about eight times yearly. Several memorable annual international conferences emerged from the study circle, and a series of three volumes, entitled collectively World Jewry and the State of Israel, was also published. Davis' last project in this field was the International Center for the University Teaching of Jewish Civilization, which promoted Jewish studies at universities in many countries. Apart from its extensive correspondence and publications, the center held stimulating gatherings every July for several years, even after Davis' health was too frail to permit more than brief appearances. A quiet, private part of Davis' life was his connection with Nir Galim, located near Ashdod. He built a home in this religious moshav, which was established by Hungarian survivors of the Holocaust. There he played an active role, personally aiding many of its members and their children. Nir Galim's fine synagogue was a benefaction from his in-laws, Isaac and Anna Keiser, who are buried in the moshav cemetery. There, too, Moshe Davis was laid to rest on April 12 (23 Nisan) 1996. Davis' achievements found expression in a long list of visiting professorships, awards and honorary degrees. Perhaps the most characteristic recognition was the Knesset Speaker's 1987 award for Davis' "distinguished contribution to the advancement of knowledge and to understanding regarding Diaspora communities and to the strengthening of Israel's links with them." Many talents were needed for so remarkable a range of achievements. One of them was Davis' charm and skill in his relations with people of all walks of life, from shopkeepers to presidents. He possessed a fine intuitive sense in sizing up professors, politicians, businessmen and men of affairs. He had the unusual combination of imagination and tenacity. Most people would have thrown up their hands in the face of the obstacles and apathy to many—perhaps most—of his projects at the outset. Yet after they were successfully launched, they seemed so obvious and necessary. The traditional Jewish piety and belief that Moshe Davis unassumingly

378

Obituaries

maintained found its fullest expression in his faith as an educator in the creative possibilities of the Jewish people. Lloyd P. Gartner

Roberto Bachi Roberto Bachi, professor emeritus of statistics and demography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and first director of the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, died on November 26, 1995, in Jerusalem. His outstanding achievements as a scholar and practitioner in statistics and demography had earned him widespread respect and recognition both abroad and in Israel, where he was termed "the father of Israeli statistics." Born in Rome in 1909 (his father was Riccardo Bachi, a leading Italian economist), he earned a doctor of law degree in 1930 from the University of Rome. Between 1932 and 1937 he lectured at various universities in Italy, and he was appointed a full professor in 1937 at the University of Genoa. In the wake of the Fascist anti-Jewish measures, he immigrated to Palestine in October 1938. Bachi was a key figure in developing the scientific infrastructure for the gathering and analysis of statistical data in Israel. From 1941 to 1945, he headed the Central Bureau of Medical Statistics of the Hadassah Medical Organization. He became assistant head of the department of statistics of the Mandatory government in 1945. Just before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Bachi submitted a blueprint for the organization of a centralized statistical service that was approved by the provisional government. He was appointed its first government statistician and founded Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, serving as its scientific director until 1971. During this period, Bachi developed a modern and efficient central statistical system, established its independence and integrity and ensured its function as a reliable measuring tool that provided high-quality service both to the government and to the public. In 1962, he brought about the establishment of the Public Council of Statistics—representing consumers and producers of statistics as well as experts—to advise on the functions and developments of the statistical system. He served as the Council's chairperson until 1990. From 1940, Bachi also taught statistics at the Hebrew University, where he was appointed senior lecturer in 1945 and full professor in 1947. Bachi founded and was the first head of the department of statistics and demography. He initiated the establishment of the Faculty of Social Sciences (the Kaplan School) and served as its first dean from 1953 until 1956. In the years 1959 and 1960, he served as the prorector of the Hebrew University. And in 1959, together with Moshe Davis, he helped found the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the university, which included within it the division of Jewish demography and statistics. Bachi was also among the founders of the Israel Statistical Association and was elected its first president in 1975. Upon retiring from the Hebrew University in 1977, he continued his manifold research and advisory activities in the areas of demographic and social policies.

Obituaries

379

Bachi had a fundamental impact on the country's population policy. During the 1960s, the Bachi Report established guidelines for future government policies concerning the levels and control of fertility in Israel. Under his leadership, the division of Jewish demography and statistics collected, organized and analyzed a vast body of demographic data on Jews from many countries in the diaspora. In 1987, he initiated a world conference on Jewish population trends and policies, which led to the creation of the Association for Demographic Policies of the Jewish People and the International Scientific Advisory Committee (ISAC) on Jewish population studies. Bachi co-chaired both the Association and the ISAC. Bachi's academic and public achievements earned him numerous awards and distinctions: member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities (1964); honorary member of the American Statistical Association (1965); the Bublick Prize of the Hebrew University (1972); "Commendatore" in the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (1976); the Rothschild Prize in Social Sciences (1978); the Israel Prize—Israel's highest civilian honor (1982); and "Worthy of Jerusalem" (1994). Bachi was a tireless researcher who published hundreds of scientific articles and numerous books, among them the standard reference The Population of Israel, issued in the CICRED World Population Year series. He was not only a leading figure in Israeli demography but was also highly instrumental in furthering the field of Jewish demographic study and statistical analysis worldwide. His intervention at the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA), for example, secured support for a major study of family formation and fertility in Israel that was carried out between 1987 and 1988 by the School of Public Health of the Hebrew University, in cooperation with the Central Bureau of Statistics. Both in his teaching and in his development of new fields of statistical methodology, Bachi influenced scores of statisticians and demographers in Israel and abroad. He collaborated with the U.S. Bureau of the Census, and in recent years a twovolume statistical atlas of Italy was produced in accordance with new approaches that he had developed, which revealed previously unknown aspects of that country's population and society. Throughout his academic career, Bachi taught and advised generations of students. His natural qualities as a leader and his gentle, kind nature will long be remembered and cherished by his many colleagues, students and friends. Gad Nathan and Sergio DellaPergola

Simon Herman It may be said of Simon Nathan Herman, who died on June 28, 1995, that he exemplified the special characteristics of South African Jewry. He was born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, in 1912 to an immigrant Jewish family from Lithuania, and he was an ardent Zionist from his early youth. Herman received his primary education at a Jewish day school in the town of Oudtshoorn in the Cape, at that time a magnet for Jewish immigrants. The interest that he later developed in the psychological effects of antisemitism on Jews might be traced back to his early experiences

380

Obituaries

as one of the very few Jews in an Afrikaans-language high school. While studying law at the University of Cape Town, Herman was elected chairman of the students' Jewish Association, to which he lent a Zionist orientation. Although he graduated with a law degree in 1934, Herman chose to devote himself fully to Zionist work in the South African Zionist Federation, which was at that time the preeminent organization of the Jewish community. Herman's professional career took a new turn in 1942, when he decided to return to academic studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in the department of psychology, headed by I.D. McCrone, a social psychologist known for his studies on race attitudes. Herman's master's dissertation on the responses of Jewish students to antisemitism was deemed worthy of publication by the university. Another of his research projects at the time was a study that he prepared anonymously, at the request of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, in which he investigated the extent and nature of antisemitic prejudice across the spectrum of white political groups in South Africa. Continuing his studies abroad at Harvard University, Herman also served as research assistant to the eminent social psychologist Kurt Lewin, founder of the Center for Group Dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Following Lewin, Herman developed a strong conviction that it was important for social science research to be action-oriented. Concurrently, he was active in a circle of Zionist students, whose number included Ben Halpern; this group was involved in the development of the Intercollegiate Zionist Federation of America (IZFA). In 1949, Herman fulfilled his aspiration to settle in Israel. Initially he worked for the World Zionist Organization in Jerusalem, but from 1954 he began to teach in the psychology department of the Hebrew University. Fusing his social psychology training with his abiding interest in Jewish life and Zionism, Herman focused his research on the study of Jewish identity. When Moshe Davis founded the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University in 1959, he invited Herman to join its faculty. At the time of his retirement in 1982, Herman was a full professor in the departments of psychology and contemporary Jewry. Herman's research focused on Jewish identity in the framework of the study of ethnic identity in general. In a series of seminal conceptual and empirical works, the most important being Israelis and Jews: The Continuity of an Identity (1971) and Jewish Identity: A Social-Psychological Perspective (1977), he pioneered the social psychological study of Jewish identity. Herman distinguished between "identification"—the process by which individuals come to see themselves as part of the Jewish group—and "identity"—what being Jewish means in the life of the individual: the content of his or her Jewishness. Herman developed conceptual criteria for empirically evaluating that identity, taking into account the fact that it exists nowhere in isolation as the sole identity of an individual Jew. Thus he demonstrated that the Jewish identity of an American Jew can only be understood in the context of an overlapping American identity, just as the Jewishness of an Israeli must be seen in relation to Israeliness. Herman's research and writing has left an indelible mark on a generation of scholars and educators. It has illuminated central issues in contemporary Jewish life—the interweaving of Jewishness and Israeliness, the impact of experiences in

Obituaries

381

Israel on the identity of Jewish students from the diaspora, the relationship between Israel and world Jewry, the nature of Jewish reactions to antisemitism, the impact of the memory of the Holocaust, and the role of Zionist ideology in contemporary Jewish life. Gideon Shimoni

Uziel O. Schmelz Uziel (Oscar) Schmelz, professor emeritus of demography of the Jews and one of the founders of the division of Jewish demography and statistics at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry, died on September 20, 1995. Schmelz was born in 1918 in Vienna. He began his university studies there, but when the position of Austrian Jewry deteriorated at the time of the Anschluss, he moved to Brussels. On the eve of the Second World War, he immigrated to Palestine. He continued his studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where Arthur Ruppin was one of his teachers. Here he obtained his master's and doctoral degrees. In the late 1940s, Schmelz collaborated with Roberto Bachi in carrying out the population census of Jerusalem, which was then under siege. In 1951, he joined the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, first as head of the social statistics section and later as a member of the directorate and top supervisor of all demographic and social statistics. In the latter capacity he was responsible for the contents and editing of hundreds of publications, gaining the reputation of a nearly infallible editor. The Bureau's scientific character and independence is also due, in large part, to Schmelz' influence. In 1959, Schmelz was called upon by Bachi to organize the division of Jewish demography and statistics at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry. Within the division, he developed systematic documentation and bibliographic compilation, and he had a considerable influence on research methods. He edited what are still the most comprehensive bibliographies on Jewish demography and statistics and on health statistics, and he initiated the series Jewish Population Studies, whose twenty-sixth volume was published in 1995. In 1973 he became an associate professor, and in 1985 he was granted the title of full professor. Schmelz worked in various fields, a fact that is reflected in his many publications. He contributed critical evaluations and revised baselines of the current estimates of Jewish population size in numerous countries, and he extensively researched the major trends in Jewish demographic development. He also produced a widely influential set of Jewish population projections. On the historical demographic side, he recently finished a book on the Jews of Hessen (Germany) before 1933, soon to be published by the Leo Baeck Institute. He also investigated the development of the population of Palestine at the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, and he published numerous works on the late Ottoman population registers. He also prepared systematic background materials in anticipation of publication of the Moshe Montefiore censuses of the Jewish community in Eretz

382

Obituaries

Israel. In addition, he studied current sociodemographic issues of Israeli society such as the processes of mass immigration and its absorption. Among his last publications was a monograph that he coauthored in 1990 with Sergio DellaPergola and Uri Avner on Ethnic Differences among Israeli Jews: A New Look. He devoted several important works to the city of Jerusalem and its population (the subject of his doctoral thesis). His book Modern Jerusalem's Demographic Evolution appeared in 1987. Schmelz was a humanist of the European school, an expert on both Western and Near Eastern civilizations. He exemplified intellectual integrity; his devotion to scholarship and civil service sometimes went to the point of effacing personal ambition. He was deeply engaged in the study of crucial social and demographic trends among world Jewry and Israeli society. Those who had the opportunity to entertain a close relationship with him were also aware of his staunch commitment to the Jewish people and the state of Israel, his wide historical erudition, and his passion for archeology and the history of art. Uziel O. Schmelz was brought to rest on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, in front of the breathtaking vista of the city he so loved. Sergio DellaPergola

STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY JEWRY

XIII Edited by Jonathan Frankel

Symposium—Explaining the Fate of European Jews (1939-1945): Continuity or Contingency GOTZ ALY AND SUSANNE HEIM, From Forced Emigration to the Final Solution: The Radicalization of German Policy, 1938-1942 ZYGMUNT BAUMAN, The Camps—Eastern, Western, Modern YEHUDA BAUER, Introductory Essay DAN DINER, The Holocaust and Tradition in Historiography GEOFF ELEY, Mapping the German Roots of Nazism JOHN-PAUL HIMKA, Ukrainian Collaboration in the Extermination of the Jews during World War Two STEVEN T. KATZ, Radical Historical Discontinuity: Explaining the Holocaust and Its Limits GAVIN LANGMUIR, Continuities, Discontinuities and Contingencies of the Holocaust MICHAEL R. MARRUS, Auschwitz: New Perspectives on the Final Solution DAN MICHMAN, Trying to Situate the Holocaust within the Broader Context of Modern Jewish History ANTONY POLONSKY, Polish Society and the Holocaust HENRY Rousso, Vichy and the Jews: The Nature of the Crime, the Shape of Memory 383

Studies in Contemporary Jewry

384

SUSAN ZUCCOTTI, Was Italy Really Different? An Analysis of Italian Jewish Survival during the Holocaust . . . Plus essays, review essays, book reviews and a listing of recent doctoral dissertations

Note on Editorial Policy Studies in Contemporary Jewry is pleased to accept manuscripts for possible publication. Authors of essays on subjects generally within the contemporary Jewish sphere (from the turn of the century to the present) should send two copies to: The The The Mt.

Editor, Studies in Contemporary Jewry Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry Hebrew University Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel 91905

Essays should not exceed thirty-five pages in length and must be double-spaced throughout (including intended quotations and footnotes).

385