Visualizing Jews Through the Ages: Literary and Material Representations of Jewishness and Judaism [1 ed.] 2014040484, 9781138795624, 9781315756479

Citation preview

Visualizing Jews Through the Ages

This volume explores literary and material representations of Jews, Jewishness and Judaism from antiquity to the twenty-first century. Gathering leading scholars from within the field of Jewish Studies, it investigates how the debates surrounding literary and material images within Judaism and in Jewish life are part of an ongoing strategy of image management—the urge to shape, direct, authorise and contain Jewish literary and material images and encounters with those images. This is a strategy both consciously and unconsciously undertaken within multifarious arenas of Jewish life from early modern German lands to late twentieth-century North London, Late Antique Byzantium to the curation of contemporary Holocaust exhibitions. Hannah Ewence is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Chester. Helen Spurling is Ian Karten Senior Lecturer in Jewish Studies and Outreach Fellow at the University of Southampton.

Routledge Studies in Cultural History

1 The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe Edited by Brendan Dooley and Sabrina Baron 2  The Insanity of Place/The Place of Insanity Essays on the History of Psychiatry Andrew Scull 3 Film, History, and Cultural Citizenship Sites of Production Edited by Tina Mai Chen and David S. Churchill 4 Genre and Cinema Ireland and Transnationalism Edited by Brian McIlroy 5  Histories of Postmodernism Edited by Mark Bevir, Jill Hargis, and Sara Rushing 6  Africa after Modernism Transitions in Literature, Media, and Philosophy Michael Janis 7 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics C. L. R. James’ Critique of Modernity Brett St Louis

  8  Making British Culture English Readers and the Scottish Enlightenment, 1740–1830 David Allan   9  Empires and Boundaries Rethinking Race, Class, and Gender in Colonial Settings Edited by Harald Fischer-Tiné and Susanne Gehrmann 10 Tobacco in Russian History and Culture From the Seventeenth Century to the Present Edited by Matthew P. Romaniello and Tricia Starks 11 History of Islam in German Thought From Leibniz to Nietzsche Ian Almond 12  Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in the Francophone World Edited by Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller 13 History of Participatory  Media Politics and Publics, 1750–2000 Edited by Anders Ekström Solveig Jülich, Frans Lundgren and Per Wisselgren

14 Living in the City Urban Institutions in the Low Countries, 1200–2010 Leo Lucassen and Wim Willems

22 Identity, Aesthetics, and Sound in the Fin de Siècle Redesigning Perception Dariusz Gafijczuk

15  Historical Disasters in Context Science, Religion, and Politics Edited by Andrea Janku, Gerrit J. Schenk and Franz Mauelshagen

23  Disease and Crime A History of Social Pathologies and the New Politics of Health Edited by Robert Peckham

16 Migration, Ethnicity, and Mental Health International Perspectives, 1840–2010 Edited by Angela McCarthy and Catharine Coleborne

24 Critical Perspectives on Colonialism Writing the Empire from Below Edited by Fiona Paisley and Kirsty Reid

17 Politics of Memory: Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space Edited by Ana Lucia Araujo

25  Old World Empires Cultures of Power and Governance in Eurasia Ilhan Niaz

18 Neutrality in Twentieth-Century Europe Intersections of Science, Culture, and Politics after the First World War Edited by Rebecka Lettevall, Geert Somsen, and Sven Widmalm

26 The Afterlife of Used Things Recycling in the Long Eighteenth Century Edited by Ariane Fennetaux, Amélie Junqua and Sophie Vasset

19  Americans Experience Russia Encountering the Enigma, 1917 to the Present Edited by Choi Chatterjee and Beth Holmgren

27 Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain Andy Pearce

20 A Social History of Disability in the Middle Ages Cultural Considerations of Physical Impairment Irina Metzler 21 Race, Science, and the Nation Reconstructing the Ancient Past in Britain, France and Germany Chris Manias

28  The Invention of Race Scientific and Popular Representations Edited by Nicolas Bancel, Thomas David and Dominic Thomas 29  Indigenous Networks Mobility, Connections and Exchange Edited by Jane Carey and Jane Lydon

30  Shadows of the Slave Past Memory, Heritage, and Slavery Ana Lucia Araujo 31  Expedition into Empire Exploratory Journeys and the Making of the Modern  World Edited by Martin Thomas 32 Luxury and Gender in European Towns, 1700–1914 Edited by Deborah Simonton, Marjo Kaartinen and Anne Montenach 33 Reassessing the Transnational Turn Scales of Analysis in Anarchist and Syndicalist Studies Edited by Constance Bantman and Bert Altena

34 Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers Conflict, Performance and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim Edited by Kate Darian-Smith and Penelope Edmonds 35 Scotland and the Caribbean, c.1740–1833 Atlantic Archipelagos Michael Morris 36 Case Studies and the Dissemination of Knowledge Edited by Joy Damousi, Birgit Lang, and Katie Sutton 37 Visualizing Jews Through the Ages Literary and Material Representations of Jewishness and Judaism Edited by Hannah Ewence and Helen Spurling

Visualizing Jews Through the Ages Literary and Material Representations of Jewishness and Judaism Edited by Hannah Ewence and Helen Spurling

First published 2015 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Visualizing Jews through the ages : literary and material representations of   Jewishness and Judaism / edited by Hannah Ewence and Helen Spurling.    pages cm — (Routledge studies in cultural history ; 37)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   1.  Jews—Identity.  2.  Jews in literature—History.  3.  Jews in art— History.  4.  Judaism in literature.  5.  Judaism in art.  6.  Imagery (Psychology) in literature.  7.  Imagery (Psychology) in art.  8.  Stereotypes (Social psychology)  9.  Social perception.  I.  Ewence, Hannah, editor.  II.  Spurling, Helen, editor.   DS143.V54  2015   305.892'4­—dc23    2014040484 ISBN: 978-1-138-79562-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-75647-9 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction: Visualizing Jews: An Introduction to Literary and Material Representations of Jewishness and Judaism Through the Ages

xi xv

1

HANNAH EWENCE AND HELEN SPURLING

Part I: Divinity, Divine Actions and Their Interpretation: The Management of Theological Images 1. The Idea of Creation Out of Nothing: From Qumran to Genesis Rabbah

17

MARKUS BOCKMUEHL

2. The Image of God in Late Antique Apocalyptic Literature: The Holy One as Teacher in Pirqe Mashiah

32

HELEN SPURLING

3. Approaching the Divine by Imitatio Dei: Tzelem and Demut in R. Moshe Cordovero’s Tomer Devorah

48

PATRICK BENJAMIN KOCH

4. The Image of Torah Min Ha-Shamayim in the Thought of Louis Jacobs

62

MIRI FREUD-KANDEL

5. Nothing and the Jews DEVORAH BAUM

78

viii  Contents

Part II: Contested Images of Judaism and Jewishness: Jewish Perspectives on Identity and Image Management 6. Iconism and Aniconism in the Period of the Monarchy: Was There an Image of the Deity in the Jerusalem Temple?

91

GARTH GILMOUR

7. The Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Visual

104

IRENE ZWIEP

8. Aestheticism and the Flight from Jewishness

122

TODD M. ENDELMAN

9. The Jew in the Eruv, the Jew in the Suburb: Contesting the Public Face and the Private Space of British Jewry

137

HANNAH EWENCE

Part III: Interaction and Conflict with the ‘Other’: The Management of Images in Jewish/Non-Jewish Relations 10. Beyond the Generic: Contextual Interpretations of Mediaeval Jewish Female Iconography

155

ISRAEL M. SANDMAN

11. Navigating Christian Space: Jewish Responses to Christian Imagery in Early Modern German Lands

181

MARIA DIEMLING

12. Translating Modernity: On Aniconism and Negative Aesthetics in German-Jewish Thought

199

LEENA PETERSEN

13. Confronting the Military Image: The Jewish Soldier and the British Army in the First World War

212

ANNE LLOYD

Part IV: C  ommunication and Representation: The Management of Jewish Images in Cultural Media 14. The Image of the Jews in Belorussian Soviet Cinema, 1924–1936 CLAIRE LE FOLL

229

Contents  ix 15. Another Man’s Faith? The Image of Judaism in the BBC Television Series Men Seeking God

247

JAMES JORDAN

16. The Absent, the Partial and the Iconic in Archival Photographs of the Holocaust

265

ISABEL WOLLASTON

17. Adorno and the Prohibition of the Image: The Case of Music

294

LARS FISCHER

18. Ari Folman’s Other War: Animating and Erasing the Holocaust in Waltz with Bashir

308

GIULIA MILLER

Contributors Index

321 325

This page intentionally left blank

List of Figures

6.1 A late Iron Age pottery sherd from Jerusalem with an inscription illustrating YHWH and Asherah. Photo by Garth Gilmour, courtesy of the Palestine Exploration Fund. 6.2 Drawing of the sherd. Drawing by Dylan Karges, courtesy of the Palestine Exploration Fund. 10.1 © The British Library Board, Additional manuscript 27210 (Golden Haggadah), 6b, bottom. 10.2 © The British Library Board, Additional manuscript 27210 (Golden Haggadah), 15a. 10.3 National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo Haggadah, 29–30. 10.4 National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo Haggadah, 31–32. 10.5 National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo Haggadah, 33–34. 10.6 © The British Library Board, Additional manuscript 27210 (Golden Haggadah), 2b, top. 10.7 © The British Library Board, Oriental Manuscript 2884 (Sister Haggadah), 2a, top. 10.8 National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo Haggadah, 3. 16.1 Auschwitz II-Birkenau. ‘Original photos taken probably by Alex, a Greek Jew, in the summer of 1944’. Credit: Isabel Wollaston. 16.2 Auschwitz II-Birkenau. ‘Original photos taken probably by Alex, a Greek Jew, in the summer of 1944’. Credit: Isabel Wollaston. 16.3 Kazimiera Mika. Julien Bryan Archives, courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives.

92 93 158 161 163 164 165 167 171 173 271 272 273

xii  List of Figures 16.4 ‘A ten-year-old Polish girl named Kazimiera Mika, mourns the death of her older sister, who was killed in a field in Warsaw during a German air raid’. Julien Bryan Archives, courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives. 16.5 ‘A ten-year-old Polish girl named Kazimiera Mika, mourns the death of her older sister, who was killed in a field in Warsaw during a German air raid.’ Julien Bryan Archives, courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives. 16.6 ‘A ten-year-old Polish girl named Kazimiera Mika, mourns the death of her older sister, who was killed in a field in Warsaw during a German air raid.’ Julien Bryan Archives, courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives. 16.7 ‘A ten-year-old Polish girl named Kazimiera Mika, mourns the death of her older sister, who was killed in a field in Warsaw during a German air raid.’ Julien Bryan Archives, courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives. 16.8 ‘A ten-year-old Polish girl named Kazimiera Mika, mourns the death of her older sister, who was killed in a field in Warsaw during a German air raid.’ Julien Bryan Archives, courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives. 16.9 ‘Photographer Julien Bryan comforts a ten-year-old Polish girl named Kazimiera Mika, whose older sister was killed in a field in Warsaw during a German air raid’. Julien Bryan Archives, courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives. In Siege the caption is simply: ‘What could I say?’ 16.10 ‘Photographer Julien Bryan comforts a ten-year-old Polish girl named Kazimiera Mika, whose older sister was killed in a field in Warsaw during a German air raid.’ Julien Bryan Archives, courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives. 16.11 ‘A Polish man wearing an armband and holding a camera leads a ten-year-old girl named Kazimiera Mika away from the body of her older sister, who was killed in a field in Warsaw during a German air raid.’ Julien Bryan Archives, courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives. 16.12 ‘A Jewish woman walks towards the gas chambers with three young children after going through the selection process on the

274

274

275

276

277

278

279

280

List of Figures  xiii ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau’. Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives. 16.13 Memorial boards, Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Credit: Isabel Wollaston. 16.14 ‘Children accompanied by an old woman on their way to the gas chambers at Auschwitz in May/June 1944’. Credit: The Wiener Library. 16.15 The Last Journey, colour stained glass window designed and made by Roman Halter and Aviva Halter-Hurn, The National Holocaust Centre and Museum.

281 282 282 283

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments

The editors would like to thank colleagues from their respective academic departments at the Universities of Chester and Southampton for their ongoing support for the volume. Special thanks are due to Professor Sarah Pearce for organising the British Association for Jewish Studies conference at the University of Southampton in 2010 from which this volume emerged. Our gratitude is also extended to all of the contributors for their commitment to delivering what we hope will be recognised as a successful multidisciplinary body of research on an important theme in Jewish Studies. We are highly appreciative of the financial assistance provided by the University of Chester to compile the index, and are indebted to Sybil Lunn for work on the index on our behalf. Thanks also to our editor at Routledge, Max Novick, for his helpful guidance and patience throughout the publication process, and also to Taylor and Francis for allowing seven of the chapters (Chapter 2, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, Chapter 11, Chapter 15 and Chapter 16) that appear in this volume (originally published as a special issue of Jewish Culture and History) to be reprinted here in a revised form. Finally, a special word of thanks to each other (if such things be allowed!), for the powers of patience, endurance and, ultimately, collegiality and friendship which have, after some challenges, and much laughter, brought this volume to fruition.

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction Visualizing Jews: An Introduction to Literary and Material Representations of Jewishness and Judaism Through the Ages Hannah Ewence and Helen Spurling On a material level, images in the sense of the pictorial have formed part of human culture since earliest recorded time. The provenance, form and ritual significance of images rendered on ancient pottery, for example, points to the plethora of functions pictorial images can perform. Similarly, in more recent times photographs and artwork produced as an articulation of personal or shared cultural ideologies or as an expression of aesthetic trends and priorities, highlight the diverse forms images might assume and the variety of contexts in which they are produced. Images, however, are not only produced but also consumed. Their value, meaning and beauty are in the eye of the beholder as much as they are affixed to the tool, paintbrush or lens of those from whom they originate. Images, then, can also refer to what can be viewed by an observer whether that be the natural world, landscapes and scenes, the image through a window, or the images produced for television and the cinema. Yet images might also take no tangible form at all, assuming an abstract quality such as what we may imagine or dream, or, through our own capacity for translating text into a visual form, what we might visualise as we read. Indeed, a stunning array of abstract images can be found in literary sources. These may be the images that we conceive as a result of reading, but also a wide use of metaphorical images and figurative imagery, a choice of motifs and symbols intended to portray a certain message. These are only a few of the ways in which the complex term ‘image’ can be understood, and there is often an interrelationship between them, but underlying all these understandings is how these images represent fundamental questions of identity; how a person, object or idea may be represented, whether by a visible or literary image, is a reflection both of ‘self’ and ‘other’. When it comes to Jewishness and Judaism and the question of ‘image’, material, literary and ideological questions are evident from the time of Antiquity. The image of God (‫ )צלם‬is famously highlighted as a key theological concept from the outset of the Tanakh. The first chapter of Genesis places the image of God at the forefront of his creation of humanity: ‘And God created the man in His image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them’ (‫ ;ויברא אלהים את האדם בצלמו בצלם אלהים ברא אתו זכר ונקבה ברא אתם‬Genesis 1:27). This principle is a much discussed theological representation within Judaism, and has led to extensive debate on the understanding of ‘image’ (‫ )צלם‬for the nature

2  Hannah Ewence and Helen Spurling of God, the relationship between God and his creation, and the reception of such ideas throughout history. Furthermore, taking discussion of Genesis 1 from the theological to the visual, Melissa Raphael, in Judaism and the Visual Image: A Jewish Theology of Art, outlines how God’s first judgement of the world was in fact aesthetic and that the creation narrative ‘sets the scene and terms for a Jewish theology of art’. Raphael argues that ‘the aesthetic precedes the moral’ when God describes his creation as good.1 The question of the production of material, pictorial images, especially in relation to images of the deity (‫ )פסל‬and in the context of idolatry, is prominently raised in the Decalogue or Ten Words, with the second commandment beginning: ‘You will not make for yourself an image of any form that is in heaven above or that is on the earth below or that is in the waters beneath the earth’ (‫לא תעשה לך‬ ‫ ;פסל וכל תמונה אשר בשמים ממעל ואשר בארץ מתחת ואשר במים מתחת לארץ‬Exodus 20:4). Debates surrounding the centrality of aniconism within Judaism—the belief that images in all their various forms are prohibited—have compounded the (mis-) perception of an exclusion on image-making within Jewish traditions. Kalman Bland, in The Artless Jew, notes that by the second half of the nineteenth century, there was a common assumption that Jews were only a ‘People of the Book’ rather than a ‘People of the Image’, which he argued was a direct consequence of the second commandment.2 With reference to a different period of Jewish history, in The Image and Its Prohibition in Jewish Antiquity, Sarah Pearce comments that recent studies are ‘gradually overturning the essentially modern stereotype of the “artless Jew”, as incapable of producing, or ideologically committed to the avoidance of, pictorial art’.3 The debates surrounding image-making within Judaism and in Jewish life are not, or not only, a discussion about the absence of all that is visual, but are in fact part of an ongoing engagement with ‘images’ evident from Jewish Antiquity to the modern day. Visualizing Jews Through the Ages: Literary and Material Representations of Jewishness and Judaism highlights how, within Judaism and Jewish life more broadly, questions of the representation of images, whether through theological, religious, literary or cultural forms, or the production of pictorial, visual images, have been prominent from Antiquity to the twenty-first century. Images—material and literary—have been in the past, and remain today, a ubiquitous feature of Jewish history and culture. However, it is our contention that the multifarious ways in which Jews and Judaism has and continues to engage with representation, whether through visual forms or literary expressions, is part of a wider strategy of image management.4 This theme of image management—the urge to shape, direct, authorise and contain Jewish images, imagery and encounters with images—reflects the complex processes at work within individual and collective identity formation and dissemination. In regulating self, communal and national images, whether religious or secular, image management is the strategy through which identity is marked out. The way in which images are expressed, produced, administered and consumed, and the representation that arises as a result, is thus typically a negotiated process between several interested (or other uninterested) parties, or navigated around numerous competing agendas. Such discourse can be

Introduction 3 found between different Jews or Jewish groups, whether they be the authoritative elite or the ‘ordinary’ Jew, in an attempt to claim priority for their particular form of representation. It can also be identified between Jews and either the majority culture or a competing minority culture at a particular historical moment, or simply found with reference to the non-Jewish ‘other’. Following from the British Association for Jewish Studies annual conference held at the University of Southampton in 2010, each contributor was invited to revise and expand their papers in light of the question of image management. Visualizing Jews Through the Ages: Literary and Material Representations of Jewishness and Judaism is the first major multidisciplinary study to explore literary and material representations of Jews, Jewishness and Judaism from Antiquity to the twenty-first century. Bringing together an international, academically diverse group of scholars in one volume has created a collection of articles which, collectively, construct a unique and forward-thinking conceptualisation of the theme of image management as well as showcasing stand-alone original research within each of the authors’ own specific research field. In the process, a whole series of wide-ranging, sometimes well-known, questions are raised, but in a way that opens up new areas for future research and debate. What is understood by Jewish images? What are the factors that affect the management of Jewish images? What methods should we use in the analysis of different Jewish images whether material or literary? What do different attitudes towards image management tell us about Jewish communities in diverse socio-historical contexts and their interaction with non-Jews? Each contributor is concerned with how ‘images’ are approached, produced and consumed within a different historical setting and geographical locale,5 but image management is a strategy that underscores discussion within each of the 18 chapters. This is evident within manifold arenas of Jewish life from early modern German lands to late twentieth-century North London, Late Antique Byzantium to the curation of contemporary Holocaust exhibitions. Yet its meaning and application, consciously and unconsciously employed by individuals and societies across time and space, is diffuse. In her analysis of the seventh-century midrashic apocalypse Pirqe Mashia h, for example, Helen Spurling assesses a ˙ Torah in the future age. This theological rabbinic image of God as a teacher of image is part of a wider debate on the relevance of Torah in the next age, but also a means of impressing the authority of the rabbinic leadership upon the audience of the text: a form of rabbinic image management. In the wholly different context of twentieth-century Britain, James Jordan expresses concerns about the presentation and interpretation of Judaism in a 1950s televised documentary. As the Jewish Chronicle anxiously forewarned in April 1954, the power to disseminate images—especially if those images are of Jews and Jewishness—‘can become a dangerous and inflammatory instrument’ if not ‘properly controlled’.6 Hence, this volume seeks to highlight the continuity of this theme across Jewish history and culture, and within various Jewish communities and Judaic traditions. It suggests that Jewish encounters with images and imagery in their various forms across the ages reflect the ongoing project to shape and define what it means

4  Hannah Ewence and Helen Spurling to be Jewish. Jews throughout the world and across the ages have repeatedly used images, whether literary or material, to mediate and disseminate individual and collective Jewish identity to the Jewish and non-Jewish world. This volume offers fresh perspectives on the processes and strategies which underlie the material, symbolic and conceptual use of images within the long history and fraught tradition of Jewish identity politics. After all, image matters. As Deborah Dash Moore recently commented in the introduction to her exploration of American Jewish identity politics, what is personal is also political.7 This is especially true of minority identity and has been borne out in the tussle by Jews, both in the ancient and modern world, to forge a place for themselves not only amongst non-Jews, but also within the complex and multi-layered categories of Jewishness itself. In recent decades, efforts within scholarship to account for this continued preoccupation with the nature of Jewishness have been manifold, pointing variously to cultural, religious and/or geopolitical expressions of identity, such as Ashkenazi/ Sephardi, orthodox/secular, pro-Zionist/anti-Zionist or outwardly visible signs of difference supposedly discernible in Jews’ physical form.8 Yet the complexities of Jewish identity go beyond simplistic binaries and what is seen, to the abstract realms of what is both within and without. As Jonathan Boyarin has said, ‘Our discourses of identity, of “who we are”, are tied inescapably to the borderline that is our skin, but through our symbolic consciousness we constantly reach beyond and within that boundary’.9 Jewish identity, then, as trends within the literature suggest, is fluid, malleable and ever-changing, shaped by forces from within Jewish life, history and culture, as well as from the network of relationships in which Jewish life exists. Managing the unwieldy creature that is one’s identity—one’s personal or collective ‘image’—in response to these internal and external forces has been, and continues to be, integral to Jewishness. * * * This volume highlights four key areas where image management is particularly prominent, and are themes that reflect diverse concerns in exploring image management as a concept: 1) Divinity, divine actions and their interpretation: the management of theological images; 2) Contested images of Judaism and Jewishness: Jewish perspectives on identity and image management; 3) Interaction and conflict with the ‘other’: the management of images in Jewish/non-Jewish relations; and 4) Communication and representation: the management of Jewish images in cultural media. Each subsection covers a chronological and spatial breadth, and, in this way, we hope to highlight how the question of image management can provide a paradigm for inter- and multi-disciplinary research in Jewish Studies. The first section on ‘Divinity, divine actions and their interpretation: the management of theological images’ consists of five chapters addressing the representation and management of divine imagery and action. The opening chapter by Markus Bockmuehl focuses on analysing the concept of creatio ex nihilo in early Jewish sources such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and rabbinic literature. Bockmuehl argues against the view that notions of creation ‘out of nothing’ are not rooted in the Tanakh or early Jewish literature, but are in fact a second-century Christian

Introduction  5 reaction to Gnostic ideas of matter as evil, and creation as the work of an inferior Demiurge. Bockmuehl instead highlights how both Qumran and rabbinic sources consistently affirm Israel’s God as the creator of everything, explicitly including matter itself. In discussing Genesis Rabbah, a fifth-century Palestinian midrash, the notion of image management comes directly to the fore, as Bockmuehl claims ‘there seems to have been two-way traffic here, from Jewish readings of Genesis to Christian affirmations about creation out of nothing, and back again’. In addition to reclaiming the concept of creatio ex nihilo for Jewish theologies, it is clear that the representation of this theological image was constructed in certain contexts in relation to competing Christian theological traditions. As Bockmuehl concludes: ‘The meaning and substance of the doctrine, although not the terminology, is already clearly rooted in Scripture and in pre-Christian Jewish literature like the Dead Sea Scrolls, even if in formal terms it seems to be adopted by Jews only in the rabbinic period—quite possibly in dialogue with Christian writers’. A concern for the way in which rabbinic Judaism and its primary interests are presented permeates Helen Spurling’s examination of the rabbinic portrayal of the image of God as a teacher of Torah. In a discussion of apocalyptic literature of the seventh–eighth centuries, Spurling considers how a plurality of textual images of God was created within rabbinic Judaism, focusing in particular upon the presentation of God within the midrash Pirqe Mashiah. The theological image of God is discussed in relation to concepts of the bet˙ ha-midrash, the future Temple, the importance of Torah and ideas of election and judgement. Spurling analyses the key theological aims of the midrash in respect to God as a teacher and the importance of Torah study, but the question of image management again surfaces. Spurling argues that the traditions in Pirqe Mashiah are concerned to present an image of God that validates a rabbinic view of the˙ world to come, a world that was imminent due to the political turmoil caused by the rise of Islam. For example, ‘The connection of the future Temple with the house of study confirms the authority and importance of the bet ha-midrash as a place for the study of Torah in this world’, and so the presentation of God as a teacher of Torah serves to validate the existing practices of the synagogue and the rabbinic focus on Torah study, as well as to reiterate the election of Israel and the special relationship between God and the Jewish people. The relationship between God and humanity in Jewish tradition is also the subject of Patrick Benjamin Koch’s chapter, which focuses specifically on the concepts of ‘image’ (‫ )צלם‬and ‘likeness’ (‫ )דמות‬as found in Genesis 1. Koch focuses on the theological notion of imitatio dei as expressed in the kabbalistic writings of R. Moshe Cordovero (1522–1570) and particularly the treatise Tomer Devorah. Koch argues that Cordovero’s work on the concept of imitatio dei suggests a similarity of structure between the human and the divine based on ‘image’ (‫ )צלם‬and ‘likeness’ (‫)דמות‬. As such, an individual is able to perfect his reality by means of imitation. However, ‘image’ and ‘likeness’ do not refer solely to physical similarity, but also to the possibility of imitating divine actions. Management of one’s attempt to imitate the image of the divine is evident in Koch’s discussion, which highlights that, according to Cordovero, the qualities of tzelem and demut must be actively acquired. With reference to the way of life promoted in Tomer Devorah,

6  Hannah Ewence and Helen Spurling Koch asks the question of ‘why and how the individual is able to perfect his reality by means of imitation’. The discussion then moves from imitating the divine in a kabbalistic worldview to the representation of another key theological image—that of divine revelation—but this time in terms of its relevance to modern Judaism rather than the apocalyptic world to come. The understanding of divine revelation in a post-Enlightenment context has led to a diversity of responses and disputes within the modern Jewish world. The twentieth-century British rabbi and intellectual Louis Jacobs no doubt felt his own ‘distinctiveness’ or, as some might have it, ‘infamy’, keenly. His commitment to a ‘flexible’ interpretation of Torah min ha-Shamayim—the principle of divine revelation—challenged the entrenched authority of this image within Orthodox Judaism. As Miri Freud-Kandel suggests, Jacobs’ writings revealed how Orthodoxy (in its most broadly defined sense) had made efforts ‘to delegitimise deviations from what has become established as the classic definition of revelation’. This insistence on controlling and maintaining one unquestionable image of divine revelation, Freud-Kandel argues, points to anxieties at the very heart of the modern-day Jewish establishment: to offer ‘a type of certainty in the teachings of Judaism that can compete against opposing attractions in the surrounding society’. The nature of divine revelation is again considered alongside perceptions of the divine ‘nothing’ or ‘absence’ in a philosophical treatment of the representation of the divine by Devorah Baum. She explores the idea that, although the concept of Jewish aniconism, inspired by the second commandment, has been shown in modern scholarship to be empirically defunct in many respects, the reputation of a negative relationship towards images and image-making amongst Jews has continued to have influence both in the popular imagination and in modern philosophical traditions. Baum points to Hegel, who suggested there was a lack of any aesthetic sensibility amongst the Jews because of their apparent rejection of images. Indeed, with respect to the Holy of Holies, she notes that ‘Hegel had identified the void with the Jewish people themselves, whose story, as he put it, “arouses horror alone”.’ However, for Baum, perceptions of a void or divine absence should be seen in conjunction with divine revelation—the text of Torah—for, as she says, ‘one can see the “nothingness of Revelation” as a horrifying abyss, as life emptied of meaning. However, one might thereby fail to see what always appears in the moment when one believes one sees nothing: the text, which continues to signify even at its vanishing point’. However, challenges to the apparent aniconistic character of Judaism and Jewish life go far beyond scholarship rooted in the modern period and link to the opening chapter of the next section of the volume on ‘Contested images of Judaism and Jewishness: Jewish perspectives on identity and image management’. Devorah Baum highlights the question of perceptions of ‘nothingness’ in the Temple, an idea that is challenged by Garth Gilmour. He draws upon archaeological evidence excavated from a site in Jerusalem in his contribution to the volume to suggest that iconography and iconism were integral to a ‘de facto orthodoxy’ for Israelite and Judahite religious communities in the period of the biblical monarchies. Gilmour’s reading of an eighth-century incised pottery sherd identifies the

Introduction 7 forms of YHWH and Asherah, offering a compelling counterpoint to the assumed ‘exclusivity’ and abstraction of YHWH within the Temple cult. This discovery of imagery unprecedented in Iron Age Israel—if it can, indeed, be authenticated as representations of the deity and his consort—overthrows the entrenched correlation between image prohibition and early Israelite religion. Moreover, as Gilmour makes clear, investment in and knowledge of this physical representation of the deity no doubt went beyond a religious elite. The presence of this illustration upon the sherd ‘strongly suggests that there was a concept of YHWH and Asherah that was held by some of the inhabitants of Judah and Jerusalem’. Hence, as the archaeological evidence implies, whole communities were complicit in the production as well as the consumption of images of the deity, which also speaks to the complexities of Jewish religious identity in this period. Irene Zwiep, in her contribution ‘The Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Visual’ similarly dismantles the seemingly infallible association between Judaism and aniconism, albeit in a very different spatial and temporal context. In an assessment of the writings of Leopold Zunz, the ‘founding father’ of the nineteenth-century intellectual movement Wissenschaft des Judentums, together with the publications of other Wissenschaftler, Zwiep demonstrates that discussions surrounding art and visual culture did feature within such texts, compelling these Jewish philologists to navigate and integrate image discourse within their more typical portfolio of textual analysis. However, such reluctance to do so, Zwiep argues, ‘was not so much the echoes of the biblical second commandment as its own methodological bias that prevented the Wissenschaft from developing an antenna for the presence and meaning of Jewish art through the ages’. Importantly, as Zwiep suggests, this management of images ‘has always been a pretty solid indicator of the state and make-up of Jewish identity’. Todd M. Endelman develops this theme of individual and collective engagement with visual culture further in his contribution to this volume. Through an exploration of the career of the art critic Bernard Berenson, Endelman suggests that his association with aestheticism and the art world from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century was a direct challenge to the commonplace assumption that Jewish culture and history was devoid of all ‘authentic’ engagement with the arts. Indeed, Endelman insists that aniconism within Judaism is itself a ‘myth’, which had become popularised by the nineteenth century ‘as a consequence of the second commandment’. The insidiousness of that myth together with the typecasting of Jews as driven by material rather than cultural considerations ‘complicated life for talented Jews who were drawn to the visual arts in Western and Central Europe and the United State in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’. Berenson, Endelman suggests, was able to use those inaccurate assumptions to his advantage, exploiting his associations with the art world to detach himself from his Jewishness and instead to remodel himself ‘as a disinterested, high-minded connoisseur’. For Berenson, as indeed for eighth-century Israelites, image-making was bound up with the process of identity making: to carve the figure of the deity onto a clay object or to become a leading light in the art world, in express defiance of all expectations, was to articulate an explicit consciousness of one’s sociocultural location within the wider world.

8  Hannah Ewence and Helen Spurling This awareness of ‘self’ against ‘other’—of the parameters of ‘difference’ even within the confines of Jewish life and culture—has been definitive within Jewish identity politics. For some leaders of the British Jewish community in the twentieth century, the politics of minority identity were bound up in the regulation of that ‘difference’, principally through managing the ways in which Jews occupied their environment. This practice of self-regulation was not so much about maintaining commitment to orthodox principles as ensuring that the community—orthodox and secular alike—presented its most ‘acceptable’ face to the surrounding non-Jewish population. Hannah Ewence’s article explores the clandestine anxiety of British Jews in the modern era to manage the community’s image by regulating residential space. Spatial control, Ewence suggests, was a fundamental part of the drive to anglicise Eastern European Jews arriving in London and other British cities at the turn of the twentieth century, manifesting itself in various bids by the established community to manicure or disperse London’s East End ‘ghetto’. These types of concerns were ultimately internalised by the children and grandchildren of the immigrants who sought to improve their own image and status through migration to the suburbs. This was outward rather than inward regulation and self-presentation. However, similarly to Berenson’s construction of his own Jewish identity, this dogged commitment to managing and maintaining a certain image was to have significant implications. By the close of the twentieth century, issues surrounding image management and spatial control, Ewence demonstrates, explosively materialised in fractious debates surrounding the proposed construction of an eruv in North West London. The question of presenting a particular image of Jewish identity to the surrounding non-Jewish population, and management of those images, is the focus of our third section on ‘Interaction and conflict with the ‘other’: the management of images in Jewish/non-Jewish relations’. The relationships between Jews and both material and literary images have often been at the heart of their relations with non-Jews. For the Jewish minority in fourteenth-century Spain, rendering the images of heroines from the books of Genesis and Exodus within the preface of those major liturgical works, the Passover Haggadot, replicated a practice found within Christian traditions. This Jewish and Christian art, Israel M. Sandman suggests, illuminated a battle between Judaism and Christianity to be ‘God’s true covenantal partner’. Through close examination of the manuscripts of the Golden Haggadah, Sister Haggadah and Sarajevo Haggadah, Sandman argues for a Jewish ‘co-opting’ of Christian motifs in order to reinforce claims of the election of the Jewish people against the Christian majority. Thus, image management is paramount here, with the careful selection of motifs in pictorial form to develop a parallel tradition to Christian mediaeval art as a means of making an argument for the artist’s Jewish community as elect. Indeed, as Sandman says, ‘It is these images that symbolise the heart of the Jewish–Christian contention over which community is God’s chosen people’. The competing claims of Jews and Christians continues as a central theme in Maria Diemling’s chapter on Jewish responses to Christian imagery in early modern German lands. Diemling surveys a diverse collection of materials, including

Introduction  9 narratives compiled by Jewish converts to Christianity, to uncover the various strategies and processes that Jews in late mediaeval and early modern German lands adopted to display their hostility towards Christian images, symbols and holidays. Diemling suggests that, whilst blatant iconoclasm was generally far too risky for Jews, other, more subtle acts of resistance against the ubiquity of Christian images was an integral, even ritualised, part of daily Jewish life. According to the convert Victor of Carben, for example, Jewish hostility towards Christian iconography in the late mediaeval period was so great that it was not uncommon for Jewish children to push apart two blades of grass that, by the act of crossing, held a resemblance to the crucifix. In doing so, Diemling suggests, Jews not only acted to challenge the boundaries of power and domination that characterised their relationship with Christians, but actively sought to forge ‘Jewish spaces within Christian places’. By the nineteenth century, Jews had forged a greater physical presence in German life but the matter of their political and cultural emancipation still remained contested. The widespread assumption of Judaism’s commitment to iconoclasm and iconophobia left Jews open to the charge of their fundamental incompatibility with Enlightenment principles. ‘The topic of aniconism’, Leena Petersen argues in her contribution to the volume, persisted as ‘a key issue of Jewish/non-Jewish interaction and conflict with ‘the other’, because it was related to the ability of Jews to acculturate into a supposedly Christian or secular society’. Yet an exploration of that assumption of a fundamental incompatibility with the non-Jewish world, can reveal much about not only Jewish/non-Jewish relations, but also about the development of the history of ideas, as Petersen points out, within the context of the ‘cultural critique’ of the German-speaking world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through an examination of two schools of thought—neo-Kantianism and the early Frankfurt School—Petersen assesses the role of aniconism and negative aesthetics in modern German-Jewish thought. As debates about Jewish emancipation spread across Northern and Western Europe throughout the nineteenth century, theological definitions of Jewishness gave way to racial ones. Representations of Jews shifted to become an immutable set of identity codes and typologies, biologically predetermined, to create a stock image of Jews as, amongst other things, physically and racially degenerate. Central to this motif was the male Ostjude, rendered backward, culturally ‘alien’ and physically enfeebled. His migration en masse to ‘the West’ injected his racialised image with potent political charge and immediacy. Against the backdrop of First World War Britain, Anne Lloyd explores how this gendered, often acerbic anti-Semitism of the fin de siècle collided with an elevated interest in visceral concepts of manliness and ideal forms of martial masculinity. ‘Those marginalised as unable or unwilling to meet these criteria’, Lloyd argues, ‘became the targets of increasing British animosity’. Jews—both from within the largely assimilated Anglo-Jewish community and from the much-maligned newly arrived immigrant population—fell into these categories. Many Russian Jews, scarred by a legacy of forced military service for the Russian Empire, refused to fight, whilst Anglo-Jews often found themselves denigrated as physically incapable of

10  Hannah Ewence and Helen Spurling attaining the required level of ‘manliness’ to serve Britain in her military endeavours. The insidious nature of this image of Jews as ‘shirkers’, cowards and physically degenerate persisted within the consciousness of the British public to such an extent that, as Lloyd concludes, ‘during the Second World War it was felt necessary to stress the Jewish military contribution in BBC broadcasts’. Section four of this volume focuses on ‘Communication and representation: the management of Jewish images in cultural media’, beginning with the blossoming of the green shoots of a Jewish cultural renaissance during the early years of the Soviet regime. In Belorussia after 1917, artistic modes of expression, communication and self-representation among national minorities evolved beyond a purely aesthetic rationale, becoming central to the project of cultural sovereignty and identity control. Yet, as Claire Le Foll makes clear, the presentation of Jews within state-controlled media forms, such as cinema, was a negotiated process. Jewish identity ‘had to develop in a space limited by ideological, political and social constraints’. Hence the image of ‘the Jews’ within Belorussian cinema evolved from three sources: Soviet power, the Belorussian authorities and the Jewish political elite. However, Le Foll suggests, amidst these competing pressures, Belgoskino—the Belorussian national studio—developed films that highlight the changing representation of the Jews in the interwar period, namely, His Excellency (1928), The Return of Nathan Becker (1932) and Seekers of Happiness (1936). As Le Foll argues, these films cultivate an image of Jews that ‘represent a middle way in the search for a new Jewish identity’ and reflect the complex transition ‘from traditional Jewishness to the new Soviet Jewishness’. This complex process reveals the mechanisms behind the politicised production of the Jewish image in a particular national, ideological and cultural context. In the burgeoning television industry of 1950s Britain, controlling the presentation and consumption of images for an audience of millions was similarly fraught with challenges. For a community already anxious about the way they appeared to the outside world, the advent of the televisual age was a matter of particular concern for British Jews. As James Jordan explains in his contribution to the volume, ‘the image of Jews and Judaism was sometimes simplistic, confused and ambivalent, with programmes seeming to merge Judaism, Jewishness, Israeliness, Anglo and British Jewishness without any real attempt at disentangling the various strands’. This type of worrying conflation occurred in a BBC television series broadcast in 1954, Men Seeking God, which, over the course of six programmes, introduced viewers to the world’s major religions. The third episode, which addressed Judaism, featured an interview with the son of the Chief Rabbi in Jerusalem together with a live studio interview with Rev Isaac Levy, Rabbi of Hampstead Synagogue. This approach, Jordan argues, produced an unrepresentative image of Judaism ‘as a faith which transcended national and geographical borders’ whilst remaining closely affiliated to Israel rather than to Britain or elsewhere in the diaspora. For Isabel Wollaston, too, the matter of image management—of tempering (or removing altogether) ‘inaccurate’, unethical or politically controversial images of Jews from the public arena—is a crucial undertaking. Indeed, for Wollaston, against the backdrop of the ever-growing Holocaust ‘industry’ of education,

Introduction 11 commemoration and tourism, questions of image management assume an even greater urgency. Wollaston, drawing upon the estimates of Sybil Milton, suggests that there are ‘over two million photographs of the Holocaust in public archives’, although only a fraction of these are ever used by documentary filmmakers or displayed within exhibitions, publications or elsewhere. This partial engagement with the visual record elevates some images to iconic status, ‘functioning as visual shorthand for the Holocaust’, whilst others are subject to editing techniques (such as cropping and/or retouching) or ignored altogether. This selective treatment of Holocaust imagery raises some pertinent ethical questions about the way in which atrocity photographs are used, and, indeed, who has the authority to determine that use. ‘The priority is to continue striving to find better ways of combining written text, image and artefact so as to avoid, insofar as possible, being exploitative or sensationalist’, Wollaston suggests, ‘whilst catering to the (sometimes competing) interests and sensitivities of a diverse range of visitors’. Wollaston’s reservations about the use of atrocity photography in the contemporary heritage industry borrow from a broader debate about the appropriateness of any form of aesthetic or artistic engagement with or representation of the murderous crimes committed by the Third Reich. Theodor Adorno’s much-quoted adage that ‘poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ has frequently been manipulated to neatly encapsulate this idea, although his meaning—that to continue to utilise the culture that ‘produced’ Auschwitz is to participate in active denial of Auschwitz—is commonly misrepresented. Lars Fischer uses this more accurate rendering of Adorno as his point of departure for discussing the philosopher and musicologist’s approach to Schoenberg’s work. In Fischer’s opening discussion of Schoenberg’s 1947 composition Survivor from Warsaw, he notes that Adorno critiqued the opera for both its redemptive framing of the Holocaust and for its ‘transgression of the prohibition of the image’. In the case of music, the ‘image’ in question is sonorous rather than visual, Bild rather than Abbild, but it nevertheless facilitates the process of image creation. Music, then, according to Fischer, can be stylised as a form of image-making. In doing so, it complicates (or, as Fischer would have it, ‘complicates and enriches’) the notion of Bilderverbot. This may be all well and good, but it nevertheless begs the question, in what way is this intellectual wrangling with modern manifestations of image management a distinctly Jewish undertaking? The answer for some scholars working within modern contexts is to look to the Holocaust, and its legacy, for answers. For Guilia Miller, the Holocaust vacillates as the elephant in the room—‘a remote’ but nevertheless ‘unresolved Jewish history’ which lurks in the background of many cultural products created within the modern Jewish world. Ari Folman’s animated documentary Waltz with Bashir (2008), which explores Israel’s role in the 1982 Lebanon war, is just such an example of this. Although it makes only passing reference to the Holocaust, Miller posits that the identity of the film-maker/protagonist as a second-generation Israeli imbues the documentary with a ‘broader ideological narrative’ of inherited suffering, trauma and guilt. This mode of post-Holocaust representation, however indirect, points to the inescapable spectre of the Shoah within modern Israeli identity. However, given the attempts to

12  Hannah Ewence and Helen Spurling enshrine the Holocaust in the shroud of aniconism (as is evident from the ferocity of the debates surrounding Adorno), it also suggests the potential of Zionist cultural outputs to liberate Holocaust representation from the restrictive framework of aniconist tendencies. * * * This volume highlights how Jews, past and present, are active creators of, and participants in, theological and literary imagery, visual life and culture, and strategies for representation, self-presentation and image control. Indeed, each of the 18 chapters suggests new readings of Jewish history, culture and theology that place images, image-making and, above all, image management, at the very centre of their analysis. From attempts within rabbinic Judaism to nurture a self-referential image of God as teacher in the ancient world, to late twentieth-century efforts by some within the British Jewish secular community to manicure a moderate and ‘inoffensive’ presentation of Jewishness, Jews throughout the world and across the ages have repeatedly used images, imagery and visual culture to mediate and represent Jewish identity both internally and to the non-Jewish world. It is hoped that this volume will offer not only new research directions but account for the processes and strategies that underlie the representation of material and literary images within the long history of defining and managing Jewish identity. NOTES 1 Melissa Raphael, Judaism and the Visual Image: A Jewish Theology of Art (London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009), 45. 2 Kalman P. Bland, The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3. 3 Sarah Pearce, ed., The Image and Its Prohibition in Jewish Antiquity (Oxford: Journal of Jewish Studies, 2013), 1. 4 The term ‘image management’ has been used within Jewish Studies before. For example, Michael Ashkenazi has discussed image management in relation to the question of the immigration and acculturation of Ethiopian Jews; Michael Ashkenazi, “Studying the Students: Information Exchange, Ethiopian Immigrants, Social Workers and Visitors,” in Ethiopian Jews and Israel, ed. Michael Ashkenazi and Alex Weingrod (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, Rutgers, 1985), 85–96. Ashkenazi understands image management as the manipulation of the social frame of any given set of circumstances to portray a certain image. His understanding of ‘image’ is primarily the impressions that we create or are created for us. In another context, Walter Zenner uses the term of Christian-Jewish relations in Late Ottoman Syria, examining how minorities interact when competing within the same social arena. His use of the term ‘image management’ includes stigmatisation of the ‘other’; Walter Zenner, “Middleman Minorities in the Syrian Mosaic: Trade Conflict, and Image Management,” Sociological Perspectives 30, no. 4 (1987): 400–22. Zenner uses the term again, but this time of American Jewish culture, in Minorities in the Middle: A Cross-Cultural Analysis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991). 5 It is traditional to discuss previous scholarly discourse in an introduction to an edited collection. However, it is evident that, aside from the specific scholarly works that

Introduction 13

6 7 8

9

discuss image management outlined in note 4, the scholarly context is often specific to the particular field of a contributor, whether Jewish history, culture, identity, philosophy, or theology, and in reference to a particular period or geographical area. As such, we have asked each contributor to highlight key contextual works in the notes at the start of their chapters. “Television: Caesar’s Friend,” Jewish Chronicle, April  23, 1954, 23, quoted by James Jordan in his contribution to this volume. Deborah Dash Moore, ed., American Jewish Identity Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 1. On this see, for example, Michael A. Meyer, Jewish Identity in the Modern World (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990); various works by Sander L. Gilman, including Jewish Frontiers: Essays on Bodies, Histories and Identities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and, more recently, Michael Berkowitz, Susan L. Tananbaum and Sam W. Bloom, eds., Forging Modern Jewish Identities: Public Faces and Private Struggles (London: Valentine Mitchell, 2003). For literature relating to the racial ambiguity of Jews, see Bryan Cheyette, “White Skin, Black Masks: Jews and Jewishness in the Writings of George Eliot and Frantz Fanon,” in Cultural Readings of Imperialism: Edward Said and the Gravity of History, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson, Benita Parry and Judith Squires (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1997), 106–26; and Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, The Color of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). Jonathan Boyarin, Jewishness and the Human Dimension (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 2.

This page intentionally left blank

Part I

Divinity, Divine Actions and Their Interpretation The Management of Theological Images

This page intentionally left blank

1  The Idea of Creation Out of Nothing From Qumran to Genesis Rabbah Markus Bockmuehl

In Antiquity, the idea of creation was far from a Truth Held to Be Self-Evident.1 The idea that whatever exists was created by a supreme God constituted a great intellectual divide—as perhaps it does once again today: obvious to some, obvious nonsense to others. It separated the Epicureans’ evolutionary materialism from the providential cosmology of the Stoics, and the ordered linear space-time of creation and redemption in the Bible from avowedly timeless Graeco-Roman cosmologies. What made the latter patently different and superior, to one fourth-century pagan apologist writing in happy but wistful memory of the great myths of the past, is that ‘these things never happened—but always are’: narratives of gods and cosmogony are just a symbolic way of sequencing what the mind sees to be eternally the case.2 On that reckoning, any entanglement of the gods in the mess of creatureliness was properly relegated to the realms of mythology, methodologically prefaced by Comfortable Words such as those of Heraclitus of Alexandria, that ‘taking Homer literally is to make him blaspheme’.3 Jews, by contrast, and later Christians, were convinced that believers in the God of Israel, and readers of his Scriptures, did not have the luxury of evacuating divinity from contingency, or God from creation. For them, as the church father Tertullian would go on to put it, God was ‘wholly employed and absorbed in [creation]—in his hand, his eye, his labour, his purpose, his wisdom, his providence, and above all, in his love’ (De Resurrectione 6). In this short study I am interested more narrowly in the question of creatio ex nihilo, which is perhaps the aspect of cosmology that showcases Jewish and Christian thought at its most fiercely anti-Epicurean—not to say ‘countercultural’. For the Greeks, the origin of the world happened not ex nihilo but from material available in a formless or disordered state (α’ κοσμι´ α) to the Demiurge’s fashioning of a state of order.4 This question of creation, Frances Young rightly stresses, is ‘an area where early Christianity did develop an understanding of the world which was self-consciously in confrontation with ancient culture’.5 The God of Israel, by contrast, did not merely fashion an ordered material world out of disjointed building blocks: far from being formed out of atomic collisions in some primal soup of matter, the world in its entirety was for Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity shaped de novo by God’s providential reason

18  Markus Bockmuehl and purpose. This act of creation did indeed entail the primal stuff of chaos (tohu va-bohu) in the sense of Genesis 1, to be sure, but the world’s ‘formless and void’ state comes to be seen as already the product of the act of creation, rather than merely its material cause. So far, so predictable, perhaps. However, one of the interesting questions here is the difficulty of understanding quite what is meant in Genesis 1. Given the narrative sequence of Genesis 1:1–2, we may read: ‘God created the world; and what he created was at first formless and void’.6 Yet the alternative is to see Genesis 1:1 as a kind of title that is then expounded, beginning in 1:2 with a description of the material state of things preceding the act of creation.7 Thus: ‘God created the world. Now let me tell you how he did it: when the earth was still formless and void, the Spirit hovered. [. . .] And then God said, etc.’. Similarly, in Genesis 2 God fashions man out of clay, an image that also brings to mind Jeremiah’s observation of the potter’s wheel, but this could be read quite differently, as ancient readers already appreciated. Is God’s clay the raw material of creation or itself the object of creation? In other words, did God create the chaos itself, and the clay, or did he work with the primeval atomic soup that he found? The Wisdom of Solomon 11:17 takes it to be self-evident that this means God created the world out of pre-existing formless matter (ε’ξ α’ μóρφου υ’´λης), a point on which it does not sound very different from Plato, Aristotle or, for that matter, Philo of Alexandria, for whom it also seems to be unproblematically the case that creation is a matter of giving shape and identity to what is shapeless.8 And yet at some point in the early Christian centuries, it came to be taken for granted in both Jewish and Christian exegesis that God created all things, including the primeval void and the clay from which man was made. By the third century, in fact, a Christian writer like Origen could show himself exasperated by any view seeming to lend hostages to Epicureanism’s principle that nothing comes from nothing, even if the gods be involved:9 I cannot understand how so many distinguished men have been of the opinion that matter [. . .] was uncreated (materiam [. . .] ingenitam). That is, it was not formed by God himself, who is the Creator of all things. Rather, they say that its nature and power were the result of chance, [. . .] thinking that so great a work as the universe could exist without an architect or overseer. (De Principiis 2.1.4) Jewish writers were perhaps less immediately challenged and threatened by pagan ideas of uncreated matter, but as and when they did encounter them, at least from the third century onward, they too firmly rejected them. At the same time, it repays close scrutiny to examine why this conclusion was not immediately obvious to Jewish interpreters (or for that matter to Christian ones). Creatio ex nihilo is often said to be absent from the New Testament, as a later distinctively Christian development in reaction to second-century Hellenistic challenges. Thus Frances Young writes:

The Idea of Creation Out of Nothing   19 It is often supposed that Hebraic understanding lost out in the assimilation of the Bible to Greek philosophy, but increasingly this seems to be a false estimate of what was going on. [. . .] Creatio ex nihilo was affirmed in the face of Greek assumptions: ‘nothing comes from nothing’ was a Greek commonplace, and implied that anything coming from nothing is a sham!10 Young is encouraged in this assessment by the concomitant view that the doctrine has no substantial foothold in Judaism prior to the Middle Ages—a position that follows the influential work of Gerhard May. May argues that it was the second century’s inner-Christian debates, occasioned by the Gnostic challenge, which enhanced the need for a free and sovereign Creator against those who, like the Valentinians, divided matter as the corrupt emanation of the Creator-Demiurge from the purely spiritual supreme deity. Like David Winston, May holds that the doctrine is not articulated in what he calls ‘Hellenistic Judaism’ (by which he means mainly Philo, who seems happier to affirm that God created the world of pre-existing matter).11 In May’s view, quite possibly Basilides was the first to posit that God created matter itself—a suggestion that serious students of that Alexandrian theologian have since come to regard as highly unlikely.12 May, like Young and other exegetes, believes that Judaism remained remarkably uninterested in this doctrine and that the biblical text of neither Testament requires a doctrine of creation out of nothing.13 The most that Frances Young will allow for the Jewish texts is that the doctrine emerged as a distinctively Christian, second-century ‘implicate’ of the affirmation of a sovereign Creator.14 It is certainly true that frequently cited Septuagintal and New Testament passages that assert God’s creation of ‘what is seen’ from ‘what is not seen’, or ‘things that are’ out of ‘things that are not’, should not be short-circuited into statements about creatio ex nihilo. Exegetes are today in widespread agreement on this point.15 2 Maccabees 7:28, for example, affirms not that God made the heavens and the earth out of ‘nothing’, merely that he made them ‘not out of existing things’ (ου’ κ ε’ ξ ’óντων). The writer applies this principle to human conception in the womb, which is clearly a case of God making human beings out of what is not a human being. Other examples could be multiplied. If God makes ‘out of nothing the things that are’, this need not be ex nihilo but merely his making out of shapelessness the things that have shape. Romans 4:17, likewise, links God’s calling into existence things that do not exist to Abraham and Sarah’s preternatural biological conception, also comparing it to resurrection from the dead. Other New Testament passages that are less explicit than is often assumed include John 1:3, Colossians 1:16 and Hebrews 11:3. Whereas we may all agree that such statements are compatible with God’s sovereign creation out of nothing, what they actually affirm seems to be rather less than this. My purpose here is not so much to question the suggestion of May and others that the explicit doctrine emerged in Christian circles in the second century. I wish instead to illustrate the extent to which, in positive substance if not in terminology, the same convictions about creation were in fact already intrinsic to Palestinian

20  Markus Bockmuehl Judaism in both the Second Temple and rabbinic periods. I will refer in passing to the New Testament and patristic literature as well; but specifically here I wish to focus more narrowly on the question of what pedigree, if any, the idea of God’s creation of matter itself can be shown to have produced in ancient Jewish sources composed or extant in Hebrew or Aramaic.16 Given the ambiguity of the biblical narratives, how and when did Jews (and Christians) move so decisively to the affirmation that God created matter itself? After a brief observation on Genesis 1 in the ancient versions we will turn to the Dead Sea Scrolls and proceed from here to the rabbinic literature. Aside from accommodating the exigencies of time and space, this very brief sketch will allow us to focus on material that Gerhard May and Frances Young entirely ignore, thereby potentially constituting a useful external point of reference.17 THE INFLUENCE OF THE ANCIENT VERSIONS It would not be possible to debate creatio ex nihilo if the biblical creation account had been unequivocal on this point. As it is, the ambiguities of Genesis 1:1 were widely appreciated in post-biblical times and attracted a good deal of semantic, cosmological and mystical speculation.18 These culminated during the rabbinic period in a creation mysticism focused on the first chapter of Genesis (the so-called ma’aseh bereshit), present already in the Mishnah (for example, at M Hagigah · 2:1) and eventually in the Sefer Yetzirah and mediaeval kabbalah, but with many 19 intervening midrashic manifestations. The fundamental argument derives from the Bible’s intriguing first word bereshit, which could be (and sometimes was) understood to mean ‘by/with/in a reshit’—a chief or principle (Aquila’s Greek version famously has ε’ ν κεφαλαι´ω.).20 Quite what that reshit might be was open to interpretation that drew at times on Proverbs 8:2 in order to identify it with Wisdom (God’s reshit darko, the beginning of his way) or, in the case of Philo’s more Hellenised reading, the Logos. Palestinian Hebrew and Aramaic sources sometimes made that connection explicit, but it is striking to trace two quite different variants in Palestinian Targums to Genesis 1:1. Some manuscripts side with the Septuagint tradition’s seemingly unanimous and poignant rendition ‘in the beginning’ (ε’ν α’ ρχ : ‫ מלקדמין‬or ‫)מן אוולא‬, which in a sense firmly contextualises 1:2; others, however, side with Proverbs in taking the first letter of the Tanakh instrumentally, ‘with wisdom’ (‫ בחכמה‬so, for example, a textual variant in Targum Neofiti).21 Much always rides on whether one regards the phrase ‘formless and void’ (‫תהו ובהו‬, Genesis 1:2) to be the raw material or, au contraire, the state of creation (LXX η’ δε` γη̃ η’̃ν α’ óρατος κα`ι α’ κατασκευ´αστος and Jubilees 2:1–2 appear to opt for the latter, thereby preparing the way for a denial of uncreated matter).22 Numerous other illustrations attest to the fascination exercised by this cosmological speculation about creation (ma’aseh bereshit) on the popular imagination.23 So, for example, the fifth-century Palestinian midrashic commentary on Genesis known as Genesis Rabbah:

The Idea of Creation Out of Nothing   21 Rabbi Yona said in the name of R. Levi: why was the world created with the letter Bet (‫—ב‬cf. ‫ ?)בראשית‬The reason is that the bet is closed on all its sides, but open only in the forward direction. In the same way it is not allowed to investigate what is above and beneath as well as what is before and after. (Genesis Rabbah 1:10)24 This same mystical tradition about Genesis 1:1 may even surface in documents close to early Jewish-Christian circles, as in a widely transmitted apocryphal anecdote about the rabbinic teacher of the schoolboy Jesus, preserved in a variety of sources including the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the mid-second-century Epistula Apostolorum 4: Our Lord Jesus Christ was sent by Joseph and Mary his mother to be taught. [And] when his teacher told him, Say Alpha: then he answered and said: You tell me first what is Beta. If the allusion is indeed present (rather than merely a fetching play on the infant Saviour’s precociousness), we may see here the mysterious significance of the letter bet, by which hangs the power of creation—a power the boy Jesus displays in other apocryphal infancy stories.25 Here it suffices to note that the reshit of Jewish discussion is Christ in New Testament and patristic discussion, as Philip Alexander has nicely illustrated, suggesting that there may well have been ‘exegetical encounters’ between the traditions—although the specific identification with Torah may be late (Genesis Rabbah).26 THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS Unsurprisingly, the Scrolls have no trouble with the biblical account of the entire world, including all its constituent matter, as created by God. The philosophical question of whether that creation occurred ex nihilo is of no explicit concern to the covenanters, even if the comprehensive language they do employ would seem to cover all bases. At the same time, in the Scrolls, as already in the canonical frame of the Hebrew Scriptures (for example, Jeremiah 5:22; Job 38:8–11; Psalm 104) even though this doctrine is not explicitly affirmed, any hint of a dualistic cosmogony is firmly rejected.27 These are points that, strictly speaking, neither require nor sustain proof; but they do bear illustration from three or four key scrolls. The constitutional document known as the Community Rule or Serek ha-Yahad exists in multiple different manuscripts (versions or drafts28) from Caves 1 and 4 spanning the first half of the first century bce. The Serek clearly affirms a maximalist view of the biblical God as Creator of all things: From the God of Knowledge comes all that is and shall be. Before ever they existed He established their whole design, and, when, as ordained for them,

22  Markus Bockmuehl they came into being, it is in accord with His glorious design that they accomplish their task without change. (1QS 3:15–16)29 The idea of an uncreated reality, in other words, is quite simply an oxymoron to the writer of the Serek, who in foregrounding divine ‘knowledge’ and ‘design’ plots a course that is remarkably cognate to the seemingly more ‘Hellenistic’ philosophical approach of Philo or other writers influenced by middle Platonism. Similarly, in a lyrical meditation towards the end of this scroll the writer reflects in quasi-creedal terms about God’s creation of all things: By his knowledge everything shall come into being, and all that does exist he establishes with his calculations and nothing is done outside of him. [. . .] For beyond you there is no perfect path and without your will, nothing comes to be. You have taught all knowledge and all that exists is so by your will.

(1QS 11:11, 17–18 = 4Q264 frg 1:4–6)

Similar themes already emerge in classic second-century Qumran documents like the Hymns (Hodayot) and the War Scroll. Without God nothing either exists or happens; and he it is who directs and determines the course of created reality by his wisdom (1QH 1:19–20; 1QH 6:27). The Hymnist believes that ‘through the heavenly host God judged all his works before he created them [. . .] he established (the heavenly host?) before eternity’ (1QH 13:10 [5:16]).30 Significantly, the idea of universal dependence on God as creator of everything appears here as elsewhere in liturgical or quasi-liturgical contexts. This is a fact that lends these assertions rather more gravitas than mere religious opinion. In the War Scroll (second century bce) manuscripts from Caves 1 and 4, God is clearly the creator of all things, including the furthest recesses of the cosmos (1QM 10:11–15). Even the prince of darkness himself has his origin in the will of the creator, who: created Belial for the pit, angel of enmity; his domain is in darkness, his counsel is for evil and wickedness.

(1QM 13:11 = 4Q495 frg 2:3)

The same theme of God’s creation even of the abyss, the darkness and the water is, incidentally, present in the earlier Book of Jubilees (2:1–3), highly regarded at

The Idea of Creation Out of Nothing   23 Qumran. Menahem Kister argues that this already expresses a non-philosophical intuition that God’s creation is all-encompassing.31 In the evidently important, multiply copied liturgical composition known as the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, finally, we also hear that ‘from the God of knowledge comes all that existed for ever’ (4Q402 frg 4:12–13). This includes all the different possible spirits and divinities there may be, because ‘he is the God of the gods of all the chiefs of the heights, and king of kings of all the eternal councils’ (4Q403 1:34–36 = 4Q404 frg 4:1–2, 4Q405 frg 4–5:2–3). Based even on this fairly slender selection of some of the leading sectarian scrolls, it seems evident that even though we find here no sustained investment in either the language or the concept of a creatio ex nihilo, nevertheless the covenanters’ belief in the supreme Creator God is thoroughgoing and all-inclusive, so that all that exists was created by him.32 What Jon Levenson says about the Tanakh applies here too: The concern of the creation theology is not creatio ex nihilo, but the establishment of a benevolent and life-sustaining order, founded upon the demonstrated authority of the God who is triumphant over all rivals.  [.  .  .] What makes this a confession of faith in YHWH’s mastery rather than a shallow truism is the survival of those potent forces of chaos that were subjugated and domesticated at creation.33 SOME NOTES ON RABBINIC LITERATURE By the time of the great rabbinic corpora we may expect to find a more conscious acknowledgement of the argument about creatio ex nihilo, which had by then become somewhat more explicitly familiar. Even here, however, a worldview predicated upon God’s creation of ‘the heavens and the earth’ and all they contained, spiritual as well as material, remained relatively untroubled by Greek philosophical palpitations about materiality and contingency. Like the Dead Sea Scrolls, rabbinic literature for all its diversity seems to have little trouble affirming all-encompassing divine sovereignty in creation and resisting cosmological dualism even despite an awareness of elements of evil or conflict. Similarly, it is not difficult to find voices untroubled by problems of scale in relating God’s creation of the universe to the particularity and intimacy of Israel’s election. For example, we read that when answering a question from ‘Daughter Zion’: The Holy One, blessed be He, answered her: My daughter, twelve constellations have I created in the firmament, and for each constellation I have created thirty hosts, and for each host I have created thirty legions, and for each legion I have created thirty cohorts, and for each cohort I have created thirty maniples, and for each maniple I have created thirty camps, and to each camp I have attached three hundred and sixty-five thousands of myriads of stars,

24  Markus Bockmuehl corresponding to the days of the solar year, and all of them I have created only for your sake, and you say, You have forgotten me and forsaken me! Can a woman forsake her nursing child? (BT Berakot 32b) Other rabbinic texts report discussion about which was created first—earth or heaven (BT Hִ agigah 12a), light or darkness (BT Tamid 32a), earth or Gehinnom (BT Pesahim 54a); whether earth was created beginning from Jerusalem outwards or the other way round (BT Yoma 54b). However, there is never any doubt that all material and immaterial reality are created by God rather than pre-existent: even if continuing insistence on this point (for example, by Rab in Genesis Rabbah 1:5; cf. Rabban Gamaliel in Genesis Rabbah 1:9) may imply that contrary ideas still needed refuting, the rabbis at least do not seem to regard dissent on this point as a ‘live’ option. One also encounters the idea that God is not only sovereign as creator but continues to be active in creation: Every day ministering angels are created from the fiery stream, and utter song, and cease to be, for it is said: They are new every morning: great is Thy faithfulness.  [.  .  .] R. Samuel b. Nahmani said that R. Jonathan said: From every utterance that goes forth from the mouth of the Holy One, blessed be He, an angel is created, for it is said: By the word of the Lord were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth. (BT Hagigah 14a) The trend in rabbinic discussion is towards the assumption that in the Genesis account the verb bara’ denotes creatio ex nihilo—a point of view more explicitly developed in mediaeval commentators like Sa’adia Gaon and Nahmanides.34 According to a famous catena of ‘tens’ in M Abot 5:1, God created the world (not with matter or hard work, but) with 10 words.35 In a discussion in BT Megillah 21b involving the Amoraic Rabbis Yohanan and Joseph, the former explains that these must be understood as: [. . .] the expressions ‘And [God] said’ in the first chapter of Genesis. But there are only nine? The words ‘In the beginning’ are also a [creative] utterance, since it is written, ‘By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth’. (Psalm 33:6) Interestingly, however, the rabbis tend to sit loosely to systematisations on this matter. Thus Yohanan b. Nappaha himself elsewhere appears to affirm God’s use of shaping pre-existing matter like the potter shapes clay:

The Idea of Creation Out of Nothing   25 How did the Holy One, blessed be He, create His world? Said R. Johanan: The Lord took two balls, one of fire and the other of snow, and worked them into each other, and from these the world was created. (Genesis Rabbah 10:3)36 Rabbinic views, then, are evidently inconsistent, although clear on the idea of the supreme God as universal creator.37 Another widespread affirmation is that creation is not limited to the material world of heaven and earth. Not only did God create the angels and the heavenly hosts, but: Seven things were created before the world, viz., The Torah, repentance, the Garden of Eden, Gehenna, the Throne of Glory, the Temple, and the name of the Messiah. The Torah, for it is written, The Lord possessed me [sc. the Torah] in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. Repentance, for it is written, Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world [.  .  .] Thou turnest man to destruction, and sayest, Repent, ye sons of men. The Garden of Eden, as it is written, And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden from aforetime. Gehenna, as it is written, For Tophet is ordained of old. The Throne of Glory, as it is written, Thy Throne is established from of old. The Temple, as it is written, A glorious high throne from the beginning is the place of our sanctuary. The name of the Messiah, as it is written, His name [sc. of Messiah] shall endure for ever, and [has existed] before the sun! (BT Nedarim 39b) One of the more interesting features of rabbinic texts alluding to creatio ex nihilo is their frequent linkage of this allusion to the affirmation that God raises the dead. Although by his own admission exaggerating the supposed causal link, Jonathan Goldstein has rightly stressed the close correlation of these two topoi, from perhaps 2 Maccabees onward.38 This of course is true already in Paul’s suggestive comment in Romans 4:17, even if Paul (like the earlier and contemporary Jewish writers) is hardly interested in the nihil, an ontology of nothingness: to form something out of what it is not does not necessarily entail forming it strictly out of ‘nothing’.39 Stripped of its strictly causal logic, however, Goldstein’s more general point also finds support among some scholars who have surmised that the eventual Christian doctrine’s affirmation of materiality mattered crucially to Christians precisely because of their belief in the resurrection.40 This is a point that came to be well attested in second-century writers, including Tatian, Irenaeus and Tertullian.41 Perhaps the key flashpoint in the discussion of rabbinic evidence has been the account of a standard rabbinic narrative trope of an apologetic encounter between a rabbi and a pagan in Genesis Rabbah, briefly mentioned above. In this case the

26  Markus Bockmuehl narrative ostensibly involves Rabban Gamaliel II and a pagan philosopher, who challenges him on the point of interpretation in the biblical text: A certain philosopher asked R. Gamaliel: Your God was indeed a great artist, but surely He found good materials which assisted Him? What are they? he said. He replied, Tohu, bohu, darkness, water, wind (ruah), and the deep. May ˙ is used by Scripthat man perish, exclaimed Gamaliel: The term ‘creation’ ture in connection with all of them. Tohu and bohu: I make peace and create evil (Isa 45. 7). Darkness: I form the light, and create darkness (Isa 45.7). Water: Praise Him, you heavens of heavens, and you waters that are above the heavens (Psa 148.4); why? For He commanded, and they were created (Psa 148. 5). Wind: For lo, He that forms the mountains, and creates the wind (Amos 4.13). The depths: When there were no depths, I was brought forth (Prov 8.24). (Genesis Rabbah 1:9)42 Given its somewhat clichéd setting, the early date Goldstein assigns to this text is in my view problematic, a point underscored by the evidence for the later (Amoraic) form of Aramaic here in view.43 To be sure, Goldstein does seem right (as against Winston) to suggest that one finds here a clear insistence against a characteristic philosophical opponent that God created not only the world, but all the possible building blocks used in making it. We have here a surprisingly clear affirmation that God’s creation of heaven and earth included matter (and the denial that God created out of matter), even if the form this takes is the doctrine’s positive substance without the explicit terminological wrapper of ‘creating something out of nothing’. Maren Niehoff argues that the linguistic and philosophical clues combine to suggest that in its present form this is a third- or fourth-century composition designed to lend Jewish pedigree to an affirmation of creatio ex nihilo that developed out of Christian-Jewish contact and controversy.44 If true, that reveals important insights about exegetical interactions in Palestine (possibly Caesarea) in Late Antiquity, even if it does not take away from the argument of Menahem Kister and others that the building blocks of a Jewish affirmation of this idea were in place several centuries earlier. CONCLUSION No known ancient Jewish text affirms the doctrine of creation ex nihilo in precise terminology, and few do so even indirectly.45 Nevertheless, biblical passages and their reception in the interpretative world of the Dead Sea Scrolls and of rabbinic literature manifest a lively and consistent conviction that the God of Israel is the creator of all that is in heaven and earth, seen and unseen, material and spiritual. Some Jewish and early Christian writings continue for quite some time to regard this conviction as fundamentally compatible with the idea of God’s use of raw materials, whose existence is apparently not thought

The Idea of Creation Out of Nothing   27 subversive to God’s sovereignty in creation. In Genesis Rabbah, however, we arrive at a position that is substantially indistinguishable from the Christian account of creatio ex nihilo, from whose exegesis, influenced in turn by Jewish precedent, it may in fact derive. There seems to have been two-way traffic here, from Jewish readings of Genesis to Christian affirmations about creation out of nothing, and back again. My argument in this study has been that the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo in its origin states the creation’s comprehensive and absolute contingency on the Creator while at the same time affirming his unlimited sovereignty and freedom. Contrary to persistent assertions from some Christian theologians, this doctrine has no explicit terminological basis in either the Tanakh or the New Testament. Contrary to twentieth-century claims like those of Gerhard May and others, however, it is at the same time not a second-century afterthought, a primarily Christian backlash against Gnosticism. The meaning and substance of the doctrine, although not the terminology, is already clearly rooted in Scripture and in pre-Christian Jewish literature like the Dead Sea Scrolls, even if in formal terms it seems to be adopted by Jews only in the rabbinic period—quite possibly in dialogue with Christian writers. NOTES   1 This study originated in a small interdisciplinary theological working group meeting annually at a variety of locations including Notre Dame University as well as Princeton and Fuller Seminaries. I  gratefully acknowledge feedback and suggestions from colleagues in that group, in audiences at the 2010 British Association for Jewish Studies conference in Southampton and at the Systematic Theology seminar in the University of St Andrews (2010), and from the editors of the present volume. The present article contains material revised here with permission from “Origins of Creatio ex Nihilo in Palestinian Judaism and Early Christianity,” Scottish Journal of Theology 65, no. 3 (2012): 253–70 © 2012 Scottish Journal of Theology.   2 Τα ∼υ τα δ`ε ε’ γένετο με` ν ου’ δέποτε, ε’´στι δ`ε α’ εί· καὶ o’ με` ν νου̃ς ’άμα πάντα o’ ρα˛, ˜ o’ δε` λόγος τα` με`ν πρω˜τα τα` δ`ε δεύτερα λέγει; Sallustius, De Dis et Mundo 4.9, in Saloustios: Des dieux et du monde, ed. Gabriel Rochefort, Collection des universités de France (Paris: Société d’édition “Les Belles lettres,” 1960).   3 Thus, Heraclitus of Alexandria, Homeric Questions 1.1: πάντα γα`ρ η’σέβησεν, ει’ μηδε` ν η’ λληγόρησεν.   4 See, for example, Plutarch, De Animae procreatione in Timaeo, 1014B: ου’ γα`ρ ε’ κ του˜ μὴ ’óντος η‛ γένεσις α’ λλ’ ε’ κ του˜ μὴ καλω˜ς μηδ’ ‛ικανω˜ς ’έχοντος; also quoted by Frances M. Young, “ ‘Creatio ex Nihilo’: A  Context for the Emergence of the Christian Doctrine of Creation,” Scottish Journal of Theology 44 (1991): 139–51 (139–40).   5 Young, “Creatio ex Nihilo,” 139.   6 John C. O’Neill, “How Early Is the Doctrine of Creatio ex Nihilo?” Journal of Theological Studies 53 (2002): 449–65 (454), suggests, perhaps a little too strongly, that putting Genesis 1:1 first ‘converts the old mythology into a statement of creatio ex nihilo’.   7 So, for example, Justin, 1 Apologia 110.2; Athenagoras and the anonymous De Resurrectione; cf. Wisdom of Solomon 11:17 (κτίσασα τòν κòσμον ε’ξ α’μóρφου ‛΄υλης). See further, for example, Gerhard May, Creatio ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of “Creation out of Nothing” in Early Christian Thought (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), 120–39.

28  Markus Bockmuehl   8 References cited in Paul Copan, “Is Creatio ex Nihilo a Post-Biblical Invention? An Examination of Gerhard May’s Proposal,” Trinity Journal 17 (1996): 77–93 (83, notes 29–32); I am also indebted to an unpublished paper by J. Ross Wagner, “Creatio ex Nihilo in Hellenistic Judaism” (conference presentation, University of Notre Dame, 2010).   9 So, famously, Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 1.149–150 (nullam rem e nihilo gigni divinitus umquam), following Parmenides: ε’κ του̃ μὴ ‛óντος ου’δεν̀ γίνεται (cited, for example, in Philo, De Aeternitate Mundi 5; and Aristotle, Metaphysics 11.6 [1026B]). Note also Persius 3.83–84, in an anti-Epicurean taunt. 10 Young, “Creatio ex Nihilo,” 139. 11 David Winston, “The Book of Wisdom’s Theory of Cosmogony,” History of Religions 11 (1971): 185–202; David Winston, “Creation ex Nihilo Revisited: A Reply to Jonathan Goldstein,” Journal of Jewish Studies 37 (1986): 88–91; and May, Creatio ex Nihilo, 6–26. 12 So, for example, Winrich A. Löhr, Basilides und seine Schule: Eine Studie zur Theologie und Kirchengeschichte des zweiten Jahrhunderts, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 83 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1996), 314 and note 110, questioning May’s appropriation of secondary phraseology in Clement of Alexandria. Cf. previously Young, “Creatio ex Nihilo,” 147–8; see also G.C. Stead, review of Schöpfung aus dem Nichts: Die Entstehung der Lehre von der creatio ex nihilo, by Gerhard May, Journal of Theological Studies N.S. 30 (1978): 547–8 (548), who suggested that first-century bce ‘scraps’ of philosophical evidence for the existence of such a doctrine can in fact be found in Eudorus and Cicero. 13 May, Creatio ex Nihilo, 24. This latter point too has been staunchly challenged, for example, in Sean M. McDonough, Christ as Creator: Origins of a New Testament Doctrine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 14 Young, “Creatio ex Nihilo,” 145. 15 Contrast, for example, James D.G. Dunn, Romans, 2 vols., Word Biblical Commentary 38 (Dallas: Word Books, 1988), 1: 218 on Romans 4:17, who assumes this text, like passages in Philo (De Opificio Mundi 81; Legum. Allegoriae 3.10; De Migratione Abrahami 183; Quis Rerum Divinarum Heres Sit 36; De Mutatione Nominum 46; De Somniis 1.76; De Vita Mosis 2.100, 267; and De Specialibus Legibus 4.187) and Jewish apocryphal literature (Joseph and Aseneth 12:2; 2 Baruch 21:4; 48:8; 2 Enoch 24:2; cf. Apostolic Constitutions 8.12.7) to be straightforwardly about creatio ex nihilo. 16 Key passages in the Hebrew Bible will have been covered elsewhere, including Genesis 1; Isaiah 44:24; Proverbs 8:22–26; and perhaps Psalm 33:6, 9. Whereas these texts may be judged consonant with a notion of creatio ex nihilo, they do not in my view establish such a notion and were not judged by pre-Christian readers to do so. 17 We thereby also usefully bracket out several customarily cited but relatively fleeting ‘hot-button’ proof texts—including the Jewish 2 Maccabees 7:28 (ου’κ ε’ξ ’óντων ε’ποίησεν αυ’τὰ o‛ θεóς) and Wisdom of Solomon 1:14, along with more doubtfully classifiable ones like Joseph and Asenath 12:1–2; 2 Baruch 48:8; Shepherd of Hermas (Mand. 1.1; Vis. 1.1.6); Odes of Solomon 16:18–19; and Apostolic Constitutions 8.12.7. Suffice it to say that some (like O’Neill, “How Early Is the Doctrine of Creatio ex Nihilo?”, with a pedigree reaching back to Origen on 2 Maccabees 7:28, Comm. on John 1.17.103; and De Principiis 2.1.5), regard these texts as ‘slam dunk’ evidence whereas others (including the present writer) consider them to illustrate what May calls ‘factors tending to the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo in Judaism’ (May, Creatio ex Nihilo, 21). For Philo of Alexandria’s views, see, in addition to May, Gregory E. Sterling, “Creatio Temporalis, Aeterna, vel Continua? An Analysis of the Thought of Philo of Alexandria,” Studia Philonica Annual 4 (1992): 15–41. 18 See Menahem Kister, “Tohu wa-Bohu, Primordial Elements and Creatio ex Nihilo,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 14 (2007): 229–56. Pace Jaroslav Pelikan,

The Idea of Creation Out of Nothing   29 What Has Athens to Do with Jerusalem? Timaeus and Genesis in Counterpoint (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 48, the LXX choice to render ‫‘ ברא‬to create’ by ποιέω (rather than, for example, κτίζω) is not in my view among the more interesting of these ambiguities; nor is the supposedly unique divine subject of ‫( ברא‬which does in fact repeatedly take a human subject in the piel and hiphil). 19 A. Peter Hayman, Sefer Yesira: Edition, Translation and Text-Critical Commentary, TSAJ (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 35–6 demonstrates text-critical emendations of Sefer Yetzirah in the direction of creatio ex nihilo, preferring the use of ‫ברא‬ to ‫ חצב‬and ‫יצר‬. This is most striking in the case of Qohelet 7:14, substituting ‫ ברא‬for the MT’s ‫( עשה‬para. 60; contrast para. 48a). 20 Similarly R. Yehudah bar Ilai is cited as saying that the word ‫ בהבראם‬in Genesis 2:4 should be interpreted not ‘when he created them’ (be-hibar’am) but ‘by the letter he [sc. of the divine name] he created them’ (be-He bar’am), leaving the yod of the divine name to be the letter by which he creates the world to come (BT Menahot 29b). 21 Variants in Neofiti and Fragment Targum MSS attest readings including ‫מלקדמין‬/ ‫בחוכמתא‬/‫ בחכמה‬for the first word of the Torah; some Neofiti MSS further insert ‫ושכלל‬ ‘and formed’ after ‫‘ ברא‬he created’, as if to underline that both generation and formation are in view. 22 Kister, “Tohu wa-Bohu,” 244 and passim; contrast more critically Maren Niehoff, “Creatio ex Nihilo Theology in Genesis Rabbah in Light of Christian Exegesis,” Harvard Theological Review 99 (2006): 37–64 (44 and note 35). For further discussion, see also Philip S. Alexander, “ ‘In the Beginning’: Rabbinic and Patristic Exegesis of Genesis 1:1,” in The Exegetical Encounter between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity, Jewish and Christian Perspectives, ed. Emmanouela Grypeou and Helen Spurling (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009), 1–29. 23 Cf. also Giuseppe Veltri, Eine Tora für den König Talmai: Untersuchungen zum Übersetzungsverständnis in der jüdisch-hellenistischen und rabbinischen Literatur, TSAJ 41 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994), 30–1, on this material. He comments that the rabbis tend to side with the LXX translation. 24 Rabbinic quotations in English are based on the Soncino translation unless otherwise stated. 25 As when he makes clay birds to fly by speaking the ineffable Name over them (Infancy Gospel of Thomas A 2.3; Qur’an 5:110; and Toledot Yeshu). 26 Alexander, “In the Beginning,” 14–17. 27 Cf. Michaela Bauks, Die Welt am Anfang: Zum Verhältnis von Vorwelt und Weltentstehung in Gen 1 und in der altorientalischen Literatur, Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1997), 14–33. Taken in isolation, texts like Psalms 74 or 29 do arguably suggest hints of creation as a matter of Chaoskampf, but in the canonical frame this is relativised by Genesis 1, including, for example, its affirmation that the sea monsters (tanninim) of Psalm 74 are themselves created on Day 5 (Genesis 1:21). 28 Charlotte Hempel has argued that the S manuscripts should perhaps be seen not as successive variants on a base text but as attesting a formative document in continual flux and development; Charlotte Hempel, “Tolerance of Textual Diversity at Qumran” (seminar paper, University of Oxford, 2009). 29 Dead Sea Scrolls translations are adapted from Florentino García Martínez and Eibert J.C. Tigchelaar, eds, The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997–1998). 30 1QH 13.7–8, 10 [5.13–14, 16]. 31 Kister, “Tohu wa-Bohu,” 249–53 and passim. 32 Cf. BT Baba Batra 16b; BT Qiddushin 30b; BT Shabbat 146a: God created both the Evil Desire and the Torah as its antidote; also (BT Baba Batra 74b; BT Niddah 22b) the sea monsters.

30  Markus Bockmuehl 33 Jon D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 47. 34 Sa’adia, Sefer Emunot ve-Deot [Book of Beliefs and Opinions] 7:7, in Sa’adia ben Joseph: The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, ed. Samuel Rosenblatt, Yale Judaica Series (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), cited in Jonathan A. Goldstein, “Creation ex Nihilo: Recantations and Restatements,” Journal of Jewish Studies 38 (1987): 187–94. Cf. Gerhard Bodendorfer and Matthias Millard, Bibel und Midrasch: Zur Bedeutung der rabbinischen Exegese für die Bibelwissenschaft, Forschungen zum Alten Testament (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998), 146 note 86: ‘Ramban is consistent in maintaining that bara always refers to creatio ex nihilo’. 35 For the radical theme of creation by ‘word’, cf. similarly Genesis Rabbah 3:2; 4:6. 36 This is also a point well put in Niehoff, “Creatio ex Nihilo Theology,” 47. 37 Ora Limor and Guy G. Stroumsa, Contra Iudaeos: Ancient and Medieval Polemics between Christians and Jews, Texts and Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Judaism (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1996), 75, point out that an outsider like Eusebius praises the Hebrew account of creatio ex nihilo (Praeparatio Evangelica 7.16–22). 38 Jonathan A. Goldstein, “The Origins of the Doctrine of Creatio ex Nihilo,” Journal of Jewish Studies 35 (1984): 127–35 (129). Note the critique of Winston, “Creation ex Nihilo Revisited,” with the rebuttal (and partial self-correction) in Goldstein, “Creation ex Nihilo: Recantations and Restatements.” NB the same creation/bodily resurrection link continues to be made in later rabbinic thought: cf. Harry Sysling, Tehiyyat ha-Metim: The Resurrection of the Dead in the Palestinian Targums of the Pentateuch and Parallel Traditions in Classical Rabbinic Literature, Texte und Studien zum antiken Judentum (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1996), 1–2. Cf. also 2 Baruch 21:2; 48:8. 39 As Kister, “Tohu wa-Bohu,” 245, puts it in relation to 2 Maccabees 7:28 and related texts, ‘the things are not considered existent before they are formed, but this does not necessarily mean that the author believed in the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo in the strict sense’. Similar questions pertain to New Testament texts like John 1:3; Romans 4:17; Colossians 1:16; and Hebrews 11:3. 40 So, for example, Martin Hengel, Studien zur Christologie: Kleine Schriften IV, ed. Claus-Jürgen Thornton, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 410–11. 41 See, for example, Tatian, Address to the Greeks 5; Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.38.3; Tertullian, On Resurrection 6; and Apostolic Constitutions 7:34. 42 Cf. the discussion in Goldstein, “Origins”; Winston, “Creation ex Nihilo Revisited”; Goldstein, “Creation ex Nihilo: Recantations and Restatements”; Niehoff, “Creatio ex Nihilo Theology”; and Kister, “Tohu wa-Bohu.” Young, “Creatio ex Nihilo,” mentions the text but dismisses its relevance fairly summarily. 43 See Niehoff, “Creatio ex Nihilo Theology,” 46, 48 (citing Michael Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic of the Byzantine Period, 2nd ed., Dictionaries of Talmud, Midrash, and Targum [Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002], 355 (on the late expression ‘may that man perish’ (‫)תפה רוחה דהוא גברה‬. 44 So, for example, Niehoff, “Creatio ex Nihilo Theology,” 48–9. Bidirectional influence on Christian and Jewish exegesis is also affirmed, for example, in Herbert W. Basser, Studies in Exegesis: Christian Critiques of Jewish Law and Rabbinic Responses, 70–300 C.E., The Brill Reference Library of Ancient Judaism 2 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2000); also Edward Kessler, Bound by the Bible: Jews, Christians and the Sacrifice of Isaac (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and for the extent of the ongoing relationships, see, for example, Samuel Krauss and William Horbury, The Jewish-Christian Controversy: From the Earliest Times to 1789, TSAJ (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1995); William Horbury, Jews and Christians in

The Idea of Creation Out of Nothing  31 Contact and Controversy (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998); and Günter Stemberger, Jews and Christians in the Holy Land: Palestine in the Fourth Century (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000). 45 Goldstein, “Creation ex Nihilo: Recantations and Restatements,” 187, writes, ‘No known pre-rabbinic Jewish text can be proved to assert the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, though passages from scripture and Hellenistic Jewish literature are ambiguous enough to have had that meaning read into them by intelligent believers’.

2 The Image of God in Late Antique Apocalyptic Literature The Holy One as Teacher in Pirqe Mashiah ̣ Helen Spurling Jewish apocalyptic literature is a valuable source in adding to the diversity of theological images and representations of God that circulated in Late Antiquity. An increase in the production of apocalyptic tractates is evidenced particularly in the seventh and eighth centuries when turbulent political events, including the Persian and then the Arab conquests of the Eastern Mediterranean, were regarded as a sign of the messianic era and the coming age.1 A plurality of ‘images’ of God are found in Late Antique apocalypses, but the focus here is on the representation of God as a teacher of Torah in the messianic age and world to come, and how this theological image is presented, or indeed managed, by the rabbinic authors of these writings. The explication of Torah is a prominent theme in apocalyptic literature of Late Antiquity, and is found particularly in connection with ideas of election and judgement.2 Previous studies on the role of Torah in the future age and preceding messianic era, and the means of its delivery, have focused on traditions of the Second Temple and rabbinic period with reference to the question of whether a new Torah is expected in the messianic age and beyond.3 However, Late Antique apocalyptic literature is scarcely discussed in relation to this topic. The discussion will centre on Pirqe Mashiah, an apocalyptic midrash from Palestine.4 This text will be analysed for its presentation of God as a teacher with reference to related traditions in wider rabbinic literature. A number of questions will be explored in relation to Pirqe Mashiah, namely: what is the function of teaching Torah in the future age and who has the authority to teach Torah, or reveal its previously hidden messages? The image of God as a teacher, including in contrast to other intermediary didactic figures, will be examined. Finally, this chapter will consider the motivation behind the particular theological image of God as teacher of Torah in Pirqe Mashiah, and what this might suggest about strategies of ‘image management’ by the rabbinic redactors particularly with reference to questions over the status of the Jewish people against a backdrop of intense political turmoil. Although dating of apocalyptic texts is notoriously difficult, Pirqe Mashiah is one of a number of apocalypses associated with the political upheavals following the rise of Islam. It is a compilation of rabbinic traditions on the future age, punctuated by a number of historical allusions intended to highlight the context of the seventh century and the rise of Islam. Pirqe Mashiah describes the Arabs in

The Image of God in Late Antique Apocalyptic Literature 33 Jerusalem in the context of the fall of Edom, which is the common pseudonym for Byzantium in texts of this period.5 The compilation also makes explicit reference to a conquest of Alexandria, and the Arabs who are fighting against the king of Persia and who confront the Jewish people over ownership of the Temple Mount.6 Thus, the author of Pirqe Mashiah would seem to be outlining the events of the seventh century when Byzantine control of Jerusalem was lost first to the Persians and then to the Arabs.7 The political turmoil in Palestine and surrounding regions in the seventh century was no doubt a key impetus for the compilation of the text. Diverse traditions are brought together to present a coherent picture of the messianic tribulations and the world to come after the Day of Judgement. Indeed, Pirqe Mashiah contains a variety of eschatological teachings, which are based on scriptural proof texts, including the glorification of Jerusalem, the Temple, the Messiah and the events accompanying his arrival, and Eden and Gehinnom.8 However, a clear emphasis in Pirqe Mashiah is on the importance and role of Torah, which is found in connection with ideas of election and judgement. The apocalypse opens with the study of the consolations of Isaiah (‫ )מתעסקין בנחמות דישעיה‬by God and the Messiah.9 Pirqe Mashiah goes on to teach of the righteousness of Israel, who accepted the Torah at Mount Sinai whilst the nations did not.10 This acceptance brought Israel merit, and it is through this merit that she will be delivered from Gehinnom at the end of time. As such, the Torah is the means of Israel’s salvation and God himself will bear witness to the merit of Israel for receiving the Torah. In this way, the receiving of Torah is a sign of God’s love for Israel. Indeed, prior to the end of time, the two key events that Pirqe Mashiah cites as evidence of divine intervention in history are the creation of the world itself, and the giving of Torah. This theme on the importance of Torah is developed in Pirqe Mashiah in an interesting tradition on the role of God as a teacher in the world to come, which illuminates the relationship between God and the Jewish people both in this world and the next.11 The tradition explains how God’s teaching will be studied even after the Day of Judgement when the Temple will be the future house of study of God. God and David sit on thrones, and the women who have had their sons taught Torah form a group around Zerubbabel, who is the interpreter, to hear his explanation of God’s teaching. These women bless God in response to what they have been taught, and the righteous and the wicked of Israel say ‘Amen’. The wicked of Israel, as a result of their response, are brought up from Gehinnom and through the gates of Eden. This tradition in Pirqe Mashiah on God as a teacher begins with a statement in the name of Rabbi Eleazar ben Jacob: ‫ר’ אליעזר בן יעקב אומר בית המדרש של הקב”ה לעולם הבא הוי שמונה‬ .‫עשר אלף רבבות פרסאות‬ (Bayerische StaatsBibliothek, Munich, Hebrew Codex 222, folio 44a) R. Eleazar ben Jacob says: The house of study of the Holy One, blessed be He, in the coming world will be eighteen thousand myriads of parasangs.

34  Helen Spurling The bet ha-midrash or house of study of God is described, based on allusion to Ezekiel 48:35, which is part of Ezekiel’s vision of the Temple.12 Thus, in Pirqe Mashiah, Ezekiel’s description of the Temple is applied to the future Temple, which is identified with the house of study of God. This recalls rabbinic traditions that describe a heavenly academy.13 The tradition teaches that the bet ha-midrash will expand to 18,000 parasangs in circumference, which is presumably so all those who want to hear God’s teaching can fit into the Temple.14 Alongside the Torah, an important sign of the elect status of the Jewish people was the condition of Jerusalem and the Temple. The reconstruction of the Temple was often projected onto an event of the messianic future,15 and this ultimate sign of deliverance is combined with the concept of the bet ha-midrash of God in Pirqe Mashiah. Indeed, the identification of the future Temple with the house of study confirms the authority and importance of the bet ha-midrash as a place for the study of Torah in this world.16 The connection between the future Temple and the bet ha-midrash may suggest that the role of the Temple as a place of sacrifice is no longer necessary in the age to come.17 In this regard, as part of a dialogue between the Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, Pirqe Mashiah states: ‫וישראל אומרים למלך הערבים בית המקדש שלנו הוא קח הכסף והזהב‬ ‫והניח בית המקדש ומלך הערבים אומר אין לכם במקדש הזה כלום אבל אם‬ ‫אתם בוחרים לכם בראשונה קורבן כמו שהייתם עוסקים מקדם וגם אנחנו‬ ‫ וישראל מקריבין ואינם‬.‫מקריבים ומי שמתקבל קרבנו נהיה כולנו אומה אחת‬ ’‫מתקבלין לפי שהשטן מקטרג לפני הקבה ובני קדר מקריבין ומתקבלין שנ‬ ‫כל צאן קדר יקבצו לך‬ (Bayerische StaatsBibliothek, Munich, Hebrew Codex 222, folio 40a)18 And Israel will say to the king of the Arabs: “The house of the sanctuary is ours. Take the silver and gold, but leave the house of the sanctuary”. And the king of the Arabs will say: “There is not anything for you in this sanctuary, but if you choose for yourselves a sacrifice like you used to do before in former days, then also we will offer a sacrifice, and whoever’s sacrifice is accepted, we will all become one people”. And Israel will offer a sacrifice, but it will not be accepted because Satan will bring charges before the Holy One, blessed be He, but the sons of Kedar will offer a sacrifice, and it will be accepted, as it was said, All the flocks of Kedar will be gathered to you. (Isaiah 60:7) Pirqe Mashiah reports the fulfilment of the prophecy in Isaiah 60:7, which describes the gifts of the nations that are brought by the exiles returning to worship at Jerusalem in the future. This prophecy is fulfilled when God accepts the sacrifice of the Arabs. This is also predicted in the rest of Isaiah 60:7, which says: ‘All the flocks of Kedar will be gathered to you [. . .] they shall be acceptable on my altar’.19 Clearly, a restoration of sacrifice is in view in Pirqe Mashiah, but this

The Image of God in Late Antique Apocalyptic Literature  35 is part of the messianic age, not the world to come. Indeed, the heavenly Jerusalem and Temple are yet to descend or appear. Pirqe Mashiah does not explicitly discuss the place of sacrifice in the future world, and ultimately no expiatory sacrifices are mentioned. Indeed, as will be discussed shortly, the tradition of God as a teacher suggests that it is acknowledgement and study of the Torah which brings salvation for the wicked in the next age. Next the tradition describes the position of God within the house of study: .‫והקב”ה יושב על כסא הדין ודוד יושב כנגדו שנ’ וכסאו כשמש נגדי‬ (Bayerische StaatsBibliothek, Munich, Hebrew Codex 222, folio 44a) The Holy One, blessed be He, will sit upon the throne of judgement and David will sit opposite him, as it is said, And his throne will be like the sun before me. (Psalm 89:37) The tradition of God as a teacher in Pirqe Mashiah is found after the description of the final Day of Judgement by God.20 Indeed, the above line on the throne of judgement clearly links God’s role in the future bet ha-midrash with his role as judge.21 This also connects the teaching of the Torah with the fate of the righteous and wicked in the future age, who are expected to respond to the instruction appropriately. David is described as sitting with God based on Psalm 89:37, which is part of a list of divine promises to David and his descendants.22 As such, the use of this description in Pirqe Mashiah indicates the fulfilment of ancient divine promises to David and his privileged position in hearing God’s teaching. The tradition in Pirqe Mashiah goes on to describe how: ‫וכל הנשים השאננות שהיו נותנות שכר על בניהם ללמדם תורה מקרא‬ .‫משנה עומדות במחיצת הקנים עשוים כגדר‬ (Bayerische StaatsBibliothek, Munich, Hebrew Codex 222, folio 44a)23 All the women who had ease who paid wages to have their sons taught Torah, Scripture (and) Mishnah will stand at the partition of reeds made like a fence. These are women whose financial circumstances were secure and so were able to provide an education for their sons. This is an allusion to Isaiah 32:9, although the negative complacency of the women of Jerusalem in Isaiah is interpreted positively here to refer to those who were able to have their sons taught Torah, Scripture and Mishnah.24 This aspect of the tradition is paralleled in BT Berakot 17a, which teaches on the basis of Isaiah 32:9 that women earn merit by making their children learn Scripture at the synagogue and making their husbands learn Mishnah at the bet ha-midrash, and waiting for their husbands to return. Thus, Pirqe Mashiah transmits a version of the tradition on the merit that women can

36  Helen Spurling gain in providing an education for their sons and husbands by saying that they will be rewarded in the apocalyptic future age by being able to listen to such teaching themselves. This not only stresses the importance of learning Scripture and Mishnah in this world, but gives an important status to women in the apocalyptic future age.25 Pirqe Mashiah also describes a partition (‫)מחיצה‬. The rationale for a partition dividing men and women is given in BT Sukkah 51b–52a, which describes how a partition to preserve modesty and attention in the form of a balcony was established in the Temple in Jerusalem for the Water-Drawing Ceremony on Sukkot.26 In BT Sukkah 51b–52a, Zechariah 12:10 is used to explain the concept of a partition. The verse describes the mourning over ‘the one whom they have pierced’, and in Zechariah 12:12 the separation of men and women in this mourning is described. In this tradition, Rav states that if men and women should be separated for mourning in the future world when the evil inclination has no power over them, then there is even more reason for men and women to be separated when rejoicing. The cause of the mourning in the future is, in one interpretation, the death of the Messiah ben Joseph. Thus, the origin of the ‫ מחיצה‬is given an eschatological frame of reference, as here in Pirqe Mashiah. The tradition then elucidates how God will pass on his instruction: ‫שומעות קול זרובבל בן שאלתיאל שמתרגם לפני הקב”ה‬ (Bayerische StaatsBibliothek, Munich, Hebrew Codex 222, folio 44a) They will listen to the voice of Zerubbabel ben Shealtiel, who is the interpreter before the Holy One, blessed be He. Zerubbabel was the governor of the community of Jews returned from exile in Babylon and, as grandson of Jehoiachin, a descendant of the royal line.27 The apocalypse Sefer Zerubbabel attests to the significance of this figure in eschatological thought where he receives a revelation of the last things.28 In Pirqe Mashiah, God passes on his instruction at the end of time and Zerubbabel interprets it so the people, and here particularly the women who had ease, can understand. Thus, the assembly is envisaged as God and David on thrones in the Temple or house of study, Zerubbabel is the meturgeman, and the women stand around the partition for the bimah (as explicitly mentioned in the Genizah fragments).29 The continued function of both the bimah and meturgeman in the next world gives authority to some of the existing practices of the synagogue in Late Antiquity.30 Shaye Cohen mentions an increasing ‘assimilation of the synagogue to the temple’ in Late Antiquity, but ultimately argues that, for the rabbis, when the Temple is rebuilt at the end of time, then synagogues will have no reason to exist and that ‘unlike prayer and Torah study the synagogue never received a legitimation which would justify its continued existence in the ideal future’.31 However, the tradition preserved in Pirqe Mashiah attests to an approach whereby not all aspects of synagogue practice are redundant in the future age.

The Image of God in Late Antique Apocalyptic Literature 37 In Pirqe Mashiah, Zerubbabel is employed to mediate the divine teaching. This is in contrast to rabbinic traditions where God speaks directly to the Jewish people to teach the Torah, which suggest an even closer relationship with the Jewish people in the future age.32 However, a variety of rabbinic traditions also adopt the concept of an intermediary teaching God’s Torah in the messianic or future age, who is party to God’s teachings and has the authority to pass them on. The Messiah features prominently in this role.33 Elijah is also often elected as the intermediary for the teaching of Torah.34 The tradition in Pirqe Mashiah portrays Zerubbabel as the interpreter. It shows that although God is present in the future Temple, he is still transcendent and requires a mediating figure to explain his teaching and does not address the audience himself. As such, the concepts of divine immanence and transcendence are brought together. The precise nature of the Torah that God will teach in the future world is not explicitly discussed in Pirqe Mashiah, although it is clear that his instruction will remain of great importance. The status of Torah in the messianic age in rabbinic traditions has been much debated. According to William Davies, some rabbinic passages seem to suggest that the Torah will change,35 will be abolished completely,36 or imply that a new Torah will replace the old.37 Joseph Klausner referred to some of the texts discussed by Davies and agreed in principle with some of his conclusions.38 However, Klausner contrasted these instances with traditions that emphasise the continuity of Torah and sacrifices in the Temple in the messianic and future age, thus highlighting a diversity of rabbinic traditions on this controversial issue.39 In a more recent and nuanced study, Peter Schäfer claims that it is more likely that in the majority of these passages, a new or changed Torah is not expected, but a complete understanding of the old Torah.40 Furthermore, in discussing the role of God, Schäfer states ‘Gott wird keine neue Torah bringen, sondern steht, wie der Messias, in dem lebendigen und auch in der EndZeit fortdauernden Prozeß der Überlieferung und Deutung der Torah vom Sinai’ (God will not bring a new Torah, but, like the Messiah, it stands in the living and, even in the end time, continuing process of the tradition and interpretation of the Torah from Sinai).41 Indeed, Pirqe Mashiah does not refer to any new precepts, and it is likely that it is a proper understanding of the Torah, whether the Law, Scripture or Mishnah (‫ )תורה מקרא משנה‬for which the women were praised for educating their sons, or more broadly aggadah, as suggested by their blessing (see below), that is found in God’s teaching.42 The nature of the tradition on God as a teacher is elucidated further through examination of the Alphabet of R. Akiva.43 This text contains a parallel version of the tradition under analysis: ‫והקב”ה דורש להם טעמי תורה חדשה שעתיד הקב”ה ליתן להם על ידי‬ ’‫ וכיון שמגיע לאגדה עומד זרובבל בן שאלתיאל על רגליו ואומ‬.‫משיח‬ ‫עד סופו‬  ‫יתגדל ויתקדש וקולו הולך מסוף העולם‬ (Jellinek, Bet ha-Midrasch, 3:12–49 [27–28])

38  Helen Spurling And the Holy One, blessed be He, will interpret for them the arguments of the new [or additional] Torah, which in the future the Holy One, blessed be He, will give to them by the hands of the Messiah. When it is time for the lesson (‫)אגדה‬, Zerubbabel ben Shealtiel will stand up and say: “Be magnified and be glorified!” And his voice will go from one end of the world to the other end. The Alphabet preserves another version of the tradition also transmitted in Pirqe Mashiah, but there are some significant differences.44 First, the traditions differ in that Pirqe Mashiah does not discuss the nature of the instruction that God expounds. The Alphabet, however, is ambiguous. It refers to ‫ תורה חדשה‬which could either be a ‘new Torah’ or a novel interpretation of the Torah. Secondly, in Pirqe Mashiah, it is David that sits with God as he teaches, rather than his descendant, the Messiah, as in the Alphabet. Furthermore, in the Alphabet, the Messiah acts as a full intermediary on behalf of God to deliver the Torah. Thirdly, Zerubbabel still has a role in the Alphabet, but rather than acting as the meturgeman, it is his place to offer the praise: ‘Be magnified and be glorified’. It is interesting that there is a version of the tradition under discussion in the Alphabet of R. Akiva that suggests the possibility of a new Torah, whereas Pirqe Mashiah does not explicitly use this language. This may be a further indication that it is the existing Torah and related traditions that are expounded by God in Pirqe Mashiah. Pirqe Mashiah then goes on to describe the reaction of those who have heard God’s teaching: ‫ועונין לאחריו יהא שמו הגדול מבורך ומקודש לעלם ולעולמי עולמים והצדיקים עונין‬ ‫אמן והרשעים שבגיהנם עונין אמן והקב’’ה אומר למלאכי השרת מי הם הללו שאומרים‬ ‫ ומלאכי השרת אומרים לפניו רבונו של עולם אלו הן המורדים‬.‫אמן מתוך גהינם‬ ‫ והקב’’ה אומר להם‬.‫והפושעים שבישראל שאע’’פ שהן שרויין בצער הם עונים אמן‬ ‫העלו אותם משם וכיון שמעלין אותן יהיו פניהם שחורין כשולי קדרה והם אומרים‬ ‫ באותה‬.‫לפניו רבונו של עולם יפה דנתה יפה חייבת יפה עשיתנו סימן לכל ישראל‬ ‫שעה פותח הקב’’ה שערי גן עדן ומכניס לישראל שנ’ פתחו שערים ויבוא גוי צדיק‬ .‫שומר אמונים‬ (Bayerische StaatsBibliothek, Munich, Hebrew Codex 222, folio 44a–44b) They will answer after him: “May his great name be blessed and sanctified forever and for all eternities”. And the righteous will answer: “Amen!” And the wicked who are in Gehinnom will answer: “Amen!” And the Holy One, blessed be He, will say to the ministering angels: “Who are they, these ones who say ‘Amen’ from the midst of Gehinnom?” And the ministering angels will say before him: “Master of the world, these are they: the rebels and the transgressors who are among Israel, who, although they dwell in pain, answer: ‘Amen’ ”. And the Holy One, blessed be He, will say to them: “Bring them up from there”. When they bring them up, their faces will be blackened

The Image of God in Late Antique Apocalyptic Literature  39 like the bottom of a pot and they will say before him: “Master of the world, you have judged well, rightly you have condemned, rightly have you dealt with us as a sign for all Israel”. At that moment the Holy One, blessed be He, will open the gates of Gan Eden and gather in Israel, as it is said, Open the gates, so that the righteous nation that keeps faith may enter in. (Isaiah 26:2) The women who had ease pronounce a blessing: ‘May his great name be blessed and sanctified forever and for all eternities’, which reflects the blessing pronounced after studying aggadah in BT Sotah 49a. The righteous respond with ‘Amen’. However, the wicked in Gehinnom also answer ‘Amen’ to the instruction. The angels tell God that it is the rebels and transgressors from Israel (rather than the nations) responding. By saying ‘Amen’, the wicked of Israel confirm that they agree with the teachings of the Torah and also confirm the blessing upon God given by the women who had ease, and as a result God brings them up from Gehinnom.45 The wicked of Israel also proclaim their recognition that they have been condemned justly by God.46 This leads God to forgive them, and they are brought into Eden, based on Isaiah 26:2. In the Hebrew Bible, this verse describes pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The ‘gates’ are those of Jerusalem and the ‘righteous nation’ refers to those who have done faithful deeds and fulfilled their vows. In Pirqe Mashiah, the gates of Isaiah 26:2 are understood to be the gates of Eden, and the righteous nation now consists of the reformed wicked who are gathered into the righteous nation of Israel as a whole.47 Here is a clear connection between God as a teacher and God’s role in the final judgement; even in the future world the wicked from among Israel can be forgiven and rewarded for proper acknowledgement of God’s teaching. As such, the need for continual instruction in the future age is made clear.48 This connection between teaching and judgement in Pirqe Mashiah is once again elucidated further through comparison with the Alphabet of R. Akiva. ‫וכל באי עולם עונין אמן ואף רשעי ישראל וצדיקי אומות העולם שנשתיירו בגיהנם עונין‬ ‫ואומרים אמן מתוך גיהנם עד שמתרעש כל העולם כולו וקולם נשמע בפני הקב’’ה והוא‬ ‫ משיבין מלאכי השרת ואומרים לפניו‬.‫שואל עליהם ואומר מה קול רעש גדול ששמעתי‬ ‫רבונו של עולם אלו רשעי ישראל וצדיקי אומות העולם שנשתיירו בגיהנם שעונין אמן‬ ‫ מיד מתגלגלין רחמיו של הקב’’ה עליה’ ביותר ואומר מה אעשה להם יותר‬.‫מתוך גיהנם‬ ‫ באותה שעה נוטל הקב’’ה מפתחות של גיהנם ונותנן‬.‫על דין זה כבר יצר הרע גרם להם‬ ‫למיכאל וגבריאל בפני כל הצדיקים ואומר להם לכו ופתחו שערי גיהנם והעלו אותם‬ .‫מתוך גיהנם שנאמר פתחו שערי’ ויבא גוי צדיק שומר אמונים‬ (Jellinek, Bet ha-Midrasch, 3:12–49 [27–28]) And all those of the coming world will answer: “Amen”. And then the wicked of Israel and the righteous of the peoples of the world who have been left in Gehinnom will answer and say: “Amen” from the midst of Gehinnom until

40  Helen Spurling all the world trembles and their voice is heard in the presence of the Holy One, blessed be He. And he will ask about them and say: “Whose is the great, trembling voice, which I have heard?” The ministering angels will respond and say before him: “Master of the World, these are the wicked of Israel and the righteous of the nations of the world who were left in Gehinnom, who answer ‘Amen’ from the midst of Gehinnom”. Immediately, the compassion of the Holy One, blessed be He, will prevail concerning them to a greater degree, and he will say: “What can I do for them further concerning this judgement which the evil inclination long ago caused for them?” At that moment the Holy One, blessed be He, will take the entrances of Gehinnom and give them to Michael and Gabriel in the presence of all the righteous, and he will say to them: “Go and open the gates of Gehinnom and bring them up from the midst of Gehinnom”, as it is said, Open the gates so that the righteous nation which keeps faith may enter in. (Isaiah 26:2) In the Alphabet, all those who have a place in the coming world answer ‘Amen’ to God’s teaching delivered by the Messiah. However, in addition, the wicked from Israel and the righteous from the nations of the world who are in Gehinnom also say ‘Amen’. This is a very different message from the tradition transmitted in Pirqe Mashiah, which records that only the wicked from Israel acknowledge God’s teaching. Then, in the Alphabet, God extends his compassion to the wicked from Israel and the righteous from the nations (the wicked from the nations are still excluded). He sends Michael and Gabriel to open the gates of Gehinnom and bring them up from there so they can enter Eden, again based on Isaiah 26:2. As such, those who are forgiven in the future age are different in the two versions of the traditions. In Pirqe Mashiah, it is only the wicked from Israel who are forgiven by God and brought into Eden. Thus, in Pirqe Mashiah, the ultimate righteousness of the whole of Israel is in view, whereas, in contrast, the nations are not mentioned as having a share in the Garden of Eden. This image of God’s judgement may reflect a heightened awareness of the socio-political situation following the Arab conquests, and the relative status of different groups in society at that time. CONCLUSION The subject of God as a teacher features prominently in the apocalyptic genre, although with great variety in the motifs employed and differences of theological aim. The topic is bound up with questions on the means of delivery of the instruction, whether by God directly, an interpreter or an intermediary. The audience of God’s teaching is a key question, as, in a number of cases, is the nature of the Torah being taught in the future age. Pirqe Mashiah, as with other Late Antique apocalypses, builds on biblical, classical rabbinic and pseudepigraphical traditions. Whilst many themes and motifs are familiar from

The Image of God in Late Antique Apocalyptic Literature 41 these bodies of literature, Pirqe Mashiah presents a detailed development of the traditions, which are placed within the context of the messianic era and world to come. A great deal of space in Pirqe Mashiah is given to descriptions of the righteousness of Israel, which is the broader context for the discussion of Torah study and is a reflection on the status of Israel; indeed, the election of the Jewish people is reiterated throughout Pirqe Mashiah. Israel is described in detail as the beloved one of God, and the superior status of Israel as the ‘bride of God’ is outlined. The theme of rejection of the nations is contrasted with passages on the election of Israel or traditions that outline the ultimate victory of Israel on the Day of the Lord and subsequent rewards in paradise. Indeed, Pirqe Mashiah explicitly states that God ‘loves Israel more than the ministering angels, and, needless to say, more than the peoples’. Even those who are wicked within Israel will repent at the end of time, and, as a result of their acknowledgement of God’s teaching, it is the entire nation of Israel that enters Eden, whilst the nations of the world will be excluded. In this way, God’s instruction in the future age provides further opportunity for the wicked among Israel to give a proper response to his teaching and so be part of the future rewards. Importantly, just as obedience to the Torah in this world can bring reward in the next, even after the Day of Judgement the continual explanation of Torah is both an honour for those who merit the understanding given to them, and a means of obtaining forgiveness for those who failed to repent in this world. As such, the teaching of Torah in the world to come is connected to concepts of judgement, reward and punishment and closely tied to the election of Israel and the righteousness of the Jewish people. Ultimately, Pirqe Mashiah illuminates attitudes to the political turmoil of the Arab conquests. The traditions in Pirqe Mashiah set out to prove the close relationship between God and Israel and show that the events surrounding the rise of Islam are a sign that the end of time is near, and that it is a time of Israel’s vindication. This no doubt has an apologetic aim: to emphasise the special relationship between God and Israel, at a time when historical events may suggest otherwise. This message is reinforced by the depiction of the nature of the world to come, which will be a time when all the Jewish people will benefit from God’s teaching of Torah. Furthermore, this emphasis on the importance of Torah study in the future age highlights the very rabbinic image of God as a teacher in his house of study, and, as such, lends authority to the rabbinic leadership and their practices at this time of great political upheaval. NOTES   1 As noted, for example, by Philip Alexander, “The King Messiah in Rabbinic Judaism,” in King and Messiah in Israel and the Ancient Near East, ed. John Day (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 456–73; and Günter Stemberger, “Jerusalem in the Early Seventh Century: Hopes and Aspirations of Christians and Jews,” in Jerusalem: Its Sanctity and Centrality to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, ed. Lee

42  Helen Spurling Levine (New York: Continuum, 1999), 260–72. Apocalyptic works from this apparent revival include Sefer Zerubbabel in Adolph Jellinek, ed., Bet ha-Midrasch, 2nd ed. (Jerusalem: Bamberger & Wahrmann, 1938), 2:54–7; and Otot ha-Mashiah in Jellinek, Bet ha-Midrasch, 2:58–63, amongst others.   2 The primacy of Torah in rabbinic traditions in general is discussed by Marc Hirshman, who states: ‘It is fair to say that among the rabbinic Sages, Torah study was accorded the highest status as a commandment, first among equals, both as a vehicle for religious knowledge and for religious self-fulfillment’; Marc Hirshman, “Torah in Rabbinic Thought: The Theology of Learning,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol.  4, The Late Roman-Rabbinic Period, ed. Steven Katz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 899–924 (899).   3 For a selection of key works, see William Davies, Torah in the Messianic Age: And/or the Age to Come (Philadelphia: Society of Biblical Literature, 1952); Joseph Klausner, The Messianic Idea in Israel, from Its Beginning to the Completion of the Mishnah (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1956); and Peter Schäfer, Studien zur Geschichte und Theologie des rabbinischen Judentums (Leiden: Brill, 1978), 198–213.  4 Pirqe Mashiah translates ‘Chapters of the Messiah’, which denotes a key theme in the content of many of its traditions. For further analysis of the material, see Helen Spurling, “Pirqe Mashiah: A  Translation, Commentary and Introduction” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2004). There are a number of printed editions of Pirqe Mashiah, themselves based on the edition of Adolph Jellinek: Pirqe Mashiah is found in Jellinek, Bet ha-Midrasch, 3:68–78; Yehudah Even-Shemuel, Midreshe Ge’ulah, 2nd ed. (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Bialik Institute, 1953), 332–44; and Judah Eisenstein, Ozar Midrashim (New York, 1915), 2:392–4. However, there is an important extant manuscript of Pirqe Mashiah from the Munich Staatsbibliothek, Hebrew Codex 222, folios 36b–46b, which is a version of Pirqe Mashiah headed with the title ‫ פרק משיח‬and ending with ‫ספר משיח‬. As Moritz Steinschneider has noted, this paper manuscript comes from the fifteenth century; see Moritz Steinschneider, Die Hebräische Handschriften der K. Hof-und Staatsbibliothek in München (Munich: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1875), 77–8. The whole manuscript is a collection of small aggadic traditions entitled ‫בשם האל עושה נסים אתחיל ספר המעשים‬. Furthermore, a section of Pirqe Mashiah has been identified in the Cairo Genizah fragments in the Taylor-Schechter Collection, Old Series, Box A45.6 (T-S A45.6). They have been edited by Simon Hopkins, A Miscellany of Literary Pieces from the Cambridge Genizah Collections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 11–14. This text represents a third, apparently new, recension of the work reproduced in the printed editions. The fragments correspond largely but not exactly to Jellinek, Bet ha-Midrasch, 3:75.11–76.24, and Even-Shemuel, Midreshe Ge’ulah, 341.260–342.307. The fragments date to the eleventh or twelfth centuries ce.   5 Jellinek, Bet ha-Midrasch, 3:71; cf. Gerson Cohen, “Esau as Symbol in Early Medieval Thought,” in Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. Alexander Altmann (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 19–48; and Helen Spurling, “The Biblical Symbol of Edom in Jewish Eschatological and Apocalyptic Imagery,” in Sacred Text: Explorations in Lexicography, ed. Juan-Pedro Monferrer-Sala and Angel Urban (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2009), 271–99.   6 On the Arabs in Jerusalem in the context of the fall of ‘Edom’, see Munich manuscript 39b; a campaign against Alexandria by a ‘great king’ is mentioned, which may allude to the conquest of Alexandria either by the Persians in c.616–620 ce, or the Arabs in 642 ce, see Munich manuscript 39a; on wars between the Persians and Arabs as a sign of the end, see Munich manuscript 38a; on the debate over ownership of the Temple mount, see Munich manuscript 39b.   7 On dating apocalypses, see Paul Alexander, “Medieval Apocalypses as Historical Sources,” in Religious and Political History and Thought in the Byzantine Empire, ed. Paul Alexander (London: Variorum, 1978), 997–1018. For Palestine in the seventh century, see Averil Cameron, “The Jews in Seventh-Century Palestine,” Scripta

The Image of God in Late Antique Apocalyptic Literature 43 Classica Israelica 13 (1994): 75–93; Gilbert Dagron and Vincent Déroche, “Les Juifs et Chrétiens dans l’Orient du VIIe Siècle,” Travaux et Memoires. Centre de Recherche d’Histoire et de Civilisation Byzantines 11 (1991): 1–46; David Olster, Roman Defeat, Christian Response, and the Literary Construction of the Jew (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994); Moshe Gil, A History of Palestine 634–1099 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Robert Wilken, The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992).   8 ‘Gehinnom’ is the ‘Valley of Hinnom’, which was a location of idolatrous worship (2 Chronicles 28:3) and child sacrifice (2 Chronicles 33:6; 2 Kings 23:10). It became associated with the judgement of the Jewish people (Jeremiah 7:30–34), and is a place of punishment after death for the wicked; cf. BT Pesahim 54a; BT Tamid 32b; BT Baba Batra 84a; and BT Erubin 19a. ‘Eden’ (Gan Eden or the Garden of Eden) is a place of reward after death for the righteous, sometimes considered to be distinct from the garden where Adam dwelt (Genesis 2–3); cf. BT Berakot 34b; BT Baba Batra 84a; BT Erubin 19a; and BT Pesahim 54a.   9 This introduction is found in the edition of Jellinek, and subsequent editions based upon Jellinek’s work, but not the Munich manuscript (Hebrew codex 222, folios 36b–46b), which begins with a description of Israel as the beloved of God. The ‘consolations of Isaiah’ refers to passages of the biblical book of Isaiah that offer comfort and encouragement to Israel. 10 See Exodus 19:8, 24:3, 24:7. The acceptance of Torah by Israel, but its rejection by the nations of the world is described, for example, in Mekhilta Bahodesh 5, Sifre Deuteronomy 343, Pesiqta Rabbati 21:2/3, Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer 41 and Tanhuma Buber Berakah 3. 11 This tradition in Pirqe Mashiah is found in the Munich Staatsbibliothek, Hebrew Codex 222, folios 44a–b, Genizah Fragments, T-S A45.6 in Hopkins, Miscellany, 12, and Jellinek, Bet ha-Midrasch, 3:75. The Munich manuscript will be used as the base text for analysis with reference to the Genizah fragments unless otherwise stated. 12 Biblical references are taken from Karl Elliger and Wilhelm Rudolph, eds., Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, 5th ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1997). Ezekiel 48:35 is cited fragments:. . . . explicitly in the Genizah . ‫ר אליעזר בן יעקב או בית המדרש הגדול של קבה עתיד להיות שמונה עשר אלפים ריבבות פרסיות‬ . . ‫‘ שנ סביב שמונה עשר אלף וג‬R. Eleazar ben Jacob says: The great house of study of the Holy One, blessed be He, in the future will be eighteen thousand myriads of parasangs, as it is said, It will be eighteen thousand round about, etc.’. Jellinek’s edition adds five parasangs and does not mention Ezekiel 48:35: ‫רבי אליעזר בן יעקב‬ ‫‘ אומר בית המדרש של הקב"ה לעולם הבא הוי שמונה עשר אלף ה' רבבות פרסאות‬R. Eleazar ben Jacob says: The house of study of the Holy One, blessed be He, in the coming world will be eighteen thousand and five myriads of parasangs’. A ‘parasang’ is a Persian unit of length or distance; see Marcus Jastrow, Dictionary of the Targumim, Talmud Babli, Yerushalmi and Midrashic Literature (New York: The Judaica Press, 1996), 1233. 13 For example, see BT Sotah 7b; BT Gittin 68a; BT Baba Mezia 85b–86a; and Ecclesiates Rabbah 1:30 and 9:10. 14 Cf. BT Sukkah 45b, which understands 18,000 to refer to the number of righteous men in the row immediately before God in heaven. 15 There are numerous references to this theme, but as a selection see 1 Enoch 85–90; 4 Ezra 10:44–50; Testament of Levi 3:4–6 and 5:1–2; Sifre Deuteronomy 1:352; T Sukkah 3:3–10; Genesis Rabbah 69:7; PT Shekalim 6:2; BT Yoma 77b–78a; and Tanhuma Buber Vayyetse 9. See Avraham Grossman, “Jerusalem in Jewish Apocalyptic Literature,” in The History of Jerusalem: The Early Muslim Period 638–1099, ed. Joshua Prawer and Haggai Ben-Shammai (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1996), 295–310; Shemuel Safrai, “Jerusalem and the Temple in the Tannaitic Literature

44  Helen Spurling of the First Generation after the Destruction of the Temple,” in Sanctity of Time and Space in Tradition and Modernity, ed. Alberdina Houtman, Marcel Poorthuis and Joshua Schwartz (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 135–52; and Günter Stemberger, “Reaktionen auf die Tempelzerstörung in der rabbinischen Literatur,” in Zerstörungen des Jerusalemer Tempels, ed. Johannes Hahn (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 207–36. 16 Lee Levine states that the bet ha-midrash was the primary setting of rabbis in Late Antiquity such that ‘it is there that the sages spent most of their time and it was the Sitz im Leben for most of their sayings and stories recorded in rabbinic literature. They controlled the agenda, composition, and proceedings of the bet midrash, and, quite naturally, ranked it foremost among the institutions in Jewish society’; Lee Levine, “The Sages and the Synagogue in Late Antiquity: The Evidence of the Galilee,” in The Galilee in Late Antiquity, ed. Lee Levine (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1992), 201–22 (203). Catherine Hezser does not challenge the existence of the house of study or the fact that it was a place for the study of Torah. However, she does contest whether this was a formal institution populated only by rabbis. Hezser states, ‘Study houses in Roman Palestine seem to have been (rooms in) private houses or apartments or public buildings where people customarily met to study Torah and where amoraim delivered sermons on the Sabbath. The same activity, the teaching and expounding of Torah, also took place elsewhere, in synagogues and open spaces’; Catherine Hezser, The Social Structure of the Rabbinic Movement in Roman Palestine (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997), 195–214 (213). 17 The fact that the sacrificial cult can be replaced by Torah study in a variety of rabbinic traditions is highlighted by Shaye Cohen, “The Temple and the Synagogue,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 4, The Late Roman-Rabbinic Period, ed. Steven Katz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 298–325. For example, see Sifre Deuteronomy 41; Leviticus Rabbah 7:2–3; BT Ta’anit 27b; BT Megillah 3b, 31b; BT Sotah 5b; BT Sukkah 49b; Targum Canticles 1:15; Abot de Rabbi Natan A 4; and Tanhuma Ki Tavo 1. 18 This is also found in Jellinek, Bet ha-Midrasch, 3:71. 19 Cf. BT Avodah Zarah 24a; Targum Isaiah 60:7; and Midrash Psalms 68:15. 20 Directly preceding this tradition, Pirqe Mashiah (see also Jellinek, Bet ha-Midrasch, 3:74–75) describes the new Jerusalem, particularly focusing on its magnificent proportions and height. An explanation is given as to how people will be able to reach Jerusalem when its height is so great, and this is followed by a description of the expansion of the boundaries of Jerusalem. An outline of the wealth and ornamentation of the new Jerusalem and Temple is provided. This leads on to the Day of Judgement, including the division between the righteous and the wicked, the opening of Eden and Gehinnom and the judgement of these groups, which takes place in the valley of Jehoshaphat. 21 Both the Munich manuscript and the edition of Jellinek describe God as sitting on a throne of judgement, but this is omitted in .the Genizah fragments reproduced . . .by Hopkins, which state simply ‘throne’: ‫והקבה יושב כסא עליהן ודויד יושב כנגדו שנא וכסאו‬ ‫‘ כשמש נגדי‬The Holy One, blessed be He, will sit on a throne over them and David will sit opposite him, as it is said, And his throne will be like the sun before me (Psalm 89:37)’. 22 On a throne for David cf. BT Hagigah 14a and BT Sanhedrin 38b. 23 Interestingly, the Genizah fragments have preserved an alternative tradition: ‫עומדות‬ ‫‘ במחצלת ק)נים( עשויות גדר לבימה‬They will stand at a mat of reeds as though making a fence for the bimah’. This suggests that the women will stand on or at a mat of reeds with they themselves making a fence (as indicated by the feminine plural participle ‫‘ עשויות‬making’). Furthermore, the fragments specify that the ‘fence’ is for the bimah (‫)בימה‬, the platform from which the Torah is read. 24 This is the same as in the edition of Jellinek, but the Genizah fragments state: ‫וכל‬ ‫הנשים השאננות שהיו נותנות שכר ומלמדות בניהם תורה ומקרא ומשנה ודרך ארץ תמימות וישרות‬

The Image of God in Late Antique Apocalyptic Literature  45 ‘All the women who had ease who paid wages and had their sons taught Torah and Scripture and Mishnah and good behaviour, integrity and propriety’. 25 For discussion of whether women studied Torah in the rabbinic era, see Hirshman, “Torah in Rabbinic Thought,” 916–18. 26 The water for the libation ceremony was drawn from the pool of Shiloah in Jerusalem and taken to the Temple. This was an occasion for rejoicing, as indicated by Isaiah 12:3, with a formal celebration in simchat bet ha-sho’evah. BT Sukkah 51b states that whoever has not seen this celebration has not known a true celebration. See Jeffrey Rubenstein, The History of Sukkot in the Second Temple and Rabbinic Periods (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995). 27 Zerubbabel is first mentioned in Jewish tradition in Ezra 3:2. He is the son of Shealtiel and the grandson of Jehoiachin; cf. Ezra 4:2; Haggai 1:1, 2:2, 2:21; and Zechariah 4:1–7. 28 Sefer Zerubbabel is arguably one of the most famous Late Antique apocalypses and has been influential for the development of Jewish apocalyptic thought. The text is found in a number of different recensions, including in Jellinek, Bet haMidrasch, 2:54–57; and I. Lévi, “L’Apocalypse de Zorobabel,” Revue des Etudes Juives 68 (1914): 129–60; Revue des Etudes Juives 69 (1919): 108–21; and Revue des Etudes Juives 71 (1920): 57–65. For an introduction to the text, see Martha Himmelfarb, “Sefer Zerubbabel,” in Rabbinic Fantasies: Imaginative Narratives from Classical Hebrew Literature, ed. David Stern and Mark Mirsky (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1990), 67–90; and John Reeves, Trajectories in Near Eastern Apocalyptic: A Postrabbinic Jewish Apocalypse Reader (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 40–66. 29 See note 23 above. The bimah is the platform from which the Torah is read in the synagogue, but here is found in the house of study or Temple. Meturgeman means ‘interpreter’ and his role in the synagogue was to orally translate the readings from Scripture into the vernacular. The description in Pirqe Mashiah recalls the Haqhel ceremony, which is described in the Hebrew Bible at Deuteronomy 31:10–13. The Haqhel refers to the practice of assembling all men, women and children within Israel to hear the reading of the Torah by the king of Israel ‘in order that they will listen and in order that they will learn, and they will fear the Lord your God, and keep to do all the words of this Torah’ (Deuteronomy 31:12). The ceremony took place at the site of the Temple in Jerusalem during Sukkot every seven years in the year following a sabbatical year. Indeed, BT Hagigah 3a teaches that men would come to learn and women would come to listen. However, children would come to provide a reward for those who brought them; cf. Nehemiah 8:4 and also M Sotah 7:8, which states that a wooden platform was set up in the Temple court upon which the king sat to read the Torah. The passages read were selected passages from Deuteronomy, and the reading concluded with eight blessings. This event was reminiscent of when the Israelites stood at Mount Sinai when every member of the nation was present and God first delivered the Torah; cf. BT Sotah 41a–b. 30 Catherine Hezser suggests that ‘synagogues were communal rather than rabbinic institutions’; Hezser, Social Structure, 214; cf. Levine, “The Sages and the Synagogue,” 201–22. However, Hezser outlines how there was sometimes an overlap between the house of study and the synagogue, with evidence for study of Torah or lecturing on Torah in both, and she notes that ‘in general rabbis seem to have had a positive attitude towards synagogues’ (ibid., 220). Cf. PT Berakot 5:1, 9a and 3:1, 6a; PT Nazir 7:1, 56a; PT Sotah 1:4, 16d; Pesiqta de Rav Kahana 15:7, 18:5; Leviticus Rabbah 32:7; Abot de Rabbi Natan A 2 and B 12. 31 Cohen, “The Temple and the Synagogue,” 319–23 (320). 32 The description of God teaching Torah directly to his audience is found in a variety of forms within wider rabbinic tradition depending on the specific context of the passage. The traditions also vary on the nature of the audience, namely those who merit receipt of God’s instruction, and the nature of the Torah imparted by God;

46  Helen Spurling cf. PT Shabbat 6:9; BT Avodah Zarah 3b; Targum Canticles 5:10; Deuteronomy Rabbah 1:12; Tanhuma Balaq 14; Tanhuma Buber Balaq 23; and Numbers Rabbah 20:20. As Hirshman notes, ‘The Rabbis insist on portraying God as studying Torah and, even more specifically, as a student of the oral law of the Rabbis’; Hirshman, “Torah in Rabbinic Thought,” 920. 33 For example, Alphabet of R. Akiva; Targum Isaiah 12:3; Ecclesiastes Rabbah 11:7; and Targum Canticles 8:1. 34 For example, M Eduyot 8:7; BT Shabbat 104a, 108a; and BT Yevamot 102a. See Schäfer, Studien, 198–213 (201–3); and Aharon Wiener, The Prophet Elijah in the Development of Judaism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). 35 For example, Sifre Deuteronomy 160 and Leviticus Rabbah 9:7. 36 For example, BT Sanhedrin 97a–b; BT Avodah Zarah 9b; BT Shabbat 151b; and BT Niddah 61b. 37 For example, Targum Isaiah 12:3; Ecclesiastes Rabbah 2:1 and 12:1; Targum Canticles 5:10; and Canticles Rabbah 2:13:4. See Davies, Torah in the Messianic Age, 50–83. The analysis of Davies may well be influenced by the approaches to the status of the Torah in the New Testament about which he wrote later in William Davies, The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964). 38 In particular, Klausner refers to the interpretations that the Torah will change (Sifre Deuteronomy 160), that there will be a new Torah (Canticles Rabbah 2:13:4) or that the Torah will be abolished (BT Shabbat 151b and BT Niddah 61b); see Klausner, Messianic Idea, 440–50. 39 For example, Sifre Deuteronomy 318; BT Megillah 29a; BT Sukkah 41a; BT Menahot 25b; BT Rosh Hashanah 30a; BT Betsah 5b; BT Ta’anit 17b; BT Sanhedrin 22b; and BT Bekorot 53b; see Klausner, Messianic Idea, 513–17. 40 For example, in reference to Ecclesiastes Rabbah 2:1, Schäfer states, ‘In der messianischen Zeit wird der Mensch die Torah in rechter Weise lernen und—dies ist zweifellos auch impliziert—vollkommen verstehen’; Schäfer, Studien, 205. Similarly, of Targum Canticles 8:1 he states, ‘Nicht eine neue Torah wird erwartet, sondern das vollkommene und endgültige Verständnis der bestehenden’ (ibid.). Alternatively, of BT Shabbat 151b Schäfer argues that ‘nicht die Aufhebung der Torah ist das Anliegen R. Schimon b. Elazars, sondern ihre vollkommene Erfüllung’ (ibid., 209). 41 Schäfer, Studien, 207. He concludes his discussion, ‘Damit stehen wir am Ende unserer Überlegungen über das Torah-verständnis in der messianischen Zeit. Es hat sich gezeigt, daß weder die Vorstellung einer neuen Torah noch die Erwartung einer völligen Aufhebung der Torah für das rabbinische Judentum charakteristisch ist’ (ibid., 213). 42 For discussion of the curriculum studied in rabbinic circles, see Hirshman, “Torah in Rabbinic Thought,” 912–13. 43 The edition of the Alphabet of Rabbi Akiva cited here is from Jellinek, Bet haMidrasch, 3:12–49 (27–28). According to Jellinek, this is version A of the Alphabet, which is older than version B included separately in Bet ha-Midrasch (ibid., 3:50– 64). Jellinek suggests a date for version A of the Alphabet in the eighth or beginning of the ninth century (ibid., 3:xiv–xvii [xv]). 44 A parallel to this tradition is also transmitted in the work entitled ‘New Pesikta’ in Jellinek, Bet ha-Midrasch, 6:36–70 (63). This is a late compilation making extensive use of Pesiqta Rabbati, Sefer Yetzirah, Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer, Ma’ase Bereshit and Midrash Konen, amongst other texts, as noted by Jellinek (ibid., 6:xix–xxi). This tradition explains how God interpreted the arguments of the new/additional Torah (‫)טעמי תורה חדשה‬. Alternatively, the midrash ‘Paradise and Hell’ in Jellinek, Bet ha-Midrasch, 5:42–51 (45–46) includes a tradition in which God reveals the arguments of Torah to Israel (‫)טעמי תורה‬, David recites a Psalm, the pious in heaven

The Image of God in Late Antique Apocalyptic Literature 47 and the wicked in Gehinnom say Amen, and then God sends an angel to bring even the wicked to paradise. 45 When the wicked from among Israel are brought up from Gehinnom, their faces will be blackened; cf. BT Rosh Hashanah 16b; Pesiqta Rabbati 20; 3 Enoch 44:6; and Tractate on Gehinnom in Jellinek, Bet ha-Midrasch, 1:149. 3 Enoch teaches that their appearance was on account of the wickedness of their doings. Thus, the sins of the wicked have tainted their bodies. John Reeves notes, ‘This change in facial hue reflects their shame or embarrassment and is not to be attributed to their exposure to the sooty fires of hell’; Reeves, Trajectories, 165. 46 Cf. BT Erubin 19a, where the wicked acknowledge the justice of their punishment and tell God that he has judged them well. 47 For the idea that Israel as a nation will be forgiven at the end cf. Mekhilta de Rabbi Ishmael Beshallah 7:145; Pesiqta de Rav Kahana S6:1; and Exodus Rabbah 15:29. 48 Cf. Targum Canticles 8:1–10, which teaches that even in the messianic age the victory of Israel will depend upon study of the Torah. This text also places an emphasis on the role of the bet ha-midrash in the future, but there is no new Torah in the next age rather a fuller understanding of the existing Torah. See Philip Alexander, The Targum of Canticles: Translated, with a Critical Introduction, Apparatus, and Notes (London: T&T Clark, 2003).

3 Approaching the Divine by Imitatio Dei Tzelem and Demut in R. Moshe Cordovero’s Tomer Devorah Patrick Benjamin Koch R. Moshe Cordovero (1522–1570), who operated in the famous kabbalistic centre in Safed during the sixteenth century, was one of the most prolific writers in the history of Jewish thought. His writings—among them his magnum opus Pardes Rimmonin, his voluminous commentary on the Zohar, Or Yaqar, and many other published and partially published works such as Sefer Elima Rabati, Sefer Gerushin, or Sefer Shi‘ur Qomah—not only attest to Cordovero’s impressive proficiency in a great variety of kabbalistic traditions but also demonstrate his talent for analysing and illustrating complex data in a systematic manner. His short treatise Tomer Devorah, The Palm Tree of Devorah, is among the most popular of his writings, not least because it appeals to a wide audience that is less familiar with esoterica than many of Cordovero’s more learned readers.1 This does not, however, imply that the path laid out in it is simple to accomplish or that Cordovero’s demands from his readers are minimal.2 At first glance, it seems that Tomer Devorah promotes the idea of imitatio dei based on the concept that humans are created in the divine image and likeness, and are therefore able to resemble their Creator. A closer examination, however, reveals that we are facing a more complex notion. The human’s basic potential for imitatio dei indeed stems from an isomorphism between the human and the divine structure.3 However, the qualities of the biblical tzelem and demut—‘image and likeness’ (for example, Genesis 1:26)—are not an inborn feature, but must be actively acquired.4 The present study shall focus primarily on this latter aspect, namely on the question of why and how the individual is able to perfect his reality by means of imitation.5 However, first, we shall discuss the question of the Sitz im Leben of Tomer Devorah and its affiliation to the genre of musar. TOMER DEVORAH AND THE GENRE OF JEWISH ETHICAL LITERATURE: A RE-ASSESSMENT Tomer Devorah is widely accepted as the earliest treatises belonging to the so-called genre of ‘kabbalistic ethical literature’.6 This categorisation is based on two problematic assumptions: first, the rather inappropriate rendering of the Hebrew term musar as ‘ethics’;7 and secondly, the evaluation of musar as an

Approaching the Divine by Imitatio Dei  49 exoteric tradition, which merged with esoteric—that is kabbalistic—thought in sixteenth-century Safed.8 Due to this rather distorted characterisation, scholars tended to underestimate the notion of ‘spiritual guidance’ as the major purpose of musar, and failed to recognise it as a self-contained form of Jewish spirituality, which developed independently from kabbalistic traditions. Already a closer look at some of the manuscript and printed versions of the title page and the opening passage of Tomer Devorah unveils two inconspicuous but noteworthy discrepancies, which qualify this predominant scholarly position. First, the prefatory sentence ‘on the straight path that man seeks, his cognisant focus (hitbodeduto), and the contemplation of his path’ is extant in the majority of the manuscript sources,9 as well as in most of the printed versions on the front page below the title.10 According to this subheading, Tomer Devorah deals with topics such as man’s purpose in life, his contemplation of his conduct, and the focus on his inner self 11—matters that do not show any specific traces of kabbalistic thought whatsoever. Quite the contrary: this outline correlates surprisingly well with what Pierre Hadot, in the Graeco-Roman context, characterises as ‘spiritual exercises’. Hadot illustrates the realisation of this ancient philosophical way of life as either (a) ‘in the order of inner discourse and of spiritual activity: meditation, dialogue with oneself, examination of conscience, exercises of the imagination’; or (b) ‘in the order of action and daily behaviour, like the mastery of oneself, indifference towards indifferent things, the fulfilment of the duties of social life [. . .], [and] the discipline of desires. [. . .]’12 Thus, Hadot’s understanding of ‘philosophy as a way of life’ provides not only ‘[. . .] a valuable heuristic tool through which we can examine certain teachings in rabbinic literature’, as laudably claimed by Jonathan Schofer.13 It is also most suitable to investigate some of the core issues of musar in general as noted by Avriel Bar-Levav.14 This typological affinity of the main intention of musar-writings and Hadot’s concept of ‘spiritual exercises’ is but one example that supports the understanding of the former as guidebooks intended to teach the reader the path of spiritual self-perfection. This appraisal holds particularly true in the case of Tomer Devorah, as Cordovero mainly addresses individual, internal processes of human self-improvement in a kabbalistic garb rather than inter-human encounters that might be described as ‘ethical’. The second variant that helps to contextualise Tomer Devorah is extant in two early manuscripts.15 In these, as Cordovero introduces the idea of imitating the actions of the first divine quality, the Sefirah of Keter,16 he refers to ‘Ein Ha-Bedolah—a subsection of his much more extensive work Sefer Elima.17 This method of cross-referencing his own writings is a well-known characteristic of Cordovero’s style. In Tomer Devorah, however, this feature is virtually absent. Tomer Devorah was first printed in Venice in 1588, in the printing press of Giovanni di Gara, and is the third of Cordovero’s writings to be published posthumously.18 Moshe Basola, who found the manuscript in the library of R. Menahem Azariah of Fano (1548–1620), edited it together with Moses Cordovero’s son Gedaliah (1562–1625).19 In the colophon of the first edition of Tomer Devorah, Basola mentions that he has:

50  Patrick Benjamin Koch [.  .  .] heard from the one whom my soul loves, the sage [our teacher and honourable R.] Gedaliah, [may his Rock and Redeemer watch over him], son of the author [R. Moshe Cordovero] ztz’’l, that this is one of the seventy palm trees which were planted by his father, [may he be remembered for life everlasting].20 Both Basola’s statement and Cordovero’s reference to ‘Ein ha-Bedolah indicate that we should perhaps think of Tomer Devorah as a part of Sefer Elima. Indeed, one of the aforementioned manuscripts contains both Tomer Devorah and portions of Sefer Elima, lending further credence to this hypothesis.21 Notwithstanding this evidence, Bracha Sack argues that this solution seems rather less plausible. Her reconstruction of the segmentation of Sefer Elima into 12 springs (ma‘ayanot), and 70 date palms (temarim), which is based on the eponymous biblical verse in Numbers 33:9,22 led her to the conclusion that Tomer Devorah more likely represents an independent work. She does, however, argue that tamar six of Ma‘ayan ‘Ein Adam possibly constitutes an early version, or a template, of Tomer Devorah.23 It might be deduced, then, that either Basola and Gedaliah availed themselves of a subsection of Sefer Elima and revised it for publication. In this case, the editorial interventions would explain the differences between tamar six of Ma‘ayan ‘Ein Adam and Tomer Devorah. Or, it is possible that Cordovero himself composed Tomer Devorah based on an excerpt from one of his larger compositions. In any event, the integration of Tomer Devorah into the greater framework of Sefer Elima calls the previously mentioned artificial distinction between an exoteric ‘ethical’ and an esoteric kabbalistic cluster of texts further into question. It suggests, instead, a holistic perception of Tomer Devorah in particular, and that of kabbalistic musar in general, regarding them as a fusion of two distinct spiritual traditions in sixteenth-century Safed. Furthermore, the previous observations reinforce the legitimacy of a complementary reading of this short treatise with Cordovero’s other writings. ON THE INTERPRETATIONS OF TZELEM AND DEMUT IN TOMER DEVORAH At the very beginning of Tomer Devorah, Cordovero immediately confronts his reader with the major objective of his book. He writes:24 It is proper for adam to imitate25 his Creator, and then he will be in the secret of the supernal form—tzelem and demut. For if [only] his body resembles [the Creator] and not [his] actions, he distorts the form, as it is said about him ‘a handsome form and ugly deeds’. The principle of the supernal tzelem and demut are their actions. For what is it useful to be [created] according to the supernal form, in the image of the figurative pattern, if his actions do not resemble his Creator?26

Approaching the Divine by Imitatio Dei  51 Cordovero here introduces two major concepts with regard to imitatio dei: first, the corporeal body is designed according to the supernal form, and thus constitutes a microcosm of the divine structure—the Sefirot; and secondly, one has to become or develop into the secret of the supernal form by means of imitatio dei. In other words: we are dealing with an isomorphism between the upper and lower body, or an inherent, natural feature of the Adamic creation, and with a process of adaptation or self-perfection. The perception of the human as a microcosm of the divine creation has been an integral part in the world-view of Jewish thinkers long before it was adopted by Cordovero.27 Shabbtai Ben Abraham Donolo (born 913), for example, was one of the first authors to discuss the microcosm motif in his short commentary Na‘aseh Adam be-Tzalmeinu.28 Donolo supports a neo-Platonic notion of the human body as an empty vessel, or golem, and the soul (ruah ha-neshamah) as the manifestation of the divinity within the former.29 The plural form ‘in our image’ (be-tzalmeinu), mentioned in the biblical account of the creation of adam, thus refers to the binary nature of the human: the soul is thereby identified with the tzelem and demut of God, whereas the body reflects the structure—or tzelem and demut—of the universe.30 Analogously, such as God rules over the universe, the soul of the individual needs to rule over the body into which it was implanted. By means of the self-adjustment of the human to the divine will, the human is able to become God-like in the sense that he has dominion over the divine creation.31 In the words of Donolo: ‘[. . .] such as God is supreme and governs over adam and the entire world above and below, thus does man when he performs the will of his Creator’.32 The actions that Donolo refers to in the course of his commentary are reminiscent of musar concepts, directed at the mastering of the good inclination over the evil one (yetzer). It is therefore not surprising that Donolo’s short commentary made a lasting impression on later musar works, including Bahya ibn Paquda’s Duties of the Heart, Elazar of Worms’ Sefer Rokeah, and the anonymous Orhot Tzaddiqim, as well as R. Elijahu ha-Cohen of Izmir’s Shevet Musar.33 Against this backdrop, it is even reasonable to regard Na‘aseh Adam be-Tzalmeinu itself as an early example of musar. Adolph Jellinek, who first published this short commentary in 1854, already suggested a connection between Donolo and the importance of the microcosm motif in later kabbalistic thought.34 Hence, he notices: If the human is the reflection of the macro-cosmos and the image of the Godhead, thus also the symbols of the ten Sefirot or those potencies, which emerged from the source of God and gained reality through the creation, must be manifested in him—and thus it happened that the kabbalists depicted both the functions of the soul as well as the parts of the human body as emulators of the Sefirot.35 As opposed to the rather strict neo-Platonic distinction between a divine soul and a material body, Jellinek rightly highlighted a major difference between Donolo’s and later kabbalists’ perceptions of the microcosm motif: whereas the former

52  Patrick Benjamin Koch draws a clear distinction between a divine soul and a material body, the latter assumes that both the soul and the body resemble the divine structure.36 In both cases, the idea of an isomorphism between a higher and lower entity marks the prerequisite of imitation. However, whereas in a vertical, neo-Platonic context, we witness the tendency that elevates the status of the soul in relation to the body, the theosophical kabbalists tend to promote a horizontal model of two distinct soul-body entities operating in parallel realms, with the ability to interact vertically. In other words, the unity of corporeality and spirituality resembles the perfect reality of the Godhead, quite similar to what Joel Hecker described as ‘embodied spirituality’.37

On the Imitation of the Divine Ethos We have seen that, in the writings of both Donolo and Cordovero, action plays a major part in the concept of man becoming tzelem elohim. Whereas Donolo highlighted the action as the imitation per se, Cordovero talks about the idea of an adjustment or rectification of the action in order to perfect the corporeal dimension, which in turn naturally resembles the divine patters of the Sefirot.38 The emphasis on action (ma‘aseh) is one of the distinctive features of musar literature, often underpinned by the rabbinic saying that not study, but rather ritual performance constitutes the major principle of religious practice.39 This idea can be regarded as a counterbalance to the contemplative approach, expressing a criticism of sorts against the dominance of study-centred expressions of Judaism.40 In the course of Tomer Devorah, Cordovero recommends two distinctive paths of imitation: first, the imitation of the thirteen attributes of mercy mentioned in Micah 7:18–20, such as patience, compassion and loving-kindness—which actually refer to God’s actions in relation to the people of Israel—and secondly, the imitation of the Sefirot. In order to practically implement the second option, Cordovero demands that the individual imitates attributes that are particularly associated with the Sefirot. In Sefer Elima, Cordovero outlines his approach as follows: If his soul [stems] from Hesed, he will grasp for the middah [=Sefirah] of Hesed, and he will be a chariot for Hesed. And thus was the chariot of Abraham for Hesed. And thus Isaac for Gevurah. [. . .] And thus Jacob for the Sefirah of Tif’eret. [. . .] But if man wants to conform his soul to one Sefirah, which does not correspond to the reality of his Sefirah, he is able [to do so] by means of the action. For indeed the conduct neutralises the soul from its Sefirah and invests in another one by means of the action. [. . .] The reason for that is that the soul is constituted of the ten Sefirot, illuminating by itself each and every [Sefirah] it wants to, by means of the action. [. . .]41 According to Cordovero, each individual soul is configured according to a certain Sefirah, and thus naturally strives to its source and serves as a chariot for it. Additionally, the adaptability of the highest soul-level of neshamah derives from its likeness to the structure of the 10 Sefirot. By means of action—on both the

Approaching the Divine by Imitatio Dei  53 physical and the contemplative level—the individual is able to change the configuration of this soul-level, and to match it to a specific Sefirah. The neshamah is therefore depicted as a dynamic entity.42 Furthermore, the theurgical responsibility of adam is highlighted by the impact that his mundane actions have on the upper worlds. As mentioned before, action appeared in the opening passage of Tomer Devorah as the crucial factor to establishing the secret of tzelem and demut. In Sefer Elima, action has an essential impact on the shaping and attachment of the soul in the upper world. A complementary reading of the passage from Sefer Elima therefore adds a psychological dimension to the rather brief statement that can be found in Tomer Devorah. So far, it has been shown how Tomer Devorah recommends the imitation of conduct that can be associated either with God or with aspects of the upper world. Kabbalistic, or more precisely Zoharic symbolisms, have been translated into codes of human conduct, serving as a tool for rectifying the Sefirot in particular, and the balance of the Sefirotic realm in general. The appropriate human behavioural patterns simultaneously cause the soul (neshamah) to adapt to the form of the respective Sefirah, thereby becoming its vessel, or chariot (merkavah).

Tzelem and Demut—Male and Female As we have previously seen, Cordovero introduces at the very beginning of Tomer Devorah the notion that it is man’s task to imitate the actions of his Creator in order to become or to develop into the secret of the supernal form—tzelem and demut. In his extensive commentary Or Yaqar, while interpreting the Zoharic account of Bezalel’s construction of the Ark of the Covenant (Leviticus 37:1), Cordovero delivers the following explanation that helps us clarify the meaning of this rather enigmatic statement:43 [. . .] the principle of the form of adam is the supernal tzelem and Malkhut is not tzelem but demut, which means that the main-principle of tzelem and the form of adam is Tif’eret, which are the first three [Sefirot] of the head;44 Hesed and Gevurah the two arms, Tif’eret the torso, Nezah and Hod the legs, Yesod the phallus, which represents a perfect body[-structure].45 Malkhut is the demut in which the supernal form is engraved, and one must perfect her by means of entering the tzelem into the demut. For she is the demut of the supernal form, female, a mantle for the supernal form. And how is she perfected? With the tzelem by means of the covenant. [. . .]46 Here, the supernal tzelem, which equals the form of adam, consists of the nine upper Sefirot and forms the male body. The tenth Sefirah of Malkhut represents a container or vessel, which unites with her male counterpart—namely the sixth Sefirah of Tif‘eret—via the ninth Sefirah of Yesod.47 The current example also differs significantly from Gershom Scholem’s analysis of tzelem as an astral body in kabbalistic thought, which enwraps either the body or the soul, respectively.48 In our example, the male supernal form, or tzelem, is perfected by its unification with

54  Patrick Benjamin Koch the female aspect of demut. By this, the demut adapts to the form of the tzelem, and thus becomes a replica of the latter. This means that it is the female element of demut, and not the male one of tzelem, that serves as an astral body of sorts. Further, the impregnated, or perfected, female demut is now able to interact with the earthly structure of adam, namely the male kabbalist who resembles the Sefirah of Tif‘eret. The imitation of the actions of Tif‘eret, such as the study of Torah, therefore constitutes the means that enables the union between the male kabbalist and the divine female or Shekhinah. This gendered rendering of imitation highlights one aspect of the complexity of Cordovero’s synthesis of various perceptions of the biblical terms tzelem and demut. The idea that the term adam refers to a male-female entity is, however, not novel in the thought of Cordovero. Already in Talmudic literature, it is stated that a man will not be called adam as long as he is not married to a woman.49 This notion would become one of the cornerstones in kabbalistic thought, lucidly articulated by the Zoharic interpretation of the term bar nash shalim or adam shalem—the perfect man—as consisting of a unit of male and female elements. Hence, the Zohar asks: ‘And when is the male Jew50 called perfect, corresponding to the supernal pattern?51 When he has sexual intercourse with his female partner, in unity and joy and will, and from him and his female issues a son and a daughter, then he [accomplished the status of] bar nash shalim according to the supernal pattern, perfected below [. . .]’.52 Apparently, the ‘secret of the supernal form’ mentioned in Tomer Devorah strongly draws from the Zoharic ideal of sexual intercourse of husband and wife as a reunion of the double-faced, divine androgyne or du-partzufin.53 In fact, the title Tomer Devorah itself alludes to this aforementioned union, as Cordovero explicitly states in his Pardes Rimmonim and Sefer Elima.54 Cordovero’s student R. Elijah de Vidas (1518–1592) presents the very same concept in his musar anthology, Reshit Hokhmah, while paraphrasing the following passage of the Zohar Hadash: [.  .  .] each and every limb of adam consists of ten, and hints to the name Yod Heh Vav Heh, on which it says ‘let us make man’, for [in Gematria] adam amounts to nine in cross sum, and the Shekhinah is the demut of adam, which perfects the tenth aspect of each and every limb. And towards the end it says: The lower Shekhinah is the perfection of the upper and the lower [realms], and thus she walks in each and every limb, and in each and every Sefirah, and says: ‘let us make adam’. [. . .]55 The author of this Zoharic passage explicates that not only does the perfect body reflect the structure of the 10 Sefirot, hinted at by the 10 letters of the fully spelled Tetragrammaton, but that every human limb is likewise created in resemblance to this divine constellation. Furthermore, the numerical value of the fully spelled Tetragrammaton equals that of adam, which is 45. The cross sum of 45, however, only amounts to nine. This means that the imperfect male aspect of adam needs to be perfected by unifying with the female aspect of the Shekhinah, which is

Approaching the Divine by Imitatio Dei  55 identified with the tenth Sefirah of Malkhut and designated by de Vidas as the ‘demut of adam’. In other words, the formation of the perfect man, consisting both of tzelem and demut, does refer to the establishment, or re-establishment of the Shekhinah in each and every aspect of the earthly, as well as the divine, structure. The above-mentioned sources primarily elaborate the meaning of tzelem and demut on a divine level. Towards conclusion, we shall now turn to the question of how these actions can be imitated on an earthly one. At the very end of Tomer Devorah, Cordovero states that the method of imitation aims at a permanent attachment to the divine female—the Shekhinah. In the penultimate chapter, he delivers the following answer on how to establish this divine-human amalgamation: [. . .] it is obvious that as long as man has not married a woman, the Shekhinah cannot be with him at all, for the main-principle of the Shekhinah[’s accessibility] for man is from the female side, as man stands between two females: the lower corporeal female [.  .  .] and the Shekhinah who stands above him [. . .] like [the sixth Sefirah of] Tif’eret, which stands between two females. [. . .] And the Shekhinah will not come to him unless he resembles the supernal reality. [. . .]56 The major precondition for the kabbalist’s attachment to the Shekhinah is being married to an earthly wife. By this, he imitates the status of Tif’eret, which is positioned between the upper female or the third Sefirah of Binah, and the lower female or the tenth Sefirah of Malkhut. However, he can also attract the Shekhinah by imitating her present exilic state, separating himself from his earthly wife.57 The later alternative also shows us that the permanent accomplishment of the secret of the ‘supernal form’ is not only attained by means of actual sexual intercourse. Rather, it serves as a role model to be constantly emulated.58 This practice of a gendered imagination of each mundane activity is clearly expressed in one of Cordovero’s highly erotic interpretations of the biblical saying ‘In all your ways acknowledge Him’ (Proverbs 3:6), which he explains as follows: ‘If one builds a house, he shall say: indeed the house is the Shekhinah [. . .], and as soon as I will reside in her I [will become] adam—namely Tif’eret inside of Malkhut’.59 CONCLUSION Moshe Cordovero’s Tomer Devorah promotes a way of life which unfolds its profoundness and complexity when analysed via the method of cross-reading. In particular, tamar six of Ma‘ayian ‘Ein Adam adds significantly to our understanding of the psychological dimension of Cordovero’s notion of divine imitation as a multi-layered process. It requires the attainment of the soul-level of neshamah by perfecting ones physical structure, and the adaptation of the neshamah to a certain Sefirah, by means of the action. As Nathan Wolsky has convincingly argued:

56  Patrick Benjamin Koch The divine reality is multidimensional, comprising hiddenness and unknowability, extension and revelation, as well as diminution of a kind. [. . .] The human being is similarly constructed and to be in the divine image one must exist in three different modes—our world, the world of separation where death prevails; the Earthly Garden of Eden, our luminescent or astral self; and divinity itself, the abode of our souls.60 If divine reality is multidimensional, and the Adamic creation is multidimensional, then imitation must be multidimensional, too, and consequently performed for different purposes. We have seen, for instance, that establishing the male-female entity of tzelem and demut in each and every aspect of life refers to the realms of inter-human, intra-divine, as well as divine-human conjunction. By actively establishing a male-female entity, the kabbalist himself becomes God-like by creating ‘[. . .] adam in His image, in the image of God [. . .] male and female [. . .]’ (Genesis 1:27). As rightly remarked by Joachim Duyndam, imitation does not correspond to an act of mere aping, but first and foremost constitutes a transmission, or translation, of a certain ideal into a different context.61 Cordovero gives expression to this very notion by writing that the human resembles the divine, but is not identical to it. In this way, imitation also constitutes a human act of interpreting God. Human self-perfection by means of imitatio dei reveals itself as an everlasting challenge, and Cordovero begins virtually every subdivision of his short musar treatise with the question of how one can accustom oneself to the implementation of the divine attributes in his everyday conduct. Ontological resemblance is thus not only the key component of the individual’s rectification of his imperfectness; the concept of the kabbalist’s theurgical impact on high enables, in turn, a re-establishment of the primordial state of the corrupted divine structure. The transformative process of rectifying both the physical and the spiritual elements of adam leads eventually to an apotheosis of the kabbalist, who elevates himself to such a level that the Sefirotic structure becomes—figuratively speaking—a ‘shadow’ (tzel) of his actions.62 NOTES   1 For an English translation of Tomer Devorah see Louis Jacobs, Rabbi Moses Cordovero: The Palm Tree of Deborah: Translated from the Hebrew with an Introduction and Notes (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1960).   2 See, for example, Joseph Dan, Jewish Mysticism and Jewish Ethics (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1986), 86; and Joseph Dan, The Heart and the Fountain: An Anthology of Jewish Mystical Experience (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 197.   3 For a brief survey of the concept of imitatio dei with a focus on the philosophical tradition, see, for example, Charles Mopsik, ed., Le Palmier De Déborah: Texte Hébreu Er Traduction Française (Lagrasse: Éditions Verdier, 1985), 30–41.   4 See Mordechai Pachter, “Homiletic and Ethical Literature of Safed in the Sixteenth Century” (PhD diss., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1976), 357 [Hebrew].

Approaching the Divine by Imitatio Dei  57   5 For a useful definition of imitation, see Joachim Duyndam, “Hermeneutics of Imitation: A Philosophical Approach to Sainthood and Exemplariness,” in Saints and Role Models in Judaism and Christianity, ed. Marcel Poorthuis and Joshua Schwartz (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004), 7–21.   6 See, for example, Dan, Jewish Mysticism, 93–5; and Lawrence Fine, Safed Spirituality: Rules of Mystical Piety, the Beginning of Wisdom (New York: Paulist Press, 1984), 31.   7 The biblical term musar, stemming from the root ysr, denominates either a disciplinary action or rebuke from the parents (for example in Proverbs 13:24, 23:13), fellow humans (for example, in Proverbs 19:20), or from God (for example, in Isaiah 26:16; Jeremiah 2:30). Moreover, it can refer to voluntary self-discipline or even self-mortification in quest for spiritual self-improvement (for example, in Proverbs 1:2, 4:13, 6:23, 15:33, 22:15, and 23:23).   8 See chapter 1 of Patrick Koch, Human Self-Perfection: A Re-Assessment of Kabbalistic Musar-Literature of Sixteenth-Century Safed (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, forthcoming).   9 See, for example, MS  New York, Jewish Theological Seminary 2174, fol. 200a; MS  Oxford, Bodleian Library Opp. 611 (Cat. Neubauer 1809), fol. 1a; MS  New York, New York University Kaplan Collection K 884, fol. 1a; MS  Jerusalem, National Library of Israel, Heb. 8°2696, fol. 1a; and MS Jerusalem, Mossad ha-Rav Kook 775/1, fol. 1a (published as Tomer Devorah [Jerusalem, 2002]). It is missing, however, in MS Parma, Biblioteca Palatina Cod. Parm. 2299, fol. 2a; MS London, British Library Or. 10788, fol. 59b; and MS Ramat Gan, Bar Ilan University 1061/4, fol. 71a. 10 See, for example, Moses Cordovero, Tomer Devorah (Venice, 1588), fol. 1a. 11 Hitbodedut usually refers to either seclusion or mental concentration. See, for example, Paul B. Fenton, “Solitary Meditation in Jewish and Islamic Mysticism in the Light of a Recent Archaeological Discovery,” Medieval Encounters 1, no. 2 (1995): 271–96; Moshe Idel, “ ‘Hitbodedut’ as ‘Concentration’ in Jewish Philosophy,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 7, no. 1 (1988): 39–60 [Hebrew]; Moshe Idel, “Hitbodedut as Concentration in Ecstatic Kabbalah,” in Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah, ed. Moshe Idel (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988), 405–38; and Moshe Idel, “Hitbodedut: On Solitude in Jewish Mysticism,” in Einsamkeit: Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation VI, ed. Aleida and Jan Assmann (München: Fink, 2000), 189–212. In this context I prefer to understand hitbodedut rather as a form of introspection or a focus of one’s thought towards the inner self. 12 See Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995), 31. According to Hadot, the term ‘spiritual exercise’ fits best, for it implies that we are dealing not only with moral conduct, but with a way of being, in the strongest sense of the term, or ‘that we are dealing with exercises which engage the totality of the spirit’; ibid., 127. See also 24–25 for his critique of Foucault, who restricted the ‘care of the self’ to ethics, and did not regard physics of logics as belonging to the category of ‘spiritual exercises’. Cf. also Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘the care of the self’ in his The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1981–1982 (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005) and Michel Foucault, “The Care of the Self,” in The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), esp. 53 and 239. See also Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Works in Progress,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Pal Rabinow (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), 229–52, esp. 237–40. 13 Jonathan W. Schofer, “Spiritual Exercises in Rabbinic Culture,” AJS Review 27, no. 2 (2003): 203–25 (209). Cf. also Jonathan W. Schofer, “Self, Subject, and Chosen Subjection: Rabbinic Ethics and Comparative Possibilities,” The Journal of Religious Ethics 33, no. 2 (2005): 267–79.

58  Patrick Benjamin Koch 14 See Avriel Bar-Levav, “Story, Ritual and Metaphor: Contemplating the Day of Death as a Spiritual Exercise and the Internal War in Jewish Ethical Literature,” in Peace and War in Jewish Culture, ed. Avriel Bar-Levav (Jerusalem and Haifa: The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History and Center for the Study of Jewish Culture 2006), 146–7 [Hebrew]. 15 MS  New York, Jewish Theological Seminary 2174, fol. 200a; and MS  Oxford, Bodleian Library Opp. 611 (Cat. Neubauer 1809), fol. 1a. Both manuscripts are dated to the sixteenth century. 16 In the theosophical-theurgical current of Kabbalah, the 10 Sefirot constitute divine qualities that were emanated by the Godhead during the process of creation, and that serve as a mediator between the mundane and the infinite Godhead (Ein Sof). For further information, see Daniel Matt, The Essential Kabbalah: The Heart of Jewish Mysticism (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1995), especially 37–64 and 73–88. 17 ‘Ein Habedolah and ‘Ein Ro’i are part of the second Ma‘ayan of Sefer Elima; cf. Bracha Sack, “On the Springs of ‘Elima’ of R. Moses Cordovero,” Kiryat Sefer 63, no. 2 (1990): 669–74 (670–1) [Hebrew]. See also Sefer Elima Rabati (Jerusalem, 1999), fols. 52a–70a. A nonacademic edition of the entire Sefer Elima has only been published recently (Sefer Elima Rabati ha-Shalem [Jerusalem, 2013]). For recent academic publications of parts of Sefer Elima, see Bracha Sack, ed., Ma‘yan ‘Ein Ya‘acov: The Fourth Fountain of the Book ’Elimah (Beer Sheva: Ben Gurion University Press; Jerusalem: The Bialik Institute, 2009) [Hebrew], and Bracha Sack, From the Fountains of Sefer Elimah by R Moshe Cordovero and Studies in his Kabbalah (Beer Sheva: Ben Gurion University Press; Jerusalem: The Bialik Institute, 2013) [Hebrew]. 18 Tomer Devorah was completed at this printing press on Wednesday, Heshwan 12, 5349 (2 November  1588). Most of the Safedian works, such as Elijah de Vidas’ Reshit Hokhmah (1579), as well as Cordovero’s Or Ne‘erav (1587), as well as his Perush ‘Avodat Yom ha-Kippurim (1587), were printed at this printing press. See Marvin J. Heller, The Sixteenth Century Hebrew Book: An Abridged Thesaurus, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2004), I: xxii and II: 946 and 949. 19 See Cordovero, Tomer Devorah fol. 1b (see note 10). According to Meir Benayahu, MS  Jerusalem, Mossad Ha-Rav Kook 775/1 is an early version of Tomer Devorah, predating the first printing, which was copied by Azariah of Fano himself and includes his glosses; Meir Benayahu, Yosef Behiri (Jerusalem: Yad ha-Rav Nissim, 1991), 227 [Hebrew]; and Meir B‘nayahu, “Rabbi Ezra of Pano: Kabbalistic Scholar and Leader,” in Jubilee Volume in Honor of Morinu Hagaon Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, ed. Shaul Israeli, Norman Lamm and Yitzchak Raphael (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook; New York: Yeshiva University, 1984), 786–855 (818 and 830) [Hebrew]. Cf. also MS New York, Jewish Theological Seminary 1585 (ENA 842), fols. 36a–39b. Azariah of Fano bought Cordovero’s manuscripts from the latter’s widow and brought them to Italy. 20 See Heller, Sixteenth Century Hebrew Book, II: 762–63. See also Benayahu, Yosef Behiri, 227. Bracha Sack states that Basola’s statement could possibly refer to tamar six of Ma‘ayan ‘Ein Adam; see Sack, “On the Springs of ‘Elima’,” 673 note 13. 21 MS New York, Jewish Theological Seminary 2174. 22 ‘They set out from Marah and came to Elim. There were twelve springs in Elim and seventy palm trees, so they encamped there’. See also Exodus 15:27 and cf. Sack, “On the Springs of ‘Elima’,” 669. 23 Bracha Sack, “Me-‘Eyin ‘Nusah Rishon’ shel Tomer Devorah Le-Rabbi Moshe Cordovero,” Asufot 9 (1995): 161–88. Cf., however, Mopsik, Le Palmier De Déborah, 26, who suggests that Tomer Devorah should be regarded as part of Sefer Elima. 24 For an overview on Tomer Devorah, see, for example, Bracha Sack, “Torat ha-Musar shel R. Moshe Cordovero: Kama He’arot,” in Tribute to Sara: Studies in Jewish Philosophy and Kabbala Presented to Professor Sara O. Heller Wilensky, ed. Moshe

Approaching the Divine by Imitatio Dei  59 Idel, Devorah Dimant and Shalom Rosenberg (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1994), 161–88; Dan, Jewish Mysticism, 84–87; Joseph Dan, Hebrew Ethical and Homiletical Literature: The Middle Ages and Early Modern Period (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, 1975), 212–16 [Hebrew]; and Pachter, “Homiletic and Ethical Literature,” 356–62 [Hebrew]. 25 Yidameh. Most of the later printed versions read yitdameh. This spelling, however, is neither extant in the first print nor in manuscript versions. 26 Tomer Devorah, fol. 2a. See also Elliot R. Wolfson, Venturing Beyond: Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 197; and Eitan P. Fishbane, “A  Chariot for the Shekhinah: Identity and the Ideal Life in Sixteenth-Century Kabbalah,” Journal of Religious Ethics 37, no.  3 (2009): 385–418 (401–2). 27 For a comprehensive survey of the micro-macro-cosmos motif, see Alexander Altmann, “The Delphic Maxim in Medieval Islam and Judaism,” in Studies in Religious Philosophy and Mysticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), 1–40 (19–28). See also Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, 7 vols. (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1925), I: 49–50 and V: 64–6 notes 4–7. 28 This short treatise was published by Adolph Jellinek, ed., Schabtai Donolo: Der Mensch als Gottes Ebenbild: Nach einer Handschrift der kaiserlichen Bibliothek in Paris (Leipzip: J. Rosenberg, 1854). See also Altmann, “The Delphic Maxim,” 21. 29 Cf. Jellinek, Schabtai Donolo, 3, 5. On the idea of the golem in the history of Jewish thought, see Moshe Idel, Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990). 30 See Jellinek, Schabtai Donolo, ix and 6–7; cf. also Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, I: 60 and V: 80–1 note 25. 31 For a similar interpretation of tzelem as the ‘image of dominion’ and demut as the ‘likeness of rulership’, see Joseph Kimhi, The Book of the Covenant of Joseph Kimhi, trans. Frank Talmage (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1972), 40. 32 Jellinek, Schabtai Donolo, 7. This passage is also quoted verbatim in the anonymous musar treatise Orhot Tzaddiqim (Jerusalem, 1976), 194–5. 33 Jellinek mentions that Donolo’s idea of the human as micro-cosmos was adopted by Bahya ibn Paquda and Joseph ibn Tzaddiq; cf. Jellinek, Schabtai Donolo, xii–xiii. See, for example, Bahya ibn Paukda, The Book of Direction to the Duties of the Heart, trans. and ed. Menahem Mansoor (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 159–60. See also Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. and ed. Shlomo Pines (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1963), I: 72 (190); and cf. Norman Lamm, “Man’s Position in the Universe: A Comparative Study of the Views of Saadia Gaon and Maimonides,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 55, no. 3 (1965): 208–34 (esp. 222–3). 34 The wide range of different interpretations in kabbalistic discourses of the term tzelem cannot be discussed here, and may be found elsewhere: on the tzelem as astral body, see Gershom Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts on the Kabbalah (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), 251–73 and 312–19; on the representation of two different types of tzelem, one referring to the good, and one to the evil yetzer, see Moshe Cordovero, Or Yaqar on Raya Meheimna (Jerusalem, 1987), 15: 82. See also Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, 42–80; and Elliot R. Wolfson, “Ontology, Alterity, and Ethics in Kabbalistic Anthropology,” Exemplaria 12, no. 1 (2000): 129–55 on ethnocentric interpretations of adam; and cf. Moshe Cordovero, Or Yaqar on Tiqqunei ha-Zohar (Jerusalem, 1985), 3: 119–21, on the distinction of the pure tzelem of the people of Israel and the impure tzelem of the nations. 35 Jellinek, Schabtai Donolo, xii–xiii. 36 See also Alexander Altmann, “Homo Imago Dei in Jewish and Christian Theology,” Journal of Religion 48 (1968): 235–59 (257); and Altmann, “The Delphic Maxim,” 14–15, 19. See also Moshe Cordovero, Shi‘ur Qomah (Jerusalem, 1999), fol. 11a, on

60  Patrick Benjamin Koch adam as resembling the whole creation, thus being created last. See also Scholem, Mystical Shape, 15–55 and 276–81. On the different perceptions of the body in the Zohar, see Isaiah Tishby, The Wisdom of the Zohar: An Anthology of Texts, 3 vols. (Oxford: The Littmann Library of Jewish Civilization, 1989), 2: 764ff. On adam as a reflection of the lower and upper realm, cf. Zohar Hadash, fol. 74a; and Elijah ben Moshe de Vidas, Reshit Hokhmah ha-Shalem, ed. Hayyim Josef Waldmann (Jerusalem, 1984), 1: 451–2 (Gate of Love, 6:2) and 1: 428 (5:2). 37 Joel Hecker, Mystical Bodies, Mystical Meals: Eating and Embodiment in Medieval Kabbalah (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 181. On Cordovero’s interpretation of the tzelem as intellect (sekhel), see Moshe Cordovero, Or Yaqar (Jerusalem, 1985), 6: 218. 38 On the importance of corporeal actions in Cordovero, see Jonathan Garb, Manifestations of Power in Jewish Mysticism: From Rabbinic Literature to Safedian Kabbalah (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2005), 223–4 [Hebrew]; and E. Fishbane, “A Chariot for the Shekhinah,” 402–3. 39 Mishnah Avot 1:17: ‘Not the study [of scripture] is the main principle but the action’. 40 The eighteenth-century kabbalist R. Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto, for example, voices his abrasive criticism towards a study-centred approach in his Messilat Yesharim (Jerusalem: Ofeq Institute, 1994), 199 and 201 [Hebrew]. 41 In Sack, “Nusah Rishon,” 180–1. 42 On the soul as the image of the creator, see Hecker, Mystical Bodies, 7–8. 43 In the Zohar, the Hebrew term aron ha-berit (Ark of the Covenant) also symbolises the union between the male Sefirah of Tif‘eret (berit) and the female Sefirah of Malkhut (aron). This idea also correlates to Cordovero’s following interpretation, namely the penetration of the male into the female vessel. 44 Namely the three Sefirot of Keter, Hokhmah and Binah. Cf. also the description of the head and its elements in the first two chapters of Tomer Devorah. 45 Cf. Tiqqunei ha-Zohar, fol. 123a. 46 Moshe Codovero, Or Yaqar (Jerusalem, 1981), 11: 90. 47 In Or Ne‘erav (part 6, chapter 2), Cordovero states that the Sefirah of Malkhut can receive via Yesod alone, as it is the only channel between her and what exists above her; see Moshe Cordovero, Or Ne‘erav (Jerusalem, 1999), 45–6. For an English translation, see Ira Robinson, ed., Moses Cordovero’s Introduction to Kabbalah: An Annotated Translation of His Or Ne’erav (Hoboken: Ktav Publishing House, 1994), 121. 48 Scholem, Mystical Shape, 251–73. 49 See, for example, BT Yevamot 62b: ‘R. Elazar says: Any man who does not have a wife is not a man because it is written, “Male and female he created them and he called them Man” (Genesis 5:23)’; cf. Charles Mopsik, “Genesis 1:16–27: The Image of God, Man and Wife, and the Statue of Women in the Writings of the Early Kabbalists,” in Sex of the Soul: The Vicissitudes of Sexual Difference in Kabbalah, ed. Daniel Abrams (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2005), 91 and note 37. 50 My translation is based on Elliot Wolfson’s observation that in Zoharic literature, the Aramaic term bar nash almost exclusively refers to the male Jew; see Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, 57; cf. The Zohar: Pritzker Edition, ed. and trans. Daniel Matt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 7: 29, who translates bar nash as ‘human’. 51 I adopted here Daniel Matt’s translation, The Zohar: Pritzker Edition, 7: 29 and note 9. 52 See, for example, Zohar 3, fol. 7a. The Zohar elaborates here on the establishment of two male-female couples in the Sefirotic realm, namely Hokhmah and Binah (father and mother), as well as Tif’eret and Malkhut (son and daughter). Cf. also Zohar 1, fol. 13b and 2, fol. 144b. 53 For comprehensive discussions of the concept of du-partzufin, see Moshe Idel, Kabbalah and Eros (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 53–103; Elliot Wolfson,

Approaching the Divine by Imitatio Dei  61 “Woman—The Feminine as Other in Theosophic Kabbalah: Some Philosophical Observations on the Divine Androgyne,” in The Other in Jewish Thought and History: Constructions of Jewish Culture and Identity, ed. Laurence J. Silberstein and Robert L. Cohn (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 166–204; and Elliot Wolfson, “Coronation of the Sabbath Bride: Kabbalistic Myth and the Ritual of Androgynisiation,” The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 6 (1997): 301–43. 54 The title of Cordovero’s work refers to Judges 4:4–5: ‘Deborah, wife of Lappidoth, was a prophetess; she led Israel at that time. She used to sit under the Palm of Deborah, between Ramah and Bethel in the hill country of Ephraim, and the Israelites would come to her for decisions’. On the words Tomer and Devorah as referring to male and female, see Bracha Sack, “Torat Ha-Musar,” 165 note 9, as well as note 8 on Shlomo Alqabetz’s interpretation of Tomer Devorah as Yesod and Malkhut in Berit ha-Levi. 55 De Vidas, Reshit Hokhmah, 2:202 (Gate of Holiness, 7:119). 56 Cordovero, Tomer Devorah, fols. 17a–b. 57 On attracting the Shekhinah, see Daniel Abrams, The Female Body of God in Kabbalistic Literature: Embodied Forms of Love and Sexuality in the Divine Female (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 2004), esp. 45–53 [Hebrew], and Garb, Manifestations of Power, 219ff. 58 For a recent interpretation of the kabbalist’s relation to the feminine power of the Shekhinah as illustrated in Tomer Devorah, see Moshe Idel, “On the Performing Body in Theosophical-Theurgical Kabbalah: Some Preliminary Remarks,” in The Jewish Body: Corporeality, Society, and Identity in the Renaissance and Early Modern Period, ed. Maria Diemling and Giuseppe Veltri (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009), 260ff. Cf. also Yehuda Albotin, Sulam ha-‘Aliya (Jerusalem, 1989), 72, on the kabbalist’s imitation of divine intercourse. 59 Cordovero, Or Yaqar (Jerusalem, 1986), 14: 51 in Bracha Sack, “The Concept of Thought, Speech, and Action,” Daat 50–52 (2003): 237 and note 60 [Hebrew]. 60 See Nathan Wolsky, A Journey into the Zohar: An Introduction to the Book of Radiance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 67. 61 See Duyndam, “Hermeneutics of Imitation,” esp. 11 and 15. 62 Cf. Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 176 and 363 note 10.

4 The Image of Torah Min Ha-Shamayim in the Thought of Louis Jacobs Miri Freud-Kandel

Central to notions of divinity in Judaism is the belief that this God reveals a Divine Will to the Jewish people. The Torah, representing in the clearest form the divine revelation received by the Jews at Sinai, has consequently been placed at the heart of Judaism. The concept of Torah min ha-Shamayim—literally meaning ‘Torah from heaven’, referring to the belief in divine revelation—takes up a very considerable proportion of the writings of Louis Jacobs (1920–2006). This was a cornerstone of Jacobs’ overall theology and to a large extent defined his place both in Anglo-Jewish history and more broadly within Jewish thought.1 Contemporary Orthodox Judaism, encompassing communities in places like Britain, the United States and Israel who are keen to preserve and defend observance of Jewish teachings, even among Jews who are otherwise engaged in the somewhat secular societies they inhabit, seeks to promulgate a simple, grand image of the principle of Torah min ha-Shamayim. Given the centrality of belief in God’s capacity to reveal a Divine Will and the impact this can have in instilling a willingness to observe commandments that have been divinely revealed, the management of a powerful image of revelation has often been deemed to be critical, not just in a contemporary context. It offers a type of certainty in the teachings of Judaism that can compete against opposing attractions in the surrounding society. As a consequence of this effort to control and maintain a forceful image of a divinely revealed will, the scope that does exist for certain levels of debate on the nature of revelation is all too often played down in Orthodoxy. The relevant rabbinic texts that raise certain questions about the concept of revelation frequently go untaught in the yeshiva world.2 Jacobs’ own work and that of certain more recent scholars, such as Marc Shapiro and Norman Solomon, have highlighted how Orthodox efforts have been made to delegitimise deviations from what has become established as the classic definition of revelation given in Maimonides’ eighth principle of Judaism.3 The popular image, reflecting a Charlton Heston-type revelatory experience at Mount Sinai, is intended to preserve an unquestionable authority for the divine teachings and commands of Torah. Of course Jacobs acknowledged that many Jews give little thought to the theological meaning of the principle of Torah min ha-Shamayim.4 Judaism’s ability to focus on practice can make any questioning of this image unnecessary. However, for

The Image of Torah Min Ha-Shamayim  63 those troubled by the image, on any number of levels, Jacobs sought to construct an alternative interpretation. For all its importance in his thought, any effort to study the work of Louis Jacobs highlights how very much more there was to his theology than this issue of Torah min ha-Shamayim.5 Jacobs’ ability to treat an incredibly diverse range of topics within the broad field of Jewish Studies is in some ways a reflection of the idealised amalgamation of the two worlds of Jewish scholarship, of the university and yeshiva, in which he had expressed an interest from the time of his first printed comment. In a 1944 letter to the Jewish Chronicle he suggested: If we can be forgiven the irreverence, we may say that the English Yeshivas provide the Cheshire cat without its cheerful grin. Jews’ College provides the grin without the cat. The time is surely ripe for a new institution, one that will combine the deep piety and love of Torah Lishmoh of the Yeshiva with the polish, the modern methods, and the efficiency of Jews’ College.6 In many respects, the combining of two worlds, that of the yeshiva and of secular society, was a goal Jacobs appeared to set for himself from an early stage in his rabbinic career. In this letter, he was expressing his sense of the benefits of some kind of blending of the yeshiva world and the Anglicised values that he associated, wrongly or rightly, with Jews’ College. He appears to have reached these conclusions on the basis of his own experiences. He has explained how he was conscious throughout his yeshiva days of a certain distinctiveness to his position there. This can be seen as the result of the traditional rather than strictly Orthodox family background that he had experienced prior to entering yeshiva.7 As will become clear, on the principle of Torah min ha-Shamayim, we can clearly identify an effort by Jacobs to construct a bridge between two worldviews of revelation, that of the yeshiva and that of the academy. The essential thrust of the understanding of Torah min ha-Shamayim that Jacobs would develop was that, in light of the findings of modern biblical scholarship, the interpretation of ‘Torah from Heaven’ required a subtle rethinking of the meaning of the term ‘from’. Jacobs continued to assert that the Torah represented divine revelation. It was the means through which God’s teachings were transmitted to the Jewish people. However, he felt compelled by critical scholarship to acknowledge that in addition to the divine teachings contained in the Torah, human contributions were also evident. Human hands were involved in its production.8 This revised interpretation of Torah min ha-Shamayim fit more broadly within a theological approach that Jacobs characterised as ‘liberal supernaturalism’. This term accurately reflected Jacobs’ blending of the traditional beliefs he imbibed in the world of the yeshiva, which he inhabited during his formative years, and the more modernist, reason-driven approach he later adopted following his encounter with modern scholarship at university.9 As Jacobs, among others, has noted, in certain respects this liberal supernaturalism represents an effort to have it both

64  Miri Freud-Kandel ways. Jacobs sought to introduce rationalism to his Judaism, but his starting point was a particularly trusting faith in both God and divine teachings. It was this that prevented him from moving away from really questioning the supernatural beliefs in a personal God that functioned as the bedrock of his theology. In a number of respects, the positions he developed on the basis of this belief system would conform to a Conservative Judaism, built on Positive Historical roots.10 As he was ready to acknowledge himself, he often popularised rather than introduced genuinely new theological positions through his varied writings. Yet Jacobs’ theology can be viewed as somewhat distinctive as a result of his own particular experiences and as a product of his rather British instincts. To view his thought in straightforward Conservative theological terms would be inappropriate. In his seminal work, We Have Reason to Believe, Jacobs explained that revelation now needed to be understood as ‘an encounter between the divine and the human, so that there is a human as well as a divine factor in revelation, God revealing His Will not alone to men but through men’.11 Notwithstanding the findings of modern biblical scholarship, Jacobs asserted that: [. . .] the believer can still see the Torah as divine revelation. The notion of divine dictation must, of course, be abandoned, once the human element is granted, and the Bible, for example can no longer be seen as revelation itself. But it is the record of revelation. [. . .] This does not mean that we can naively mark (as I have been accused of trying to do) certain lofty passages as divine and others of a more primitive nature as human. In the new picture of the Bible the divine and the human are intertwined. Because humans had a hand in its composition it is, from one point of view, all human. Because out of its totality God is revealed to us and speaks to us, it is, from another point of view, all divine.12 Essentially this was an argument built upon the principle of the ‘genetic fallacy’. Jacobs’ point here was that the specific origins of the mitzvot contained in the Torah were unimportant. In his understanding, regardless of the derivation of Judaism’s commandments, they represented God’s teachings and should be observed as such. Jacobs could not fail to acknowledge that his revised image of Torah min ha-Shamayim undoubtedly diminished the far grander, more compelling, and authoritative image of Torah that has become enshrined within Orthodox Judaism. It diverged significantly from Maimonides’ eighth principle. He nonetheless sought to construct an argument that would enable his reinterpreted view of revelation somehow to fit within the parameters of the variety of views that exist on this subject within the rabbinic Jewish tradition that forms the bedrock of Orthodoxy. As we shall see, by identifying the multiplicity of views that have been promulgated on the nature of divine revelation, Jacobs hoped that the scope for a broader contemporary reinterpretation could perhaps be identified. For all its tarnishing of the grand image, Jacobs argued that his theology still sought to keep elements of the received image intact. Particularly in his Principles

The Image of Torah Min Ha-Shamayim  65 of the Jewish Faith, he demonstrated how some scope for debate on the meaning of revelation could be found to exist within rabbinic traditions of Judaism.13 Of course both in the Talmudic and mediaeval rabbinic debates on revelation, the nature of the questioning of Torah min ha-Shamayim differed markedly from the questions modern scholarship has raised, let alone those posed by postmodernist critiques. Modern scholarship examines matters like the composite nature of the biblical text, its multiple authors and the extended historical period of its development.14 Traditional debate focused on issues such as whether it was Moses who received the entire Torah or whether sections could be attributed to Joshua or possibly Ezra.15 It contains discussion concerning whether Moses could have composed part of the Torah himself rather than having relied entirely on some process of divine dictation. Analysis of the form of divine dictation also occurred, in recognition of the difficulties of communication between a transcendent God and human beings.16 Jacobs nonetheless sought to argue that although his view of Torah min ha-Shamayim: [. . .] ascribes more to the human element than the ancients would have done [. . .] this is a difference in degree, not in kind. The new knowledge need not in any way affect our reverence for the Bible and our loyalty to its teachings. God’s Power is not lessened because He preferred to co-operate with His creatures in producing the Book of Books.17 In certain respects Jacobs’ argument here can be viewed as somewhat disingenuous, in contending that his altered image of Torah min ha-Shamayim represents no more than a difference in degree. This might be true of how revelation was understood in Jacobs’ own theology, but whether it can be applied more broadly is questionable. This position reflected the somewhat uneasy confluence of faith and reason in Jacobs’ theology. For Jacobs, revelation was a matter of faith, which he sought to construct arguments to defend. The facts about the record containing that revelation were what were in dispute. In his earlier writings, it is notable that Jacobs at times suggested his position could be characterised as ‘orthodox’. In We Have Reason to Believe he argued that, provided one moves away from what he characterised as the fundamentalist interpretation of received Jewish teachings on Scripture, there was no reason why his views should be deemed non-orthodox.18 Although Maimonides’ 13 principles of faith have acquired a normative and defining status in Orthodox Judaism, a number of Jacobs’ works were intended to demonstrate the flexibility in Jewish interpretation that in fact existed beyond the parameters of Maimonides’ dogmas. In its efforts to retain the grand image of Torah min ha-Shamayim, Jacobs demonstrated how Orthodox Judaism sought to downplay the scope that has existed within rabbinic tradition to contemplate the nature of revelation. It is interesting to consider here how other scholars have since come along and continued the effort to identify ways in which Orthodoxy can find room for modern critical scholarship on the Bible. James Kugel differentiates between two distinct images of Torah constructed respectively by proponents of a classical

66  Miri Freud-Kandel rabbinic or modern scholarly mindset. Kugel and Jacobs, in their different ways, have argued that it is futile to try to reconcile two such contradictory theories. Rather, by acknowledging the differences between the two images, it may become possible to construct a revised image that can identify the truth in both positions.19 Both James Kugel and Tamar Ross, with distinct methodologies, have sought to suggest that there is scope within contemporary Orthodoxy to reinterpret Torah min ha-Shamayim in a manner that retains the force of divine teachings while recognising the claims made by different scholarly approaches to the image of Torah. Ross’ position diverges somewhat from those propounded by both Jacobs and Kugel, and is built on postmodernist principles rather than more modernist ones. Making use of feminist critiques, she constructs a revised image of Torah min ha-Shamayim that is built on a concept of cumulative revelation.20 Of note in the context of this chapter is how both Kugel and Ross have so far managed to remain broadly within the confines of Orthodox Judaism, although both have, without question, been subjected to criticism from various sectors across the spectrum of Orthodoxy for the views they express.21 The differences here with Jacobs’ experiences, in which he was explicitly ejected from Anglo-Jewish Orthodoxy for espousing views that were deemed to be heretical, reflect another element of the role of image in the debate on Torah min ha-Shamayim. As a rising star in the Anglo-Jewish rabbinate in the 1950s, many viewed Jacobs as a likely future Chief Rabbi. He was promised the principalship of Jews’ College by his supporters on the College’s Governing Body. This appointment failed to receive the ratification it required from the serving Chief Rabbi at the time, Israel Brodie. It was later claimed that this was because questions had been raised about Jacobs’ Orthodoxy in light of views he had stated on Torah min ha-Shamayim in his We Have Reason to Believe.22 The subsequent controversy that engulfed much of Anglo-Jewry came to be known as the ‘Jacobs Affair’, and included a number of later stages as disputes over Jacobs’ place in Anglo-Jewry simmered on.23 As Jacobs came to be placed explicitly outside the boundaries of what was deemed Orthodox in Anglo-Jewry, his supporters established an independent synagogue for him to lead, The New London. This ultimately led to the creation of a Masorti movement in Britain as additional synagogues came to be founded over time and broadly aligned themselves, although far from fully, with the theology that drove Jacobs. He continued to believe there was greater scope for incorporating his views into the mainstream than had been permitted.24 Yet image played a role in Orthodox perceptions of what Louis Jacobs represented and the reactions to his ideas. First, the fact that Jacobs was raising questions about the traditional image of Torah min ha-Shamayim as a rabbi, rather than an academic, was of considerable importance. In this context it is worth considering how his views became the subject of controversy when he was seeking to head an Orthodox rabbinical training seminary, Jews’ College, which would have given him influence over a new generation of Anglo-Jewish ministers. Secondly, as a graduate of bastions of ultra-Orthodox Judaism—Manchester Yeshiva and Gateshead Kollel—his questioning of the received image of revelation was perceived to pose still more

The Image of Torah Min Ha-Shamayim  67 significant problems. Rabbis steeped in tradition like Jacobs were precisely the last ones expected to take on board the ideas of critical scholarship and question the grand image of Torah min ha-Shamayim. By his later writings, any inclination Jacobs may have had to portray his theology as within the boundaries of contemporary Orthodoxy had evaporated, perhaps burnt away by the force of Orthodox polemic against his positions. Whereas he believed that scope remained to reinterpret Orthodoxy according to the terms he defined, which highlighted rabbinic Judaism’s scope for development and adaptation, in a later retrospective work he explained: In the present climate of opinion, it would indeed be ridiculous for someone with my views to lay claim to Orthodoxy, which is why I do not now make any such claim. But at the time of the controversy [of the Jacobs Affair] [. . .] it was not completely hypocritical for me to label myself as Orthodox, meaning, at the time, simply kosher, in the sense of observant of the precepts [. . .] though labels are often restrictive, and misleading, honesty now compels me, in order to avoid confusion, to describe my position not as Orthodox but as Masorti.25 In truth this characterisation is not so clear-cut. Looking closely at his wording, it is not certain that Jacobs fully accepted this view—he talks of ‘describing his position’ without implying that he necessarily accepts this identification himself. Moreover, as we will see, whereas Jacobs’ position may pose problems from an Orthodox perspective, his Masorti credentials may also be questionable. It is perhaps instructive here to consider the image of Torah min ha-Shamayim that has come to prevail in Orthodox Judaism. Marc Shapiro’s The Limits of Orthodox Theology broadly follows the model of Jacobs’ Principles of the Jewish Faith.26 Like its predecessor, it examines how, despite the debates that can be shown to have taken place on the subject, almost all of the different ideas contained in Maimonides’ formulation of his eighth principle have become entrenched in contemporary Orthodoxy. This has created a basic, largely unquestioned and unquestionable doctrine on revelation. As Tamar Ross noted in a review of Jacobs’ Beyond Reasonable Doubt: Far too often in today’s Orthodox world, it is regarded as a serious breach of good manners, if not downright chutzpah, to raise honest and urgent questions concerning current Orthodox theology. The “keepers of the gate” can be very harsh in reacting to such lapses, and the degree of severity with which they treat offenders is usually in direct proportion to the establishment’s inability to answer (or even understand) the questions that have been posed.27 Shapiro’s book was intended to demonstrate the greater scope for flexibility in dogmatic interpretation within Orthodoxy. On the question of revelation, Shapiro, like Jacobs, listed the alternative views on this issue that have been produced within rabbinic tradition.28 He noted the likelihood that Maimonides himself did

68  Miri Freud-Kandel not entirely follow all the elements listed in his eighth principle. For example, it seems clear that Maimonides was aware of certain textual variations between sifrei Torah despite his eighth principle clearly stating that the text of the Torah is identical to that received by Moses.29 More broadly, Shapiro suggests it is worth considering how Maimonides was inclined on theoretical matters to draw a distinction between ‘necessary beliefs’ and ‘true beliefs’. With regards to revelation, Shapiro details how he is not the first to argue that Maimonides deemed it necessary to set out his eighth principle in the unequivocal terms he did in order to ensure correct acceptance of the authority of Torah by the masses. Whether he accepted as ‘true beliefs’ all the different aspects contained in the principle would appear open to question, particularly given the existence of Talmudic debate about the Mosaic authorship of the entire Pentateuchal text, quite aside from later rabbinic discussions.30 Moreover, Maimonides’ own questioning of the nature of divine ‘dictation’ raises the possibility that his understanding of revelation may not have been so different from Jacobs’ account of an encounter between humans and God, albeit restricting the human side to Moses alone.31 Orthodox responses to Shapiro’s work have been less willing to concede the greater breadth of dogmatic interpretation that he sought to highlight. One academic review, by a Yeshiva University graduate who is a prominent rabbinic author in the Orthodox blogosphere, seeks to dismiss all alternative readings of received traditions that differ from those studied in the yeshiva today. The review argues that positions such as those highlighted by Shapiro, by having lost their influence on what the author perceives as ‘normative Judaism’, simply no longer apply. He states: Shapiro would have done well to separate and emphasize the sources that have validity in the Bet Midrash because, as the book stands, it proves little to the traditional Talmudist.32 This position is essentially repeated in the AJS Review of Shapiro’s work. This review discredits Shapiro’s interpretation of Maimonides’ views on the validity of upholding minority opinions on theoretical issues that treat theological beliefs rather than practical halakhic matters. It argues that from a halakhic perspective the alternative positions identified by Shapiro, on issues treated in Maimonides’ principles, should now be viewed as heretical even though this was not previously the case.33 This inclination to try to downplay the possibility of alternative viewpoints and insist on narrow definitions of doctrinal positions has become an increasingly prominent feature of Orthodox Judaism as a whole since its emergence in the modern period.34 As Orthodoxy developed into a distinct, self-selected choice, from among a range of alternative options on how to be Jewish in a modern and postmodern world, the importance of boundary definition has heightened. Increasing stringency in halakhic interpretation and efforts to impose greater uniformity in the types of observances expected of Jews identifying with Orthodoxy has helped demarcate those who are within and outside. The advantages

The Image of Torah Min Ha-Shamayim  69 of using Maimonides’ 13 principles as a clear marker of acceptable beliefs has become apparent, as some of the responses to Shapiro’s work highlight. Within Modern Orthodox Judaism, among the ostensibly more secularly engaged Torah u-Madda type Jews, the importance of efforts to heighten stringency in interpretations of Torah min ha-Shamayim in particular became an issue of even greater importance. The Jacobs Affair offered one example of this in a British context, but it is a wider phenomenon, as evidenced in the reactions already noted to the scholarship of Kugel and Ross. To the extent that the scope for interaction with secular ideas is maintained, the need to identify theological positions from which Modern Orthodox Jews should not stray increases. The potential scope for flexibility in theological interpretation is removed in an effort to ensure that halakhic decision-making does not follow the path the Conservative movement is perceived to have taken.35 It is undoubtedly the case that Judaism has often found itself facing schisms that required definitions of who could be considered ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Jews. The perceived need to define boundaries is not merely a modern phenomenon. Those who argue that dogma has a limited place in Judaism should consider how Maimonides produced his 13 principles within his commentary on the Mishnaic passage in Sanhedrin 10:1, which lists those Jews whose beliefs mean that they ‘have no portion in the world to come’. Yet, as Jacobs, Shapiro and others have noted, Maimonides’ principles hardly enjoyed broad acceptance within his own lifetime or for some time thereafter.36 The type of response Jacobs faced from those who sought to defend Orthodoxy from the theological path they believed he had entered is broadly captured in Immanuel Jakobovits’ pronouncements on the doctrine of Torah min ha-Shamayim. Quite regardless of whether the views on revelation put forward by Jacobs extended beyond the permissible looser definitions of Maimonides’ eighth principle that can be identified, Jakobovits demonstrates the effort to circumscribe interpretations of the doctrine. Jakobovits was the Chief Rabbi appointed in the aftermath of the infamous Jacobs Affair, during which interpretations of acceptable definitions of Torah min ha-Shamayim provided a central thrust to the theological wranglings—which were distinct from the more socially and politically inspired debates that were also present at the time. His statement on the subject captures prevailing views amongst the Orthodox: To me belief in Torah min ha-Shamayim, in its classical formulation by Maimonides, represents a definition of the essence of Judaism as inalienable as the postulate of monotheism [. . .] this axiom of Judaism was never challenged or varied by any Jewish thinker or movement, whether traditional or sectarian. [. . .] This is fundamental and not fundamentalistic. If ethical laws were good, immutable, and divine because their virtue is manifest to reason, intuition, conscience, or any other human faculty, or if the validity of any law in the Torah were subject to human discrimination [. . .] the whole structure of Judaism as a revealed religion would collapse. We would create a god in man’s own image.37 (my emphasis)

70  Miri Freud-Kandel This statement sweeps aside the varied discussions, all held within classical rabbinic Judaism by recognised religious authorities, on the nature of revelation, on Moses’ contributions to the text, and on Joshua’s possible additions, quite aside from acknowledgements about textual differences. This sort of narrow approach derives from an effort to construct an image of Torah min ha-Shamayim that fits into the sorts of contemporary Orthodox sensibilities we have considered. Emeritus Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks rarely ventured to address the question of revelation during his tenure. On one of the rare occasions when he did so, in a talk at the London School of Jewish Studies in 2009, entitled ‘Revelation—What Does It Really Mean?’, he unequivocally stated that: No one has proved that the Torah isn’t God’s word, you can’t prove it. All you can do is assume it and that is what Biblical critics from Spinoza until today have done. [. . .] It’s an entirely circular way of thinking which has no particular basis in logic, reason or what have you.38 Sacks’ argument in this talk was that Judaism should be understood as ‘the religion of holy words’. Words bridge the gap between believers and a transcendent God in Judaism. He suggested the biblical critics’ approach to the text simply fails to appreciate this. In certain limited respects upholding the position put forward by Kugel, Sacks explained that it was this differing approach to the text which facilitates a reading of Scripture that can support the documentary hypothesis. Sacks argued that a clear distinction should be made between Christian and Jewish approaches to Scripture. This distinguishes respectively between the text as inspired teachings rather than as the revealed word of God. He explained: ‘In Judaism, words are holy, why? Because they not only describe, they create [. . .] the gift of language allows us to create order out of chaos [.  .  .] they create a holy relationship’. The capacity for revelation to construct this holy relationship between believers and God further ensures the centrality of the principle in Judaism. Sacks’ reasoning in this talk skirts around many of the key issues, including an avoidance of the types of arguments offered by Jacobs. It is nonetheless clear that Jacobs took his questioning of Torah min ha-Shamayim beyond the debates that have existed within rabbinic discourse. His position unquestionably undermined the grandeur of the image that was upheld in Orthodox Judaism. It is this grandeur that instils the principle with the authority that allows the Torah’s teachings to be accepted regardless of any questions raised by particular sections of the Torah. Jacobs was conscious that despite his efforts to retain an argument for divine revelation, his reconstructed image of Torah min ha-Shamayim was a diminished proposition compared to the one that had become so deeply enshrined within Orthodoxy. He conceded: ‘I must admit that once the idea of uncertainty is allowed into one’s theological stance, one tends to be less scrupulous in observance of the laws’.39 The dominant view in Orthodox Judaism is that Torah needs to be viewed as the unadulterated word of God. Jacobs’ image of Torah fell somewhat short of this. Yet as he explained: ‘Fundamentalism may provide

The Image of Torah Min Ha-Shamayim  71 the certainty that many require in order to be observant, but history has shown that fundamentalism is untenable’.40 He was ready to acknowledge that his own answers had limitations, but was inclined to argue that ‘it is better to be vaguely right than definitely wrong’.41 Jacobs’ reinterpreted views provided him with the scope to identify what he characterised as downright ‘harmful’ laws within the Torah, quite aside from those that he was also willing to identify as ‘meaningless’.42 However, perhaps the key point to note in understanding the impact of Jacobs’ altered image of Torah min ha-Shamayim on his overall theology is the influence it exerted in practical terms. Upon closer examination, it becomes apparent that the grandeur of the image was, in fact, retained in Jacobs’ own thought. In practice, for all his acknowledgements of human influence in the Torah, Jacobs’ own sense of its divinity precluded him from introducing the changes in interpretation and application of halakhah that his reconstructed image of Torah min ha-Shamayim may have been expected to facilitate.43 This can perhaps explain how he could maintain the complex nature of his own quest. It partially accounts for his inclination at times to label his theology as orthodox, because its practice was. His unwillingness to produce the sort of halakhah that his theology and understanding of Torah min ha-Shamayim implied could be constructed points to this dissonance between thought and practice. In his later writings, Jacobs increasingly came to acknowledge how a key factor in determining religious observance is neither reason nor faith. Rather, he acknowledged the significance of the emotional, the sociological, and the experiential in determining how and why Jews act in the way they do.44 Jacobs could construct theories to underpin his overall theology of liberal supernaturalism, but ultimately his acceptance of the supernatural elements in his belief system was deeply influenced by personal inclination and experience. In a rebuttal to a critical Jewish Chronicle review of his A Tree of Life, penned by Jonathan Sacks when he was Principal of Jews’ College, he explained how his altered view of the origins of the Torah’s teachings did not lead him to advocate scope for broad changes in halakhic interpretation: ‘Where a change in the law is required it must be brought about by the acknowledged authorities of the whole observant community’.45 He remained attached to halakhah regardless of his analysis of its origins, as his argument about the genetic fallacy had implied. Accordingly, he limited the scope for real change. Jacobs is not alone in being disinclined to apply the consequences of his theology to his halakhic reasoning. Kugel and Ross, like Jacobs before them, contend that their positions can fit within Orthodoxy. Both have been subjected to charges that they are in fact orthoprax.46 What we can identify in all three thinkers is an abiding attachment to the value of halakhah and mitzvah. Observance somehow perpetuates a connection with God through a sense of Sinaitic revelation, however that is understood. In the theology of revelation constructed by Tamar Ross, the explicitly postmodernist approach she adopts appears to offer greater room for defending the nature of this maintained attachment to the authority of Scripture regardless of its precise origins. She explains:

72  Miri Freud-Kandel My understanding of the nature of religious truth statements relates to a more general sympathy for non-foundationalism (i.e., rejection of the view that there is one universal truth, “out there”, simply waiting to be discovered, and unaffected by our perceptions of it). This leads me to view the function of such statements, in the wake of the 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and his followers, as expressive, constitutive or regulative rather than propositional. The profession of doctrines and the willingness to live by them comes to reflect or enable certain attitudes, experiences or mindsets essential to the religious life or even to serve a ritual function as declarations of loyalty to the general worldview entailed.47 Ross’ embrace of postmodernism can in certain respects be viewed as a mirror of Jacobs’ attachment to modernism. Ross’ position provides a strategy for defending the authority of revelation even while seeing it in relativised terms. Jacobs’ position, in contrast, retains an attachment to the idea that there is an objectively rational means of assessing the text of Scripture and uncovering the divinity that lies at its heart. Hence he wrote of the importance of uncovering ‘the reasonable conclusions that result from “scientific” investigation into the origins of the Bible and of Judaism itself’.48 Both Ross and Jacobs reject the imposition of a simple dichotomy on approaches to revelation that wish to characterise the Torah as either entirely divine or entirely human. Given the feminist thrust of Ross’ critique of revelation, she cannot help but note that the inclination to focus on binary models is itself generally viewed as reflective of a male way of thinking. Yet Jacobs proceeds from this point to retain a sense that foundational truths can be uncovered in the text. He recognised there was more to belief than that which could be constructed on the basis of reason. He prioritised the individual’s quest for belief, which allowed faith to mean different things to different people. As noted, he was willing to concede that his account of revelation was incomplete; it failed to provide all the answers. Yet the appeal of modernism’s rationalism to Jacobs’ halakhically trained mind impeded his ability to address the critique that postmodernism posed to his exaltation of rationalism’s ability to solve scholarship’s questioning of the nature of Torah min ha-Shamayim. Jacobs argued that flexibility in interpreting revelation had long been a feature of Judaism. On this basis, he identified the scope for interpreting revelation in a manner that could accommodate the findings of critical scholarship through reference to reason. Yet for Orthodoxy, by demeaning the commanding voice of the Torah, by acknowledging the human elements it contains, the authority of the text as a whole is devalued. The fact that this authority was not demeaned in practice in Jacobs’ faith is largely irrelevant. In Jacobs’ own personality he had succeeded in creating the grinning Cheshire cat about which he had spoken as a young yeshiva graduate. Yet the image of Torah min ha-Shamayim he constructed altered the idea of the Torah on which contemporary Orthodoxy has been built.

The Image of Torah Min Ha-Shamayim  73 NOTES   1 Louis Jacobs was a prominent rabbi in British Jewry and a Jewish thinker who wrote widely, see notes 5, 8 and 23 below. He came to be ostracised from Orthodox Judaism in Britain in the 1960s ostensibly as a consequence of views he published on possible interpretations of the principle of divine revelation. This led his supporters to establish an independent synagogue for him and ultimately resulted in the creation of the Masorti movement in Britain.   2 For rabbinic sources, see notes 15 and 16. For further analysis of yeshiva study, see William B. Helmreich, The World of the Yeshiva: An Intimate Portrait of Orthodox Jewry (New York: The Free Press, 1982); see esp. 94–125.   3 Maimonides laid out his 13 principles of faith in Arabic in his Commentary on the Mishnah, in the introduction to chapter  10 of Sanhedrin. For an English translation, see Fred Rosner, trans., Maimonides’ Commentary on the Mishnah, Tractate Sanhedrin (New York: Sepher-Hermon Press, 1981), 134–58; the eighth principle is on 155–6. Works noting how Maimonides’ principles did not receive the type of unquestioning acceptance with which they are viewed in contemporary Orthodoxy include: Jacobs’ own Principles of the Jewish Faith: An Analytical Study (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1964); Marc B. Shapiro, The Limits of Orthodox Theology: Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles Reappraised (Oxford and Portland: Littman, 2004); and Norman Solomon, Torah from Heaven, The Reconstruction of Faith (Oxford and Portland: 2012).   4 See, for example, Louis Jacobs, Beyond Reasonable Doubt (London: Littman, 1999), 51–2, 237, where Jacobs notes the importance of recognising the influence of sociology in determining how Jews act and approach their religion.   5 A bibliography of Jacobs’ work has been compiled by Michael Fischer and is available at the Leopold Muller Library at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, which holds the Louis Jacobs Library.   6 Louis Jacobs, “Letter,” Jewish Chronicle, July  28, 1944. Interestingly, in Jacobs’ autobiography he claims to have felt immediate remorse at having been presumptuous enough to have submitted this letter for publication. See Louis Jacobs, Helping with Inquiries, An Autobiography (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1989), 68.   7 See Jacobs, Helping with Inquiries, 16–20.   8 Jacobs set out his views on alternative approaches to revelation in many of his writings. As has been noted, this was a central question that his theology sought to address. His ideas were initially expressed in We Have Reason to Believe: Some Aspects of Jewish Theology Examined in the Light of Modern Thought, first published by Vallentine Mitchell in 1957. His later retrospective Beyond Reasonable Doubt offered a reflection on his essentially unchanged views on the subject. In between, many of the works that can be characterised as Jacobs’ popular theological writings, as distinct from his studies in the fields of Rabbinics and Hasidism, touched on the issue of revelation in greater or lesser depth. The most notable include Principles of the Jewish Faith; A Jewish Theology (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1973); and God, Torah, and Israel: Traditionalism without Fundamentalism (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1990). His A Tree of Life: Diversity, Flexibility and Creativity in Jewish Law (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press for the Littman Library, 1984) examines the historical nature of halakhah and the influences to which it is subject and in doing so offers another means of appreciating Jacobs’ understanding of revelation.   9 He started to attend classes at Manchester Yeshiva aged 13, enrolling full-time at 15. Aged 20 he moved to the newly opened Gateshead Kollel, where he spent a further year of study before returning to Manchester to receive his semikhah. He enrolled

74  Miri Freud-Kandel at University College London following his appointment as assistant rabbi at the Golders Green Beth ha-Midrash in London in 1945. 10 See notes 23 and 24 below. 11 Louis Jacobs, We Have Reason to Believe, 4th ed. (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1995), 80. 12 Ibid., 139. 13 Jacobs, Principles of the Jewish Faith. 14 Summaries of modern biblical scholarship, considering the questions posed by a variety of different academic approaches to the text and the impact these exert on received Jewish understandings of the biblical text, include Jon D. Levenson, Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1993); John Barton, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge: CUP, 1998); and Andrew D.H. Mayes, ed., Text in Context (Oxford: OUP, 2000). 15 See BT Baba Batra 15a; BT Menah.ot 30a; and BT Makkot 11a for Talmudic discussion of how the last eight verses of the Pentateuch were written by Joshua. The last of these examples also contains discussion of whether it was Joshua who wrote the text dealing with the cities of refuge detailed in Numbers 35:9–34 and Deuteronomy 19:1–13. Ibn Ezra, in his commentary on Deuteronomy 34:1, suggests the last 12 verses of the Pentateuch were written by Joshua. In his commentary on Deuteronomy 1:2, he suggests additional sections of the Torah should also be considered post-Mosaic. The possible role of Ezra and the Men of the Great Assembly in altering the biblical text is discussed in Numbers Rabbah 3:13 and Avot de-Rabbi Natan 34:5. 16 The question of whether Moses composed sections of the Torah without relying solely on divine dictation is considered in BT Megillah 31b; Exodus Rabbah 47:9; and Midrash ha-Gadol: Shemot 796. Questions regarding whether the Torah was revealed all at once or in stages during the desert wanderings are discussed in BT Gittin 60a and BT Hagigah 6a–b. On the nature of divine dictation, while arguing that Moses functioned as a scribe, Maimonides’ eighth principle itself notes that the meaning of this is understood only by Moses. 17 Jacobs, We Have Reason to Believe, 80–1. 18 Ibid., 11. See also Jacobs, Principles of the Jewish Faith, x; and Jacobs, A Jewish Theology, xi. It should be noted that his use of the term fundamentalism was not intended to equate Orthodox views on Scripture to those of fundamentalist Christianity. 19 Among a variety of examples in Jacobs’ work, see his We Have Reason to Believe, 68ff; James Kugel addresses distinctions (and indeed interrelations) between how the biblical text is received and interpreted in many of his works. His How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now (New York: Free Press, 2007), represents an effort to bring some of these strands together and address the divide between critical and religious approaches to the text. 20 For Ross’ view, see “The Cognitive Value of Religious Truth Claims: Rabbi A.I. Kook and Postmodernism,” in Hazon Nahum: Jubilee Volume in Honor of Norman Lamm, ed. Yaakov Elman and Jeffrey Gurock (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1997), 479–527; see in particular 502–3. In her Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2004), 197ff, Ross elaborates on her theory of revelation in the context of an analysis of the difficulties that feminism poses for the established view of Torah. Her argument builds on rabbinic midrash, kabbalah, her work on the theology of Abraham Isaac Kook, and postmodernist approaches to the meaning of texts to create a distinction between a primordial Torah and an ongoing, cumulative revelation. As she explains, this constructs ‘a more subtle definition of the relationship between divine intent and human interpretation’; ibid., 197.

The Image of Torah Min Ha-Shamayim  75 21 There was considerable debate at Yeshiva University in New York following an invitation to James Kugel to speak at a student-organised event in December 2008. His Orthodox credentials were questioned in a number of quarters including Yeshiva University’s own student newspaper, The Commentator (see January 7, 2009; February 11, 2009; see also his response February 18, 2009), and a variety of Orthodox blogs such as Hirhurim, January  1, 2009, http://hirhurim.blogspot.com/2008/12/ considering-kugel.html (accessed December 2, 2013). A critique of Ross’ views was forcefully laid out by Aryeh Frimer in a review essay on Ross’ Expanding the Palace of Torah entitled “Guarding the Treasure,” Bekhol Derakhekha Daehu—Journal of Torah and Scholarship 18 (2007): 67–106. Ross also recalls the reception her ideas received at an academic conference convened by the Orthodox Forum of Yeshiva University where she was subjected to repeated criticism following a presentation of her views on the conference theme of ‘human and societal influence on halakhah’. She noted, ‘It soon became obvious that members of the American Modern Orthodox establishment were not prepared to deal critically with the issues at hand’; Ross, Expanding the Palace of Torah, xiii. 22 See Israel Brodie, “Statement to Rabbis and Ministers,” May 5, 1964, reproduced in his The Strength of My Heart: Sermons and Addresses 1948–1965 (London: G.J. George & Co., 1969), 343–55. 23 For a more detailed consideration of the Jacobs Affair, see Miri J. Freud-Kandel, Orthodox Judaism in Britain since 1913: An Ideology Forsaken (London and Portland: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006), 123ff. See also the analysis of events leading up to the Jacobs Affair in Elliot Cosgrove, “Teyku: The Insoluble Contradictions in the Life and Thought of Louis Jacobs” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2008). 24 See, for example, Louis Jacobs, Beyond Reasonable Doubt, 241–2. 25 Ibid., 14. 26 Marc B. Shapiro, The Limits of Orthodox Theology. 27 Tamar Ross, “Religion, Thought, and Education: Review of Beyond Reasonable Doubt,” in Studies in Contemporary Judaism, Jews and Violence: Images, Ideologies, Realities, ed. Peter Medding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 18: 302–4. 28 Shapiro’s sources differ in some instances from Jacobs. See Shapiro, Limits of Orthodox Theology, 91–121; and Jacobs, Principles of the Jewish Faith, 216–301. In Shapiro’s introduction he more broadly sets out the nature of Orthodox approaches to the 13 principles. 29 Shapiro, Limits of Orthodox Theology, 115. 30 Ibid., 115–21. 31 Questions have been raised about Maimonides’ understanding of prophecy and the scope this allows for interpreting Moses’ role as a scribe, taking divine dictation at Sinai. Maimonides denied the possibility of God being able to ‘speak’ in order to transmit divine teachings, even if he argued that Moses’ receipt of prophecy was more direct than that of others. See further Daniel Rynhold, “Fascination Unabated: The Intellectual Love of Maimonides,” The Torah u-Madda Journal 15 (2008/9): 1–26, esp. 16; and the following two essays in Jay Harris, ed., Maimonides after 800  Years: Essays on Maimonides and His Influence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007): Alfred Ivry, “The Image of Moses in Maimonides’ Thought,” 113–34; and Howard Kreisel, “Maimonides on Divine Religion,” 151–66. 32 Gil Student, “Crossroads: Where Theology Meets Halacha—A Review Essay,” Modern Judaism 24, no. 3 (2004): 272–95 (274). 33 Gidon Rothstein, “Marc B. Shapiro. The Limits of Orthodox Theology: Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles Reappraised,” AJS Review 29, no. 1 (2005): 169–71. For Shapiro’s argument on this point, see Limits of Orthodox Theology, 116–21, 141ff. 34 See, for example, Shapiro, Limits of Orthodox Theology; and Menachem Kellner, Must a Jew Believe Anything (London: Littman, 1999).

76  Miri Freud-Kandel 35 On the changes that have taken place in Modern Orthodox Judaism, see Samuel Heilman, Sliding to the Right: The Contest for the Future of American Jewish Orthodoxy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Charles Liebman, “Orthodoxy in American Jewish Life,” American Jewish Year Book 66 (1965): 21–97; Jeffrey Gurock, “Twentieth-Century American Orthodoxy’s Era of Non-Observance, 1900–1960,” The Torah u-Madda Journal 9 (2000): 87–107; and Jeffrey Gurock, “From Fluidity to Rigidity: The Religious Worlds of Conservative and Orthodox Jews in Twentieth Century America,” in American Jewish Identity Politics, ed. Deborah Dash Moore (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 159–204. 36 See, for example, Menachem Kellner, Dogma in Medieval Jewish Thought: From Maimonides to Abravanel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); and his more recent Must a Jew Believe Anything. These works consider the local influences that led Maimonides to fix his dogmatic presentation of Judaism in the strict form he adopted. 37 Immanuel Jakobovits, The Condition of Jewish Belief, A Symposium Compiled by the Editors of Commentary Magazine (Northvale: Jason Aronson Inc., 1989), 109–10. This collection was compiled in 1966. 38 Recorded transcript of talk given at the London School of Jewish Studies, July 9, 2009, as part of a series by Jonathan Sacks entitled “The Art of Listening to Torah”. 39 Jacobs, God, Torah, Israel, 49. 40 Jacobs, Beyond Reasonable Doubt, 115. 41 Jacobs, God, Torah, Israel, 48. 42 Jacobs, A Jewish Theology, 227f. 43 In scholarly terms, Jacobs’ Jewish Theology in the Responsa (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975) is notable for highlighting theological concerns of the rabbis while making limited efforts to tie the discussed issues together and consider their practical implications. Jacobs’ focus in this work is a chronological study that further substantiates a recurring argument in his work regarding the absurdity of efforts by some to deny that Judaism is concerned with theology. His detailed halakhic analysis of “The Problem of the Mamzer,” in A Tree of Life, Diversity, Flexibility, and Creativity in Jewish Law, 239–54 is similarly characterised by a consideration of the differing positions on the issue of a child deemed illegitimate according to this ‘harmful’ Jewish law without any formal judgement being offered by Jacobs of how he believed the halakhah should be reinterpreted. In more practical terms, Jacobs rejected the idea that halakhic innovations introduced into Conservative Judaism in America should be introduced into his own community, suggesting they did not resonate with Anglo-Jewish concerns. See, for example, Jacobs, Beyond Reasonable Doubt, 241–2. Yet his motivations here were likely influenced by his own attachments to established Orthodox practices and his unwillingness to apply his altered image of divine revelation to halakhic interpretation. This point about a tension between theology and practice is also noted by Elliot Cosgrove in his Teyku, 337–40. See also his “Conservative Judaism’s Consistent Inconsistency,” Conservative Judaism 59, no. 3 (2007): 3–26, in which he suggests that many Conservative thinkers similarly fail to apply theology to halakhic decision-making. 44 See, for example, Jacobs, Beyond Reasonable Doubt, 130–1. 45 Louis Jacobs, “The Origin of Torah: A Response,” Jewish Chronicle, November 16, 1984, 25. 46 Ross’ Expanding the Palace of Torah represents an effort to construct an Orthodox response to the problems posed to it by feminism. One example of her efforts to preserve rabbinic authority can be noted at 157–8. For an example of Kugel’s affirmation of his Orthodoxy, see his How to Read the Bible, 45–6. See also his open letter sent to Yeshiva University’s The Commentator following the controversy over

The Image of Torah Min Ha-Shamayim  77 his invitation to speak on campus, February 18, 2009. Examples of the charges of orthopraxy are referenced in note 21 above. 47 Response to review by Aryeh Frimer of Expanding the Palace of Torah, Tamar Ross, “Guarding the Treasure and Guarding the Tongue,” Bekhol Derakhekha Daehu 18 (2007): 13; available at www.lookstein.org/articles/response_to_frimer. pdf (accessed December 2, 2013). 48 Jacobs, Beyond Reasonable Doubt, 25. Interestingly, in a review of Beyond Reasonable Doubt, Ross herself comments on Jacobs’ failure to address the postmodernist questions of his modernist interpretation of revelation. She asks whether this later retrospective work could not have been expected to acknowledge these problems. See Tamar Ross, review of Beyond Reasonable Doubt, by Louis Jacobs, Studies in Contemporary Jewry 18 (2002): 302–4.

5 Nothing and the Jews Devorah Baum

The following short essay, here revised, was originally written for a catalogue book accompanying the “Vides/Voids” art exhibition of 2009, which took place simultaneously in three galleries: the Centre Pompidou Paris, the Centre Pompidou Metz and the Kunsthalle in Bern. It was possible for these three galleries to host the same exhibition at the same time because of the nature of the show: a retrospective of works by nine different artists, beginning with Yves Klein in 1958, who have each, for different reasons, chosen to exhibit nothing at all. The exhibition thus consisted of nine empty gallery rooms. Despite its ‘retrospective’ character in celebrating an established modern art tradition, there was some concern that such a show could still be perceived as shocking, disturbing and even enraging for certain spectators. As such, the curators decided to produce a weighty catalogue book as a textual supplement to the visual ‘voids’. The catalogue, which comprises a series of essays analysing the experience and spectacle of ‘nothing’ from a number of different theoretical and aesthetical perspectives, reveals how no two ‘nothings’ are quite the same. My own invited essay, for example, addresses a certain Jewish interpretation of the exhibition’s theme, centring on a secularised but still discernibly Judaeo-Christian agon at work in modern and contemporary thought. The essay begins by citing, via Derrida, Hegel’s Early Theological Writings, although it should be noted that Hegel’s historical sources are critiqued in modern scholarship for the perspectives they show. In the episode I cite, for instance, Hegel draws upon the Roman historian Tacitus, who in turn seems to have derived most of his Jewish history from a number of notoriously anti-Jewish Alexandrian writers. My intention, however, which is worth stating at the outset, is not to establish historical veracity or otherwise. Rather, what follows eschews questions of historical accuracy in order to analyse the discursive frameworks imbricated within such historical representations and misrepresentations. * * * When Pompey, the great Roman general, conquered the City of Jerusalem, he had somewhere special within his sights. In the centre of Jerusalem stood the Jewish Temple and in the inner sanctum of the Temple was the ‘Holy of Holies’, a place

Nothing and the Jews  79 where only one man, the High Priest, was permitted to enter just once a year, on the Day of Atonement. Here is how Hegel tells the story: After Pompey had approached the most interior place of the Temple, the centre of adoration, and had hoped to discover in it the root of the national spirit, to find indeed in one central point the life-giving soul of this remarkable people, to gaze on a Being as an object for his devotion, on something significant for his veneration, he might well have been, on entering the secret, mystified before the ultimate sight and found what he searched for in an empty room.1 Intent on ‘entering the secret’, Pompey pulls back the veil to discover . . . what? Nothing. An empty room. How spectacularly unspectacular! Behind the veil there appeared no image of a god upon which to vent his passions or his fury; no trophy by means of which to seize or parade his victory; no object to appropriate; no Being to venerate; nothing, even, to desecrate or destroy. Pompey, says Hegel, can only have been ‘mystified’ before this ‘ultimate sight’. Of course, if Hegel’s Pompey had been slightly better informed about the nation he was conquering, he may have heard tell that the Jewish God held rather radical views on image-making as a devotional practice: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. (Exodus 20:4) The Jewish God was not one for appearing.2 He did not walk incarnate amongst His people. Indeed, when He did make a ‘show’, it was to be from behind a cloud above a mountain in the desert. This was a God who refused to be mediated via any representation, deeming it impossible to frame the infinite within the limitations of the finite. As such, He made it perfectly clear where He stood: beyond reason or the imagination, beyond knowledge or human understanding; to know Him was not to know Him; to see Him was not to see Him. Hence, recognising that man, driven by the desire to have and to possess, could be tempted to worship a substitute or idol, a creation in the place of the Creator, He placed a prohibition on all graven images. Hegel, however, took Pompey’s side of the argument. The incomprehensible, ungraspable, abstract, distant and alien God of the Jews struck the philosopher as rather nihilistic. In fact, the Jews’ rejection of images and idols seemed to Hegel to confirm this people’s distinct lack of any aesthetic sensibility. As he remarked, ‘They have no inkling of its [the idol’s] deification in the enjoyment of beauty or in the intuition of love’.3 These were the people, after all, who first followed Abraham, a man who left his country, cut himself off from his family, and marked this cut with the circumcision of his own flesh and the sacrificial offering of his own son.4 Thus, for Hegel: The great tragedy of the Jewish people is no Greek tragedy; it can rouse neither terror nor pity, for both of these arise only out of the fate which follows from the inevitable slip of a beautiful being; it can arouse horror alone.5

80  Devorah Baum If we jump now from the ancient to the modern world, it might be worth comparing Pompey’s ‘ultimate sight’ to the following incident from the dawn of aesthetic modernity: On August 21, 1911, house painter Vincenzo Peruggia removed the Mona Lisa from her pride of place in the Louvre and exited the building unseen. In the weeks following the theft, crowds gathered in unprecedented numbers to stare at the absent entry on the wall where the world’s most famous portrait had only recently hung. ‘Many of these excited spectators’, comments psychoanalyst Darian Leader in his book Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us from Seeing, ‘had never been to the Louvre, or indeed seen the picture before’.6 What motivated these visitors was the prospect of viewing, first hand, ‘the empty space [. . .] it was less a case of going to see a work of art because it was there, than, on the contrary, because it wasn’t there’.7 Whereas Pompey had been looking forward to seeing something magnificent and found in its stead an empty room, these spectators seemed to sense that what they were looking for could only be sought in the spectacle of an empty space: a non-appearance; a disappearance. Peruggia, says Leader, ought perhaps to be counted as one of the great artists of the Modernist era, for his ‘crime seems to herald so many of the preoccupations of both the artists and the writers of Modernism: the powers of absence, the void beyond the image, the emptiness at the heart of civilization’.8 Is it any wonder, then, that, as many commentators have noted,9 the Modernist era, as the first time when Jews, following emancipation, were able to participate fully in the political, social and cultural spheres, can be characterised as manifesting a quintessentially Jewish aesthetic? One thinks, for example, of the enigmatic writings of Kafka, or of the mystifying abstractions of Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottleib. Indeed, even in the case of those modern Jewish artists engaging in figurative works, such as the portraiture of Amadeo Modigliani, traces of this tendency towards abstraction can still be detected. As Lisa Naomi Mulman remarks of Modigliani’s various representations of sitters with one eye open and one eye closed, or both eyes blank and empty of detail: ‘The blind eye is a metaphor not only for the subject who must turn his vision inward, but also for the painter himself, whose eye must probe beyond the external features of the model into the depths of the soul’.10 However modern and rebellious they may be, such works arguably remain faithful to the second commandment. Of course, as Dan Smith has pointed out, there is plenty of evidence to challenge the assumption that ‘prohibitive iconoclasm is the sole reason for an overall absence of Jews from Western art history. Rather, it was that Jews were prohibited from entering academies to study art, and were therefore denied professional opportunities as artists’.11 Yet, this caveat notwithstanding, it may nonetheless be reasonable to conjecture that a consequent distrust of representation became, even if only on historical rather than consciously theological grounds, a paradoxical source of creative inspiration for Jewish artists in particular. For while the modernist fascination with emptiness is usually viewed as a nihilistic response to the death of God, we can also see how this same focus might equally be regarded as a return to an older, more distant and alien God: the God of the Jews who prohibits images.

Nothing and the Jews  81 So let us return to those crowds who headed for the Louvre to catch a glimpse of something they knew would not be there. What motivated their curiosity? For it was not just any empty space they were viewing. What they were drawn to was the scene of a crime. They had come to see a space that had been vacated: a space emptied of something—or someone. On the wall’s exposed surface they were able to detect the evidence or trace of an event: something which had been there before was there no longer. It was taken—gone—stolen—lost—missing. It was a mystery awaiting its solution. Moreover, the disappearing object could be seen virtually everywhere besides the spot from which it had been lifted. For what had gone missing was the original of a painting that had spawned more reproductions than any other; a picture whose many imitations had only intensified its mystery. Peruggia had stolen the portrait of someone at whom one gazes, only to get the strange impression of her eyes staring back. Like the eyes of our mother, who protects and looks over us, the Mona Lisa’s all-seeing vision seems to take us in no matter where we stand. Does she see us more clearly than we see her? Her smile is a famed enigma: it hints at secrets, at mysteries, at horizons beyond our imagination or understanding. It is as if she were better represented by her absence than her presence. So, by gazing into the void that had opened up through an act of criminality, what did those visitors to the Louvre imagine they saw there? Perhaps the spectacle of the painting’s loss reminded its spectators of their own feelings of loss. Staring into the space of a lost object, a lost original, which had left a world full of cheap imitations, they may have been able to glimpse an impression of this world as but a shadow-land of the real world of which they had been robbed. The empty space of a loss seems to suggest a time of original plenitude. The stolen object thereby comes to represent the hope of a future return to an earlier, better time. For in the space of a disappearance one can begin to imagine that what one feels is lacking is, precisely, this lost object, and one can continue to dream of this object (call it—call her—the Mona Lisa) for at least as long as she’s still missing. Which may be why, as Leader notes, when the Mona Lisa was, finally, returned to her proper place, she failed to satisfy the expectations of all those who had missed her. According to some people, the returned painting was not the real thing—she was a copy, a fake. Once restored, the previously missing object disappointed those for whom the void had promised something which the painting itself could not. Drawing on the insights of Jacques Lacan, Leader suggests that the visual arts have a peculiarly ambivalent role in the play of our desires. What are we looking for when we are looking at art? A work of the imagination always seems to beg the question of its own origins. By virtue of its seeming creation ex nihilo, the artwork appears to have a privileged relationship to the empty zone before or beyond the imagination from whence it came. Most theories of creativity are thus accompanied by myths of originality. For it stands to reason that things do not just appear out of nowhere. Or, if they do appear out of nowhere, then this ‘nowhere’ begins to accrue its own fascination. As Leader argues, the artwork simultaneously draws our attention to the empty space behind or beyond its image, while, at the same time, standing in

82  Devorah Baum the way of our ever being able to see or visualise this emptiness. This nowhere lies ‘always beyond what we can represent, or symbolise, or give meaning to’.12 Psychoanalysis analyses this notion of a ‘beyond’ all our systems of representation as something we feel we have lost, but which was something we never, in fact, possessed. The perceived failure of our attempts at representation to recuperate this loss fully seems to imply the existence of a reality outside of our grasp. That notion of a reality, however, is only suggested to us precisely because we do not feel convinced by this reality. As Leader writes: ‘The empty space comes to incarnate what we are separated from. [. . .] Our desires will circle it, and the less we grasp it, the more powerful its gravitational pull’.13 So, to return to the empty room of the Holy of Holies, which refused to admit of any lost object that could be represented as the true or missing object of our desires, might Pompey’s ‘ultimate sight’, as glimpsed in the holiest of places, provide a vista onto this ‘beyond’? Hegel had identified the void with the Jewish people themselves, whose story, as he put it, ‘arouses horror alone’.14 Hegel’s words, read retrospectively, ought, perhaps, to arouse our horror. Yet his formulation remains interesting. For the spectacle of horror is strangely arousing, is it not? As Leader notes, horror movies invariably advertise themselves by promising their audiences something ‘beyond’ their wildest imaginings. What inhabits this beyond? The victims in horror movies tend to fixate on an object which they misconstrue as the real object of their desires. As Leader remarks of many of the characters in horror movies, ‘They follow cats. Even in the most suspicious circumstances and against their (and our) better judgment, they have to find their cat and, in doing so, they usually end up being devoured or diced’.15 The cat ineluctably leads to some place beyond the cat: ‘Monsters and relentless killers are the images that we project into this zone beyond the imagination, and the search for the cat invariably leads the characters closer to it’.16 Hegel’s sense of horror’s arousal thus confirms this perception that, beyond every possible imagining, a ‘zone’ seems to beckon, whose very fascination consists in its unimaginable emptiness. For who does not want to know what lies behind the curtain? The unveiling may frighten us, or horrify us, but it also arouses us. Is the real horror, then, the thought of arousal or desire without an object, which is to say, a desire without end—a desire that might have nothing or no one who could, finally, satisfy or sate it? This, however, begs the question: if, as is here being argued, the zone of emptiness remains impossible to visualise, then what was it that Pompey did see behind the curtains? What, exactly, when we claim to be seeing nothing, are we failing to see? When Pompey unveiled the Holy of Holies, he may not have discovered what he was looking for (an idol or an icon) but what he would have seen was something else: the Torah scrolls.17 Lacking any image of God, the Holy of Holies nonetheless housed the very text that had proscribed such images. Did this text fail to appear to Pompey somehow, despite its being right there, before his eyes, the only thing inside an otherwise empty room? Pompey failed to see the text. Looking for an object for veneration, he overlooked the Torah scrolls, as if these did not constitute an object as such. The Torah

Nothing and the Jews  83 is the primary text of Jewish Revelation, and Jewish Revelation is the Revelation, not of an object, but of the Word. This Word lacks the full presence of something one can touch, hold or possess. It reveals itself in a barren land, where nothing grows and there is not very much to see. In this wilderness, empty of all attractions or distractions, the Word makes its appearance. Perhaps, then, Pompey’s impression of ‘nothing there’ loomed because he sensed that what was there—the Torah scrolls—might prove strangely resistant to his powers, as a conqueror, of usurpation or appropriation.18 Indeed, with this insight, which was also an oversight, Pompey may have been anticipating the course taken by a certain kind of philosophy after Hegel: a modern philosophy whose so-called ‘linguistic turn’ brought the very means or medium of philosophical enquiry (words, text, language) into focus, as if for the first time.19 So, to revise our story, what mystified Pompey was perhaps less the sight of nothing than the sight of nothing besides the text. Or, to put it in more familiar terms, ‘nothing outside the text’ (those famous words, of course, attributable to Jacques Derrida). Derrida, too, has paid close attention to Hegel’s representation of the Hebrew language as ‘primitive’, in contrast to the Greek language, which he considered ‘a more appropriate language’20 for scripture or philosophy. What had disturbed Hegel about the Hebrew language or text was, precisely, the Jewish refusal to see outside it; the failure to move beyond the letter of the Law, to the animating spirit.21 Hegel’s objection to the language of the Jews resembles the reaction of many people to Derrida’s conception of language; people for whom ‘nothing outside the text’ constitutes a statement of ultimate nihilism such as can arouse our horror alone. Indeed, much contemporary thought returns to the inescapable fact of language as that which comes both first and last, at the beginning and end of every inquiry. By meeting language, philosophy seems to meet its own limits. Yet, in meeting the limits of reason or philosophy, something else appears: Revelation. What is Revelation? Something other than reason, something beyond reason’s reach. ‘The meaning of revelation’, writes philosopher Giorgio Agamben, ‘is that humans can reveal beings through language, but cannot reveal language itself’.22 Revelation reveals the invisibility of what is revealed. Revelation is thus also concealment, for what is revealed is revealed as incomprehensible and ungraspable. With this in mind, consider Erich Auerbach’s essay, “Odysseus’ Scar”, which compares the language of Homer’s Greek epic to that of the Hebrew Bible. In Homer, writes Auerbach, ‘never is there a form left fragmentary or half-illuminated, never a lacuna, never a gap, never a glimpse of unplumbed depths’.23 The ‘Homeric poems conceal nothing, they contain no teaching and no secret second meaning’, unlike the biblical stories, whose aniconic prose suggests that ‘[e]verything remains unexpressed’.24 The Hebrew text seems to invite its readers to enter into the empty spaces to seek out more than can be understood by a literal reading of the words alone. Indeed, the hermeneutic tradition of the rabbis inhabits the margins and spaces of its primary text, whereas Jewish mysticism takes its inspiration from the ‘white fire’ (gaps) between the ‘black fire’ (words).25

84  Devorah Baum What an irony, therefore, that the writing which most closely resembles the ‘primitive’ language of the Hebrew Bible is the literature of modernism. One thinks, in particular, of Franz Kafka, whom Walter Benjamin claimed observed the second commandment better than any other writer.26 For it was Kafka, after all, who, in his Letter to his Father, complained bitterly of his Jewish inheritance as a dead letter, devoid of all content.27 As Stéphane Moses summarises: For the father, the Law was nothing more than an empty container devoid of meaning. And yet he did not question its validity and expected his son to maintain that same formal loyalty. For the generation of the fathers, the Law’s sole content is its own legality; it expresses no more than its own authority, but means nothing, founds no symbolic order: its only function is that of a sign, the sign of Jewish identity.28 The Jewish Law appeared to Kafka as ‘an empty container devoid of meaning’, which is a perception that can also be read into his most famous parable, ‘Before the Law’, in which man remains powerless before a Law that retains its authority in the absence of any particular prescription. Gershom Scholem called the Law’s appearance in Kafka’s text ‘the nothingness of Revelation’: a state in which Revelation appears to be without meaning, in which it still asserts itself, in which it has validity but no significance [. . .] the wealth of meaning is lost and what is in the process of appearing (for Revelation is such a process) still does not disappear, even though it is reduced to the zero point of its own content.29 Yet this lament from modernity, which seems to see, in the withdrawal of the Law to the point of nothingness, the loss of an object for veneration, forgets Pompey’s unveiling of the seat of Jewish Law when the Temple was still standing. Was the Jewish Revelation ever anything else besides the revelation of nothingness? Or rather, the revelation of nothing outside the text, such as the text that Pompey failed to see, as though it was there but not there, like an object that disappears the more we try to fix it in our line of vision. Or just as, in the ceremonies of synagogues around the world, the Torah scrolls are lifted from the ark, paraded around the community, and then replaced in the ark, back behind the curtains. The text thus appears in the spectacle of its disappearance, rather like the Auto-Destructive art works of Gustav Metzger, which vanish under our gaze. In his South Bank Demonstration of 1961, for example, Metzger painted hydrochloric acid onto nylon canvasses which then disintegrated before the eyes of onlookers. By consuming themselves, such temporary and public works resist the drive of those ‘consumers’ who would wish to own or appropriate them, remaining deliberately intractable to the commodifications of the art market. Moreover, Metzger’s successive “Manifestos of Auto-Destructive Art”,30 by virtue of their own plurality, similarly renege against the objectification of any particular work into a unitary meaning or ‘content’ such as might seek to preserve it beyond its passing. Like the works themselves, Metzger’s “Manifestos” are subject to change

Nothing and the Jews  85 and re-evaluation over time. Hence, in Metzger’s Historic Photographs, in which the journalistic images of major historical events are rendered partial or obscured, the spectator is forced to confront the impossibility of ever fully apprehending the dimensions of any particular event of history. As Metzger remarks, ‘When confronted with nothing it is difficult to find one’s bearings. This is the state in which I seek to place the viewer’.31 Metzger, a refugee from Nazi Germany, knows only too well the scandal and radical insufficiency of every representation or memorialisation after Auschwitz. After Auschwitz. . . this famous framing of an epoch hails from Theodor Adorno,32 who reprised the second commandment, as if instinctively, when he rejected all forms of post-Auschwitz cultural production. Today, then, it may be less the Jewish God than Jewish history that has made the concept of the ‘unrepresentable’ such a powerful theme. One can see the ‘nothingness of Revelation’ as a horrifying abyss, as life emptied of meaning. However, one might thereby fail to see what always appears in the moment when one believes one sees nothing: the text, which continues to signify even at its vanishing point. As Agamben has analysed, if we consider the human voice as understood by someone who does not know the significance of what has been said, what we will discover is ‘[n]o longer the experience of mere sound and not yet the experience of a meaning’.33 Rather, the voice indicates ‘the pure taking place of language without any determinate event of meaning’. It thus reveals ‘a possibility of thought beyond meaningful propositions’; for the voice ‘without signifying anything signifies signification itself’.34 This is what Revelation reveals. The spectacle of an empty room or an empty space reveals not the end of meaning or significance, but an unadulterated encounter with meaningfulness itself, which refuses to go away, no matter how hard one tries to vanquish it, destroy it, or reduce it to nothing.

NOTES   1 Quoted in Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John Leavey and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 50. Derrida’s accompanying reflections offer a probing account of the cited passages from Hegel. As noted above, Hegel’s account is disputed by most historians—indeed, as Simon Schama notes in The Story of the Jews, the only eyewitness account we have comes not from Tacitus but from the turncoat Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who tells a rather different story. As Schama summarises it: ‘Brushing aside all the taboos against foreigners, the general marches through the Temple, tearing aside the curtain veil and entering the Holy of Holies where only the high priest was admitted. But then Pompey is so awed by the golden altar and shewbread table and the menorah and candlestick [. . .] that he uncharacteristically refrains from plunder’; Simon Schama, The Story of the Jews (London: Bodley Head, 2013), 131.   2 The Jewish scriptures and their many respondents are, of course, much more complex, nuanced and divided on this issue than the stereotype admits. In Simon Schama’s recent book, for example, he cites copious evidence that images and aesthetics have played a greater role throughout Jewish history than is usually recognised (he looks, for instance, at the far from abstract images inlaid on the mosaics

86  Devorah Baum of floors of the archaeological remains of synagogues of antiquity). But we can still say that the Jewish God has had, and retained—in the imagination of both non-Jews and Jews—a fierce reputation for being distant, aloof and invisible.   3 Quoted in Derrida, Glas, 49.   4 Once again, Hegel’s proof texts, which refer to the ‘Old Testament’, appear to be based primarily on his reading of Tacitus’ representation of these same sources.   5 Quoted in Derrida, Glas, 40.   6 Darian Leader, Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us from Seeing (New York: Counterpoint, 2002), 2.   7 Ibid., 3.   8 Ibid., 68–9. There are a number of excellent introductions to the key concepts of modernism—see, for example, Christopher Butler, Modernism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: OUP, 2010). Two scholarly essays debating the issues surrounding modernist aesthetics in illuminating ways are Robert Holub, “Modernism, Modernity, Modernisation,” in Twentieth-Century Historical, Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Christa Knellwolf and Christopher Norris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Susan Stanford Friedman, “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 8, no. 3 (2001): 493–513. Or for a recent analysis of the fate of modernism in contemporary culture, see Gabriel Josipovici’s polemical What Ever Happened to Modernism? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).   9 The shaping influence of Jews on modern history and modernist aesthetics is mapped out in many works, but perhaps most emphatically and comprehensively in Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), with its arresting opening line: ‘The modern age is the Jewish age—and we are all, to varying degrees, Jews’. See also Catherine M. Soussloff’s Jewish Identity in Modern Art History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Or for a recent publication that explicitly analyses the Jewish modernist moment in connection to its sublimated religious heritage and the second commandment in particular, see Lisa Naomi Mulman’s excellent monograph, Modern Orthodoxies, Judaic Imaginative Journeys of the Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2012). 10 Mulman, Modern Orthodoxies, 77. 11 Dan Smith, “Zion Painters,” Jewish Quarterly 60, nos. 3–4 (2013): 160–1 (161). 12 Leader, Stealing the Mona Lisa, 59. 13 Ibid., 60. 14 As noted before by Derrida in Glas—the context for this statement was the young Hegel’s intimation, derived largely from Tacitus, that the Jewish people and their God were invested in rituals and practices designed to cut themselves off from sensibility, aesthetics and natural human feelings (Derrida, Glas, 40). 15 Leader, Stealing the Mona Lisa, 60. 16 Leader is colourfully alluding to the ‘cellar’ moment where the hero is ineluctably drawn to go into dark spaces that make us scream ‘No!’ There may or may not be an actual cat, of course—it could as easily be a voice or some other potentially innocuous yet ambivalent marker—but it is no accident that cats are associated with curiosity. The ‘descent into the cellar’ moment is such a cliché of horror cinema that it is even referred to in postmodern reworkings of the genre, such as Joss Whedon’s recent horror satire Cabin in the Woods (2012). 17 BT Gittin 56b claims that when Titus (rather than Pompey) sacked the Temple in Jerusalem, he fornicated with a prostitute on the Torah scrolls as a sign of the cult’s total desecration (this, indeed, gives a rather different sense to Hegel’s idea of horror’s ‘arousal’!). 18 Again, Josephus tells the story of Titus’ (as opposed to Pompey’s) sacking of the Temple rather differently. As Schama points out, the fact there were spoils to be

Nothing and the Jews  87 taken seems to be in evidence in the Rome of today where, for example, one can still see the parade with the seven-branched candlestick ‘reproduced in the frieze decorating the Arch of Titus’; Schama, The Story of the Jews, 153. Yet Schama also quotes Josephus that the ‘last of the spoils’ the Romans carried out was ‘the Laws of the Jews’. Nevertheless, writes Schama, on the frieze itself, ‘you look in vain for the scrolls. Perhaps they defied adequate representation, loot-wise? Furled, or unfurled, how could mere scrolls, parchment writing, have made much impression on admirers of Roman conquest? Could someone have belatedly appreciated the impossibility of capturing the words of the Torah, either in sculpted image or by military power? Could there have been a sudden, silent moment of embarrassment when the impotence of trophy display became inescapable?’; ibid., 153. Even if the scrolls were noticed and taken, there was, according to Schama, something intractable about the text that made it impervious to appropriation. 19 There was no official movement collectivising all the various philosophers associated with the twentieth-century emphasis on the relationship between truth and language, which was based primarily on the insight that language is never neutral—it always shapes and mediates what it pretends to merely communicate. Ludwig Wittgenstein is widely regarded as one of the linguistic turn’s key progenitors, although in The Linguistic Turn, Richard Rorty suggests Gustav Bergmann got there first; Richard Rorty, The Linguistic Turn (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1967), 63–71. 20 Quoted in Derrida, Glas, 75. 21 Hegel was effectively reiterating for a modern audience the longstanding Pauline objection to putative Jewish ‘literalism’ versus Christian ‘spiritualism’. 22 Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 40. 23 Erich Auerbach, “Odysseus’ Scar,” in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 3–23 (6–7). 24 Auerbach, Mimesis, 13. 25 This Jewish mystical terminology has been widely popularised but it is derived from the Zohar and is not a vocabulary deployed by Auerbach. 26 Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969; London: Fontana, 1992), 108–35; ‘No other writer has obeyed the commandment “Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image” so faithfully’; ibid., 125. 27 Kafka wrote his famous letter to his father, which ultimately remained unsent, in November  1919. See Franz Kafka, Letter to My Father, trans. Howard Colyer (North Carolina: Lulu Press, 2008). 28 Stéphane Moses, “Gershom Scholem’s Reading of Kafka: Literary Criticism and Kabbalah,” trans. Ora Wiskind-Elper, New German Critique 77 (1999): 149–67 (151). 29 Gershom Scholem, ed., The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem 1933–1940, trans. Gary Smith and André Lefevre (New York: Schocken, 1989), 142. 30 Not artworks so much as statements of intention about art-making, which ironically shadow the processes involved in the act of artistic creation insofar as they are no more permanent than the works themselves. 31 Gustav Metzger, “A Terrible Beauty,” interview by Andrew Wilson, Art Monthly 222, December 1998, 7. 32 Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. S. Weber (Boston: MIT Press, 1983), 34. 33 Agamben, Potentialities, 42. 34 Ibid.

This page intentionally left blank

Part II

Contested Images of Judaism and Jewishness Jewish Perspectives on Identity and Image Management

This page intentionally left blank

6  Iconism and Aniconism in the Period of the Monarchy Was There an Image of the Deity in the Jerusalem Temple? Garth Gilmour The archaeology of early Israelite religion has become a significant area of research in recent years. In addition to probing the vagaries and subtleties of the biblical text, scholars have sought to understand and interpret the increasing variety of cultic artefacts and inscriptions that have been uncovered in archaeological excavations. These range from cultic paraphernalia like altars and stands and pottery vessels to inscriptions and even to entire rooms and shrines set apart for religious activity. The analysis of this archaeological evidence has greatly enhanced our understanding of the biblical text and thrown new light on the development of religion in the period of the Israelite monarchy and the emergence of monotheism. The recent publication of an incised sherd from Jerusalem has added significantly to this understanding, offering fresh insight into the exclusivity of YHWH and the elements of Temple ritual in pre-exilic Jerusalem. The incised sherd was found during excavations conducted in the 1920s by the London-based Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF), but the original excavators did not comment on it in their notes nor did they publish it in their reports. It was rediscovered by this author in the archives of the PEF and published for the first time in 2009.1 Carved onto the outer surface of the sherd is a pictorial inscription of two figures which, I have suggested, represent YHWH and Asherah.2 The sherd comes from the body of an Iron Age II strainer spouted jug that was incised post-breakage. It was found along with other Iron Age sherds in what is now known as ‘Area G’ of the City of David. The vessel type and surface treatment indicate that the vessel probably dates to the second half of the eighth century bce, and the stratigraphic context suggests that the incised decorative design should be dated to the same period.3 THE INSCRIPTION The inscription is relatively small, only 8.5cm by 6.5cm, suggesting that it was carved for private personal use, rather than for public display. It shows two triangular humanoid figures, one male and one female, set upon a series of semicircular lines that extend to the break in the pottery. The figures are joined by a line extending from the top left corner of the male figure to the top right corner of the female, and from the bottom right corner of the female to the bottom left corner

92  Garth Gilmour

Figure 6.1.  A late Iron Age pottery sherd from Jerusalem with an inscription illustrating YHWH and Asherah. Photo by Garth Gilmour, courtesy of the Palestine Exploration Fund.

of the male. In the roughly pentagonal shape created between the two figures by these lines is an X, perhaps a ‘tav’, one of whose arms cuts the edge of the lower triangle of the female figure. It may be significant that at least two cutting tools were used to incise the figures, so that the lines of the male figure are thick and deeply cut, whereas the female figure was cut much more delicately and with thinner and shallower lines. It is possible that the lines were deliberately incised in this way to emphasise the different sexes of the two figures, or it may be indicative that two different individuals, one male and one female, worked on the design. In the latter case, this may represent a form of sympathetic magic hitherto undocumented in the religion of ancient Israel.4 Both male and female figures have a rudimentary face carved into an inverted triangle, with eyes and eyebrows, nose and nostrils, a mouth and a chin. In the male, a domed hat or crown is on top of the face and a pair of legs extends to the

Iconism and Aniconism in the Period of the Monarchy  93

Figure 6.2.  Drawing of the sherd. Drawing by Dylan Karges, courtesy of the Palestine Exploration Fund.

break in the sherd. In the female, the face has a second triangle below it that contains two elements: an inverted triangle in the middle and a small dot just above, representing the pubic triangle and navel respectively. DISCUSSION Whereas this type of imagery is unprecedented in Iron Age Israel, and there is no written inscription to accompany the two images to explain what they represent or might mean, nevertheless attempts must be made on the basis of what we do know to try and understand what was apparently clear to the artist. As will be reasoned

94  Garth Gilmour in the following discussion, the two figures are most appropriately understood as representing two deities, which in turn should be identified as YHWH and Asherah, with the male figure, YHWH, striding over the natural world. In spite of the sherd being dated to the later Iron II period, both figures contain imagery that points to Late Bronze Age precedents. Although the incised image is very crude, the details are clear enough to propose that the headdress on the male figure and the pubic triangle on the female are both elements that recall Canaanite imagery as represented in male seated and striding Baal and El figurines, and female plaque figurines representing the goddesses Asherah, Astarte and/or Anat.5 Both the rounded headdress on the male figure and the pubic triangle on the female figure are indicators of divine identity. The headdress on the male figure recalls the distinctive rounded headgear on bronze deity figurines found across the Ancient Near East from the Middle Bronze Age through to the Early Iron Age.6 The crudeness of our male figure’s appearance notwithstanding, it is likely that a generic type of high, rounded headdress is symbolised. The female imagery is similarly symbolic. The prominent pubic triangle in the naked frontal view aspect identifies this figure as female, and it too draws on Canaanite and early Israelite imagery from the second half of the second millennium bce. Late Bronze II plaque figurines are the most common type of female religious iconography in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages and are the most obvious antecedents,7 but other types of iconography (such as those represented on stands and seals and in metal sheets and pendants), and types from earlier periods, also contain this imagery.8 Female plaque figurines do trickle down into the Iron II period as well, but they are unusual, especially following the fall of Samaria in 720 bce.9 As early as the Late Bronze Age II, the pubic triangle is associated with a goddess ‘Elat’ on a selection of vessels from the Lachish Fosse Temple. On one jar, the ‘Lachish Ewer’, the goddess’ name appears above a sacred tree flanked by two quadrupeds, whereas, on a goblet found nearby, an almost identical design has the animals flanking not a tree but a pubic triangle.10 This interchange between triangle and sacred tree in designs from Lachish and elsewhere has led Ruth Hestrin and others to identify the ‘Elat’ of the Lachish Ewer, as well as the pubic triangle itself, with the goddess Asherah.11 For the rest of the incised image, the semicircles at the edge of the sherd, over which the male figure is striding, should be interpreted as representing the natural world, perhaps the sea or mountains or clouds, so that the entire image recalls ancient Canaanite imagery of God as Lord of War allied to his status as Lord of Nature. This recurs later in biblical literature in such passages as Exodus 15, Deuteronomy 33, and several Psalms such as 18, 29 and 77.12 For those who used this image, for whom it was important, all the symbolism and imagery that pertained to these deities were reduced to the two simple elements of male headdress and female pubic triangle. This was sufficient to identify the figures in the image and convey all the meaning and significance they were designed to transmit.

Iconism and Aniconism in the Period of the Monarchy  95 THE IDENTIFICATION OF THE FEMALE IMAGE WITH ASHERAH The evidence from the site of Kuntillet ‘Ajrud in the Sinai is critical to our understanding of the association of YHWH and Asherah. At this site, excavated by Ze’ev Meshel in 1975 and 1976 and dated to the early eighth century bce, YHWH and Asherah are famously linked in three written inscriptions inked on pithoi and plastered walls.13 The many inscriptions at the site contain references to El, Baal, YHWH and Asherah, but most significant for our purposes are an inked inscription on Pithos A referring to ‘YHWH of Shomron and Asheratah’, and two inscriptions on Pithos B referring to ‘YHWH Teman and to Asheratah’.14 Similarly, at Khirbet el-Qôm, south-east of Lachish and not far from Hebron, another eighth-century bce inscription carved into the wall of a burial cave also refers to YHWH and Asherah (Asheratah) together.15 We also need to consider briefly the evidence of widespread pairing of objects in the religious practice of Israel and Judah from the tenth century bce onward that is now well documented archaeologically at several sites. At the Judahite fortress of Arad in the northern Negev desert, a shrine was found that took up some 20% of the floor space of the fortress.16 Clearly an important element of this military base, its significance was reinforced with the discovery of a number of ostraca—pottery fragments used for writing names or messages—at the site with the names of priestly families that served there, some corresponding to biblical priestly names.17 The shrine consisted of three parts: an outer courtyard that contained a sacrificial altar, which led into a broad room, which in turn had a small raised niche in the middle of the long wall. The niche is presented today as being clearly delineated, with three steps leading up to it; flanking the steps are two incense altars, one large and one small, and against the back wall are two standing stones, or masseboth, one large and one small. Actually, the excavations were confused, the recording poor, and interpretations have been subject to dispute ever since. What seems clear is that when it was excavated the two altars and the large massebah were found on the floor of the niche. Built into its back wall and right hand wall were two further masseboth, smaller than the first, and carved of flint as opposed to limestone. Scholars are divided as to the interpretation, but the most widely accepted view is that originally the two flint masseboth served as the focus of attention in the niche, and later the single limestone massebah either replaced them, or stood alongside them.18 The date of the sanctuary’s destruction is also the subject of debate, but recent analysis of all the material has resulted in some consensus that the shrine was destroyed (or perhaps more appropriately ‘dismantled’) in the late eighth century bce during the reign of Hezekiah.19 In the tenth-century stratum IVB/VA at Megiddo in the Jezreel Valley, a large structure, perhaps the house of the governor of the site, was excavated near the city gate. A courtyard was reconstructed from the few remains of walls in front of the building, and in the corner of this courtyard was a small area that contained a significant collection of cultic artefacts.20 Whether these represented a shrine at that location or simply a storage area for another shrine nearby is not clear; what

96  Garth Gilmour we do know from the drawings and photographs of the excavations is that in this corner of courtyard 2081 there were several pairs of artefacts with one of the objects larger than the other, including standing stones, incense altars, limestone offering stands and fenestrated stands.21 The finds at Arad and Megiddo provide evidence of pairing in the religious practice of Iron Age Israel and Judah, with two deities being worshipped alongside each other. This evidence is supplemented by a cult stand excavated at Ta‘anach in 1968, also dated to the tenth century bce, whose four tiers represent, alternately, female and male deities.22 Here too it seems likely that the same pairing is represented, with male and female deities sharing the attention. This pattern of paired objects representing deities is repeated at the site of Lachish in Judah, where another storage room for cultic paraphernalia was excavated in stratum V, dated again to the tenth century bce. Nearby, a tall standing stone was excavated with a circle of ash a few centimetres deep alongside. The excavator interpreted it as a cultic standing stone with an Asherah image alongside that was later burnt down.23 The many pillar figurines found in late eighth- and seventh-century sites add to the evidence for the strong presence of a female deity in the life and religious activities of the Judahites. Many scholars, including this writer, interpret these figurines as images of the goddess Asherah,24 possibly small copies (for private, domestic use) of the larger Asherah statue (‫ )פסל האשרה‬that evidently was placed in the Temple by Manasseh (2 Kings 21:7) until it was thrown out in the reforms of Josiah described in 2 Kings 23.25 Indeed, the presence of this pairing of YHWH and Asherah in eighth- and seventh-century religious practice in Judah is supported by many references in the Hebrew Bible to Asherah’s unwelcome presence (for example: 1 Kings 14:15, 23; 2 Kings 17:10, 16; 2 Kings 21:3, 7; 2 Kings 23:4–15; Isaiah 17:8, 27:9; Jeremiah 17:2; Micah 5:14). A distinction has been drawn between the pillar figurines on the one hand, and the Iron II ‘naked goddess’ plaques and imagery on the other. Pillar figurines are found in the late Iron Age II predominantly in private domestic contexts within the borders of Judah,26 whereas the ‘naked goddess’ figurines, which resemble the Canaanite plaque figurines, are confined to Judah’s neighbours. Othmar Keel and Christoph Uehlinger state that these naked goddess plaque-type figurines emphasise the deity’s erotic charm, and are a continuation of a Late Bronze tradition that never died out completely. Rather than identify her as Asherah, they suggest that this type of image represents Astarte.27 Yet this seems to be an unnecessary distinction. The pillar figurines are tightly located in time and space to Judah in the late eighth and seventh centuries,28 and there is no reason why the same goddess represented in Judah by the pillar figurines should not have been represented in a different way outside of Judah. Anyhow, in the Iron Age the roles and identities of the goddesses Asherah and Astarte, along with Anat and Ishtar, were being changed and merged due to the cosmopolitan nature of Iron Age II social and political interaction in the Ancient Near East, particularly following the rise of the neo-Assyrian Empire in the eighth century.29

Iconism and Aniconism in the Period of the Monarchy  97 THE IDENTIFICATION OF THE MALE IMAGE WITH YHWH Whereas there may be a number of candidates for the male image on the Jerusalem sherd,30 I  suggest that the most likely interpretation is that it represents YHWH. The inscriptions from Kuntillet ‘Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qôm referred to above offer textual confirmation of the association of YHWH and Asherah in the Iron Age II period, and there is little reason to doubt the biblical record’s strong testimony to YHWH as the principal if not the only God of Israel. The many horse and rider figurines from Judah in the eighth and seventh centuries may be related to a particular male deity, and, whereas the absence of written texts describing them is restrictive, most scholars agree that they are connected to the introduction of the Assyrian astral cult, probably related to the sun god Shamash.31 Again, it is the biblical text in 2 Kings 23 that suggests that these objects may have a cultic role, for verse 11 speaks of the king disposing of horses and chariots of the sun. The presence of discs on the foreheads of many of the excavated horse figurines, with and without riders, suggests that they may represent horses of the sun. The dating of the incised sherd is important in seeking to understand its significance. Whereas it is not possible to date it securely to a particular primary stratigraphic context, it appears from its shape, decoration and its location in a fill containing Iron Age II material that it should be dated to the eighth century. It was in the last years of the eighth century that Hezekiah conducted his religious reforms in Judah, following the destruction of the northern kingdom and the exile of a significant proportion of its population. The shrine at Arad, the dating of which was a source of extensive disagreement among archaeologists, has now been re-evaluated and is widely agreed to have been carefully dismantled at the end of the eighth century.32 The Rav Shakeh’s words during the siege of Jerusalem in 702 or 701 bce, as described in 2 Kings 18:22, appear to support the dating: ‘And if you [. . .] are relying on the Lord your God (to deliver you), He is the very one whose shrines and altars Hezekiah did away with, telling Judah and Jerusalem: “You must worship only at this altar in Jerusalem” ’, as does the comment in verse 4 of the same chapter that Hezekiah destroyed ‘the Asherahs’ in his reforms. It is quite possible, some would say likely, that there are Deuteronomistic editorial inserts here, but the textual and archaeological evidence seems strong enough to posit significant changes and cutbacks of a state-sponsored and public cultic variety during the reign of Hezekiah. AN IMAGE OF YHWH IN THE TEMPLE In the light of the archaeological evidence for the presence of a pair of deities at Arad, Megiddo, Ta’anach and other places, coupled with the textual evidence from Kuntillet ‘Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qôm, and now the pictorial evidence of the sherd from Jerusalem, it is legitimate to speculate on whether there was an image

98  Garth Gilmour of YHWH in the Temple in Jerusalem. While the religious reforms that included the prohibition of images in ancient Israelite religion are increasingly considered to be late—exilic and post-exilic—with their beginnings in the late pre-exilic period, it remains true that many scholars still hold that the cult of YHWH was probably ‘de facto aniconic’ in the beginning.33 Nevertheless, the observation in 2 Kings 23:6, in the context of Josiah’s reform, that ‘the Asherah’ (‫ )האשרה‬was removed ‘from the Temple’ and burned in the Kidron Valley begs the question: if there was an image or statue of Asherah (‫—פסל האשרה‬2 Kings 21:7) in the Temple, and she was the consort of YHWH, then would there not also have been an image of YHWH in the Temple alongside the image of Asherah? If so, what did this image of YHWH look like, and why was it not removed along with the image of Asherah? Whereas there is strong evidence in archaeology for the presence of imagery representing the two deities, we have had no evidence of an actual representation or physical likeness of Asherah alongside one of YHWH—until now, on the sherd from Jerusalem, if my identification is correct. It remains a possibility, of course, that YHWH’s likeness was not represented in the Temple by an object, by something that could be seen or touched or held, but rather by an idea, or a concept, or an abstract reality—such as, for example, the space above the ark of the covenant (the mercy seat), or even the Holy of Holies itself, or something else that was understood and accepted by the people to be the representation of God, even though for the uninitiated there may have been nothing there at all. Tryggve Mettinger calls this ‘empty-space aniconism’.34 Mettinger distinguishes between de facto aniconism and ‘programmatic’ aniconism, where the latter is formal and prescribed, whereas the former relates to ‘the existence, prior to that, of a much older de facto tradition of aniconism in which aniconism was perhaps a conventional observance but not the subject of theological reflection and hardly linked with iconophobia or iconoclasm’. Mettinger’s de facto aniconic tradition is characterised by ‘an indifference to icons’, ‘a mere absence of images’, and ‘tolerant aniconism’, whereas the programmatic aniconic tradition that developed later is identified with a ‘repudiation of images’, ‘iconophobia’ and even ‘iconoclasm’.35 It is worthwhile noting that, contrary to the suggestion above of a kind of ‘empty space aniconism’, which holds that the image of YHWH in the Temple was abstract or conceptual, the prohibitions in the biblical text demonstrate that cultic images were indeed prevalent in the early Israelite cult. There are references to theriomorphic images (God represented as an animal) in Israel and Judah in the period of the monarchy, such as the presence in the Jerusalem Temple of Nechushtan (2 Kings 18:4)—its exact manifestation is unclear—and the bull calf at Bethel that represented YHWH and functioned as an alternative to the Jerusalem cult (1 Kings 12:28ff ).36 Thus it seems possible that the image of YHWH in the Temple may have been more than merely an empty space, but rather was represented by an object that was real and recognised by the people as a physical representation of YHWH.

Iconism and Aniconism in the Period of the Monarchy  99 Private worship, the religious practice of small family groups, was different to the public cult. Rainer Albertz posits that this was not affected by Hezekiah’s or even Josiah’s reforms in the same way as the public, state-sponsored cult.37 Rather, it managed to crawl under the radar of prophetic attack for much of the eighth and even seventh centuries. During this time, the Assyrian presence in (and even domination of) the cultural and social aspects of Judahite life opened doors to a variety of practices, some new, most renewed versions of old customs that had lain dormant for decades. Rooftop shrines, oracles of the dead, worship of Shamash the sun god and the moon and stars, altars for incense and libations all became, if not acceptable, then widespread enough for late seventh-century prophetic opprobrium. The Queen of Heaven—Assyrian Ishtar—became prominent and confused and identified with the local female ‘queen’, Asherah.38 Whereas many of these practices had been bubbling under the surface for decades, centuries even, they received a boost in both popularity and legitimacy at the end of the eighth century with the Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom and subsequent colonisation of the south. The dating of the Jerusalem sherd to just this period places it squarely in the context of these dramatic political, social and religious changes, and contributes to our understanding of them. CONCLUSION To conclude, we have here, for the first time, pictorial imagery of twin deities, male and female, from Judah in the Iron Age II. In the context of our understanding of this period, it is legitimate to propose that the two figures on the Jerusalem sherd should be identified with YHWH and Asherah. The presence of Asherah as a prominent female deity in eighth- and seventhcentury Israel and Judah, and her association with YHWH as evidenced by the biblical record, archaeological discoveries, the Kuntillet ‘Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qôm inscriptions, and now the discovery of these two deity figures on the Jerusalem sherd, suggest that what has hitherto been considered by some as unorthodox or ‘folk religion’ may instead have been the de facto orthodoxy.39 The image on the sherd may well have been carved for use in private, domestic religious exercise, but the carver drew on images that were familiar to him and/ or her. For the user, these images represented the gods they worshipped, namely YHWH and Asherah. The sherd strongly suggests that there was a concept of YHWH and Asherah that was held by some of the inhabitants of Judah and Jerusalem that found expression in this illustration. If so, it is not insignificant that it strongly reflects the Canaanite antecedents from the Late Bronze Age. The Phoenician influence in Judah and Jerusalem during the late eighth and into the seventh centuries increased as a result of the Assyrian presence. With the advent of this Empire, old practices, widely held but largely dormant, were revived and found acceptability in a time of change, challenge and national stress. The revival of Asherah imagery

100  Garth Gilmour with a different design, as represented in the commonly occurring pillar figurines, all severely chaste and with nothing below the waist, suggests a compromise between the authorities wanting to break with the past and the people wanting to express their adoration to a physical representation of their female deity. The even more numerous horse figurines from the seventh century, which are representative of the Assyrian god Shamash, are another manifestation of this widespread rise in iconic imagery. The female image on the sherd is different to the pillar figurines that proliferate during the Assyrian period. It harks back to their predecessor, but still it represents the goddess Asherah for the owner and carver of the image. So too, we must at least suggest, the second image on the sherd harks back to an early concept, and represents for the owner of the sherd the God YHWH, whose updated, more acceptable image, however it may have appeared, probably stood in the Temple in Jerusalem. So, what was orthodox, and what was contrary? Whereas there has been a tendency for some scholars to divide between ‘official’ religion on the one hand, and ‘folk’ religion on the other, this is an artificial divide, no longer supported by the archaeological evidence.40 Based on the array of evidence discussed above, what has until now been considered unorthodox, or ‘folk religion’, should rather be acknowledged as orthodox, mainstream and accepted practice for much of the period of the monarchy. The Temple in Jerusalem and all it stood for was a full partner, possibly even hosting an image of YHWH alongside one of Asherah. The incised sherd from Jerusalem is critical to this debate. If it is correct to conclude that the figures indeed represent YHWH and Asherah, then it is the first pictorial representation of these two deities together and the earliest picture of YHWH ever found. The sherd betrays a concept of YHWH and Asherah that is portrayed pictorially, and was inspired by visual representations known to the artist(s). Whereas the images on the sherd clearly preserve critical elements of much earlier Canaanite deities, and this tells us much about the development of Israelite religion and the ongoing influence of elements of Canaanite culture in ancient Israel, it is the reference to an image of Asherah in the Temple in the reform narrative of Josiah in 2 Kings 23 that makes it likely that the conceptual understanding represented by the two images on the sherd is drawn from the physical presence of images of YHWH and Asherah in the Jerusalem Temple. NOTES   1 Garth Gilmour, “An Iron Age II Pictorial Inscription from Jerusalem Illustrating Yahweh and Asherah,” Palestine Exploration Quarterly 141, no. 2 (2009): 87–103. I am grateful to the Department of Old and New Testaments at the University of Stellenbosch for their assistance in the preparation of this paper, and to my colleague Dr Stephen Herring for his input and encouragement.   2 Central to the study of religion in Israel in the period of the monarchy has been the identity and function of Asherah. Mentioned 40 times in the Hebrew Bible, Asherah not only played an important role in the biblical narrative but also occurs in texts from neighbouring cultures and appears on archaeological inscriptions. The literature about the identity of this goddess and her significance is broad. Judith

Iconism and Aniconism in the Period of the Monarchy 101 M. Hadley’s The Cult of Asherah in Ancient Israel and Judah. Evidence for a Hebrew Goddess (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) is a major recent scholarly review, whereas William G. Dever’s Did God Have a Wife? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005) provides a more popular overview of the subject.   3 Gilmour, “An Iron Age II Pictorial Inscription,” 89.   4 By ‘sympathetic magic’ is understood the use of a substitute image in ritual activity to procure some effect on or for the one represented.   5 All three of these female deities were members of the Canaanite pantheon. Although their roles were fluid and changed over time, Asherah (or Athirat) was the principal consort of El, the head of the pantheon, whereas Astarte (or Ashtoreth) and Anat were closely associated with the warrior god Baal. See Adrian W.H. Curtis, “Canaanite Goddesses in the Old Testament,” in Women in the Biblical Tradition, ed. George J. Brooke (Lewiston: Mellen, 1992), 1–15; and for an extensive treatment of the subject, John Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000).   6 Ora Negbi, Canaanite Gods in Metal (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Institute of Archaeology, 1976), 42–3, 50–3; and Othmar Keel and Christoph Uehlinger, Gods, Goddesses, and Images of God in Ancient Israel (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), 58–60.   7 Izak Cornelius, The Many Faces of the Goddess: The Iconography of the SyroPalestinian Goddesses Anat, Astarte, Qedeshet, and Asherah c. 1500–1000 bce (Fribourg: Academic Press; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 45–8; and Keel and Uehlinger, Gods, Goddesses, 68, 96–108. Among the many examples that may be cited are: figurines from Lachish—see Olga Tufnell, Lachish IV (Tell ed Duweir): The Bronze Age (London: published for the Trustees of the late Sir Henry Wellcome by Oxford University Press, 1958), plate 49:4; Gezer—see William G. Dever, H. Darrell Lance and G. Ernest Wright, Gezer I: Preliminary Report of the 1964–66 Seasons (Jerusalem: Hebrew Union College, 1970), plates 25A, 37:11; and Tel Batash—see George L. Kelm and Amihai Mazar, Timnah: A Biblical City in the Sorek Valley (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1995), fig. 4:35, plate C8.   8 For examples of stands, see Pirhiyya Beck, “The Cult Stands from Ta‘anach: Aspects of the Iconographic Tradition of Early Iron Age Cult Objects in Palestine,” in From Nomadism to Monarchy. Archaeological and Historical Aspects of Early Israel, ed. Israel Finkelstein and Nadav Na’aman (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi and the Israel Exploration Society, 1994), 352–81. For metal sheets and pendants, see Joe D. Seger, Gezer VII. The Middle Bronze and Later Fortifications in Fields II, IV, and VII (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2013), 165–8, pl. 26:13–15; David Ussishkin, The Renewed Archaeological Excavations at Lachish (1973–1994) (Tel Aviv: Emery and Claire Yass Publications in Archaeology, 2004), 1: 129, colour plate VII, 3; and Christa Clamer, “A Gold Plaque from Tel Lachish,” Tel Aviv 7, no. 2 (2004): 152–62. For seals, see Othmar Keel, “Stamp Seal Amulets from Gezer,” in Garth Gilmour, Gezer VI. The Objects from Phases I and II, 1964–1974 (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2014), Object 2301, page 262, plate 50:16; also in Seger, Gezer VII, 169–70.   9 They appear to be limited to the following: Tel Batash stratum III—see Amihai Mazar and Nava Panitz-Cohen, Timnah (Tel Batash) II: The Finds from the First Millennium bce (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Institute of Archaeology, 2001), 203; Ashdod strata VIII–VI—see Moshe Dothan, Ashdod II–III. The Second and Third Seasons of Excavations 1963, 1965. Soundings in 1967 (Jerusalem: Ministry of education and culture; Department of antiquities and museums, 1971), fig. 64; Megiddo strata II–I—see Herbert G. May, Material Remains of the Megiddo Cult (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935), pl. XXIV; and Tel Ira—see Pirhiyya Beck, “Human Figurine with Tambourine,” in Tel ‘Ira. A Stronghold in the Biblical Negev, ed. Itzhaq Beit-Arieh (Tel Aviv: Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University, 1999), 386–94.

102  Garth Gilmour 10 Olga Tufnell, Charles H. Inge and Lankester Harding, Lachish II (Tell ed Duweir): The Fosse Temple (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), 47, frontispiece, pls. LIA:287, LX:3, XLVIIA:229, LIX:2. 11 Ruth Hestrin, “The Lachish Ewer and the ’Asherah,” Israel Exploration Journal 37, no. 4 (1987): 212–23. 12 Alberto R.W. Green, The Storm-God in the Ancient Near East (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 258–80. 13 Ze’ev Meshel, Kuntillet ‘Ajrud (Horvat Teman). An 8th Century bce Religious Site on the Judah-Sinai Border (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2012); Ze’ev Meshel, Kuntillet ‘Ajrud: A Religious Centre from the Time of the Judean Monarchy on the Border of Sinai (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1978); Ze’ev Meshel, “Kuntillet ‘Ajrud,” in Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David N. Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 4: 103–9; and Pirhiyya Beck, “The Drawings from Horvat Teiman (Kuntillet ‘Ajrud),” Tel Aviv 9 (1982): 3–86. 14 Judith M. Hadley, The Cult of Asherah in Ancient Israel and Judah. Evidence for a Hebrew Goddess (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 121–9, 137– 52; and Ziony Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel: A Synthesis of Parallactic Approaches (London: Continuum, 2001), 390, 393–9. 15 Ziony Zevit, “The Khirbet el-Qôm Inscription Mentioning a Goddess,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 255 (1984): 39–47 (39); and Zevit, Religions of Ancient Israel, 361. 16 Ze’ev Herzog, Miriam Aharoni, Anson F. Rainey and Shmuel Moshkovitz, “The Israelite Fortress at Arad,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 254 (1984): 1–34; and Ze’ev Herzog, “The Fortress Mound at Tel Arad: An Interim Report,” Tel Aviv 29, no. 1 (2002): 3–109. 17 Yohanan Aharoni, Arad Inscriptions (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1981); and Herzog et al., “The Israelite Fortress at Arad,” 22. 18 Gilmour, “An Iron Age II Pictorial Inscription,” 97 note 7. 19 Lily Singer-Avitz, “Arad: The Iron Age Pottery Assemblages,” Tel Aviv 29, no. 1 (2002): 110–214 (159–76); and Zevit, Religions of Ancient Israel, 165–8 (168 note 77). 20 Gordon Loud, Megiddo II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 45–6, figs. 101, 102. 21 Garth Gilmour, “The Archaeology of Religion in the Southern Levant: An Analytical and Comparative Approach” (DPhil diss., University of Oxford, 1995), 59–60; and Zevit, Religions of Ancient Israel, 220–5, 247–9, 312–13. 22 Paul Lapp, “The 1968 Excavations at Tell Ta‘annek,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 195 (1969): 2–49 (42); Pirhiyya Beck, “The Cult Stands from Ta‘anach,” 352–81; Zevit, Religions of Ancient Israel, 319–25; and Hadley, Cult of Asherah, 69–76. 23 Yohanan Aharoni, Investigations at Lachish: The Sanctuary and the Residency (Lachish V) (Tel Aviv: Gateway Publishers, 1975), 28–32; and Elizabeth BlochSmith, “Will the Real Masseboth Please Stand Up,” in Text, Artifact, and Image: Revealing Ancient Israelite Religion, ed. Gary Beckman and Theodore J. Lewis (Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 2006), 64–79 (73). 24 John S. Holladay, “Religion in Israel and Judah under the Monarchy: An Explicitly Archaeological Approach,” in Ancient Israelite Religion, ed. Patrick D. Miller, Paul D. Hanson and S. Dean McBride (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), 249–99 (276–8); and Raz Kletter, The Judean Pillar Figurines and the Archaeology of Asherah (Oxford: Tempus Reparatum, 1996), 76–7; see also Peter R.S. Moorey, Idols of the People. Miniature Images of Clay in the Ancient Near East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 60, who rejects the association with Asherah, suggesting that they represent ‘mourning’ figures.

Iconism and Aniconism in the Period of the Monarchy 103 25 Actually, the Asherah statue/image may have been in the Temple a lot longer, if the reference in 2 Kings 18:4 to Hezekiah cutting down the Asherah refers to the image in the Temple. 26 Holladay, “Religion in Israel and Judah,” 276–8; and Kletter, Judean Pillar Figurines, 76–7. 27 Keel and Uehlinger, Gods, Goddesses, 336. 28 Kletter, Judean Pillar Figurines, 43–8. 29 William G. Dever, “Asherah, Consort of Yahweh—New Evidence from Kuntillet Ajrud,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 255 (1984): 21–37 (28–9); Tikva Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses. Women, Culture, and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth (New York: The Free Press, 1992), 159; Zevit, Religions of Ancient Israel, 321–4; and Richard S. Hess, Israelite Religions. An Archaeological and Biblical Survey (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), 322. 30 Gilmour, “An Iron Age II Pictorial Inscription,” 99. 31 Kathleen M. Kenyon, Digging Up Jerusalem (London: Benn, 1974), 142; Keel and Uehlinger, Gods, Goddesses, 343; see also Thomas A. Holland, “A Study of Palestinian Iron Age Baked Clay Figurines, with Special Reference to Jerusalem: Cave I,” in Excavations by K.M. Kenyon in Jerusalem 1961–1967, vol. 4, The Iron Age Cave Deposits on the South-East Hill and Isolated Burials and Cemeteries Elsewhere, ed. Itzhak Eshel and Kay Prag (Oxford: British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and Oxford University Press, 1995), 159–89 (184–7); contra Moorey, Idols of the People (who says they have no religious significance), and Izak Cornelius, “A Terracotta Horse in Stellenbosch and the Iconography and Function of Palestinian Horse Figurines,” Zeitschrift des Deutsches Palästina Vereins 123, no. 1 (2007): 28–36 (who proposes they represent cavalry). 32 See note 19 above. 33 Stephen L. Herring, Divine Substitution: Humanity as the Manifestation of Deity in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2013), 50–1. 34 Tryggve N.D. Mettinger, No Graven Image? Israelite Aniconism in Its Ancient Near Eastern Context (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1995), 19–20. 35 Mettinger, No Graven Image?, 18; and Herring, Divine Substitution, 51 note 6. 36 Herring, Divine Substitution, 52–4. 37 Rainer Albertz, A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period, vol. 1, From the Beginnings to the End of the Monarchy (London: SCM Press, 1994), 187. 38 Albertz, History of Israelite Religion, 189–94; see also note 29 above. 39 See note 40. 40 Francesca Stavrakopoulou, “ ‘Popular’ Religion and ‘Official’ Religion: Practice, Perception, Portrayal,” in Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah, ed. Francesca Stavrakopoulou and John Barton (London: T&T Clark International, 2010), 37–58.

7 The Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Visual Irene Zwiep

As the basic premise of this volume goes, Jewish image management has always been a pretty solid indicator of the state and make-up of Jewish identity. Accordingly, the biblical rejection of ‘the graven image’ can be considered just as significant as the subsequent Jewish embrace of art and beauty. Whereas the former emphasises the particular dimensions of Judaism-the-religion, the latter links up Jewish sentiment with general human experience. Throughout history Jewish artists have ignored the second commandment and joined the universal effort of producing art. Scholars, on the other hand, seem to have taken the biblical ruling much more seriously. In their studies they wilfully created the idea of a Jewish ‘aniconism’, of an image-less and art-less Judaism, blindly adhering to the ancient prohibition. Or did they? In this chapter I intend to discuss the theme of ‘Jewish aniconism’ from the perspective of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, the nineteenth-century intellectual movement that sought to forge a modern European Jewish identity with the help of historical-critical inquiry. Was it religious traditionalism that prevented the Wissenschaft from developing a halfway decent branch of Jewish art history? Or should we contribute its ‘negative image management’ to other, more secular factors? In present-day scholarship, it has been observed that the Wissenschaft des Judentums had little affinity with art and the visual. Richard Cohen and Vivian Mann, for example, both have assumed that the founding father Leopold Zunz (1794–1886), in his pioneering Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur of 1818, had made a modest plea for the study of Jewish art, which subsequent generations had unanimously failed to heed.1 Traditional Jewish aniconism, or so the subtext of this assumption reads, was an important factor in the Wissenschaft’s persistent neglect of Jewish art, both secular and ceremonial. As I  hope to show in this contribution, both this assessment of Zunz’s research agenda and of his disciples’ failure to follow it up are, at best, only partly correct. Therefore, I would first of all like to return to Zunz’s multi-layered, deeply political text and scrutinise its paragraph on art: where does it feature in Zunz’s enumeration of the sciences, how did he define its place in (national or human) culture and precisely what kind of study did he propose? Working in the spirit of early nineteenth-century cultural nationalism, Zunz had little choice but to base his approach on that of contemporary philology, a

The Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Visual  105 discipline which was then celebrated as the ultimate tool for diagnosing a nation’s cultural content and quality. In his footsteps, the Wissenschaft developed a hermeneutic that was highly sensitive to national features like language and literature, while showing a consistent neglect of universal values such as beauty and aesthetics.2 When, in the final decades of the nineteenth century, jüdische Kunst finally found its way onto the Wissenschaft’s agenda, its interpretation continued to rely on the textual and historical strategies of national philology. As I hope to show in the following, it was not so much the echoes of the biblical second commandment as its own methodological bias that prevented the Wissenschaft from developing an antenna for the presence and meaning of Jewish art through the ages. I shall briefly discuss four examples of the Wissenschaft’s relative helplessness vis-à-vis the visual, which illustrate the intrinsic supremacy of critical philology over iconography in the Wissenschaft’s approach to Jewish national heritage. NEXT TO NATURE: ART IN ZUNZ’S ETWAS ÜBER DIE RABBINISCHE LITERATUR Our first example is Leopold Zunz’s scholarly debut entitled Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur, published in Berlin in 1818. Despite its modest title, it was a highly ambitious little monograph that aimed to serve various causes and audiences in one broad sweep. In less than 50 octavo pages it offered a comprehensive survey of all manifestations of what, for want of a better term, Zunz had named ‘rabbinic literature’.3 According to Zunz, the ‘rabbinic’ corpus covered virtually all genres, both religious and secular, that had been stored in the Jewish library over the ages. In trying to prove that Jewish Bildung was an obvious and indispensible supplement to world culture, Zunz hoped to draw the Jews out of the oriental proto-history to which they had been relegated by contemporary Christian scholars, and introduce them into the timeline of modern European history. In his view, it was crucial that this should be done by a Jewish scholar. Having been the object of Christian theological bias for too many centuries, the Jews should now reclaim their heritage and become the subject as well as the object of their historical narrative. Zunz realised that in order for this narrative to convince both Jewish and gentile colleagues, it needed to be structured in accordance with readily identifiable parameters and draw on a cutting edge methodology. Therefore, he set out to identify the most important Jewish expressions of universal human culture by offering a critical assessment of the many (Hebrew and other) sources that testified to those achievements. Thus, by developing a Jewish national philology (jüdische Philologie) that was based on source criticism (Kritik) and textual analysis (Interpretation), he prepared the soil for almost two centuries of fruitful, if predominantly textual, inquiry into the historical Cultur der Juden. Inspired by the contemporary doctrine of wissenschaftliche Totalität and its quest for one comprehensive, unifying system of knowledge, Zunz decided to put his bibliographie raisonnée of ‘rabbinic literature’ in a broad, universal ontological perspective. It was this all-inclusive angle that necessitated his—admittedly

106  Irene Zwiep few and rudimentary—observations on art, or rather, on the most prominent Jewish sources on and, occasionally, of art.4 What concerns us here is the location of that brief section within the overall structure of the book, and the methodology that Zunz proposed for the study of this area of human productivity. As has been stressed before, Zunz wrote his Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur in order to convince as broad an audience as possible, and therefore approached the vast historical reservoir of Jewish literature from a universal ‘bird’s-eye vantage’ rather than an inner-Jewish perspective.5 All branches of Bildung, he argued, including the ‘rabbinic’ variant, implied an intense human intellectual effort that could be divided into three major domains. The first domain was the sphere where the world of man touched upon the divine; the second was to be found where the realms of man and nature met; the third, and most relevant to his cultural-nationalist argument, was that of human society, where man joined forces with his fellow-men in shaping and perfecting ‘das universale Leben der Nation’, the culture of each particular nation.6 Human discourse in each of these three domains (that is, the divine, the natural and the national) had developed its own genres, each ensuring maximum efficacy when trying to gather, formulate and disseminate the knowledge it wished to convey. None too surprisingly, the domain of national culture almost exclusively relied on genres in which language, the age-old cement of society, had taken centre stage. Accordingly, Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur mapped out how the Jewish philologist, scrutinising the literary output of the Jewish Kulturnation, should browse the shelves of archives and libraries for Jewish poetry and rhetoric, grammar and lexicography, gathering all possible information on books and typography, language and style. In addition, he should of course make proper study of general history, both ancient and modern, in order to put his findings into their original context. On the basis of these textual witnesses, which he was supposed to tackle with a combination of Kritik and Interpretation, he should set out to reconstruct the history of Jewish literature, the ultimate object of all jüdische Philologie. Needless to say, in 1818 the art of how to understand (Verstehen) this vast cultural repository was still waiting to be refined and standardised; in nuce, however, its principles were present in Zunz’s early research agenda. By his authority, and for many decades to come, the early hermeneutic paradigm, with its emphasis on texts and their documentary and linguistic-stylistic deconstruction, would remain the dominant research strategy of the Wissenschaft des Judentums. This was so much the case that when, towards the end of the century, Jewish scholarly attention began to shift towards the analysis of non-literary testimonies, source criticism and literary hermeneutics continued to govern the process of interpretation. There is little need to stress here that art and (other) material objects are conspicuously absent from Zunz’s enumeration of sources that together make up the corpus of Jewish national (read: literary) culture. Nor are they to be found among the divine genres, in which man strives to articulate his understanding of God (notably in theology, halakhah, ethics and liturgy) and His creation (as in the natural sciences, among which Zunz included astronomy, geography, medicine

The Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Visual  107 and his cherished mathematics).7 Yet from man’s abstract contemplation of God’s creation, it was only a small step to his practical involvement with the natural world over which, following biblical teaching, he had been appointed as ruler and keeper. On the one hand, humanity had a long history of using nature and exploiting its fruits for its own benefit; as subheadings in this category, Zunz chose such general accomplishments as ‘technology’, ‘commerce’ and ‘industry’.8 Apart from these utilitarian forms of exploitation, however, there was the time-honoured tradition of man’s efforts at embellishing and adorning the raw matter of nature (die Verschönerung der Stoffe), and of transforming it into objects of beauty—in short: his inalienable inclination to produce art (die Kunst).9 There was no doubt that the Jews had participated in this overall effort, yet, unfortunately for Zunz, it was equally clear that a Jewish Vasari had yet to be born. When it came to the historical-critical study of the (visual) arts, he acknowledged that Jewish sources on the whole proved rather disappointing.10 Architecture (Baukunst), for one, had been grossly neglected, with Constantijn l’Empereur’s (1591–1648) Latin edition of Bavli Middot (1630) as the sole ‘recent’ exception. The same went for the fields of Buchdruckerkunst and calligraphy, where historical information seemed to be lacking completely. By contrast, a scholar who wished to devote his attention to the arts of painting and embroidery might be able to assemble a few, mostly contemporary, testimonies.11 Unfortunately, Zunz concluded, Jewish sources on music had almost solely been transmitted in manuscript, if at all. Still, there was much to be gained from the study of Jewish liturgical melodies, as well as from the scattered references to musical practice in the works of Jewish Renaissance authors such as Judah Moscato (especially from Nefutzot Yehudah, 1588) and Abraham Portaleone (in his Shiltei Gibborim of 1612). When overlooking this modest inventory, we immediately notice that the rich collection of mediaeval manuscript illuminations, the frequent rabbinic negotiations of Hellenistic art, the wealth of Jewish epitaphs and other themes that are receiving considerable scholarly attention today are absent from Zunz’s 1818 list of Jewish sources on universal, supra-national art and the visual. For early nineteenth-century scholars, art equalled the manipulation and beautification of omnipresent nature, and accordingly could never assume a specific nationality. Like philosophy, a discipline that was supposed to reign supreme over all human endeavour,12 it was considered universal and thus entirely hors categorie as far as any cultural-nationalist agenda was concerned. Therefore, if Zunz’s paragraph on art strikes us as elementary, it was not because he secretly subscribed to the idea that Jewish spirituality or monotheism were incompatible with artistic material plurality. On the contrary, when sketching for the first time the contours of the Jewish contribution to Human Culture, he had been keen to trace sources that would supplement the art-historical section from a Jewish perspective. In the current paradigm, however, those sources simply could not be interpreted as Jewish art. The (mostly written) testimonies themselves, however, were Jewish and thus should be submitted to the standard Jewish philological procedure, as developed by Zunz in ‘his’ Wissenschaft des Judentums.

108  Irene Zwiep ART AND THE SAGES IN SACHS’ BEITRÄGE ZUR SPRACH- UND ALTERTUMSKUNDE A neat illustration of the impact of Zunz’s universalistic, textual approach to ‘art and the Jews’ is provided by the Prague/Berlin rabbi and disciple of Solomon Yehudah Rappoport, Michael Sachs (1808–1864), in his Beiträge zur Sprach- und Altertumskunde aus jüdischen Quellen of 1852. Aiming to provide his fellow philologists with a ‘classical-oriental’ contribution to this wide-ranging field,13 Sachs decided to concentrate on the documentary state and, especially, on the linguistic properties of the rabbinic corpus of antiquity, which in the early Wissenschaft paradigm constituted the hard core of Jewish national literature. In an effort to present, as Zunz had instructed, ‘the [Jewish] particular within its broader milieu’,14 he paid special attention to examples of linguistic and cultural contact between the Hellenistic and the Semitic realms. Graeco-Roman art, both as a concept and in the form of concrete objects, was one such point of contact that deserved closer inspection.15 For where the Bible had rejected the very idea of l’art pour l’art, the midrashim showed a deep appreciation of Greek and Roman Bild- und Kunstwerke, especially of the many royal statues the Sages encountered (and enjoyed) on their way to the bath, the circus or the theatre. The rabbinic pun on the biblical phrase ‘ein tzur ke-eloheinu’ (‘neither is there any rock like our God’; 1 Samuel 2:2), which the Sages chose to read as ‘ein tzayyar ke-eloheinu’ (‘there is no artist like our God’; BT Berakot 10a), for Sachs was ‘characteristic of the apparent recognition of art as a noble talent and pursuit’ in early learned circles.16 Ten years after Franz Kugler (1800–1858), in his groundbreaking Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte of 1842, had relegated the Jews to primitive pre-Hellenic times,17 Michael Sachs wrote a modest, if largely implicit, correction, by drawing attention to the productive rabbinic negotiations of Hellenistic art in ancient Roman Palestine. In overall orientation as well as in approach, his rehabilitation neatly followed the methodology laid out by Leopold Zunz in his 1818 treatise, as confirmed and substantiated in his much more elaborate Zur Geschichte und Literatur of 1845. In Sachs’ little exposé, art was once more presented as universal (in casu Graeco-Roman) and approached from a Jewish philological angle. Rather than searching the rabbinic legacy for original Jewish objects and artefacts, Sachs offered a creative reading of those passages from Talmud and midrash that gave evidence of a positive attitude towards art that had been developed on the interface of the Jewish and the Graeco-Roman geistige Atmosphäre (‘spiritual atmosphere’).18 As Sachs’ kindred ‘Jewish nationalist spirit’ Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891) remarked in 1846, it was ‘Paganism [that] saw its God, whereas Judaism heard Him’.19 Yet if Judaism from the onset had renounced the visual, the Jews throughout history had never quite been able to close their eyes, nor their hearts, to its many manifestations. On this distinction hinged the logic of Zunz’s, and later Sachs’, evaluation of the mildly positive Jewish attitude towards art and the visual, despite the harsh wording of the biblical second commandment. Sachs’ suggestive reading of selected rabbinic passages constituted, one might say, the Jewish answer to the budding discipline of German romantic art

The Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Visual  109 history, at a time when Jewish nationalism was still in statu nascendi.20 By the end of the century, however, when nationalism had become an ever more consequential ingredient in European discourse, Jewish intellectuals felt called upon to formulate more decisive responses. One such answer was provided by one of the Wissenschaft’s most prominent critics, Martin Buber (1878–1965), in a famous plea for a ‘normalised’ Jewish national art, which he delivered at the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basle (1901) and which was followed by a collection of essays on contemporary Jewish artists from Joseph Israels to Max Liebermann.21 Working in a context in which Jewish—especially religious and ceremonial—artefacts were becoming increasingly visible as objets d’art, the Wissenschaft too had to readjust its position vis-à-vis art as a potential carrier of Jewish nationality. Within 25 years, four big Judaica exhibitions were staged in Paris (1878), London (1887), Chicago (1892) and Washington (1904).22 The 1890s witnessed the foundation of at least two societies for the study of Jewish art and folklore,23 and, from 1897, almost every five years a new Jewish museum was erected in the main Jewish centres of Central Europe. Thus, with a wealth of new material being made available to a wide Jewish as well as non-Jewish audience, the Wissenschaft had little choice but to broaden its scope and adapt its definition of Jewish literature to henceforth include the visual. Or, as Moritz Steinschneider did in his 1901 Allgemeine Einleitung in die Literatur des Mittelalters, to devote at least some learned space to beauty, which in Steinschneider’s opinion had been a tragically neglected category in Jewish tradition. STEINSCHNEIDER’S ALLGEMEINE EINLEITUNG: TRUTH, GOODNESS, BEAUTY (AND ART) IN LITERARY HISTORY From the beginning, the Wissenschaft’s interpretation of culture as the combination of ‘Literatur und Leben’ carried the mark of the nineteenth-century stress on the textual expression of human civilisation.24 This textual emphasis still determined Moritz Steinschneider’s conception of culture, even if his—surprisingly complex—definition of the phenomenon suggests that the Zunzian paradigm, in which Steinschneider had been raised and to which he remained loyal throughout his long career, had reached its obvious limits. It is hardly surprising that he arranged his compilation of lectures on Jewish civilisation, which he had given at the Veitel Heine Ephraimsche Lehranstalt, under the general heading of Allgemeine Einleitung in die jüdische Literatur des Mittelalters (1901). In the introduction, when discussing the seven parameters of cultural history (that is, nation or race, geography, religion, politics, culture, language and the encyclopaedia of scholarly disciplines), he still identified literature as the core business of the study of a Kulturnation.25 Yet he then immediately proceeded to treat his readers to a survey of cultural manifestations that revealed a much broader, more pluralistic perspective. According to Steinschneider, who leaned heavily on the French historian and philosopher Ernest Renan (1823–1892) for this strand in his argumentation,

110  Irene Zwiep culture found its expression in a Bildung that, in the ideal scenario, was equally related to the three universals of humanity, namely ‘the Good’, ‘the True’, and ‘the Beautiful’ (bonum, verum, pulchrum).26 In Judaism, however, the latter had suffered from a persistent, theologically inspired neglect. Whereas ‘the Good’ had been amply represented in the laws and rites of the Jews, and much ‘Truth’ was to be found in their literature and education, ‘Beauty’ (the natural child of ‘sensual’ polytheism, which the pluralist Steinschneider secretly favoured over ‘intolerant’ monotheism)27 had always been incompatible with abstract Jewish spirituality. ‘Judaism in its fundamental religious principles did not favour the arts’, he wrote, reiterating the age-old cliché of Jewish aniconism.28 It was little wonder then that Hebrew, unlike German, had always lacked an indigenous term for art.29 He therefore heartily disagreed with Michael Sachs, who had totally misread the ancient ein tzayyar ke-eloheinu (‘there is no artist like our God’) as a token of rabbinic enthusiasm for the fine arts. On the contrary, Steinschneider argued, the exegetical witticism indicated that the Sages had unanimously renounced all human art in favour of God as the sole legitimate artist (‘there is no artist but our God’). The rest, he pronounced, was nineteenth-century Jewish apologetics. While Steinschneider believed that Jewish theology had always been essentially opposed to art, the final decades of the nineteenth century had witnessed a budding interest in Jewish material culture that had not escaped his—indeed omnivorous—attention. ‘In recent times’, he wrote, ‘people in Germany have begun to collect objects, which may shed light on Jewish history and cultural history. The original impetus was given by the special exhibition in London (1887), on which some publications have appeared—albeit that, regrettably, England has so little significance for Jewry in general’.30 For the bibliographer Steinschneider, it was not so much the actual exhibition on Anglo-Jewish history in the stately Royal Albert Hall as the subsequent catalogue by Joseph Jacobs (1854–1916) and Lucien Wolf (1857–1930), published in 1888 and describing no less than 2,954 objects, which might prove relevant to the study of Jewish literary history.31 Unlike the 1878 Paris and 1892 Chicago exhibitions, London had been an exclusively Jewish initiative. On the Continent, it had received a follow-up in various societies (notably in Frankfurt, Hamburg and Vienna) that sought to safeguard jüdische Denkmäler (monuments) by approaching them from a primarily ethnographic, rather than philological, perspective. Eminent historians of the Wissenschaft, first and foremost Zunz’s devoted admirer David Kaufmann, had not been reluctant to join these young folkloric Vereine. On a methodological level, the elitist Steinschneider had little affinity with these initiatives, which he accused of pandering to popular tastes and indulging in the latest, trendy German-Jewish jargon.32 Still, as a bibliographer striving for old-fashioned Totalität, he felt obliged to include their results in his exposé on ‘beauty and the Jews’.33 He compiled an exhaustive and fully up-to-date survey of Jewish sources on and of art, ranging from the ‘propaedeutic disciplines’ of theatre, music and dance, to sculpture, monuments, coins and architecture, and also Jewish cemeteries, tombstones and epitaphs, which Zunz had already identified as a veritable goldmine for Jewish historiography.34 Ever the philologist,

The Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Visual  111 Steinschneider could not help but subordinate the study of (material) beauty to the study of (immaterial, literary) truth, and explicitly introduced his survey as an auxiliary tool to critical Literaturgeschichte.35 Occasionally, he would allow his scepticism to gain the upper hand, for example, when claiming that Judaism had always been particularly opposed to sculpture36 or that, pace Kaufmann’s recent work on the Spanish Haggadah, the mediaeval ‘Ornamentik’ of illuminated manuscripts could hardly be classified as art.37 In the same breath, however, he took to task all those (read: the majority of Christian scholars) who had spurned ‘Hebrew art’ and had dared to suggest that the Hebrews had abhorred beauty to such a degree that their artistic production barely covered half a page of archaeological scholarship.38 Steinschneider’s stance vis-à-vis ‘Jewish art’ can be read as the diagnoses of Sachs and Graetz combined: even if religious Judaism had been dogmatically opposed to art, the Jews as a culture had not. Therefore Christian scholars were wrong to ignore or dismiss the possibility of a Jewish appreciation of the arts. In order to judge that appreciation, one should study the relevant historical testimonies, which the bibliographer Steinschneider was keen to lay out for his audience. Characteristically, he did not venture to give an interpretation of those testimonies, nor did he join some of his contemporaries (remember that Buber had given his lecture on Jewish art in the same year that Steinschneider published the Allgemeine Einleitung) in claiming that there was such as thing as Jewish art. From a theological as well as a methodological point of view, Jewish art would always remain a contradiction in terms. Almost a century after Zunz had divulged his preliminary thoughts on the Jewish contribution to universal art, declaring it secondary to the grand project of Jewish literature, the 85-year-old Steinschneider stayed true to the basic tenets of national philology. Yet the changing intellectual climate and his definition of culture in terms of verum, bonum as well as pulchrum prompted him to also include fields (in casu the arts and material culture) that the Wissenschaft had hitherto deemed eccentric to Jewish culture and philology. TO SATISFY THE HISTORICAL RESEARCHER AND THE ART LOVER: DAVID HENRIQUES DE CASTRO’S KEUR VAN GRAFSTENEN (1883) According to Steinschneider, Jewish cemeteries (batei ‘olam, lit. ‘houses of eternity’) had been the only Baudenkmäler (architectural monuments) that had been left by the wandering Jews of Europe.39 In his days, die Kritik had begun to devote considerable energy to the study of Jewish tombstones and epitaphs, but in earlier times it had been Samuel David Luzzatto (1800–1865) in Avnei Zikkaron (Stones of Remembrance, 1841) and Leopold Zunz who had pointed the Wissenschaft in that direction. In the fourth chapter of his 1845 Zur Geschichte und Literatur, entitled ‘Das Gedächtnis der Gerechten’ (The Memory of the Just), the latter had provided a classic scheme for the study of cemeteries, ‘those powerful building blocks [. . .] of specialist history and literature, for genealogy and information on

112  Irene Zwiep historical figures’.40 Steinschneider’s bibliographical survey shows that Zunz’s groundbreaking chapter had been an inspiration to many, even in the Netherlands, where scholars generally had been slow to pick up the lead of the German Wissenschaft. For some reason, Steinschneider failed to mention the monumental Keur van Grafstenen (Selection of Gravestones) of the Portuguese-Jewish Beth Haim in Ouderkerk aan de Amstel, which the wealthy Amsterdam collector David Henriques de Castro Mzn. had published in a bilingual Dutch and German edition in 1883.41 He did mention, however, the various articles through which Henriques de Castro had disseminated the preliminary results of his explorations of this magnificent cemetery during the 1870s. When the Keur appeared in print in 1883, Henriques de Castro had been working on the project (for which he relied on his own ample means) for several decades. He had begun by relying on language and palaeography as the main keys to his historical research, but had soon moved on to more complex strategies, including archaeology and photography. Over the years, he not only managed to write a comprehensive history of the Ouderkerk cemetery, which he discovered had been founded in 1614, but also photographed, described and, if necessary, restored the most striking tombstones, identifying the men and women whom they commemorated, thus adding a colourful chapter to the history of the Portuguese-Jewish community of Amsterdam. In December 1866, he proudly announced in a letter to the ageing Solomon Munk (1803–1867) that he had discovered the tombstones of virtually all the protagonists of the young seventeenth-century community, including Menasseh ben Israel, Saul Levi Morteira, Jacob Sasportas, Moses Rephael d’Aguilar, Samuel Palache and Isaac Orobio de Castro, all of whose headstones ‘were pretty well conserved and appeared most important also from an artistic perspective’.42 In 1888, he was proud to report the discovery of the grave of Spinoza’s parents. In 1892 he completed his survey, having documented some 6,000 graves, and moved on to the cemetery at Middelburg, where he located and restored the grave of Menasseh ben Israel’s son Samuel. Six years later, in 1898, he himself was buried in the Ouderkerk Beth Haim, where he had spent so many of his working days. Several decades before Henriques de Castro had begun his task, two Dutch Ashkenazi literati had followed in Zunz’s and, more explicitly, in Luzzatto’s footsteps, by exploring for the first time the history of the High-German cemetery at Muiderberg, which, like Ouderkerk, was at a comfortable distance from the Jewish capital Amsterdam. Working in a tradition that preferred to merge historicism with religious genres,43 they had interpolated their results into Hebrew-Dutch prayer-books, to be read on the deathbed and at the cemetery. In 1851, Hebrew author, translator and school inspector Samuel Mulder (1792–1862) published Sefer ha-Chayyim (The Book of Life), to which he appended a section called Avnei Zikkaron. In the latter he shared the results of his archival research on the cemetery’s history since 1636, and presented the matzevot of 19 rabbis, scholars and communal leaders.44 Sixteen years later, his younger contemporary Gabriël Polak (1803–1869) composed Sefer Chayyim la-nefesh (The Book of Life to the

The Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Visual  113 Soul; 1867), again a ‘religious manual for the Israelite, to be used in cases of illness, death, and on the cemetery’.45 As in Mulder’s book, the Hebrew prayers and their Dutch translations were followed by a historical section written in Dutch, and a Hebrew chapter called Bat qol gallim (Divine Voice of the Stones) where, again under the generic heading Avnei Zikkaron, Polak had reconstructed and annotated 23 epitaphs of ‘outstanding Jewish men and women’. In both manuals, history and ritual, no doubt still bien étonné, joined forces in order to provide the pious Dutch Israelite with a fitting, cutting edge handbook. In Mulder’s Sefer ha-Chayyim, the balance soon shifted from history towards old-fashioned ethics of the ‘hodie mihi, cras tibi’ kind; in Polak’s Sefer Chayyim la-nefesh the narrative culminated in an atmospheric impression of the cemetery’s layout, buildings and library. Yet, despite their obvious pride in the dignity of the location and its Jewish couleur locale, both authors reveal little sensitivity towards the beauty of the place, nor to the art-historical value of its architecture and sometimes ‘curiously decorated’ gravestones.46 In this, they strongly differ from Henriques de Castro, for whom the Ouderkerk Beth Haim was a locus amoenus of unparalleled beauty. Therefore, he believed, his study would no doubt ‘satisfy the historical researcher and the art lover’, its object being a superior cemetery ‘both on account of its honourable antiquity and its historical memories. But it is also its capacity to move and its beauty that make this cemetery such an interesting and compelling place to visit’, he wrote.47 Aesthetics and the experience of beauty—these were philosophical themes which nineteenth-century national philology had never been allowed to articulate. Henriques de Castro, therefore, had little choice but to emulate the Zunzian model of jüdische Philologie and dissect the Beth Haim not only from the point of view of local history and Jewish literature, but also in terms of its visual and material splendour, of art and iconography. He therefore selected the 30 gravestones most worthy of analysis in the Keur on the basis of two, mutually not always exclusive, criteria: historical potential and artistic value. The photographic material he chose to include ranged from austere slabs covering the graves of illustrious rabbis, via lush floral decorations and the portentous coats of arms of former new-Christian nobility, to detailed biblical scenes that were directly derived from Christian sources. In the young Amsterdam Sephardic community, which had been struggling to fight off gentile jealousy and strike a balance between its Iberian Christian past and the sterner demands of rabbinic Judaism, the issue of ostentatious graves had been a matter of debate. This had not, however, prevented some of the more prominent families from adorning their tombs with a figurative ornamentation, which, when measured against the second commandment, deserved the predicate ‘highly problematic’. When compared with the photographic renderings of these richly decorated graves, Henriques de Castro’s descriptions of their imagery strike us as simple and superficial. In a few curt phrases, he listed what he saw precisely as he saw it, without venturing any further interpretation, adding neither technical comment nor theological verdict. He never admitted any speculation on the Christian origins of the decorations, nor did he raise the question of what those origins meant for their

114  Irene Zwiep presence in a Jewish setting. By way of exoneration, we should remember that the Wissenschaft, with its intricate textual hermeneutics,48 had not provided him with an appropriate ‘visual’ apparatus. The following description of Grave No. 21 at the Ouderkerk Beth Haim may serve as an illustration of the methodological handicap he experienced when facing the intricate Jewish-Christian iconography of seventeenth-century Amsterdam Sephardic funereal art. The early eighteenth-century Grave No. 21 harboured the remains of Samuel Senior Teixeira and his wife Marble, who, judging by the image on her headstone, had died in childbirth in the year 5476/1716. On that headstone, carved in obvious reference to Genesis 35:17–18, we are drawn into the intimate space of the matriarch Rachel’s bedroom, where a midwife and grieving family members crowd together in order to greet the new-born infant and mourn the death of their wife and mother. On the second stone, we find the husband/widower not in his own private rooms but surrounded by the impersonal, monumental architecture of the Temple, as suggested by the presence of the menorah. In this sacred public place, none other than God, in a beam of light, makes His appearance. In Henriques de Castro’s description, the scene is captured as follows: At the top of the stone is a depiction of God’s apparition to Samuel in the Temple. Below, a drapery panel, with floral and fringed border, held up by three cherubs, presents the following Portuguese inscription. [. . .] Below the drapery two mourning putti are seated, leaning against a skull resting on two bones, above which is a winged hourglass.49 It need not be stressed here that Henriques de Castro’s summary adequately recapitulates the figurative elements on Samuel Teixeira’s tombstone. Likewise, his identification of the central tableau as representing the divine epiphany described in 1 Samuel 3:10 (‘then the Lord came and stood and called as at other times’) is entirely accurate. What is striking, however, is his utter silence on this blatant violation of the second commandment, on the apparent Christian provenance of the image, and on the ambivalent Sephardic mentality that had suffered the theological tension. Equally salient is the fact that he did not comment on the effect of the biblical intertextuality in this funereal context, nor on the fact that an uncensored image of the divine apparition served to evoke the memory of the deceased appearing before God in the afterlife—indeed not exactly a Jewish theme either. Not yet equipped to deal with the polyvalence of intertextuality, let alone with its two-dimensional representation in the three-dimensional space of the cemetery, Henriques de Castro failed to contribute to his readers’ understanding of the Beth Haim tombstones beyond the readily visible. Thanks to Zunz, however, he did know how to utilise their inscriptions for the writing of ‘specialist history and literature, for genealogy and information on historical figures’.50 It was up to another disciple of Zunz, the Budapest rabbi and scholar David Kaufmann, to introduce that additional interpretative layer, to supply it with the proper disciplinary basis and to add, almost a quarter of a century before Buber raised the issue, a national dimension to the study as well as the production of Jewish art.

The Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Visual  115 THE MARRIAGE OF PHILOLOGY AND ART IN KAUFMANN’S ETWAS VON JÜDISCHER KUNST In 1818, Leopold Zunz had revolutionised Jewish scholarship by writing a 50-page booklet called Etwas (Something) über die rabbinische Literatur; in 1878, David Kaufmann set out to expand the disciplinary limits of Zunz’s Wissenschaft in a four-page article carrying an equally unassuming title: Etwas von jüdischer Kunst (Something on Jewish Art).51 Before writing down their respective arguments, both men had experienced an encounter that had changed their outlook on Jewish culture. In 1815, Zunz, whose educational career had begun in a German cheder, had entered Berlin university, where he had studied classics with the foremost philologists of his time; in 1878, the young Wissenschaftler Kaufmann had visited the Trocadéro Galleries in Paris, where he had viewed the Judaica collection of the French-Jewish musician Joseph Strauss (1806–1888), which had been included in the first Universal Exhibition of that year.52 As far as Kaufmann was concerned, the Strauss collection eloquently refuted Ernest Renan’s preconception that the Jews had no inclination towards art. What struck him, however, was the fact that Jewish artists seemed involved in producing universal rather than Jewish art, as if they had faithfully internalised the early nineteenth-century scholarly paradigm. As an example, he mentioned two works by the French painter Henry Léopold Lévy (1840–1904) in which the artist, depicting two pivotal scenes from the (after)life of the Parisian patron-saint St.  Dénis, had chosen to express Jewish patriotism with the help of Christian iconography. According to Kaufmann, Lévy’s paintings adequately disproved the claim that ‘because of his subjectivity the Jew was unable to rise to the arts’. He found it hard to stomach, however, that the Jewish artist should be quite so objective as to borrow his themes from Christianity in order to make that ascendance.53 Was there not an entire field of Jewish history, systematically opened up, verified and publicised by the Wissenschaft des Judentums, to be searched for subject matter? Would not the exemplary wars of the Maccabees, the destruction of the Temple, and the subsequent centuries of wandering and persecution serve as a source of constant Jewish inspiration? Kaufmann not only strongly believed that the Jews could produce art—like Sachs and Steinschneider, yet more explicitly than either of them—he also recognised the early ‘victory of art over the prescriptions of religious rite’.54 He also felt that the Jews should produce Jewish art, by choosing their heroes and selecting their themes from the rich, if somewhat lachrymose, Jewish past. In that same innovative movement, the Wissenschaft in its turn should not forget to enrich and reinvent itself with the help of Jewish art. Where Steinschneider had dismissed the catalogue, the Bilderatlas and the ethnographic Mittheilungen as inferior popular genres, Kaufmann hoped they would grow into the ‘cornerstone of a literature [. . .] which one day will constitute a proud building in our midst’.55 In the years that followed, Kaufmann worked hard to lay the foundations of that new building by personally introducing ‘archaeology’ into the Wissenschaft curriculum,56 and, perhaps his most famous project, by collaborating with Austrian

116  Irene Zwiep art-historian Julius von Schlosser (1866–1938) and palaeographer David Heinrich Müller (1846–1912) on the splendidly decorated Sarajevo Haggadah.57 Given the current state of scholarship, Kaufmann argued in his part of the publication, the study of Jewish manuscript illumination might seem a journey to nowhereville (eine Reise nach Nirgendheim). Like archaeology, it had not yet secured its position on the Jewish national map, no doubt partly due to the ineradicable, circular bias that ‘since [on the basis of the second commandment] the Jews had not been allowed art, there had been no Jewish art’.58 To correct this gross misreading of Jewish cultural history, Kaufmann sketched the contours of what he considered to be the obvious indigenous tradition of Jewish art, with the synagogue as the central locus of its production, the professional class of soferim as its main producers, and the wealth of mediaeval illuminated Bibles, megillot, haggadot, siddurim, machzorim and ketubbot as its foremost platforms. Coming from a tradition that had long spurned ‘cosmopolitan’ art in favour of the national hermeneutics of Jewish language and literature, David Kaufmann strove to realise a timely innovation: the marriage of philology and art, which, he believed, would be of the greatest benefit to both. Henceforth, art could draw upon the nation’s long and varied history, which philologists had worked so hard to uncover. Scholarship, on the other hand, would do well to embrace the visual and expand its apparatus beyond the textual dimensions of traditional philology. Thus, whereas the Wissenschaft’s curriculum was expanded, universal art was reduced to national, Jewish proportions. In Kaufmann’s conception of art-history, the nationality of Jewish art lay in its authorship. If the Wissenschaft could prove, with the help of arguments derived from the work itself, that its maker had been a Jew, consciously working from the Jewish iconographic tradition, then it could rightly claim to have identified a work of Jewish art. The longstanding tension between ‘likely Christian’ and ‘potentially Jewish’ authorship thus became an important, perhaps even the most important, constant in Kaufmann’s studies. Unlike David Henriques de Castro before him, he was deeply attentive to the problem of symbolism as a complicating factor in determining the nationality of an object at hand. When trying to establish the Jewish provenance of the Hammâm-Lif mosaics, for example, which had been discovered in Tunisia in 1883 and featured a curious combination of Jewish and Christian emblems, he observed that ‘one should pay proper attention to whether a symbolically used object in a figurative picture appears isolated and with a clearly symbolic function, or without additional meaning, as one object among many’.59 When viewed in isolation, the ancient images of bread and fish might easily refer to Jesus and the Christian Eucharist; when set among other plants and animals, however, and depicted in a plainly naturalist style, they might well be no more than what they appeared to be: plain bread and ordinary fish, most likely even of Jewish extraction. Of course, we should not mistake Kaufmann’s attention to iconographic symbolism for an abstract interest in the polyvalence, let alone the ambivalence, of art. Both in his discussion of the Hammâm-Lif synagogue and of the Sarajevo Haggadah, his ultimate, indeed somewhat apologetic goal had been to prove the Jewish origin of the items under consideration, and thus to strengthen the Jewish national cause from this additional perspective.

The Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Visual  117 Summing up, one could say that David Kaufmann’s late nineteenth-century turn to Jewish archaeology and art-history was not so much a breach from the previous scholarly tradition as a logical continuation of that tradition, and an attempt at adapting it to an intellectual climate that was increasingly dominated by both the visual and the national. It did not, for example, entail a fundamental rethinking of the incompatibility of art and Jewish spiritual monotheism. Indeed, the Wissenschaft had never neglected the study of art because of a belief in Jewish aniconism; it was its early cultural-national emphasis on Jewish literature (as opposed to ‘natural’, universal art) that had distracted them from its potential. Staying true to this initial orientation, each of the scholars discussed in this article made a clear distinction between Judaism’s essential religious hostility towards art on the one hand, and art’s pragmatic, at times even enthusiastic, reception by the Jewish Kulturnation on the other. As part of the Jewish cultural heritage, they could not help but occasionally encounter the visual and study it as far as their methodology allowed. Indeed, when scholars finally began to open up and expand the Wissenschaft’s original philological paradigm, that methodology still remained firmly indebted to its original hermeneutic, as witnessed by David Kaufmann’s eminent focus on Kritik, that is, on determining the provenance of an object and affirming its non-Christian ‘nationality’. To this very day, the Wissenschaft’s many disciples have never felt entirely comfortable when studying Jewish art. Sometimes confusing Jewish religion and Jewish culture, they occasionally allowed the second commandment to distract them, even if its foreboding presence never quite dissuaded them from studying Jewish art in greater historical depth. Perhaps the best illustration of this persistent ambivalence is provided by the great British historian Cecil Roth (1899–1970), who once famously remarked that the ‘conception of Jewish Art may appear to some a contradiction in terms’,60 yet surprised his readers by offering a 300-page illustrated history of that splendid paradox, which has baffled, upset and inspired so many great minds in (Jewish) history. NOTES   1 ‘Leopold Zunz [. . .] encouraged the study of Jewish art. [. . .] Zunz’ mention of the arts was concealed in a general discussion of the overall needs in Jewish studies and made no impact on anyone’; in Richard I. Cohen, Jewish Icons. Art and Society in Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 5 (emphasis added); ‘Although Leopold Zunz had mentioned art in his 1818 programme for the study of Judaism [. . .] art continued to be excluded from the canon of Jewish studies for the remainder of the nineteenth century’; in Vivian B. Mann, Jewish Texts on the Visual Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 143 (emphasis added).   2 Together with ‘Truth’ and ‘the Good’, ‘Beauty’ belonged to the three so-called universals of nineteenth-century thought; see, for example, Victor Cousin’s (1792–1867) Sorbonne course on the subject, which was published in 1836 as Du vrai, du beau et du bien, and was reprinted many times during the following decades. In Zunz’s Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur (Berlin: Maurersche Buchhandlung, 1818), he tacitly adopted this classification, without further comment. When discussing ‘Jewish art’ almost a century later, Moritz Steinschneider offered a few elaborations on the subject; see above, pp. 109–11.

118  Irene Zwiep   3 Zunz, Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur, 2, footnote (unnumbered). Perhaps Zunz’s choice was polemically motivated; see the following remark in his Zur Geschichte und Literatur (Berlin: Veit und Comp., 1845), 20: ‘Den Namen “rabbinisch” hat die jüdische Literatur gleichfalls von den Theologen erhalten’ (The name ‘rabbinic’ was likewise bestowed upon Jewish literature by the theologians).   4 Zunz, Zur Geschichte und Literatur, 21–2.   5 The wish to outline the Jewish contribution to universal culture determined the structure of the 1818 treatise, but received more prominent attention in the 1845 Zur Geschichte und Literatur, where Zunz put forward Jewish literature as one of the many currents that nourished the ‘sea of spiritual endeavour’ and, by the same token, would lead us back to the Urgeist, that is, to the source of all human culture: ‘zugleich eine Ergänzung der allgemeinen Literatur, aber mit eigenem Organismus [. . .] ist die Totalität der geistigen Betriebsamkeit ein Meer, so ist einer von den Strömen, welche jenem das Wasser zuführen eben die jüdische Literatur [. . .] die Schiffahrt auf dem einen Strome kann zu der Urquelle führen, der aller Geist entströmt.  [.  .  .]’ (complementing general literature, yet with an organism of its own. [. . .] The totality of spiritual endeavour is a sea, and one of the currents that supply it with water happens to be Jewish literature [. . .] sailing one current can lead one to the original source, from which all spirit flows); Zunz, Zur Geschichte und Literatur, 2–3.   6 For Zunz, his immediate colleagues and many of his followers, Cultur (quite a novel concept at the time) was the combination of the literature and the actual (everyday and historical) life of a particular nation. See, among many others, Abraham Geiger in his Allgemeine Einleitung in die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Berlin: Louis Gerschel Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1875), 10: ‘und hierbei ist Literatur und Leben, also Cultur, gleichmässig zu berücksichtigen’. For the introduction of the concept and its early connotations, see Irene E. Zwiep, “Scholarship of Literature and Life. Leopold Zunz and the Invention of Jewish Culture,” in How the West Was Won. Essays on Literary Imagination, the Canon, and the Christian Middle Ages for Burcht Pranger, ed. W. Otten et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 165–73.   7 Zunz, Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur, 16–20. Anticipating the Wissenschaft’s persistent abhorrence of the ‘unenlightened’, Zunz chose to ignore all references to the Jewish mystical tradition.   8 Ibid., 20–1.   9 Ibid., 21. 10 ‘[über] die Kunst besitzen wir einige Schriften, zuviel, wie es scheint, für die Kritik, die sich daran geübt,—zu wenig, als daß wir nicht selbst noch mithelfen müssten Inneres und Ausseres zu beschreiben’; ibid., 22. 11 ‘Sogar über Mahlerei und Stickerei, wenigstens aus neuerer Zeit, könnte ein Liebhaber etwas zusammen bringen’; ibid., 22. 12 ‘über den ganzen Tummelplatz menschlicher Thätigkeit herrscht mit ausschließender Majestät die Philosophie, überall unsichtbar [. . .]’; ibid., 42. 13 ‘die mannigfachen Philologischen Disciplinen’; Michael Sachs, Beiträge zur Sprach- und Altertumskunde aus jüdischen Quellen, 2 vols. (Berlin: Veit und Comp., 1852–1854), iii. 14 ‘das Einzelne im größeren Zusammenhange’; ibid., v. 15 Ibid., 44–52. 16 ‘karakteristisch für eine bereits zur Geltung gekommene Anerkennung der Kunst, als einer edlen Begabung und Thätigkeit’; ibid., 47. 17 See Margaret Olin, “From Bezal’el to Max Liebermann. Jewish Art in Nineteenth-Century Art-Historical Texts,” in Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, ed. Catherine M. Soussloff (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 19–40 (22–3). 18 Sachs, Beiträge zur Sprach- und Altertumskunde, 36. 19 Quoted in Cohen, Jewish Icons, 6.

The Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Visual  119 20 For Sachs’ work mirroring ‘the prevailing national spirit of contemporary historiography’ and his influence on Heinrich Graetz’s more outspokenly Jewish-national orientation, see Ismar Schorsch, The Structure of Jewish History and Other Essays (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary/Ktav Publishing House, 1975), esp. 50. 21 Martin Buber, “Von jüdischer Kunst. Aus einem Referat erstattet auf dem 5. Zionisten-Congress zu Basel am 27.12.1902,” in Buber, Jüdische Bewegung. Gesammelte Aufsätze und Ansprachen (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1920); and Martin Buber, Jüdische Künstler (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1903). 22 Bill Gross, Catalogue of Catalogues. Bibliographical Survey of a Century of Temporary Exhibitions of Jewish Art (Jerusalem: Center for Jewish Art of the Hebrew University, 1980). 23 The Gesellschaft für Sammlung und Konservierung von Kunst- und historischen Denkmählern in Vienna (1895) and Rabbi Max Grünwald’s (1871–1953) Gesellschaft für jüdische Volkskunde in Hamburg (1898); for an overall survey, see Naomi Feuchtwanger-Sarig, “Linking the Past to the Future. A  Centenary of Documenting Jewish Art,” in Presenting Jewish Ceremonial Art, ed. Julie-Marthe Cohen and Emile Schrijver (Amsterdam: Joods Historisch Museum, 2001), 11–44. 24 See note 7 above. 25 ‘[. . .] und da die Literatur selbst ein Teil der Kultur ist, also hier das engste Verhältnis zwischen beiden stattfindet, so ist überall die Kulturbetrachtung die Hauptgrundlage für die Anschauung der Literatur, also beide gegenseitige Hilfsmittel’; Moritz Steinschneider, Allgemeine Einleitung in die jüdische Literatur des Mittelalters (Jerusalem: Bamberger & Wahrmann, 1938), 10–11. 26 ‘Die Kultur besteht in der harmonischen Bildung zu den drei Grundideen, der humanen Trias: des Guten, des Wahren und des Schönen’; ibid., 11. In his historical work, Renan had built his teleological tales of human progress on the premise that it had always been his striving for le vrai, le beau et le bien (no doubt an allusion to Victor Cousin’s 1836 publication of the same title; see note 2 above) that had elevated mankind above the level of sheer materialism; cf. Dieter M. Hoffmann, Renan und das Judentum. Die Bedeutung des Volkes Israel im Werk des historien philosophe (Würzburg: s.n., 1988), 48. 27 See Irene E. Zwiep, “From Dialektik to Comparative Literature. Steinschneider’s Orientalism,” in Studies on Steinschneider. Moritz Steinschneider and the Emergence of the Science of Judaism in Nineteenth-Century Germany, ed. Gad Freudenthal and Reimund Leicht (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), 137–50. 28 On Jewish aniconism, see Kalman Bland, The Artless Jew. Medieval and Modern Denials of the Visual (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), esp. 13–36. 29 When explaining the mediaeval term melakhah (Latin ars, equivalent to Arabic sina‘a), Steinschneider harked back to Menachem ben Abraham Bonafous’ late fourteenth-century Sefer ha-Gedarim (Book of Definitions), where art had been defined as ‘a human action, managed by the practical intellect, executed in limited ways with the help of limited means [. . .] aiming as much as possible for the likeness of nature, since art is close to nature’; Steinschneider, Allgemeine Einleitung, 23 (emphasis added). 30 Ibid., 26–7. 31 Joseph Jacobs and Lucien Wolf, Catalogue of the Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition, Royal Albert Hall, London 1887 (London: Publications of the Exhibition Committee 4, 1888). 32 ‘Die Vereine für Erhaltung von Antiquitäten in Frankf. a. M., in Hamburg und Wien sind für das grössere Publikum berechnet. [. . .]’; Steinschneider, Allgemeine Einleitung, 27. For Steinschneider’s elitist stance on scholarship, see especially his brief but ardent plea against popularising the results of Wissenschaft philology in the introduction to Die Hebräischen Übersetzungen des Mittelalters und die Juden als Dolmetscher. Ein Beitrag zur Literaturgeschichte des Mittelalters (Berlin: Kommissionsverlag des Bibliographischen Bureaus, 1893), xxiv.

120  Irene Zwiep 33 Steinschneider, Allgemeine Einleitung, 22–36. 34 Zunz, Zur Geschichte und Literatur, chapter 4. 35 ‘Für die hier folgende Übersicht gilt als leitender Gesichtspunkt, daß sie zugleich als Hilfmittel für die Literatur diene’; Steinschneider, Allgemeine Einleitung, 25. 36 ‘Plastische Kunst war vorzugsweise verboten’; ibid., 25. 37 ‘Jene Ornamentik ist nicht eigentlich darstellende Kunst’; ibid., 26. For Kaufmann on mediaeval manuscript illuminations as Jewish art, see above, pp. 115–17. 38 ‘Hebräische Kunst war nicht vertreten. In der Kunstgeschichte von [Gustav] Lübke ist das Hebräische auf einer halben Seite erledigt und den Archaeologen überlassen. Ein Anderer ([Otto] v. Leixner) entdeckt sogar bei den Hebräeren einen “Schönheitshass” ’; Steinschneider, Allgemeine Einleitung, 26. 39 ‘Die jüdische Baukunst konnte sich nicht auf die eigene Wohnung verlegen, da die Juden meistens eines festen Wohnsitzes entbehrten, nicht auf öffentliche Gebäude, weil sie des Vaterlandes entbehrten. [. . .] Also blieb nur das Haus der Ewigkeit’; ibid., 29. 40 Thus Henriques de Castro in Keur van grafstenen op de Portugees-Israëlietische begraafplaats te Ouderkerk aan de Amstel met beschrijving en biografische aantekeningen, photographic reprint with English translation (Ouderkerk aan de Amstel: Stichting tot Instandhouding en Onderhoud van Historische Begraafplaatsen in Nederland, 1999), ‘Voorrede’, x. 41 For Henriques de Castro as a scholar and, above all, collector, see Julie-Marthe Cohen, “David Henriques de Castro Mzn.: A  Collector in Nineteenth-Century Amsterdam,” Studia Rosenthaliana 33, no.  1 (1999): 28–46; and Julie-Marthe Cohen, Onder de hamer. De veelzijdige verzameling van David Henriques de Castro (1826–1898) [Up for auction. The variegated collection of David Henriques de Castro (1826–1898)] (Amsterdam: Joods Historisch Museum, 1999). For his work on the Ouderkerk cemetery, see her introduction (‘De onderste steen boven. David Henriques de Castro en zijn onderzoek op Beth Haim in Ouderkerk aan de Amstel’) in the 1999 re-edition of the Keur. 42 Quoted in Cohen, “De onderste steen boven,” 12–13. 43 Irene Zwiep, “The Haskamah of History, or: Why Did the Dutch Wissenschaft des Judentums Spurn Zunz’s Writings,” European Journal of Jewish Studies 7, no.  2 (2013): 131–50. 44 Sefer ha-Chayyim (Amsterdam: s.n., 1851), 144–52. That same year the historical section was published, together with Avnei Zikkaron, as a separate brochure under the title Iets over de begraafplaatsen der Nederlandsch-Israëlitische gemeente te Amsterdam, en bijzonder over die te Muiderberg [On the cemeteries of the Dutch-Israelite community of Amsterdam, and on Muiderberg in particular]. 45 Sefer Chayyim la-nefesh. Godsdienstig handboek voor Israëlieten te gebruiken bij ziekte, overlijden, en op de begraafplaatsen (Amsterdam: J.L. Joachimsthal, 1867). 46 For a brief outline and comparison of the two, see Irene E. Zwiep, “Piety, Poetry and History. The Study of Cemeteries and the Infrastructure of the Early Dutch Wissenschaft des Judentums,” in Memoria—Wege jüdischen Erinnerns. Festschrift für Michael Brocke zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Birgit E. Klein and Christiane E. Müller (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2005), 292–6. 47 Henriques de Castro, Keur, 33. 48 For a survey of nineteenth-century Hermeneutik, see Joachim Wach, Das Verstehen. Grundzüge einer Geschichte der hermeneutischen Theorie im 19. Jahrhundert, 3 vols. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1926–1933; reprint Hildesheim: Olms, 1966). 49 Henriques de Castro, Keur, 109. 50 See above, pp. 111–12 and note 40. 51 First published in David Kaufmann, “Etwas von jüdischer Kunst,” Israelitische Wochenschrift 9 (1878): 301, 309, 317, 325, 333, 341, 349, and later included in Marcus Brann, ed., Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: J. Kaufmann, 1915), 3: 150–3.

The Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Visual  121 52 The catalogue (which was enthusiastically welcomed by Kaufmann) was compiled by George Stenne, Collection de M. Strauss. Description des objets d’art religieux hébraïques. Exposés dans les galéries du Trocadéro, à l’Exposition universelle de 1878 (Poissy: S. Lejay et Cie, 1878). 53 ‘Da hätten wir also den ersten Beweis für jene so dreist vorgetragene Behauptung, daß der Jude in folge seiner Subjectivität sich nicht zur Kunst erheben könne. Nur Schade, daß die Wiederlegung so ungestüm und bis ins Extrem geliefert wurde. Mußte die Objectivität so weit getrieben werden, dass der künstlerische Vorwurf einem fremden Gedankenkreise, einer anderen Religion entnommen wurde?’; Kaufmann, “Etwas von jüdischer Kunst,” 151. 54 ‘[. . .] der Sieg der Kunst über die Vorschriften des Cultus’; ibid., 152. 55 ‘einen Grundstein zu einer Literatur [. . .] die dereinst einen stolzen Bau in unserer Mitte darstellen könnte’; ibid., 152. 56 ‘Zahlreiche Disziplinen hat die in diesem Jahrhundert so wunderbar erblühte Wissenschaft des Judentums ins Leben gerufen; die Archaeologie is nicht darunter’; David Kaufmann, “Beiträge zur jüdischen Archäologie,” in Brann, Gesammelte Schriften, 3: 154–72 (first published in Revue des Études Juives 13 [1886], 45–61). Under this new disciplinary heading, Kaufmann suggested, much established research could be classified more adequately, notably the study of graves and epitaphs, which Steinschneider had considered a mere auxiliary to Jewish literary history (see above, note 32). 57 Kaufmann had written the appendix to David Heinrich Müller and Julius von Schlosser, Die Haggadah von Sarajevo. Eine Spanisch-Jüdische Bilderhandschrift des Mittelalters (Vienna: s.n., 1898), 254–311. The elaborate “Zur Geschichte der jüdischen Handschriften-Illustration” was reprinted in Brann, Gesammelte Schriften, 3: 173–228. On von Schlosser’s initiative and the bias of Jewish aniconism that informed it, see Olin, “From Bezal’el to Max Liebermann,” 30–1. In view of this bias, it is hardly surprising that the Christian scholars left the discussion of the Jewish art-historical aspects to Kaufmann, thus almost provoking the apologetic, emphatically Jewish nationalist orientation of his contribution to their project. 58 ‘Ein Vorurteil ist es hauptsächlich, welches die Vernachlässigung dieses Kunstgebietes noch begünstigt hat. [. . .] Weil es angeblich bei den Juden keine Bilder geben sollte, darum gab es keine’; Kaufmann, “Zur Geschichte der jüdischen Handschriften-Illustration,” 174. 59 Kaufmann, “Beiträge zur jüdischen Archäologie,” 159. 60 Cecil Roth, introduction to Jewish Art. An Illustrated History (London: Valentine Mitchell, 1961), quoted in Olin, “From Bezal’el to Max Liebermann,” 19.

8 Aestheticism and the Flight from Jewishness Todd M. Endelman

The acculturation and integration of Jews in the West unfolded against a background of widespread contempt for and apprehension about their perceived otherness in which visual and literary images of their differences from their neighbours were rife. Central to the stigmatisation of their difference was the hoary association between Jews and commerce. Here, unlike the imagined linkage between Jews and murder lust in the case of the blood libel, the connection was not illusory. Instead, it reflected, even if in a distorted way, the high profile of Western and Central European Jews in local, regional and international trade from the late mediaeval period. For those Christians whose status was threatened by the expansion of capitalism and the levelling of hierarchies, trade was a tainted, disruptive force; its ethos and practices sordid, at worst, and dreary, at best. It was imagined to corrupt the soul and dull the imagination, chaining its practitioners to the ordinary, the everyday, the commonplace, the coarse and the material. Reinforcing this discursive link between Jewishness and materialism was Christian theological polemic. Long before trade became the hallmark of Jewish economic activity, Christian polemicists forged the binary distinction that Christianity was a spiritual religion and Judaism a material or this-worldly religion, obsessed with the corporeal, the sensual and the mundane—that is, observing the Law. Christian supercessionism incorporated this opposition, privileging believing over doing. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, this constellation of ideas influenced the behaviour of upwardly mobile, socially ambitious Jews who strove to make their mark outside the bounds of their own community. In the German states, for example, it quickened the influx of Jews into the universities and their flight from ‘Jewish’ occupations into the professional, artistic and bureaucratic middle class, to which Bildung, rather than wealth, was the ticket of admission. The logic underwriting this flight was straightforward: what better way to demonstrate one’s freedom from and transcendence of the materialism of Jewish life than to turn one’s back on buying and selling and devote oneself to the pursuit of science, art, music, literature, philosophy and the like. Such reasoning was especially attractive in states where emancipation and integration were partial and incomplete, and Jews who desired a larger arena in which to shine were compelled to demonstrate their difference from other Jews. This is not to claim that Heinrich Heine became a poet because banking and trade were viewed as essentially Jewish. Rather, my

Aestheticism and the Flight from Jewishness  123 point is that the discursive links between Jewishness and trade influenced and guided the movement of Jews into new, non-commercial spheres of activity. Complicating this was an additional assumption, commonplace in Jewish and Christian scholarship and high culture more generally, that cast its shadow on Jews who devoted their lives to the creation, promotion, interpretation and celebration of the plastic arts: the myth of Jewish aniconism. As Kalman Bland explains in The Artless Jew, by the second half of the nineteenth century it was widely believed that Jews, as a consequence of the second commandment, were ‘a People of the Book rather than a People of the Image’, that there were no ‘authentic Jewish traditions in painting, sculpture, and architecture’, that Jews imitated the art of their hosts or neighbouring cultures and that Jewish attitudes ‘toward visuality and the visual arts’ ranged ‘from indifference to suspicion and hostility’.1 The dark side of this assumption was Richard Wagner’s claim that the Jews of his day produced and appreciated art only for its commercial, pragmatic value. In Das Judenthum in der Musik (1850), he made the additional claim that among Jews ‘the sensory capacity for sight’ was insufficiently developed to allow them to create anything real in art. ‘[T]heir eyes are preoccupied with matters much more practical than beauty and the spiritual content of things in the phenomenal world’. The Jewish artists of his day, he wrote, ‘are no different in attitude toward their visual art than modern Jewish composers are to music’.2 The Wagnerian twist to the myth of Jewish aniconism, along with the association of Jews with materialism, complicated life for talented Jews who were drawn to the visual arts in Western and Central Europe and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was especially the case for young men who identified with aestheticism, a cultural movement that cultivated and celebrated acts of intense visual perception, including the verbal description and interpretation of works of art. Single-mindedly worshipping the beautiful, the sublime and the lofty distanced them from the grubby world of commerce, while bringing them into contact with elite social circles of collectors, patrons, connoisseurs and tastemakers. If Jews were thought to lack ‘the sensory capacity for sight’, as Wagner claimed, then the exquisite taste, discernment and connoisseurship of Jewish aesthetes demonstrated how distant they were from their origins. What Jonathan Freedman wrote about the social function of aestheticism in late-Victorian Britain encapsulates what aestheticism accomplished for Jews everywhere who flocked to its banner: Aestheticism became a way for children of the middle class to make their way in the increasingly fluid social world of late-nineteenth-century England. For it helped middle-class men and women claim authority for themselves in that world: to establish oneself as the arbiter of the aesthetic, devotee of ‘the beautiful’, was to proclaim oneself as a member of an elite whose standing was based on taste and discernment, not birth, wealth or the other accoutrements of aristocratic privilege.3 Yet, however cultivated their perceptions, Jewish aesthetes were rarely able to escape the shadow cast by the imaginative link between Jews and materialism.

124  Todd M. Endelman At times some doubted the success of their transformation into arbiters of taste and beauty, and worried that others did as well, fearing that their aestheticism was skin-deep, imitative and derivative, an act that they, like other Jews on the road to radical assimilation, were performing or a mask they were donning. Compounding the precariousness of their achievement was the increasing prominence of Jews in the business of art from the end of the century—the Duveen brothers and Asher Wertheimer in London; René Gimpel, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Siegfried Bing, Georges Bernheim, Paul Rosenberg, Nathan Wildenstein and the Seligmann brothers in Paris; Paul Cassirer in Berlin; and Julius Stern in Düsseldorf. How were Jewish aesthetes, especially those who profited from their connoisseurship, to escape identification with Jewish merchants of art, who also prided themselves on their taste and discernment? These art dealers, moreover, were often no more than one generation removed, if even that, from the ranks of humble Jewish traders. Nathan Wildenstein sold ties in Strasbourg, for example, before moving to Paris, whereas Joel Duveen was a travelling salesman for a wholesale firm in Hull that imported Dutch vegetable products. These tensions—between art and commerce and between Jewishness and aestheticism—loomed large in the life of the once well known but now largely forgotten Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), who, with determination and flair, made himself into the consummate connoisseur and aesthete, a disinterested sage ‘whose continuing service to art put him on a rarefied plane far above mere professors or professionals’.4 Born in Lithuania in 1865, Berenson came to Boston in 1875, when his mother and siblings joined his father, who had settled there two years earlier. His father, an unsuccessful but well-read peddler, neither attended synagogue nor provided his sons with a Jewish education once they left Lithuania. As a young adolescent, Berenson became aware that he was intellectually gifted and determined to make the most of it, in every way possible. In his view, this required the blurring of his Jewishness. Educated at a local grammar school and then briefly at the famed Boston Latin School, he attended Boston University for a year and then crammed for a year before entering Harvard as a freshman, in 1884, at age 18. At the time, he already knew what path he wished to follow: ‘a striving for perfection’, cultivating ‘a precise discrimination of distinctions’—what one of his biographers called ‘a connoisseurship of the spirit’.5 At Harvard, Berenson adopted an aestheticist persona and became a protégé of Charles Elliot Norton, professor of the history of art and Ruskinian critic of industrial society. In a photograph from his freshman year, his small, delicate features and his hair, worn in luxuriant wavy curls, parted in the middle, swept back over his ears almost to the nape of his neck, exude pre-Raphaelite sensitivity and sensuality. At the start of his second year, Berenson was baptised an Episcopalian at Trinity Church, Copley Square, by Phillips Brooks, the church’s rector and one of the four regular preachers at Harvard. His motives, whereas not entirely utilitarian, were not especially spiritual or doctrinal either. He had not been a believing Jew and never became a believing Christian (that is, he never believed that Jesus of Nazareth was the son of God whose death atoned for the sins of humankind). Christianity’s appeal to him, rather, was cultural. In a short story he published

Aestheticism and the Flight from Jewishness  125 in the Harvard Monthly in his junior year, he attributed to the central figure, the aptly named aesthete Robert Christie, what was undoubtedly his own attitude to Christianity: Mr. Christie [. . .] had no religious feelings or belief. But he had the profoundest admiration for Christianity, not only as a historic fact and still living force, but for its successful symbolization of human life. [. . .] His regard for Christianity was, on the whole, much more because it inspired artists than for any other reason. And he thought an appreciation of Christianity necessary now to enable us to appreciate the arts.6 Berenson’s baptism in Boston was the first of two as a young man. In early 1891, after settling in Italy, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. This, too, was a conversion of cultural conviction, although less lofty concerns were at work as well. He was in love by then with Mary Costelloe, wife of the Anglo-Irish barrister and militant Catholic, Frank Costelloe, who repeatedly urged his religious views on Berenson when he visited London. So it is possible that his second conversion was mixed up with his infatuation with Mary, whom he married after the death of her husband. His comments at the time of his baptism, however, echo the comments he made in the short story to which I referred above. While he wrote that his second baptism brought him temporarily ‘into direct contact with otherness’, he also expressed himself in terms that referenced the visual. He felt as if he had ‘emerged into the light after long groping in the darkness’, such that ‘every outline, every edge, and every surface was in a living relation to me and not as hitherto, in a merely cognitive one’.7 He also made clear that this baptism bridged the gap between him and his Italian Catholic surroundings. A few months before his baptism, he wrote to Mary from Venice that it was ‘so easy’ to feel Catholic there: ‘I dare say what makes me love Catholicism so much is the fact that it is so essentially Italian. It is only in Italy where I feel that nothing can be thought of without it’.8 And soon after his baptism he wrote to her: ‘Today I felt so at one with everybody. I even felt reconciled to the brass band. [. . .] Why not walk in step with it sweetly and gladly, instead of paralyzing my legs by trying to march in another step’.9 Why remain odd man out? he seemed to be saying. In any case, whatever transcendent feelings overcame him at the time, they soon faded, for Berenson was at heart a sceptic. A Harvard classmate, also Jewish, who was with him in Italy, viewed the episode as a passing enthusiasm, remarking that Berenson had ‘lost his sense of humor’.10 Within a year or two, he ceased to practise his new religion.11 This, however, is to get ahead of ourselves. To return to Boston: his conversion to Episcopalianism and his reputation as a brilliant Harvard man, along with Norton’s patronage, gained him entry into the Back Bay homes of fashionable Bostonians. This gratified him immensely, for he was—and remained his entire life—a relentless social climber. But his baptism did not endear him to elite undergraduate social circles. He continued to experience slights and exclusions, for he had three strikes against him: his Jewishness, his poverty and his physical slightness. Thus, in part from necessity,

126  Todd M. Endelman he found friends largely among other exotic aesthetes. The two most important were the half-Spanish George Santayana, who later taught philosophy at Harvard, and Charles Loeser, son of a wealthy, German-Jewish, Brooklyn dry goods merchant and already a discriminating collector of books and pictures. Santayana later described the group as: [. . .] that odious category of outsiders who hung loosely on the fringes of college life: odd persons going about alone, or in little knots, looking intellectual, or looking dissipated. They were likely to be Jews or radicals or to take drugs; to be musical, theatrical, or religious; sallow, or bloated, or imperfectly washed; either too shabby or too well dressed.12 After the Second World War, Berenson recalled, when he was at Harvard he preferred the conversation of his professors to that of his fellow students. Their conversation was more worthwhile and more ‘accessible’, for ‘nothing is so clicky [cliquish] and exclusive as the schoolboy or the schoolboy-minded Anglo-Saxon of all ages’.13 Loeser charted a course similar to that of Berenson, while, however, remaining a Jew. After graduation from Harvard and a year and a half of graduate work in philosophy there and in Berlin, he settled permanently in Florence, devoting himself to the study of art and archaeology, contributing to Italian art journals, becoming ‘a familiar figure known for his connoisseurship’ in the print rooms of Europe.14 He collected old prints and drawings, Italian mediaeval and Renaissance art, and the work of Cézanne, whom he was one of the first to appreciate. Unlike Berenson, he was willing to be known as a Jew. Santayana, whose relations with Berenson were often prickly, implicitly highlighted this difference when he later recalled the first time that he met Loeser: He at once told me that he was a Jew, a rare and blessed frankness that cleared away a thousand pitfalls and insincerities [. . . for] many of them [Jews] court the world and wish to pass for ordinary Christians or ordinary atheists. Not so Loeser: he had no ambition to manage things for other people, or to worm himself into fashionable society.15 Berenson’s years at Harvard strengthened his commitment to aestheticism and radical assimilation. However, like many other Jews who chose this path, he found that baptism, even when repeated, and fastidious connoisseurship did not easily wash away his Jewishness, at least in the eyes of others. This led him not to renounce but, rather, to renew the effort. One way he did so was to underline his detachment from Jewishness by presenting Jews and Judaism negatively and radical assimilation positively. In another short story, this one published in the Harvard Monthly in July 1888, after he was already in Europe, his protagonist, Israel Koppel, a young shtetl prodigy, finds enlightenment in Vilna and returns home a clean-shaven free-thinker. One day he falls into a coma while reading a secular book and, due to the immemorial, superstitious customs of the shtetl,

Aestheticism and the Flight from Jewishness  127 is buried alive. The anti-orthodox message of the story is clear. What is not immediately clear is why he wrote a ‘Jewish’ story in the first place. Why did he call attention to a part of himself that he was otherwise trying to minimise or obscure? The answer, in part, is that he was compelled or driven by something inside him. Like other radical assimilationists who were his contemporaries, such as Karl Kraus and Walther Rathenau, he was emotionally incapable of letting go of his past and moving on. Instead, he returned obsessively to the source of his shame and discomfort. In letters that he wrote to Isabella Stewart Gardner, the Boston socialite and collector who helped to bankroll his early years of study and travel in Europe, he gratuitously introduced disparaging comments about Jews. For example, after visiting a large Reform synagogue in Berlin (probably the relatively new Moorish-style one in the Oranienburgerstrasse), he wrote positively about the beauty of the building, choir and service, but then added, in a characteristic gesture, that despite the effort to create elegance, the worshippers ‘seemed to be selling old clothes’.17 Once, after making his way from Dresden to Vienna, he reported to his patron that he had travelled ‘with Jews and other indecencies’.18 At times the young Berenson wrote as if ‘the Jews’ were an alien tribe with whom he shared nothing in common. In a curious article in the Andover Review in December 1888 on “Contemporary Jewish Fiction”, he reviewed the development of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature as an impersonal outsider, keeping his own Jewish background under wraps. He signalled his lack of connection by stating at the outset that studying Jewish literature was a means to start understanding ‘the puzzling character of the Jews’. Comprehending them fully, however, he declared was impossible: ‘Their character and their interests are too vitally opposed to our own to permit the existence of that intelligent sympathy between us and them which is necessary for comprehension’.19 Berenson could not have been clearer. He was an ‘us’—not a ‘them’. His invocation of the canard that Russian Jews ‘had little scruple about fleecing their Gentile neighbors’ two pages later cemented this identification with the Christian camp.20 For Berenson, comments like these demonstrated how different he was from other Jews and how free he was of tribal loyalties. In August 1904, he wrote to Mary from St. Moritz that at a music recital at his hotel ‘the whole crowd of Jews were shedding streams of tears’ but added that they were not genuine: ‘The most offensive thing about Jews is their aesthetic insincerity’. He had no complaints about the Rothschilds whom he met there, however. The Rothschild women, he told Mary, had ‘scarcely any trace of the ordinary Jewish vices’.21 Berenson also demonstrated his lack of connection to other Jews when he remained silent in the face of antisemitic comments. He was in St. Moritz in August 1899 during the Dreyfus Affair, and said nothing when his titled acquaintances said ‘the most outrageous things’ (Mary’s phrase) about Jews. Later, word about his silence reached his friend the archaeologist and classicist Salomon Reinach in Paris, who told Mary that he considered Berenson’s behaviour (trying to ‘get in with those swells’) dishonourable and that he no longer respected him. Nine years later, Berenson, who had not changed his ways, was still smarting over what Reinach said. He complained to Mary that Reinach despised him and considered him a 16

128  Todd M. Endelman scoundrel because he would not ‘fight for Jewish old clothes, which even he won’t wear on his back, although he will flaunt them as a flag’.22 Berenson’s feelings about his origins were no secret. A  1908 novel of Ezra Brudno, a Cleveland lawyer, drew on legends about Berenson’s experiences in Boston and Cambridge. The protagonist of the novel is the inappropriately named David Sphardi, son of an East European Jewish peddler in Boston, Harvard graduate and budding writer. Brudno’s description of Sphardi’s growing antipathy to Jewish causes and concerns captures what I imagine Berenson felt: As time rolled on he felt the chasm between himself and his people widening. The least thing Jewish jarred him; everything non-Jewish seemed charming to him. And yet he was all the while conscious of a great struggle within himself: the struggle of two antagonistic elements. While the outer world seemed beckoning to him the seductive eye of beauty, the obloquy of his race seemed to stand before him like a threatening shadow. He hated this shadow. He wished to remove it—remove it beyond the chance of reappearance.23 Whereas David does not become a Christian, he espouses intermarriage, the loss of Jewish identity and the radical assimilation of the Jews. When Berenson sailed for France in June  1887 at the start of what would become a multiyear Grand Tour, he was determined to become a writer. Viewing and studying the Old Masters in European galleries and churches, however, shifted his ambition from the creation of literature to the connoisseurship of art, to which he subsequently devoted the remainder of his long life. The chief obstacle he faced was his poverty. He was not the son of a wealthy father, like his college friend Charles Loeser, and connoisseurship is not an occupation, a way of putting food on the table and paying the rent, even if one has sympathetic, supportive friends and patrons (their occasional gifts sustained him during his early years in Europe). Yet within a few years, he found ways to make his soon unparalleled knowledge of Italian paintings and his discerning eye a source of income. At the start, building on his Harvard reputation and the entrée it gave him to circles of wealthy Americans living or travelling abroad, he gave lecture tours of galleries and advised and assisted collectors with their purchases. He also wrote for The Nation and other periodicals. Whereas these activities enhanced and widened his reputation among collectors, curators and dealers, they were stopgap measures, for they could not guarantee an income that would allow him to live in a princely manner. What enabled Berenson to achieve this was his entry into the art market. Within two or three years of his arrival in Europe, he was scouting pictures, not only for Harvard friends and British and American visitors, but for dealers as well, who passed on a percentage of the profits when they sold paintings that he had identified. He also began to deal in works of art on his own account, secretly, with a small number of private clients. Having crossed one line—from connoisseurship to commerce—he then crossed another line—from the legal to the illegal. He began smuggling pictures out of Italy, where concern about the stripping of

Aestheticism and the Flight from Jewishness  129 its cultural patrimony was high, and selling forgeries—at a small antiques shop in London and in auction rooms (also in London) with the help of friends who allowed him to use their names. A charitable interpretation of Berenson’s descent into crime, in which Mary was an enthusiastic accomplice, would be that it was an occupational hazard, that it was unavoidable if one wished to prosper in the art market. As The Times noted, in commenting on the price-fixing scheme between Christie’s and Sotheby’s in the early 1990s, ‘the art world is corrupt, always has been and probably always will be’.24 One reason that corruption is endemic is the instability and uncertainty of the value of the goods being traded and, in the case of Old Masters, the demand that this creates for the expert who certifies their authenticity and thus helps to fix their value. The temptation to attribute paintings to the most valued artists and to circulate forgeries was especially strong in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the market in Old Masters was booming, due to an influx of new American money. The art historian Kenneth Clark, a one-time protégé of Berenson, noted that ‘the world of art dealing was in an unusually depraved condition’ in the first three decades of the twentieth century.25 To say this is neither to condone nor to condemn Berenson, but to provide the context for his behaviour. In this sense, he was no different from those Jews in late-Georgian London who, in buying and selling second-hand goods, knowingly traded in stolen goods. Whether he realised ‘what kind of a jungle he was entering’, we do not know. Clark charitably concludes: ‘He could not have foreseen the density of the forest, the hidden pitfalls and the poisonous tendrils that were to enmesh him, and make freedom of action almost impossible’.26 By 1900, Berenson had sufficient funds to lease and renovate Villa I Tatti, outside Florence, where he lived and hosted a constant stream of the wealthy, the well born and the talented until his death in 1959. His income became princely only from 1906, when he signed a secret contract with Duveen Brothers in London to authenticate pictures for them—by this time his reputation was well established and his certifications highly valued—in return for a percentage of their sales price, enabling him to purchase the villa in 1907. During this association, which lasted 30 years, he received at least $100,000 a year. In the 26 years between December 1911 and December 1937, his share of Duveen’s profits was $8,370,000—more than $350 million in current dollars.27 In truth, the firm owed him much more, because its head, Joseph Duveen, whose sharp dealing was legendary, systematically defrauded him by keeping two sets of accounts. Once Berenson contracted to work for Duveen, he put himself in an untenable position, which he nonetheless tolerated until the Second World War forced his withdrawal from the art market. He lived, in effect, two lives. To the public and to most of those who made the pilgrimage to I Tatti, he was a disinterested aesthete, the world’s living expert on Italian Renaissance paintings. Kenneth Clark recalled the first time that he met him, at lunch at I Tatti in 1925. He describes a little group of guests who: [. . .] stood in a semi-circle, nervously waiting the appearance of the great man. At the last, perfectly chosen moment he entered, small, beautifully

130  Todd M. Endelman dressed, a carnation in his button-hole. There was an awestruck silence, and he went towards the company, kissing the ladies and extending a small, dry hand to the men.28 When Israel and Edith Zangwill visited I Tatti in 1922, the former wrote to the poet and Hebrew translator Nina Salaman: [. . .] we are at the most beautiful house we have ever stayed, combined with the most luxurious. Erected by Berenson the art-critic, it is full of books, Italian pictures & statues. The libraries alone are larger than Far End [Zangwill’s home], and they are in every language. [. . .] The company is composed of counts, duchesses, connoisseurs & the like.29 But with art dealers and curators, his reputation was tarnished. In Paris, René Gimpel (1881–1944), who was Joseph Duveen’s brother-in-law, recorded his impression of Berenson after a meeting in 1918: If small, lithe tigers could speak, they would have the voice and intelligence of this feline Pole. Behind that calculated sweetness a high old roaring goes on. He has velvet paws and killer talons of steel. He’s let his beard grow to cover up the fact he is only half a man [this alludes to rumours that Berenson was homosexual—rumours that started when he was at Harvard and owed something to his friendship with Loeser and Logan Pearsall Smith, who were homosexual, as well as to his aestheticism and appearance].30 His eyes are blue—the better to deceive. Educated in America, he may or may not have been born there. Who knows? He lives in Italy, and some say he is English. His ambition, which is consuming, is to be recognized as the world’s greatest expert on the Italian primitives; and he achieved his goal about three years ago. He is a dying man, but he’ll go on for a long, long time. He doesn’t do business or accept commissions, but he shares in the profits.31 In the art world, Gimpel’s view of Berenson—as calculating and unscrupulous— was not uncommon. In 1904, when Berenson was in New York City and the board of trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art was considering establishing a connection with him, he met with William M. Laffan, a trustee and owner and publisher of the New York Sun, and his wife. She later told the art critic Roger Fry that Berenson ‘was the first person of whom she understood what people felt when they talked about the feeling of mistrust inspired by Jews’.32 Santayana also associated Berenson’s Jewishness with sharp dealing. In 1913, after visiting Florence, he wrote that the place did not please him. The climate was bad and there were ‘too many fugitive aesthetes and Jewish antichità people for me there’. He preferred less cosmopolitan places with a distinct national flavour where people were ‘simple and honest’.33 After James Lees-Milne, the English country house expert, visited Berenson in 1947, he described him in his diary as ‘a vain, blasphemous, tricky Jew’.34

Aestheticism and the Flight from Jewishness  131 Berenson was aware of how others perceived him. What disturbed him was that, at times, he saw himself in a similar light. Not only did his connection with Joseph Duveen sully his reputation but his very immersion in the art trade undermined the integrity of his aestheticist credentials. Dealing in Old Masters made him a businessman, a trader, a handler, like his father and like those worshippers in the Berlin synagogue whom he described as ‘old clothes’ men at heart. Part of him believed that he was a fake, a charlatan only pretending to be free of the taint of commerce and living in fear of exposure. Lees-Milne picked up on this, recording in his diary that Berenson gave him ‘the impression of a great man striving to be something which he isn’t’, and speculating that he wished ‘he were an aristocratic connoisseur, and not a self-made professional expert’.35 Berenson’s regret and anxiety about his connection to the art trade led him, in turn, to redouble his effort to appear as someone who lived only for beauty and disdained not only buying and selling but even talking about money. Kenneth Clark, who lived at I Tatti in the 1920s, remembered that Berenson never mentioned money. Once Clark told the Berensons how much he dreaded receiving letters, so much so that he left them unopened for days. The more down-to-earth Mary Berenson replied: ‘Oh, I love opening letters. They might contain a cheque’. Her remark, Clark wrote, caused her husband to shudder.36 As a rule, Berenson left the management of their finances to her. When Joseph Duveen visited them at I Tatti in 1924, she wrote to a friend that she had ‘a difficult task’ ahead of her, ‘to screw money out of him [Duveen] and arrange somehow we are kept au courant of the Accounts’. Bernard, she wrote, liked being kept ‘like a god on an altar, free from human wrangling [over money]’ and preferred that she deal with Duveen.37 Berenson’s problem was that he could not accept himself as he was, and admit that being rich was as gratifying as being sensitive to the visual. He could not acknowledge that he was a parvenu and a bounder. He could not do so because it ‘would have undermined that sky-scraper of high-mindedness which he had been erecting in his mind [and displaying to the world] since his boyhood’.38 Interestingly, Clark failed to mention the Jewish dimension of Berenson’s anguish (perhaps he thought it impolite). But, in Berenson’s mind, the buying and selling from which he strove to distance himself was linked with his Jewish background, and with hoary associations between Jewishness and materialism, corporeality, superficiality and lack of spiritual depth. He did not want to be seen or to see himself as a Jewish businessman, even if his goods were Old Masters. Indeed, he certainly did not want to be exposed as a Jewish swindler and confidence man, which his association with the unscrupulous Duveens made him.39 Pretending to be something other than what he was required hard work and steely resolve, as he began to realise during the Second World War, when circumstances isolated him and he began to take stock of his life. In a diary entry from October 1953, he admitted that it had been ‘an effort (no matter how unaware) to act as if one were a mere Englishman or Frenchman or American’. He wrote that he relished those occasions when he was in the company of Jews like Isaiah Berlin, Lewis Namier and Bela Horowitz, a publisher of art books in Vienna and later in London, and they were able to ‘drop the mask of being goyim and return to Yiddish reminiscences,

132  Todd M. Endelman and Yiddish stories and witticisms’. Those moments were ‘something like [a] home-coming [.  .  . and a] return to “Mother’s cooking” ’.40 In the same vein, when the playwright and screenwriter Samuel N. Behrman (1893–1973) visited I Tatti in 1955, Berenson noted that, when he was alone with Behrman, he would talk about matters he would seldom discuss with others ‘because of our common ghetto origins’.41 I do not want to suggest that his experience in hiding during the war reconciled him to his Jewishness. He remained to the very end ambivalent about Jews and unsure of what bound them together and where he stood in relation to them. Whereas the war and old age revived in him memories of ‘the ghetto’, they did not bring about a radical transformation in his ambivalence. He admitted in 1953 that he did not yet ‘feel at home at all with Jews as Jews, unless like Isaiah Berlin they have absorbed as I have the English-speaking world on top of their Jewish one’.42 His dislike of Jews unlike Isaiah Berlin never flagged. It was fed by his snobbery, which was linked to his discomfort with his Jewishness. He always preferred well-bred, upper-class guests over middle-class guests. When a New York businessman and his wife, collectors of modern art, visited him in 1951, she—flashy, overdressed, loud, arrogant and ‘as nouveau riche as possible’—caused him to wonder why she so unnerved him. His answer mixed his ambivalence about Jews and his snobbishness in ways that cannot be disentangled. His irritation, he wrote, was not due to the fact that as a Jew he was ashamed of the misbehaviour of other Jews (surely this is a case of ‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks’).43 ‘It must be due to a distaste for manifest pretense, bluff, arrogant assumption in any class, or race, or nation, but there seems to be a peculiar tendency of Jewesses recently enriched’.44 I have used the word ambivalence, rather than self-hatred, intentionally, not because I am averse to invoking the notion of self-hatred, but because Berenson was capable at every stage of his life of reacting both positively and negatively to Jews, Judaism and Jewishness, often in the same breath. Take the example of his long-standing friendship with Israel Zangwill, which began in London in 1894 and continued until Zangwill’s death in 1926. The Berensons read his work, including his public statements on Jewish issues, followed his Zionist activities in the newspapers, dined with him when they were in London, and later hosted him at I Tatti. On one occasion, when Berenson was visiting London in 1896, Zangwill invited him to attend a dinner of the Maccabeans, an association of Anglo-Jewish professional and literary men. The invitation unsettled Berenson. Mary wrote to Zangwill that whereas Berenson ‘would like to go as a dumb, unknown spectator’, he could not ‘take part in anything as a Jew’ any more than she could ‘as a Philadelphia Quaker’, explaining that he had ‘no sympathy with ancient or modern or any kind of Judaism’.45 Yet, despite what Mary thought was his lack of sympathy with Judaism, Berenson took ‘a special pleasure in Zangwill’s conspicuous Jewishness’ (according to his biographer Ernest Samuels),46 to the extent that he set aside his own fastidiousness and overlooked Zangwill’s rough edges. Mary, on the other hand, was unable to relax her standards. How, she asked her husband, was he able to endure someone who ate tomatoes with the butter knife and the jam spoon?47

Aestheticism and the Flight from Jewishness  133 His ambivalence also found expression in his reaction to the creation of the State of Israel. Berenson followed the Jewish struggle to oust the British from Palestine with sympathy, and thought that Britons were hypocritical to complain about Jews displacing Arabs because the history of England was a history of successive invasions—Celts, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, Norse and Normans.48 However, like Arthur Koestler, he believed that Jews who did not choose to settle in Israel should assimilate completely, because he saw no value in Jews remaining a recognisable group elsewhere in the world, self-consciously separated from their neighbours. They had no mission that would justify their separateness. ‘The only possibility would be the argument that by keeping their blood pure they produce more gifted individuals’. But he thought this was doubtful and, in any case, if they had a gift to hand on, it would in the long run come to the fore no matter how mixed their blood was with the blood of non-Jews.49 In his self-reflective writing in the 1940s and 1950s, Berenson returned to Jewish themes time after time. As in his stories and essays from the 1880s, he was unable to leave the topic of his Jewish birth alone. Some of this was due to the fact that for much of his life few would let him forget his origins. Some, certainly, was due to the shock of having to leave I Tatti and hide from the Nazis. And some was due to his inability to repudiate the world of his childhood and family. Reading his diaries, one is struck by how often he commented on the physical appearance—especially the facial features—of Jews. He noted not only which of his guests were Jewish but frequently also commented on ‘how Jewish’ they looked or did not look, as the case might be. For example, an entry from November 1947 reads: ‘To dine: a youngish Austrian Jew, well made, with sparkling deep brown eyes and beautiful hands, with no touch of Jew in appearance, except faintly in the curve of the nostrils’.50 He also noted that there was nothing Jewish about Marc Chagall’s looks and manners. When he saw his own face in the mirror, he thought: ‘So bored with my own face, which besides is not the kind I instinctively admire. I admire the completely Nordic one, and mine is a mixed grill’.51 Even in old age he could not abandon the racial categories that were common currency in his youth. Nor could he escape the aestheticism of his youth, which privileged physical over inner beauty, social justice and intellectual acumen. What was beautiful was valuable. To him, this explained why he liked old money, good breeding, manners, taste and what he called ‘thoroughbreds’.52 Being in their company was intrinsically ‘life-enhancing’—like being in the presence of Old Masters. ‘I cannot help enjoying the presence of well-bred, well-groomed people, who look and act as if by inheritance and bringing up they were in the foremost ranks of culture’.53 This explained, he thought, why he was more attracted to Englishmen than Americans, even when they were equally talented and successful. The Englishman, he thought, was ‘more of a work of art to be enjoyed as such particularly’, whereas the American ‘with rarest exceptions’ could only be admired. In the end, it was ‘a question of breeding’.54 Berenson was not the only young American Jewish aesthete to find a home in fin de siècle Europe. I  have already mentioned Charles Loeser, and could expand the list by including the Stein siblings—Gertrude, Leo and Michael—whose aestheticism was unabashedly modernist, unlike Berenson’s.

134  Todd M. Endelman In the Anglo-Jewish context, there were the half-Jewish Freudian art critic Adrian Stokes,55 and, later, the American expatriate biographer and bon vivant Stanley Olsen (the family name had been Olshanitsky), in whom aestheticism went hand in hand with dandyism. Olsen, whose father owned a chain of electronics stores in Akron, Ohio, arrived in London, age 22, in 1968 and created himself anew ‘as if born without parents, siblings, family history and religion, Midwest education and cultural trappings’.56 He spoke with an English accent, wore superbly crafted bespoke shirts, shoes and suits of the finest materials (his suits were lined in red silk, his shoes in red leather), exuded impeccable taste and behaved with impeccable manners, befriended the surviving members of the Bloomsbury set, and never, ever, told anyone he was Jewish, not even the few Jews who moved in his circle. I could continue in this vein, but numbers are not the point. My aim is to expand our thinking about radical assimilation (the desire and effort to obscure one’s Jewishness), and to add aestheticism to the list of ideologies, orientations, behaviours and outlooks that potentially served as vehicles for this. The celebration and creation of art seemed to promise escape from what was commonly regarded as Jewish. The painter Mark Gertler captured this when he told Dora Carrington how ‘immensely relieved’ he was to be leaving the East End, having taken a studio in Hampstead. ‘There, I shall be free and detached—shall belong to no parents. I shall be neither Jew nor Christian and shall belong to no class. I shall be just myself and be able to work out things according to my own tastes’.57 In this way, aestheticism functioned like universalist varieties of revolutionary socialism, which also promised a future in which the Jewishness of the Jew was irrelevant. However, the aestheticist solution was the more demanding and difficult path to the erasure of Jewishness. It required wealth, specialised knowledge, faultless taste and flawless manners. It also called on the aspiring aesthete to make his peace, one way or the other, with Christianity, which was too tightly woven into the fabric of Western culture to be ignored or sidestepped. Submerging one’s Jewishness in the cause of universal revolution was less tricky. Trotsky had an easier time of it than Berenson. However, the successful aesthete reaped a greater reward, at least potentially. Trotsky and other Jewish revolutionaries were unable to escape the Jewish label because Marxism itself became marked as Jewish. Aestheticism, on the other hand, never suffered that fate. Successfully pursued in a thoroughgoing way, it offered considerable rewards. As the realist novelist Robert Herrick wrote to a friend in 1905 after dining at I Tatti, although Berenson was ‘an awful liar and intellectual adventurer [. . .] he has made it go—he is somebody—he’s imposed himself’.58 NOTES   1 Kalman P. Bland, The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3.   2 Quoted in Bland, The Artless Jew, 27.   3 Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism and Commodity Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 48.

Aestheticism and the Flight from Jewishness  135   4 Meryle Secrest, Being Bernard Berenson: A Biography (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979), 3.   5 Ernest Samuels, Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 23.   6 Quoted in Samuels, The Making of a Connoisseur, 46.   7 Quoted in Michael Fixler, “Bernard Berenson of Butremanz,” Commentary 36 (1963): 139.   8 Bernard Berenson to Mary Costelloe, 10 November 1890, in The Bernard Berenson Treasury, ed. Hanna Kiel (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962), 47–8.   9 Bernard Berenson to Mary Costelloe, 1 February 1891, in Kiel, The Bernard Berenson Treasury, 57–8. 10 Fixler, “Bernard Berenson of Butremanz,” 139; Samuels, The Making of a Connoisseur, 136, 140. 11 In 1927, while rereading Bernard’s old letters to her, Mary noted how quickly he ceased to be a Catholic: ‘What a quick and thorough revulsion thee had from Catholicism! It is almost frightening. The psychology of that period is very strange, for thee saw the beauty and felt the glow of Catholicism in scores of ways unconnected with being in love. And yet in 2 years thee can write “It has not been a very merry Xmas. But better so. Why should I be merry on the day that the institution I most hate in the world has chosen for its birthday!” ’ Mary Berenson to Bernard Berenson, 7 February 1927, in Mary Berenson: A Self-Portrait from Her Letters & Diaries, ed. Barbara Strachey and Jayne Samuels (London: Victor Gollancz, 1983), 264. 12 George Santayana, The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel (New York: Charles Scribner’s Son, 1936), 424–5. 13 Bernard Berenson, Rumor and Reflection (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952), 28. 14 Agnes Mongan, “The Loeser Collection of Drawings,” Bulletin of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University 2, no. 2 (1933): 22. 15 George Santayana, Persons and Places (New York: Charles Scribner’s Son, 1944), 224–5. 16 Samuels, The Making of a Connoisseur, 67–9. 17 Quoted in Samuels, The Making of a Connoisseur, 74. 18 Ibid., 75. 19 Bernard Berenson, “Contemporary Jewish Fiction,” The Andover Review 10 (1888): 587–8. 20 Ibid., 589. 21 Quoted in Ernest Samuels, Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Legend (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 16. 22 Quoted in Samuels, The Making of a Legend, 65. 23 Ezra S. Brudno, The Tether (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1908), 196. 24 Peter Watson, “The Great Art Swindle,” The Times, 26 June 2004. 25 Kenneth Clark, Another Part of the Wood: A Self-Portrait (New York: Harper  & Row, 1974), 140. 26 Ibid. 27 Colin Simpson, Artful Partners: Bernard Berenson and Joseph Duveen (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 2. 28 Clark, Another Part of the Wood, 128. 29 Israel Zangwill to Nina Salaman, 22 October  1922, Redcliffe Nathan Salaman Papers, box 24, Cambridge University Library. 30 Simpson, Artful Partners, 49–50. 31 René Gimpel, Diary of an Art Dealer, 1918–1939, trans. John Rosenberg (New York: Universe Books, 1987), 4. 32 Samuels, The Making of a Connoisseur, 421. 33 George Santayana to Mary Potter Bush, 21 May 1913, in The Works of George Santayana, vol. 5, book 2, entitled The Letters of George Santayana, 1910–1913, ed. William G. Holzberger (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002), 133.

136  Todd M. Endelman 34 James Lees-Milne, Caves of Ice: Diaries, 1946–1947 (Norwich: Michael Russell, 1983), 233. 35 Ibid., 230. 36 Clark, Another Part of the Wood, 139. 37 Mary Berenson to Nicky Mariano,  4 September  1924, in Strachey and Samuels, Mary Berenson, 256. 38 Clark, Another Part of the Wood, 139. 39 Berenson’s relationship with Joseph Duveen is the central theme in Simon Gray’s play The Old Masters, first performed in 2004. 40 Bernard Berenson, Sunset and Twilight: From the Diaries of 1947–1958, ed. Nicky Mariano (New York: Harcourt, Brace  & World, 1963), 323. According to Hugh Trevor-Roper, Berlin denied the accuracy of this passage. Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson in Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson, ed. Richard Davenport-Hines (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2006), 23 note 1. 41 Berenson, Sunset and Twilight, 381–2. 42 Ibid., 308–9. 43 Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 3, scene 2, line 230. 44 Berenson, Sunset and Twilight, 228. 45 Mary Costelloe to Israel Zangwill, 29 June 1896, Israel Zangwill Papers, Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem, 54/2. 46 Samuels, The Making of a Connoisseur, 263. 47 Ibid., 257. 48 Berenson, Sunset and Twilight, 108. 49 Ibid., 107. 50 Ibid., 48. 51 Ibid., 162. 52 Ibid., 126. 53 Ibid., 118. 54 Bernard Berenson diary, 1 August 1947, quoted in Davenport-Hines, Letters from Oxford, xxi. 55 Richard Read, Art and Its Discontents: The Early Life of Adrian Stokes (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). 56 Phyllis Hatfield, Pencil Me In: A Memoir of Stanley Olson (London: André Deutsch, 1994), 3. 57 Mark Gertler to Dora Carrington, January 1915, in Mark Gertler, Selected Letters, ed. Noel Carrington (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1965), 80–1. 58 Quoted in Blake Nevius, Robert Herrick: The Development of a Novelist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 157.

9 The Jew in the Eruv, the Jew in the Suburb Contesting the Public Face and the Private Space of British Jewry Hannah Ewence In a recent, highly acclaimed novel by the young British-Jewish writer Naomi Alderman, the protagonist Ronit, a young Jewish woman returning to London from her new home in the United States, compares and reflects with pensive authority upon the condition of Jews in Britain. ‘I’m friends with Jews in New York’, Ronit explains. ‘Not Orthodox Jews, but some knowledgeable, articulate, highly identifying Jews. The kind of people who boycott the New York Times because they think it’s anti-Israel or who argue violently against boycotting the New York Times’.1 Tearing her admiring gaze away from her new-found American friends, and training it instead across the Atlantic, the full force of Ronit’s frustration quickly becomes evident: By and large, you don’t get people like that in England. [. . .] [Y]ou don’t get the vast participation in the cultural and intellectual life of the country of people who want to talk about, write about, think about Jewish things. It’s as though Jews in this country have made an investment in silence. There’s a vicious circle here, in which the Jewish fear of being noticed and the natural British reticence interact. They feed off each other so that British Jews cannot speak, cannot be seen, value absolute invisibility above all other virtues.2 This is a rather dim view of the Jewish community in twenty-first century Britain. Moreover, it is a view that young, dynamic and intellectually engaged Jews, such as Alderman herself, would, I feel convinced, go to great lengths to contest. After all, her novel, Disobedience, from which this abstract is taken, is a loud and unapologetically ‘Jewish’ novel of the first order, making ‘no bones’ about its subject matter—an approach that won Alderman the prestigious Orange Award for New Writers in 2006. Its primary themes of homosexuality and female subversion of, and aversion to, traditional Jewish life, caused a storm within the British-Jewish Orthodox community. Its exposé of lifestyle preferences, thoughts and experiences that run counter to the prescribed modes of Jewish life not only revealed a plethora of diversity where once the impression had been only of conformity, but also uncovered a community deeply uncomfortable with laying itself bare to public scrutiny.3

138  Hannah Ewence This conclusion is not without foundation. A  half-century of debates about so-called ‘Jewish’ spaces and places in Britain (and most especially in London) that have taken place within the Jewish community offer some illumination. Jews in Britain have been and continue to be preoccupied with image and, as Geoffrey Alderman has, rather fittingly, recently observed, with ‘the management of that image’.4 Certainly, for the firmly middle-class, anglicised Jews in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, it was a matter of grave importance that their newly arriving brethren from the shtetls of Eastern Europe ‘towed the line’ and conformed as quickly and as noiselessly as possible to the ideals, aspirations and appearance of ‘Britishness’—however that was to be understood. Crucially, however, it was through careful monitoring of the locations—the synagogue, the street, the home, the urban quarter—in which British-Jewish life took place that was seen as fundamental for fostering the ‘right kind’ of lifestyles, and which would ensure that change and conformity amongst the immigrant community was quickly achieved. Throughout the period of mass immigration from 1881 onwards, the key place of Jewish settlement in London’s East End rapidly achieved a degree of notoriety, which was, for the established Jewish community, wholly unwelcome. In August  1881 an indignant correspondent by the name of Arthur Klein of Belsize Park begged the liberal metropolitan newspaper, the Daily News, ‘the space for a few lines, in order to draw attention to the state of lawlessness, and, consequently, misery, degradation, and vice’ endemic within the ‘notoriously bad quarter’ known as Petticoat Lane. Klein grimly likened the fetid aesthetic of the district to a Dickensian slum. Poverty and depravity co-existed, claimed Klein, one seeping from the other, ‘in as dark colours as it ever did’.5 For the North Londoner, as for many others by the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Petticoat Lane was the very nexus of this evil union of pauperism and immorality, and at the heart of Petticoat Lane resided thousands of recently arrived immigrant Jews, swelling considerably the community of existing working-class Jews from earlier decades. Although the district had long since held that reputation and, indeed, was just one, of many, late Victorian slums that, in equal measure, fascinated and appalled philanthropists, politicians and the concerned general public, Klein and others held the new arrivals largely responsible for the perpetuation and inflammation of the area’s vile subterranean character. Thus sensationalised as a ‘slum’ and, by other anxious outsiders and onlookers, a ‘ghetto’, the Jewish East End was typically conceptualised as an impoverished and degraded world enclosed unto itself, impenetrable from the outside and incomprehensible to the outsider. Herein lay its greatest threat, and, for British-Jewry, the greatest problem. The Jewish Chronicle admonished in 1888: If poor Jews will persist in appropriating to themselves whole streets, in the same districts, if they will conscientiously persevere in the seemingly harmless practice of congregating in a body at prominent points in a great public thoroughfare like the Whitechapel or Commercial Road, drawing to their peculiarities of dress, of language and of manner, the attention which they might otherwise escape, can there be any wonder that the vulgar prejudices of which they are the objects should be kept alive and strengthened?6

The Jew in the Eruv, the Jew in the Suburb  139 For the newspaper, the immigrants’ insistence upon physical and cultural apartness was a recipe for disaster. Far from easing anti-Semitic tensions by way of urban containment, the presence of a Jewish ghetto, feared by the paper and the British-Jewish establishment alike, would instead provoke an increase in racial hostilities. The problem was not merely a matter of paranoid self-perception and hypersensitivity on the part of British-Jewish communal leaders. Non-Jewish observers had similarly noted the cultural separateness of the immigrant quarter, casting the Jewish East End as a strange urban outpost of the colonial Empire. George Sims, the inveterate social reformer and journalist, reinforced this association in an article penned for the Strand Magazine in 1904. “In Alien-Land”, one article in a series of six entitled “Off the Track in London”,7 followed, in essence, the same formula of ‘visiting strange quarters inhabited by strange people’ as Sims’ earlier and better-known studies How the Poor Live (1883) and Living London (1902–1903).8 However, Sims’ journey into London’s East End was framed not simply as an excursion into an unfamiliar corner of the city but as an expedition into another world. Upon coming to Wentworth Street (a main thoroughfare through the ‘notorious’ district of Petticoat Lane), Sims assumed the gaze of a tourist, delighted and yet a little overawed as ‘the strangeness of the scene reveals itself’: Here all the shops are open and the narrow thoroughfare is packed with the stalls of Jewish hawkers. We hear a little English at the top of Wentworth Street, but as we push our way through the seething crowd and get nearer to Brick Lane the English words become rarer and rarer, and presently only the German Hebrew jargon known as “Yiddish” reaches our ears.9 Sims consciously crossed the border into ‘Alien-Land’, and knew himself to be ‘in the heart of the old Ghetto’.10 The ‘Oriental’ characters who populated the thronging streets, which were lined by makeshift shops and market stalls, were Jewish immigrants no less, made exotic in Sims’ eyes. Despite Sims’ evident thrill with the peregrine curiosities on offer in the East End, urban living was seen by the British-Jewish community, local MPs, journalists and others as detrimental to the successful integration, upward mobility and physical health of the immigrant community in British life. Instead, through dispersion and settlement in provincial towns, as well as taking up the various opportunities on offer within the Empire, the immigrant Jew could instead achieve the transition from trespasser to welcome and valued guest.11 ‘With some training in practical agriculture, these immigrants might make welcome colonists’, suggested an anonymous correspondent to the Jewish Chronicle in 1886: A system might be devised for ‘passing them on’ to places where their skilled labour would be valuable. Jewish enterprise, grafted on Jewish capital, might give an impetus to the present depressed state of farming interests even in this country. London, certainly in their own interests should be tabooed to the emigrants, but it seems not impossible to formulate a plan by which Ireland and some of the provinces might be the better for them.12

140  Hannah Ewence In response to this not inconsiderable image problem, British-Jewish individuals, such as Samuel Montagu, banker, Liberal politician and founder of the Federation of Synagogues, began working tirelessly in the early years of the twentieth century to encourage suburban and provincial Jewish migration, often with little success. This process was mirrored in the United States with the establishment of the Industrial Removal Office (IRO) in 1901, which arranged the distribution of Jews arriving or already settled along the eastern coast to the interior of the country. The IRO worked in conjunction with the Jewish Agricultural and Industrial Aid Society (JAIAS) to encourage immigrants to try their hand at farming, or to settle away from the metropolises along the eastern seaboard.13 In Britain, the Jewish Dispersion Committee (JDC), set up in 1902 by the Federation of Synagogues at Montagu’s behest to relieve ‘the overcrowding of Jews in our large towns’, battled steadfast resistance from Jewish East Enders in their efforts to persuade them to exchange the squalor of that unequivocally urban district in favour of ‘healthier’ surroundings.14 The efforts of philanthropists to promote the benefits of semi-urban or even rural living to the Jewish immigrant community, through schemes such as Henrietta Barnett’s country holiday fund (established in 1877 to send slum children on holidays to the countryside),15 were typically more positively received in the short term, but had little effect in the longer term.16 In truth, the parents of those children lucky enough to enjoy a holiday had neither the means nor the inclination to leave the city. Becoming a suburban pioneer or country dweller was an enticing idea in theory, but in reality was simply not sustainable. Industry, together with the necessary provisions for Jewish life, and, above all, the comfort of the Jewish community itself, remained in the inner city. It was only with the passing of one generation and the inevitably greater levels of anglicisation and social mobility amongst the children and grandchildren of the immigrants that finally made suburban living fashionable. This played out in demographic terms: the population of the East End shrank from its peak in 1905 of approximately 125,000 to 85,000 by 1929.17 Place—namely the East End and other ‘immigrant’ districts—was rejected in favour of prospects. As David Cesarani has pointed out, this process was not always a straightforward one, as the experience was frequently indicative of ‘stasis or sideways movement’ rather than a steady climb to the top of the social ladder.18 During the interwar period, Jews leaving the East End were more likely to take a small step, to inner-suburban, working-class districts such as Hackney, Canonbury and Stoke Newington rather than the giant socio-economic leap that was required to land in the leafier surrounds of North West London. Even as fortunes began to brighten, allowing families to migrate further out still to North East London and Essex as well as the more affluent districts in the North West of the capital, a substantial core of the community remained, essentially, working class, or, at best, lower-middle class. Despite these quite significant differences, migration to the suburbs amongst British Jewry was, nevertheless, a phenomenon that would fundamentally refashion the lives of the whole community in the interwar and postwar era. Thus, London’s East End, Manchester’s Cheetham Hill and the Gorbals of Glasgow, to name but a few of the best known urban examples, were gradually

The Jew in the Eruv, the Jew in the Suburb  141 abandoned in favour of more salubrious and prestigious surroundings in the cities’ outer edges. Indeed, by the 1940s and 1950s, life in the suburbs had become such an alluring idea, even a crucial component of one’s identity to British Jews, that it was considered to be a topographical commodity worth fighting for. The suburb had become a status symbol, an external signifier of one’s worth, the very manifestation of successful assimilation, whilst the old areas of settlement were relegated to its antithesis. ‘[T]he most fundamental index of the decline of the East London ghetto’, wrote the sociologist Howard Brotz in 1955, ‘is the widespread agreement in the Jewish world of its low prestige value. A  failure is a person who “can’t even get out of the East End” ’.19 Instead, North London, or better yet North West London, had become the district to which all socially ambitious Jews aspired. ‘When I buy a parcel in a West End store to be sent, and they ask for the address, I feel much prouder that it goes to N.W.4 than to E.1’, admitted J.G. in an interview with Brotz in the early 1950s. ‘It’s a nicer feeling’.20 By the middle of the twentieth century, North London in particular had become firmly established as the new Jewish space, and suburban living as the lifestyle of choice for the British-Jewish community, with the number of Jews in most other British urban centres declining (mostly due to intermarriage and secularisation rather than relocation elsewhere). This is distinct from the American experience in the postwar era, which witnessed the emergence of other cities besides New York, notably Miami and Los Angeles, as major centres for suburban Jewish life.21 Seen within the life choices of British Jewry, however, London has continued to occupy an unrivalled position. This powerful attachment to North London was articulated with particular vigour within the late, much-loved Clare Rayner’s memoir of her long and frequently tortuous journey out of the East End, and away from the grasp of her abusive parents, to a happy and successful career as a nurse, writer and broadcaster. On searching for her first marital home in the late 1950s, Rayner recalled, rather humorously, that her new husband ‘blenched’ at the suggestion that they settle in South London for the area’s proximity to a promising job prospect. ‘I had to agree’, Rayner conceded. ‘That would be like emigrating’—an attitude which cast North London not simply as a space of aspiration but as a place of belonging, a place already invested with sociocultural meaning and imbued with the power to both anchor and define individual and collective Jewish identity and image.22 In this way, the North London suburb seemed to act as a microcosm of, or indeed a substitute for, the nation. The writer Al Alvarez, son of a wealthy Hampstead family, has similarly interpreted his ambivalent sense of belonging—what Naomi Alderman might define as a very British-Jewish identity complex—in terms of his attachment to place rather than citizenship: ‘The self-deception I call my provenance is a city, not a nation. I am a Londoner, heart and soul, but not quite an Englishman’.23 For Alvarez, who grew up in Hampstead and lived in North London all his life, the city and, more particularly, the suburb had become the place of ‘provenance’—it facilitated the illusion of Jewish ‘rootedness’, evoking a substitute patriotic feeling for those British Jews who could not quite believe that they belonged and, moreover, that it was safe to shout about it.

142  Hannah Ewence Thus, for these newly forming North London Jewish communities, by the mid-twentieth century the ‘other’ was not only the non-Jew, but was, in a curious sense, now the Jewish non-suburbanite as well. As Brotz’s interviewee, J.G., explains: In the East End today, the people are grob [coarse], very rough, swear, don’t have any manners. But they can’t help it. It’s the environment.  [.  .  .] You know it sounds a bit snobby but I went to visit somebody who was sitting shiva in the East End, very nice people, but I  couldn’t help thinking how we’ve grown apart.24 These rare testimonies from the 1950s collected by Howard Brotz, as well as memoirs that recall the same period, convey a very real sense of the communal fractures brought about through suburban migration.25 The East End had become the hazy landscape of the past—a foreign country, a curiosity—peopled by those who were strangely familiar yet nevertheless ‘peculiar’. As Nils Roemer has pointed out, across the fin de siècle and through the interwar period, a tradition of visiting the East End as ‘a spectacle of urban tourism’ by Jews and non-Jews alike remained popular, even as Jews were beginning to leave the area in numbers.26 In the postwar era, British-Jewish suburbanites revisiting the East End unconsciously and informally perpetuated this tradition, assuming the role of social commentator and voyeur, glad to experience the East End so long as they might leave it at the end of the day.27 For the most part, there was little that was new in the snobbery that suburban migration engendered amongst postwar Jewry towards their ‘poorer’ brethren.28 Yet, unlike previous eras, a sense of superiority was not accompanied by philanthropic efforts to intervene and assist. Those Jews who had scaled the socio-economic ladder seem to have felt little sense of responsibility towards their fellow Jews in a less fortunate position. Perhaps the introduction of the welfare state in the immediate postwar years and the rise in standards of living more generally lessened the need for communal intervention. Whatever the foremost reason, wholesale migration to the suburbs in the postwar era fundamentally altered Jewish communal life, hastening assimilation irreversibly amongst the majority. Ironically, those Jews who had ‘made it’ to the suburbs viewed their new landscape as the pinnacle, the very physical manifestation, of their achievements as a diaspora Jew. The suburbs signified acceptance. By conforming to the restrictive norms of suburbia, at that time essentially white, middle class, and gendered (with men returning to the city to work whilst women remained at home as housewives and mothers), these Jews felt they had transgressed the boundaries of ‘difference’ that had previously separated them from the wider non-Jewish community.29 The irony is that as more and more Jews moved ‘out’ of the city to the suburbs, as a means to be ‘in’, North and North West London began to resemble concentrated Jewish areas not so dissimilar from the Jewish quarter of the East End that they had been so eager to leave behind. As Brotz observed, ‘The ghetto, that is the voluntary ghetto in the technical sociological sense, has not vanished at all. It has

The Jew in the Eruv, the Jew in the Suburb  143 simply moved north and north-west’.30 By the mid-twentieth century, the suburbs of North London had become intrinsically linked with their Jewish residents—a spatial association to which some Jews were particularly sensitive. ‘Ha! This isn’t such a marvellous place any more’, complained a resident doctor who had been born in the East End and later migrated to suburban Golders Green. ‘You know what they’re calling it now? Goldstein Green’.31 Hence the appeal of the suburbs for so many British Jews seems to have been bound up in their perceived exclusivity. Migration to the urban peripheries was regarded with a growing ambivalence as confidence in that exclusivity—and, by extension, confidence in the perpetuation of a certain image—diminished. The suburbs, when ‘unspoilt’ by the presence of fellow Jews, was for the socially ambitious, modern Jew ‘the promised land’—a fabled terrain that pledged to facilitate tolerance, even acceptance. Far from being a confined and confining locale, as the dominant anti-suburban ethos of the twentieth century has suggested, for some Jews in Britain the suburbs were idealised as the path to freedom. However, recent, high-profile events have unsettled this modicum of cautious confidence, which British Jews living the suburban dream had slowly but surely begun to adopt. In the second half of this article, I want to examine the fraught debates that broke out within the Jewish community over the matter of image—debates that brought to the fore the tense issue of communal solidarity and cohesion, as well as sparking discussions about image control. In February 2003, after more than a decade of dispute, the Orthodox Jewish community of North West London were finally able to make use of their eruv—a ‘symbolic enclosure’, which allows observant Jews to ‘carry’ on Shabbat.32 According to Jewish law, it is forbidden to undertake any form of labour on the Sabbath, which has been interpreted in Talmudic debate and rabbinical literature to include ‘carrying’ even the smallest item outside of the home. Those laws have meant that those unable to walk—young children, the elderly, and the disabled—are housebound for the entirety of that day, as pushing a pram or wheelchair also constitutes ‘carrying’. Such laws can be circumvented, however, by figuratively extending the boundaries of the home, transforming and incorporating previously ‘public’ space into the domestic sphere. Eruv boundaries are typically discreet, even invisible to the uninformed. In North West London, the eruv makes use of pre-existing markers such as roads and railway lines, and, when no border can be found within the urban architecture, a series of poles joined by thin wires, designed to emulate utility poles, are erected. The creation of an eruv around a Jewish settlement is an ancient ritual practice first textually evidenced in the Mishnah.33 In modern times, eruvim have been established in cities across the Western world, and in Israel an eruv encircles virtually every town. The majority of eruvim have been established with little or no word of objection from the local community, although some proposals, namely in Palo Alto (California), Tenafly (New Jersey; both proposed in 1999) and Outremont (Montreal; proposed in 2001), are particularly notable exceptions, which join the North West London case as incidents that stirred up deeply felt antagonisms within the community.34

144  Hannah Ewence As in these other cases, even before the North West London eruv, the first to be proposed in Britain, became physically manifest, the Orthodox community faced considerable opposition from Jewish and non-Jewish neighbours alike, who objected to the very concept of what the construction of an eruv would constitute. ‘It is a physical claim of territory which the majority of people find inappropriate’, angrily explained Elizabeth Lawrence of the residents’ Barnet eruv objectors group (made up of Jews and non-Jews) to the Guardian newspaper in August 2002. ‘We should try to live together, not split the community. This has been a harmonious area but the eruv will cause trouble’.35 Ned Temko, former editor of the Jewish Chronicle, has suggested that, within the Jewish community itself, some secular Jews who felt themselves to be fully assimilated were particularly apprehensive about the prospect of an eruv within their community because it might act as an enticement for more visibly ‘Jewish’ Jews to move to the area.36 However, opposition to the eruv came not only from various secularised Jews, but also from some far-right Ultra-Orthodox Jews, who feared that the construction of an eruv would result in the loosening of strict social codes that operated on the Sabbath to maintain the social order.37 The eruv was regarded as an inevitably divisive practice, which, far from binding the community together in a display of multiethnic tolerance and cohesion, would, as the Ultra-Orthodox foresaw, bring about disorder or, as some secular Jews and non-Jews suggested, heighten ethnic particularism and impose relationships of hierarchy and power between those who had a claim to ‘use’ the eruv and those who did not.38 Within such rhetoric, the eruv became denigrated as a quasi-colonial project. Consequently, as Jennifer Cousineau has observed, ‘In articles, maps and sketches, the eruv was represented as a highly visible, public, physically daunting, symbol of Jewish presence, to be tended and repaired when damaged by subservient gentiles, a hazard to animal life, and a blight on what was once a pastoral scene’.39 Thus, the eruv, as a spatial expression of Jewish life and difference mapped onto the pre-existing non-Jewish milieu, was perceived as distinctly threatening, as a subversive force that would disrupt the English essentialism of the suburb. It was, according to that thinking, a triumphant assertion of socio-cultural dominance and spatial acquisition, which rendered both the non-Jew and the secular Jew ‘subservient’ to the whims and will of the Orthodox community.40 Certainly rabbinic conceptualisations of urban space, evident within the eruv dispute, differ markedly from how space, especially residential space, is perceived within British society. The idea of the home as the Englishman’s castle remains a particularly potent one for Britons, with home ownership growing as a priority across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first as financial services and widespread upward social mobility and government schemes have rendered the purchase of property aspirational as well as possible for many.41 Various forms of media, especially television, have steadily yet stealthily infiltrated the British home, often confusing and challenging boundaries between public and private. The phenomenon of reality television in particular has contributed significantly to the blurring of these boundaries, remaking the idea of ‘the home’ and home-life in its own, postmodern image. Despite these trends, the explicit practice

The Jew in the Eruv, the Jew in the Suburb  145 of effectively extending the home into the outside world, which the construction of an eruv seemed to signify, not only deeply offended notions of ‘British’ constructions of spatial practice, but was seen as an affront to a sense of community cohesion because of its imagined ‘exclusionary’ nature. ‘If “eruv” refers to the amalgamation of private and public space, then what the establishment of an eruv does is privatise, in a sense, public space, and this is something that eruv opponents vociferously oppose’, insists Susan H. Lees.42 Many opponents were disgruntled because the creation of the North West London eruv signified the construction and privatisation of a formerly public space without their consent, through which they could still pass but the ‘benefits’ of sanctuary and spiritual virtuousness they could not enjoy.43 However, to some of the most impassioned opponents and select sections of the tabloid media, the semblance of domesticity and refuge offered by the eruv enclosure was something to be reviled rather than coveted. Indeed, in some of the most bitter exchanges between supporters and opponents, baited, perhaps, by the polemical style of some of the press coverage, the eruv was likened to a ghetto—a space that would encourage ‘dangerous’ insularity, slum lifestyles and, more sinisterly still, was reminiscent of the Nazi ghettos of Central and Eastern Europe. In typically sensationalist style, the right-wing Daily Mail newspaper published an article in 1994 with the headline “The Danger of Creating your own Ghettos”, accompanied by film-stills from Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, depicting frightening images of impoverished and terrified ghetto inhabitants.44 The analogy—although noxiously crude—was nevertheless clear: the depravities and horrors of enforced confinement during the years of the Holocaust were being resurrected in the leafy suburbs of North London. Anti-eruv campaigners were quick to pick up on the grotesque parallel, taking it upon themselves to speak on behalf of all Jews, who, they claimed, would be offended by the proposal. ‘The poles and wires are very distasteful—especially to a certain generation of Jews that escaped from the camps’, insisted Elizabeth Lawrence, alluding to the negative symbolism of the wires as evocative of concentration camps.45 The eruv, designed as a space that would be conducive to the continuation of Jewish life within the diaspora, was instead inverted in such discourse into an abominable, bordered terrain in which the very opposite would occur. As Cousineau has pointed out, ‘[a]lthough eruv makers argued for the eruv as a space of liberation, opponents choose to interpret it as one of restriction’.46 Of course, the idiosyncratic conclusion of such representations, namely that Orthodox Jewry had now resorted to imprisoning themselves within walls of their own making in a terrifying re-enactment of the Holocaust, seems thoroughly ridiculous. Nevertheless, one opponent, Alan Jacobs, a secular Jew and member of the Barnet Eruv objectors group, argued that those in favour of constructing the eruv did indeed have an agenda besides their liberation from the Sabbath law, which actually depended upon the perceived ‘ghettoisation’ of the Jewish quarter: By saying this is an eruv—this is where orthodox Jews live—their hope, in my opinion, is that the orthodox will be less pressured by the community on the other side of the line to be integrated and assimilated.47

146  Hannah Ewence Thus, the eruv was paradoxically depicted as a space of restriction and a space through which Jews sought to liberate themselves not from the confines of Sabbath regulations but from the demands of the wider society in which they lived. In Jacobs’ wholly egocentric view, therefore, Orthodox Jewry were defined, and defining themselves, solely in relation to the outside world, and thus acted not for their own sake but in response to the ‘pressures’ of modernity.48 Charlotte E. Fonrobert has rightly debunked this reading of eruv practices, arguing that it is too simplistic to view the eruv as providing a boundary between traditional and even ‘pre-modern’ Jewish values, and the world of modernity that lies beyond. Instead, Fonrobert has insisted that the eruv actually facilitates a way for Jews to exist and even integrate as a minority amongst a majority of non-Jews.49 For all of its inaccuracies, Jacobs’ response seems to get to the very crux of the conflict: the eruv dispute exposed anxieties about the changing and diversifying character and image of the British-Jewish community—a community that many of those opposed to the eruv continued to idealise as, at least historically, ethnically and culturally homogenous. Such ideas carried particular weight in the suburbs, especially in those areas which identified strongly with the romanticised notion of what a suburb should be: a genteel and aesthetically pleasing retreat from the frantic, rambunctious city. Nowhere was such a notion more apparent than in the neat, pastoral lanes of the purpose-built Hampstead Garden Suburb—an affluent and highly desirable location for British Jews—and nowhere else was opposition to the eruv fiercer.50 In that quarter of the borough, arguments against the planned eruv rested largely upon the issue of visibility—explicitly the visibility of the purpose-built eruv boundaries, implicitly the increased visibility of ‘difference’, namely Jewish difference, from the ‘cultural status quo’.51 As Susan H. Lees has noted: Political cartoons in the British media opposing the eruv depicted a brash contrast between the image of the Orthodox Jew (urban and foreign, men dressed in long black overcoats, wearing wide black hats, with side curls hanging down, accompanied by their wives and large numbers of children, conspicuously “different” and conspicuously unconcerned to be so) and the genteel cottage-like houses and gardens of the Suburb.52 It is no small irony that Hampstead Garden Suburb was conceived of by its founder, Henrietta Barnett in 1905, as an inclusive residential location where all classes and religions might live together.53 The cornerstone of the Free Church, built in 1911 and which stands in the Suburb’s Central Square, attests to this ethos, inscribed with the declaration, ‘God is Greater than the Creeds’.54 However, by the 1990s this rather utopian vision had long been forgotten, and not only by Hampstead Garden Suburb residents and their ‘defenders’. In contrast to the celebrated ‘function’ of some city suburbs in the early decades of the century as a solution to urban overcrowding and then, by the 1940s and 1950s, as a space that facilitated greater social harmony (in the form of Jewish assimilation), according to its opponents the eruv—a space within that space—orchestrated the very opposite.

The Jew in the Eruv, the Jew in the Suburb  147 Furthermore, it is this interpretation of the eruv, as a space that threatened to wholly disrupt the project of assimilation with which many suburban Jews had engaged, which explains the fierce, even bitter opposition mounted amongst local secular Jews.55 The eruv would not only mark out Jewish ‘territory’—it would also mark out Jews. Thus, opposition to the proposal was a desperate attempt by some ‘internal’ opponents within the British-Jewish community to not only protect and preserve the fragile communal image that they had toiled so long to construct, but also to keep that image away from public scrutiny. Jewish matters, so the thinking goes, are private matters. The response to the proposed eruv mirrored a firm and abiding determination within the community that they be the ones to shape and regulate their own self-image. If it could not be satisfactorily regulated, the only solution was prohibition, and prohibition from within. Despite a long and very public battle, the protests of the British-Jewish secular community and others failed to win through, and the eruv ‘went live’ in February 2003. For the past 11 years it has functioned virtually without a hitch, improving the quality of life for many within the Orthodox community, allowing the young, the elderly and women with small children to move with greater freedom and to participate more fully in Shabbat activities. Its success has also prompted the establishment of more eruvim in the North London area and elsewhere in Britain. Greater London now boasts four fully operational eruvim and, at the last count, a further four that have been granted planning permission.56 Manchester Jewry have followed the capital’s lead and, since January 2014, have been enjoying the benefits of a three-year-long project (and a decade in the planning) to construct a 13-mile eruv boundary, spanning Prestwich, High Boughton, Sedley Park and Cheetham Hill. The city’s eruv project was similarly beset by opposition from local residents, both Jewish and non-Jewish, at the planning stage, who objected to the proposal on religious, human rights, and conservation grounds.57 Although most objections were premised upon practical considerations for property security and the well-being of the local environment, one objector lamented that the existence of an eruv would mean ‘increasing properties being bought up by the Jewish communities’.58 Although the controversies engendered in the building of eruvim in Britain has, quite evidently, not dissipated altogether in the decade since its launch, the North West London eruv has been deemed to be such a success story that its proponents are convinced that their arguments ultimately won out. As councillor Jack Cohen recently confidently boasted to a local newspaper, the Hampstead and Highgate Express: It is a non-issue now. For all the dire warnings we had of rioting on the streets, damage to poles and birds being killed in their thousands—we’ve had no evidence and no one cares any more—it has been a non-event.59 But, for all of this bravado, has the construction of the eruv in North West London really been such a ‘non-event’ for British Jewry? Might it, after all, have damaged the public image of the community as was feared, or, more importantly still,

148  Hannah Ewence has the ferocity of the debates done irreversible harm to relations between the already seemingly disparate factions of British Jewry? It is both challenging and complex to answer these questions with any certainty. But, what is clear from the debates generated by the concept and construction of the North West London eruv is that the very British-Jewish identity complex that novelist Naomi Alderman so astutely identified, and with whose words this chapter opened, is alive and well. As journalist Matthew Kalman lamented at the height of the eruv dispute, ‘[t]he trouble begins when Jews stop being invisible’.60 NOTES   1 Naomi Alderman, Disobedience (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 54.   2 Alderman, Disobedience, 54–5.   3 The Jewish Tribune, the Stamford Hill based Haredi newspaper, declined to publish a review of the novel, describing the plot as ‘laughable’. In an opinion piece published in the Jewish Chronicle, regular columnist and father to Naomi, Geoffrey Alderman, took the newspaper to task over its decision, deriding it for refusing to review the novel even as a means to warn its readers against buying it. However, even Geoffrey Alderman had to admit that ‘the background of the novel is factual and authentic. Perhaps just a little too authentic’. See Geoffrey Alderman, “Disobedience of an Obedient Girl,” Jewish Chronicle, March 3, 2006, 31.   4 Geoffrey Alderman, “Introduction,” in New Directions in Anglo-Jewish History, ed. Geoffrey Alderman (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2010), vii–x (ix).   5 Ibid.   6 “Jewish Gregariousness,” Jewish Chronicle, September 28, 1888, 8–9.   7 The series was published in six parts, between April–September  1904: George R. Sims, “In Alien-Land,” Strand Magazine, vol. 27, April 1904, 416–23; “In the Royal Borough of Kensington,” Strand Magazine, vol. 27, May 1904, 545–51; “In Hidden Camberwell,” Strand Magazine, vol. 27, June 1904, 666–72; “ ‘Downtown’ in Rotherhithe,” Strand Magazine, vol.  28, July  1904, 34–40; “In the Shadow of St. Stephens,” Strand Magazine, vol. 28, August 1904, 152–8; and “Round Hackney Wick,” Strand Magazine, vol. 28, September 1904, 323–9.   8 George R. Sims, How the Poor Live: With Sixty Illustrations by Frederick Barnard (London: Chatto and Windus, 1883); and George R. Sims, ed., Living London: Its Work and Its Play, Its Humour and Its Pathos, Its Sights and Its Scenes (London: Cassell and Company, 1902–1903).   9 Sims, “In Alien-Land,” 416. 10 Ibid. 11 Similar thinking, which celebrated the ‘advantages’ of country living, had partially guided the decision in 1860 to relocate the Jews’ Hospital from Mile End to eight acres of land at West Norwood, South London—at that time still virtually open countryside. The hospital was amalgamated with the Jews’ Orphan Asylum in 1877, with both institutions sharing the site. See Edward Conway, “The Origins of the Jewish Orphanage,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society 22 (1968–1969): 53–66; and London Museum of Jewish Life, What about the Children? 200 Years of Norwood Child Care, 1795–1995 (London: London Museum of Jewish Life and Norwood Child Care, 1995), 10–11. 12 “Our Foreign Poor,” Jewish Chronicle, December 17, 1886, 5. 13 Jack Glazier, Dispersing the Ghetto: The Relocation of Jewish Immigrants across America (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998). 14 The aims of the Jewish Dispersion Committee, as well as the opposition they faced from immigration Jews, are recorded in the minutes of the Federation of

The Jew in the Eruv, the Jew in the Suburb  149 Synagogues from the period. See Joseph E. Blank, ed., “Minutes of the Federation and the Provinces,” in The Minutes of the Federation of Synagogues: A Twenty-Five Years’ Review (London: Rabbenowics Printers, 1912), 57. 15 Micky Watkins, Henrietta Barnett in Whitechapel: Her First Fifty Years (London: Hampstead Garden Suburb Archive Trust, 2005), 60–2. 16 This can be seen in the poor take-up amongst East End Jews of opportunities to migrate to provincial Jewish communities. By summer 1903, a full year after the JDC’s establishment, uptake from provincial congregations to join the Federation of Synagogues remained so low that the Federation called a public meeting ‘for the purpose of encouraging and stimulating removals from the congested area to Tottenham and surrounding districts’. See Federation of Synagogues public meeting, June 1903, cited in Geoffrey Alderman, The Federation of Synagogues, 1887–1987 (London: The Federation of Synagogues, 1987), 38. 17 See Vivian D. Lipman, A History of the Jews in Britain since 1858 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990), 203–27 (207). 18 David Cesarani has challenged the broadly held assumption that migration to the suburbs was indicative of prosperity, arguing instead that ‘the belief in upward social mobility is cherished in Anglo-Jewry today, but it is substantially a myth [. . .] for a [. . .] significant section of the Jewish population, the experience was one of stasis or sideways movement’. See David Cesarani, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Suburbs: Social Change in Anglo-Jewry between the Wars, 1914–1945,” Jewish Culture and History 1, no. 1 (1998): 5–26 (5). 19 Howard M. Brotz, “The Outlines of Jewish Society in London,” in A Minority in Britain: Social Studies of the Anglo-Jewish Community, ed. Maurice Freedman (London: Vallentine, Mitchell and Co., 1955), 137–97 (142). 20 J.G., interview by Howard Brotz, in Brotz, “Outlines of Jewish Society,” 143. 21 The growth and significance of Jewish suburbia besides New York is reflected in the available literature on the suburbanisation of American Jewry, which overwhelmingly takes the form of local case studies. See, for example, Selig Adler and Thomas E. Connelly, From Ararat to Suburbia: The History of the Jewish Community of Buffalo (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1960); Marshall Sklare and Joseph Greenblum, Jewish Identity on the Suburban Frontier: A Study of Group Survival in the Open Society (New York: Basic Books, 1967); and Gerald Gamm, Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 22 Claire Rayner, How Did I Get Here from There? (London: Virago Press, 2003), 271. 23 Al Alvarez, Where Did It All Go Right? (London: Richard Cohen Books, 1999), 7. 24 J.G., interview by Howard Brotz, in Brotz, “Outlines of Jewish Society,” 143. 25 Many of these testimonies were first collated by Brotz during research for his doctoral thesis, Howard Brotz, “Analysis of Social Stratification within Jewish Society” (PhD diss., University of London School of Economics, 1951). For a memoir of this period, see Michele Hanson, What the Grown-Ups Were Doing (London: Simon and Schuster, 2012). 26 Nils Roemer, “London and the East End as Spectacles of Urban Tourism,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 99, no. 3 (2009): 416–34. 27 A special supplement in the Weekend Telegraph made passing reference to this tendency, noting particularly the habit of middle-class Jewish businessmen who have ‘made it’ to keep their business premises in the East End and travel to them on a daily basis, whilst living in the London suburbs. See the case study of Mr  and Mrs Kaye by David Pryce-Jones, “Two Families at the Far Ends of the Scale,” Weekend Telegraph, April 1, 1966, 18–23. Gerda Charles also discussed this in terms of the patronage of Bloom’s Restaurant, Whitechapel, in “The Great Jewish Pastime,” Weekend Telegraph, April 1, 1966, 28–30. 28 Jews who have ‘made it’ have often looked down upon those who have not. This has been demonstrated particularly well in fiction. See, for example, Abraham Cahan,

150  Hannah Ewence The Rise of David Levinsky (New York: Harper, 1917); and Howard Spring, Shabby Tiger (London: Collins, 1934). 29 See discussion of country clubs and golf clubs by Pryce-Jones, “Two Families”; although, as Pryce-Jones points out, these clubs were often established by middle-class Jewish suburbanites because gentile clubs refused to admit them; Pryce-Jones, “Two Families,” 21. 30 Brotz, “Outlines of Jewish Society,” 149. 31 S.R., interview by Howard Brotz, in Brotz, “Outlines of Jewish Society,” 149. Similarly derisive renaming occurred in other British cities also. The ‘desirable’ South Manchester suburb of Didsbury, for example, quickly became known as ‘Yidsbury’, and its main thoroughfare Palatine Road as ‘Palestine Road’—crude references to the large Jewish presence in the area in the mid-twentieth century. 32 The phrase ‘symbolic enclosure’ is used by Susan H. Lees in her article “Jewish Spaces in Suburbia: Interpreting the Eruv Conflict in Tenafly, New Jersey,” Contemporary Jewry 27, no. 1 (2007): 42–79 (42). 33 Charlotte E. Fonrobert, “From Separatism to Urbanism: The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Rabbinic Eruv,” Dead Sea Discoveries 11, no.  1 (2004): 43–71. 34 For further details on these conflicts, see Lees, “Jewish Spaces in Suburbia”; and Barry Smith, “On Place and Space: The Ontology of the Eruv,” in Cultures: Conflict—Analysis—Dialogue, ed. Christian Kanzian and Edmund Runggaldier (Frankfurt: Onto Verlag, 2007), 403–16. 35 Elizabeth Lawrence, interview by Steven Morris, “Testing the Boundaries of Faith,” Guardian, August 10, 2002. 36 Ned Temko, “Suburban Battle Lines,” Guardian, August 14, 2002. 37 See Hampstead and Highgate Express, February  5, 1993. The same section of the Orthodox community in Manchester has also been instrumental in blocking the construction of an eruv in the north of the city. See Oliver Valins, “Institutionalised Religion: Sacred Texts and Jewish Spatial Practice,” Geoforum 31 (2000): 575–86 (582–4); and Oliver Valins, “Stubborn Identities and the Construction of Socio-Spatial Boundaries: Ultra-Orthodox Jews Living in Contemporary Britain,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28, no. 2 (2003): 158–75. 38 Anxiety about ethnic particularism can be seen, for example, in an interview between BBC news and Mrs Simms, a secular Jew, who argued that allowing advocates of the eruv to ‘do what they wanted’ would mean ‘we would end up heading for the same kind of division that we see every day in Northern Ireland—and that should be a lesson to us all’. See Dominic Casciani, “Jewish Eruv Set for London,” BBC News, August 9, 2002. The issue of disorder is discussed by Barry Smith, “On Place and Space: The Ontology of the Eruv,” 403–18 (406, 415), www.ontology.buffalo. edu/smith/articles/eruv.pdf (accessed April 12, 2014). 39 Jennifer Cousineau, “Rabbinic Urbanism in London: Rituals and the Material Culture of the Sabbath,” Jewish Social Studies 11, no. 3 (2005): 36–57 (52). 40 Against such imperialistic interpretations of the eruv, parallels were readily drawn with Israel and the West Bank by eruv opponents. See Davina Cooper, “Talmudic Territory? Space, Law, and Modernist Discourse,” Journal of Law and Society 23, no. 4 (1996): 529–48 (542). 41 A government research paper, issued at the end of the millennium, reported that ‘the rate of owner-occupation [in Britain] has increased from 10% to 68% from 1914 to 1999’. See House of Commons, A Century of Change: Trends in UK Statistics since 1900, December 21, 1999, Research Paper 99/111, 6. 42 Lees, “Jewish Spaces in Suburbia,” 51. 43 This view is evident in a letter written by an opponent to the editor of Local London, December 5, 2000: ‘Eruv-believers would happily pass through their symbolic

The Jew in the Eruv, the Jew in the Suburb  151 gateways in the streets, but everyone else would be compelled to do so without such a benefit’; cited in Barry Smith, “On Place and Space: The Ontology of the Eruv,” 403–18 (407), www.ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/articles/eruv.pdf (accessed August 20, 2011). 44 “The Danger of Creating Your Own Ghettos,” Daily Mail, cited by Cousineau, “Rabbinic Urbanism in London,” 51–2. 45 Elizabeth Lawrence, interview by Sanchez Manning, “Plans For a New Eruv Sparks Fresh Debate,” Hampstead and Highgate Express, January 7, 2010. 46 Cousineau, “Rabbinic Urbanism in London,” 52. 47 Alan Jacobs, interview by James Meek, “ ‘Ghetto’ Boundary Will Free Orthodox Jews,” Guardian, July 9, 1999. 48 Peter Vincent and Barney Warf provide a compelling reading, which partially complements this interpretation of the pro-eruvist’s agenda, arguing that the upsurge in the popularity of eruvim nationally and internationally can be explained as a form of localised resistance to globalisation: ‘Opposition to globalization is generally rooted in appeals to a mythologized pre-modern past and centres around ethnic and religious identity, in effect celebrating the local and traditional as an antidote to the global and modern’. In this way, then, eruvim are ‘defiant assertions of pre-modern lifestyles in a hyper-modern world’. Thus, although Orthodox Jewry are responding to external pressures, they are also acting with their own agenda. See Peter Vincent and Barney Warf, “Eruvim: Talmudic Places in a Postmodern World,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 27, no. 1 (2002): 30–51 (47–8). 49 Charlotte E. Fonrobert, “The New Spatial Turn in Jewish Studies,” AJS Review 33, no. 1 (2009): 155–64. 50 This correlation between ‘ideal’ suburban living and opposition to the eruv was made clear in a BBC documentary entitled “Omnibus: Dame Henrietta’s Dream,” shown on BBC 1 in July 1997. The documentary traced Henrietta Barnett’s legacy of social and racial harmony, and the strong anti-eruv feeling in the modern-day suburb. 51 Davina Cooper has argued that inherent to such rhetoric was the conviction that ‘public expression of difference contravenes the right of the dominant/universal community not to confront cultural otherness’. See Cooper, “Talmudic Territory?” 537–8. 52 Lees, “Jewish Spaces in Suburbia,” 62. 53 Henrietta Barnett, “A  Garden Suburb at Hampstead,” Contemporary Review 87 (1905): 231–7 (232). 54 According to Henrietta Barnett’s biographer, at the time of Hampstead Garden Suburb’s establishment Barnett insisted that these words be carved on the cornerstone of the Free Church, a sentiment for which she sought and gained royal approval. See Watkins, Henrietta Barnett in Whitechapel: Her First Fifty Years, 104. 55 See, for example, the objections raised by Dr D.L. Simms, who insisted that only ‘well-financed religious zealots’ were in favour of the proposal, likening the repercussions for the ‘majority’ of Jews who were opposed to the plans as similar to the ‘helplessness’ of ‘tolerant’ Jews in Israel against ‘single-minded fanaticism’. The implication is that all Jews would be judged by association. See “Disputing Where a Community Should Draw the Line,” Guardian, July 13, 1999. 56 At time of going to press, the United Synagogue website lists four current eruvim in London. These include the Edgware Eruv (which came into being in 2006); the Elstree and Borehamwood Eruv (November 2010); and the North West London Eruv and the Stanmore Eruv (December 2011). According to coverage in the Jewish Chronicle and several local newspapers based in London, eruvim have also been proposed and planning approved for Belmont (passed planning June 2013); Mill Hill (under construction from March 2013); Chigwell in Essex (approved by Redbridge

152  Hannah Ewence Council in May 2013 and awaiting the approval of Epping Forest District Council); and Bushey in Hertforshire (which was given the go-ahead in August 2013). 57 Some of these objections, especially those posed by secular and religious Jews, have been discussed by Oliver Valins, “Institutionalised Religion: Sacred Texts and Jewish Spatial Practice,” Geoforum 31 (2000): 575–86. 58 The identity of the objector is unknown but quoted by Jonathan Kalmus, “Manchester Eruv Hit by ‘Racist Objections’,” Jewish Chronicle, December 16, 2011. 59 Manning, “Plans For a New Eruv Sparks Fresh Debate,” Hampstead and Highgate Express, January 7, 2010. 60 Matthew Kalman, “The Trouble Begins When Jews Stop Being Invisible,” The Independent, May 31, 1997.

Part III

Interaction and Conflict with the ‘Other’ The Management of Images in Jewish/ Non-Jewish Relations

This page intentionally left blank

10 Beyond the Generic Contextual Interpretations of Mediaeval Jewish Female Iconography Israel M. Sandman

Mediaeval Judaism and Christianity each claimed to be God’s chosen people. Judaism’s claim was buttressed by its direct biological and communal continuity from the biblical chosen people, and by its continued adherence to Torah’s legal instructions—despite Israel’s exile and the lack of the Jerusalem Temple. These handicaps were frequently understood as a temporary, pre-messianic state, decreed by God, often inflicted by Christian usurpers.1 Christianity’s claim to supersede Judaism as ‘chosen’ was buttressed by its ascendancy and florescence, coupled with the downtrodden state of the Jews, dated and attributed to the Jewish rejection of Jesus and his followers’ transition from supposed biblical literalism. Contemporary Judaism was often considered a relic, underscoring Christian supersession.2 This competition was expressed in art. Christian dominance allowed the Christian artistic expression of supersession to be blatant, whereas Jewish subjugation required the Jewish artistic repudiation to be subtle.3 Mediaeval art consists of standardised symbolic representation of theological concepts, reinforced via dissemination.4 The Jewish minority, as a stratum within mediaeval society, made use of these symbols, albeit often to express dissent subtly.5 Whereas Christian art is often left unexplained, the motifs it contains are explained frequently enough for their meanings to be established and applied generally. In contrast, the related Jewish art is never properly explained. At most, one finds brief captions, containing neutral, factual labels of questionable accuracy.6 By examining ‘context’, meanings of Jewish images can be uncovered. This ‘context’ includes: explicit definitions of parallel motifs in Christian art and literature regarding the broad societal context;7 in tension with the specific societal context, the différance  highlighted by the appearance of these motifs (sometimes with modification) in the sources of the Jewish rival;8 mediaeval Jewish texts that have thematic parallels to the images; and the agendas of those who contribute to the production of the manuscripts—patrons, planners, scribes, artists9—and their desire to convey multiple messages to multiple audiences, including Jewish cognoscenti and intelligentsia, ordinary Jews, Jewish children or antagonistic Christian eyes. The Jewish images analysed here come from three related illuminated manuscripts of the Passover Haggadah (plural: Haggadot): British Library Additional

156  Israel M. Sandman Manuscript 27210 (the ‘Golden Haggadah’); British Library Oriental Manuscript 2884 (the ‘Sister Haggadah’); and the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s ‘Sarajevo Haggadah’. The manuscripts were produced in fourteenth-century ‘Sepharad’ (the Jewish appellation for Iberia), in the vicinity of Barcelona, Catalonia, which served as a bridge to France and Italy. Indeed, the iconography of these Haggadot contains Latinesque elements that migrated thence, Byzantine elements, plus uniquely Jewish elements.10 The images considered below are mostly of heroines from Genesis and Exodus, mediaeval contemporary Jewish women, and the Jewish community at large. As will be seen from parallel Christian iconography with commentary, as well as from Jewish and Christian religious texts, the female biblical protagonists often symbolise the religious community at various stages of development in its relationship with God. The locus classicus for this prominent Jewish and Christian typology is the historical-communal exegesis of the Song of Songs, in which the (male) lover is God, the (female) beloved is the religious community, and their relationship develops over the course of history.11 Thus, Jewish co-opting of Christian motifs of biblical heroines is particularly fraught, for it is these images that symbolise the heart of the Jewish–Christian contention over which community is God’s chosen people. VALIDATION OF KENESET ISRAEL (SYNAGOGA) VS. ECCLESIA Members of the Jewish minority in fourteenth-century Christian Spain used the identical historicising device as did the clergy of the Christian majority: prefacing a major liturgical work—for the Jews, the ‘Passover Haggadah’, and for the Christians, the ‘Psalter’—with a historicising pictorial cycle.12 As in the three above-mentioned Haggadot that are analysed here, this cycle often begins with the world’s creation, and culminates with images, as will be discussed below, affirming the particular group’s claim to be God’s true covenantal partner. Furthermore, this culmination segues into the liturgical text itself and thereby the user participates in sacred history. Thus, a primary purpose of these Sephardic Haggadot was to offer the Jewish Haggadah-user a Jewish narrative. According to this narrative, contemporary Jewry, even in its protracted exile, continue to be God’s chosen people, countering the Christian narrative in which Judaism was superseded by Christianity.13 Contra Katrin Kogman-Appel, the juxtaposition of the historicising pictorial cycle with the liturgical text is a clear rhetorical demonstration of God’s election of the liturgical group in question, reinforcing its ‘specialness’.14 The point of the Haggadah pictorial cycles is not to link the Bible and the messianic era via the bridge of contemporary Judaism, but rather to validate contemporary Judaism in its own right, as an authentic continuation from biblical and Temple Judaism.15 This is manifest in the collocation of biblical and contemporary scenes within a single page or opening. It is this drive to reiterate the ongoing nature of this covenant that underlies and explains: why two Haggadot end the biblical scenes with Miriam’s song and dance; the meaning of the recurring image of enthronement under a baldachin (canopy); and

Beyond the Generic  157 the three final openings of the Sarajevo Haggadah’s pictorial cycle. WHY END THE BIBLICAL SCENES WITH MIRIAM’S SONG?—THE EMERGENCE OF KENESET ISRAEL The Golden Haggadah in particular contains ‘a surfeit of images of women’, ‘the obvious result of authorial choices’.16 As Marc Epstein demonstrates, women are included where not required by the surface narrative, and in surprisingly prominent ways. Amongst this Haggadah’s prominently recurring female types is the Marian image, which Epstein analyses, including ‘Madonna and Child’ and ‘Pietà’ subtypes,17 and with the Christian symbol inverted for Jewish polemical purposes. Particularly from the twelfth century, in Christian symbolism, Mary often represents ‘Ecclesia’, the Church or corporate body of Christians.18 Thus, when used by Jews, Marian types represent Keneset Israel, the Collective of Israel, referred to by Christians as ‘Synagoga’, the image and aspects of its meaning being co-opted and Judaised from the ‘Ecclesia’ of the broad societal Christian context.19 This would make fuller sense of the polemic of the entire biblical narrative cycle, construing it as conveying the emergence of Keneset Israel, the confirmation of her place as God’s eternal partner, and the rejection of any competitors. While Epstein does endow some female figures with meta-individual status—‘this woman [. . .] might have been a personification of ‘Mourning’ [. . .] the queen of Egypt [.  .  .] as a personification of “Egypt” ’20—he stops short of ascribing the meta-individual, collective status of Keneset Israel to any of the depicted Israelite women (although he does interpret a particular image of Moses as representing Synagoga [militans]).21 Keneset Israel’s emergence begins with the Haggadah’s first woman, Eve. In some Christian sources, Eve (in addition to Mary) represents Ecclesia or Ecclesia’s prototype.22 For example, Ambrose records that ‘The second Adam is Christ and the rib of Christ is the life of the Church. [. . .] This rib is no other than Eve’.23 Adapted to a Jewish context, Eve, too, represents Keneset Israel or her prototype. Further stages in the emergence of Keneset Israel are represented by Noah’s wife, and, as can be extrapolated from Epstein’s analysis, the image of Sarah in the tent, and the visual contrast between Lot’s daughters and Rachel. Moving along, the personified ‘Mourning’, who Epstein associates with Jacob’s daughter (Genesis 37:35), ‘is placed in direct chiasmic parallel on the page to the fallen seductress Potiphar’s wife’ (Golden Haggadah 6b; see Figure  10.1).24 Moving beyond Epstein’s analysis, note that Potiphar’s wife, who is longingly gazing at the fleeing Joseph and is pulling on his garment, is evocative of images of Ecclesia at the crucifixion:25 she is crowned (although she is not queen); and she is positioned to the right of Joseph (a parallel for the Christ figure). As seductress, she would be trying to enter a relationship that is not rightfully hers. Thus, the parallel figure of the mourning daughter, who is sharing a gaze of pathos with suffering Jacob, would represent Synagoga: she is correctly positioned to the left of Jacob (an equivalent for the Christ figure, possibly hinted at by the small cross decorating the medallion on his canopy,

158  Israel M. Sandman

Figure 10.1.  © The British Library Board, Additional manuscript 27210 (Golden Haggadah), 6b, bottom.

turned away from the blood [associated with Ecclesia] at his right).26 Following Epstein, the drama and polemical contrast continue to be symbolised by the Israelite women of the Egyptian slavery and Exodus. This process reaches its culmination with Miriam’s Song. In the Christian Bible moralisée,27 particularly the episode where Miriam talks against Moses and is afflicted with leprosy (Numbers 12), Sara Lipton suggests that ‘Maria [= Miriam], who reproached her brother [= Moses] in front of Aaron [= her other brother], signifies Synagoga [= the corporate body of the Israelites/ adherents of Judaism], who [.  .  .] cursed Christ, son of God. God, who struck Maria with leprosy, signifies Jesus Christ, who reproved, tore to pieces, and made leprous Synagoga’.28 In Lipton’s analysis of the Bible moralisée, this can be rectified only when Synagoga will ‘submit to the ministrations of the [Christian] clergy and accept the cleansing of baptism’, as alluded to in a subsequent image in which ‘Miriam bows down to her brothers, demonstrating appropriate feminine submission’. The Golden Haggadah 15a (see Figure 10.2) and Sister Haggadah 16a offer a counter-narrative, ending their biblical scenes with Miriam the prophetess, sister of Aaron, leading the women in song and dance (Exodus 15:20–21), just as her brother Moses led the men in song (Exodus 15:1–19). As demonstrated by Kogman-Appel, these images are influenced by related illustrations in various versions of the Bible moralisée, highlighting the point that these Haggadot are in dialogue with the Bible moralisée.29 In these images, and particularly as they occur in the Haggadot, Miriam, with her symbolic association with

Beyond the Generic  159 Keneset Israel/Synagoga, is neither sinful nor subordinate to her male counterparts. Rather, in the Haggadot it is Miriam—Keneset Israel/Synagoga—who brings the Bible to its fruition and fulfilment, occupying the final biblical pictorial frame. The fact that, as in the biblical account, it is specifically the women who are illustrated holding musical instruments evokes the comment of the most popular mediaeval Jewish commentator, Rashi, who extolls the righteousness of the women: ‘The righteous women of the generation felt certain that the Holy Blessed One will do miracles for them, so they brought tuppim (drums/tambourines) out of Egypt’.30 The above-discussed Miriam/Keneset Israel/Synagoga connection may also explain why in these Haggadot (unlike the version in the Bible moralisée) the image of the Song at the Sea contains women only.31 This is because the meta-narrative of the entire biblical pictorial cycle is about the emergence and crystallisation of Keneset Israel, which reaches its fulfilment in this image. In other words, at the time of the Exodus, Keneset Israel, symbolised by Miriam and the women, rectified the sin of Eve, the prototype of the religious corporate body, via the intervening women, representing the process by which other corporate bodies were rejected and Keneset Israel was crystallised. This fits with the radically unique nature of this image in comparison to other images in the Golden Haggadah, discussed eloquently by Epstein: [It] attracts the eye by virtue of its scale and the audacity of its construction. [. . .] Miriam and the women of Israel [. . .] occupy the whole of the quadrant in which they appear, and are thus taller, bigger, and closer than any other figure in the illuminations. Mariam and the women occupy a ‘spaceless’ space, right up against the picture plane—with no residue of landscape, architecture, or history [. . .] this is the only scene that is spaceless, hence contextless, hence timeless, hence eternal. Wrenched from its historical context, it stands as the pivot. [. . .]32 Miriam’s association with Keneset Israel may be extrapolated from Jewish textual sources, too. As discussed above, in the Jewish historical-allegorical reading of the Song of Songs, the Song’s beloved, the female protagonist, stands for Keneset Israel, and the Song’s lover, the male protagonist, stands for God.33 According to Rashi’s interpretation, the ‘Shulamite’, the female/beloved (namely Keneset Israel) in Song of Songs 7:1, refers to the people of Israel in exile. They resist gentile attempts to entice them into forsaking Judaism in order to gain greatness, because no gentile enticements can compare to the ‘ “dances of the encampments” of the wilderness’. In a general sense, this associates the dance of Song of Songs 7:1 with dances of the Exodus. More importantly, Rashi’s exegetical trajectory is further developed by an unnamed member of the school of the Tosaphists (founded by Rashi’s disciples). In this Tosaphist’s commentary to the Exodus 15:20–21 passage,34 the dance of the encampments in Song of Songs 7:1, to which the verse compares the Shulamite, is

160  Israel M. Sandman explicitly related to Exodus 15:20, which discusses the dance of Miriam and the women at the sea: ‘With dances’ [in Exodus 15:20 refers to] ‘as the dance of the camps’ [in Song of Songs 7:1]. What is the meaning of ‘the camps’ [namely, in the plural]? Two camps: that of the men, and that of the women. Earlier in his commentary to Exodus 15, the Tosaphist often makes hermeneutical reference to the female beloved of the Song of Songs. The result is a cluster of teachings that radically promotes the special place of the women in general, and of Miriam in particular, in the story of the Exodus—paralleling the mentality underlying the Haggadah images. Furthermore, he portrays Miriam as possessing extramundane aspects, which parallel my interpretation of the Haggadah images. First, Miriam’s song is interpreted to have a place of honour in its own right: ‘Miriam the Prophetess took [. . .]’ (Exodus 15:20): This section is ‘open’35 so as not to conflate the Song of Miriam with the first song [namely, the immediately preceding song of the men, Exodus 15:1–19], so as not to make it subordinate and incidental. Rather, it is considered worthy in and of itself to be a prominent song. Subsequently, Miriam and her song are endowed with superhuman greatness: ‘Miriam the prophetess took’ (‫)ותקח מרים הנביאה‬. The acrostic formed by the end letters (‫ )חמה‬spells ‘sun’: ‘She is clear as the sun’ (Song of Songs 6:10), for she was beautiful; indeed, the Sages said, ‘Her face resembled noontide’.36 ‘The prophetess’: She declaimed this song by means of prophecy and the holy spirit. Therefore it states ‘the prophetess’. Further on, we find an expansion of Rashi’s interpretation that the women took musical instruments because of their confidence that God would perform miracles: ‘[Miriam.  . . took] the tof (= drum / tambourine) in her hand’ (Exodus 15:20): The definite article of ‘the drum / tambourine’ lets us know that that tof was known and recognised. But what tof was it? However, the explanation is: that tof which she had prepared in advance of this event. Indeed, Miriam and the women knew that the Holy Blessed One would perform miracles for them, so in advance of this event they had prepared tuppim and dances. This is why it says ‘the tof ’ (Mekhilta).37 Subsequently it is exegetically demonstrated that specifically women took instruments: ‘[. . .] the tof in her hand, and all the women went forth after her with tuppim and dances’: This is the purport of the statement ‘in the middle, tof-playing

Beyond the Generic  161 maidens’ (Psalm 68:26). This refers to Miriam and her colleagues. And it is written ‘Maidens have loved You (‫( ’)אהבוך‬Song of Songs 1:3). These are the ‘tof-playing maidens’. [And indeed this is alluded to in] ‘the tof in her hand, and there went forth all’ (‫)את התף בידה ותאצן כל‬, the initial letters of which spell ‘have loved You’ (‫)אהבוך‬. Shortly, there follows the association of Miriam’s dance with that of Jephthah’s daughter (Judges 11:34), ‘who was a saint, and declaimed song as did Miriam’. Also, as Jephthah’s daughter was his only child, the Israelite women of the Exodus are considered to be not merely God’s daughters, alongside the Israelite men,

Figure 10.2.  © The British Library Board, Additional manuscript 27210 (Golden Haggadah), 15a.

162  Israel M. Sandman who are His sons, but the women are in fact considered to be His only ones (or possibly: His only daughters [yeh· idot]).38 In the two adjacent panels of the Golden Haggadah 15a (see Figure  10.2), the message of the greatness of the biblical Miriam, symbolising the election of Keneset Israel, is carried forth into contemporary Jewish life. Directly beneath the Miriam panel, a similar-looking contemporary Jewess engages in preparation for the Passover holiday, stressing the continuity between biblical and contemporary Judaism. Directly to the left of the Miriam panel, a contemporary Jewish mother, uncannily resembling a ‘Madonna and Child’ (another Miriam/Mary),39 holds both an infant and an unleavened bread (= matzah), thus co-opting a variety of Christian symbols (the infant Jesus; the Eucharist).40 Furthermore, this mother stands across the panel from a Jewish man enthroned under a baldachin (discussed below), who in fact is simply the head of a Jewish household. He is overseeing the distribution of matzah and another Passover food (h· aroset), via three youths, to a gaggle of young children who surround the mother figure. Thus, everyday contemporary Jews, fecund families of men, women, and children, living Torah law, embody the sacramental and sacerdotal powers of which Christians wish to divest them and transfer to (celibate) Christ, Ecclesia, Mary and clergy. THE BALDACHIN—THRONE IMAGE Throughout the Golden Haggadah’s biblical cycle, great individuals are enthroned under baldachins. The same occurs in the Sister Haggadah in a simplified form. This is in contrast to parallel imagery in Christian sources41 and the Sarajevo Haggadah. Indeed, the Golden and Sister Haggadot embody a distinctive message, exemplified by the difference in the portrayal of Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dreams when contrasted with the depiction in Christian sources and the Sarajevo Haggadah. In the latter sources, Joseph kneels before Pharaoh; in the former sources, Joseph is seated upon Pharaoh’s royal seat, beside Pharaoh (in the Golden Haggadah 7a, under a baldachin).42 Furthermore, in the Sister Haggadah 9b, Joseph as viceroy is crowned, and seated enthroned under a baldachin. These images in these Haggadot are in continuity with earlier images of enthronement—not only of kings, such as Nimrod, but also of the Patriarch Jacob (see Figure  10.1, above).43 Thus, the Golden and Sister Haggadot convey the message that great Israelites are as royal as kings, and that even while under the jurisdiction of a gentile king, the great Israelites retain their nobility. Then, by enthroning a contemporary Jewish householder beneath a baldachin, the Golden Haggadah expands upon the theme: even the ordinary contemporary Jewish householder (and not only the greats of the past, such as Joseph) is noble, particularly when observing Jewish law, and should not be cowed by pressures to apostatise from Judaism and embrace, in this case, Christianity.44

Beyond the Generic  163 THE THREE FINAL OPENINGS OF THE SARAJEVO HAGGADAH’S PICTORIAL CYCLE The three final openings of the Sarajevo Haggadah’s pictorial cycle are exceptional. Although the right side of each of these final openings contains, as standard, two pictorial panels, the left side of each of these three contains a single, full-page image. Eva Frojmovic and Sarit Shalev-Eyni have focused only upon the exceptional three full-page images on the left, and have read therein a message about Torah.45 However, examining the entirety of these three openings, including the right sides, broadens the focus of the message to one about continued divine agency, sustenance and provision, and indwelling. In the first of these three page-openings (see Figure 10.3, below), on the right we see, in two panels, that God was with the ancient Israelites in the wilderness, providing them with their material needs: manna, dates and water.46 On the left, in the full-page image, we again see that God was with the ancient Israelites in the wilderness, this time providing them with their spiritual needs: the divine voice; the tablets containing the Ten Commandments; Moses, standing on the mountain, whose head is just beneath heaven and the train of whose robe is just above the heads of the people, visually and notionally mediating between heaven and earth, between God and the people; and Joshua, ‘head and shoulders above the people’ (1 Samuel 9:2 and 10:23), head reaching part way up the height of Moses’ leg, holding a miniature set of tablets, visually and notionally mediating between Moses and the people.

Figure 10.3.  National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo Haggadah, 29–30 (view from right to left).

164  Israel M. Sandman Turning the page (see Figure 10.4, below), we find the provision for maintaining God’s presence among the people even after the passing of Moses. On the right we find the preparations: in the top panel, Moses blesses the people (as indicated by his outstretched hands and by the caption) before he dies, with Joshua standing in the wings; in the bottom panel, on one side Moses has begun to ascend the mountain where he is to die, on the other side the people are assembled, and bridging the two sides Moses turns back and lays his hand on obeisant Joshua, endowing him as his successor (cf. Numbers 27:12–23). In the full-page image on the left, we have the indication that God’s presence remained with Israel even after the passing of Moses: within an erect Temple—‘They shall make for me a Sanctuary so that I shall dwell in their midst’ (Exodus 25:8)—we see the Ark of the Covenant containing the tablets of the Law on which the Ten Commandments are clearly visible. This links back to the preceding full-page image, but also calls to mind the divine instruction to Joshua, ‘just as I was with Moses I shall be with you. [. . .] However [. . .] keep and do in accordance with the entire Torah that I commanded unto Moses my servant’ (Joshua 1:5–8). Above the Ark are the cherubs, one of which represents God, and the other of which represents the people of Israel, the cherubs in this image being joined together, indicating harmony between God and Israel,47 with white luminosity, presumably representing divine manifestation, sprouting from the point at which they are joined. In the final opening (see Figure 10.5, below), we find how God is present with Israel even after the destruction of the Temple, during the exile. On the right, we find two scenes in which contemporary Jews provide the special holiday foods required by their brethren. Whereas these scenes thematically parallel the provision of manna, dates and water in the wilderness, now contemporary Jews have assumed the divine role of providing—indicating that, even during exile, the

Figure 10.4.  National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo Haggadah, 31–32 (view from right to left).

Beyond the Generic  165

Figure 10.5.  National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo Haggadah, 33–34 (view from right to left).

people’s good deeds maintain divine providence in their midst. On the left, in the full-page image, we see, once again, the locus of the continued divine presence, here even during exile. This locus has dual meaning. It is the ‘Sanctuary-in-miniature’ (Ezekiel 11:16), the synagogue edifice48 (the ‘house of the Keneset’ or ‘house of the congregation’), and particularly the ark containing the Torah scrolls, paralleling the Temple’s Ark of the Covenant containing the tablets, hearkening back to Sinai. The locus is also Keneset Israel, the people of Israel, the community of Jews, men, women, and children, who are gathered in the synagogue edifice, and who are about to set out towards home to perform the Passover Seder. WHY WAS THE PICTORIAL CYCLE ASSOCIATED WITH THE PASSOVER HAGGADAH? Why out of all the Jewish liturgical works was the Passover Haggadah chosen to present the historicising pictorial cycle that counters Christian claims? This may be due to the intensified tensions between Jews and Christians at the Passover–Easter season. Christians accused the Jews of Jesus’ era of having had Jesus killed at this season, in relation to the Jews’ rejection of Jesus as the messiah.49 On occasion, Christians accused contemporary Jews, particularly at this time of year, of ritually killing Christians or of torturing the Eucharistic bread, believed to embody Christ, in an alleged attempt to re-enact the killing of Jesus.50 Often, these accusations, fuelled by the clergy and the masses alike, ended in violent tragedy for the Jewish population. Years in which Passover and Easter coincided were particularly volatile.51 Relatedly, a major focus of the Christian Psalter’s historicising pictorial cycles was the crucifixion,52 dwelt upon with heightened intensity at this time of

166  Israel M. Sandman year, the anniversary of the event. Thus, at this season in particular, Jews needed extra internal strengthening of their Jewish claim to election. Thus, the Passover Haggadah was the natural place in which to communicate the Jewish claim of chosenness.53 PARTICULARISED CONTEXT: INTERNAL MORALISING WITHIN THE JEWISH COMMUNITY We have seen that on one level the pictorial cycles of the Haggadot reassure the community of Keneset Israel/Synagoga of her inalienable place as God’s chosen beloved, despite the rival claims of Ecclesia. On another level, however, the pictorial cycles moralise Keneset Israel about what she must live up to as God’s chosen beloved, addressing internal problems. Kogman-Appel’s discussion of this second level is fertile, as is her discussion of the differences between the material quality of various Haggadot (particularly the Golden and Sister Haggadot) as indicators of social differences (that is, differences in mentality) between their patrons.54 Nevertheless, I disagree with her characterisation of the iconography of the Haggadot as being against rationalist philosophical allegory, as well as her assertion that ‘Zoharic materials are not reflected in the Haggadah cycles’.55 In my reading, the Golden Haggadah’s illustration of the Adam story (Golden Haggadah 2b; see Figure 10.6, below) parallels moralising rationalist allegorical literary interpretations of that story.56 Furthermore, the Sister Haggadah’s illustration of that story (Sister Haggadah 2a; see Figure 10.7, below) is parallel to moralising Zoharic literary interpretations of the story, as discussed below, from Zohar 1: 49a–b.57 These literary affiliations are highlighted by differences between the iconography of these Haggadot. My interpretation of the images is further supported by parallel Christian iconography and literature. Regarding literature, important here is Hildegard of Bingen’s concept of man, woman, and the speculative forma, namely, the ‘mirroring of the image’ or ‘contemplation of the form’ that passes between them.58 Man represents the rational voice, and woman its embodiment: ‘When Eve looked at Adam, she gazed at him as if she were seeing into heaven, as a soul that longs for heavenly things stretches upward, for she set her hope in man’.59 Complementing the Hildegardian literature, there is a rich and varied Christian iconographic tradition of Eve’s gaze—sometimes focused upon the Logos, sometimes locked with Adam’s gaze, and sometimes locked with the serpent’s gaze—as illustrated in the Salerno Ivories. Furthermore, we shall see that Hildegard’s symbolic text interpretation of male and female have broad parallels in mediaeval Jewish rationalist, philosophical and Zoharic texts.60 These typologies can be discerned in the adaptations of Christian iconography in these Haggadot, as seen when comparing the imagery in the Haggadot with the Salerno Ivory, ‘Creation of Eve, Temptation and Fall’.61 Jewish changes include the elimination of the (Christological) Logos, the reorientation of the image from to right-to-left (the direction of Hebrew), and the changing of Eve’s hand gestures.62 Furthermore, unlike the Christian image in which Eve, facing

Beyond the Generic  167 the Logos, is turned away from Adam, in the Haggadot she turns towards Adam. In the Sarajevo Haggadah (see Figure 10.8 below, top frame) and Golden Haggadah (see Figure 10.6), Adam nevertheless remains turned away from Eve, following the Christian exemplars. The Sister Haggadah (see Figure 10.7), however, seems innovative: despite the poor state of preservation of this image, it seems that Adam is turned towards Eve. Unlike my reading of the meta-narrative, my localised interpretation of these images is about the inner dynamic of the individual, not about the status of Keneset Israel. However, in both cases the feminine plays a pivotal role; she is the locus where the drama happens and the key issues are played out. THE GOLDEN HAGGADAH’S CORRESPONDENCE TO DAVID QIMḤI’S ALLEGORICAL INTERPRETATION OF THE ADAM AND EVE STORY Several related mediaeval Jewish philosophical allegorical interpretations of the Adam and Eve story have been preserved.63 Adam, at one extreme, signifies abstract intellect, and the snake, at the other extreme, signifies abandon to physical appetites; between the two, Eve signifies the mediation between intellect and appetites, and that amount of bodily involvement which is necessary to remain alive, for the good of the abstract intellect. In Qimh·i’s allegory, Eve/earthy intellect is portrayed as a necessary evil, at fundamental odds with Adam/pure human intellect. The alienation and tension between Adam and Eve is well represented in the Golden Haggadah’s iconography (see Figure 10.6), as will be shown below.64 Linking this localised meaning to my understanding of the meta-narrative of the

Figure 10.6.  © The British Library Board, Additional manuscript 27210 (Golden Haggadah), 2b, top.

168  Israel M. Sandman Golden Haggadah—that it is about the emergence of Keneset Israel as God’s eternal and only beloved—Eve would signify problematic beginnings, which become rectified only later with the emergence of crystallised Keneset Israel. In this Golden Haggadah image, Adam, who, as we have seen, represents human intellect, is elevated upon a hillock, separate from the animals—which he is studying and understanding.65 His elevated position anticipates the Haggadah’s images of enthroned kings and other great individuals. His greatness beyond the flora, fauna and inanimate items is further highlighted by portraying him as disproportionally large in relation to the rest of these items in the frame.66 He is thinking, not doing, highlighting the idea that human greatness is intellectual. The fact that it is the natural world that he is contemplating underscores the importance for man to have knowledge of the natural sciences. These same themes are present in Qimh·i’s comments to Genesis 2:19–20. God’s bringing of the animals to Adam is interpreted to mean that God brought the animals to Adam’s awareness. Adam, by means of his intellect, then contemplates both their general nature as well as their particular natures (= calling each by name). Indeed, ‘God put into him the power to know the natural sciences unto perfection’ (cf. Golden Haggadah 2b, top; see Figure 10.6 above, Adam pointing with his index finger). In his very act of intellection about the animals, Adam would realise that they are bereft of intellect (= the capacity for abstract thinking); the animals are exclusively ‘of the earth’ (Genesis 2:19), and thus fundamentally unlike Adam. Adam ‘is master over them all [cf. his throne-like position]. If so, he will not tread the path of those which are lower than he, being a beast as they are. Rather, he will endeavour with all his might to make himself resemble those who are higher than he’. Adam’s ‘not finding a help in relation to him’ (Genesis 2:20) is interpreted by Qimh·i to mean that the intellect feels that involvement with animals, namely physicality, is not a help but a hindrance. The divinely imposed slumber of Adam (Genesis 2:21), according to Qimh·i, means that God saw fit that sometimes one ‘should sleep and slumber from wakefulness of the intellect, being involved in earthiness, so that it may be a help to him in the this-worldly existence’. In Qimh·i’s reading, woman is one ‘side’ of the human—with the majority of ancient and mediaeval Jewish interpreters, Qimh·i takes the Hebrew tsela’, from which Eve emerges, to mean ‘side’, not ‘rib’. But which side of the human is the woman? ‘The woman is called the earthy intellect, in which the faculty of appetite is set. Indeed, the sages of the investigative sciences have called matter “woman,”67 because it is the recipient of forms, one after another, bearing changes’. This side was ‘taken’ (Genesis 2:21), meaning separated off from the intellect, the intellect being ‘shut’ (ibid.) in by that side’s ‘fleshiness’ (ibid.). ‘He brought her to the Adam’ (Genesis 2:22) means that God ‘attached her to him’. How does the abstract intellect react to this appendage? ‘He distances her as is fitting, since he is human and not animal. If he does not distance her as is fitting, then he becomes animal, in keeping with the majority of his structure’. In the Golden Haggadah’s image (see Figure 10.6), Eve is turned towards Adam, spanning and gripping his body. The posture of spanning and gripping is a fundamental change from earlier, Christian models, exemplified by the Salerno Ivories, carried over into other Jewish images of this scene, highlighted by the

Beyond the Generic  169 Sarajevo Haggadah (see Figure  10.8), in which Eve holds her hands together prayerfully. In this change, I  see the signification of the dominance of earthiness, Eve, over pure, abstract intellect, Adam. Adam, for his part, is turned away from Eve, signifying that he rejects her. Whereas Adam is asleep, Eve is awake, symbolising the incompatibility of abstract human intellect and earthy intellect. Whither is Eve looking? Although it is unclear, she does not seem to be looking at Adam, but beyond him. If so, this may signify the earthy intellect’s disconnect from abstract intellect. The discord and alienation between Adam and Eve figure prominently in the Golden Haggadah and, as we have just seen, in Qimhi. Unlike the Salerno Ivories · (and the Sister Haggadah [see Figure  10.7]), here (and in the Sarajevo Haggadah) the Tree and snake intervene—that is, cause disjunction—between Adam and Eve. For Qimh·i, both the cunning snake and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil represent the earthy intellect, the Tree being ‘the earthy (h· umri) intellect’ (comment on Genesis 2:9), and the snake being, in particular, this intellect’s ability ‘to entice and cause rebellion’ (comment on Genesis 3:1). This disjunction between Adam and Eve is further highlighted by two overarching dynamics of the iconography: the intimacy between Eve and the snake, and Adam’s disinterest in Eve. Qimh·i has the snake telling the woman that if God ‘withheld from you the pleasures of the body, then it is every good thing that He has withheld from you. This is the enticement of the snake’. In the Golden Haggadah, the woman and the snake gaze at one another intimately, excluding Adam. According to Qimh·i on Genesis 3:6, ‘The woman saw that the tree is good for food’, the gaze would mean that ‘She gazed at the concept of appetite, and she saw that it is good to be engaged in bodily appetites. The word “food” includes the food of the mouth, and, as an epithet, the “food” of sexual relations’. Back to the Golden Haggadah, the woman’s hand, seemingly holding the forbidden fruit for Adam, has paused (lovingly?) under the snake’s head. These two factors seem to be interpolated from God’s curse to the snake, ‘I shall place enmity between you and the woman, and between her offspring and your offspring; he shall pound you on the head [. . .]’ (Genesis 3:15).68 Taking the longing and intimate sentiment between the snake and Eve a step further, Qimh·i quotes the rabbinic tradition that the snake had sexual relations with Eve. In contrast to the snake, Adam does not seem very interested in Eve. His feet and lower half are pointed as if walking away from her. His head is pointed upwards, his eyes gazing at an angel who is addressing him, or them, from upon high. Although Adam’s hand reaches across towards Eve, to get the forbidden fruit from her, this is merely a superficial, external gesture, not in harmony with the rest of his body. Indeed, here Qimh·i quotes ‘the sage Rabbi Samuel Ibn Tibbon’, saying that ‘one who is called Adam [. . .] does not have this within his nature. It is only by means of the woman that he ate of it’. By bringing various stages of the biblical story together in a single image, the illustrator gives the impression of inner conflict, in which a single individual is pulled in multiple directions. An additional dimension of this conflict is represented by the inclusion of the fig leaves with which Adam and Eve cover their genitals, signifying that along with inappropriate appetites and longings, there also exists shame about those appetites, and the drive to overcome them.

170  Israel M. Sandman Qimh·i, too (comment on Genesis 2:10), takes up the penitent associations of the fig leaves, stating that they represent ‘the three faculties that are within the brain’. This penitence is motivated by the eyes, a further dimension that plays a deep and prominent role in the Golden Haggadah and for Qimh·i (on Genesis 3:7), both of which highlight opposing possibilities inherent in the gaze of the eyes. Qimh·i makes it clear that ‘ “The eyes of the two of them were opened ” (Genesis 3:7) is the opposite of “and your eyes will be opened ” (Genesis 3:5), which was spoken by the seducer. Sometimes the eyes of the two of them are opened and the earthy becomes human, just as at first the human became earthy. They realised that in pursuing appetites they had sinned. “They knew that they were naked ”. They knew that they were naked of intellect’. Whereas the biblical text says that ‘the voice of the Lord, God’ (Genesis 3:8–9) confronted Adam and Eve—and in the Sarajevo Haggadah the voice is depicted by lines emanating from the heavens (Sarajevo Haggadah 3, bottom panel)—in the Golden Haggadah it is not God’s voice, but an angel, who speaks.69 Similarly, in his commentary (to Genesis 3:8), Qimh·i explains that God does not get directly involved, but communicates via an agent: ‘the human intellect, which makes proclamation and announcement by the command of God and by His will’. As we have seen, the essential aspect of this intellect is signified by the (higher self of ) the man—but not the woman, who signifies earthy intellect. Similarly, in the Golden Haggadah’s iconography, only Adam, not Eve, is addressed (this time in keeping with the biblical account), whereas in the Sarajevo Haggadah, the voice confronts both Adam and Eve, and in fact Eve is in closer proximity to the voice. Adam’s heavenly focus in the Golden Haggadah is reminiscent of Qimh·i’s mention (on Genesis 3:8) of the stage at which ‘one begins to distance the bodily appetites’. THE SISTER HAGGADAH’S CORRESPONDENCE TO THE ZOHARIC INTERPRETATION OF THE ADAM AND EVE STORY The Sister Haggadah, despite its close, derivative relationship with the Golden Haggadah, has a voice of its own, often differing from that of the Golden Haggadah.70 Whereas the Golden Haggadah depicts a negative relation between Adam and Eve, focusing on discord and alienation, the Sister Haggadah depicts their harmony, focusing on relatedness. This parallels the difference between the philosophical allegorists on the one hand, and the Zohar on the other, on the meaning of femininity. Although both the Zohar and the philosophers see Eve, typologically, as a liminal stage of soul between good and evil, the lofty and the lowly, and thus more susceptible to evil, nevertheless, in the Zohar, the feminine stage is not seen as a necessary evil, to be avoided as much as possible. Rather, as we are about to see from Zohar 1: 49a–b, the Zohar seeks harmony and fusion between Adam and Eve, man and woman, and what these represent. Furthermore, in the Zohar, the human Eve/woman is seen as parallel to a divine Eve/woman, the divine feminine, the divine origin of Keneset Israel. The Zohar

Beyond the Generic  171 narrative even weaves back and forth between the human and divine feminine parties, as in the following passage from Zohar 1: 49a–b:71 ‘ “[Jacob] approached the place, and lay there [. . .]” (Genesis 28:11).72 […] This teaches us that when a man wishes to lie with his wife [. . .]’. Similarly, at the end of the passage we find: ‘This demonstrates that events among men are patterned on the world above. [. . .] Therefore matters so far may be interpreted as applying to both the upper and the lower worlds’.73 It may be the Zohar’s recognition of a feminine dimension in the divine realm that allows it to frame femininity in a comparatively positive light. The existence of a divine feminine that is parallel to the human feminine is in harmony with my two-tiered reading of the iconography of the Haggadot, in which the iconography’s local narrative is about male and female and the individual; and in which that local narrative is integrated into the meta-narrative, which is about the emergence of the meta-individual feminine, Keneset Israel.74 Unlike the Golden Haggadah (see Figure  10.6), the iconography here illustrates harmony. Eve emerges from Adam with her hands spread open in a welcoming gesture. Uniquely, Adam apparently (despite the poor state of preservation) reciprocates, facing Eve, possibly awake, making eye contact with her. To continue the quotation of the Zohar above:75 This teaches us that when a man wishes to lie with his wife he must first of all coax her and persuade her with words [. . .] for they must share the same desire and there must be no compulsion. [. . .] Come and see. It is written The man said: This is now [bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall therefore (le-zot) be called ‘woman’ (ishah) because she was taken out of man (ish)] (Genesis 2:23). These are pleasant coaxing words, to arouse love in her

Figure 10.7.  © The British Library Board, Oriental Manuscript 2884 (Sister Haggadah), 2a, top.

172  Israel M. Sandman and to persuade her to share his desire. See how beautiful these words are, how full of love: “Bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh,” to show her that they are one and that there is no separation at all between them. [. . .] Therefore, a man should leave his father and his mother and cleave to his wife, and they shall be one flesh (verse 24). This is still intended to persuade her with love, so that he may cleave to her.76 Also unlike the Golden Haggadah (but like the Salerno Ivories—noted above, analysing the Golden Haggadah), in this Haggadah, the scene of Eve and the snake is separate from the scene of Eve giving the fruit to Adam. Thus, the snake and Tree do not intervene between Adam and Eve; Adam and Eve make direct tactile and eye contact—it even seems that Eve, with a kind look on her face, is (intimately) placing the fruit directly into Adam’s mouth. Adam and Eve are matched at the various horizontal points (entire stature, heads, arms, lower body, legs and ground), as well as in distance from the viewer. This equality is also in the Sarajevo Haggadah (see Figure 10.8). By contrast, in the Golden Haggadah, Adam is slightly more forward, and comes out higher in the panel, whereas in the Salerno Ivories, Adam is taller. Additionally, in most cases, the iconography of the Sister Haggadah is oriented from right to left, a mirror-image reworking of the left-to-right Christian iconography.77 Nevertheless, the direction of Eve in this panel is not reversed. In this Salerno panel, moving from left to right: scene one depicts Eve to the left of Adam’s head; scene two—to the left of the snake wrapped around the tree; and scene three—to the left of Adam, her back adjacent to the tree, her face towards Adam. In the Sister Haggadah (see Figure 10.7), beginning from right to left, we find that in the first scene, the emergence of Eve from Adam’s side, the positioning is the same as that in Salerno, with Adam to the right, Eve to the left (this holds true in all three Haggadot, but only in this Haggadah would we have expected mirror-image reorientation). Moving left, we move from one image of Eve directly into the next, following the motion of Eve’s extended hand into the scene of Eve and the snake, where Eve is to the right of the snake, a proper mirror-image of Salerno. However, in the final scene, the mirror-imaging is not sustained; again Eve is to the left of Adam (as in Salerno)—although this breaks the flow and centrality of Eve images. This may be related to the identification of the female with the left side, as found in Zoharic thinking in general and in our passage in particular: ‘the left in the world above takes hold of the female [. . .], as it is said “His left hand is under my head ” (Song of Songs 2:6)’.78 Furthermore, in the Sister Haggadah, the drama that Eve is acting out is not whether she will choose Adam or the snake. It is clear that she is fundamentally connected with Adam. The question is: what will be the nature of the intimacy between her and Adam? Will it be pure, as in the first scene, on the right, of her emergence from him? Or will her contact with the snake (middle) pervert her intimacy with Adam (left) with sin? Compare the continuation of the Zohar passage:79

Beyond the Generic  173

Figure 10.8.  National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo Haggadah, 3.

When he (= Adam) had aroused all these things80 in her, Scripture then says The serpent was more cunning [than any other beast of the field] (Genesis 3:1). The evil inclination bestirred himself in order to take hold of her, to bind her with bodily desires,81 and arouse in her other things82 in which the evil

174  Israel M. Sandman inclination could delight. So much so that when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired, [. . .]83 she took of its fruit and ate (v. 6). She received it willingly.84 And she gave to her husband, too, with her (v. 7). Her desire for him was aroused, so that she bestowed on him love and desire.85 Unlike the Zohar, in this Haggadah, the pivotal player is Eve, not Adam. Eve is pictured thrice here, active each time (as indicated by her hand gestures), whereas Adam is pictured only twice, away from the frame’s centre, the first time largely passive. This may also allude to the focus on Keneset Israel, to the pivotal role of the community in shaping its relation with God in the unfolding of sacred history in the world. CONCLUSIONS Pictorial images need to be read and interpreted with at least as much nuance as do texts. These interpretations need to be made in light of contextual factors. For these Haggadot, contextual factors include mediaeval Jewish and Christian iconographic and literary parallels and their late antique antecedents, as well as the shared contemporary Jewish and Christian life on the ground, as recapped below. In this context, on the macro level of the Haggadah, namely taking the whole of the pictorial cycle into account, I concur with Shalev-Eyni: the images convey contemporary Jewry’s self-fortification in its self-identity as God’s eternal partner in an eternal covenant, regardless of external circumstances, including exile. Jews and Christians shared a theologically intense world, fraught by paradoxes of mutuality and mutual exclusivity. Both groups shared a worldview shaped by the Hebrew Bible and its ongoing interpretation, in which God is engaged in a covenantal relationship with the religious community as well as the individuals therein, both often symbolised by biblical female heroines such as Eve and Miriam, as well as the female ‘Ecclesia and Synagoga’. This covenant began with the Creation and unfolds over history, being defined by key events of durative relevance. Both groups share hermeneutic and iconographic approaches to the unpacking and expressing of this covenant, as seen in the images illustrating the biblical narrative and texts decoding the female imagery. However, it is this very mutuality that engenders sharp exclusivity, in a way irrelevant to those who are not pretenders to the same covenantal throne: were the Jews un-chosen, superseded by the Christians, or is the Christian claim to supersession bogus, because the Jews are irrevocably the chosen people? The most prominent message that I find in these images on the micro level of the Haggadah, namely taking the local image into account, revises Kogman-Appel’s thesis. Yes, the polemic is anti-libertinism or anti-licentiousness; but no, the libertines are not philosophers, but simply libertines. The two Haggadot, Golden and Sister, represent two critiques of libertines or licentious people: the Golden Haggadah’s critique is philosophical, whereas the Sister Haggadah’s critique is Zoharic. The Sarajevo Haggadah bears further analysis.

Beyond the Generic  175 Finally, the use of image was part of a dynamic in mediaeval Judaism in which abstract, meta-individual and meta-human feminine entities came to be seen as embodied in concrete, contemporary Jewish females. Textually this is exemplified by Qimhi . and the Zohar, in the overlapping mediaeval philosophical and Kabbalistic worldviews of which concrete phenomena are seen as derivatives of spiritual antecedents. Iconographically, this is seen in the segue of the Haggadot from the biblical heroines with all their metaphysical symbolism into contemporary mediaeval Jewish women. NOTES

Many thanks to Professor Richard North (Department of English, University College London) for his involvement with this paper; to the editors of this volume for their painstaking input into this paper; to Ambassador Jakob Finci, President of the Jewish Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina, for permission to reproduce images from the Sarajevo Haggadah; and to Jackie Brown and the British Library board, for permission to reproduce images from the Golden and Sister Haggadot.

  1 Robert A. Harris, “Rashi’s Introductions to His Biblical Commentaries,” in Shai le-Sara Japhet: Studies in the Bible, Its Exegesis and Its Language, ed. Moshe Bar-Asher et al. (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2007), 219*–41*; Ivan Marcus, “Rashi’s Historiosophy in the Introductions to His Bible Commentaries,” Revue des Études Juives 157 (1998): 47–55; and Sarit Shalev-Eyni, “Who Are the Heirs of the Hebrew Bible? Sephardic Visual Historiography in a Christian Context,” Medieval Encounters 16 (2010): 23–63 (46ff).   2 See Jeremy Cohen, “Revisiting Augustine’s Doctrine of Jewish Witness,” Journal of Religion 89, no. 4 (2009): 564–78.   3 Marc Michael Epstein, Dreams of Subversion in Medieval Jewish Art and Literature (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), esp. chap. 1.   4 Herbert L. Kessler, “On the State of Medieval Art History,” Art Bulletin 70, no. 2 (1988): 166–87.   5 Ibid., 167, and see note 18 in that article.   6 For examples of these captions and their unreliability, see below note 15.   7 On the tracing of mediaeval Jewish use of Christian iconographic motifs (which may, in turn, be based on ancient Jewish models) see (for the images analysed herein) Bezalel Narkiss, The Golden Haggadah: A Fourteenth-Century Illuminated Hebrew Manuscript in the British Museum (London: Eugrammia Press Limited & The Trustees of the British Museum, 1970), chaps. 9 and 10. On the favouring of this sort of broad contextual evidence, see Peter Schäfer, “How Much ‘Origins,’ or: The Anxiety of Influence,” in his monograph Mirror of His Beauty: Feminine Images of God from the Bible to the Early Kabbalah (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), chap. 10, esp. 238–9.   8 See Epstein, Dreams of Subversion, chap. 1; and Shalev-Eyni, “Who Are the Heirs of the Hebrew Bible?” 23–63.   9 Epstein, Dreams of Subversion, 4–7, privileges the patron, whereas Sarit Shalev-Eyni, Jews among Christians: Hebrew Book Illumination from Lake Constance (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), xii, points to the multiple agendas of the multiple participants. 10 Narkiss, Golden Haggadah, chaps. 9 and 10. 11 Harris, “Rashi’s Introductions,” 295–7, quoting Rashi, introduction to Song of Songs commentary, who develops the rabbinic view as found in Song of Songs Rabbah,

176  Israel M. Sandman end of comment on 1:1 and onward; Origen, The Song of Songs Commentary and Homilies, trans. Ruth Penelope Lawson (Westminster: The Newman Press; London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1957), opening of Book One (58); and J. Paul Tanner, “The History of Interpretation of the Song of Songs,” Bibliotheca Sacra 154 (1997): 23–46 (26–8). 12 Narkiss, Golden Haggadah, 75–6; and Shalev-Eyni, “Who Are the Heirs of the Hebrew Bible?” 51–63. 13 See Shalev-Eyni, “Who Are the Heirs of the Hebrew Bible?” 23–63, published just after my conference presentation upon which the present article is founded. 14 Katrin Kogman-Appel, Illuminated Haggadot from Medieval Spain: Biblical Imagery and the Passover Holiday (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 182–3, who writes, ‘very little real polemics was expressed pictorially [. . .] anti-Christian iconography is very subtle [. . .] marginal [. . .] rare [. . .] ambiguous and hidden. [. . .] On the imagery of the picture cycles they had little effect’. 15 The (mis)interpretation of the caption to the Sarajevo Haggadah’s Temple image, ‘The Holy Temple, may it be built speedily in our days’, as referring to the future, messianic Temple breaks the temporal progression of the images from Sinai to the previous Temple to contemporary exile. The concluding prayer ‘may it be built speedily in our days’ is based on the concept that the future Temple will be a rebuilding of the previous Temples. Furthermore, cf. Cecil Roth, The Sarajevo Haggadah (London: W.H. Allen, 1963), 22: ‘The Hebrew captions [.  .  .] in a slightly later hand. [. . .] Sometimes misinterpret the artist’s intention. [. . .] The misunderstanding may be [. . .] fundamental. [. . .] Implicit trust should not be placed in these captions’; cf. Eva Frojmovic, “Messianic Politics in Re-Christianized Spain,” in Imagining the Self, Imagining the Other: Visual Representations and Jewish-Christian Dynamics in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, ed. Eva Frojmovic (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2002), 91–128 (107–8); also cf. Kogman-Appel, Illuminated Haggadot, 208, although Kogman-Appel herself notes the disjunction between the artist and caption-maker (ibid., 6). Marc Michael Epstein, The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative, and Religious Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 298 note 7, claims that the image in the Golden Haggadah 15a bottom left is of the preparation of ‘the restored [i.e., messianic-era] Passover sacrifice [. . .] based [. . .] on the possible halakhic impermissibility of the consumption of [non-sacrificial] lamb/sheep/mutton at the Passover seder’ [i.e., in the contemporary, non-messianic era], neglecting evidence adduced by Shalev-Eyni, “Who Are the Heirs of the Hebrew Bible?” 33–4. 16 Epstein, Medieval Haggadah, 181 and 178. 17 Ibid., esp. 197–9 and 255–62; see also 193–6. 18 See Sarit Shalev-Eyni, “Iconography of Love: Illustrations of Bride and Bridegroom in Ashkenazi Prayerbooks of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century,” Studies in Iconography 26 (2005): 27–57 (31, 36 and notes). 19 See Schäfer, Mirror of His Beauty. Arthur Green, “Shekhinah, the Virgin Mary, and the Song of Songs: Reflections on a Kabbalistic Symbol in Its Historical Context,” AJS Review 26, no. 1 (2002): 1–52 (21), goes further, seeing the construal of Shekhinah as the divine feminine ‘as a Jewish response to the great popular revival of Marian piety in the twelfth century Western church’ (emphasis in original), in which Mary becomes quasi-deified (27ff). See, however, Daniel Abrams’ critique of Schäfer and Green, Kabbalistic Manuscripts and Textual Theory: Methodologies of Textual Scholarship and Editorial Practice in the Study of Jewish Mysticism (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, The Hebrew University; Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2010), 149–57: ‘in its attempts to uncover and reconstruct kabbalistic myths, scholarship at times creates them’ (152; emphasis in original). 20 Epstein, Medieval Haggadah, 194 and 197, respectively. 21 Ibid., 248–50.

Beyond the Generic  177 22 See James George Kiecker, ed., The Postilla of Nicholas of Lyra on the Song of Songs (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1998), 33: ‘[.  .  .] the universal Church which extends from Abel, the first just person, all the way to the last elect person who will be born before the end of the world’. 23 Ambrose, Exposition on Luke, Book 2, N. 85–89, LXV, 1666–1668, quoted in John Quinlan, “Ecclesia Mater,” The Furrow 10, no.  2 (1959): 79–88 (83). Similarly, Hildegard of Bingen posits a progression of female prototypes beginning with Eve and evolving into Ecclesia; see Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 210. See also Isidore of Seville on Galatians 4:26, referenced in Hans Aurenhammer, Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, vol. 1 (Wien: B. Hollinek, 1959), col. 47; and Otto Schmitt, Reallexikon zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1937), col. 154. 24 Epstein, Medieval Haggadah, 196. 25 For example, Schernberg Psalter, 8r; Shalev-Eyni, “Iconography of Love,” 32, fig. 4; and Bourges Cathedral, ambulatory windows, Bay 3, Panel 10—“Crucified Christ with personifications of Ecclesia and Synagoga,” www.medievalart.org.uk/ bourges/03_pages/Bourges_Bay_03_panel_10.htm (accessed June 7, 2014). 26 I wonder if there is subversive intention in, over adjacent panels, having Potiphar’s wife on the left and the mourning daughter on the right. Also, Joseph’s hand gestures (twice in bottom left frame) bear analysis. 27 Literally ‘Moralised Bible’, a mediaeval paraphrase of the Bible with illustrated moralising commentary. This genre was geared towards prominent Christian laypeople. See Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible Moralisée (Berkley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1999), 1. 28 Sara Lipton, “The Temple Is My Body: Gender, Carnality, and Synagoga in the Bible Moralisée,” 129–64 plus plates, in Frojmovic, Imagining the Self, 136–9; square brackets: my glosses. 29 Kogman-Appel, Illuminated Haggadot, 67. 30 Rashi’s final comment to Exodus 15:20, s.v. ‘‫’בתפים ובמחלת‬. 31 The square drum (prominently illustrated here in both Haggadot) was used in mediaeval Iberian all-female religious worship. This drum’s name, adufe, is from the Arabic ’al-duff (= the duff), cognate to the Hebrew tof. See Judith R. Cohen, “ ‘This Drum I Play’: Women and Square Frame Drums in Portugal and Spain,” Ethnomusicology Forum 17, no. 1 (2008): 95–124 (95–6, 98–9). 32 Epstein, Medieval Haggadah, 184–5. 33 See note 11. 34 This and the following tosaphistic extracts are taken from Jacob Gilles, ed., Tosafot ha-Shalem (Jerusalem: Hotza’at Mif‘al Tosafot ha-Shalem, 1987/8), 7: 243b–244a. I thank Rabbi Z.H. Lieberman for this source. 35 petuha: in the Masoretic configuration of the Bible, new sections of text can begin · in either an ‘open’ or ‘closed’ format. The tosaphistic point is that the open format diminishes the connection to the preceding section, the men’s song. 36 Cf. Yalqut Shimoni to 1 Chronicles 2–4 (no. 1074). 37 Whereas the author (or glossator) cites Mekhilta, it must be simply to note the locus classicus for the general concept. This tosaphistic version differs from the Mekhilta: lexically, defining the biblical term mahol as ‘dance’, as in the iconography of the · Haggadot, against the Mekhilta, in which it is construed as a musical instrument; Jacob Z. Lauterbach, ed., Mekilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1949), II: 83: ‘flutes’; and ideologically, as in Rashi (and the Haggadot), only the women had this extra faith in God, in contrast to Mekhilta. 38 The use of the feminine gender is ambiguous: does it exclude the men, or is it used simply in agreement with the feminine subject, but not intended to exclude the men?

178  Israel M. Sandman 39 On the Marian association of this and similar images, particularly from the Golden Haggadah, see Epstein, Medieval Haggadah, 193–9, 248, and 261–2, and Epstein’s “Another Flight into Egypt: Confluence, Coincidence, the Cross-Cultural Dialectics of Messianism and Iconographic Appropriation in Medieval Jewish and Christian Culture,” in Frojmovic, Imagining the Self, 31–52 plus plates (43). 40 On the matzah/Eucharist connection in fourteenth-century Spain, see Michael Batterman, “Bread of Affliction, Emblem of Power: The Passover Matzah in Haggadah Manuscripts from Christian Spain,” in Frojmovic, Imagining the Self, 53–89 plus plates (67–70). 41 See Kogman-Appel, Illuminated Haggadot, 111. 42 Ibid. 43 Golden Haggadah, 5a bottom right, 6b bottom right, and 8b top right; and Sister Haggadah, 4b bottom, 9b top, and 10a bottom. 44 See, for example, Harris, “Rashi’s Introductions,” 296–7; and Daniel J. Lasker, Jewish Philosophical Polemics against Christianity in the Middle Ages (New York: Ktav Publishing House, Inc., 1977), 7–8. 45 Frojmovic, “Messianic Politics in Re-Christianized Spain,” 107–8; and Shalev-Eyni, “Who Are the Heirs of the Hebrew Bible?” 35–43 (including images). 46 For details of this and the other images, see Roth, Sarajevo Haggadah, 21. 47 Cf. BT Yoma 54a: ‘When Israel would ascend for the pilgrimage festival, the curtain would be rolled back for them, and they would be shown the cherubs, which were intertwined with one another. They would be told: See that the affection for you from God is like the affection between a male and a female’. 48 Cf. BT Megillah 29a: ‘Come and see how beloved are Israel in the sight of God, such that to every place to which they were exiled the Shekhinah went with them. [. . .] Where in Babylon? Abaye said: in the synagogue [. . .] “Yet have I been to them as a miniature sanctuary” (Ezekiel 11:16). Rabbi Isaac said: this refers to synagogues. [. . .]’ 49 Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999). 50 Cf. Rubin, Gentile Tales; and Anthony Bale, “Fictions of Judaism in England before 1290,” in The Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary, and Archaeological Perspectives, ed. Patricia Skinner (Woodbridge and Rochester: Boydell, 2003), 129–44 (130–3). 51 On the volatility of the coincidence of Passover and Easter, see Rubin, Gentile Tales, 41, 65, 72 and 89. 52 Shalev-Eyni, “Who Are the Heirs of the Hebrew Bible?” 51–63, and sources cited in note 58 of that article, including Kogman-Appel, Illuminated Haggadot, esp. 3. 53 Shalev-Eyni, “Who Are the Heirs of the Hebrew Bible?” 45ff, demonstrates that around the time that these Haggadot were created in Barcelona, these issues were the subject of Jewish-Christian polemics. 54 Kogman-Appel, Illuminated Haggadot, 197 to the end of that chapter; ibid., 189. 55 Ibid., 221 and 194 respectively. 56 Kogman-Appel reads creatio ex nihilo into the Haggadot, construing it as being against the view of the rationalist philosophers (ibid., 190–208). However, only the Sarajevo Haggadah depicts the early stages of Creation; even there, she admits that ‘creatio ex nihilo appears to be beyond visual expression; the cycle begins with the initial, shapeless substance already created’ (ibid., 205), begging the question as to whether this initial substance was created or pre-existent. David Qimhi, in his ratio· nalist, philosophical, allegorical interpretation (see end of comment on Genesis 2:10), explicitly endorsed creatio ex nihilo. 57 Zohar, 3 vols. (Vilna: Romm Press, 1923). 58 Cf. Newman, Sister of Wisdom, 89–120 on “The Woman and the Serpent,” particularly “The Garment and the Mirror” (94–9), but also “The Bright Cloud and the Shadow” (100–7).

Beyond the Generic  179 59 Hildegard of Bingen, Causae et curae, cited and translated in Newman, Sister of Wisdom, 98. 60 Also, cf. BT Baba Batra 58a: ‘Rabbi Bana would mark sepulchres. When he arrived at the sepulchre of Abraham [. . .] what does Abraham do? He sleeps in the arms of Sarah, who gazes intently at his head’. 61 See Robert P. Bergman, The Salerno Ivories: Ars Sacra from Medieval Amalfi (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1980), plate 5, viewable also at www. bigano.com/gallery/gallery_avori/ssp.swf, Image 3 (accessed April 29, 2014). 62 In the Salerno Ivories, Eve’s hands indicate veneration/worship of the Logos, whereas in the Sarajevo Haggadah, they are prayerful, but with no Logos. On the Golden and Sister Haggadot, see below. I have moved from my initial conception, “Medieval Jewish Art: Does It Have a Perspective of Its Own?” September 2006, Midwest Jewish Studies Association, Annual Conference, that in the Haggadot Eve (= anima) venerates Adam (= Intellect); cf. Epstein, Medieval Haggadah, 154, discussing the Golden Haggadah: ‘Here, unlike the Christian iconography wherein Eve turns away from Adam to face God, she is represented as turning toward Adam, the only depictable image of God, in a distinctly Jewish rendering’. 63 Solomon Ibn Gabirol, outlined in Abraham Ibn Ezra’s alternative commentary to Genesis 3:21, see in Michael Friedlaender, Ibn Ezra Literature: Hebrew Appendix to the Essays on the Writings of Abraham Ibn Ezra (London: Society of Hebrew Literature, [no date available]), IV: 40–1; Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, II: 30 (cf. I: 2 and 17); and David Qimhi in Louis Finkelstein, The Commentary of · David Kimhi on Isaiah (New York: Columbia University Press, 1926), liii–lxxiv, “Appendix I: Kimhi’s Allegorical Commentary on Genesis,” in which Samuel Ibn Tibbon’s allegory is mentioned. 64 I do not claim that Qimhi’s allegory, or any particular literary work, was the para· digm upon which the Golden Haggadah’s pictorial cycle was planned. Nevertheless, I find substantial correspondences between nuances of the Golden Haggadah’s cycle and a number of elements in Qimhi’s allegory. The following passages are my trans· lation, based on Finkelstein’s Hebrew edition, “Kimhi’s Allegorical Commentary on Genesis,” cited in the previous note. 65 Cf. the image in Genesis Rabbah 17:4 and parallel sources, in which Adam has superlative intellect. God passes the animals before Adam, who knows the appropriate name for each species. 66 Cf. Genesis Rabbah 12:6. 67 Cf. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, I: 17, citing Plato and his predecessors. 68 Cf. Genesis Rabbah 20:5: ‘You [namely, the snake] sought to kill Adam and marry Eve [so] “I shall place enmity between you and the woman” (Genesis 3:15)’. 69 Whereas I  appreciate Epstein’s insight that in this manuscript the emergence of angels from the clouds ‘signifies moments when the scriptural text interpolates the voice of God’, all of his examples are ones in which the biblical text mentions angels, and in which the showing of angels is therefore appropriate. In contrast, in this case, the reprimand of Adam, where the biblical account contains no mention of an angel, the angelic presence is seemingly inappropriate; Epstein, Medieval Haggadah, 155. 70 See Kogman-Appel, Illuminated Haggadot, 78–88; the artist of the socioeconomically modest Sister Haggadah is more scholar than artist, who, although having access to the sumptuous Golden Haggadah and its models, had his own illustrative agenda and thus added his own modifications and innovations; and the same socio-economic difference is applied to the respective patrons. 71 Zohar translations are from Isaiah Tishby, The Wisdom of the Zohar, vol. 3, trans. David Goldstein (Oxford: The Oxford University Press for The Littman Library, 1989); ibid., 1389. 72 Tishby notes: “According to the mystical interpretation, Jacob is [i.e., signifies] Tiferet [a masculine divine power], and ‘the place’ is [i.e., signifies] the Shekhinah [a feminine divine power]”; ibid., 3: 1389 note 78.

180  Israel M. Sandman 73 Zohar 1: 49b; Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, 3: 1390. 74 I do not claim that the Zohar was directly consulted in the planning of this pictorial cycle. Rather, the pictorial cycle embodies a Zoharic mindset and motifs. 75 Zohar 1: 49a–b; Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, 3: 1389. 76 Tishby notes: This verse is taken to be a continuation of Adam’s approach to Eve; ibid., 3: 1389 note 83. 77 See Kogman-Appel, Illuminated Haggadot, 87; this is characteristic of the Sister Haggadah, but not of the Golden Haggadah. 78 Zohar 1: 49b; Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, 3: 1390. Thanks to my student Eli (Jean) Gauthier for suggesting this in the case of the Sarajevo Haggadah, which bears further analysis. 79 Zohar 1: 49b; Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, 3: 1389–90. 80 Tishby notes: Pure love (ibid.). 81 Tishby: Even during proper intercourse [. . .] gross physical lusts (ibid.). 82 Tishby: Sinful thoughts (ibid.). 83 The Zohar skips the biblical words ‘for it could make one wise’, presumably because they work against the Zohar’s point. 84 Tishby: She responded to the seduction of the evil inclination, and physical desires took possession of her (ibid.). 85 Tishby: Strong physical desire (ibid.).

11 Navigating Christian Space Jewish Responses to Christian Imagery in Early Modern German Lands Maria Diemling

Unlike contributions to this volume that discuss visual representations of Jewishness and Judaism by both Jews and non-Jews, this chapter asks a different question: How did Jews historically respond to non-Jewish—and more specifically, Christian—images? Life in late mediaeval and early modern German lands brought a great deal of insecurity to Jews. Following a number of expulsions from most major cities, many migrated to the east, particularly to Poland-Lithuania, while many others moved to the countryside where often only relatively few other Jews lived. These demographic changes meant that those early modern Jews who had remained in Germany lived in close proximity to their Christian neighbours, but also that they often had to travel quite extensively to earn a living.1 Interaction with Christians and close observations of their ways of life were unavoidable. Jews were also exposed to the same powerful visual images proclaiming the power and ubiquitousness of Christendom, manifested in splendid cathedrals, parish churches and modest wayside shrines. Jews would see frescoes of St Christopher painted on external church walls to ensure that travellers would be safe, and they would encounter local shrines devoted to the Holy Virgin. They might see a priest hurrying with the Holy Communion to a dying parishioner, be aware of processions winding their way through a village on a holy day when members of various fraternities would pray loudly and carry wooden statues of the Virgin Mary, venerated saints or the popular Palmesel on Palm Sunday.2 Each day was structured not only by the movement of the sun over the sky but also by acoustic reminders of the time: church bells would ring at certain hours to remind the faithful of the Angelus prayer, they would call the community to church, announce the consecration of the Eucharist in Catholic churches and chime three times when the community spoke the Lord’s Prayer in many Lutheran churches. Church bells would toll when somebody had died and when a dead body was brought to funeral.3 Jews could closely observe the cyclical nature of the Christian year.4 Most holidays were celebrated publicly within the local community and with many lively local customs and variations. Occasions that marked the major transitions in people’s lives such as baptism, weddings and funerals also involved whole villages or neighbourhoods and were public and highly ritualised and visualised affairs. Whereas Jews were often explicitly excluded from participating or even witnessing some of these celebrations, they could not help being aware of Christian holidays and celebrations and also knew quite a lot about

182  Maria Diemling their details. The ubiquitousness of Christian images, symbols and rituals made it clearly impossible to avoid them. However, Jews were never at ease with the ostensive nature of the church. They regarded some of the most prominent Christian symbols and rituals with deep suspicion, and sometimes even fear or hatred. In this chapter, I shall discuss how early modern Jews in German lands navigated public space in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and responded to visual and material representations of Christianity. Public space was not a neutral but distinctively Christian space. Living in a world where all senses were exposed to Christian images, sounds and smells, Jews had to find ways to counter the powerful pervasiveness of Christendom, in its Catholic and Protestant manifestations, and develop strategies to avoid particularly jarring examples, or, if this proved impossible, to reinterpret them in a meaningful and affirming way. The aim of this chapter is to shed some light on Jewish agency, highlighting some of the creative solutions adopted by Jews in response to an overwhelmingly non-Jewish space. Such strategies can be understood as creating Jewish spaces in Christian places, following the definition of place as ‘geographically located, bound to a specific location’, and of space as ‘spatial environments in which Jewish things happen’, where specific activities are performed, and which in turn are shaped and defined by these actions.5 Such creative—and risky, if noticed by Christians—strategies can be found even in highly ritualised public performances, such as the encounter between the Pope and the curial personnel and Jewish representatives between the High Middle Ages and the mid-nineteenth century, brilliantly analysed by Amnon Linder. These rituals ‘enacted the authorized version of the correct relationship between dominant Christianity and dominated Judaism, publicizing sentiments and beliefs, and the lines of action that depended on them’,6 but even in highly visible public laudations of a newly elected Pope, Jews sometimes managed to ‘express complete compliance and subjection, yet covertly transmit to the Jewish home audience [a] subversive, counteracting message’.7 Transmitting such messages can be understood as a form of resistance. ‘Resistance’ as a topic for research has begun to attract increasing scholarly interest across many different disciplines.8 The term is used to describe a number of diverse phenomena, which range from physical violence to specific choices of hairstyles, and are expressed in many different behaviours and settings. An attempt by sociologists Hollander and Einwohner to conceptualise the bewildering diversity of the use of the term in research identified action and opposition as core elements in what is most commonly understood by ‘resistance’.9 James Scott’s research on the ‘everyday’ acts of resistance of peasants has stimulated a lot of interest in expressions of defiance by relatively powerless and subjugated groups.10 An important question that arises from researching ‘low-profile techniques’ of opposition is if these actions need to be recognised as resistance by the powerful and dominant group to qualify as such.11 Another crucial issue is that of intent, the awareness of the actor that they are engaging in an action that expresses resistance to power.12 I will argue that the examples discussed in this chapter are everyday acts of resistance that were seen as an expression of such by the Jewish actors and clearly perceived as hostile and subversive by the Christian majority group

Navigating Christian Space  183 once they learned about them. Tracing subversive messages and empowering responses to Christian images and rituals and trying to locate discreet Jewish spaces in Christian places in everyday life is difficult and relies on sources that have until recently been neglected by historians.13 This chapter draws mainly on the publications of early modern Jews who had converted to Christianity and, specifically, Victor of Carben (1423–1515) and his relatively unknown book, published in 1508,14 and republished in 1550 as Juden Büchlein, a typographically and orthographically updated edition of the first edition. Victor, a protégé of the Dominicans in Cologne, is best known as one of the witness experts on Jewish books called for in the notorious Pfefferkorn-Reuchlin affair. Having converted in 1476 or 1477, he left his Jewish family behind, studied Theology and pursued a career in the church. He engaged in a public disputation with some rabbis and published, in close cooperation with the Dominicans, a book on Jewish rituals and customs that contains a lot of interesting observations on everyday Jewish life in the late fifteenth century.15 Books authored by former Jews who have left the fold and are trying to forge a new identity as Christians are by definition biased sources with a usually well-defined polemical agenda that seeks to denigrate Judaism and to boost the author’s standing as a sincere and honest new Christian. However, in recent years such writings have been fruitfully analysed as, for example, the earliest references for certain Jewish rituals and customs.16 They are also increasingly understood as biased but basically accurate accounts of Jewish life.17 It is important to acknowledge that, historically, Jewish-Christian encounters were by no means characterised by disharmony, conflict and mutual hatred only. Numerous sources provide ample evidence of good neighbourly relations, smooth business interactions and even intimate relationships. At the same time, it is necessary to critically address issues of tension and antipathy to avoid a distorted view of Jewish history in which Jews are only seen as passive and hapless victims of Christian aggression who did not seek or possess ways to express their feelings. I shall argue that such sources do provide us with unique insights into the mentality of a vulnerable and politically powerless religious and ethnic minority that resented being in exile and was longing for redemption and restoration of its political sovereignty. Whereas early modern Jews had a strong sense of not being part of the political space of a dominant majority culture, they found ways of reclaiming space by counteracting offensive images or even reinterpreting Christian rituals in a meaningful Jewish way.18 In this sense, seemingly trivial everyday acts, expressed as avoidance or mockery, can be interpreted as acts of resistance that enabled Jews to create Jewish space in Christian places and assert a sense of power and control over their lives. CHRISTIAN SYMBOLS: THE CROSS The cross, symbolising the vicarious death of Jesus of Nazareth, is arguably the most obvious and common symbol of the Church that early modern Jews would have encountered, representing Christendom on churches and graves, on shrines

184  Maria Diemling and on the garments of clerics. In Christian theology, ‘it expresses the meaning of death, the acceptance of the rupture that opens the way to resurrection. For this reason Christians plant the Cross on the graves of their dead, on church steeples and wherever “the mystery that saves” can be shown forth’.19 The cross also signifies Christian dominance, power and control, as it was prominently—and traumatically for persecuted Jews and Muslims—displayed as a symbol of Christian triumphalism, most notably during the Crusades. As already noted in 1991 by the editors of SIDIC Review, a journal that was edited by the Catholic order of the Sisters of Our Lady of Sion and dedicated to Jewish-Christian relations, ‘Jews and Christians often look at events from totally different viewpoints’, which is ‘strikingly true in the case of the Cross, which is a sign of redemption and love for the Christian and an object of horror and threat for the Jew’. They muse that perhaps ‘because of the fear of touching emotions that lie very deep in the psyche of both Christians and Jews’, the underlying issues regarding the complex relationship Jews have had with the symbol of the cross have hardly ever been addressed.20 Elliott Horowitz has more recently argued that throughout history Jews were both appalled and attracted by the cross. He discusses various sources from Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages in which Jews are being described as having mocked the cross, physically attacked it, spat or urinated on it—the latter as an act of defiance before martyrdom.21 Solomon Grayzel observed in 1933, commenting on thirteenth-century Jews, that ‘[i]t is clear [. . . that they] were indiscreet, but one must remember that they had not yet learned the self-effacement which the subsequent centuries were to teach them’.22 By the late fifteenth century, Jews had indeed learned this lesson and they were very guarded as their experience taught them that the smallest act of defiance could endanger not only the individual but the whole community. Only Jews who had nothing left to lose would dare to publicly defile the cross, as we learn from the description of the public execution of the convert Franz Ferdinand Engelberger in Vienna in 1642. He was caught breaking into the Imperial Treasury with two Jewish accomplices and sentenced to death. When a priest offered him Holy Communion, a dramatic scene under the gallows erupted. Engelberger threw the cross on the ground and spit the host out of his mouth, renouncing Christianity and professing his return to Judaism. There was a public outcry among the spectators, the hanging had to be interrupted and several local Jews were attacked, robbed and killed. Engelberger was eventually hanged as the Jew he had claimed to be (Jews were hanged with their heads down) and, as punishment for blasphemy, he was also burned.23 We do not find many descriptions of daring (or foolish!) Jews publicly defiling the cross in late mediaeval and early modern sources,24 but Jews developed more subtle and private methods to express their antagonism towards this most Christian of symbols. The convert Victor of Carben reports that late mediaeval Jews disliked the sign of the cross so much that it was common even for Jewish children to push apart with their feet two blades of grass which happened to cross over to resemble the sign of the cross.25 An interesting echo of this claim, and clearly based on a close reading of the convert’s book, is found in a curious

Navigating Christian Space  185 and, until recently, neglected little pamphlet, first published in 1560, that aimed to provide an extensive summary of Jewish invectives against Christians and Christendom.26 It includes a whole section of ‘ways to infuriate Jews’, for example, by asking them annoying questions about the Messiah, but also advises that if one wishes to make a Jew angry to ‘put two pieces of wood or straw in the shape of a cross next to his house. Out of disgust, the Jew will kick it with his feet, refusing to touch it with his hands’.27 It is likely that the anonymous author of this booklet learned about Jewish discomfort with the sign of the cross from the brief note in Carben’s book and not from personal observation, but this example demonstrates Christian awareness of Jewish sensibilities well. That this was not simply happening in Christian imagination, always ready to suspect Jewish blasphemy, can be learned from the following responsum. A seemingly minor incident that happened in the late fifteenth century in Regensburg, one of the major Jewish communities of that time, shows how deeply the abhorrence of this symbol was felt. R. Isaac Bruna, the chief rabbi of the community, found a cross carved into his wooden bench in the synagogue. He clearly understood this as a serious matter and tried to find out who was responsible for it. When nobody was forthcoming, he threatened to ban (to exclude from the community) anybody who withheld information about the perpetrators. What sounds like a provocative prank of impudent youngsters was taken very seriously. Bruna understood this as an attack on his personal and professional integrity and was not prepared to let it go easily. It could well be that the hated Christian symbol was used within the Jewish community to express strong dissatisfaction with Bruna’s leadership. Bruna had founded a yeshivah in Regensburg, which had caused conflict with a well-established local rabbi, Anshel Segal, who felt threatened by it. Although Bruna’s right to live and work was affirmed by some of the most important scholars of the time, Segal’s followers made his life in Regensburg difficult and the controversy only ended with Segal’s death.28 Perhaps the explosive symbol was used in this context by some of Bruna’s opponents. Some mediaeval rabbis had been more sanguine about the use of the cross. They made fine distinctions between the potential danger of idolatry and pragmatism, a differentiation lost in later sources and popular usage where a more cautious approach seemed advisable. The Spanish rabbi Shlomo ben Aderet (Rashba, 1235–1310), whose influence extended into Ashkenaz from where he attracted many students, permitted Jewish embroiderers to stitch crosses on silk gowns for Christian women because they were for decorative purposes only.29 The fifteenth-century scholar R. Moses Mintz, who served as rabbi in several Jewish communities in Germany, permitted the writing of place names that contained a reference to the cross or other Christian symbols, such as Kreuzberg or Kirchberg, and did not find it necessary to replace the potentially offensive word by a neutral term.30 This was, however, often avoided in popular use. For example, the small Jewish community in Deutschkreutz, one of the Sheva Kehillot in Burgenland where Jews settled from the seventeenth century onwards under the protection of the Hungarian Princes of Esterházy, is the only Austrian village that also boasts a Hebrew name: it was traditionally referred to as tzelem.31

186  Maria Diemling Such linguistic strategies to avoid the uttering of offensive terms have been quite common since the Middle Ages. The use of the word ‘Kreuz’ was heavily loaded for Jews and they tried to avoid having to say it. The mediaeval terminology for ‘cross’ is the clearly pejorative to’eva (abomination) and the somewhat more neutral tzelem (image or sign). Another interesting and, it appears, particular early modern pejorative use of Christian vocabulary is the use of Christian names, especially ‘Jesus’ as a swearword, or when scolding wayward Jewish children whom their parents feared would turn out badly.32 Jews were consciously avoiding everything that would have given the impression that they were paying respect to the cross. As Victor of Carben reported, a Jew would never pick up a coin from the ground if that coin happened to lie close to a wayside shrine.33 While the underlying message of this observation is that Jews hate Christianity even more than they love money, this is also an indication of the spatial awareness of Jews in a Christian space. Christian clerics often appeared considerate of Jewish reluctance to appear as if they were venerating the cross, and they met Jews halfway if that served their own purposes. Numerous sources, particularly contemporary responsa, indicate that priests belonging to orders which required habits that displayed the cross prominently, covered their sleeves so that Jews could meet them, pay their respects to them and then pay their rent or the habitually given annual pecuniary ‘gift’ for the Christian New Year34 or engage in other economic interactions they might have had.35 CHRISTIAN PLACES: CHURCHES Popular Christian tales, such as the ‘legend of the Jewish boy’,36 developed around the strong visual impact of Christian places of worship on Jews. The basic story line is that of a young Jewish boy who plays with Christian children in a church and/or has received Holy Communion while innocently joining his friends. The child is deeply impressed by the sensual beauty of the church. The incident deeply upsets his father who—in some versions by the explicit instruction of the heads of the Jewish community—throws the child into an oven. The main element in the original legend is the miraculous salvation of the boy from the burning fire, which is often attributed to the intervention of the Virgin Mary to whom the child has earlier shown veneration. This miracle causes the conversion of the Jews. The origin of this legend can be traced back to the sixth century. It was very popular in all classes of Christian society and was successfully disseminated by the popular form of the Exempel.37 Whereas both Jewish children and adults will have occasionally entered Christian churches, out of curiosity if nothing else, Jews usually kept their distance from Christian places of worship. The pejorative terminology in use since the Middle Ages (bet to’eva, house of abomination) denotes idol worship.38 The well-known convert Johannes Pfefferkorn (1469–c.1522/23) disclosed a list of Jewish distortions of Christian terms in 1509 that included bet moshav or bet kise (euphemisms

Navigating Christian Space  187 for lavatory), which he unambiguously translated as ‘scheißhaus’, stressing the notion of impurity.39 Being made to enter such a contested place was particularly problematic. The practice of forcing Jews to listen to missionary sermons given by itinerant preachers or converted Jews in churches was less common in German lands than it had been in mediaeval Spain or in early modern Rome. Preachers knew they had to make their message more appealing to a reluctant Jewish audience, and they learned Hebrew or Yiddish and used terminology with which Jews would be familiar. Sometimes they also demonstrated awareness of ­Jewish sensibilities when organising such events by avoiding a synagogue or church but preaching in a public space.40 If Jews were made to enter a church to listen to Christian preachers, they sometimes put wax into their ears to shield themselves from the words uttered by the preacher. In some cases, Jews had to endure an examination of their ears before entering the church to make sure that they had not put earplugs in them.41 Jews still managed to drown out the offensive words of Christian preachers by chatting and laughing among themselves, or showing disrespect to the Christian place of worship by refusing to uncover their heads.42 Victor of Carben noted that Jews make every effort to avoid walking by Christian wayside shrines and churches, but, if they cannot avoid it, they utter a curse when passing by, ‘The Lord tears down the proud man’s house’ (Proverbs 15:25), to express their contempt. Jewish cemeteries were usually outside settlements—an arrangement preferred by both Jews and Christians—but Christian cemeteries often surrounded the Parish church and were placed in central locations. Jews chose not to walk through Christian cemeteries, even if it would have been a significant shortcut, and preferred keeping a clear distance from a place they regarded as impure and daunting.43 CHRISTIAN SOUNDS: BELLS AND MUSIC It was more difficult to avoid hearing the sound of church bells than walking around a Christian cemetery. In a time when clocks were only just invented and unattainable to the vast majority, people relied on the church bells to structure their day, to call them to mass, tell them the time and remind them of the evening prayer. Church bells were also rung to ward off hail or other dangers to the harvest. Jews felt uncomfortable with these sounds. Victor of Carben remarked that Jews strongly detest church bells because they are baptised.44 The ritual naming of bells in a rite, which is reminiscent of the sacrament of baptism and includes washing with consecrated water, anointing with holy oil, name-giving and godparents, expressed the understanding of bells as voices of the church and as such comparable to human beings. However, this elaborate ritual was already criticised by Reformers in Luther’s time as a debasement of baptism. Several synods, in particular in Cologne in 1536, expressed concerns with the popular idea that the sound of bell ringing had the same magical quality as prayer.45 However, according to the same source, Jews resent bells not only out of fear of idolatry but also out of envy:

188  Maria Diemling They believe the chiming of the bells to be the biggest expression of wisdom in Christendom and feel ashamed that they haven’t thought about it themselves. When the Jews were powerful and mighty, they had to go on high mountains with timbales and trombones and drums and sound the trumpet with great effort on the new moon or holiday.46 Victor of Carben added that the Infidels (referring to Muslims) begrudge Christians their bells as well, and do not permit their use in their countries,47 but this attributed combination of envy and abhorrence is not a new claim. In a religious disputation staged between a Christian and a Jew in the Middle Ages, the Jew replied to the question as to why Jews had no bells in their synagogues with a lot of self-confidence, saying that herrings had to be ballyhooed to be sold on the market, but better fish found their buyers without puffery.48 Victor of Carben also preserved a Jewish rhyme that voices a negative attitude towards conversion: Moschech bahefel gippol basefel bahefel moschech gyppol bahoschech.49

In an interlinear translation, he explains that one who pulls the rope will fall into the dirt, and one who pulls the rope will fall into the darkness. Those pulling the rope are baptised Jews who entrusted themselves to the protection of the church—the rope symbolised the ropes of the church bells—but will fall into the dirt of a miserable life and the darkness of eternal damnation. This saying serves as a warning to those contemplating leaving the Jewish community and converting to Christianity, anticipating not only suffering in the world to come but also after their baptism. It echoes the polemical statement preserved in the Nizzahon Vetus, where the verse ‘Woe unto them that draw iniquity with cords of vanity’ (Isaiah 5:18) is explained as referring to the ropes with which Christians pull the bells in their house of abomination as part of the worship of their god.50 Whereas bells were seen as distinctively Christian and as a direct expression of Christian worship, music is slightly different. Mediaeval sources indicate that some Jews were wary of having their children exposed to Christian nursery rhymes and asked non-Jewish wet-nurses to refrain from singing them to their infants. From various Jewish and Christian sources, it is clear that it was quite common in the Middle Ages to employ Christian wet-nurses in Jewish homes and, thus, to establish intimate contact between a Jewish baby and a Christian woman.51 Sefer Hasidim (late twelfth or early thirteenth century) mentions the possible dangers of having a Jewish child hear a Christian lullaby sung by their wet-nurse, which should be avoided.52 This sense of danger is conveyed in the memories of some early modern converts, who sometimes describe their exposure to Christian music as a powerful spiritual and sensual awakening and which eventually led them to leave Judaism and embrace Christianity. Philipp Johann Bleibtreu described how at the age of 15 he had walked by a church with his sister and was suddenly struck by the singing of Psalm 130. This song impressed him deeply, although his sister scolded him for his enthusiasm for the ‘nonsense of the Goyim’.53

Navigating Christian Space  189 However, music and singing are pervasive, and late mediaeval and early modern people sung not only in churches but in the street, during pilgrimages, when out to work, playing with other children and so on. As Alexander Fisher has noted of counter-Reformation Augsburg, music was an expression of religious identity well beyond church walls.54 This means that Jews would have overheard Christian songs and popular melodies in a variety of non-Church settings and adapted them for their own needs, as vividly demonstrated by two still popular Jewish songs with mediaeval German roots. The Chanukkah hymn Maoz Zur is said to have originated in thirteenth-century Germany, and its most popular melody closely follows a Church hymn dated 1474 or, as another theory suggests, a mediaeval German folk song.55 Had Gadya, which has become part of the Passover liturgy, possibly in order to keep the younger children entertained and awake, seems to date from the sixteenth century and first appeared in print in a Haggadah in 1590 (Prague). It is based on a still popular German folk song (“Der Herr, der schickt den Jokel aus”).56 To give a non-religious example, a Jewish dance song, printed around 1595–1605 in Worms in Yiddish, betrays clear non-Jewish models.57 It is impossible to ascertain on what level of consciousness these cultural borrowings worked. It is well known that Christian musicians played at Jewish weddings, and it is unlikely that they would have played exclusively specific ‘Jewish’ music.58 Music was a source of attraction, emotion and danger. However, more research needs to be done on how music transcended communities, particularly in the German context.59 CHRISTIAN HOLIDAYS: CHRISTMAS What might have been opportune in terms of keeping good relations with one’s neighbours, did not always sit easily with how Jews regarded these neighbours’ beliefs and practices, as the example of the Christmas holiday demonstrates. Christmas celebrations were particularly varied, and, unlike today where the focus is mostly on the home and the family, very much a public holiday with midnight mass, which often attracted drunk and rowdy youth, popular Christmas plays, processions, carol singing and particular food.60 Christmas Eve was also perceived as a dangerous and strange time where demons and ghosts were active and animals could be overheard talking to each other. Rituals, such as fumigating the house with frankincense and some burned remains from the Easter palms, are Christian responses to persistent beliefs in demonic forces.61 Jews were not part of these celebrations, but they seem to have shared some of the anxieties of their Christian neighbours and developed their own strategies and rituals in response. Christmas is referred to as nitl in rabbinic sources, mostly widely understood as a reference to ‘the hanged one’ (ha-tola, ha-talui or nitle).62 The most common practice seems to have been one of ‘passive resistance’, of not studying Torah on Christmas Eve until midnight. An active and conscious engagement with Christian theology, and in particular the figure of Jesus, is the reading

190  Maria Diemling of Toledot Yeshu, a Jewish polemical counter gospel well known to late mediaeval and early modern Jews.63 A  peculiar custom, which has also come down from the writings of converts (and the not entirely convincing denial of a rabbi), is the eating of garlic as a consciously anti-Christian act on Christmas Eve (and some other holidays).64 Whereas Victor of Carben did not mention any specific Jewish reactions to Christmas, his contemporary Johannes Pfefferkorn wrote in his polemical Handt Spiegel (1511) that Jews secretly read Toledot Yeshu on Christmas night. He also noted that Jews believed that Jesus, ‘punished by God for his apostasy and false teaching’, has to crawl through pits of excrements or latrines on that night. He added, as a personal recollection, that as a youngster he was so afraid of encountering Jesus that he urinated outside the lavatory.65 Another convert, Ernst Ferdinand Hess, made a similar claim in his book Juden Geissel. He wrote that Christians spend December 25 solemnly in church. Following old traditions, they get up at night-time and pray and praise God because according to Isaiah, the ‘Alma’ has given birth to ‘our Messiah’. The Jews, however, when they hear the bells ringing, utter outrageous blasphemies: ‘Now the Mamser crawls through all Moshovim [moshavim, a euphemism for ‘lavatories’], which means that now the son of a whore has to crawl through the sewers and privies’. He also suggested that this considerably scared Jewish children and servants who were afraid to use the privy even if they needed it very badly.66 Shapiro has noted parallels to the notion that Jesus crawls through the sewers on Christmas Eve in Toledot Yeshu and in a Talmudic passage (BT Gittin 57a) that might even be the origin of this idea.67 Shapiro has also traced the first reference to avoidance of Torah study during a Christian holiday to the convert Johann Adrian, who mentioned in his Send und Warnungs-Brieff (1609) that Jews believe that Jesus crawls through latrines and that they do not study on Ascension Day, the holiday celebrating Jesus’ ascension to heaven in his resurrected body 40 days after Easter. Jewish children are told not to go to the privy so that the ‘hanged one does not pull you in’. Adrian connects the abstention from Torah study with the belief that Jesus is only allowed to rest when Jews study, so to deprive him of this they do not study on that day.68 According to one (admittedly rather notorious) convert, Samuel Friedrich Brenz, Jews tell their (Christian) servants that God has condemned Jesus to crawl through all the latrines on Christmas night when Christians are more devout than on any other night. He added that Jews spend Christmas night in merry-making and playing cards because this deprives the ‘hanged one’ of proper rest, and that they read the book Maese thola (Toledot Yeshu). Brenz also claimed that early modern Jews responded to Christmas by eating even more garlic than usual because the tola, the ‘hanged one’, is despised and it made them ‘stink even more’.69 Salman Zwi of Aufhausen, a Jewish scholar, countered Brenz’s claims in detail in an apologetic book, published in 1614. He did not deny this specific claim, but argued that Jews are indeed, based on biblical precedent, fond of garlic but they know that the Germans are not:

Navigating Christian Space  191 So we found the solution to eat garlic when we have a holiday or when they have a holiday, when we don’t meet Christians and have contact with them. It may happen that people eat garlic on Christmas night, because the Christians celebrate for several days and don’t trade with us. But not because we want to despise Jesus Notzri. Who could believe such nonsense! Aufhausen asserted that Jews have no reason to feast and be merry on Christmas night. If anything, they would rather mourn ‘because of Joshua Notzri, born in that night, much pain and sorrow has come over us’.70 It is clear from these accounts written by former Jews that the authors wrote independently of each other. The fact that pre-modern Jewish sources (with one exception noted by Marc Shapiro)71 do not mention such rituals does not invalidate the converts’ reports because Jewish authors were keenly aware of the possible dangers to the Jewish community should such subversive strategies have been known to Christians.72 Various reasons have been given as to why Jews would refrain from studying on that night. Several scholars have suggested that rabbis prohibited going to the house of study on Christmas Eve for their students’ safety, because attacks on Jews were common on that night. As Shapiro has pointed out, there is no evidence that public prayer (which would have meant going out anyway) was ever abolished on Christmas Eve nor that Jews were prohibited from appearing in public during Christmas.73 It is indeed more likely that Jews internalised some of the excitement, mixed with anxiety, caused by various beliefs in the power of supernatural forces that were so prevalent among Christians in the Christmas period. These include Jewish beliefs such as that Jesus was punished on Christmas Eve for his transgressions and that Jews had an influence on his fate by refraining from a holy duty. This would also explain the consumption of garlic, which is well known for its use in seeking protection from demonic forces.74 Important recent studies by historians of mediaeval Jewish history have demonstrated how Jews acculturated specific Christian rituals and ideas and reinterpreted them in a specifically Jewish way.75 I would argue that the Jewish customs that developed from at least the sixteenth century onwards in reaction to Christmas (and which became particularly prevalent in Hasidic communities in Eastern Europe) are an early modern example of how shared mentalities and shared exposure to ‘superstitions’ and fears lead to specific ritual responses. CONCLUSION This chapter explored some of the strategies that early modern Jews in German lands developed to avoid exposure to Christian symbols without openly showing hostility towards offensive Christian images. They had to navigate a tricky path between not unwittingly being perceived as worshipping Christian symbols on the

192  Maria Diemling one hand, and not offending Christians by being disrespectful towards what they regarded as idolatry on the other. At the same time, as the Regensburg incident related above shows, Christian symbols were also used within the Jewish community to express strong dissatisfaction. As a powerless and marginalised religious minority, there was not much Jews could do about ubiquitous Christian images and symbols. These were everywhere, and, even if Jews found them offensive, they knew better than to show their abhorrence and disgust publicly. However, Jews did find ways to express their antagonism to Christian images, sounds and rituals in a manner they found empowering, comforting and reassuring. These strategies included avoidance, the use of coded language and sometimes acts of active and passive resistance. Jews often chose to avoid exposure to Christian symbols and spaces by making a detour, even if that meant taking a longer way so that they did not pass a Christian cemetery or wayside shrine, by closing their ears so that they would not hear the heated arguments of a fervent preacher or by choosing not to read non-Jewish books. This may seem like the most passive form of resistance, but avoidance implies making a conscious choice that can be felt as empowering and affirming one’s minority identity. Linguistic strategies that reinterpret Christian terms in a derogatory and dismissive way, sometimes as quite witty Hebrew puns and word-plays, have been used in Jewish culture regarding enemies of the Jewish people for a long time. They serve as a ‘secret code’, which the insiders who are part of the community understand. Coded language also undermines the hegemony of the powerful majority by distorting a Christian term in a way that often still sounds similar to its original meaning, but mocks it and links it to idol worship and impurity. Aya Elyada, discussing anti-Christian elements in early modern Yiddish usage, has noted that ‘offensive language was perhaps the “weapon of the weak,” but it was nonetheless a weapon, and the aggressiveness it communicated as well as the damage it was believed to invoke were perceived as a real, tangible threat to mainstream society’.76 As such, it is a powerful tool of resistance that Christian authorities attempted to counter by increased censorship of Jewish texts. The seemingly small act of breaking up two overlaying blades of grass that form the shape of a cross can be understood as an active expression of subversion and opposition to the most pervasive Christian symbol. Refraining from Torah study on Christmas Eve even assumes the ability to influence the fate of people when they are dead. In reversal of the belief that prayers, Torah study and good deeds can bring repentance to a dead person’s soul,77 Jews who did not study Torah on Christmas Eve believed that they could punish Jesus for his transgressions. Such actions assert their own sense of superiority, even if the everyday reality was rather different.78 The study of texts written by former Jews, by people who had once belonged to the community and had been part of an unwritten, but well understood, consensus, can provide us with glimpses of how Jews managed to create meaningful Jewish spaces in often overpowering Christian places. Convert authors expose strategies of resistance that demonstrate how early modern Jews were actively choosing action in order to express their opposition towards Christendom.

Navigating Christian Space  193 NOTES   1 Late mediaeval and early modern German-Jewish history has in the past decades attracted increased scholarly attention. Important studies include Friedrich Battenberg, Die Juden in Deutschland vom 16. bis zum Endes des 18. Jahrhunderts (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2001); Mordechai Breuer and Michael Graetz, eds., Deutsch-jüdische Geschichte in der Neuzeit, 1600–1780 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1996); Dean Phillip Bell, Sacred Communities: Jewish and Christian Identities in Fifteenth-Century Germany (Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2001); Sabine Hödl, Peter Rauscher and Barbara Staudinger, eds., Hofjuden und Landjuden: Jüdisches Leben in der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin and Vienna: Philo, 2004); and Michael Toch, “Aspects of Stratification of Early Modern German Jewry: Population History and Village Jews,” in In and Out of the Ghetto: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany, ed. R. Po-chia Hsia and Hartmut Lehmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 77–89.   2 A wooden statue of Christ seated on an ass, a re-enactment of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem (Matthew 21:5–7, based on Zechariah 9:9) on Palm Sunday. See Robert W. Scribner, Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London: The Hambledon Press, 1987), 25–6.   3 Whereas Jews were clearly aware of the Reformation and the development of different Christian denominations in its wake, the actual ritual differences may not have been that apparent to outside observers. Reformation historians have suggested that there was a long transition period to more austere observance because the local population was often reluctant to give up cherished rituals that did not appeal to Lutheran authorities. On the other hand, the Catholic churches removed certain rituals from its liturgy in response to the Reformation. See Günther Lottes, “Popular Culture and the Early Modern State in 16th Century Germany,” in Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, ed. Steven L. Kaplan (Berlin, New York and Amsterdam: Mouton Publishers, 1984), 147–88.   4 For Jewish awareness of Christian holidays, see Elisheva Carlebach, Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), in particular chapter 5, “Keeping Christian Time in Jewish Calendars,” 115–40.   5 Julia Brauch, Anna Lipphardt and Alexandra Nocke, eds., Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space, Traditions of Place (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 2–4. The editors quote Steve Harrison and Paul Dourish in linking places to their functions: ‘Space is the opportunity; place is the (understood) reality’.   6 Amnon Linder, “ ‘The Jews Too Were Not Absent . . . Carrying Moses’s Law on Their Shoulders’: The Ritual Encounter of Pope and Jews from the Middle Ages to Modern Times,” Jewish Quarterly Review 99, no. 3 (2009): 323–95 and appendix b, e1–e18 (325).   7 Linder, “ ‘The Jews Too Were Not Absent,’” 389–90, notes that about 3% of the extant laudes presented by the Jews at these occasions express a subversive message, mainly by ‘skilful manipulation of bilingual texts and the disjoining of texts from their original contexts’.   8 See Jocelyn A. Hollander and Rachel L. Einwohner, “Conceptualizing Resistance,” Sociological Forum 19, no. 4 (2004): 533–54, for examples from different disciplines.   9 Ibid. 10 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 11 Ibid., xvi. 12 Hollander and Einwohner, “Conceptualizing Resistance,” 539–44. 13 See the important studies by Elisheva Carlebach: “The Anti-Christian Element in Early Modern Yiddish Culture,” Braun Lectures in the History of the Jews in

194  Maria Diemling Prussia 10 (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 2003); and “Jewish Responses to Christianity,” in Reformation Germany in Jews, Judaism, and the Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Germany, ed. Dean Phillip Bell and Stephen G. Burnett (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 451–80. 14 Victor von Carben, Hierinne wirt gelesen, wie Herr Victor von Carben, Welicher eyn Rabi der Iude gewest ist zu Cristlichem glawbn komen (Cologne: 1508). 15 For a preliminary overview of Victor’s life and work, see Maria Diemling, “The Image of Women in the Writings of Victor of Carben,” World Congress of Jewish Studies 12.B (1997): 91–100. 16 For example, Daniel Sperber, Minhagei Israel. Mekorot veToldot (Jerusalem: Mossad harav Kook, 1990–2007, 8 vol. passim) [Hebrew]; Marc Shapiro, “Torah Study on Christmas Eve,” The Journal for Jewish Thought and Philosophy 8 (1999): 319–53; and David Kraemer, Jewish Eating and Identity through the Ages (New York: Routledge, 2007), chapters 7 and 8. 17 See several important studies by Yaacov Deutsch on such polemical accounts that employ an ethnographic approach towards Jewish rituals and practices: Yaacov Deutsch, “A View of the Jewish Religion—Conceptions of Jewish Practice and Ritual in Early Modern Europe,” Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 3 (2001): 273–95; Yaacov Deutsch, “Von der Iuden Ceremonien: Representations of Jews in Sixteenth-Century Germany,” in Jews, Judaism and the Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Germany, ed. Dean Phillip Bell and Stephen G. Burnett (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 335–56; Yaacov Deutsch, “Polemical Ethnographies: Descriptions of Yom Kippur in the Writings of Christian Hebraists and Jewish Converts in Early Modern Europe,” in Hebraica Veritas? Jews and the Study of Judaism in Early Modern Europe, ed. Allison P. Coudert and Jeffrey S. Shoulson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 202–33; and Yaacov Deutsch, Judaism in Christian Eyes: Ethnographic Descriptions of Jews and Judaism in Early Modern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 18 For an exemplary study of this phenomenon in the Middle Ages, see Ivan G. Marcus, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 19 Edward H. Flannery, “The Cross in Jewish-Christian Relations,” Service International de Documentation Judéo-Chrétienne 24, no. 1 (1991). The article is available online at www.notredamedesion.org/en/dialogue_sidicView.php?id=415 (accessed November 1, 2011). See also Jean Dujardin, “Reflections on the Cross as the Sign of Christian Identity,” Service International de Documentation Judéo-Chrétienne 24, no.  1 (1991), www.notredamedesion.org/en/dialogue_sidicView.php?id=416 (accessed November 1, 2011). 20 Editorial, Service International de Documentation Judéo-Chrétienne 24, no.  1 (1991), www.notredamedesion.org/en/dialogue_sidicView.php?id=242 (accessed November 1, 2011). 21 See his chapter “ ‘The Fascination of the Abomination’: Jews (and Jewish Historians) Confront the Cross,” in Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 149–85. 22 Solomon Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the Thirteenth Century, rev. ed. (New York: Hermon Press, 1996), 29 note 42. 23 Maria Diemling, “Grenzgängertum: Übertritte vom Judentum zum Christentum in Wien, 1500–2000,” Wiener Zeitschrift zur Geschichte der Neuzeit 7, no. 2 (2007): 45–6; and Rudolf Glanz, “The ‘Jewish Execution’ in Medieval Germany,” Jewish Social Studies 5 (1943): 8. 24 For mediaeval case studies, see Joseph Shatzmiller, “Desecrating the Cross: A Rare Medieval Accusation,” Studies in the History of the Jewish People and the Land of Israel 5 (1980): 159–73 [Hebrew]; and Christopher Cluse, “Stories of Breaking and Taking the Cross: A Possible Context for the Oxford Incident of 1268,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 90, nos. 3/4 (1995): 396–442.

Navigating Christian Space  195 25 Victor of Carben, Hierinne wirt gelesen, fol. E4r. 26 Yaacov Deutsch, “Jewish Anti-Christian Invectives and Christian Awareness: An Unstudied Form of Interaction in the Early Modern Period,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 55, no. 1 (2010): 41–61. 27 Ibid., 50. 28 R. Israel Bruna, c.1400–(after) 1477. Cf. Arye Maimon and Yacov Guggenheim, eds., Germania Judaica, 1350–1519 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1987–1995), 3.2: 1192–3; and Eric Zimmer, Harmony and Discord: An Analysis of the Decline of Jewish Self-Government in 15th Century Central Europe (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1970), 97. 29 Abraham Berliner, Aus dem Leben der deutschen Juden im Mittelalter, zugleich als Beitrag für deutsche Culturgeschichte nach gedruckten und ungedruckten Quellen (Berlin: M. Poppelauer, 1900), 13. 30 Moses Mintz, GA, 65. Quoted in Moritz Güdemann, Geschichte des Erziehungswesens und der Cultur der abendländischen Juden während des Mittelalters und der neueren Zeit, (Vienna: A. Hölder, 1888), 3: 53. 31 Eveline Brugger et al., Geschichte der Juden in Österreich (Vienna: Ueberreuter, 2006), 359. 32 See Ernst Ferdinand Hess, Flagellum Judeorum. Juden Geissel (Erfurt: Martin Wittel, 1600), fol. Eiiir, stating Jews regard Jesus as a mamzer, a son of a whore, and call evil boys who do not obey their parents, ‘Oh, what a Jeschu you are!’, which indicates their contempt of Jesus. See Elisheva Carlebach, Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500–1750 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 99, for some other examples. 33 Victor von Carben, Hierinne wirt gelesen, fol. A3r–v. 34 On New Year gifts, see Zimmer, Harmony and Discord, 164–5. 35 Shlomo Eidelberg, Jewish Life in Austria in the XVth Century as Reflected in the Legal Writings of Rabbi Israel Isserlein and His Contemporaries (Philadelphia: Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning, 1962), 79 note 114. See Horowitz, Reckless Rites, 157, for a midrashic discussion from the eighth century where the story of Purim is read in a Christian context and Haman, the Jewish archenemy, is turned into a Christian bishop. The biblical Mordecai does not bow and show reverence to the bishop wearing the sign of the cross embroidered on his chest. 36 See Franz Pfeiffer, ed., Marienlegenden (Stuttgart: 1846), 237–60 (a Latin version in the appendix: 274–5); and Kurt Ruh, ed., “Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters,” Verfasserlexikon (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1983), 4: 891–3. 37 See the excellent summary in Mary Minty, “Kiddush haShem in Christian Eyes in Medieval Germany,” Zion 2–3 (1994): 209–66, and particularly 234–47 [Hebrew]. A  shorter English version appeared in Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 4 (1995): 13–38, as “Responses to Medieval Ashkenazi Martyrdom (Kiddush ha-Shem) in Late Medieval German Christian sources.” 38 See, for example, the consistent use of this term for Christian places of worship in the polemical Sefer Nizzahon Vetus. David Berger, The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages: A Critical Edition of the Nizzahon Vetus with an Introduction, Translation, and Commentary (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979), 99, 175, and 213. 39 Johannes Pfefferkorn, Ich bin ein buchlein der judenveindt (Cologne: 1509), fol. A4. 40 For a discussion of some of the practical considerations when organising the visit of a preacher, see Maria Diemling, “Petrus Nigri (Peter Schwarz): Fifteenth-Century Polemicist, Preacher and Hebraist,” in Dominicans and Jews: Personalities, Conflicts, and Perspectives from the 13th to the 20th Century, ed. Elias H. Füllenbach and Gianfranco Miletto (Oldenbourg: Akademie Verlag, forthcoming). 41 Abraham Berliner, Geschichte der Juden in Rom von der ältesten Zeit bis zur Gegenwart, (Frankfurt; Main: J. Kauffmann, 1893), 2: 87.

196  Maria Diemling 42 Peter Browe, Die Judenmission im Mittelalter und die Päpste (Rome: Saler, 1942),  282. 43 Victor von Carben, Hierinne wirt gelesen, fol. O5r. 44 This sentiment was expressed earlier in the Sefer Nizzahon Vetus where the abhorrence of baptising the crosses in their ‘houses of abomination’ and of bells and chalices is discussed. Berger, The Jewish-Christian Debate, 175. 45 Herders Conversations-Lexikon, (Freiburg im Breisgau: 1855), 3: 93. Cf. Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer and Hanns Bächtold-Stäubli, Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, 3rd ed. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2000), 3: 868–74, for some material on the apotropaic qualities of bells and the idea of bells as animated and thinking entities. 46 Victor of Carben, Hierinne wirt gelesen, fol. C4r. 47 See Jacob Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World: A Sourcebook, 315–1791, Revised Edition with an Introduction and Updated Bibliographies by Marc Saperstein (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1999), 14–16, for a translation of the Pact of ‘Umar,’ which regulated the relations between Muslim authorities and Jewish (and Christian) subjects in Muslim countries. Jews and Christians were only allowed to use discreet means to alert believers to the beginning of services. 48 Samuel Krauss, The Jewish-Christian Controversy from the Earliest Times to 1789, ed. and rev. William Horbury (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1996), 150. 49 Victor of Carben, Hierinne wirt gelesen, fol. C4r. See Deutsch, “Invectives,” 48, for a different translation and interpretation of Carben’s ‘anti-bell rhyme’. 50 Berger, The Jewish-Christian Debate, 99. 51 Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 119–53. 52 Sefer Hasidim §346. 53 Bleibtreu’s Jewish name was Meyer, and he was baptised in 1681 with his son in Frankfurt/Main. He died in 1702. See Christian Gottlieb Jöcher, Allgemeines Gelehrten-Lexicon (Leipzig: Johann Friedrich Gleditsch, 1750–1751), 1: 1130. For other examples, see Carlebach, Divided Souls, 100. 54 Alexander J. Fisher, Music and Religious Identity in Counter-Reformation Augsburg, 1580–1630 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 55 Encyclopaedia Judaica, (Detroit: Macmillan, 2007), 13: 496–7. 56 Encyclopaedia Judaica, (Detroit: Macmillan, 2007), 8: 190. 57 Berliner, Aus dem Leben, 17–18. 58 See, for example, Güdemann, Geschichte des Erziehungswesens, 3: 139; and Berliner, Aus dem Leben, 122. R. Isserlein prohibited former Jews who had become Christians from playing at Jewish weddings. This is an interesting indication of the (weak) boundaries between Jews and those who had left Judaism. For some general remarks on cultural influences and borrowing in music, see Steven M. Lowenstein, The Jewish Cultural Tapestry: International Jewish Folk Traditions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 175–95. 59 For a discussion of a specific example of Italian ‘ebraica’, a ‘song about Jews’, that raises many questions about mutual knowledge and influences, see Don Harrán, “Adonai con voi (1569), a Simple Popular Song with a Complicated Semantic,” in The Jewish Body: Corporeality, Society, and Identity in the Renaissance and Early Modern Period, ed. Maria Diemling and Giuseppe Veltri (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 427–61. 60 Richard van Dülmen, Kultur und Alltag in der Frühen Neuzeit, vol.  2, Dorf und Stadt. 16.–18. Jahrhundert, 2nd ed. (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1999), 133–4. 61 Paulus Stephanus Cassel, Weihnachten, Ursprünge, Bräuche und Aberglaube. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der christlichen Kirche und des deutschen Volkes (Berlin: Ludwig Rauh, 1862), 276, points out that, in popular early modern beliefs, each year world history was being repeated: the devil is powerful until the birth of Christ at midnight. He knows that he is going to lose his power and is terrifyingly frightening

Navigating Christian Space  197 in the hours before his final defeat (incidentally, the author of this work, who put Christmas rituals firmly into a German national context, was a convert from Judaism, very active in the mission of Jews but also outspoken against the rising antisemitism in Germany). See also note 68. 62 See Shapiro, “Torah Study on Christmas Eve,” 320–1, for a discussion of the etymology of the word ‘nitl’. 63 Samuel Krauss, Das Leben Jesu nach jüdischen Quellen (Berlin: S. Calvary, 1902; repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1977); and Yaacov Deutsch, “The Second Life of the Life of Jesus: Christian Reception of Toledot Yeshu,” in Toledot Yeshu (“The Life Story of Jesus”) Revisited, ed. Peter Schäfer et al. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 283–95. 64 For a discussion of garlic in Jewish-Christian polemics, see Maria Diemling “ ‘As the Jews Like to Eat Garlick’. Garlic in Christian-Jewish Polemical Discourse in Early Modern Germany,” in Food and Judaism, ed. Leonard J. Greenspoon et al. (Omaha: Creighton University Press, 2004), 215–34. 65 Johannes Pfefferkorn, Handt Spiegel (Mainz: 1511) [no pagination]. 66 Ernst Ferdinand Hess, Flagellum Judeorum. Juden Geissel, fol. Fr–v. See also the convert Dietrich Schwab, Detectum Velum Mosaicum Iudaeorum nostri temporis: Das ist: Judischer Deckmantel deß Mosaischen Gesetzes (Paderborn: Mattheus Portanus, 1615), 7–8, which relies on Hess but mentions in addition that sometimes the members of the household are so scared of using the toilet that a pair of trousers or a shirt needs to be sent to the washing on the following day, but also, more importantly, that Jews refrain from Torah study and prayer on Christmas Eve to increase Jesus’ suffering on that day. 67 Shapiro, “Torah Study on Christmas Eve,” 335. 68 Johann Adrian, Send und Warnungs-Brieff an alle hartneckige und halsstarrige Jüden (Wittenberg: 1609). See Cassel, Weihnachten, 275–83, for a collection of popular beliefs on various figures (the devil, Frau Holle, sinners, werewolves, demons, witches and others) who re-enact world history and have power over the world until midnight when Christ is born and their reign is over. The Jewish belief that Jesus is haunting sewers and latrines on Christmas Eve sounds like a curiously reversed image of this Christian belief. 69 Samuel Friedrich Brenz, Jüdischer abgestreiffter Schlangenbalg (Nuremberg: Scherff, 1614), 7. 70 Salman Zwi of Aufhausen, Jüdischer Theriack, in Theriaca judaica ad examen revocata sive scripta Amoibea, ed. Johann Wülfer (Nuremberg: Andreas Knorzius, 1681), chapter 1, §20, 29. 71 R. Jair Hayyim Bacharach (1638–1702), Mekor Hayyim, 2: 256. Unfortunately, the work has not been preserved in its entirety and the reference to the custom of abstaining from Torah study on Christmas night is only referred to in the index. Cf. Shapiro, “Torah Study on Christmas Eve,” 344. 72 For attempts at keeping this material deliberately hidden, see Carlebach, “The Anti-Christian Element,” 12–15. 73 Shapiro, “Torah Study on Christmas Eve,” 348. 74 See Hoffmann-Krayer and Bächtold-Stäubli, Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, 5: 4–6. 75 See, for example, Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, and Baumgarten, Mothers and Children, 92–116, on Jewish and Christian birth rituals. See also David Berger, “A Generation of Scholarship on Jewish-Christian Interaction in the Medieval World,” in Persecution, Polemic, and Dialogue: Essays in Jewish-Christian Relations (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2010), 40–50. 76 Aya Elyada, A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 63. See on this issue in particular her chapter “Blasphemy, Curses, and Insults: Yiddish and the Jews’ ‘Hidden Transcripts’,” 48–64. 77 Shapiro, “Torah Study on Christmas Eve,” 349.

198  Maria Diemling 78 See Marc Saperstein, “The Baal Shem Tov and the Priest: On Problematic Texts and Dialogue,” for a fascinating case study (beyond the scope of this chapter) on competing holiness and cosmic influences. Saperstein discusses a story about how the Besht involved an old priest whose ‘celibate holiness [. . .] is in competition with the holiness of the Jewish people’, in a sexual fantasy to cause his accidental ejaculation in order to ensure that the prayer of the Jewish community reach the heavens: ‘In this zero-sum game, the Christian holiness has to be subverted through an act that both traditions view as impure’ (www.jnjr.div.ed.ac.uk/Primary%20Sources/ Early_Modern/saperstein_baalshemtovpriest.html [accessed November 11, 2011]).

12 Translating Modernity On Aniconism and Negative Aesthetics in German-Jewish Thought Leena Petersen

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Judaism was perceived as an image-less or aniconistic religion and therefore as art-less. As a consequence of this, Judaism has and continues to be represented as replete with iconoclastic tendencies.1 This association between Judaism and aniconism, or the absence of images, renders this tendency a religious phenomenon, and thus, as a practice, one opposed to the visual in Judaism, Islam and Byzantine culture. Yet aniconism is, as David Freedberg famously stated, an ambiguous ‘historiographic myth’.2 Historically, Judaism was of course much more variegated: partly accommodating aniconism as a Jewish characteristic in Western Europe, with East European Jewry continuing traditions of religious imagery.3 In the case of Jewish aniconism, it has been suggested by Moshe Carmilly-Weinberger that ‘the Second Commandment and many other restrictions in the Bible undoubtedly had a negative impact on the artistic development of the Jewish people’:4 hence, in Western European Jewish culture, Christian debates concerning the role of the visual, and thus idolatry, played a predominant role. However, in East Europe, possibly as a result of the Hasidic movement and different trajectories of spiritual development (as can be observed in the writings of, for example, Jacob Frank, Sabbatai Zwi, David Kaufmann or Rabbi Kook), visual representation was found in several artistic movements, which allows us to speak of ‘Jewish art’. To be precise, the visual already held importance in antiquity.5 The ‘Jewish’ aesthetic theory developed by Kalman Bland considered visual dimensions in philosophy, art, mysticism, poetry and law, as well as biblical commentaries.6 However, even without Bland it becomes evident that interpreting Judaism as a purely aniconistic religion is problematic; it is simply not the case. Instead, other forces are at work. In the ostensibly secularised nineteenth and twentieth centuries, religion became a distinct factor in the debates surrounding the Jewish minority’s struggle for political and cultural emancipation, especially regarding the attempt to demonstrate that Judaism was a religion that was compatible with Enlightenment and modern European culture, capable of being modernised and of contributing important cultural, religious and ethical values. The topic of aniconism thus represents a key issue in comprehending Jewish/non-Jewish interaction and conflict with ‘the other’, because it was related to the ability of Jews to acculturate into a supposedly Christian or secular society. In the German-speaking

200  Leena Petersen world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in particular, the assumption of a Jewish aniconism was shared by Jews and non-Jews, and had wide-ranging consequences—not only in the history of ideas. Indeed, the particularity of Jewish aniconism in that world resulted in an understanding of Judaism as a religion hostile towards images.7 This chapter will consider two distinctive schools of thought in dealing with aniconism and negativity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century German-Jewish thought, namely, neo-Kantianism and the early Frankfurt School. Through this approach it will highlight the importance of aniconism in the development of the history of ideas in the context of cultural critique in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century German-speaking world. In Neo-Kantianism, which reconsidered epistemology, the theories of Hermann Cohen proved to be highly influential in German-Jewish thought. Whereas Judaism was not regarded as an aniconistic religion in several other European countries, in the German-speaking world Cohen’s doctrines influenced—together with mainly critical Protestant and Catholic theologies8—the idea of Judaism’s hostility towards images. As a result, and in correspondence with the nineteenth century’s aniconistic bias, an epistemological approach was established in German-Jewish aesthetics that considered the negative, imageless facet of appearance in order to illuminate an understanding of the world. On the other hand, in German philosophy, the emergence of so-called Lebensphilosophie, philosophy of life, with its positive estimation of the visual as almost the only way to grasp reality, presented a partly antisemitic bias. This very particular tendency of Lebensphilosophie becomes understandable by considering the following example of distinctive imagistic epistemology. On the modern theme of images in aesthetics, the perspective is twofold: first, the image is understood in contrast to the literal and refers to higher meanings behind naturalistic appearance. Secondly, the aesthetic approach considers the effectiveness of images that have a genuine and influential consequence by working on the sense of the self, relationships with the world and the Christian concern for eternal salvation; this very potency becomes important by means of ethical differentiations between linguistic and aniconistic alignments. In order to understand the synthetic and, apparently, religious alliances of visual approaches, one might have a look at their supposed meaning in relation to their modern subject.9 By following the particular character and impact of images, further and corresponding observations can be made: by fostering a hope that is often connected with images, a ‘curing of the separation of human beings and the universe’ is apparently offered.10 Reaching far beyond the boundaries of purely ‘aesthetic’11 concern, this particular modern idea implies an expectation according to which the image presents a kind of ‘no man’s land’. Correspondingly, the image is regarded as a suitable method for catharsis or cosmic agreement; in any case, it is seen as enabling privileged surveys of reality. Thereby, the enchanting character of images comes into play: it can be argued that the tendency of secularised individuation requires the enchanting qualities of images as a kind of iconological surrogate of Christian idolatry. Hence, the effects of supposedly enlightened secularisation on the development of aesthetics demand a comparative approach that pursues these as

Translating Modernity  201 distinctively ‘non-Jewish’ tendencies of iconography and their origins. These tendencies are clearly opposed to aniconistic bias and negativity. Negativity does not offer salvation through synthesis with the world or its supposedly cathartic aspects. Quite the opposite: as will be shown in the following, it can offer a history-related interpretation and culture critique beyond purely subjective or sublime concerns. The following example contrasting negativity is primarily characterised by subjective immediacy or synthesis. The paradigm of a philosophy of life does not, at first glance, refer to Christian messages of salvation. This approach of understanding modern reality does not consider the intrication of mind and historical event as relevant,12 nor ethics, but rather the interrelations of subject and concreteness and as such it constitutes an approach that contrasts with aniconism and negativity. The example in question is that of Ludwig Klages’ doctrine, whose formerly widespread theory of Lebensphilosophie is still applied today. Alongside a still-growing body of publications supporting his view, there still exist Klages’ organisations,13 and he also became an icon for various environmental conferences.14 Hence, we might ask why Klages’ ideas are still applicable today, and what exactly makes his writings so appealing. One explanation may well be that Klages’ culture critique—based on criticising technological progress and an archaic postulate of preserving nature—is presently understandable and relevant to the critical reader. Another reason can be found in Klages’ philosophy of life, which embeds truth in the realm of the imagistic, and, hence, may possibly correspond with contemporary tendencies to view the visual as a pre-destined way to interpret reality and history. Two analyses of Klages’ work, published in 1937 and 1938, are revealing in this regard. In his study of 1937, entitled Anti-Klages oder Von der Würde des Menschen (Anti-Klages or On Human Dignity), Max Bense declares Ludwig Klages the ‘most popular philosopher of a time’, but an ‘antisoph’, a counterpart of the mind. Bense questions the reasons for Klages’ great popularity, and discovers them in his style, rather than his content. Moreover, he claims that Klages’ tone banalises all life and being, and his journalistic-style reasoning transforms metaphysics into a matter of jargon. What Bense describes as an intoxicating element in Klages’ style can be extended to Klages’ definition of image: as his definition was very general and stated clear polarities, it was accessible to a wide audience and so experienced a wide-ranging reception.15 On the other hand, in support of Klages’ approach, Maria Kliefoth explains in her 1938 study of Klages’ work that, for him, the conceptual within the attempt to comprehend reality is only artificial and, consequently, has to be separated from reality, which is regarded as visual.16 In other words, the mind is understood as artificial. The mind cannot represent reality, which consists of natural appearances. The mind itself is, according to Klages, Jewish per se, an idea that has also found its way into Christianity via Paul, as he claims. The mind is thereby understood as a principle of separation, which disconnects the bearer with the world. After the mind has dismantled the world, the intended unification with the world is reached via pure, soulful and immediate experience. Hence, reality is no longer represented by rational thought, but becomes symbolic knowledge. Reality is thus

202  Leena Petersen to be discovered within the image, namely in an essentialising process using the experience of symbols.17 In summary, and also in opposition to the account above, it can be argued that Klages’ idea of imagistic knowledge via the soul—and a short intermediate procedure of alienation—represents a culture critique of intellectualism and also of technological progress. This rather extreme approach stands for perceptive immediacy in its most subjective, archaic and ahistorical sense. The meaning of his process of experience lies in the experience itself, a process of unity with the world and thus a synthesis with the concrete. The lack of metaphysical subjectivity is replaced by sentimental inwardness. In particular, Klages’ use of dream images and phantasms aiming at world experience already points towards such an alignment: the ecstatic state of immediacy is thus supposed to make an incorporation of soul and world experience possible via bodies and images. This kind of immediacy can be regarded as an extreme case, although common themes of modernity are certainly detectable. In this connection we might think, for example, of certain contemporary traditions of interpreting modernity that focus on such themes as dream images, phantasm, the figure of the flâneur or modern myth in an uncritical way, removed from historical-critical contextualisation. In this context, negativity can be regarded as fundamentally opposed to the experience of immediacy described above. Although intuitive motifs—for example, immediate perception as in a dream—can occasionally also play a role in approaches characterised by negativity, the primary methodology is more language-based and beyond the imagistic and concrete. In modernity we can discern a major turn from the linguistic as a medium of knowledge and world experience towards the imagistic, in sharp contrast to aniconism and negativity. This marks a transition from the rational knowledge of Enlightenment ideas through and within the medium of language towards an understanding of the world as an imagistic phenomenon. Within this period of time, reason has lost its dominating significance. Instead, doubts occur regarding the project of Enlightenment. In terms of the broader context of modernity and its ground-breaking alterations, the role of appearance and perception has changed drastically, not only through innovations such as the circulation of images through the mass media, photography and later film, but also in literature and philosophy. As a result, modern imagery, mainly in the mass media, is intertwined with religious connotations despite—or because of—the Enlightenment: religion returned as a distinct factor in culture critique, media and the arts up to the present. There are many possible explanations as to why religion experienced resurgence, often in different forms, after the Enlightenment and its predominantly secularising effects. One interpretation,18 which takes into account the role of artworks and secularisation, points to the Baroque period as one replete with artworks containing messages of salvation: these can be regarded not so much as secular but rather as substitutes of the sacred. Related to this thesis is the following historical context: during the time of secularisation, in as yet unequalled numbers, altars and illustrations for the decoration of Protestant churches were produced. However, the work of art lost its cult status and ceased to be an instrument of

Translating Modernity  203 messages of salvation for the church. The contradictory elements of this statement are explained by Katharina Flügel.19 Flügel argues that religion became secularised. In the course of mystification and individuation, the development was followed by a kind of realisation of the celestial and cathartic elements in art, in particular concerning imagistic representation. The function of art turned out to be evoking sensations of subjective devoutness. Secularisation of art is thus not to be equated with the ceasing of Christian imagistic themes, but as part of a process, the core of which is formed by single individuations. Related to subjectivity, this attitude resulted, on the one hand, in an insight into the world, on the other hand, an altered turn towards parochial practice and the realisation of the ‘supernatural’ in art. The reasons for the development were rooted in the emergence of public devoutness, which was widespread under the renewed influence of mysticism.20 Thereby, religion became secularised, and artwork could fulfil its function of producing sensations of subjective devoutness.21 This early ‘afterlife’ of religion22 began to manifest itself not only in artworks but also in theoretical accounts and philosophical movements. Corresponding with this development, the visual gained influence throughout the history of ideas in the nineteenth and twentieth century up to the present. Therefore, the notion of a Jewish aniconism became a relevant topic of debate. However, before such imagistic tendencies could gain influence in modernity, the verbal and the visual were, across the Enlightenment period, undergoing a process of critical consideration. Evidently, the predominance of the image, and imagism, in modernity is akin to religious practice in a secularised world. In the Romantic Age, some ideas from modernity became widely applied. The dream, for example, was considered to be a form of correlation between the verbal and the visual on a metaphysical level, which became important in the course of modernity, in particular, in the context of the mystical tradition of Kabbalah. For instance, according to the Romantic Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, and in contrast to Klages, language forms an immediate and self-reflective human organ. However, the proper use of it is forgotten—only the dream can represent the experience of connecting the verbal with material objects.23 As the dream consists of picture sequences in combination with language, it is considered to be blurring the difference between words and objects, that is, the visual beneath a rather conscious perception of symbols. Simultaneously, Johann Heinrich Lambert rediscovered semblance as part of reality.24 Immanuel Kant reformulated Lambert’s idea within his conception of appearance through semblance.25 Kant in The Critique of Pure Reason attempts to bring logos (the word) and aesthesis (the image) into line by means of a schematism that accommodates the otherwise heterogeneous images and words into spatio-temporal rhythmic patterns, in other words, to bring the otherwise oppositional visual and linguistic together.26 Hence, Kant aims to establish identity; in fact, in his theory, identity becomes the precondition of thought. One fundamentally contrasting approach can be found in Hermann Cohen’s concept of ethical aniconism. Cohen’s influential neo-Kantian consideration of an image-less philosophy derives from ethical demands that are based on a philosophy of Judaism. Cohen developed his particular ethical principle of aniconism in

204  Leena Petersen response to aniconistic and antisemitic prejudices of the nineteenth century. Based on the prohibition of images in the Decalogue, Cohen’s theory emanates from an acceptance of ‘the other’ or ‘the stranger’ transgressing the boundaries of Jewish religion. This approach comes from the so-called Noahide commands, which concern both Jews and gentiles, and are supposed to allow all to lead a godly life and thus include all human beings, as their natural right, into a plan of salvation. In the context of Cohen’s speculative philosophy, and his distinct universalist approach in particular, the importance of the acceptance of ‘the other’ becomes clear. Following Cohen’s interpretation of the Noahide commands, the prohibition of images means a prohibition of an imagistic fixation undertaken by humans. This was exemplified in the first antisemitism trial in Germany in 1888, when Cohen, who had been summoned as an expert witness on Judaism, showed that aniconism could serve as a foundation for a national state.27 He thereby implied that this would be impossible in the case of Christianity due to its mythologising and, therefore, unethical use of images. A plethora of images renders citizens as unequal and unhuman, fixed instead by determining features of the imagistic. Moreover, Cohen’s critical response towards Immanuel Kant’s thoughts on Christian superiority consisted of a system of critical idealism and represented an aniconistic interpretation of Judaism. Yet, according to Cohen, a consideration of the importance of the artistic and aesthetics had to be beyond doubt: the law and its immanent ethics suggest these phenomena. Nevertheless, as Cohen explains in Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, language and architecture are to be regarded as exceptions to the dictum of the second commandment among otherwise purely linguistic topoi. As Hermann Cohen explains in his critique of Kant, these artistic perspectives are excluded as they do not serve idolatry as visual representations of the divine.28 The unethical application of the imagistic can be summarised as an abolition of this world and the beyond.29 Simultaneously, the contrasting aniconistic theory supports a separation of religion and state, as propounded by Cohen; for the aspect of the infinite, which is suggested by an image, ceases to apply within the aniconistic tradition. In this context, the restriction of human abilities becomes a topic in Enlightenment thought; in other words, eternity is bought into relation with the phenomenon of human restrictions. Not only through consideration of the example of Cohen, whose speculative philosophy becomes influential in fin de siècle culture, it becomes clear that in the German-speaking world being ‘Jewish’ is often popularly connected with the medium of language in a general way, whereas Christianity, and particularly Catholicism, is largely defined by imagistic, iconographic traditions. Hence, the following thesis is proposed, which puts the subsequent supposedly secular approaches of culture critique into question: whereas in Judaism, aniconism can represent a religious affirmation, on the other hand, particularly in Catholicism, an image-less approach might point towards secularisation. Above all, self-proclaimed secular culture critique utilised negativity in the twentieth century—in contrast to the prevailing visualisation of culture. A modern reception and interpretation of concreteness might suggest the idea of synthesis,

Translating Modernity  205 as pointed out earlier in the context of identity and non-identity. However, one can also find rare intermediate in-between positions, which connects modern imagery and a mythology of capitalism by means of allusion. In his iconographical studies, Aby Warburg developed the concept of intuitive synthesis in contrast to the approach of both Ludwig Klages and Cohen. In dissociation from a descriptive analysis of the concrete, Warburg’s enormous accumulation of visual material, called Mnemosyne Atlas contains an archive of expressions and gestures, which he collected between 1924 and 1929.30 Warburg planned to document the so-called ‘wandering ideas of images’ within a genealogical tree. Indeed, his approach indicates the transformation from art history to cultural studies, in which linguistic interpretation is ever more replaced by visual explanations and intuitive interpretation. This method, according to Warburg, is elicited by the realisation that: [.  .  .] die Bildwelt der Frührenaissance nicht durch, die stille Größe des Gipsabgusses oder des präparierten Klassikers’ verbreitet wurde, sondern daß die Festumzüge mit ihren mythologischen und allegorischen Figuren‚ das Vehikel (im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes) waren, das zunächst die Vergangenheit in unmittelbar anschaulicher Verkörperung auferstehen ließ [the ‘image world’ of the early Renaissance was not disseminated by the silent greatness of the cast or the classic, but by the processions with their mythological and allegorical figures, the vehicle (in the truest sense of the word) that revived the past in its concrete materialisation].31 While examining the early Renaissance, Warburg came to the conclusion that this period can be signified as an age of ‘international image migration’. Alongside influential art works, he also records in his Mnemosyne Atlas standardised ‘image ideas’, which also include, at first glance, objects beyond conventional artwork. These imagistic imprints are shown in cross-epochal genealogical trees. These branch out from their original meaning—like, for example, the three Graces who live on not only in classic art, but also in fashion photography and caricatures, or the goddess of victory, whose genealogical tree reaches from Sicilian coins to paper banderols of Warburg’s time, from Nike of Samothrace to the radiator mascot of a Rolls Royce. He classifies his collection as fundamental fragments of a pragmatic account of expression, combining the spatio-temporal, the functional aspects of image ideas, and their trails and linkages under the ward of symbolical astrology and the cosmic commission of astronomic doctrines. Although he applied these mystical configurations very carefully in his rather secular method, he still hoped that science might be extended towards mysticism, namely within a unifying oscillation of the soul from cultic practices to mathematic contemplation—and back. In this early example of cultural studies, the artwork is defined as a social organ. The concrete turns out to be contextualised in the understanding of history as an interrelated and reflective process, in which human expression comes to be the centre of attention. However, Warburg’s attempt to grasp particular historical content via the visual simultaneously results in certain distrust towards the

206  Leena Petersen concrete. A suspicious attitude is exposed in the huge accumulation of images, in which an image cannot stand on its own but has to be investigated in a comparative approach. Warburg’s project comprises the history of, for example, so-called pathos formula—a comparative history of human gestures from antiquity to modernity—and attempts to draw a connection between different epochs since antiquity, with the tools and ideas of modernity. However, in this approach, which is close to theories of Lebensphilosophie, the role of language in understanding a historical situation is clearly reduced, and the main focus is on the alignment of the body and its historical expressions, and on an attempt to understand human nature via a combination of mythology and photographs of daily life.32 Myth critique, which is implicit in Warburg’s work, comes to be of central importance for the following examples of culture critique. The approach of combining aniconism with a critique of modern visual culture is central to Walter Benjamin, for example, and is to some extent related to Warburg’s method of interpretation. Benjamin was, however, influenced by Cohen’s theory. Benjamin’s somewhat more profane—yet messianic-libertarian—interpretation of negativity33 was equally opposed to the mythical content of his time and relied on language as a medium of interpretation, in contrast to Warburg. In his theory of knowledge, Benjamin combines a philosophy of the subject with the theme of externalisation.34 Here, the intrication of language and knowledge is unavoidable. Hence, knowledge cannot be pure, because it is connected with the visual metaphors of language. Consequently, knowledge is in this context never ‘image-less’. The task of language critique is thus to call to mind the imagistic elements of knowledge. Accordingly, Benjamin is less interested in the origins of language but, with Delacroix,35 in its ‘Becoming’, its constant historical development.36 However, Benjamin turned against an understanding of language as absolute mediation. For him, the immanent contradictive elements of language come to be important, as corresponding with Henri Bergson’s concept of a ‘durée réelle’.37 Transformed within language, the substantial, material aspect gains a content of truth.38 In terms of the relation between German-Jewish thought, historical materialism and visual culture, religion proves to be a distinctive factor, as noted earlier: religion is regarded within Critical Theory,39 and in particular within Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectics of Enlightenment,40 as deeply intertwined with myth, and, therefore, as implicated within suppression, exploitation and alienation. However, as Adorno and Horkheimer wrote in their work of 1944, the Jewish religion represents an exception as an example of ‘true practice’. This perspective on religion in Critical Theory can be found in all the early writings of the Frankfurt School, but was formulated most clearly in the Dialectic of Enlightenment and within Negative Dialectics.41 In the case of Adorno, the religious concept can be understood as a Benjaminian theological Messianism. Judaism is preferred as an example of ‘true practice’, and here it is distinguished clearly from Protestantism. Protestantism is described by Max Horkheimer as responsible for introducing a subject-object dichotomy, and thus as an origin not only of continental philosophy but also of capitalism. Hence, religion becomes interesting for historical

Translating Modernity  207 materialism. One can find two different approaches that make up the one critical theory of religion of the early Frankfurt School. The first expression is that formulated by Horkheimer in collaboration with Adorno. They focused on the radicalisation of the second and third commandment of the Jewish Decalogue, and made its prohibition against making names or images of the absolute into the driving methodological force of their theory: the dialectic of determinate negation. Benjamin and Adorno developed the second form of the critical theory of religion—an inverse theology of remembrance of the suffering and death of innocent victims and a longing for messianic redemption.42 Even though the early Frankfurt School never connected itself officially to Cohen’s concept of aniconism, the influence is quite obvious. A further distinct and related comment can be found in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment by following their two central arguments: myth represents enlightenment, and, at the same time, enlightenment regresses to myth. They evoke a ban on images, which prohibits picturing concreteness, as mentioned above. Historical interpretation, therefore, is relieved from such transfigurations through the introduction of negativity. In other words, if modern reality is signified by the rise of visual experience, another means of interpretation beyond imagery itself has to be found: immanent critique is the suggestion. This particular form of negativity suggests that comprehension is perceived as beyond the concrete picture of history, namely in critical relation to the past. Thus, both Benjamin’s and Warburg’s approaches are partly rejected by Adorno. In the case of Benjamin, Adorno criticises the potential of a new mythology of modern phenomena as central to his method. Although Adorno recognises the historiographic quality of Benjamin’s method, he argues that it nevertheless remains within the sphere of mythology. In reference to early editions of Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction”,43 Adorno accordingly criticises Benjamin’s project itself as part of the general mythologising of reality, strictly speaking as ‘mythologising of the demythologising’.44 Consequently, Adorno’s method represents a more conceptual, non-imagistic approach of myth criticism. In his Aesthetic Theory, Adorno gives a particular emphasis to his rejection of the unfinished montage work of the Historical Avant-garde. According to Adorno, these artworks simply affirm reality due to their fragmentary state. Hence, the dialectical character, which is already immanent, is ignored.45 Within Negative Dialectics, Adorno directly opposes Benjamin’s Arcades Project as an ideological form of totalitarianism and subjective immanence.46 Additionally, he describes Benjamin’s unfinished work as theoretical surrender, as well as a form of masochism due to the latter’s fear of unvarnished observation of history and contemporary reality; as, according to Adorno, he remains in the sphere of myth within his image-inflated methodology. Benjamin’s imagistic experiment, through the introduction of mythological semblance into the method itself, can—according to Adorno—be regarded as totalitarian and also as determined by an ideological perspective ‘due to Benjamin’s acceptance of dialectical materialism as a Weltanschauung, so to speak, with closed eyes’.47 However, Benjamin’s attempt to describe the nineteenth

208  Leena Petersen century as well as his present, represented in the single moments of a physiognomy of history, is, even in its fragmentary state, still revealing for an investigation of reification and its consequences for the twentieth century. A closer look at Benjamin’s method of physiognomic historiography and culture critique might reveal that Adorno’s critique can also be, and possibly ought to be, directed to the current attempts by, for example, visual studies at mystification rather than the critical interpretation of images. Considering not only the antisemitic bias in visual interpretations, the strong opposition towards images in the critical approaches discussed above can be understood. In conclusion, it can be stated that the idea of aniconism is important not only for Jewish/non-Jewish relations: the relationship between Judaism and images became central for many debates and theoretical movements in the German-speaking world. As is clear in the case of Cohen’s ethical aniconism, the  ability of Jews to integrate into an ostensibly secularised society depended on the question of Jewish aniconism and Christian idolatry. Moreover, it was expected that Jews would share the general trend towards visualisation. As a subtext, and sometimes openly as in Hermann Cohen’s case, the idea of aniconism and negativity document the relationship between Jews and non-Jews. The intrication of aniconism with modern phenomena, in particular from the influential perspective of German-Jewish thought, highlights the importance of the topic, which can be found in both religious and secular traditions, and helps to explain the current appearance of increasing visual culture and its religious heritage from a different angle. NOTES   1 See Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek, “Zum Stereotyp des biblischen Bilderverbotes,” in Das Recht des Bildes. Jüdische Perspektiven in der modernen Kunst, ed. Hans Günter Golinski and Sepp Hiekisch-Picard (Bochum: Museum Boch, Edition Braus, 2004), 53–64. This chapter is partly based on my postdoctoral research project “Negative Aesthetics in German Jewish Thought in the 19th/20th Century” at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center, Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2007–2008. I would like to thank Professor Gabriel Motzkin for inspiring conversations, and also my colleague at the time, Dr Elke Dubbels.   2 Cf. David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 54. This statement points out the relationship between sophistication and visualisation.   3 This chapter does not permit further detail regarding a more differentiated reading of the multifaceted developments in Europe. Of course, no simplistic East-West divide is intended but an overview of major trends. For an overview of the variegated histories of Jewish art in the different parts of Europe, see, for example, Annette Weber, ed., Jüdische Sammler und ihr Beitrag zur Kultur der Moderne [Jewish collectors and their contribution to modern culture] (Heidelberg: Universitaetsverlag Winter, 2011).   4 Cf. Moshe Carmilly-Weinberger, Fear of Art: Censorship and Freedom of Expression in Art (New York: R.R. Bowker, 1986), 4. The work of religious studies scholar Kalman P. Bland has been paramount in investigating the topic of so-called Jewish

Translating Modernity  209 aniconism. As Bland points out: ‘Jewish aniconism implies that Jews are a People of the Book rather than a People of the Image. Proponents of Jewish aniconism deny the existence of authentic Jewish traditions in painting, sculpture, and architecture. They concede that Jews imitate, in production and reception, the foreign art of their host or neighboring cultures. They claim that Jewish attitudes toward visuality and the visual arts range from indifference to suspicion and hostility’; Kalman P. Bland, The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3.   5 Cf. Heimann-Jelinek, “Zum Stereotyp des biblischen Bilderverbotes,” 53–64.   6 Ibid.; cf. Kalman P. Bland, “Anti-Semitism and Aniconism: The Germanophone Requiem for Jewish Visual Art,” in Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, ed. Catherine M. Soussloff (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1999), 41–66.   7 Here, aniconism is defined as the absence of a representative artificial substitute of the divine whereas iconoclasm describes the destruction of images. As a result, the multifaceted phenomenon of Jewish aniconism reflects Jewish-Christian relations. Following the thesis of Bland, to be ‘Jewish’ has been equated with the idea of iconoclasm since the nineteenth century. Bland argues that—mainly since the nineteenth century—Christianity has misinterpreted Judaism as a religion hostile to images. See Bland, The Artless Jew.   8 As to Protestantism’s critical attitude towards Judaism, see, for example, Christian Wiese, Challenging Colonial Discourse: Jewish Studies and Protestant Theology in Wilhelmine Germany (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005).   9 The relation between the visual and the modern subject is often described as substitution; to be precise, the replacement of religious idolatry occurs by means of apparently secularised modern imagery. 10 Volker Bohn, ed., “Einleitung,” in Bildlichkeit. Internationale Beiträge zur Poetik (Frankfurt; Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), 9. 11 It would seem that it is ‘aisthesis’ rather than aesthetics that is apparently reaching its limits in this context. If we refer to the threefold classical poetics of poesis, aisthesis and catharsis, the current phenomenon of ‘aisthesis’ as an academic discipline defines the requirement to perceive works of art ‘adequately’; such perception is thus regarded as a sufficient counterpart of artistic creativity. Hence, in aisthetic interpretations, a historical, not to mention sociopolitical perspective via the form of art, is mainly ignored. 12 As in other ‘philosophies of life’, for example, famously Henri Bergson’s, who focuses on the interrelation of history and mind. 13 These organisations still exist today, for example, in Marburg and Zurich. 14 Cf. Hans Eggert Schröder, ed., Hestia 1970/71. Gefahr und Verantwortung. Ein Beitrag zum Europäischen Naturschutzjahr (Bonn: Bouvier, 1972). Next to environmental meetings, Klages was honoured also at psychological conferences; see Wilhelm Hager, Ludwig Klages in Memoriam. Gedenkrede auf der Freiburger Psychologentagung am 3. Oktober 1956 (Munich: Barth, 1957). 15 Max Bense, Anti-Klages oder Von der Würde des Menschen (Berlin: Widerstands-Verlag Anna Niekisch, 1937); and Max Bense, Aufstand des Geistes. Eine Verteidigung der Erkenntnis (Stuttgart and Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1935). 16 Maria Kliefoth, Erleben und Erkennen. Eine Untersuchung an Hand der Philosophie von Ludwig Klages (Würzburg and Aumühle: Konrad Triltsch Verlag, 1938). 17 Ludwig Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele. 3.Band 2.Teil: Das Weltbild des Pelasgertums (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1932). 18 Walter Benjamin, The Origins of the German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 2003).

210  Leena Petersen 19 Katharina Flügel, “Heiligenkult und Bilderglaube,” in Kunst der Reformationszeit, ed. Günter Schade and Klaus-Peter Arnold (Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Hauptstadt der DDR, Ausstellung im Alten Museum, 1983). 20 Mysticism was a form of faith mediation, the anti-dogmatic character of which emphasised the sensual, individual perception of the history of salvation without having to ask the assistance of priests. 21 See Flügel, “Heiligenkult und Bilderglaube,” 75. 22 See Martin Treml and Daniel Weidner, “Einleitung,” in Nachleben der Religionen. Kulturwissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zur Dialektik der Säkularisierung, ed. Martin Treml and Daniel Weidner (Munich: Fink, 2007), 7–22. 23 Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, Die Symbolik des Traums (Bamberg: Kunz, 1814). 24 Johann Heinrich Lambert, Neues Organon, ein Versuch über die “Bezeichnung des Wahren” (Leipzig: Olms, 1764). 25 Immanuel Kant, Critik der reinen Vernunft (Riga: Hartknoch, 1787), 157ff.; and Norbert Bolz, Eine kurze Geschichte des Scheins (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1991), 43–6. 26 Kant, Critik der reinen Vernunft, 37ff. However, Kant states that, in general, one cannot find the essence in appearance; ibid., 1–5. 27 See David Myer’s article on the trial, which he describes as follows: ‘One of the most apposite instances of such activism was Cohen’s role in an antisemitic episode in Marburg shortly after Otto Boeckel was elected to the Reichstag. In 1888, Cohen was summoned by a judge to serve as an expert witness in the trial of a local teacher who had been accused of defaming the Jewish religion. Pitted against the well-known Gottingen orientalist Paul de Lagarde, Cohen took a page out of the history of medieval disputations by defending the integrity of the Talmud, particularly by asserting that it was not antagonistic to non-Jews. On the contrary: Cohen argued, the Talmud was full of charitable sentiments towards Gentiles. Moreover, Cohen sought to demonstrate not only that moral precepts were prominently represented in the Talmud, but that “in many places in the Talmud one notices the tendency to shift the centre from law to ethical teachings” ’; David N. Myers, “Hermann Cohen and the Quest for Protestant Judaism,” Leo Baeck Year Book 46 (2001): 195–214 (205, 206). 28 Hermann Cohen, Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (Leipzig: Gustav Fock, 1919), 66. 29 See Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, Der frühe Walter Benjamin und Hermann Cohen. Jüdische Werte, Kritische Philosophie, vergängliche Erfahrung (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2000), 125–7. 30 Cf. Werner Hofmann, Georg Syamken and Martin Warnke, eds., Die Menschenrechte des Auges. Über Aby Warburg (Frankfurt; Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1980) 36–42. 31 Ibid., 25. 32 Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999). 33 Although Benjamin’s method is oriented towards a history of the secular, his approach and methodology are also based on theological notions. Thereby, messianic and libertarian visions play an important role. 34 In general, externalisation means embodiment in an outward form, for example, as objectification, an abstraction is represented as a physical thing. 35 Eugene Delacroix is often regarded as the most important French painter, who first created impressionism. 36 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften. Band III, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt; Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 453.

Translating Modernity  211 37 ‘Durée réelle’ describes a lived duration. See Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 179. 38 For a more detailed discussion, see Leena Petersen, Poetik des Zwischenraumes. Zur sprachlichen Kulturkritik und physiognomischen Historizität am Beispiel von Walter Benjamin und ausgewählten Schriften seiner Zeit (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2010). 39 Founded in the 1930s in Germany, Critical Theory aimed to bring together philosophy and social sciences. 40 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente (Frankfurt; Main: Suhrkamp, 2003). 41 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1973). 42 See, for example, Rudolf Siebert, The Critical Theory of Religion and the Frankfurt School: From the Universal Pragmatic to Political Theology (New York: Mouton Press, 1985). 43 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 217–52. 44 See Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, 40. 45 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetische Theorie (Frankfurt; Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 221. 46 For example, Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt; Main: Suhrkamp, 1966), 18–20 and 28. 47 Ibid., 18.

13 Confronting the Military Image The Jewish Soldier and the British Army in the First World War Anne Lloyd

Perceptions of the Jewish soldier in wartime Britain had their foundation in the decades before 1914. Since the Napoleonic wars, Britain had been unique among the combatant nations of the First World War in maintaining its military manpower on a voluntary basis until early 1916.1 Few British Jews had been attracted to join the Regular Army in this period, although a considerable number had fought as Reservists in the Boer War to confirm their patriotism. Acknowledging their contribution, Lord Roberts, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, encouraged more young Jews to enter military service in order to raise their standard of ‘manliness’ and ‘manly duty’, and bring them into closer touch with the general population.2 In 1914, when the Jewish population in Britain was estimated to be between 250,000 and 300,000, there were 400 Jews in the Regular British Army of just under a quarter of a million men.3 The Jewish community, re-established in Britain since the seventeenth century and increasingly assimilated in national life, had undergone radical change at the fin de siècle with the arrival of many thousands of impoverished Jews from Eastern Europe seeking to escape economic hardship, ethnic persecution and military conscription.4 Differences between Anglo-Jews and immigrant Jews were not only economic and social but political and cultural, with the rejection of the military image by many immigrant families as a consequence of the harsh and humiliating treatment of Jews in the Russian Army.5 By the Armistice, 41,500 Jews from Britain were in military service. This number represented a slightly greater proportion (13.8%) of the Jewish community than that of recruits from the British population. Despite this, the First World War  was to provoke a crisis of identity for Britain’s Jewish minority in their responses to military service. It forced to the surface pre-existing tensions both within the community and between Jew and non-Jew, and tested their perceptions of a Jewish martial image. This era of radical change in the Jewish community coincided with the emergence of a cult of masculinity and manly duty in Britain, largely in response to the demands of colonial expansion and domestic fears of national degeneration.6 The idealisation of manliness with its associated qualities of aggressiveness, discipline and the capacity to be violent when necessary, had the effect of recasting public perceptions of the British soldier from the wastrel of the early nineteenth century to the hero of the late Victorian and Edwardian period. An ethos of martial

Confronting the Military Image  213 masculinity rapidly permeated British culture, and Henty’s novels glorifying colonial adventures and military exploits were avidly read.7 In parallel, chivalric symbolism abounded in painting and sculpture, particularly after the Boer War, with the ideal Englishman depicted as the erstwhile knight of Camelot.8 However, conflicting Jewish attitudes to war and warriors in fin de siècle Britain were further challenged by the new national concept of martial virility. Indeed, during the First World War, the validity of a Jewish military spirit became an issue that increasingly divided established Anglo-Jewry and immigrant Jews. British concepts of manliness were derived from empirical observation and scientific exploration. Darwin’s study of man as part of the animal kingdom had spawned a new political and social ideology in which the human form was scrutinised for inherited differences, not only in physique but also in character. Initially, the ‘lower orders’ of the Empire were the objects of anthropological inquiry.9 For example, in India, particular tribes, such as the Pathans, Kolis, Gujars and Marathas, were admired by the pundits of the Raj for their bravery, athleticism, love of hunting and of war.10 These characteristics then became the accepted markers of masculinity and contributed to the Indian Army’s ‘martial race theory’.11 Indeed, imperial criteria of martial worth continued to influence the mindset of War Office elites after Lord Wolseley, the Adjutant General, firmly opposed the introduction of men of ‘any well-known cowardly race’ into British regiments whether at home or in India.12 The utility of eugenics as a route to national rejuvenation had rapidly gained ground in fin de siècle Britain. First introduced into the scientific arena in the 1880s by Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, eugenics flourished in a domestic climate of economic depression, unemployment, strikes and growing political radicalism.13 Immigrants were widely denounced as paupers and criminals but also damned as degenerate and insane by prominent medical men, such as Robert Rentoul. A Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, he was the author of Race Culture: or Race Suicide, published in 1906, which advocated the harsh treatment of ‘degenerate’ alien immigrants.14 Britain’s imperial responsibilities prompted Karl Pearson, Galton Professor of Eugenics at University College, London, to assert: ‘To no nation is a high human breed more necessary than our own for we plant our stock all over the world’.15 Such ideas were applied to the Jewish population and, after working on the impact of Jewish immigration, Pearson concluded that the alien Jew was physically and mentally inferior to the native population, leading him to question ‘the purpose of legislating for a superior breed of men if, at any moment it could be swamped by an influx of immigrants of inferior race hastening to profit by the higher civilization of an improved humanity’.16 After the Boer War, eugenics was no longer of peripheral academic interest but had entered the psyche of political and military elites. The low level of physical fitness of over 50% of men enlisting to fight against the Boers in South Africa had shocked the Army High Command.17 It also had wider implications for national efficiency, leading the Director-General of the Army Medical Service to state that ‘the want of physique was [. . .] not only serious from its military aspect [. . .] if these men are unfit for military service, what are they good for?’18 Physical fitness

214  Anne Lloyd and courage exemplified by military service were held to be eugenically useful, and an occasional war was regarded as ‘of service by reason of the fact that in times of danger the nation attends to the virility of its citizens’.19 This ensured that in the prelude to the First World War the benchmarking of masculine qualities had turned from the indigenous men of the Empire to the urban underclass at home, and in particular the East European immigrants. JEWISH WARRIORS AT THE FIN DE SIÈCLE Until the era of imperial expansion, antipathy towards army service had been deeply rooted in non-Jewish working class families for whom ‘to have a member who had gone for a soldier was [. . .] a crowning disgrace’.20 Probably in recognition of such attitudes, Prince Albert had advocated the creation of an Army Volunteer movement in 1859 for men ‘who do not, under our present system, enter either into the Regular Army or the Militia’.21 The Volunteers’ function was to constitute a national Reserve in case of actual or threatened invasion. From its inception, the Jewish press reported considerable national enthusiasm in the middle-class sections of the community and by 1878 the social historian Joseph Jacobs noted that over 2,000 ‘Israelites’ had enlisted.22 Volunteers were required to take part in fortnightly drills and Saturday parades, which necessitated breaching Shabbat observance. An initiative by some middle-class Anglo-Jews to form an all-Jewish unit, which would be exempt from Saturday duties, led to the formation of the East Metropolitan Rifle Volunteers (11th Tower Hamlets), composed of East End working-class Jews.23 Pollins suggests that there was little opposition within the community to participation either in the Volunteers or in the Regular Army and Navy, although in 1870 the Reverend A. L. Green stated that ‘the spirit of military ambition was condemned by the creed of the Jew as well as [being] alien to his character’.24 The Volunteer movement was not highly regarded by the Regular Army or the general public, and recruits were often ridiculed for their gaudy uniforms and social pretensions.25 Genteel Victorian society drew a sharp distinction between the Regular Army officer corps, dominated by the landed gentry of the shires, and the parvenu commercial class from the cities. Volunteer officers were criticised for ‘being men of intensely vulgar, conceited and ignorant manners, men who still drop their h’s, and are among the uneducated nouveau riche in local society’.26 Early Jewish enthusiasm for auxiliary service diminished over time, perhaps, in part, as a consequence of social derision, and by 1914 there were 600 Army Reservists.27 The decline may also have been due to military experiences in South Africa during the Boer War. Alfred Salinger, who served there from 1899 to 1900 with the City Imperial Volunteers, reported that ‘we have all had enough of it, and those who were previously the most ardent military spirits are ready to lapse into civilian life again at short notice’.28 Twelve hundred British Jews served in the Boer War, largely middle-class volunteers who enlisted in the early months. Described in the Jewish press as ‘the very

Confronting the Military Image  215 pick’ of the community, a number were immigrants’ sons who had attended the Jews’ Free School or the newly formed Jewish Lads’ Brigade, both established as measures of anglicising Anglo-Jewish philanthropy.29 Fighting for Britain against the Boers was celebrated not only as a ‘glorious privilege’ and a confirmation of Jewish loyalty, but also as the opportunity to repudiate charges of shirking and cowardice, and of the Jewish male as the weakling of Europe. A poem published anonymously in the Jewish press in 1900 recalled that the Jewish warrior tradition dated back to the Hasmoneans, who successfully fought against the Seleucids in the second century bce: Long ago and far away, O Mother England We were warriors brave and bold, But a hundred nations rose in arms against us, And the shades of exile closed o’er those heroic Days of Old. The Jewish Soldier 30

After the war, the considerable Jewish military contribution in South Africa was undermined by a Liberal backlash against imperialism, which accused a small elite, including Jewish financiers, of being the true beneficiaries of the Boer War.31 Conflicting attitudes to war and warriors became apparent in the Jewish community after 1901. Correspondence in the Anglo-Jewish press suggested that a small section of Jews had been contaminated by the national military spirit, and that the modern Jew eschewed the biblical image. This view was immediately challenged by the contention that any lack of military spirit existed only among the nation’s ‘outcast foreign Jews’.32 Despite Lord Roberts’ criticism of a Jewish lacuna in the British Army, there had been a small but gradually growing interest in a military career among the more privileged Anglo-Jews, especially those educated at England’s leading public schools. Such schools had been chosen for the social cachet they afforded in the higher echelons of British society in which the Jewish elite increasingly moved, and for their access to Oxbridge, open to Jews after the passing of the 1871 University Tests Act. Both Clifton and Cheltenham Colleges had established a significant Military Stream for prospective Army entrants, and also provided small Jewish boarding houses. Polack’s House at Clifton, opened in 1878, recorded ‘a taste for military matters’ among its boarders but limited interest in entering Army service with two service entrants compared with 35 university admissions between 1895 and 1905.33 At Corinth House, Cheltenham College’s Jewish boarding house established in 1891, 16% of boarders followed the Military stream between 1896 and 1912.34 Whereas there was an apparent preference for university over service life at Clifton and Cheltenham, Jewish boys had been immersed in their formative years in the ethos of sportsmanship, masculinity and increasing militarism, which characterised the prewar public school. Games were dominated by the contact sports of rugby, football, boxing and wrestling, which combined controlled violence with

216  Anne Lloyd discipline, the same criteria perceived to produce ‘manly men’ and good soldiers. After 1901, there was an increasing military emphasis in all public schools.35 Service in the Cadet Corps, later renamed the Officer Training Corps, became virtually compulsory, and regular visits were paid by grandees of the National Service and Navy Leagues. By 1914, there were 41 Jewish officers serving in the Regular British Army, nine in the Indian Army, and a further 117 in the auxiliary units.36 In the spirit of Anglo-Jewish philanthropy, ex-public school men were frequently involved in the creation and management of the Jewish youth clubs, transferring the mores of their school years to the boys of London’s East End. Clifton’s Jewish boarding house made a formal link with the Victoria Club for Working Lads in 1903, and at a summer camp Polack’s Housemaster reflected that the liaison offered Old Cliftonians ‘a chance of meeting for the first time some of the rougher elements of Jewish life [. . .] and instilling into them something of the Clifton spirit we loved so well’.37 The Jewish Lads’ Brigade conformed to military standards of organisation and drill. The view of its co-founder, the Reverend Cohen, on immigrant youth was that ‘if you called these boys “boys” you didn’t have a hope but if you put a fivepenny cap on them and called them “soldiers”, which they were not, you could order them about ’til midnight’.38 In all likelihood the militaristic regime of the Jewish Lads’ Brigade jarred with the sensitivities of many immigrant families who had first-hand experience of conditions in the Russian Army. In addition, some boys chafed at the Brigade’s culturally foreign discipline to the extent that they chose to transfer to Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts movement.39 The extent to which the anglicising tenets of the Jewish youth clubs influenced immigrant boys is difficult to quantify. The relatively short period of the clubs’ existence before 1914 and a certain level of antipathy towards them amongst immigrant Jews may offer some insight into the reticence of many young men from this sector of the community to volunteer for army service in the First World War. JEWS UNDER FIRE—THE WAR YEARS After Leopold Greenberg’s damaging volte face from advocating neutrality on the eve of hostilities to expressing war fever some days later, Anglo-Jewry embarked on the immediate and comprehensive projection of the khaki Maccabee within the community.40 They invoked a distinctly Jewish hero, whose worth had been proven in battle, to inspire and encourage young Jewish men to enlist, and to counter the negative stereotype. In early October  1914, the Jewish press called on British Jews between the ages of 19 and 35 to join up, not only to repay Britain’s ‘fairest treatment’ of the community since the seventeenth century but also to show that ‘the old spirit of the Maccabees’ was not dead.41 Shortly afterwards, similar wording was used by the Chief Rabbi, Joseph Hertz, in a leaflet issued under the auspices of the national Parliamentary Recruitment Committee, created in August  1914 to maximise voluntary enlistment.42 The ancient imagery of the Maccabees was not confined to recruitment but permeated other aspects of military life. No dietary

Confronting the Military Image  217 provision for Jews was made in Regular Army regiments, a matter of particular concern to many Orthodox conscripts from 1916. To ameliorate such difficulties, soldiers’ relatives were able to send boxes of special foods to France, Egypt and Salonica via Jewish grocery merchants, such as Abramsons, the Jewish Chronicle announcing that ‘delicious nosh preserved in tin and glass ready for use’ was now available to ‘our khaki Maccabees’.43 From the first weeks of the war, the ‘good physical condition’ and ‘very good spirit’ of Jews enlisting at recruiting stations was commended in the Anglo-Jewish press. It also published soldiers’ letters from the Front praising the Jewish fighting spirit: a private in the Black Watch reported ‘bonnier and braver lads I don’t wish to see, they fought just splendid’.44 Indeed, the military experience could reverse the prewar negative stereotype that sometimes lingered in the Jewish soldier’s consciousness. Writing from Malta, where military hospitals had been established to take the wounded from Gallipoli and the Greek islands, Private Albert Lissack remarked, ‘I have sometimes heard in peacetime belittling remarks about Jewish bravery, but the stories one hears out here of our poor Jewish men makes one feel proud of the Jewish religion’.45 From the beginning of the war, the Jewish war record of enlistment, casualties and fatalities appeared regularly in the Jewish Chronicle together with military awards. By November  1918, just under 1,600 Jewish servicemen in His Majesty’s Imperial Forces had been decorated. The Victoria Cross for Conspicuous Bravery, awarded to all ranks, was presented to four British Jews who came from significantly different backgrounds. For his gallantry at Ypres in 1915, Sergeant Issy Smith (born Israel Schmuluvitch), the champion heavy weight boxer of his regiment, the Manchesters, received the nation’s highest military award as well as the Russian Order of St George and the French Croix de Guerre.46 The son of Russian Jews, Private Jack White (Jacob Weiss) was an ex-member of the Jewish Lads’ Brigade and, typically, was an early volunteer in 1914.47 Killed in action in November 1914, Lieutenant Frank de Pass was a Regular Indian Army cavalry officer, whose family traced its settlement in England back to the seventeenth century. He was described in regimental memoirs as ‘the very perfect type of British officer [. . .] with a degree of valour which made him the idol of his men’.48 The fourth recipient, Captain Robert Gee, Royal Fusiliers, was also awarded the Military Cross.49 Despite the military record, disparaging non-Jewish commentary on Jewish men, particularly those from the immigrant areas, persisted, even among British servicemen: So they are rounding the gallant Hebrews up. They are not quite so bad as I thought. I did not expect to see one in khaki when I came here but out of our company, 200 strong, a dozen of them are Jews. I can see Whitechapel getting a V C yet—if the war goes on long enough.50 Ten thousand Jewish volunteers, just over 3% of the Jewish population, were officially recorded at the point of conscription in 1916, although this figure has more recently been challenged as an underestimation.51 They constituted less than

218  Anne Lloyd 0.5% of total volunteers in the British Army.52 Although past members of the Jewish youth clubs had eagerly enlisted in the early days of war, other first- and second-generation, as well as naturalised, British Jews showed some reluctance until conscription in 1916 removed their choice.53 Shared history and tradition had continued to occupy an important place in the daily lives of Britain’s newer citizens, and their sense of national identity was still embryonic. Military service had deep social roots in immigrant memory as well as recollections handed down of harsh conditions and anti-Semitic discrimination in the Czar’s armies. In Russia, soldiers were regarded as the pariahs of society, excluded from entering theatres, restaurants and trams, and, like dogs, were forbidden to enter public parks.54 Anglo-Jewry was well aware that many immigrant families regarded military service as a disgrace, and that some removed their sons from the Jewish Lads’ Brigade for fear they would be automatically recruited by the Army.55 Nevertheless, the reluctance of many ‘new’ British Jews to volunteer caused them considerable discomfort.56 Anglo-Jewish concerns over the lack of enlistment enthusiasm in the immigrant quarters was greatly eclipsed in 1917 by the efforts of several thousand Russian Jews to evade military service after an Anglo-Russian Convention legalised their conscription into the British Army. Their non-compliance with Home Office directives included frequent changes of address, self-inflicted physical damage resulting in their failure to pass army medical examination, or escape to Ireland, which remained exempt from the Military Services Acts. By their actions, they appeared to fulfil the stereotype of the Jewish shirker in British public opinion, while their responses greatly dispirited Anglo-Jews, some of whom harboured not dissimilar opinions.57 However, viewed from the perspective of pre-migration cultural norms, evasion of military service by various means was common practice in the Pale for Orthodox Russians as well as many Jews.58 It has been suggested that anti-conscription folklore and literature, which continued to flourish long after the forcing of young Jewish boys into the Cantonist battalions had ended, played a greater cultural role in the Diaspora than among Jews remaining in Russia.59 Many had continued to identify with the sentiments of the eponymous hero of Mendele’s nineteenth-century fictional tale, The Travels and Adventures of Benjamin the Third. When caught attempting to escape from military service in Russia, Benjamin pleaded ‘that we don’t know a thing about waging war, that we never did know, and never want to know [. . .] our thoughts are devoted to other things; we haven’t the least interest in anything having to do with war’.60 Only 8,000 of the 30,000 Russian Jews who became eligible for military service in 1917 were conscripted by the Army: of these 4,900 were posted to non-combatant battalions. During the nine months it had taken to ratify and implement the Anglo-Russian Convention, Russian Jews had been assessed in Government circles as ‘not quite good enough’ for hard battle conditions, but adequate for work in communication lines, namely, the Labour Corps.61 By the Armistice, the Labour Corps was 750,000 strong, and also included others who were generally regarded by the Army elite as inherently unfit for combat service, such as 300,000 non-white men from Asia and Africa.62

Confronting the Military Image  219 From September 1917, large numbers of Russian Jews were routinely posted to labour units, some of which had been specially created to receive them such as the 8th and 9th Russian Labour Battalions, which included the 302nd, 1001st, 1002nd, 1021st and 1022nd Russian Labour Companies.63 A postwar evaluation of labour efficiency in France suggests that Russian Jews were regarded in much the same way as non-white labour from overseas, with manpower collectively described as ranging from ‘Whitechapel Jews turned onto digging to Chinese fitters repairing tanks’.64 Labour Corps deployment became automatic for new Russian recruits in the spring of 1918, allegedly for ‘diplomatic reasons’, after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was ratified and Russia had irrevocably withdrawn from the war. Many Anglo-Jews regarded the War Cabinet’s decision to categorise the Russian Jews en masse as non-combatants to be wholly objectionable.65 They feared it would be regarded by non-Jews as a concession, inflaming anti-Semitism. Equally important was their anxiety that Jews had been stigmatised as ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water, unfit and untrusted for the common cause’.66 Moreover, they perceived that in wartime Britain, the public made little differentiation between long established Jews and the newest immigrants. Anglo-Jewish anxieties about the Russian Jews had already been exercised by the Government’s decision in August  1917 to create an all-Jewish military unit, the 38th Battalion Royal Fusiliers (gazetted the following summer as the 1st Judeans). A distinctly Jewish unit was in itself anathema to most assimilated Jews, but of greater concern was the intention to fill its ranks with over a thousand Russian Jews, which, in effect, appeared to entrust the community’s good name to the military performance of a group of disaffected aliens.67 Accepting the unwelcome fait accompli, some prominent Anglo-Jews were convinced that everything should be done to make it a success, including serving as part of its officer corps.68 ‘MEDICINE AND DUTY’—CAPTAIN SALAMAN AND THE JUDEANS69 Numerous autobiographical accounts of service with the Jewish battalions have been augmented by recent archival scholarship to give more incisive, nuanced and sophisticated insights into the political as well as military and social aspects of the Jewish units.70 Objectionable as it was to much of Anglo-Jewry, the battalion’s creation had also found little favour with the military hierarchy, particularly with General Allenby, Commander-in-Chief of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, who was fundamentally averse to ‘fancy regiments’, and had specifically opposed the deployment of the new battalion in Palestine.71 His general opposition later reflected a more racial prejudice when he requested that the War Office brigade the Jewish units with West Indian troops, described as ‘two battalions of negroes’.72 Perceived as less ‘manly’ than white soldiers by the War Office, troops from the West Indies were in the anomalous position of having been categorised as soldiers as the result of a political decision but then confined almost exclusively to manual labour by the Army.73 Allenby’s suggestion may well have originated with his Chief of Staff, General Bols, described by the Judeans’ non-Jewish

220  Anne Lloyd Commanding Officer, Colonel John Patterson, as the worst Jew hater he had ever met.74 Ultimately, the request was refused but it appears to have been an attempt to marginalise and denigrate the Jewish and West Indian troops as British Army soldiers. As one of the Anglo-Jews committed to securing the success of the Jewish battalions, Redcliffe Nathan Salaman had been commissioned into the Royal Army Medical Corps in the spring of 1915 at the age of 41. Born into a wealthy family, he has been described as one of the last and most articulate of the old Jewish elite.75 His medical career had begun in the London Hospital at Whitechapel Road, where at least half the patients were local Jews, and had followed an education at St  Paul’s school in London and Trinity Hall, Cambridge.76 Fully assimilated into local society, from the beginning of the war he acted as the Army Honorary Recruiting Officer for Royston, close to his home. In 1917, he was serving in Colchester, hoping to be posted overseas, when he heard of the new battalion of Russian Jews, and readily accepted Patterson’s invitation to join its medical staff.77 When Salaman took up his post at the Crown Hill training camp near Plymouth, he was immediately concerned about the low medical category of the recruits, rightly suspecting that the War Office had sent the fittest men to other regiments.78 He was equally dismayed by their ‘lack of moral fibre’, instancing a recruit ‘rolling on the floor and bellowing’ in fear of vaccination. Admitting that ‘I could have thrashed his life out [. . .] for a Jew to do such a thing is almost more than I can bear’, he confessed that he was hard pressed ‘to make men of some of the craven skunks they are sending us’.79 The high attendance of men at his daily Sick Parades enraged him as cowardly and mean behaviour to the extent that in correspondence with his wife he declared himself almost anti-Semitic in his attitude towards the Russian Jews.80 Most recruits received little medicine from Salaman but more duty by way of an hour’s extra drill. What of the men themselves? Yiddish speaking and with poor ability to read and write English, Army regulations and discipline were decidedly irksome to them in the early days of training in England. One of the new recruits at the battalions’ training camp had previously attempted to claim exemption from military service on medical grounds, and continued to commiserate with his compatriots in the East End who had been caught in absentee raids by the police.81 After an average of six months’ training before embarkation for Egypt, he acknowledged that the army regime had improved the general health and physique of recruits so that they had become ‘tall, upright, with alert eyes and the tailor’s hump has completely disappeared’.82 In addition, new skills had been learned in army service which would be an asset in postwar civilian life.83 By the time Salaman’s battalion, 39th Royal Fusiliers, reached Egypt in the spring of 1918, he reported that the men looked very fit, their physique and general discipline were much improved and they had ‘quite given over shamming’ sickness.84 At the time of its establishment, the naming of a distinctively Jewish unit had been an extremely sensitive issue among the Anglo-Jewish hierarchy, and the Army took the somewhat anodyne decision to incorporate it into the Royal Fusiliers. Following active service in 1918, and perhaps to lend visible credence to the

Confronting the Military Image  221 Government’s Balfour Declaration the previous November, the Army granted the Jewish troops their own regimental name.85 The Judeans had, in fact, been suggested as an appropriate title by Salaman when he attended a War Office meeting in the summer of 1917.86 During the course of discussions, Major Lionel de Rothschild, anti-Zionist Vice President of the Jewish War Services Committee, the official Jewish liaison with Army authorities, had preferred the unit to be called the Maccabeans.87 Given Anglo-Jewry’s reservations about the Russian Jews, it was perhaps all the more necessary to imbue the battalion with a precedent of Jewish heroism, and also to present the War Office with a consistent community image of military service. At the end of the war, Salaman mused over the effectiveness of the troops from Britain. Acknowledging that few had any enthusiasm for Zionism, and were originally in his view ‘hopeless men’, who took longer to train as soldiers than other army recruits, he concluded they had ‘unquestionably made good’.88 In the early months at Crown Hill, their lack of ‘manliness’ undoubtedly appalled Salaman, deepening the unease already felt by many assimilated Jews about the ‘alien’ sector of the community, although his attitude was also a reflection of his education in institutions that promoted and sustained the cult of masculinity.89 CONCLUSION Unlike the thousands of Jews in European armies, the Jewish soldier had been barely visible in Britain before 1914. However, the military image per se had been greatly elevated in Britain in the prelude to the First World War in the national drive towards greater manliness and manly duty. Those marginalised as unable or unwilling to meet these criteria became the targets of increasing British animosity, a factor which later bore heavily on Anglo-Jews eager to display the courage and loyalty of a unified community. Eulogies by British luminaries in the “Foreword” of the official record of Jewish military service in the First World War might suggest that Anglo-Jewry had been successful in reversing the negative stereotype. Newspaper magnate Lord Northcliffe paid the following tribute: The Jews are a cautious people and not anxious to make war, but in this great conflict they waged it just as vigorously as they did in the wars of the Bible.90 Indeed, the Liberal politician, Lord Crewe, acknowledged that the ancient traditions of Jewry had been revived.91 But was this just a diplomatic nicety negotiated between prominent men in British and Anglo-Jewish society? The reality was that Jews had been deeply divided in their responses to military service. Anglo-Jewry’s efforts to rally the community by invoking a renewed Maccabean spirit had fallen on many deaf ears, and heroic symbolism was confronted by an ethnic culture that had retained strong anti-militarist sentiments. Many of Britain’s most recent immigrants from Russia had chosen to shelter under the widely held image of ‘the sickly Jew’, even in military service.

222  Anne Lloyd In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, a re-orientation of British identity that embraced masculinity and manly duty was nourished by Social Darwinism and eugenic discourse to the detriment of the Jewish immigrant. The negative perception of the Jewish soldier resonated in the psyche of Army and Government hierarchies during the war years. In her study of the factors that moulded the mentalité of political elites before the Second World War, Zara Steiner concurred with the opinion of American social scientists that the beliefs such men held took priority over the evidence before them, and that experience was assimilated into an existing framework of inherited ideas, which were slow to change.92 For soldiers on the battlefields and their families, four years of heavy fighting had ‘opened the abyss between the imagery of knights [.  .  .] and the reality of war’.93 Despite the ensuing disillusionment with the concept of masculine identity, the negative stereotype of the Jew had been only marginally affected by the extremely limited interface between Jewish and non-Jewish soldiers during the war. Although the percentage of recruits from the community at 13.8% was higher than the national average, by 1918 41,500 Jewish soldiers spread throughout the army constituted less than 1% of its total manpower of over 5,000,000.94 The image of the timid Jew, who shirked his military duty, remained prevalent in British public opinion to the extent that during the Second World War it was felt necessary to stress the Jewish military contribution in BBC broadcasts.95 It was not until after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 that the negative perceptions of Jews and non-Jews were transformed by the reality of the Jewish fighter.96 NOTES   1 J.G. Fuller, Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies, 1914–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 32.   2 “Jews as Soldiers,” The Spectator, January 3, 1903, in A Documentary History of Jewish Immigrants in Britain, 1840–1920, ed. David Englander (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1994), 342–5 (345).   3 Geoffrey Alderman, Modern British Jewry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 120; Barry Kosmin, Stanley Waterman and Nigel Grizzard, “The Jewish Dead in the Great War as an Indicator for the Location, Size and Social Structure of Anglo-Jewry in 1914,” Immigrants and Minorities 5 (1986): 181–92 (183); and Jay Winter, The Great War and the British People (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985), 28.   4 Lloyd Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant in England, 1870–1914 (London: Allen  & Unwin, 1960), Appendix. Census returns of Aliens in England show that the number of Russians and Russian Poles (mostly, but not all Jewish) rose from 9,569 in 1871 to 82,844 in 1901.   5 Alderman, Modern British Jewry, 151; and Joshua Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation. Military Conscription and Mass Politics, 1905–1925 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), 116.   6 See David Cannadine, Ornamentalism. How the British Saw Their Empire (London: Penguin Books, 2002); Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes. British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Penguin Books, 2002); Niall Ferguson, Empire. How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Penguin Books, 2004); Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot. Chivalry and the English Gentleman (London: Yale University Press, 1981); and Jonathan Rutherford, Forever England. Reflections on Masculinity and Empire (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1997).

Confronting the Military Image  223  7 With Clive in India (1884), With Biller in Natal (1901), and With Kitchener in the Soudan (1903), in Ferguson, Empire, 256–8.   8 Girouard, The Return to Camelot, 171.   9 John Efron, Defenders of the Race. Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin de Siècle Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 33–5. 10 Christine Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race (London: Routledge  & Kegan Paul, 1971), 182. 11 David Killingray, “All the King’s Men. Blacks in the British Army in the First World War,” in Under the Imperial Carpet. Essays in Black History, 1780–1950, ed. Rainer Lotz and Ian Pegg (Crawley: Rabbit Press, 1986), 164–81 (166). 12 Ibid., 167. 13 See Geoffrey Searle, Eugenics and Politics in Britain, 1900–1914 (Leiden: Noordhoff International Publications, 1976); Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960 (Oxford: Macmillan Press, 1982); and Dan Stone, Breeding Superman. Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002). 14 Stone, Breeding Superman, 95. 15 Ibid., 103. 16 Ibid., 105. 17 Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, Committee Report, 1904, CD.2175. 18 Memorandum of the Director-General, Army Medical Service, 1903, cited by Gerard Oram, Worthless Men. Race, Eugenics and the Death Penalty in the British Army during the First World War (London: Francis Bootle, 1998), 75. 19 Statement by Colonel Melville, Professor of Hygiene, Royal Army Medical College, cited by Searle, Eugenics and Politics, 36. 20 Edward Spiers, “The Regular Army, 1914,” in A Nation in Arms. A Social Study of the British Army in the First World War, ed. Ian Beckett and Keith Simpson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 36–60 (46). 21 Edward Spiers, The Army and Society, 1815–1914 (London: Longman, 1980), 165. 22 “North Shields—Volunteer Rifle Corps,” Jewish Chronicle, November 4, 1859, 5; and Joseph Jacobs, Jewish Statistics (London: D. Nutt, 1891), 24. 23 Harold Pollins, “11th Tower Hamlets Volunteers: The First Jewish Unit in the British Army,” Military Historical Society Bulletin 48 (1998): 130–5 (131). 24 Ibid., 130. 25 Spiers, The Army and Society, 167. 26 Nugent Tailliefer, Rondeaux of the Auxiliary Forces, Militia and Volunteers (London: Lucas, 1883), in Spiers, The Army and Society, 167. 27 Kosmin, “The Jewish Dead in the Great War,” 183. 28 Salinger-Nathan Family Papers, MS  209 A810/1/4, June  2, 1900, Anglo-Jewish Archives, Hartley Library, University of Southampton. Alfred Salinger was 33 at the time of his army service, and had worked in commerce in South America and South Africa before the Boer War. His father had come from Prussian Poland in the 1830s, and his mother from an old Sephardic family that had settled in England in the late seventeenth century. 29 Richard Mendelsohn, “The Jewish Soldier—Anglo-Jewry at War, 1899–1902,” Jewish Affairs 54, no. 3 (1999): 11–19 (15). The Jews’ Free School had been opened in 1817, largely financed by the Rothschilds, for the education of immigrant children and to wean them away from their ‘foreign’ customs and use of Yiddish. A Jewish Army Officer, Colonel Goldsmid, had established the Jewish Lads’ Brigade in the 1890s to improve the physical and moral health of immigrant youths and turn them into ‘fit and respectable’ English Jews. 30 Quoted in ibid., 18. The poem was allegedly written by Alice Montefiore. 31 Ferguson, Empire, 282.

224  Anne Lloyd 32 Letter from Alfred Bussweiler, “The Jew and Military Spirit,” Jewish Chronicle, November 1, 1901, 7; and letter from Henry Behrend, “The Jew and Military Spirit,” Jewish Chronicle, November 8, 1901, 9. 33 Polack’s House Magazine, 1905, Clifton College Library. 34 Class Records for Military Stream Entry, Corinth Boarding House Records, 1896–1912, Cheltenham College Archives. 35 C. Otley, “Militarism and Militarization in the Public Schools, 1900–1972,” British Journal of Sociology 29 (1978): 321–39 (323). 36 Isadore Harris, ed., Jewish Year Book 1914 (London: Greenberg & Co, 1914), 177. 37 Polack’s House Magazine, 1907, Clifton College Library. 38 Simon Bernstein, “Ironing Out the Ghetto Bend: A  History of the Jewish Lads’ Brigade, Its Aims and Its Influences up to 1919,” Papers of the Jewish Lads’ and Girls’ Brigade, 1897–1991, MS 244/GEN 128, 7–8, Anglo-Jewish Archives, Hartley Library, University of Southampton. 39 Ibid., 18, 24. 40 “England and the War,” Jewish Chronicle, July 31, 1914, 7; and “Jews Respond,” Jewish Chronicle, August 14, 1914, 5. Leopold Greenberg was editor of the Jewish Chronicle from 1907 to 1931. 41 “Recruiting Appeal,” Jewish Chronicle, October 2, 1914, 13. 42 Parliamentary Recruitment Committee leaflet 22, Papers of Chief Rabbi J.H. Hertz, MS  175 AJ 141/2, Anglo-Jewish Archives, Hartley Library, University of Southampton. 43 “Abrahamson’s Advertisement,” Jewish Chronicle, February 25, 1916, 1; “Abrahamson’s Advertisement,” Jewish Chronicle, March  24, 1916, 3; and Harry Barnett, “The Pesach Touch,” Jewish Chronicle, February 2, 1917, 26. 44 “The Call for Men,” Jewish Chronicle, August 28, 1914, 11; and “Jews in the Black Watch,” Jewish Chronicle, September 11, 1914, 10. 45 Private Albert Lissack, “Black Jews in Malta Synagogue,” Jewish Chronicle, March 24, 1916, 20. 46 Sgt. Issy Smith, AJEX binder of cuttings and photographs, MJM 458, Manchester Jewish Museum. 47 Pte. Jack White, AJEX binder of cuttings and photographs, MJM 459, Manchester Jewish Museum. 48 Martin Gilbert, First World War (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1994), 113. 49 Michael Adler, ed., British Jewry Book of Honour (London: Caxton Press, 1922), 6–9. A  fifth recipient of the Victoria Cross served with 1st Battalion, Australian Imperial Force. 50 Clarke to his father, May 26, 1917, Papers of J.A.C. Clarke, 2nd Royal Fusiliers, 96/57/1, Imperial War Museum. 51 Adler, British Jewry Book of Honour, 3. 52 Winter, The Great War, 27. 53 Barbara Bush, Behind the Lines (London: Merlin Press, 1984), 167. 54 Harold Shukman, War or Revolution. Russian Jews and Conscription in Britain, 1917 (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006), 2. 55 Lt. Denzil Myer, “The Work of the Jewish Recruiting Committee,” Jewish Chronicle, October 8, 1915, 16. 56 Lord Kitchener to Jewish Recruiting Committee, Jewish Chronicle, July 9, 1915, 6. 57 In early 1916, an anonymous Councillor in Stepney, East London, claimed that he had not seen a dozen Jewish soldiers since the war began; cited in Barbara Bush, Behind the Lines, 71. The smuggling of Russian Jews to Ireland was condemned as belittling the efforts of the majority of Jews to the patriotic cause; see “The Jew as Soldier,” Jewish Chronicle, March 22, 1918, 8. 58 Joshua Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation, 23–4, 117. 59 Olga Litvak, Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 198.

Confronting the Military Image  225 60 Mokher Mendele, The Adventures and Travels of Benjamin the Third, trans. Moshe Spiegel (New York: Schocken Books, 1949), 123. Mendele was born in Lithuania in 1836, and died in Odessa in 1917. 61 Leo Amery to Lord Derby, April 5, 1917, WO 32/11353, National Archives. 62 John Morrow, Jnr, The Great War. An Imperial History (London: Routledge, 2004), 83. 63 List of 429 Russian Army applicants for postwar naturalization, of which 243 had served in Labour units, 96 in the Judeans and 90 in Regular Army regiments, HO 144/133362, National Archives. 64 A. Lindsay, “The Organisation of Labour in the Army in France during the War and Its Lessons,” The Economic Journal 34 (1924): 69–82 (72). 65 “Why Not Judeans?” Jewish Chronicle, April 12, 1918, 5. 66 “Russians and Military Service,” Jewish Chronicle, May 17, 1918, 3. 67 Battalion Strength Returns March 1918–May 1921, Jewish War Services Committee to War Office, October  18, 1917, WO 32/11353, National Archives. See also Martin Watts, The Jewish Legion and the First World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 244–7. 68 Jewish Regiment Committee, August 1917, Papers of M.J. Landa Relating to The Jewish Regiment 1916–1944, MS 185 AJ 320 1/1, Anglo-Jewish Archives, Hartley Library, University of Southampton. Led by Lord Rothschild, a committee set up to support the Russian battalions included Sir Stuart Samuel, recently retired Liberal politician, Leopold Greenberg, the Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, and Captain Redcliffe Salaman. 69 Richard Holmes, Tommy. The British Soldier on the Western Front, 1914–1918 (London: Harper Perennial, 2004), 460. ‘Medicine and Duty’ was a widely accepted ‘prescription’ given by Army Medical Officers: the soldier would remain at work while he took appropriate medication. 70 See John Patterson, With the Judeans in the Palestine Campaign (London: Hutchison, 1922); Horace Samuel, Unholy Memories of the Holy Land (London: Hogarth Press, 1930); Rodney Gouttman, An Anzac Zionist Hero. The Life of Lt-Colonel Eliazer Margolin (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006); James Renton, The Zionist Masquerade. The Birth of the Anglo-Zionist Alliance, 1914–1918 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Patrick Streeter, Mad for Zion. A Biography of Colonel J. H. Patterson (Harlow: The Matching Press, 2004); and Watts, The Jewish Legion. 71 Jill Hamilton, God, Guns and Israel. Britain, the First World War and the Jews in the Holy Land (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2004), 165; and Streeter, Mad for Zion, 110. 72 Streeter, Mad for Zion, 153. 73 Glenford Howe, West Indians and World War I. A Social History of the British West Indian Regiment (Oxford: Ian Randle/James Curry, 2002), 29–38. 74 Streeter, Mad for Zion, 122. 75 Todd Endelman, “The Decline of the Anglo-Jewish Notable,” The European Legacy 4 (1999): 58–71 (62). 76 Ibid., 62–5. 77 Redcliffe Salaman to Nina Salaman, August 2, 1917, Papers of Redcliffe Nathan Salaman, ADD 8171, Box 4, Cambridge University Library. 78 Ibid., November 24, 1917. For the posting of B1 and C1 men (Not Fit for General Service) to units of lower categories, see Minute, August 21, 1917, WO 32/11353, National Archives. 79 Redcliffe Salaman to Nina Salaman, November 1, 1917, Papers of Redcliffe Nathan Salaman, ADD 8171, Box 4, Cambridge University Library. 80 Ibid., February 18, 1918. 81 Paul Epstein to His Parents, January  26, 1918, Diary and Letters of Private Paul Epstein, 1918–1919, MS 124/2/2, Anglo-Jewish Archives, Hartley Library, University of Southampton. Private Epstein was stationed at Crown Hill training camp

226  Anne Lloyd in Plymouth in early 1918 with C Company, 42nd Battalion, Royal Fusiliers. He travelled through France and Italy, reaching Egypt in March 1918. 82 Ibid., March 2, 1918. 83 Ibid. 84 Redcliffe Salaman to Nina Salaman, May 3, 1918, Papers of Redcliffe Nathan Salaman, ADD 8171, Box 4, Cambridge University Library. 85 Watts, The Jewish Legion, 233. 86 Redcliffe Salaman to Nina Salaman, September  1, 1917, Papers of Redcliffe Nathan Salaman, ADD 8171, Box  4, Cambridge University Library; and ibid., June 16, 1918. 87 Watts, The Jewish Legion, 111. 88 Redcliffe Salaman to Nina Salaman, January 3, 1919, Papers of Redcliffe Nathan Salaman, ADD 8171, Box 4, Cambridge University Library. 89 Alderman, Modern British Jewry, 151–2. 90 Adler, British Jewry Book of Honour, xvii–xviii. 91 Ibid. 92 Zara Steiner, “Elitism and Foreign Policy,” in Shadow and Substance in British Foreign Policy, 1895–1939, ed. Barry McKercher and David Moss (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1984), 19–55 (26). 93 Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male. Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 1996), 18. 94 Alderman, Modern British Jewry, 235. 95 Tony Kushner, The Persistence of Prejudice. Anti-Semitism in British Society in the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 125. 96 Sharman Kadish, A Good Jew and a Good Englishman: The Jewish Lads’ and Girls’ Brigade, 1895–1995, (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1995), 57. In her appraisal of the work of the Jewish Lads’ Brigade over the century from its inception, Sharman Kadish suggests that the image of the Jewish soldier jarred in the eyes of Jews and non-Jews until 1948.

Part IV

Communication and Representation The Management of Jewish Images in Cultural Media

This page intentionally left blank

14 The Image of the Jews in Belorussian Soviet Cinema, 1924–1936 Claire Le Foll

The establishment of the Soviet regime after the events of 1917 provided new opportunities for cultural development amongst national minorities previously oppressed under the tsarist regime. Belorussians and Jews, among others, were offered the right and the material means to develop their own culture in their national language. The Jewish ‘cultural renaissance’, actually initiated before 1917 but vigorously promoted by Jewish cultural activists in 1917–1918, was initially supported by the Bolsheviks.1 Yiddish culture and language received the official recognition and support of the Bolshevik authorities despite the fact that Jews did not have their own autonomous region until the 1930s and the creation of the Birobidzhan. Belorussian culture and language, previously oppressed and disdained for their ‘peasant’ character, finally became the main language of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR) established in 1921. The flourishing of Yiddish and Belorussian cultures was particularly striking in literature, theatre and scholarship.2 This ‘liberation of the peoples’ also had its ambiguities and resulted in the suppression of some major aspects of these cultures—those connected with national or non-communist parties, religious practices or ‘social enemies’.3 Thus, the new culture had to develop in a space limited by ideological, political and social constraints. Among other cultural media, cinema became ‘the most important of all the arts’, as well as a powerful tool of propaganda and popular entertainment.4 The Belorussian Soviet Republic created its own national studio, Belgoskino, in December 1924. Little researched by historians of Jewish Soviet cinema, Belorussian cinema provides nevertheless a rich and fascinating case study for the analysis of the changing representation of the Jews in the interwar period. This image encapsulated all the contradictory expectations and projects of three political actors: the Soviet power, the Belorussian authorities and the Jewish political elite. My thesis is that, despite these divergent influences and the constraints imposed by the communist ideology, the Belorussian Soviet cinema, Belgoskino, sought to produce a coherent image of Jews, which differed from the image of Jews in films produced in Ukrainian and Russian studios during the same period. Before looking at the images of Jews themselves, it is important to understand the Soviet and Belorussian context for the production of these films.

230  Claire Le Foll JEWS IN THE SSSR AND THE BSSR The Bolshevik policy towards the Jewish question was quite ambiguous from the beginning. Jews were not considered a people, and even less a nation, by Lenin and Stalin because they did not have a territory and a common language, so they were ultimately and inevitably expected to assimilate completely.5 However, in practice, considering that Jews represented a large proportion of the population in the Belorussian and Ukrainian Soviet Republics and that assimilation could not be immediate, they were granted the right to develop their own national culture as any other national group.6 The ‘indigenisation policy’, introduced in 1923,7 was pursued within those republics where Jews represented an important share of the population: Ukraine, Belorussia and Russia. Jews received the right to have their own Yiddish-speaking schools, theatre, publishing house, tribunal and press, as well as Jewish sections in universities and research institutions. They had the opportunity to build their own culture, as long as it was ‘socialist in content and national in form’, according to Stalin’s famous formula.8 However, Jewish political parties such as the Bund, Socialist Zionism and Zionism, as well as Hebrew cultural and religious institutions, were persecuted and eventually liquidated. Jews were eventually expected to assimilate and turn into productive ‘Soviet citizens’, engaged in agriculture and industry. The increase of anti-Semitism in the 1920s, in particular in the factories and state apparatus, forced the Soviet authorities to launch a vast campaign against anti-Semitism in the years 1926–1930.9 However, in the 1930s, this campaign was soon replaced by a denunciation of ‘Jewish chauvinism’, as of all the ‘nationalisms’. Indeed, from 1928, Stalin undertook a repressive campaign and political purges against the so-called ‘nationalistic deviation’. This first campaign against nationalism was not directed specifically at Jews. The first victims were Ukrainian and Belorussian nationalists,10 only to be followed by a purge of several Jewish members of nationalist institutions such as the Academy of Sciences, universities or the press. In 1930, all the national sections of the Communist Party were abolished, including the Jewish section. From the beginning of the 1930s, ‘traitors’, ‘enemies of the people’ and ‘deviationists’ were chased, unmasked and denounced. The enthusiasm by some of the Jewish activists to maintain Jewish culture was seen as suspicious. The fear of being accused, purged and deported paralysed Yiddish cultural activity in the 1930s. These shifts in the Soviet policy regarding nationalism and Jews evidently had a visible impact on the way Jews were portrayed in Soviet propaganda and popular culture,11 and especially in the cinema, the ‘most important of all the arts’ according to Lenin and, as such, the medium most controlled by the state. Soviet cinema progressively removed Jewish types condemned by the Stalinist regime, such as rabbis, luftmentsch of the shtetl as in Jewish Luck (Evrejskoe Schast’e, Granovsky 1925) and NEPmen, to impose the smiling and happy face of the ‘new Soviet Jew’ (factory worker or Birobidzhan colonist) completely emancipated from the religion on the screen. The question of the representation of ‘Jewishness’ was very delicate in 1920s and 1930s Soviet cinema, as analysed by Valérie Pozner.12 The late 1920s campaign against anti-Semitism necessitated

The Image of the Jews in Belorussian Soviet Cinema, 1924–1936   231 the production of films on Jewish topics and with clearly identifiable Jewish characters. However, the authorities feared that the representation of Jewishness (for example, scenes of pogroms or scenes with caricatured Jewish bourgeoisie) would encourage anti-Semitism among the Soviet audience. The censors were also wary of any insistence on the particularities of Jewish life before or after the Revolution, as the latter were seen as signs of an excessive nationalism.13 The negative and ironic depiction of the Jewish ghetto before the Revolution, and of the poor and oppressed luftmentschn, as in Through Tears (Skvoz sliozy, Gricher-Cherikover 1928), could seem apologetic and nostalgic to the regime and be subject to censorship. Similarly, the denunciation of ‘negative’ Jews (typically rabbis and Jewish bourgeoisie) and their way of life (scenes at the synagogue or religious holidays) were likely to shock the censors as they feared a misinterpretation of these religious scenes. Furthermore, Jewish heroes could not be ‘too Jewish’, and Jewish films could not show images of rabbis and synagogues. As noted by Pozner, censors complained that there were ‘too many Jews on the screen’, a fact which reflects the ambiguity of the Soviet authorities towards the Jewish question and the representation of Jews on the screens. Ultimately, the Jews had to assimilate and disappear as a separate national group.14 The contradictions within Soviet policy towards Jews were interpreted variously by the regional authorities, directors and cinema studios, and led to a variety of Jewish characters on screen. In the BSSR, the hard-line approach adopted in Moscow was ubiquitous and left a strong impact on the republic’s economic, fiscal, social and ideological policies. However, the Belorussian authorities tried to imprint their own outlook in cultural matters and issues related to nationalities.15 The Belorussian Republic, as established after the Treaty of Riga in 1921, in other words after the annexation of its Western part by Poland, had the highest proportion of Jews when compared with the Ukrainian and Russian republics.16 The Belorussian republic also had significant Russian and Polish minorities (respectively 7.7% and 2% in 1926). The ‘indigenisation policy’ was implemented in the BSSR as in the other Soviet republics, and guaranteed the creation of institutions operating in Belorussian in order to ‘abolish backwardness’ and to ease the diffusion of socialist ideology in the native language.17 However, unlike their Ukrainian and Russian counterparts, the Belorussian authorities defended a multicultural vision and put a strong emphasis on respect of the rights of national minorities.18 One of the most visible signs of this multiculturalism was full equality for all the ‘local’ or ‘native’ languages (Belorussian, Russian, Polish and Yiddish), which was proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence of 1920, during the Conference of the Communist Party in the BSSR in 1923, and in the Constitution of 1927.19 National minorities were granted the right to establish national soviets and to use their native tongue at meetings, in the law courts, in government institutions and in public life. Belorussia was the only Soviet republic where equal rights for all national languages were guaranteed by the Constitution. Therefore, the simultaneous development of four national cultures was supported and monitored by the Belorussian government.20 In this policy, which was favourable to minorities in general, the Jews enjoyed a distinctive

232  Claire Le Foll status.21 They were a ‘special kind of national minority’ because they constituted a high proportion of the general population of Belorussia, especially of the urban population (40%), but also because their culture had been oppressed and mocked as had Belorussian culture.22 Therefore, the Belorussian Communist Party paid particular attention to the development of Belorussian and Yiddish cultures in order to compensate for the oppression of the tsarist period.23 In its January 1925 resolution on the nationalities policy,24 the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the BSSR insisted on the urgent need to develop the popular Belorussian language and concentrate all efforts on the publication of literature in that language. The following addition to this injunction shows the special status of the Jewish minority when compared to the other minorities: ‘The same work should be done for the Jewish language (regarding the Polish language, this goal must be considered authorised)’.25 Therefore, as part of the ‘Belorussianisation’ implemented in all spheres from 1924, the Belorussian government endorsed the flourishing of Yiddish culture. The legitimisation of the new Belorussian state necessitated the legitimisation and development of popular national languages in all spheres of private and public life—press, literature, schools, theatres, universities, scholarship, law courts, unions and administration. The BSSR appeared to be, at least in the 1920s, a haven for the Jewish cultural revival in Yiddish. The cinema, although silent and not yet able to promote national languages, also became instrumental in the building of the Belorussian multinational state. However, the success of the Belorussian Cinema Studio, created in 1924 (Belgoskino), was hindered by two circumstances. First, it was founded in Petrograd/ Leningrad as Belorussia had no cinematographic tradition, trained specialists and material to be able to host Belgoskino. Similarly, ‘Sovetskaja Belarus’, a studio producing fiction films, was established in 1928 also in Leningrad. The ‘Russianness’ of the studio’s staff26 worried the Belorussian authorities, who, in response, sought to raise their awareness and knowledge of Belorussian culture, literature and language by organising field trips in the BSSR. Furthermore, the obligation to use the Belorussian language exclusively as the working language was reiterated, so as to strengthen the link between the studio and Belorussian writers. However, as exemplified by the mocking remarks of Russian critics in the 1930s, Belgoskino, partly because of the campaign against national deviations, failed to overcome this strong ‘Russianness’ and to impose itself and be identified as a truly Belorussian national studio.27 The second reason why Belgoskino had difficulties in establishing itself as a national studio is connected with the specific nationalities policy of the BSSR. According to the policy, which guaranteed equality for four languages and support for the cultural development of national minorities, Belgoskino was given the mission to ‘focus on national particularities and various ways of life of the region’.28 Belgoskino therefore had to create a Belorussian national cinema that reflected the multiethnic character of the country. In other words, Belgoskino had to create from scratch a Belorussian cinema that would reflect and strengthen Belorussian nation-building and at the same time make sure that the Jewish population was represented on Belorussian screens. Belgoskino was requested to

The Image of the Jews in Belorussian Soviet Cinema, 1924–1936   233 showcase the multinational nature of the Belorussian state and, as such, to be the breeding ground for two distinct, if not rival, national cinemas. Apart from the central campaign against anti-Semitism, the Belorussian studio had then its own reasons to produce films on Jewish subjects. Several ‘Jewish movies’29 were released by Belgoskino. This study will focus on three of them, chosen from films that have been preserved up to today, but which caused polemic and debate among the critics, authorities and public at three crucial moments: the beginning of Belgoskino (a period of relative liberalism in cultural and national matters); the early 1930s after the ‘Great Turn’ and the instauration of a stricter control over cultural as well as economic issues; finally the end of the 1930s when the ‘Friendship of the Peoples’ metaphor replaced the indigenisation policy of the 1920s as a uniting principle for the Soviet multiethnic state. Through the analysis of these three films, we will see that the young Belorussian studio sought to respond to the specific and contradictory agenda imposed by the Belorussian authorities in the 1920s by reflecting the multiethnic character of the republic and promoting the Jewishness as well as the Belorussianness of its characters. Later, however, it had to take into account the accusations of ‘nationalism’ targeted at the Jewish and Belorussian intelligentsia by Moscow. In accordance with the new ideological line adopted in the 1930s by the Soviet central authorities, Belgoskino tended to abandon the task of ‘Belorussianisation’ of the population in favour of its ‘Sovietisation’. Nevertheless, I will argue that the ‘Jewish films’ produced by Belgoskino continued to express the particular position of the Belorussian republic towards the nationalities issue and to promote a culturalist and nationalities-friendly vision of the world.

His Excellency His Excellency (Ego prevoskhoditel’stvo/Zayn Ekselents, Roshal 1928) was the first Belorussian film with a Jewish theme, and the fifth film made by Belgoskino. As with most Soviet films on Jewish subjects of this period, the film denounces the oppression of the Jews under the tsarist regime. It has a historical basis—the story of Hirsh Lekert, a Jewish tanner and member of the Bund, who attempted to kill the governor of Vilna, the general Victor von Wahl, in 1902.30 In Soviet Russia, Hirsh Lekert was a controversial figure: he belonged to the Bund, the Jewish socialist party banned in 1921 by the Bolshevik regime, and his individual act was criticised by Lenin in 1903, which was unsurprising as the Bolshevik leader criticised any solitary act of terror not emanating from the ‘masses’. However, Hirsh Lekert was very popular in Lithuania and Belorussia.31 The fact that he was executed three weeks after his failed assassination attempt contributed to the construction of his legend. Interestingly, he became a national hero both for Jews and Belorussians because he embodied the emerging workers’ movement in the northwestern provinces of the Russian Empire. The anniversary of his execution was officially marked in 1927 in the BSSR. His exploit therefore constituted a popular topic for cinema and a good opportunity to represent the Jewish contribution to the revolutionary past of Belorussia. With Kastus Kalinovski (Gardin

234  Claire Le Foll 1927) and His Excellency, Belgoskino made the first attempts to produce popular films with high artistic ambitions and national content: both films had a popular national hero, a well-known revolutionary topic connected with local history, famous actors and promising artistic talent,32 and the multinational tone promoted by the Belorussian authorities. The topic is quite typical of Soviet films on a Jewish subject produced in the same period and contains the main patterns identified by Pozner: the film shows the oppression of the Jewish population under the Tsars, the anti-Semitism of the officials and the poverty of the Jews.33 The culmination of the representation of the pre-revolutionary oppression—the scene of pogrom—does not appear in His Excellency but is mentioned as a threat. Contrary to some films and Yiddish novels analysed by Pozner and Krutikov, which paid attention to the process of ‘transformation’ of one character from a state of humiliation and submission to a state of revolt and liberation, the film sets in opposition fundamentally irreconcilable characters and distinguishes clearly between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ characters.34 Initially, the figure of Lekert was a typically positive hero. He was a worker engaged in the revolutionary movement. Furthermore, in order to avoid any ideological mistake, the director of the film, Roshal, did not indicate that Lekert was a Bundist. In the film, he appears to belong to an unidentified revolutionary party that some uninformed censors mistook for the Socialist Revolutionary Party.35 The censors, therefore, required minor changes to make the film fit with official ideology and show that Lekert acted against the will of his Party. In following the official ideology, it was necessary to make it clear that no political action should be undertaken if the ‘masses’ are not ready for it.36 Indeed, in the final version of the film, Roshal intended to show that ‘individual action is not a course which can bring positive results’.37 Alongside this ultimately imperfect hero, most of the other Jewish characters in the film are craftsmen and belong to the impoverished and exploited Jewish proletariat. The film also shows in passing the Jewish population of the Pale of Settlement, a ‘mass’ of bearded Jews wearing traditional dress and symbolising the ignorant, religious and poor population that needed to be enlightened. The negative characters of His Excellency belong to three groups: the tsarist authorities, first among them the governor but also policemen, military officers and Cossack soldiers; the Jewish bourgeoisie (including Shpis the merchant) who proclaim their adherence to Zionism; and the religious clergy (mainly the rabbi). The staging and lighting effects underline the frightening character of the governor and fanaticism of the rabbi. The scene in the synagogue—prayers to prevent the pogrom—is also a typical means of demonstrating the harmfulness of religion and backwardness of these practices. Although well received in general by the Party and the people,38 the reaction of the Belorussian and Jewish press shows that this distinction between good and bad Jews was not shown clearly enough and failed to convince. The Jewish workers and former comrades of Lekert questioned by the Yiddish and Belorussian press were disappointed because they did not recognise ‘their’ Lekert.39 They

The Image of the Jews in Belorussian Soviet Cinema, 1924–1936   235 found him too dull and melancholic, too bourgeois and not revolutionary enough. They essentially reproached the film as being focused less on Lekert than on the figure of the governor and ‘bad Jews’, namely the rabbi and rich Jews. They also found that the representation of the rabbi was not realistic (‘there has never been such a rabbi in the whole world’).40 The Belorussian press for its part criticised two aspects of the film: the unclear presentation of the class struggle in Belorussia and the inaccurate depiction of the national issue. In general, Hlybotski, the author of the detailed review published in Sovetskaja Belarus, complained about the fact that the representatives of the exploiting classes were portrayed in too sympathetic a manner and, therefore, were too ambiguous for the audience.41 The governor was sitting in his office and talking with Jewish bourgeoisie, attending the whipping of the Jewish political activists or enjoying himself at the circus. For Hlybotski, these actions were insufficient in showing his active role in the oppression of the proletariat. By contrast, the film failed to portray the difficult life of the proletariat or to clarify the reasons for their struggle. The depiction of Lekert as a dominant householder and husband who invites his comrades for dinner on the eve of May 1 reminded the critic of Sovetskaja Belarus of the bourgeois way of life. Most importantly, argued Hlybotski, the attenuation of class opposition and the weakening of the social claims in the film were aggravated by an overtly exaggerated focus on the national issue and on Jewish solidarity at the expense of class solidarity. Although the film had been modified, according to the censors’ demands, to show that the Jewish bourgeoisie and rabbi were allied with the governor and gave their approbation to the punishment of the protesters to avoid a pogrom (in the first version of the film, the governor snubbed them when they came to ask for help), the figure of the rabbi, who appears in several scenes, was the target of all the critics. Despite some caricatured scenes in the synagogue where the rabbi and praying Jews are shown lit from below, which throws high and frightening shadows on the wall behind them, the critics found that, on the whole, the rabbi was portrayed as a non-violent and righteous man. For the Belorussian critic, the rabbi was too radiant and positive a figure. He looked like ‘a nice old man with the beard of a patriarch’, looking at his adoptive daughter with tenderness, and he was in no way a repulsive figure. Similarly, when he is angry and curses his daughter and the other protesters, he is impressive and powerful, not resembling the comic representation of rabbis in the Belorussian folk tales. The Belorussian critics found fault with His Excellency for presenting the rabbi’s fanaticism in too subtle and complex a way. Therefore, by highlighting the national characteristics of the Jewish population, the film was reproached as blurring the class struggle and as being too focused on national solidarity between the Jewish workers and the Jewish notables. Ultimately, the Belorussian critic regretted the prominence of Jewish workers on the screen and the total absence of Belorussian workers. This excess of Jewish nationalism resulted in the marginalisation of the Belorussian people, as highlighted in bold characters in the article: ‘In the action of His Excellency, the revolutionary role of the Belorussian proletariat is erased, as well as the proletarian

236  Claire Le Foll solidarity between nationalities’. Clearly, the film was too ‘Jewish’ for the Belorussian press and symbolised persistent isolationism. By targeting primarily a Jewish audience, Belgoskino had failed to fulfil its national mission and to create a multicultural and revolutionary film. Thus, the first attempt of Belgoskino to satisfy the demands of the Belorussian authorities for the creation of a multicultural and revolutionary cinema seemed to be a failure in the eyes of the Belorussian press, despite its popular success and Moscow’s permission. More broadly, as a ‘Jewish film’, His Excellency reflects the contradictory expectations of the Jewish intelligentsia, the Soviet ideologues and the Belorussian authorities. As in other Soviet films that depicted the life of Jews before the revolution (for example, pogrom scenes in Against the Fathers’ Will [Protiv voli otsov, Ivanov-Barkov 1926–1927] or in Five Brides [Piat’ nevest, Soloviev 1929]), the almost ethnographical representation of observant Jews praying in the synagogue seemed too realistic and not caricatured enough to the Soviet censors, and was interpreted by Belorussian commentators as evidence of Jewish isolationism and ultimately of Jewish reluctance to integrate into the Belorussian Republic. However, it must be emphasised that His Excellency focused on a ‘positive’ Jewish hero, unlike Ukrainian and Russian Jewish films, which were adaptations of the classics of Yiddish literature and denounced the misery and promiscuity of life in the shtetl under the Tsars and the social uselessness of the luftmentschn.42 The focus on revolutionary heroes was common in Soviet cinema in general, as observed by a commentator in Oktiabr,43 but was still quite unusual in films with Jewish subjects, which focused mostly on the depiction of the humiliation and oppression of Jews in the ghetto, and, in the best case, on their transformation, final liberation and Soviet emancipation.44 However, the neutrality of Lekert in the film and his lack of sharp, distinctive traits, all intended to avoid the critique of excessive Jewishness, Bundism or portrayal of an isolated revolutionary, doomed him to unpopularity and were seen as a failure to incarnate the revolutionary leader that Jews and Belorussians awaited. His Excellency encapsulated a subtle and less melodramatic image of the Jews than other films of the period, but failed to be recognised as a representative ‘Jewish film’ precisely because it toned down the social and cultural distinctiveness of the hero, and, without clearly ridiculing them, exaggerated to some extent the religiosity of the ‘bad Jews’.

The Return of Nathan Becker At the end of the 1920s, the Stalinist campaign against nationalist deviation, whether it was Belorussian, Ukrainian or Jewish, resulted in the decline of national issues in Belorussian cinema. It halted the production of films inspired by Belorussian life or adapted from Belorussian literary works, which had grown dramatically in the years 1928–1929. In the following years, Belgoskino’s production lost its national distinctiveness and exclusively served Soviet propaganda. Similarly, and despite the incentive given by the official campaign against anti-Semitism between 1926 and 1930, Belgoskino ignored the Jewish question

The Image of the Jews in Belorussian Soviet Cinema, 1924–1936   237 until 1932, probably through fear of being accused of being nationalist. Indeed, films that dealt exclusively with Jewish life or with pre-revolutionary shtetl life now risked being seen as contrary to the official line: ‘Preoccupation with the Jewish past, which had been the mainstay of Soviet Yiddish cinema, was now considered “bourgeois” and “nationalistic” ’.45 In consequence, the Return of Nathan Becker (Vozvrashenie Neitena Bekera/ Nosn Beker Fort Aheym, Boris Shpis 1932) approached the Jewish question very carefully, if not marginally. It tells the story of a Jewish mason who leaves America after 28  years because of the US economic crisis and returns to his native Belorussian village. However, the film had big ambitions and is remarkable for other reasons. First, it was the earliest Yiddish ‘talkie’ produced in the Soviet Union, and the first long sound film produced by Belgoskino. The opportunity to produce sound films in the Soviet Union had been investigated since 1928 but ‘by 1931 most Soviet films were either being made with sound or were provided with soundtracks in post-production’.46 Secondly, by new aesthetic technological means, the film was meant to celebrate the success of the first Five Year Plan introduced in 1928.47 The aesthetic of Leningrad’s avant-garde Factory of the Eccentric Actor48 (to which the director and main actor belonged) is noticeable and serves the propagandist purpose of the film, which was to show the technical, social, economic and moral superiority of the Soviet Union over America.49 As an illustration, the most spectacular scene of the film is an ‘American-style’ competition staged in a circus, which is the forum for a masonry contest between Nathan Becker and a Soviet mason. Although initially ironic and sceptical if not contemptuous towards the training of Soviet workers, Becker loses the contest. He is exhausted and slower at building his wall. He fails to prove that the American techniques are better than the Soviet ones. Humiliated, he prepares to go back to America. However, the Soviet manager of the factory decides to employ him and to learn from his technique in order to improve the Soviet methods. As a result, Becker joins the Soviet working class and contributes to the rapid and successful industrial growth of the Soviet Union, symbolised in the film by the building of Magnitogorsk, the biggest iron and steel plant of Europe constructed during the first Five Year Plan on an empty steppe beyond the Urals. Apart from the clear ideological function of the film, which aimed to show the effectiveness of Stalin’s new policy of planification and industrialisation, it also addressed a Jewish audience and Jewish issues. The film had a Yiddish and a Russian version.50 The Yiddish version was probably produced for American Jews. Indeed, the film’s plot is set against an international background. It mirrors an historical situation—the small amount of immigration from the United States to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s when the economic crisis hit America, and industrialisation, together with the policy of ‘socialism in one country’, attracted job hunters. Thus, it carries an ideological message to Soviet and American Jews, emphasising ‘the failure of American assimilation while offering a non-Zionist aliah (return to Zion)’.51 The film also incorporated the very best of Soviet Yiddish culture of the time. It was based on an original scenario written by Peretz Markish, the most famous Soviet Yiddish writer of the time. It starred Solomon

238  Claire Le Foll Mikhoels, the director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre (GOSET)52 and symbol of Yiddish culture, especially since his unforgettable incarnation of Sholem Aleikhem’s Menahem Mendel in Jewish Luck. Apart from its obvious ideological message on the deceptiveness of America as a refuge for Jews, Nathan Becker will be analysed here in the double context of the Jewish experience in the BSSR and of the Belorussian search for a national cinema. First, far from this rough propaganda, the film showed the shtetl and its old Jewish types in a very realistic manner in the opening scene of the film. The first images show a miserable and almost abandoned shtetl, populated by old traditional Jews, beggars, idle men and ragged children. The quirky houses with half-crumbled foundations as well as the portraits of old Jews and the performance of Jewish musicians (klezmer) reflect the visual representation found in the graphic works of Belorussian Jewish painters, such as Solomon Yudovin.53 Like the paintings and graphic works produced at the beginning of the 1920s by these Jewish artists, the film depicts the Belorussian hamlet in a realistic and accurate way, for example, including ethnographic details of the habitat far from the traditional and romanticised images of the poor but happy shtetl found in Yiddish literature and its cinematographic adaptations. As observed by Hoberman, ‘unlike the Ukrainian settings of Granovsky’s Jewish Luck and Gricher-Cherikover’s Through Tears, this dilapidated Belorussian village is eerily underpopulated, halfway toward becoming a ghost town’.54 Interestingly, one shot of shop signs in Russian and Yiddish/Hebrew (‘kosher’)55 incidentally reminds the audience of the multiethnic character of the Belorussian shtetl. However, these images were criticised because they gave a ‘wrong’ and negative representation of Soviet small towns. Indeed, officially, the pre-revolutionary ruined shtetls did not exist in the Soviet Union anymore. To the Belorussian critic, the ‘mournful tone of the minor music’ summarised the ideological weakness of this part of the film. R. Halubitskaja argued that ‘it was necessary to make clear in which period the shtetl was shown, because it is incorrect to depict a shtetl of 1929–30 as it was in 1921’.56 She criticised the film for failing to show the transformation of the Jewish-beggar into a productive worker. Nevertheless, as reflected in the advertisement in the Yiddish American press,57 arguably the main strength of the film resides in the enjoyable, playful and humorous depiction of its main characters, and, through their individual experience, the depiction of the successful sovietisation of different categories of Jews. Three different types of Jewishness, incarnated by the three main characters, can be identified in Nathan Becker. Nathan’s wife, as often in Soviet films, embodies attachment to Jewish religious traditions. Back in the Soviet Union, she feels lost because nobody can tell her when the Sabbath occurs. Indeed, the six-day week introduced in 1929 in the Soviet Union made it difficult for believers to observe the Sabbath.58 She keeps asking: ‘When is shabbes, what day are we?’, or ‘When will be Purim?’ To her, the Soviet Union is a place where ‘they turn everything upside down and nobody knows what day is today’. Tsale, Nathan’s father, is only able to reply: ‘today is off’. His sense of time has become Soviet and unreligious. He incarnates the half-way sovietised Jew. He is completely secularised and seems

The Image of the Jews in Belorussian Soviet Cinema, 1924–1936   239 to have forgotten about all the religious rules and traditions. It is worth observing that unlike His Excellency, the film was expurgated of all the images of synagogues and of rabbis, as in most Soviet films of the 1930s. Tsale is also a defender of the Soviet order. He keeps reprimanding his son for his scepticism and insisting that he should not ‘quarrel with us’. However, he is illiterate and is unable to sign his name. The illiteracy and backwardness of the population was one of the justifications behind the nationalities policy. He has kept some Jewish cultural patterns: he continuously whistles a sort of hasidic nign59 and he continues to symbolise, as in Jewish Luck, traditional Jewish humour consisting of sad irony and tenderness. Finally, Nathan, or Nosn as Tsale keeps calling him, as an American Jew, is not completely secularised but he symbolises the physical and moral regeneration intended for the idle Jews shown in the first scene: he becomes a good worker, physically strong and morally emancipated of Jewish traditions. The transformation of the two men, and the salvation of all the Jewish inhabitants of the shtetl, is realised through their arrival and work at Magnitogorsk. Ultimately, Stalin’s ‘Great Turn’ of 1929–1933 towards industrialisation should guarantee not only the employment of all the shtetl elders, but also the conversion of all Jews to the Soviet moral way of life. The film ends with a hymn to labour and a shot of Nathan, Tsale and Jim, the black friend that Nathan brought with him from America, working happily on a Magnitogorsk site. However, the final scene is not unambiguous. Tsale instructs Jim in the fine art of his nign, explaining with hand gestures that workers need to work with their hearts and their heads. Should we see in the culmination of the film a more subtle and nuanced message: maintaining culture and national heritage should also be part of the Soviet way of life? In this way, Belgoskino has evolved from His Excellency to Nathan Becker in its approach to the Jewish question. Refusing to create a strong hero or a revolutionary Jew probably through fear of accusations of nationalism, it shows the slow and gradual transition from the old mode of Jewish identification based on religion and ‘social parasitism’, according to Soviet vocabulary, to the formation of a new Jewish man freed from his social and moral prejudices but keeping his cultural and national identity. Although very discreetly and in the background of a propagandistic film targeted at a large audience, Belgoskino continued to build a complex image of the Jew, reflecting contemporary issues and contradictions and promoting its own ideal of national flourishing.

Seekers of Happiness Probably the least Belorussian, but certainly the most Jewish film produced by Belgoskino, Seekers of Happiness (Iskateli schast’ja, V. Korsh-Sabline 1936) constitutes the culmination of the celebration of the new Soviet Jew. The film is completely dedicated to the Jewish question, namely to the Birobidzhan, the autonomous Jewish region established in 1934 in the far eastern region of the Soviet Union.60 The film shows the confrontation between the old and new Jewish way of life, and celebrates the triumph of the new Soviet Jew, personified in the Birobidzhan colonists, over the luftmentsch of the shtetl, Pinia, who is shown as

240  Claire Le Foll lazy, antisocial and even criminal. Seekers of Happiness was not initially a film on the Birobidzhan. The first scenario, written by Grigori Kobets, who spent months in Birobidzhan to observe local life, and Iogan Zeltser, had nothing to do with Jews or with the Birobidzhan. It was an adventure film about gold-diggers in the Soviet Far East, and addressed the question of the search for happiness.61 Several later versions were rejected and censored for various reasons. The first version was considered to be too focused on gold, a dubious symbol of happiness for the Soviet censors. The second version showed ‘too many Benia Krik going to Birobidzhan’ and not enough workers. The censors wanted to avoid the suggestion that Jews should be equated with members of the underworld, as in the novels of Isaac Babel and the film Benia Krik (Vilner 1927). The script was also criticised for not emphasising in clear political terms the multiethnic character of the region. The third version contained many ironic lines referring to ‘Birobidzhan as a prison’ or comparing the suffering of the Birobidzhan Jews to that endured in Egypt.62 The fourth, final version was realised by Vladimir Korsh-Sabline, who had already directed several films for Belgoskino. He invited two well-known actors from Moscow to appear in the film: Veniamin Zuskin, a star from the GOSET, and Maria Blumenthal-Tamarina, a popular actress. They both represented on the screen two faces of traditional Jewish identity, ultimately overpowered by the optimistic and strong values of Soviet identity. The film tells the story of a Jewish family who come back from the United States to settle in Birobidzhan.63 While the new colonists adopt the Soviet way of life and values with enthusiasm and build a new life in the kolkhoz,64 working in friendly cooperation with the local populations, Pinia (played by Veniamin Zuskin) seems interested only in making a quick fortune by finding gold. He is reluctant to work in the fields and shows scepticism and hostility towards the Soviet order. His thirst for gold leads him at the end of the film to fight and injure one of his relatives. He is finally arrested by the NKVD,65 while the rest of the kolkhoz celebrates the marriage of Dvojra’s daughter, Rosa, to a young Cossack. During the celebration, every nationality (Mongolian, Korean, Siberian and Cossack) presents the couple with gifts. The final scene symbolises the triumph of the internationalist ideology imposed by Stalin in the 1930s, and, in particular, the overcoming of Dvojra’s prejudices against intermarriage and Soviet ‘modernity’. The end of the film presents a moral message as Pinia is arrested by the NKVD and punished for his avidity and crime. The ‘positive’ Jews are happy, optimistic and rewarded for their hard work. However, as in the two films discussed earlier, the ideological message is more subtle. The true hero and popular figure of the film is Pinia, the luftmentsch. As observed by Anna Shternshis, who held interviews with former Soviet Jews, the popularity of the film among Jews exceeded all expectations: ‘Overnight the soundtrack became a hit, the dialogue remained in viewers’ memories, and countless respondents reported that they saw the movie at least three or four times’.66 Despite its heavy propagandistic content, it was regarded as an authentic film about Jews and Jewish life in the Soviet Union. Jewish spectators seemed to like the Jewish melodies and songs particularly. The hit of the film, the song ‘Fishing

The Image of the Jews in Belorussian Soviet Cinema, 1924–1936   241 by the River’, although sung in Russian, was viewed by the Jewish public as Jewish, or more precisely as ‘our Soviet Jewish song’ because it was ‘performed by Jews in a movie devoted to Jewish issues’.67 Another key factor was the presence of Veniamin Zuskin and his interpretation of the ‘negative’ Pinia, which received both popular and critical acclaim. His first line, while on the boat to Russia, became legendary and made him the most likable and memorable character of the film: ‘Could you tell me, please, how much does this boat cost?’ Thanks to Zuskin’s talent, Pinia’s jokes, his charm, his sceptical remarks and his ironical view of the Birobidzhan seemed acceptable. For the audience, Pinia became by far the most charming and meaningful character in the film probably because he conveyed an implicit criticism of the Birobidzhan project and echoed real affection and nostalgia for the ‘traditional’ Jewish culture and way of life still felt by the audience. Shternshis concludes: ‘In preferring Pinia’s “negative” character over the apparently propagandistic “positive” figures in the film, the Jewish viewers were expressing their silent protest against Soviet rhetoric and ideology’.68 The fact that many of them did not remember the plot of the film and the ideological messages conveyed by the film about productive labour, intermarriage and internationalism, demonstrates that Soviet Jews did not identify themselves with the ‘positive’ Soviet characters, and highlights that their culture and identity was still a mixture of traditional Jewish culture, although non-religious and apolitical, and modern Russian popular culture. CONCLUSION Overall, Belgoskino made an important contribution to the production of Soviet Jewish films, although most of them are less famous and emblematic than those produced by the Ukrainian and Russian studios, Vufku or Sovkino. They are marked by a distinctive approach to the Jewish question and Jewishness: neither rooted in classic Yiddish literature, nor completely proletarian, these films represent a middle way in the search for a new Jewish identity. They often highlighted the long and complex process of transformation from traditional Jewishness to the new Soviet Jewishness, rather than categorically condemning the old identity for the sake of the new one. Without idealisation or radical rejection of the past, they encapsulate the complex identity issues encountered by most of the Jews of the shtetls of Belorussia, and show a Jew still rooted in the shtetl but on his way to his voluntary ‘productivisation’ and sovietisation, which would mean secularisation rather than blind adherence to Soviet values. The ‘Jewish films’ produced by Belgoskino also express the ideal of national growth actively proclaimed and implemented by the Belorussian Soviet authorities in the 1920s, and more discreetly in the 1930s. This sensitivity to the national question caused difficulties with censorship but also resulted in a more complex and unconventional vision of the Jewish question in Belorussia, a vision that promoted the flowering of a non-religious but strong national identity in accordance with Soviet ideology but not completely uprooted from the past and the traditional way of life.

242  Claire Le Foll NOTES   1 Many works have been published recently on Jewish popular and national culture before and during the Revolution: Kenneth B. Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); Jeffrey Veidlinger, Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); David E. Fishman, The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005); Mikhail Krutikov, Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 1905–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Kenneth Moss, “Jewish Culture between Renaissance and Decadence: Di Literarishe Monatsshriften and Its Critical Reception,” Jewish Social Studies 8, no.  1 (2001): 153–98; Gennadii Estraikh, “From Yehupets Jargonists to Kiev Modernists: The Rise of a Yiddish Literary Centre, 1880s–1914,” East European Jewish Affairs 30, no. 1 (2000): 17–38; Ruth Apter-Gabriel, ed., Tradition and Revolution. The Jewish Renaissance in Russian Avant-Garde Art 1912–1918 (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1988), 21–60; Mirjam Rainer, “The Awakening of Jewish National Art in Russia,” Jewish Art 16–17 (1990–1991): 98–121; Kenneth Moss, “Bringing Culture to the Nation: Hebraism, Yiddishism, and the Dilemmas of Jewish Cultural Formation in Russia and Ukraine, 1917–1919,” Jewish History 22, no.  3 (2008): 263–94; Seth L. Wolitz, “Vitebsk Versus Bezalel: A Jewish ‘Kulturkampf’ in the Plastic Arts,” in The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics: Bundism and Zionism in Eastern Europe, ed. Zvi Gitelman (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), 151–77; Seth Wolitz, “The Kiev-Grupe (1918–1920) Debate: The Function of Literature,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 4, no. 2 (1978): 97–106; and Hillel Kazovsky, The Artists of the Kultur-Lige (Jerusalem: Gesharim, 2003).   2 Gennadii Estraikh, In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004); David Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet-Jewish Culture 1918–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Jeffrey Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); Benjamin Harshav, The Moscow Yiddish Theatre: Art on Stage in the Time of Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); and Alfred Abraham Greenbaum, Jewish Scholarship and Scholarly Institutions in Soviet Russia, 1918–1953 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1978).   3 See Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence. The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union 1881 to the Present, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 59–87.   4 Quoted by Peter Cowie, A Concise History of the Cinema: Before 1940 (London: A. Zwemmer; New York: A.S. Barnes, 1971), 137.   5 See Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Lenin’s Jewish Question (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), chapter 3; Benjamin Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 49–52; Nora Levin, The Jews in the Soviet Union since 1917 (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 1: 14–26; Lionel Kochan, ed., Les juifs en Union soviétique depuis 1917 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1971), 65–89; and Gitelman, A Century, 86.   6 On the Soviet nationalities policy, see Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire. Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 1–27; Yuri Slezkin, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (1994): 414–52; Jeremy Smith, The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917–23 (Basingstoke: MacMillan Press, 1999); Ronald G. Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), chapter 3; and Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, eds., State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

The Image of the Jews in Belorussian Soviet Cinema, 1924–1936   243   7 The ‘indigenisation policy’ (korenizatsiia in Russian) was the central axiom of the Soviet nationalities policy introduced in 1923. It promoted national languages and national elites in each national territory. It was part of the Soviet rhetoric of decolonisation and was meant to facilitate the installation of Soviet power. See Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 10–12. For examples of indigenisation in other republics, see Martin Suny, ed., State of Nations .   8 Quoted in Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 12. For recent work on Soviet Jewish Culture, see Shneer, Creation of Soviet-Jewish Culture; Anna Shternshis, Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); and Jeffrey Veidlinger, “Let’s Perform a Miracle: The Soviet Yiddish State Theatre in the 1920s,” Slavic Review 52, no. 2 (1998): 380–4.   9 See Arkadiï Zel’tser, Evrei sovetskoj provintsii: Vitebsk i mestechki. 1917–1941 [The Jews of the Soviet provinces: Vitebsk and the shtetls. 1917–1941] (Moscow: Rosspen, 2006), 218–22; and Valérie Pozner, “Le cinéma contre l’antisémitisme,” in Kinojudaica: les réprésentations des Juifs dans le cinéma de Russie et d’Union soviétique des années 1910 aux années 1980, ed. Valérie Pozner and Natacha Laurent (Paris: Nouveau monde éditions, 2012), 131–42. I would like to express all my gratitude to Valérie Pozner for her constant support and invaluable advice and suggestions which accompanied my first steps in the study of cinema. 10 Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, chapter 6; and Zel’tser, Evrei sovetskoj provintsii, 182. Excerpts of the report sent by Zatonsky to the Central Committee in June 1929 denouncing the excessive nationalism of the Belorussian Communist Party leaders were published in “Tak nachinalas’ natsional’naja tragedija,” Neman 9 (1992): 122–49. 11 Shternshis, Jewish Popular Culture, 158–70. 12 Pozner, “Le cinéma contre l’antisémitisme,” 155–70. 13 In this period, each Soviet film was submitted to a draconian and complex system of censorship. The censors, who included the artistic council at the cinema and even Stalin himself, could demand revisions, cuts or forbid the release of a film. See Natacha Laurent, L’œil du Kremlin, Cinéma et censure en URSS sous Staline (Toulouse: Privat, 2000); and Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society: From the Revolution to the Death of Stalin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 14 Pozner, “Le cinéma contre l’antisémitisme,” 169. 15 On the distinction between hard- and soft-line policies, see Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 21–2. For an example of the implementation of NEP hard-line policy in the BSSR and the resulting conflicts and disagreements between the Jewish sections of Moscow and Minsk, see Zel’tser, Evrei sovetskoj provintsii, chapter 3. 16 According to the 1926 census, the Jewish population represented 5.4% of the whole population of the Ukrainian SSR, 0.6% of the Russian SSR and 8.2% of the Belorussian SSR. Mordechai Altshuler, Soviet Jewry on the Eve of the Holocaust: A Social and Demographic Profile (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, Yad Vashem, 1998), 221–2. 17 For major contributions on ‘indigenisation’ and the Soviet nationalities policy, see Martin, Affirmative Action Empire; Smith, The Bolsheviks and the National Question, chapter 5; Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union. Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923 (London: Macmillan Press, 1999); Slezkin, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment”; and Cadiot, Le laboratoire imperial. Russie-URSS 1860–1940 (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2007), 115–18. On ‘Belorussianisation’, see Rastsislau Platonau and Uladzimir Korshuk, eds., Belarusizatsyja 1920-hady. Dakumenty i materyjaly [The Belorussianisation of the 1920s. Documents and material] (Minsk: Belaruskij Dzjarzhauny Universitet, 2001). 18 See Claire Le Foll, “The ‘Belorussianisation’ of the Jewish Population in Interwar Belorussia: Discourses and Achievements in Political and Cultural Spheres,” East European Jewish Affairs 38, no. 1 (2008): 65–88. 19 “Deklaratsija o provozglashenii nezavisimoj Sovetskoj Sotsialisticheskoj Respubliki Belorussii” (1920) [Declaration on the proclamation of independence of the

244  Claire Le Foll Soviet Socialist Republic of Belorussia], published in Prakticheskoe razreshenie natsional’nogo voprosa v Belorusskoj Sotsialisticheskoj Respublike. Chast’1. Belorussizatsija [Practical resolution of the national question in the Belorussian Socialist Republic. Part 1: Belorussianisation] (Minsk: Izd. Natsional’noj komissii TsIK BSSR, 1927), 120–3; “Rezoliutsija XII Vsebelorusskoj partkonferentsii (Mart 1923)” [Resolution of the 12th all-Belorussian Party Conference (March 1923)], in Prakticheskoe, 89; and “Rezoliutsija plenuma TsK KP(b)B (Janvar’ 1925)” [Plenum resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belorussia (January 1925)], in Prakticheskoe, 90–100. 20 See the documents on the implementation of the nationalities policy in the BSSR published in Platonau and Korshuk, Belarusizatsyja. 21 Zvi Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics. The Jewish Sections of the CPSU, 1917–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 395. There were three categories of minorities: 1) those who belong to a nation of whose members the majority lived abroad under bourgeois governments (Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, Germans); 2) Jews; 3) miscellaneous nationalities (Tatars, Gypsies). 22 Vilgelm Knorin, “Vegn bashlisndike ‘kleinikeytn’ in a groyser frage: fragn fun kultureler boyung fun di natsionale minderheytn,” Oktiabr, October 16, 1928, quoted in Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics, 396. 23 Alfred Abraham Greenbaum, “The Fate of Belarusian and Yiddish in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Periods,” East European Jewish Affairs 30, no. 2 (2000): 71–6. 24 Unlike the resolution adopted in March 1923 at the Belorussian Party Conference, which was general and programmatic, the 1925 resolution provided details on how the nationalities policy should be implemented. The watchword was ‘Belorussianisation’ of all layers of society. The Belorussian language was to be promoted through all possible means (school, publications, academic research, higher education and recruitment of Belorussian-speaking officials). Yet, paragraphs were devoted to the ‘national work’ among Jews, Poles and Latvians. 25 “Rezoliutsija plenuma TsK KP(b)B (Janvar’ 1925)” published in Prakticheskoe, 93. See note 19 above. 26 It must be noted that according to the Belorussian independent researcher, Iakov Basin, the majority of the staff of Belgoskino were Jewish (8 out of 10 employees in 1926; 38 out of 55 in 1929). Jakov Basin, Bol’shevizm i evrei: Belorussija, 1920-e [Bolshevism and Jews: Belorussia, 1920s] (Minsk: Izd. A.N. Varaksin, 2008), 228. 27 Aleksei Morov, “Besprizornaja kinostudija,” [A neglected film studio] Pravda, July  2, 1936, quoted in Vse belorusskie filmy. Tom 1. Igrovoe kino (1926–1970). Katalog-spravochnik [All the Belorussian films. Volume 1. Live-action films (1926–1970)], ed. Igor Avdeev and Larisa Zajtseva (Minsk: Belaruskaja navuka, 1996), 86. The article credited the success of Seekers of Happiness less to the ‘progress of the Belorussian studio’ than to the talent of Moscovite actors, and denied any ‘Belorussian’ character to the films produced by Belgoskino. 28 “A  foto-kino opteylung,”  [A photographic and cinematographic department] Der Veker, July 23, 1924. 29 On the difficulty in using and defining this term, see Valérie Pozner, “La notion de ‘cinéma juif’ interrogée à travers le film les Juifs sur la terre,” Diasporas 4 (2004): 37–54. 30 On these events, see Basin, Bol’shevizm i evrei, 230–8; Ezra Mendelsohn, “Worker Opposition in the Russian Jewish Socialist Movement, from the 1890’s to 1903,” International Review of Social History 10 (1965): 268–82; and Henri Minczeles, Histoire générale du Bund: un mouvement révolutionnaire (Paris: Austral, 1995), 91–3. 31 At least until 1937, when the Communist Party of the BSSR banned the use of the name of ‘enemies of the people’ such as Menshevik and Bundist from institutions, factories, kolkhoz or streets; Zel’tser, Evrei sovetskoj provintsii, 181.

The Image of the Jews in Belorussian Soviet Cinema, 1924–1936   245 32 The governor and rabbi in His Excellency are played by a star of the Moscow Theatre, Leonid Leonidov. The popular comic actor Nikolaj Cherkasov featured in the circus scene. Mark Donskoj, the famous Soviet director, participated in both films. The scenario of His Excellency was inspired from a synopsis prepared by the Yiddish writer Tsodek Dolgopolski, famous in Belorussia, and adapted by Roshal’s sister and wife; Basin, Bol’shevizm i evrei, 228. 33 Pozner, “Le cinéma contre l’antisémitisme,” 150–5. 34 His Excellency belongs to the group of ‘classification’ stories, according to the categorisation used by Krutikov to analyse modern Yiddish novels and novellas. It shows the emergence of a ‘new’ Jew with a strong ideological dimension but does not ‘capture the very process of transformation’ as in the ‘transformation’ works; Krutikov, Yiddish Fiction, 210–12. 35 Pozner, “Le cinéma contre l’antisémitisme,” 161. The censors consulted the HistPart (History Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party), which explained that Hirsh Lekert was a well-known member of the Bund Party. 36 Ibid., 161–2. 37 Interview with Grigory Roshal, Moscow, August 1977, quoted in Eric A. Goldman, “The Soviet Yiddish Film, 1925–1933,” Soviet Jewish Affairs 10, no.  3 (1980): 13–28 (23). 38 According to Roshal, the film had been supervised by the Commissar of Education himself, Lunacharski. It was praised for its historical accuracy by the HistPart and in consequence was authorised with only minor changes and well distributed. See Goldman, “The Soviet Yiddish Film,” 22–3; and Pozner, “Le cinéma contre l’antisémitisme,” 162. 39 “Minsker leder-arbeter vegn ‘zayn ekselents’,” [Minsk’s tanners talk about ‘His Excellency’] Oktiabr, March 21, 1928. 40 Ibid. 41 Todar Hlybotski, “Na belaruskim ekrane,” [On Belorussian screen] Sovetskaja Belarus’, April 1, 1928. 42 The most famous being Jewish Luck, but see also Through Tears, The Deluge ([Mabl], 1925), Against the Fathers’ Will, Motl the Weaver ([Motele shpindler/Glaza kotorye videli], 1928). 43 Horodoker [pseudonym], “Notitsn fun a kino-tsushoyer,” [Remarks of a cinema spectator] Oktiabr, February 25, 1926. 44 See the analysis of the synopses of Motl the Weaver, Cain and Artem ([Kain i Artem], Petrov-Bytov, 1929), A Man from the Shtetl ([Chelovek iz mestechka], Roshal, 1930) and Suburban Quarters ([Kvartaly predmestia], Gricher-Cherikover, 1930) by Pozner, “Le cinéma contre l’antisémitisme,” 155–60. 45 Goldman, “The Soviet Yiddish Film,” 25. 46 Ibid., 24. 47 Stalin replaced the NEP (New Economic Policy) in 1928 by the Five Year Plan whose aim was the rapid industrialisation of the Soviet Union. During the first Plan (1928–1933), Stalin also implemented ‘collectivisation’ in agriculture. This led to the famines of 1932. See Ronald Suny, The Soviet Experiment (Oxford University Press, 1998), 217–51. 48 The Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS) was based in Petrograd (Leningrad) during 1922–1926. Its manifest (‘Eccentricism’) was heavily influenced by leftist artists such as Vladimir Mayakovsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold. The FEKS publicised popular genres such as the music hall and circus in theatre, and turned to cinema to create an expressionist and psychological style. See Oksana Bulgakova, FEKS: Die Fabrik des Exzentrischen Schauspielers (Berlin: Potemkin Press, 1996). 49 James L. Hoberman, Bridge of Light. Yiddish Film between Two Worlds (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 171–2.

246  Claire Le Foll 50 Only fragments of the Yiddish version have survived. The reviews of the film suggest that there were differences between the two versions; Hoberman, Bridge of Light, 178 note 1. 51 Hoberman, Bridge of Light, 171. 52 The Moscow State Yiddish Theatre (abbreviated GOSET in Russian) was between 1920 and 1949 one of the most famous and successful Yiddish-language theatres in the world. It staged classic and modern Yiddish plays and attracted the most prominent Jewish artists (Marc Chagall, Natan Altman). See Jeffrey Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). 53 On Yudovin and other Jewish artists in Belorussia, see Zel’tser, Evrei sovetskoï provintsii, 308–16; Zel’tser, “Jewish Artists of Vitebsk in the Interwar Period: Between the National and the Universal,” Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe 50, no.  1 (2003): 77–108; Claire Le Foll, L’école artistique de Vitebsk (1897–1923). Eveil et rayonnement autour de Pen, Chagall et Malevitch (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002); Ruth Apter-Gabriel, The Jewish Art of Solomon Yudovin (1892–1954) (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1991); and Grigoriï Kazovsky, Artists from Vitebsk. Yehuda Pen and His Pupils (Moscow: Masterpieces of Jewish Art, 1992). 54 Hoberman, Bridge of Light, 174. 55 The sign is not in Belorussian, which might be regarded as a sign of the lack of Belorussian awareness amongst the Belgoskino staff mentioned earlier. 56 R. Halubitskaja [pseudonym], “Zvarot Nejtana Bekkera,” [The Return of Nathan Becker] Litaratura i Mastatstva, November 19, 1932. 57 See Hoberman, Bridge of Light, 176. 58 Shternshis, Jewish Popular Culture, 3. 59 The nigun (in Yiddish nign, pl. nigunim) is a Hassidic spiritual melody without words. It is supposed to help simple Hassidic people to attain spiritual elevation by singing or listening. 60 This was not the first film on the Birobidzhan produced in the Soviet Union. In 1934, a documentary film written and directed by Mikhail Slutsky celebrated the establishment of Jews in Birobidzhan (Birobidzhan, Soyuzkino 1934). 61 See the discussions of the censors on this first version published in Alena Kobets-Filimonava, Kali utsjakala sontsa [When the sun fled] (Minsk: Knihazbor, 2006), 277–83. 62 This scenario was published in a Yiddish translation (‘glikzukher’) in Sovetish Heymland 6 (1986): 118–43. Excerpts of the censored dialogues have been published by Kobets-Filimonava, Kali utsjakala sontsa, 285–7. See also Valérie Pozner, ed., Kinojudaica. L’image des Juifs dans le cinéma de Russie et d’Union Soviétique des années 1910 aux années 1960 (Toulouse: Cinémathèque de Toulouse, 2009), 70–3. 63 In an earlier version of the script, the family arrived from Palestine, a meaningful choice because the Birobidzhan was promoted by the Soviet authorities as the ‘Red Zion’, the Soviet Promised Land for Jews. In the final scenario, the characters come from America, but, in the film, the place from where the family comes is not clearly mentioned. This vagueness was probably intentional so as to emphasise the failure of all other refuges for Jews and the inevitability of the creation of a Soviet Jewish region. 64 Kolkhoz were collective farms that emerged after the October Revolution of 1917. The violent ‘collectivisation’ launched in 1928 forced peasants to abandon individual farming and to join collective farms. 65 NKVD is the Russian abbreviation for People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. Between 1934 and 1954, the NKVD was the Soviet law enforcement agency and secret police, known for its political repression especially during the purges. It was renamed as KGB after 1954. 66 Shternshis, Jewish Popular Culture, 166. 67 Ibid., 169. 68 Ibid., 168.

15 Another Man’s Faith? The Image of Judaism in the BBC Television Series Men Seeking God James Jordan

In an interview conducted for the Jewish Chronicle in May 1963, Viennese émigré Rudolph Cartier, a senior drama producer at the BBC, spoke of his passion for film and television and the joy he found in creating images for the screen. As part of this he reflected briefly on the particular challenges a Jewish artist faced when working with the visual: I don’t feel that Jewish artists are necessarily better [. . .] but there is something urgent in our sense of the need to create. The Jewish religion has no visual images, and this fact has created a sort of extra urge for pictorial outlet in other spheres. I  am a non-practising Jew, and I  don’t know whether Chagall is a practising Jew, but I do feel the urge streaming out of him to create the shapes and colours that he didn’t see in the synagogue in his own childhood.1 That urge to create was evident in many of the extraordinary programmes he made for the BBC, programmes in which the small screen was frequently stretched beyond its presumed limits and was often anything but small. These included not only lauded science fiction series, lavish epics and operas, but works which drew on his Jewish heritage such as the groundbreaking 1952 production of The Dybbuk, a piece of theatre that used television to bring Jewish culture and the shtetl into the non-Jewish home.2 As remarkable as that production was, it was not the only programme of the period to amalgamate Jewish and non-Jewish themes or to present images of Jews, Jewishness and Judaism to the watching, predominantly non-Jewish audience. The following chapter considers the production of one of those other programmes, an edition of the documentary series Men Seeking God. Broadcast in May 1954, this programme offered a personal view of Judaism as one of a series of six portraits of major religions that were perhaps less familiar to the BBC’s target demographic. Whereas the programme set out to explore Judaism through the eyes of an individual living in Israel, technical problems with the recording meant that the final depiction was less straightforward.

248  James Jordan IMAGES OF JEWS AND JUDAISM IN BRITISH TELEVISION, 1946–1955 As I  have described in more detail elsewhere, between 1946 and 1955, 10 years which represented the final years of the BBC’s monopoly of television broadcasting, the BBC produced a range of programmes that could be said to present, in some way, images of Jews, Jewishness and Judaism. Aimed at a predominantly non-Jewish audience, these diverse programmes included the drama and mystery of Cartier’s version of The Dybbuk, the educational Chanukah: The Jewish Festival of Dedication (tx. December 10, 1950) and the comedy of David Kossoff’s evening of Jewish folk humour (tx. September 26, 1953). Whereas this output was often intentionally pedagogic and positive in its presentation of Jews and Judaism, looking to introduce the non-Jewish viewer to Jewish religion and culture, the programmes were not always popular with the audience, or indeed nuanced, progressive or subtle in their representations. The Dybbuk, for example, was dismissed by some viewers as being of interest only to a Jewish audience, while other productions provoked letters of complaint from organisations such as the Board of Deputies, the Council of Christians and Jews, and the Anglo-Jewish Association because of their use of caricature and antisemitic stereotypes.3 The frequency of these complaints grew as television itself expanded, gradually becoming ‘a force to be reckoned with in the home’ across the first decade of postwar Britain.4 As a Jewish Chronicle article noted in April 1954: ‘TV, now no longer a luxury but an essential part of many households, is an important educational—and propaganda—medium. But unless properly controlled it can become a dangerous and inflammatory instrument’.5 The increased influence of television was cause for anxiety for some members of the Jewish community both in Britain and beyond. In November  1955, for example, several synagogues in England and Wales displayed posters produced by the Central Rabbinical Congress of the United States and Canada, which stated that ‘any Jew who wishes to remain loyal to his religious principles must not admit a television set into his house’. Television was, the posters explained, ‘a menace to the religious and moral life of the Jewish family’. In order to protect the Jewish home, ‘the last citadel, where the orthodox Jew and his family have been able to preserve purity, chastity, and the love of religion and learning’, television had been pronounced to be Issur Torah.6 There was no religious objection, as such, to television, but rather ‘to the type of entertainment provided’, with Caesar’s Friend being perhaps such a programme.7 The latest in a line of annual Easter plays, it was considered by at least one reviewer in the Jewish Chronicle as ‘likely to offend the hypersensitive Jewish listener or viewer’ and evidence of ‘the BBC’s occasionally tendentious treatment of religious themes’: The play [was] superbly acted [.  .  . but] how can inter-faith relations be advanced [.  .  .] when millions of viewers see Caiaphas and other Jewish

Another Man’s Faith?  249 priests depicted as bigoted, sinister, gloating plotters who blackmail Pilate [. . .] into agreeing to the crucifixion.8 Although the play was contentious for some of its Jewish viewers, it was popular with the BBC’s wider audience, with the BBC’s Programme Correspondence Section (PCS) receiving only eight complaints compared to 34 appreciations. Moreover, the BBC’s internal audience research awarded the play a Reaction Index score of 67, with 19% giving it an A+ rating, 38% a rating of A, and only 6% C or C–: ‘The few who did not care for this play were, almost without exception, viewers who dislike the dramatization of Biblical stories and found the play “heavy” and “gloomy” ’.9 Elsewhere in that same edition of the Jewish Chronicle, under the heading ‘The Jew and the Crucifixion Story’, Caesar’s Friend was referenced in connection with a recent sermon given by the Rev. Chaim Pearl, senior Rabbi of Birmingham Hebrew Congregation. Pearl had called the play and its predecessors ‘grossly antisemitic’ and ‘an annual Easter nightmare to the sensitive Jewish citizen’, opining that they ‘effectively brought anti-Jewish propaganda [. . .] before millions of people’ each year.10 The following week, a reply from Neville Laski, QC, the prominent former President of the Board of Deputies, was critical of Pearl’s conclusions, calling them ‘as short-sighted as your premises are ill-informed’. ‘If we Jews were more sensitive to the difficulties confronting our Christian colleagues’, he continued, ‘we might well be more appreciative of what has already been achieved, rather than critical because there are still problems to be solved’.11 Pearl’s sermon and the support for the Central Rabbinical Congress of the United States and Canada reveal the concerns and sensibilities held by a section of British Jewry towards television and its image of Jews and Judaism. However, Laski offered a different view, one which suggested celebration rather than condemnation; it was a position highlighted a week later when the Jewish Chronicle devoted a substantial amount of space to an overwhelmingly positive review of Christopher Mayhew’s documentary series Men Seeking God.12

Men Seeking God Men Seeking God, as the opening programme made clear, broke new ground in television broadcasting, looking ‘at the human race [. . .] not as members of nations, or races, divided [. . .] into the familiar pattern of frontiers, but as believers in different religions’.13 This would not offer a comprehensive or comparative analysis of the six faiths in question; neither would it present Mayhew’s own objective or critical examination. Instead, Mayhew travelled ‘to various parts of the world meeting devout adherents of the great living religions [. . .] trying to discover what their faith means personally to them’.14 Significantly, there was to be no programme on the Church of England: subtitled ‘an enquiry into other men’s faiths’, the series set out to explore those faiths considered unfamiliar and outside of the experience of the majority of viewers.

250  James Jordan Christopher Mayhew was one of several Labour politicians who had moved into television after losing their seats in the 1950 or 1951 General Elections. By 1954, he was already an experienced and popular broadcaster, the presenter of such fascinating and pioneering programmes as the 1952 International Commentary series, which looked at Africa and Race.15 Mayhew had first approached the BBC with the idea for Men Seeking God in April  1953, calling it ‘brand-new [. . .] ambitious, dangerous and fantastically expensive’.16 His original notes for the series, outlined on embossed House of Commons notepaper, summarised it as follows: The aim of the series will be to present the great living religions as their most devout adherents would want them presented. The programmes would thus not attempt to weigh up the historical or sociological importance of the religions, but rather to explain them as living spiritual forces, dominating the lives of a number of devout people. The programmes would be aimed particularly at viewers who might ask ‘Has this religion, at its best, a spiritual message for my fellow-humans and myself?’17 The idea was greeted enthusiastically by the pioneering Current Affairs producer Grace Wyndham Goldie, Head of Television Cecil McGivern, and the Rev. Francis House, the BBC’s Director of Religious Broadcasting. They all gave their support to what Goldie called ‘an idea of major importance and [something] that we ought to do [given the] lack in television of broadcasting about [a] subject of this kind’. Moreover, Goldie felt, Mayhew’s ‘popularity and skill’ meant ‘he would not be suspected of trying to put over any particular kind of religious propaganda’.18 Keen to produce the series herself, Goldie wrote to Mary Adams, Television’s Head of Talks, endorsing Mayhew’s idea and emphasising that whereas this was ostensibly a programme on religion—and therefore perhaps beyond the remit of the Current Affairs Unit—there was certainly: a case for considering this series as a background to international affairs. Whenever we attempt to go behind the surface of international problems, we come up against the conflicts of faith, ie Marxism and Christianity (notably the conflict between Marxism and the Catholic Church); Moslem and Jew in the Middle East; Moslem and Hindi in India and Pakistan. It would be interesting to go behind the surface in a series conducted by Mayhew.19 The series was approved that summer, with Mary Adams writing to Mayhew on July 18, 1953, asking him officially to proceed: ‘We all feel that the idea of the series, which you have discussed with us in general terms, is a good one and a new and exciting departure for television’. However, Adams warned Mayhew that although the programmes were ‘intended to be non-political, there is no doubt that the series will lead to controversy’. In particular, the ‘appraisement of the real meaning and value of the various religions you describe is likely to be scrutinised by experts in the religious field’. She concluded with another warning: George

Another Man’s Faith?  251 Barnes, the Director of BBC Television, was ‘naturally anxious that offence shall not be given by a surface appraisal of the meaning of the religious beliefs you will be analysing’.20 In preparation for the series, Mayhew consulted S.G.F. Brandon, Professor of Comparative Religion at the University of Manchester, asking for his help in acquiring ‘a fair general knowledge’ about religions and raising four specific questions: (1) Which religions do you think I should deal with? (2) Where should I  travel? I  cannot, unfortunately, visit China or any ironcurtain country. (3) Who should I meet? (4) What should I read? Brandon suggested Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism (Hinayana), Parsiism, Zen Buddhism and Shinto, noting that he had included Parsiism because it ‘represents the survival of Zoroastrianism. You might prefer Sikhism, which has more adherents’.21 By the time the original costings for the series came to be drawn up, this had become Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, two on Protestantism, and Summing Up, with Judaism ‘in reserve’.22 Only at the series planning conference held on July 22, 1953 was it decided that the series should comprise programmes on Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and two on Christianity, with the final order to be decided at a later date. The meeting also clarified that this should ‘be treated not as a series on “Comparative Religion” nor as simply a spectacle of curious ceremonies’ but a genuine attempt at obtaining ‘a clear insight into what each religion means to the life of a devout believer, and the effect it has on such a believer’.23 Each programme was to be 30 minutes in length, including around 20 minutes of film footage. This would comprise a close-up sound interview and contextual images, both shot on location overseas. Together these films would be used: [. . .] not as a means of illustrating a verbal description but as a means of getting across to the viewer the deeper spiritual effect of the various beliefs on the believers. To achieve this, the material filmed will progress from a general portrayal of the religious life and devotions of a selected representative of each religion and finally narrow down to his personal beliefs and feelings in relation to his religion.24 The content and nature of these films was discussed at greater length in the pre-production meetings, and in August 1953 it was agreed that the filming would follow the same basic routine: In the chosen centre we would approach, by means of film, through the city or town or locality, the house of the individual who is to be the centre of the programme. We would enter the house, meet him, see the circumstances in

252  James Jordan which he lives. He would then explain [. . .] speaking direct to the camera, what his daily life consisted of, and this would be illustrated with film which would follow him through something of his daily routine.25 The camera would show him at his place of worship, ‘watch him at prayer and generally try to follow him through a complete part of his life’. To conclude, the same individual would speak ‘direct to the camera, giving the inner as distinct from the outer nature of his worship and explaining to us the nature of his belief and the way in which his daily life and his daily worship were of significance to him in a deeper sense’.26 It was Mayhew’s responsibility to identify the ‘outstanding personalities’ and to direct the filming of the interviews, using local film unit facilities overseas, if they existed. An exhausting schedule saw him travel in turn to Italy, Israel, Pakistan, India and Burma in September and October 1953, making his principal bases in Rome, Jerusalem, Lahore, Karachi, Benares, Delhi and Rangoon. He was followed in November by a two-person BBC film unit: series assistant producer Geoffrey Woodward and cameraman Ken Higgins. Higgins and Woodward would spend 10 weeks following Mayhew’s route, looking for material that was both informative and visually striking. ‘It will be up to us’, Woodward wrote to Higgins, ‘to extract every ounce of artistic effect in our own filming sequences, and to try and catch the feeling of reverence and sincerity of our subject’.27 The first episode—‘Islam’—was transmitted on the evening of April  26, 1954. An opening introduction from Mayhew was followed by footage of prayer leader Muhammad Ali, showing him at work and prayer in Lahore, with Mayhew explaining what was being seen on screen. This was followed by the pre-filmed interview with Ali, with Mayhew asking questions that would recur across the series, such as asking Ali for his conception of God, how does God show himself, and God’s relationship to man. The programme then turned to Higgins and Woodward’s film, showing mosques, the call to prayer, services and ceremonies. ‘I wonder how that struck you’, asked Mayhew to the camera afterwards. ‘I found a lot of it very strange, a lot of it, in an uncanny way, extremely familiar’. The final section of the programme saw passages from the Qur’an, selected by Ali, being read out and then translated in the studio by Hassan Karmi, ‘a distinguished Moslem living in England’.28 In the episodes that followed, Mayhew looked at: Buddhism, interviewing U Maung Maung Ji, a Burmese Buddhist, in London, followed by a pre-filmed segment with U San Nyun in Burma; Judaism, featuring Isaac Levy and Jacob Herzog; Hinduism, a programme that did not claim to be representative of Hinduism, but rather was ‘just a portrait of a Hindu monk called Swami Lokeswaranananda’ in Calcutta; Catholicism, meeting in Rome with the Franciscan Friar Father Germanus, and then with Father Andrew Angellus in the London studio; and finally Protestantism, a portrait of the Rev CC Pande in West Bengal, followed by a studio interview with Normal Goodall, the Secretary of the International Missionary Council.29

Another Man’s Faith?  253 Controller of Television Programmes Cecil McGivern, who the previous year had given his support to Men Seeking God, praised the finished series as ‘simple, important and with nobility in it. Now that it is at an end the Television Service is going to miss it—badly’.30 It was a view shared by the press and public. Writing in the Daily Herald on June  23, 1954, Philip Phillips called Men Seeking God ‘one of the best things the BBC has done. To give us an understanding of the great religions of the world to stop us mocking another man’s faith; makes us tolerant. TV can perform no higher service’.31 Furthermore, the BBC’s internal audience research noted that whereas ‘a small number [of viewers] said that religion—like politics—should be left alone by Television [. . .] a majority [. . .] welcomed the opportunity to hear something about other people’s beliefs’.32 Nowhere in the series was this clash of religion and politics more obvious than in episode three on Judaism. In spite of Mayhew’s stated intent for the series, this episode went beyond the individual to present Judaism as a faith that was comprehensive, not limited by national boundaries, and was in some ways tied to the new, and highly political, state of Israel.

Men Seeking God. Episode 3: Judaism, tx. May 10, 1954 Transmitted at 10pm on the evening of May  10, 1954, episode three looked at Judaism ‘through the eyes of Rabbi Jacob Herzog, son of the Chief Rabbi in Jerusalem, and Isaac Levy, the Senior Jewish Chaplain to HM Forces and Minister of Hampstead Synagogue’.33 The programme started with Mayhew interviewing Levy in the studio, before a sequence of film footage illustrated Levy’s religious life at home and in the synagogue. The second film sequence then took the viewer to Israel, with a commentary by Mayhew, based predominantly on Levy’s and Herzog’s scripts, highlighting the role that land and faith played in Jewish and Israeli identity. For the ‘devout adherent’, Mayhew had wanted someone who was ‘100% orthodox Jew and probably a scholar’.34 His choice, Jacob Herzog, was the son of the Chief Rabbi in Jerusalem.35 Mayhew arrived in Israel to shoot the interview with Herzog at the start of September 1953, the second leg of his intensive two-month itinerary. The 15-minute interview was filmed by independent cameraman Eliezer Bianco on September 6. Due to budgetary constraints and the lack of facilities, this followed the standard practice of being shot on silent film with separate sound recording, a complicated and unreliable technique, as Mayhew had been warned prior to his departure. Throughout the filming, Mayhew had been concerned that the camera ‘sounded like a full-blooded machine-gun’, and that even wrapping it in a blanket failed to muffle the noise.36 Upon viewing the rushes back in the UK, Geoffrey Woodward confirmed Mayhew’s worst fears: [A]lthough the picture quality was pretty good, the voices were soon out of [synchronisation with the images. . . .] In addition [. . .] there was the constant

254  James Jordan whirr of the camera which really did (and we are not being fussy about this) sound awful. We could not have used them for this reason, even had the voices been synchronised’.37 The interview was central to the series’ ethos and so it was suggested that Mayhew return to Israel at the end of his tour to re-shoot. If that were logistically impractical, then it was asked whether arrangements could be made for Herzog, a frequent visitor to the UK, to be interviewed in London later in the year.38 Both options proved impossible to arrange and instead the decision was made to replace the interview with one shot in London. The programme’s production files suggest that Mayhew and assistant producer Geoffrey Johnson Smith were not totally unhappy at the loss of the interview with Herzog. When considering how best to re-film the lost segment, Johnson Smith had asked Mayhew if it were possible to arrange for a different setting, somewhere that looked ‘less like a high powered executive’s office’ and ‘more of a religious character’. Herzog should be asked to dress ‘in his religious regalia’ rather than his simple suit, again accentuating not only his religious character but his ‘otherness’.39 Mayhew’s objections were more concerned with the content rather than the appearance. The young rabbi had been, according to Mayhew’s notes, an unsatisfactory interviewee, with a palpable lack of energy in the 15-minute interview, which had taken nearly five hours to complete. Furthermore, although Herzog had spoken ‘intelligently and with authority’, the ‘utmost effort could not induce [him] to look and speak humanly’.40 There would be no such problem with the London interviewee, with suggestions including Dr Brodie, the UK’s Chief Rabbi, or ‘another good British Jew’.41 Mayhew eventually chose Isaac Levy, Rabbi of Hampstead Synagogue.42 Levy, the son of a tailor who had come to the United Kingdom from Poland, is perhaps best remembered today for his writings on the liberation of Belsen. He had been born and raised in London, educated at Yeshiva Etz Chaim and at Jews’ College (London University), obtaining a PhD in Rabbinical History at the School of Oriental and African Studies. After the war, he was appointed Senior Jewish chaplain to HM Forces and was awarded an OBE in the Coronation honours list of 1953. Levy would be interviewed ‘live’ in the studio, being asked ‘the same personal questions’ as had been asked of Herzog, with additional filming that would ‘demonstrate private Jewish practice’ and his daily routine.43 This would now be filmed in Hampstead rather than Jerusalem. The opening shots of the programme showed an open Torah on a lectern in the studio, with Levy visible in the background reciting in Hebrew the Shema Yisrael. Mayhew introduced Levy as ‘an orthodox Jew’ without any further explanation. He then asked Levy to translate his words into English. The ensuing scripted discussion, based in part on the questions Mayhew asked each week, led directly to the first pre-filmed sequence. This visual demonstration of ‘faith in action’ showed Levy entering his Hampstead home, with a close-up of the mezuzah and a description of its significance.44 Levy was then seen going about his daily routine, including the saying of prayers ‘in the traditional way, according to an elaborate ritual’,

Another Man’s Faith?  255 with the putting on of the tallit, and the binding of the tefillin on his head and left arm. The first section concluded with Levy performing the Kiddush service. In the second section, the viewer was taken into Hampstead synagogue as the onus shifted from private to public worship. Here, Levy was seen opening the Ark and reading the scroll in a sequence that Mayhew was clear to explain was a demonstration rather than an actual service. The film ended with close-up shots of the Hampstead synagogue’s stained glass windows, the camera focusing on the image of what Mayhew called the ‘Jewish people’s hope and inspiration—Mount Zion in Jerusalem’. Upon returning to the studio, Mayhew departed from the series’ stated purpose, asking Levy about those elements of his faith that went beyond the individual because, he said, ‘all my Jewish friends always impress on me that Judaism is very comprehensive. It’s not only a personal religion in perhaps our sense of the term: it’s a belief about the Jews as a people, about God’s purpose for them’. Levy replied: We Jews believe we cannot live in isolation. We have never lived in isolation. We have always touched the perimeter of other people’s lives. We have always been living in, and amongst other peoples. [. . .] I think it’s quite right to say, as somebody once said: “We Jews are what history has made us”. We have constantly come into contact with other peoples. We have all too frequently—I regret to say—suffered for our contact, because of persecutions, and I think it would be right to say that we have been a much-persecuted people, but we feel that even in our persecution and in our adversity there’s been a purpose, even perhaps God’s purpose for us. [. . .] Where the Jew has been persecuted, there has been indicated that the Jew has suffered for other people’s moral laxities—not that he’s always been entirely innocent. It has been said we are the “barometer of civilisation”. It was this question of history and the assertion of God’s purpose for the Jews that drew Mayhew to recall his own visit to Israel, saying that ‘even the most sceptical person must feel there’s something miraculous about the history of the Jews [. . .] about the way that after two thousand years of dispersion they have kept their identity’. Following on directly from the brief illustrated history of migration that followed, Mayhew spoke of how in 1948 ‘Jews returned [to the Promised Land] in many hundreds of thousands to form the third Jewish commonwealth’. The second montage sequence was then played. This had been compiled almost entirely from the material shot by Higgins and Woodward in Israel in December 1953.45 It was a sequence accompanied by a commentary from Mayhew, which was based heavily on the ideas and faith of Herzog and Levy. It was conceived as relating ‘to the conception in Judaism of God’s purpose for Israel and for the world’ and once again took the programme away from the individual and his faith. This had been pre-empted by assistant producer Geoffrey Johnson Smith who, although very pleased with the Israel material, had noted that there could be problems:

256  James Jordan I think that the subject is going to be a difficult one, because unless we watch our step we can so easily let part of the Israel programme turn into a piece of propaganda about the work going on in that country, instead of the main theme, religion.46 The inclusion of Levy and his performing of the daily routine was one way of addressing this concern, with his presence adding, for Woodward, a ‘personal and more intimate atmosphere into the programme’, which would balance the ‘national feeling of the Israeli film’.47 However, as will be seen, that balance was not always evident in the finished programme, and in fact the links between the two sequences could be interpreted as enhancing rather than balancing the Zionist message. The ‘national feeling’ of the second sequence was hardly surprising given the involvement of Herzog. Although ordained, he was not a practising rabbi but a civil servant, a counsellor on Jewish affairs at the Foreign Office in Jerusalem. He was also, as Mayhew noted in November the year before, ‘a strong personality, with decided views about the programme, mainly in the direction of bringing out the political as against the religious teachings of Judaism’.48 Woodward and Higgins had found Herzog ‘most helpful and co-operative’ in the filming, in fact he was almost too helpful ‘as he kept on suggesting shots he felt to be vital to the story and had to be talked out of some of them’.49 The year before, Geoffrey Johnson Smith had written to Herzog asking if he would guide Woodward and Higgins and be involved personally on-screen: This would involve establishing your personality on film, as before, and showing you as a link in the different scenes in Israel which you discussed with Mr  Mayhew. We should also very much like your voice recorded, in many instances, to form part of the commentary on this film of Israel.50 When used in conjunction with Herzog’s interview, this combination would have presented an image of Judaism as seen by an orthodox Jew living in Israel. However, the loss of the interview was compounded by the loss also of Herzog’s commentary. Although the images were used, the quality of the sound was once again so bad that it could not be utilised. In the finished version, therefore, Mayhew pre-recorded the commentary from Herzog’s script with additional suggestions made by Levy. Herzog had recommended to Woodward that the Israel material be divided into five distinct sequences: (1) The European destruction. (2) The return of the Refugees to the Promised Land. (3) The development of the country by the people. (4) The spiritual rebuilding of the existing faith. (5) The hope for the future of the Jewish Race based on the strength of their faith.51

Another Man’s Faith?  257 The broadcast version bore a very close resemblance to this, with the most significant difference being that the decision was taken to open with the return to the Promised Land, with images of men and women arriving by plane at the former Lydda airport, rather than scenes of the European destruction. This gave the film a more optimistic, forward looking tone, one which, Mayhew explained in his commentary and underlining his narrative of return, showed Jews ‘from a remote part of the Yemen, descendents of the men who left the Promised Land after the Babylonian invasion’. New arrivals were also the subject of the next scenes, with shots of Haifa and the view from Mount Carmel, ‘the immigrants’ first sight of land’. These celebratory scenes of return were followed by film of Jerusalem and Herzl’s tomb, with Mayhew describing the view across the ‘uneasy frontier’ that divided Jew and Arab in the city below. It was a city that Mayhew described as, attributing his words to Herzog, ‘the centre of our hopes for centuries [. . .] the city [. . .] to which all synagogues, all over the world, are orientated’. The mood of the film then changed as the focus briefly looked to the recent past and remembered the fate of the Jews of Europe, with shots filmed inside the Ghetto Fighters House museum in kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaoth, near Haifa. This material had been shot by Woodward and Higgins thanks to the assistance of David Landwehr, chief of the Tel-Aviv Press Information Department, who had organised both a car and interpreter for them.52 Woodward called this ‘very good stuff’, and it is indeed a moving sequence in which the camera pans from the image of an old camp uniform now on display in the museum, past an exhibition board, which recorded the numbers murdered by the Nazis, down and across the museum, being guided by a Ghetto survivor walking through the shot. The sequence ended with the founder of the museum, Miriam Novitch, displaying to the camera musical instruments that the Nazis had made from sacred scrolls. Mayhew informed the watching audience that here in Israel: [. . .] the years of tragedy are remembered too. In this museum for instance photographs and documents and the uniform of the concentration camp are reminders of the murder by the Nazis of nearly five million Jews. This was yet another sequence that could have been different. It had been as recent as April 21 that the production team decided on a number of alterations to this montage, including the shortening of the ‘persecution by Nazis’ sequence, removing footage of life in the Warsaw ghetto and scenes of destruction, leaving ‘only the old uniform, the resistance worker walking across shot and Miriam Novitch’.53 Moreover, Novitch had in fact recorded a piece for camera. Although ultimately not used and not kept by the BBC, the production file for the episode records various ‘takes’. Novitch’s comments are again revealing in terms of how the programme could have taken a different angle if there had not been technological problems: The Jewish religion was not my religion: it was the expression of national life of a people who loved its fatherland and never lost the hope to regain it. Our

258  James Jordan faith gave us this chance during centuries to hope that one day Jerusalem would be again the capital of our nation. Our faith, too, was a living bridge linking one Jewish community to the other. Faith helped the many to endure the horrors of the concentration camps, but our faith was always strongly connected to each other [sic] of our national virtues. Because of our faith—that the sense of justice and solidarity are so developed in us, we believe, and many of our people fought, and are fighting still, for justice and peace among all the nations.54 Although this sequence was not used, the programme as a whole confirmed this feeling of faith—and the attempted genocide by the Nazis—as a bridge across communities. The European destruction was also the focus of the next images, shots filmed in the Forest of Martyrs, a place to which ‘Jews who lost a friend or relative contributed a tree to this forest’. While looking back to the Holocaust, the film did not dwell on the horror of the past—a message reinforced by the re-editing of the sequence—but spoke again of the hope for a future, which was being indelibly linked to the land of Israel as Mayhew spoke of Jews being reunited with soil. Quoting again from Herzog, Mayhew spoke of how the land was: [. . .] arid, but [. . .] the Jews had refused offers of more fertile land in other parts of the world. ‘Only the Promised Land,’ he [Herzog] said, ‘could bring the Jews together again’. The planting of trees, Mayhew concluded, was ‘more than a way of improving the soil: they are symbols for the Jews of faith and hope in the Promised Land’. The film then cut to the striking interior of the synagogue Connegliano Veneto, with shots of the celebration of Hanukkah and the seemingly incongruous sight of a hatted rabbi opening the Ark, a sequence which recalled the Hampstead footage seen earlier in the programme. ‘Don’t be worried because the rabbi wore a trilby’, wrote Woodward to Johnson Smith, ‘they have to be covered, and this seems a typical way of doing it, but interestingly unusual to our eyes’.55 If this sequence emphatically underlined that Israel was both the source of renewal and the Jewish home, then by visually linking the two demonstrations, the sequence made clear that the ‘interestingly unusual’ Jews of Israel were connected to the more familiar Jews in London. It was a link also made in Mayhew’s commentary: The Ark of the Covenant and the scrolls are more ornate and much older than in Hampstead, but their significance is precisely the same. And Jacob Herzog told me that it was the strict observance of the Torah, with the same use of ritual objects like these that held the Jewish people together in different parts of the world and from one century to another. ‘They united us in time, and in space,’ he said. ‘They were a homeland for us when we had no other.’ The film ended with a pan view from Mount Zion, the final visual signifier of a common heritage and future shared by Jews of Jerusalem and Hampstead, with Mayhew quoting Herzog one last time:

Another Man’s Faith?  259 When I see how after two thousand years God has restored my people to the Promised Land, how can I doubt my faith? The programme then returned to the studio, where Levy and Mayhew discussed the image of Judaism just seen, before Levy concluded with the ‘beautiful words’ of the prophet Malachi: Have we not all one Father; Hath not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously Every man against his brother?

CONCLUSION Whereas episode three was watched by only 22% of the viewing public (the lowest figure of the series), it scored an impressive 70 on the BBC’s Reaction Index, suggesting that whereas fewer watched, those who did found it excellent. Although there was little by way of specific appreciation in the press for the programme on Judaism, the Yorkshire Post for that week, under the headline of ‘Well Done, TV!’, was effusive in its praise for ‘a masterpiece in documentary, brilliantly planned and executed, thoughtful, stimulating, compact and concise. A peak, in other words, of TV. [. . .] It won respect and it challenged the viewer to question. What could be more successful?’.56 The most detailed response came from the review in the Jewish Chronicle of May 14, 1954, mentioned above. This was fulsome in its praise for the programme, with two columns on page nine devoted to the programme, a striking level of coverage when a television review could more normally expect only a few lines further towards the rear of the paper. The article acclaimed the programme as a whole, with particular praise for one standout figure: Britain’s millions of viewers could hardly have failed to be impressed by the ‘star’ performer, the photogenic Rev I Levy [. . .] as he explained the meaning of Judaism, took us through his beautiful house of prayer, and outlined synagogue procedure.57 The review also stated that ‘the reborn Jewish State was shown in an excellent light’, something that seems remarkable given the subsequent career of Mayhew and his relations with Anglo-Jewry. As Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in the 1940s, Mayhew had received a death threat from the Stern Gang. In later years he gained a reputation for being anti-Israel, with his public pronouncements on the subject often leading to controversy. But, in Men Seeking God, he had produced a programme which was overwhelmingly pro-Israel, so much so that he later recalled in his autobiography how the programme had led to the planting of ‘The Christopher Mayhew Grove’.58 In the book to accompany the series Mayhew wrote that ‘none of the programmes tried to describe a religion comprehensively or objectively—still less to

260  James Jordan subject it to criticism—but simply to show what it meant to one person believing in it’.59 It was obvious, therefore, that the choice of interviewee would be pivotal. Mayhew’s brief was not only ‘to find people who were representative of their religion at its best’ but those who could express themselves ‘clearly and concisely’.60 He selected his interviewees, therefore, ‘not only because they were devout, but also because they spoke excellent English, and had faces and personalities likely to make an impact on the screen’. The near unanimous praise for the programme was tempered only by frustrations with the limitations of television as a medium for dealing with such important issues, and a sense that the chosen interviewee was not representative of his faith. Reginald Pound in The Listener, for example, felt that Ali ‘reflected a little too thoroughly the comparatively languid impulses of western religious ideas’,61 while the Sunday Times suggested that the first episode in the series answered the question of ‘Upon what does a Muslim dwell when he prays?’, but had failed to address the question of ‘Upon what does an uneducated Muslim dwell?’.62 More bluntly, Robert Cannell in the Daily Express felt that the Buddhists on screen in episode two ‘were utterly unrepresentative of the vast crowds which use the temples’.63 This sentiment was echoed in the News Chronicle, arguing that Mayhew’s series was ‘absorbing but hardly representative’.64 This had been highlighted as a potential problem at the end of 1953 by Mary Adams, who was concerned that the series was ‘making too much use of professional religious personalities who were English speaking and were also people who could be said in some cases to express the more “Liberal” interpretations of their respective faiths’.65 It was a point that was addressed by Mayhew in the book adapted from the series in which he confirmed that in selecting the interviewees, ‘Emphasis had been placed … on the personality of the believer rather than the historical background of his faith, which would have been hard to televise adequately; and the particular believers had been selected not only because they spoke excellent English, and had faces and personalities likely to make an impact on the screen’.66 This was also true of episode three in which Levy, a British citizen and recent recipient of the OBE, was the primary ‘other’, but he was hardly an unfamiliar figure. This distinctive approach, although not as Mayhew originally intended, confused throughout the notion of the self and other, both in what was said and what was seen, with the Jewish believers on screen being both here and there, both familiar and unfamiliar, part of the fabric of modern Britain and ‘interestingly unusual’ in some of the scenes shot in Israel. In this combination of British and Israeli Jew, in the common links between the two films within the episode, and particularly in the commentary that accompanied the second half of the programme, this episode went beyond the stated focus on the personal, presenting Judaism as a faith which transcended national and geographical borders in a programme that was remarkably positive about the state of Israel. Back in July 1953, S.G.F. Brandon had reminded Mayhew that he had to remember ‘that there is considerable divergence in faith and practice between orthodox (traditional) and liberal Judaism’, but the image of Judaism in Men Seeking God seemed to conceal difference. That is, whereas in the book Mayhew explained Levy ‘appears to stand

Another Man’s Faith?  261 somewhere midway between the ultra-orthodox and the “liberal” or “reform” Jews’, there was no such explanation on screen because, Mayhew reasoned, any discussion of the difference between ultra-orthodox, orthodox, liberal and reform would have run counter to the series’ aims. Levy’s description of Judaism, he concluded, would ‘probably be generally acceptable to the great majority of devout Jews throughout the world’.67 The inclusion of images of both British and Israeli Jewish life and religious practice, with a commentary identifying more similarities than differences, elided the complexity of Judaism, Jewishness, Anglo-Jewish and Israeli identity, while connecting Jews the world over through religious faith, the Holocaust and the land of Israel. This was a world away from the image of Judaism seen in Caesar’s Friend. As a token of gratitude, Mayhew sent a copy of the book of the series to Walter Eytan at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Jerusalem. Eytan replied: ‘I have never seen a TV programme in my life, and possibly I never shall, but I am beginning to understand from what I hear and read that TV has had, and has every day, an almost unimaginably powerful effect on the minds of millions of people’.68 NOTES   1 Pamela Melkinoff, “Cartier the Creator: Epics on the Small Screen,” Jewish Chronicle, May 31, 1963, 36.   2 James Jordan, “ ‘What We Have Gained Is Infinitely More Than That Small Loss’: Rudolph Cartier and The Dybbuk,” Jewish Culture and History 11 (2009): 156–71.   3 For an overview of the period, see James Jordan, “Assimilated, Integrated, Other: An Introduction to Jews and British Television, 1946–1955,” Jewish Culture and History 12 (2010): 251–66. For a more detailed case study of one of the more controversial drama productions, see James Jordan, “The Prisoner (1952) and the Perpetrator in Early Post-war British Television,” Holocaust Studies 17, nos.  2/3 (2011): 207–29.   4 “The TV Screen,” Jewish Chronicle, January 14, 1955, 20. The number of combined television and radio licences, which had been only 350,000 in 1950, reached nearly 6,000,000 five years later, rising to 10,000,000 by the end of the decade. For an assessment of the growth of television in the immediate postwar period, including details of coverage and licences, see BBC Annual Reports, 1946–1960. For more general background to the BBC and development of television in this period, the most informative overview remains Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, vol. 4, Sound and Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).   5 “Television: Caesar’s Friend,” Jewish Chronicle, April 23, 1954, 23.   6 “May Jews Watch Television? Rabbis Pronounce Issur Torah,” Jewish Chronicle, November 11, 1955, 9.   7 “Keep Television Out of Home: Appeal by Rabbis,” The Guardian, November 14, 1955, 4.   8 “Television: Caesar’s Friend,” Jewish Chronicle, April  23, 1954, 23. It had been staged before, most recently in May  1947, with Burmese-Jewish actor Abraham Sofaer, a familiar face on 1950s television in ‘ethnic’ roles, playing Caiaphas. In 1948 and 1950, there were versions of John Masefield’s verse play Good Friday (tx. March 26, 1948 and April 7, 1950), and in 1949 A Man’s House (tx. April 15, 1949) by John Drinkwater, again starring Sofaer, this time playing the merchant Salathiel, head of the ‘well-to-do Jewish household’ at the heart of the story. The Marvellous

262  James Jordan History of St Bernard (tx. April 11, 1952), starring Claire Bloom as Marguerite de Milans, followed in 1952, while in 1953 there were two plays: Behold the Man (tx. April 3, 1953) and R.F. Delderfield’s Spark in Judea (tx. April 5, 1953).   9 PCS to CPTel, April 20 and 26, 1954, BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham (hereafter BBC WAC), R41/211 PCS Television Memos 1952–1954; and BBC WAC Audience Research Report VR/54/198. 10 “The Jew and the Crucifixion Story,” Jewish Chronicle, April 23, 1954, 17. See also “Passion Sermon Leads to Controversy,” Birmingham Post, May 3, 1954. 11 “Crucifixion Story on Television,” Jewish Chronicle, April 30, 1954, 9. In response to the outcry over Caesar’s Friend, Sidney Solomon of the Board of Deputies suggested to the BBC that any future Easter play on television should be preceded with an introductory talk, an idea that Michael Barry, the BBC’s Head of Drama, thought ‘wise and helpful’. ‘An authoritative talk on Palestine in the time of Jesus’, Barry replied to Solomon, ‘would widen the appreciation of those watching the programme that followed and, indeed, this kind of introduction is a device we use from time to time’; Michael Barry to Sidney Salomon, April 22, 1954, BBC WAC T5/74 TV Drama: Caesar’s Friend. 12 “Men Seeking God: TV Programme on Judaism,” Jewish Chronicle, May  14, 1954, 9. 13 Telediphone recording, Men Seeking God, “Islam,” tx. April 26, 1954, BBC WAC TV Talks Scripts. 14 “Men Seeking God,” Radio Times, May 7, 1954. Across the series Mayhew visited Italy, Israel, Pakistan, India and Burma where he and his audience learnt about Islam (tx. April 26, 1954), Buddhism (tx. May 3, 1954), Judaism (tx. May 10, 1954), Hinduism (tx. May 17, 1954), Catholicism (“Franciscan Friar,” tx. May 24, 1954) and, finally, Protestantism (“Indian Methodist,” tx. May 31, 1954). 15 For more on Mayhew’s career in broadcasting, see his autobiography, Christopher Mayhew, Time to Explain (London: Hutchinson, 1987); and Grace Wyndham Goldie, Facing the Nation: Television and Politics, 1936–1976 (London: Bodley Head, 1977). 16 Mayhew to Goldie, dated ‘mid-April 53’ in Mayhew 12/6, Papers of Sir Christopher Mayhew, Liddell Hart Military Archives, King’s College London (hereafter LHMA). The author is grateful to the BBC Written Archives Centre and the Trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives for permission to use the material. 17 Undated note, Mayhew 12/6: Men Seeking God, LHMA. 18 Goldie to Adams, May 13, 1953, BBC WAC T32/253/7 Men Seeking God: Planning. 19 Goldie to McGivern, June 3, 1953, BBC WAC T32/253/7. 20 Minutes, July 22, 1953, BBC WAC T32/253/7. 21 Mayhew to Brandon, July 14, 1953; and Brandon to Mayhew, July 15, 1953, Mayhew 12/6: Men Seeking God, LHMA. 22 BBC WAC T32/253/3. 23 Minutes, July 22, 1953, BBC WAC T32/253/7. 24 Minutes, July 22, 1953, BBC WAC T32/253/7. 25 Minutes, August 4, 1953, BBC WAC T32/253/7. Goldie suggested that Woodward contact Aidan Crawley, Lord Samuel in Palestine (Edwin Samuel) and Robert Henriques in the search for material; Goldie to Woodward, July 13, 1953, BBC WAC T32/253/7. 26 Minutes, August 4, 1953, BBC WAC T32/253/7; and Woodward to George Rottiner, BBC Films, August 26, 1953, BBC WAC T32/253/4 Men Seeking God: Film Unit. 27 Woodward to Ken Higgins, September 11, 1953, BBC WAC T32/253/4. 28 The descriptions and details of the programmes are taken from the episode scripts in BBC WAC TV Talks Scripts 1946–1955.

Another Man’s Faith?  263 29 The BBC programme files are BBC WAC T6/203 TV Films: Men Seeking God and BBC WAC T32/253 TV Talks: Men Seeking God. The latter is subdivided into: BBC WAC T32/253/1 Foreign Filming; T32/253/2 Correspondence with Mayhew; T32/253/3 Costings; T32/253/4 Film Unit; T32/253/5 General Production File; T32/253/6 Organisation; T32/253/7 Preliminary Policy and Contract Negotiations; T32/253/8 Programme 1: Islam b/c April 26, 1954; T32/253/9 Programme 2: Buddhism b/c May  3, 1954; T32/253/10 Programme 3: Judaism b/c May  10, 1954; T32/253/11 Programme 4: Hindu Monk b/c May 17, 1954; T32/253/12 Programme 5: Franciscan Friar b/c May  24, 1954; T32/253/13 Programme 6: Indian Christian b/c May 31, 1954; T32/253/14 General 1953–1955; and T32/253/15 General 1957–1960. 30 McGivern to Mayhew, June 1, 1954, Mayhew 12/2, LHMA. 31 Philip Phillips, “I  Like Pickles and Mayhew and Music For You,” Daily Herald, June 23, 1954. 32 BBC Audience Research Report VR/54/226 Men Seeking God: An Enquiry into Other Men’s Faiths, no. 1 Islam. 33 “Men Seeking God,” Radio Times, May 7, 1954. 34 Minutes, August 19, 1953, T32/253/5 MSG General. 35 Undated note, Mayhew 12/6: Men Seeking God, LHMA. 36 Mayhew to Woodward, September 8, 1953; and September 15, 1953, BBC WAC T32/253/2. 37 The synchronisation of sound and image was notoriously difficult to achieve and Mayhew had been given detailed advice before leaving; Woodward to Mayhew, September 25, 1953, BBC WAC T32/253/2. 38 One other option suggested was that enquiries could be made with the Israeli Motion Picture Company in London to see whether it would be possible for them to re-film Herzog’s interview in Israel. There is nothing to suggest this was followed up. 39 Woodward to Mayhew, September 25, 1953, BBC WAC T32/253/2. 40 Mayhew to Woodward, September 8, 1953, BBC WAC T32/253/2. 41 Mayhew’s schedule allowed no time for a return visit to Israel, and, by November 1953, it was clear that Herzog would not be in London during the winter. The production team also rejected the idea of finding a different interviewee in Jerusalem, thinking it inadvisable given Herzog’s ‘prominent position’; Mayhew to Woodward, September 29, 1953; and Woodward to Mayhew, October 7, 1953, BBC WAC T32/253/2. 42 Mayhew telephone message, December  16, 1953, BBC WAC T32/253/1. Levy’s biographical details are drawn from his obituaries by Michael Freedland, The Guardian, May 3, 2005, www.guardian.co.uk/news/2005/may/03/guardianobituaries.religion (accessed August 20, 2013); and Musa Moris Farhi and Anthony Rudolf, Independent, May  19, 2005, www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/the-revdr-isaac-levy-6145843.html (accessed August 20, 2013). 43 Mayhew to Johnson Smith, November  9, 1953, BBC WAC T32/253/1; Mayhew added ‘although we should ask both to do it, and choose the best’. 44 The book published to accompany the series contains a version of Levy’s interview as well as a series of photographs taken of the film sequence. This includes an image of the mezuzah, which has been printed upside down. See Christopher Mayhew, Men Seeking God (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1955), 62–77, passim. 45 The presence of the BBC camera crew made an impact and was used for their own purposes by Israel radio, who requested that they be interviewed and asked for their ‘personal reactions to Israel’. Woodward to Johnson Smith, December  11, 1953, BBC WAC T32/253/4 TV Talks: Men Seeking God: Film Unit. 46 Johnson Smith to Woodward, December 29, 1953, BBC WAC T32/253/4 TV Talks: Men Seeking God: Film Unit.

264  James Jordan 47 Woodward to Mayhew, March 8, 1954, BBC WAC T32/253/10. 48 Mayhew to Johnson Smith, November 9, 1953, BBC WAC T32/253/1. 49 Woodward to Johnson Smith, December 11, 1953, BBC WAC T32/253/10. 50 Smith to Herzog, November 6, 1953, T32/253/1. 51 Woodward to Johnson Smith, December  11, 1953, BBC WAC T32/253/4 and T32/253/10. The programme file in the BBC WAC retains the camera shots under these headings, as compiled by Woodward. 52 Woodward was especially grateful to Jack Wolksberg of the International Press Division, Jerusalem, ‘a chap who has become one of Us—we even had him doing the clapper board [. . .] it is mainly due to Jack that we have got what we have shot’; Woodward to Johnson Smith, December 11, 1953, BBC WAC T32/253/10. Other assistance was given by: Geoffrey Wigoder, ‘The Voice of Zion’; L. Pyetan of the Israeli Government’s Press Division, Tel-Aviv; Mrs  Klausner-Brandstetter, Israel Motion Picture Studios, Tel Aviv; Moshe Pearlman, Israel Broadcasting Corporation; and Michael Arnon, the press attaché at the Israeli Embassy in London. Woodward to Goldie, June 7, 1954, BBC WAC T32/253/14. 53 Undated memo, BBC WAC T32/253/10. 54 BBC WAC T32/253/10. Miriam Novitch was in the UK at the time of transmission visiting various libraries to collect material on ghettoes and resistance for the Ghetto Fighters’ House and to speak at a memorial for the poet Itzhak Katznelson. “Ghetto Fighters’ House,” Jewish Chronicle, April 30, 1954, 6; and “Katznelson Anniversary,” Jewish Chronicle, May 14, 1954, 27. 55 Woodward to Johnson Smith, December  11, 1953, BBC WAC T32/253/4 and T32/253/10. 56 “Well Done, TV!,” Yorkshire Post, May 14, 1954. 57 “Men Seeking God: TV Programme on Judaism,” Jewish Chronicle, May  14, 1954, 9. 58 Mayhew, Time to Explain, 162–3. 59 Mayhew, Men Seeking God, 8. 60 Mayhew, Men Seeking God, 8. 61 Reginald Pound, “Critic on the Hearth,” The Listener, May 6, 1954, 796. 62 R.R., “Television,” Sunday Times, May 2, 1954. 63 Robert Cannell, “So Much Is Left Unsaid, Mr.  Mayhew,” Daily Express, May 4, 1954. 64 James Thomas, “Why Not Ordinary Men, Mr  Mayhew?” News Chronicle, May 4, 1954. 65 Smith to Adams, November 11, 1953, BBC WAC T32/253/5. 66 Mayhew, Men Seeking God, 7. 67 Mayhew, Men Seeking God, 62. 68 Eytan to Mayhew, March 20, 1955, Mayhew 12/2, LHMA.

16 The Absent, the Partial and the Iconic in Archival Photographs of the Holocaust Isabel Wollaston

In 1986, Sybil Milton estimated that there were over two million photographs of the Holocaust in public archives.1 Today, Yad Vashem claims to have the largest Holocaust-related photographic archive with over 214,000 photographs, c.400 albums, 9,000 collections, and c.130,000 photographs attached to Pages of Testimony.2 Despite such numbers, this photographic record is incomplete, with what we do have standing in for, or pointing towards, what is missing either because no photographs were taken, none survived, or they have yet to enter the public domain. Which photographs documentary filmmakers, curators of museums or publishers use, therefore, depends in part on what is known and accessible at any given time. What is, nevertheless, a substantial photographic record is rarely utilised to the full: there is a tendency to rely on a relatively small number of images, some of which have become iconic, and now function as visual shorthand for the Holocaust or aspects of it. This chapter explores how archival photographs are used (some critics would say misused) in visually representing the Holocaust, reflecting on how this usage evolves over time, with reference to three case studies, each of which was taken from a different perspective for very different purposes: (1) the Sonderkommando photographs (Auschwitz II-Birkenau, summer 1944); (2) the American photographer and filmmaker Julien Bryan’s photograph of Kazimiera Mika taken during the siege of Warsaw (September 1939); and (3) a photograph from the so-called Auschwitz Album of a woman and children walking down the road between sectors BIIc–d in Auschwitz II-Birkenau (May 1944). Each of these images is well known, but they are not all iconic. Of the three, the second, whilst familiar in a Polish context,3 is less well known in Western Europe, Israel and the United States, suggesting that there is national and cultural difference within the visual iconography of the Holocaust. Each case study is part of a sequence of photographs rarely reproduced in full, highlighting the issue of selectivity. This chapter is distinctive both in its use of case studies and exploration of the different strategies in deploying archival photographs adopted within museums, paying particular attention to the approaches in two more recent, and therefore comparatively understudied contexts: the Holocaust Exhibition, Imperial War Museum London (IWM), which opened in June 2000; and the Holocaust History Museum (HHM), which opened in March 2005 and is the centrepiece of the comprehensive redevelopment of Yad Vashem.

266  Isabel Wollaston USING AND MISUSING ARCHIVAL PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE HOLOCAUST Photographs related to the Holocaust fall into different categories, such as portrayals of ‘the world that was’; those taken by perpetrators, victims, by and/or for resistance groups; aerial reconnaissance photographs by the Allies; or photographs by those liberating the camps. There is an increasing number of exhibitions and publications of photographs of ruins of the Jewish past and/or Holocaust-related sites in the present. A striking embodiment of this trend is ‘Traces of Memory: A Contemporary Look at the Jewish Past in Poland’, permanent exhibition of the Galicia Jewish Museum (GJM), Kraków (2004).4 Stills from archival film are widely reproduced as photographs; that of a young girl peering from a freight wagon in a transport departing from Westerbork to Auschwitz on May 19, 19445 is now ‘one of the most iconic images of the Holocaust’.6 For years the identity of the girl was unknown, but she was widely presumed to be Jewish.7 Then in 1994 a Dutch journalist identified her as nine-year-old Sinti, Settela Steinbach.8 Her image and story now feature prominently in books, films and exhibitions representing the Holocaust in the Netherlands, the experience of Sinti and Roma, and/ or children during the Holocaust.9 Raul Hilberg points out that, although ‘Jews are the most frequent figures in Holocaust photographs [.  .  .] they contributed the smallest portion of the photographic record. Eventually their cameras were confiscated, and relatively few photographers in the Jewish community worked clandestinely to record the fate of Jewry on film’.10 Personal and family photographs are used to illustrate, celebrate and mourn the individuals, communities and way of life that was destroyed during the Holocaust, and, insofar as possible, to provide a visual record from the perspective of the victims. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s (USHMM) Tower of Faces served as an inspiration, even a template, for the display of such photographs. Other powerful examples include the Sauna exhibition in Auschwitz II-Birkenau, ‘Life before the Nazis’ in the IWM’s Holocaust Exhibition, and the Hall of Names in the HHM, Yad Vashem. Roman Vishniac’s photographs are also exhibited and reconfigured as a tribute to communities on the brink of destruction, as in the USHMM.11 One strategy that seeks to counterbalance the dependence on images taken by the perpetrators is to utilise the considerably smaller number of clandestine images taken by ghetto photographers such as Mordechai Grosman and Henryk Rozencwajg-Ross in the Łódź ghetto, and George Kadish (Hirsh Kadushin) in the Kovno ghetto, or the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz discussed in detail below. Grosman and Rozencwajg-Ross both worked in the ghetto’s department of statistics. Alongside their official duties, they clandestinely recorded the harsh realities of life in the ghetto, including deportations and public executions. Grosman’s photographs are the more familiar because they are more widely used.12 It may be that there is limited awareness of the range of Rozencwajg-Ross’ work: some photographs were submitted as evidence at the Eichmann trial and use is made of clandestine images of deportations and hangings, but his photographs of the

Archival Photographs of the Holocaust  267 ghetto elite only entered the public domain relatively recently.13 It is equally probable that Grosman’s photographs are preferred because of their greater capacity to generate empathy and/or pity for the victims. Howard Jacobson describes them as ‘beautiful’, despite their subject matter, because they enable the viewer to look at the men, women and children of the Łódź ghetto ‘with exquisite pity and affection, as into the eyes of people we love’,14 that is, to identify with those depicted rather than see them as ‘other’. Rozencwajg-Ross’ photographs of the ghetto elite are unusual in portraying the complexities of social organisation and power structures in the ghetto, and can therefore provoke more ambivalent responses. For example, Robert Jan van Pelt recalls his ‘feeling of apprehension and even an unexpected annoyance’ that such ‘privilege amidst general destitution’ existed.15 That the photographs went on public display only after his death suggests Rozencwajg-Ross himself was concerned about how they would be received. The vast majority of archival photographs were taken by perpetrators or liberators. The latter, however, document the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. For Susan Sontag they are potentially ‘misleading because they show the camps at the moment the Allied troops marched in. What makes the images unbearable—the piles of corpses, the skeletal survivors—was not at all typical for the camps, which, when they were functioning, exterminated their inmates systematically (by gas, not starvation and illness)’.16 Vast numbers of photographs taken by the perpetrators survived and bear witness to the extent to which ‘photography was a routine part of the extermination process in Nazi Germany’.17 They constitute an official record, generally taken for propaganda or administrative purposes, for example, to document the construction and functioning of concentration camps, or ‘mug shots’ taken on arrest and/or arrival at such camps. This official record is complemented by ‘unofficial’ snapshots (often collated into albums), some of which were for private consumption, others for wider circulation.18 The motivation for taking such snapshots varied. Whether they are understood as souvenirs and/or ‘trophies’ can only be determined on a case-by-case basis, insofar as this is possible given the evidence available.19 Relying on atrocity photographs taken by the perpetrators to represent the Holocaust is particularly problematic if they embody ‘a Nazi gaze’ objectifying, humiliating and violating those photographed. Collectively atrocity photographs embody a desire to record and/or flaunt the deed, staging then recording state-sanctioned murder as spectacle, entertainment even. Their composition suggests that the photographer could operate overtly with time to frame the picture (in contrast to the poor professional quality of covertly taken photographs, such as those by the Auschwitz Sonderkommando), and was often located behind or beside the killer with the camera in the approximate eye-line of the gun. Sometimes the killer seems to pose for the camera. Given their nature, can re-presenting such staged violations for public consumption in educational and commemorative contexts ever be justified? Curators often defend the decision to display such photographs by arguing that they play an essential role in conveying the true horror of what took place. Thus Suzanne Bardgett, former Project Director of the IWM’s Holocaust Exhibition, recalls that her team debated the issue but concluded ‘we

268  Isabel Wollaston must not censor the truth’.20 This response prioritises an educational agenda over ethical concerns about the appropriateness of putting such images on public display or religious sensitivities (for example about modesty). Susan Crane challenges this justification, countering that it is equally if not more likely that ‘the more familiar we are with atrocity images, the more debilitated our moral and ethical responses become, and the more likely atrocities are to occur’. Contra Bardgett, Crane is adamant that ‘more thorough knowledge of the Holocaust has never impeded the continued occurrences of genocide’.21 Paul Salmons, whilst IWM’s Holocaust Education Coordinator, also challenged Bardgett’s justification, arguing that ‘the Holocaust can be taught effectively without using any photographs of piles of naked bodies, and the overuse of such imagery can be harmful’.22 Despite curators’ best intentions, there is also a risk that putting such images on public display will titillate or inspire ‘morbid curiosity’.23 Making an ethical decision not to display such photographs or film footage in a more general Holocaust exhibition is not to ‘censor the truth’, but to be acutely aware of the implications of how that truth is presented. The extensive use of atrocity photographs and what little film footage there is of Einsatzgruppen aktions suggests that there is more support for Bardgett’s position than Crane’s advocacy of ‘choosing not to look’.24 Even an exhibition such as the GJM’s Traces of Memory, which deliberately looks away in the sense that it consists solely of photographs taken in the present, is premised on the assumption that visitors are likely to be familiar with archival images, including atrocity photographs, from school, TV and/or visiting sites such as Auschwitz, that is, it seeks to complement and challenge rather than replace more conventional approaches to the visual representation of the Holocaust. Yet in ‘looking’, whether this be curators putting such images on public display or visitors jostling to see them, elements of the original violation of death as public spectacle are replicated, even though the intention and the power relations between killer/spectator and their victims at the moment of death and curators/viewers of such photographs in a museum and those photographed are very different.25 I would, however, argue that there are specific contexts in which the display of atrocity photographs is justified when contextualised within a serious exploration of who the perpetrators of such crimes were and the nature of the crimes themselves. Two particularly powerful but very different examples of such an approach are: the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung’s exhibition Verbrechen der Wehrmacht. Dimensionen des Vernichtungskrieges 1941–1944 (March 1, 1995–November 1, 1999, withdrawn following criticism of its historical accuracy, redesigned and exhibited from November 28, 2001–March 28, 2004); and, more recent, the permanent exhibition of the Topography of Terror Documentation Centre (2010) on the site in Berlin where the key institutions of the SS and police were based, which offers a detailed examination of the Nazi system of terror and the nature of perpetration as run from this particular location. In addition, if atrocity photographs are to be shown, curators and publishers could decide, out of respect for the victims’ privacy at the moment of death, and with at least some concession to concerns about modesty, to exhibit only those where the victims cannot be directly identified

Archival Photographs of the Holocaust  269 and/or their facial expressions are not visible, for example, the iconic photograph of the woman and child at Ivangorod (Ukraine) or the rear view of women about to be shot at Liepaja (Latvia). Unlike Traces of Memory, the majority of Holocaust-related exhibitions are dominated by archival photographs and film, and are characterised by a ‘striking repetition of the same very few images, used over and over again iconically and emblematically to signal this event’.26 Even a cursory survey of exhibitions, publications, films, works of art, and websites demonstrates the existence of a common visual vocabulary, iconography even, of instantly recognisable symbols, photographs and film clips. Some iconic photographs have now acquired complex cultural afterlives of their own, notably that of a young boy with hands raised from the so-called Stroop Report recording the suppression of the Warsaw ghetto uprising.27 Decisions on which images to use may be pragmatic, dictated by availability, but the primary consideration remains their ability to encapsulate an event or experience and/or their likely impact on the viewer. Such decisions risk becoming self-perpetuating with photographs preferred on the grounds that they will be more effective precisely because they are more familiar, serving as points of recognition. Dorit Harel, designer of the HHM, deliberately positioned iconic photographs at key points in the exhibition, enlarging them so they stood out.28 Bardgett recalls discussing the advantages and disadvantages of using iconic photographs in the IWM’s Holocaust Exhibition: It seemed important to avoid including too much that was familiar from other well-known Holocaust displays. [. . .] On the other hand many “iconic” images—the SA man gesticulating at the crowds outside a broken shop front the morning after Kristallnacht, the mother clutching her child as they are about to be shot on the eastern front, the British soldier using a bulldozer to bury dead bodies at Belsen—had such power that it seemed self-defeating to exclude them simply because they are on show elsewhere.29 A further significant factor influencing how the Holocaust is visually represented is a widespread belief that these events are ‘best’ (that is, most appropriately) portrayed in black-and-white. Steven Spielberg is an influential advocate of this approach, insisting that ‘when we think or dream of the Holocaust, it’s always in black and white. [. . .] Colour is wrong for the subject’.30 He suggests our cultural memory of the period, drawn primarily from film and TV, consists of black-andwhite images. This is a popular perception, and, in the 1990s, documentaries such as The Second World War in Colour (ITV, 1999) were marketed as noteworthy precisely because they revealed ‘hidden’ or recently discovered colour footage.31 The result, particularly in exhibitions, is to emphasise the sharp visual contrast between black-and-white/sepia photographs and the strong vibrant colours of the paraphernalia associated with the Nazi Party and the Third Reich. The contrast between a black-and-white past and the colour of the present is central to Alain Resnais’ artistic vision in Nuit et Brouillard (1955), which cuts between archival imagery and contemporary colour footage of Auschwitz. Darius

270  Isabel Wollaston Jablonski’s Fotoamator (1999) inverts Resnais’ approach by juxtaposing archival colour photographs of the Łódź ghetto with black-and-white footage of the city in the present. Claude Lanzmann refused to include any archival footage in Shoah (1985), filming only in the present, predominantly in colour. Both Jablonski and Lanzmann sought to challenge viewers’ expectations of what a visual representation of the Holocaust should be, using colour to break down the boundaries of past and present, and stress that the Holocaust, or its traces, is very much part of the now. The use of black-and-white photographs may, however, be pragmatic, reflecting what was available when designing an exhibition. Thus, there are no colour photographs and no audiovisual in the permanent exhibition in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and State Museum (Blocks 4–7, 11), which has remained largely unchanged since 195532 (a replacement is under development). This differs fundamentally from the multimedia approach in national exhibitions at the site redesigned since 1989,33 and in stark contrast to the USHMM’s permanent exhibition (1993), which makes prominent use of colour slides of the Łódź ghetto discovered in 1987.34 The more recent IWM Holocaust Exhibition is contemporary in its extensive use of audiovisual media (including colour footage of the Third Reich), but more traditional in using few colour photographs, for example, one in the section on the ghettos and one of the liberation of Buchenwald.35 THE SONDERKOMMANDO PHOTOGRAPHS The power of archival photographs of the Holocaust is widely acknowledged. Raye Farr, founding director of the USHMM’s Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive, believes that ‘regardless of their provenance, regardless of the limits of our knowledge of their details, it is the images, whether moving or still, that reach out most directly, that shake and reveal and persuade. It is the images that seem most incontrovertible as evidence to the layman’.36 Raul Hilberg acknowledges that archival photographs perform a valuable service in depicting detail that eyewitnesses might not think to comment on, or even remember, yet is of value to the historian.37 Despite widespread belief in their power to move and inform, critics such as Georges Didi-Huberman complain that photographs are frequently treated unprofessionally, becoming ‘generally ill seen images [. . .] ill seen because they are ill said: poorly described, poorly captioned, poorly classed, poorly reproduced, poorly used in the historiography of the Shoah’.38 His lament was prompted, in part, by concern over how the Sonderkommando photographs are, in his view, frequently misused. This sequence of four is normally reproduced as a trio (or pair), often cropped as in Figures 16.1–16.2 below (for example, to reduce or remove the doorframe in two of the photographs) and/or retouched to provide a more focused image.39 Such practices seek to highlight what is considered essential about the photographs, namely that they are the sole direct visual evidence of the process of mass murder at Auschwitz. Little attention is paid to their order or to the existence of a fourth. The number of references to ‘three’

Archival Photographs of the Holocaust  271 Sonderkommando photographs suggests either a lack of awareness that a fourth exists or, more likely, the fourth photograph is omitted because it shows nothing of the killing process at Auschwitz, just a blur of branches and sky.40 Three photographs are reproduced on memorial boards at the site where they are thought to have been taken. The accompanying text reads: These three photographs are the only remaining pictures of Auschwitz actually to have been taken clandestinely by prisoners. One shows Jewish women being driven naked to the Gas Chamber of Crematorium V where they were to be murdered; the other two show the bodies of people who had been gassed being burned in the open air next to Crematorium V. Cropped versions of these photographs can also be found in several of the museum’s publications.41 Yet to crop and/or touch up these photographs alters what is arguably most significant about them: they were taken clandestinely as an act of resistance at considerable personal risk. Differing accounts of who took them and how the camera was obtained share a common core: this was a group activity by several Sonderkommando in liaison with the camp resistance and those outside. A case can be made that the fourth neglected photograph is the most revealing because its failure to show anything of the killing process bears witness to the

Figure 16.1.  Auschwitz II-Birkenau. ‘Original photos taken probably by Alex, a Greek Jew, in the summer of 1944’. Credit: Isabel Wollaston.

272  Isabel Wollaston

Figure 16.2.  Auschwitz II-Birkenau. ‘Original photos taken probably by Alex, a Greek Jew, in the summer of 1944’. Credit: Isabel Wollaston.

hasty, covert manner of its taking. However, in excluding the fourth photograph and cropping/touching up the other three to focus on their primary content, curators and editors echo the priorities of the Sonderkommando who took and then smuggled the photographs out to inform the world of what was happening in Auschwitz. This is particularly evident in more recent exhibitions, such as the IWM’s, presenting the three photographs uncropped and drawing visitors’ attention to their status as invaluable clandestine contemporaneous evidence of mass murder at Auschwitz. By contrast, the Auschwitz Museum has recently altered the presentation of the Sonderkommando photos (in Room 4, Block 4) within its permanent exhibition to include all four. The two images of burning bodies are displayed on either side of the large white plaster model of Gas Chamber and Crematorium III, created for the exhibition by survivor Miecysław Stobierski, and which portrays the Sonderkommando at work. Opposite the model, on the right hand side as the visitor enters the room, is a display cabinet containing documents relating to the Sonderkommando by the camp authorities and the camp resistance. Above it is the fourth photograph alongside both an uncropped and cropped version of the photograph of the women in the woods, thus explicitly drawing attention to the choices we make in which of these photographs to display and how to display them.42

Kazimiera Mika The photograph of Kazimiera Mika in Figure 16.3 below is part of a sequence also rarely reproduced in full. It was widely published in the early years of the war,

Archival Photographs of the Holocaust  273

Figure 16.3.  Kazimiera Mika. Julien Bryan Archives, courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives.

for example, in Time (September 16, 1939), and on the cover of The War Illustrated (November  4, 1939) and The Polish Black Book, Volume 1: L’invasion allemande en Pologne (April 1940). The incident portrayed in the photograph was

Figure 16.4.  ‘A ten-year-old Polish girl named Kazimiera Mika, mourns the death of her older sister, who was killed in a field in Warsaw during a German air raid’. Julien Bryan Archives, courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives.

Figure 16.5.  ‘A ten-year-old Polish girl named Kazimiera Mika, mourns the death of her older sister, who was killed in a field in Warsaw during a German air raid.’ Julien Bryan Archives, courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives.

Archival Photographs of the Holocaust  275

Figure 16.6.  ‘A ten-year-old Polish girl named Kazimiera Mika, mourns the death of her older sister, who was killed in a field in Warsaw during a German air raid.’ Julien Bryan Archives, courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives.

also captured on film in Bryan’s documentary Siege (released 1940, nominated for an Academy Award 1941). The IWM’s Holocaust Exhibition covers two floors. The upper floor focuses primarily on antisemitism, Nazi anti-Jewish and eugenic policies, culminating with the ‘euthanasia’ programme. The lower floor begins with the invasion of Poland. Figure 16.3 first appears in the opening film Under the Cover of War, then again in the section ‘Terror Strikes Poland’ as a photograph in a pivotal position opposite the foot of the stairs, enlarged to cover roughly three quarters of the height of the wall. It is captioned ‘a young girl weeps over the body of her sister, killed by German bombs in September 1939. Over 50,000 civilians were killed during the invasion of Poland’. There is no explicit acknowledgement that those depicted are non-Jewish Poles, although this is implicit given the context. The lack of precise detail is striking given what is known, including the girls’ names (Kazimiera and Anna Mika), the photographer, and the precise circumstances, location (Warsaw) and date (September 13, 1939). In 1940, Bryan recalled: Seven women had been digging potatoes in a field. There was no flour in their district, and they were desperate for food. Suddenly two German planes appeared from nowhere and dropped two bombs only two hundred yards away on a small home. Two women in the house were killed. The potato diggers dropped flat upon the ground, hoping to be unnoticed. After the bombers had gone, the women returned to their work. They had to have food.

Figure 16.7.  ‘A ten-year-old Polish girl named Kazimiera Mika, mourns the death of her older sister, who was killed in a field in Warsaw during a German air raid.’ Julien Bryan Archives, courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives.

Archival Photographs of the Holocaust  277

Figure 16.8.  ‘A ten-year-old Polish girl named Kazimiera Mika, mourns the death of her older sister, who was killed in a field in Warsaw during a German air raid.’ Julien Bryan Archives, courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives.

But the Nazi fliers [.  .  .] came back and swooped down to within two hundred yards of the ground, this time raking the field with machine-gun fire. Two of the seven women were killed. The other five escaped somehow. While I was photographing the bodies, a little ten year-old girl came running up and stood transfixed by one of the dead. The woman was her older sister. The child had never before seen death and couldn’t understand why her sister would not speak to her. [. . .] The child looked to us in bewilderment. I threw my arm about her and held her tightly, trying to comfort her. She cried. So did I and the two Polish officers who were with me. What could we, or anyone else, say to this child?43 In 1958, Bryan returned to Warsaw hoping to discover what happened to those he filmed and photographed in September 1939. He met the then 32-year-old Kazimiera44 and paraphrases her recollection of events: How could she ever forget the terrible day on which her older sister Anna had been killed and her mother and father wounded? She had never seen death before. Did she truly remember me? Yes. I was the first foreigner she had ever seen. I had taken some pictures, she recalled, and had tried to comfort her.

278  Isabel Wollaston

Figure 16.9.  ‘Photographer Julien Bryan comforts a ten-year-old Polish girl named Kazimiera Mika, whose older sister was killed in a field in Warsaw during a German air raid’. Julien Bryan Archives, courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives. In Siege the caption is simply: ‘What could I say?’

Bryan concludes that her ‘story is the story of the people of Warsaw under siege, occupation, and the gray hardship of reconstruction’.45 The inclusion and placement of the photograph at this point in the IWM’s exhibition contextualises the Holocaust within the war and in relation to the suffering of the non-Jewish Polish population under occupation.46 As to why this particular photograph was chosen from the sequence (Figures 16.4–16.10),47 it could be that it was published widely at the time. It foregrounds Kazimiera’s evident distress as she bends over her dead sister’s body,

Archival Photographs of the Holocaust  279

Figure 16.10.  ‘Photographer Julien Bryan comforts a ten-year-old Polish girl named Kazimiera Mika, whose older sister was killed in a field in Warsaw during a German air raid.’ Julien Bryan Archives, courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives.

powerfully conveying both the vulnerability of the victims and the brutal suddenness and indiscriminate nature of such an air attack. Figures  16.4–16.7 are broadly similar, but Figure  16.3 differs in capturing Kazimiera’s outspread arms. Her facial expression is clearer than in Figures  16.5–16.7, but less clear than in Figure  16.4. Figures  16.9–16.11 differ significantly in revealing the presence of others and Bryan’s attempts to comfort Kazimiera, aspects completely absent when Figure 16.3 is reproduced in isolation, as here, thus potentially misleading the viewer.

280  Isabel Wollaston

Figure 16.11.  ‘A Polish man wearing an armband and holding a camera leads a ten-yearold girl named Kazimiera Mika away from the body of her older sister, who was killed in a field in Warsaw during a German air raid.’ Julien Bryan Archives, courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives.

The IWM’s caption gives more detail than that in Siege (‘Sisters’), but is less specific than the caption in the online USHHM Photo Archives: ‘a ten-year-old Polish girl named Kazimiera Mika mourns the death of her older sister, who was killed in a field in Warsaw during a German air raid’. The IWM’s more generic caption suggests the photograph was chosen and enlarged because of its likely emotional impact and to encapsulate the suffering accompanying German occupation, rather than because it documented the fate and responses of particular individuals. The section ‘Terror Strikes Poland’ serves to broaden the definition of the Holocaust, and link it to the museum as a whole with its emphasis on conflict in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the impact this has both on those fighting and on civilians. The incident becomes emblematic and the caption is worded accordingly. Yet, close by, another photograph has a brief caption providing exactly the kind of precise detail missing here: ‘Hersz Izrael Laskowski and his father, Rabbi Eliasz Laskowski, were humiliated and then hanged with eight other Jews in the town of Warta’. It is difficult to see the logic behind the naming of some victims and locations in the one caption but not in the other. WOMAN AND CHILDREN (AUSCHWITZ ALBUM, MAY 1944) The photograph in Figure 16.12 below has been described as iconic and ‘arguably the most familiar Holocaust image’,48 yet it is not as ubiquitous as images of the boy

Archival Photographs of the Holocaust  281 in the Warsaw ghetto or Anne Frank. It comes from what has become known as the Auschwitz Album, but was originally entitled Umsiedlung der Juden aus Ungarn (Resettlement of the Jews from Hungary). The photographer is thought to have been SS-Unterscharführer Ernst Hoffman, who worked for the Erkennungsdienst (camp identification service), and/or SS-Hauptscharführer Bernhard Walter, head of the service. We know that they documented the arrival of a transport which left German-occupied Hungary on May 24, 1944; after liberation, Lili Jacob,49 a former Auschwitz prisoner, came across the album whilst convalescing from typhus in an SS barrack in Mittelbau-Dora, and recognised members of her extended family, including two of her brothers, Zril and Zeilek. There is widespread agreement on the photographs’ importance. Avner Shalev, Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate, hails the album as ‘an extraordinary and immensely valuable human and historic document, from the perspective of the murderers, of one day in the systematic annihilation of the Jewish people during the time of the Holocaust’.50 Yet there is disagreement over how to interpret the photographs and whether they should be reused for commemorative purposes. For Martin Gilbert, ‘they are terrible pictures, since we know the fate of those seen standing about, sitting with their bundles, or walking along the fence’,51 whereas Gideon Greif is struck by the ‘quiet and harmonious atmosphere’, commenting ‘if we did not know the truth behind these photographs we would not so much as glance at them’ for they contain ‘no evidence of brutality, aggression, or

Figure 16.12.  ‘A Jewish woman walks towards the gas chambers with three young children after going through the selection process on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau’. Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives.

Figure 16.13.  Memorial boards, Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Credit: Isabel Wollaston.

Figure 16.14.  ‘Children accompanied by an old woman on their way to the gas chambers at Auschwitz in May/June 1944’. Credit: The Wiener Library.

Archival Photographs of the Holocaust  283

Figure 16.15.  The Last Journey, colour stained glass window designed and made by Roman Halter and Aviva Halter-Hurn, The National Holocaust Centre and Museum.

killing’.52 It is not, therefore, that they are ‘terrible pictures’ in and of themselves. They only become ‘terrible’ if the viewer can go beyond what is in many cases a relatively benign surface meaning. The photographs themselves conceal as much as they reveal. Yad Vashem implicitly acknowledges this in the way it constructs the section of the HHM dealing with Auschwitz around the original album, and enlarged photographs from it, so as to provide the necessary historical context.53 The section includes three Sonderkommando photographs precisely to illustrate what is not shown in the Auschwitz Album. This photograph in Figure 16.12 (number 11954) appears bottom left of four on a page with no caption, but following a page with the handwritten caption Nicht mehr einsatzfähige Frauen und Kinder (usually translated ‘No longer able-bodied women and children’55). The use of Nazi euphemisms in the album’s title and captions generates considerable unease.56 The 2002 edition deliberately reformulates the caption as ‘Doomed to death: “No longer able-bodied men, women and children” ’, placing the photograph in the section ‘Last Moments before the Gas Chambers’ with the explanatory caption: ‘An old Jewish woman takes care of

284  Isabel Wollaston the little children on their way to the gas chambers’.57 There is a fuller caption in Auschwitz: A History in Photographs: ‘Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Jewish women and children on the way to their death in Gas Chamber IV or V. All these photographs were taken on the road between compounds BIIc and BIId (Photos taken by the SS, 1944)’;58 the text here is virtually identical to that accompanying the photograph on memorial boards placed at this location: ‘Jews selected by the SS for immediate death in the Gas Chambers of Crematoria IV and V were herded along this road. Photos taken by the SS, 1944’. The photograph is widely reproduced, but often cropped, as in Figure 16.14, and so omitting the figure sitting on the ground in the background. The photograph has its own cultural afterlife, featuring on a number of book covers, cropped to zoom in on the group walking, the trio in front, or the child following,59 or is flipped, and/or edited using shading, colour or superimposing other motifs.60 A particularly striking example of such practices is The Last Journey, a stained glass window created by Holocaust survivor Roman Halter with his daughter Aviva, located in the central meeting hall of the National Holocaust Centre and Museum (Laxton, Nottinghamshire). Richard Rubenstein and John Roth employ The Last Journey on the cover of the second edition of Approaches to Auschwitz, describing it as a: stained-glass version of a 1944 Nazi photograph from Auschwitz-Birkenau depicting a Jewish grandmother walking with little children, including perhaps an infant cradled under her arm. They are on their way to the gas chambers. No words, no book, can ensure that journeys akin to that one will ever end, but we have written with the conviction that they must and the hope that they will.61 As this comment indicates, the photograph is widely read as an image of comfort and care amidst atrocity,62 possibly based on an assumption that those photographed are related or because the smallest child may be holding the woman’s hand but is definitely holding the hand of the stockier child on her left (stockiness that could reflect the amount of clothing worn). Shalev comments of the woman: It is, however, our belief and prayer that, in taking those final steps, she does not signify the perishing of values and a dark future; rather, may this image be a sign and a symbol of love that strengthens all that is human within us and radiates hope, even in the last moments before death.63 Inga Clendinnen offers a particularly personal reaction: Among the handful of photographs rescued from the murderers there is one in which a small girl of perhaps seven walks a little behind the remnants of a family group: a burdened woman, bundle under her arm, two smaller children in hand. The girl may or may not be attached to them. She walks alone, head slightly bent, shoulders hunched against the cold. Above too-large shoes her bare legs look thin and fragile, but she is walking resolutely, with a slight air

Archival Photographs of the Holocaust  285 of independence. Girls of that age value independence. I cannot easily bear to look at that photograph. Had she lived, she would be an old woman by now. As it is, she is forever my grand-daughter, trudging towards death in shoes too big for her.64 Struk’s reading is provocative, attacking the museum’s decision to reproduce the photograph on a memorial board at Birkenau: The photograph of the old woman and the children has been erected so that they face down a long track which once led to the gas chamber. [. . .] Whoever they were, they have been condemned to tread the path for ever. Returning their image to Birkenau may be their final humiliation. They had no choice but to be photographed. Now they have no choice but to be viewed by posterity. Didn’t they suffer enough the first time around?65 The possibility of attaching multiple meanings to this photograph is evident in the permanent exhibition of the Holocaust Memorial Centre, Budapest, which features a cropped version three times. First, the photograph is at the start of the exhibition, accompanying János Pilinszky’s short poem ‘On the Back of a Photograph’, which was inspired by it. Secondly, a brief film on the fate of Jews from Hungary in Auschwitz, projected on four screens, utilises archival photographs to depict the fate of a transport from arrival and selection to death. A timer in the top left hand corner of each screen shows the putative time of day, enabling viewers to consider how much time has elapsed since arrival, whilst titles at the bottom of the screen note the stage in the process. The time against this photograph is 11:22 with the description ‘On the way to the gas chambers’; it is 14:57 when we see the Sonderkommando burning corpses in the open air. Thirdly, the photograph appears towards the end of the exhibition with the figures shaded black without any explanatory text. It is up to the visitor to notice the recycling of the image then respond to this as they choose. The power and poignancy of this photograph is rooted in the viewer’s knowledge of the fate awaiting the woman and children at the end of the road. Nothing in the image itself explicitly points to that fate. This small sample of responses to the photograph suggests that the source of its fascination lies in the plasticity of the image: its indeterminacy requires the viewer to draw on their own knowledge of the context to make sense of what they see, to use their imagination to fill in the details and create their own narrative. Those in the photograph have not been identified. We cannot see their faces or be certain of the relationship between them despite a common presumption that they are related and the taller child belongs to the group in front. Their ages are unknown, although Rubenstein and Roth’s belief that the woman is the children’s grandmother is widely shared. The assumption that she is elderly seems based on her stooped posture and/or the contrast in age between adult and children. We cannot even be certain that all four are female, although there is consensus that this is the case. Rubenstein and Roth even suggest five rather than four are photographed.66

286  Isabel Wollaston CONCLUSION Janina Struk is one of the more vocal critics of attempts to reuse perpetrator photographs for educational or commemorative purposes, questioning whether ‘we have the right to show people in their last moments before facing death’ and calling for ‘a halt to the repetitive and frequently reckless use of these photographs, out of respect for those who died’.67 Her proposed alternative is to ‘return these photographs, and those unfortunate enough to be in them, to the status of historical documents instead of flaunting them’ (for example in Holocaust museums or on memorial boards at sites of mass murder).68 Susan Sontag expresses similar concerns in relation to atrocity images more generally, worried that viewers remember the photographs rather than reflect on the complex realities that produced them.69 She expresses reservations about memorial museums and the responses they generate:70 whilst accepting that such memory-work can generate compassion and serve to reinforce group identities, Sontag doubts whether it leads to clear, critical reflection and/or meaningful action.71 However, is it a case of either/or? Struk and Sontag overlook the variety of approaches taken in memorial museums, many of which are conscientious in the extreme rather than ‘reckless’, and seek to address rather than evade such questions. This is particularly evident in Yad Vashem’s HHM and exhibitions at German memorial sites and Gedenkstätten, notably those developed or revised in recent years such as the Information/ Documentation Centres at Bergen-Belsen, the Topography of Terror, and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The key question is surely how photographs are used and which are used, rather than whether they are used per se, as was noted in the discussion of atrocity photographs. A burgeoning number of memorial museums are dedicated to documenting and commemorating a range of atrocities.72 These are unlikely to disappear, certainly in the short- or medium-term. The priority is to continue striving to find better ways of combining written text, image and artefact so as to avoid, insofar as possible, being exploitative or sensationalist, whilst catering to the (sometimes competing) interests and sensitivities of a diverse range of visitors. The ways in which archival photographs of the Holocaust are treated as historical evidence in their own right and then reproduced, for example in books, films, and exhibitions, varies considerably. Different approaches are evident within the same site (for example the redeveloped Yad Vashem or the Auschwitz museum) and between sites (such as the IWM’s Holocaust Exhibition and Bergen-Belsen’s new Information and Documentation Centre). Approaches evolve over time, for example Yad Vashem’s strategy in displaying photographs has changed radically: Shalev admits the previous museum focused on the collective experience of the Jewish people, and, therefore, decided not to name those photographed. By contrast, the HHM seeks to personalise the Holocaust, constructing the exhibition around individual images, artefacts and narratives: In the past, when we had a picture, and had a positive identification of the person depicted on it, we would refrain from writing his or her name, because

Archival Photographs of the Holocaust  287 we wanted them to represent a phenomenon and not just themselves. Today, we are taking the opposite approach. Now we are seeking the picture and photographs in which we can identify the person.73 Similarly, Yad Vashem’s edition of the Auschwitz Album identifies as many of those photographed as possible, including disputed identifications. The IWM’s Holocaust exhibition is equally committed to personalising the Holocaust, notably in its opening and closing sections: ‘Life before the Nazis’ and ‘Reflections’. In the exhibition as a whole this is done via survivor testimony and personal artefacts (the story of each illustrated with a contemporaneous photograph of the owner insofar as this is possible). In describing the ‘vital’ role photographs play in the exhibition, Bardgett explains that they are deployed ‘as large backdrops to invoke particular places; as indictments of appalling cruelty; to illustrate stories of individual families who fell victim to Nazi persecution policies’.74 Photographs are primarily deployed to illustrate a point made in the historical narrative and/or for their emotional impact rather than as evidence or artefacts in and of themselves: some have no captions, as in part of the display on the ghettos and the enlarged photograph of an Einsatzgruppen execution at Vinnitsa (Ukraine). Where captions are supplied, they are concise and often generic, failing to identify precisely who or what is photographed (as with Kazimiera Mika), but not always (as with Rabbi Eliasz Laskowski). Only rarely is the photographer identified. Information on who supplied the photograph is primarily restricted to a generic list of individuals and institutions on the left hand wall on exiting the exhibition. Only in very specific cases, notably photographs considered to be important historical artefacts in their own right (for example those from the Auschwitz Album and the three Sonderkommando photographs), do captions contain detailed information about context and provenance. A different approach again underpins the new Information and Documentation Centre at Bergen-Belsen, which claims to embody ‘a new concept for the presentation of audio-visual media’, presenting photographs, film and testimonies as important historical sources in their own right. It makes strenuous efforts to avoid using photographs and film as a ‘backdrop’ to illustrate testimony and/or the historical narrative. Instead, ‘photographs are put into the historical context of their production and are treated just like the written documents and artefacts in the exhibition’.75 This approach is exemplified in the presentation of photographs of the liberation of the camp by the British No. 5 Army Film and Photographic Unit; the photographs are in chronological order, with the name of the photographer and precise date each was taken. Explanatory text is drawn from the photographers’ original captions. The curators hope that this approach will encourage visitors to reflect on, and question, how the Holocaust is represented and what different types of primary sources contribute to this process. The positioning of the Information Centre in relation to the historical site of the camp is a central part of this strategy. A purist stance, such as this, which treats archival photographs as artefacts in their own right, maintains that, at the very least, viewers/readers are entitled to

288  Isabel Wollaston expect an accurate caption stating who or what is shown, who took the photograph and when it was taken, insofar as this is known. Critics such as Didi-Huberman advocate the display of the whole image as originally taken or an indication that an edited version is reproduced. A  more pragmatic approach accepts that what level of information is appropriate varies given the context and intended audience. It would, however, be helpful if those involved in designing exhibitions were as explicit as Harel and Shalev about the approach taken in relation to the HHM, or the staff of the new Information and Documentation Centre at Bergen-Belsen. Those closely associated with the IWM’s Holocaust exhibition have given lectures and written detailed articles discussing its overall approach, educational philosophy, use of artefacts, audiovisual and survivor testimony, but it is striking that, with the exception of Bardgett’s article, there is limited discussion of its use of photographs. The interested visitor is, therefore, free to speculate why some photographs are enlarged and not others, some are captioned and not others, and some captions are more detailed and specific than others. Adopting a generic approach to captioning also poses an ethical question, implicitly raised by Yad Vashem: if the Holocaust bears witness, at least in part, to the suppression and eradication of difference, and an increasingly industrialised production of mass death, then there is arguably an obligation, where possible, to restore a sense of the lives and death of differentiated individuals and communities rather than of an undifferentiated statistical mass (for example ‘the Jews’, the Six Million). The IWM exhibition goes to considerable lengths to personalise artefacts, but is less consistent in relation to photographs. It is perfectly legitimate to use photographs to illustrate and/ or for their emotional impact, but this does not need to preclude providing captions that at a minimum state what is portrayed, naming the individuals shown, if this is known. Such an approach would also highlight the extent to which this information is not known (as in Yad Vashem’s limited success in identifying all those photographed in the Auschwitz Album). The range of approaches taken in the recently opened exhibitions discussed, albeit briefly, in this chapter suggest that the visual representation of the Holocaust, particularly in museums, is coming of age, with a divergent range of approaches competing with, and influencing one another. However, it is essential that such cross-fertilisation continues to develop serious discussion over the choice of images and its ramifications, particularly the insistence on showing and seeing all.

NOTES

I would like to express my thanks to the following for their assistance in providing electronic copies of the images embedded in this chapter and securing permission to reproduce them: Caroline Waddell (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photographic Reference Collection); Marek Jaroš (Wiener Library Photo Archive); and Glen Powell and Aneesa Riffat (National Holocaust Centre and Museum).

  1 Sybil Milton, “Photographs of the Warsaw Ghetto,” Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 3 (1986): chapter 15, http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.asp?c=gvKVLcM

Archival Photographs of the Holocaust  289 VIuG&b=395055 (accessed April 4, 2014); her estimate predates the opening up of access to collections in the former eastern Bloc post 1989.   2 See “About the Yad Vashem Archives: Photo and Film Archives,” www.yadvashem. org/yv/en/about/archive/about_archive_photos_movies.asp (accessed April 4, 2014).   3 For example, the permanent exhibition of the Museum of the Pawiak Prison, Warsaw, displays publications featuring Bryan’s photographs of Kazimiera. See also Jacek Zygmunt Sawicki and Tomasz Stempowski, eds., Siege of Warsaw in the Photographs of Julien Bryan (Warsaw: Institute of National Remembrance, 2010).   4 See the Galicia Jewish Museum’s website (www.en.galiciajewishmuseum.org) and Jonathan Webber with photographs by Chris Schwarz, Rediscovering Traces of Memory: The Jewish Heritage of Polish Galicia (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2009).   5 The sequence comes from surviving footage which was commissioned by Lagerkommandantur Albert Konrad Gemmeker and thought to have been filmed by Rudolf Breslauer, a Jewish prisoner who was camp photographer. Extracts from this footage, not always identified as Westerbork, feature in many documentaries and exhibitions on the Holocaust.   6 Diana Gring and Karin Theilen, “Fragments of Memory: Testimony in the New Permanent Exhibition at Bergen-Belsen,” in “Bearing Witness: Testimony and the Historical Memory of the Holocaust,” ed. Rainer Schulze, The Holocaust in History and Memory 2 (2009): 37–52 (39).   7 For example, in Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy (London: Fontana/ Collins, 1987), 672, the still is captioned ‘A Jewish boy, deported to Theresienstadt’.   8 Aad Wagenaar, Settela (Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications, 2005).   9 The still is on the front cover of Romani Rose, ed., The Nazi Genocide of the Sinti and Roma (Heidelberg: Documentary and Cultural Centre of German Sinti and Roma, 1995). In the permanent exhibition Extermination of European Roma (Block 13, Auschwitz I), it is captioned ‘Settela S., a Sinti girl, in the process of being transported from Westerbork to Auschwitz on 19th May 1944. Settela was murdered in the gas chamber in the night of 2nd to 3rd August along with her mother and her siblings’. The national exhibition for the Netherlands (Block 21) includes the still and Breslauer’s footage with the detailed caption: ‘Nine-year old Settela Steinbach, together with her mother and nine sisters and brothers, was also murdered shortly after her arrival in Auschwitz. She can be seen on the train to Auschwitz in a film made about Westerbork during the war. For many years she was thought to have been a Jewish girl, until it emerged in 1995 that she was in fact a Sintezza. It is estimated that several thousand Sinti and Roma people managed to escape the razzias’. 10 Raul Hilberg, Sources of Holocaust Research (Lanham: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), 16. 11 See, for example, Carol Zemel, “Z’chor! Roman Vishniac’s Photo-Eulogy of East European Jews” in Shaping Losses: Cultural Memory and the Holocaust, ed. Julia Epstein and Lori Hope Lefkovitz (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 75–86. 12 Grosman’s work figures prominently in exhibitions such as the USHMM, HHM and the Information Centre of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin. His photographs appear in the IWM’s Holocaust Exhibition, but he is not credited as the photographer. Israel Gutman, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (New York: Macmillan, 1990), and Robert Rozett and Shmuel Spector, eds., Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (New York: Facts on File, 2006) both include an entry on Grosman but not Rozencwajg-Ross. The brief essay Alan Adelson, “The Photographers and Photographers,” in Five Notebooks from the Łódź Ghetto: The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak, ed. Alan Adelson (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 267–71, is unusual in giving equal weight to both photographers, and Janina Struk discusses both in Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003), 83–94.

290  Isabel Wollaston 13 Rozencwajg-Ross selected photographs for publication in Israel as Aleksander Klugman, ed., The Last Journey of the Jews of Łódź, photographs by Henry Ross, edited by Aleksander Klugman (Tel Aviv: Kibel Publishing, 1962), and catalogued his negatives in 1987. After his death in 1991, c.3,000 negatives were acquired by the Archive of Modern Conflict, London, resulting in the exhibition of a wider selection of photographs, and publication of Martin Parr and Timothy Prus, Łódź Ghetto Album: Photographs by Henryk Ross (London: Boot, 2004), which divides the photographs into ‘Public’ (available in Ross’ lifetime) and ‘Private’ (previously unpublished). 14 Howard Jacobson, “Introduction,” in My Secret Camera: Life in the Łódź Ghetto, photographs by Mendel Grossman, text by Frank Dabba Smith (London: Frances Lincoln, 2000), unnumbered. 15 Robert Jan van Pelt, “Foreword,” in Parr and Prus, Łódź Ghetto Album, 7. 16 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003), 75. See also Marianne Hirsch, “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory,” Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2001): 5–37 (19). 17 Sybil Milton, “Photography as Evidence of the Holocaust,” History of Photography 23, no. 4 (1999): 303–12 (303). 18 For a provocative discussion of such photographs, see Berndt Huppauf, “Emptying the Gaze: Framing Violence through the Viewfinder,” New German Critique 72 (1997): 3–44. 19 Some snapshots may have been taken to express revulsion or protest at such sights. The difficulty in determining the photographer’s motivation is evident in the controversy over Joe J. Heydecker’s photographs of the Warsaw ghetto. See Daniel Magilow, “The Interpreter’s Dilemma: Heinrich Jöst’s Warsaw Ghetto Photographs,” in Visualizing the Holocaust, ed. David Bathrick et al. (Rochester: Camden House, 2008), 38–61. 20 Suzanne Bardgett, “The Use of Historical Film and Photographs in the Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum,” (conference paper, June 9, 2011), published as Suzanne Bardgett, “Die Verwendung von historischen Film- unde Fotoaufnahmen in der Holocaust-Ausstellung des Imperial War Museum,” in AugenZeugen. Fotos, Filme und Zeizeugenberichte in der neuen Dauerausstellung der Gedenkstätte Bergen-Belsen. Hintergrund und Kontext, ed. Rainer Schulze and Wilfried Wiederman (Celle: Stiftung niedersächsiche Gedenkstätte, 2007), 221–38. I  am grateful to Emily Fuggle and Suzanne Bardgett for providing me with a copy of the original English transcript of this paper (with unnumbered pages). It is this English version of the paper that is quoted. Bardgett is currently Head of the Department of Research, IWM. 21 Susan Crane, “Choosing Not to Look: Representation, Repatriation, and Holocaust Atrocity Photography,” History and Theory 47, no. 3 (2008): 309–30 (323). 22 Paul Salmons, “Teaching or Preaching? The Holocaust and Intercultural Education in the UK,” Intercultural Education 14, no. 2 (2003): 139–49 (147). 23 Crane, “Choosing Not to Look,” 314–15. James Young questions whether ‘any exhibition, even the most rigorously framed, can ever merely show such sensationalist imagery without descending into sensationalism. Can the artists, curators, or even viewers objectively critique such sensationalist images without participating in the sensation itself?’; from James Young, “Regarding the Pain of Women: Questions of Gender and the Arts of Holocaust Memory,” PMLA 124, no. 5 (2009): 1778–86 (1783–4). 24 Crane, “Choosing Not to Look,” 311. 25 Sontag suggests that the victim is ‘forever looking at death, forever about to be murdered, forever wronged. And the viewer is in the same position as the lackey behind the camera; the experience is sickening’; Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 54–5. Similar discussion surrounded the decision to exhibit postcards of public

Archival Photographs of the Holocaust  291 lynchings; see Dora Apel, “On Looking: Lynching Photographs and the Legacies of Lynching after 9/11,” American Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2003): 457–78 (450, 458). 26 Hirsch, “Surviving Images,” 7; and Cornelia Brink, “Secular Icons: Looking at Photographs from Concentration Camps,” History & Memory 12, no. 1 (2000): 135–50. 27 For two different responses to this photograph, see Richard Raskin, A Child at Gunpoint—A Case Study in the Life of a Photograph (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2004); and Dan Porat, The Boy: A Holocaust Story (New York: Hill & Wang, 2010). For discussion of how it is used in the HHM, see Dorit Harel, Facts and Feelings: Dilemmas in Designing the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2010), 52–3. 28 Harel, Facts and Feelings, 53. 29 Bardgett, “The Use of Historical Film and Photographs”. 30 Quoted in David Gritten, “The Making of a Masterpiece,” Daily Telegraph Magazine, January 15, 1994, 22–6 (26). 31 See Dafydd Sills-Jones, “The Second World War in Colour: The UK History Documentary Boom and Colour Archive,” Journal of British Cinema and Television 7, no. 1 (2010): 115–30. 32 See Jonathan Huener, Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 108–37. 33 See, for example, “Prisoners from the Czech Lands at Auschwitz” and “The Tragedy of Slovak Jews” (both Block 16, dating from 2002); and “The Citizen Betrayed: To the Memory of the Hungarian Holocaust” (Block 18, 2004). 34 Genewein was chief accountant in the German administration of the Łódź ghetto and a keen amateur photographer. In 1987, several hundred colour slides taken by him surfaced in Vienna. They are now part of the collection of the Jüdisches Museum, Frankfurt am Main. They feature prominently in Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides, eds., Łódź Ghetto: A Community Under Siege (New York: Viking, 1989), and the documentary of the same name directed by Adelson and Kathryn Taverna released that year, and in Jablonski’s film Fotoamator. 35 On the HHM’s use of colour photographs, see Harel, Facts and Feelings, 48. 36 Raye Farr, “The Use of Photographs as Artifacts and Evidence,” in Holocaust Chronicles, ed. Robert Moses Shapiro (Hoboken: KTAV, 1999), 277–83 (279). 37 Hilberg, Sources of Holocaust Research, 15. 38 Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 66. See also Crane, “Choosing Not to Look,” 324. 39 Only three photographs are exhibited in Yad Vashem and the IWM, which are cropped in the former and are full versions in the latter. For further discussion, see Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All; and Dan Stone, “The Sonderkommando Photographs,” Jewish Social Studies 7, no. 3 (2001): 132–48. 40 Didi-Huberman describes the fourth photograph as ‘practically abstract: we can just make out the top of the birch trees’; Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, 16. 41 See, for example, Teresa and Henryk Świebocki, eds., Auschwitz: Voices from the Ground, with photographs by Adam Bujak (Oświęcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 1994); Jadwiga Bezwińska and Danuta Czech, eds., KL Auschwitz Seen by the SS (Oświęcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2006); and Teresa Świebocka, ed., Auschwitz: A History in Photographs, trans. and ed. Jonathan Webber and Connie Wilsack (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 42 Until 2012/13 the fourth photograph was not on display in Block 4. Although the permanent exhibition dates from 1955, its content and accompanying text is periodically updated whilst retaining the style of the original. No indication is given that such updating has taken placed. The guidebook still refers to there being ‘three photographs’ on display. See Kazimierz Smoleń, Auschwitz-Birkenau Guide Book (Oświęcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim, 2012), 9–10.

292  Isabel Wollaston The permanent exhibition of the Wannsee Haus, Berlin, is another museum that is unusual in displaying all four photographs. 43 Julien Bryan, Siege (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1940), 28. According to Bryan, Kazimiera’s sister was killed by machine gun fire, and not bombs as in the IWM caption. 44 In Siege, Bryan states Kazimiera was 10 years old (28), but he says she was 12 in Julien Bryan, Warsaw: 1939 Siege, 1959 Warsaw Revisited (Warsaw: Polonia Publishing House, 1959–1960), 159, 162. 45 Bryan, Warsaw, 162; see also 163–4, 118–21. 46 At the start of the exhibition, the IWM provides the following definition: ‘Under the cover of the Second World War, for the sake of their “new order”, the Nazis sought to destroy all the Jews of Europe. For the first time in history, industrial methods were used for the mass extermination of a whole people. Six million were murdered, including 1,500,000 children. This event is called the Holocaust. The Nazis enslaved and murdered millions of others as well, Gypsies, people with physical and mental disabilities, Poles, Soviet POWs, Trade Unionists, Political opponents, Prisoners of Conscience, Homosexuals and others were killed in vast numbers’. 47 Berlin’s Deutsche Historiches Museum also uses only one photograph from the sequence for its permanent exhibition and made exactly the same choice. Its caption is more precise in some regards, but also refrains from naming the main subject: ‘Polish Girl next to her dead sister after a German strafer attack. (Julien Bryan 1899–1974. Warsaw, September 1939)’. 48 Crane, “Choosing Not to Look,” 327. 49 Lili Jacob is an anglicised form of Lenke Jakab (or Lili Jákob) in Hungarian; on marrying she became Lili Zelmanovic, then Lili Meier on remarrying after the death of her first husband. Lili (1926–1999) was born in Bilke in Carpatho-Ruthenia, now in the Ukraine. The area was annexed by Hungary in March 1939. In spring 1944, Lili and her family were sent to the ghetto in Beregszász (Berehovo in Ukrainian). The ghetto was liquidated and four transports sent to Auschwitz II-Birkenau from May 16 to 29, 1944. The photographs were used as evidence in the Auschwitz trials, Frankfurt, with Lili called as a witness on December 3, 1964. She formally donated the Album to Yad Vashem on August 27, 1980. It was restored in 1994 and digitally scanned in 1999. The first English-language edition was Peter Hellman, ed., The Auschwitz Album: A Book Based upon an Album Discovered by a Concentration Camp Survivor, Lili Meier (New York: Random House, 1981). Yad Vashem published a new edition in conjunction with the Auschwitz Museum: Israel Gutman and Bella Gutterman, eds., The Auschwitz Album: The Story of a Transport (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem; Oświęcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2002). For additional background, see Serge Klarsfeld, ed., L’Album D’Auschwitz (Paris: Éditions Al Dante et Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, 2005), 8–29, 46–8. 50 Avner Shalev, “Foreword,” in The Auschwitz Album, 7–9. In the HHM, the Album is described as ‘a rare historical document and the only visual witness to the deportation of Jews beginning with their arrival in the camp until the moment they were sent to death’. 51 Martin Gilbert, Holocaust Journey: Travelling in Search of a Past (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997), 161. 52 Gideon Greif, online review of Israel Gutterman and Bella Gutterman, eds., Das Auschwitz Album—Die Geschichte eines Transports (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag; Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2000), www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/education/books/das_ auschwitz.asp (accessed April 4, 2014). 53 See Harel, Facts and Feelings, 47, 80, as well as “The ‘Final Solution’ ”, #6 of the online galleries of the Holocaust History Museum on the museum’s website, www. yadvashem.org/yv/en/museum/gallery06.asp (accessed April 4, 2014). 54 It is photograph 119 in the 2002 edition and L’Album D’Auschwitz, but 112 in the 1981 English edition.

Archival Photographs of the Holocaust  293 55 A less tendentious translation might be ‘Women and children who are no longer deployable (or fit for deployment)’. 56 According to Nina Springer-Aharoni, ‘Looking at the album is like reading a chapter in a Nazi history book, written in conformity with the rules’. See her “Photographs as Historical Documents,” in the 2002 edition of the Album, Gutman and Gutterman, The Auschwitz Album, 87–97 (96). 57 Gutman and Gutterman, The Auschwitz Album, 249. Dan Stone also makes the meaning explicit in paraphrasing the caption as ‘incapable of work and therefore to be killed immediately’; Dan Stone, “Chaos and Continuity: Representations of Auschwitz,” in Representations of Auschwitz, ed. Yasmin Doosry (Oświęcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 1995), 25–33 (30). 58 Świebocka, Auschwitz: A History in Photographs, 147. In the IWM’s Holocaust Exhibition, the photograph is one of a number from the Auschwitz Album placed alongside a model depicting the processing of a transport, itself based on the Album. The caption is ‘The final walk’. 59 See, for example, the covers of Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), and Otto Friedrich, The Kingdom of Auschwitz (New York: HarperPerennial, 1994). The cropped image of the single child appears on the spine of Alvin Rosenfeld, ed., Thinking about the Holocaust: After Half a Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), with a cropped photograph of the full group on the front cover. 60 For example, Daniel Weissport, ed., The Poetry of Survival: Post-war Poets of Central and Eastern Europe (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991); and David Cesarani, ed., Genocide and Rescue: The Holocaust in Hungary (Oxford: Berg, 1997). 61 Richard Rubenstein and John Roth, Approaches to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and Its Legacy, rev. ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), xi. 62 Hellman speculates that ‘though the mother of these children is no longer with them, it is perhaps the grandmother who has carefully tucked their scarfs inside their coats’; Hellman, The Auschwitz Album, 97. 63 Shalev, “Foreword,” 9. 64 Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust, 10. 65 Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 216. 66 Rubenstein and Roth, Approaches to Auschwitz, xi. See also Klarsfeld, L’Album D’Auschwitz, 129: ‘Une vieille femme et quatre enfants se trouvent au début de la Lagerstraße A, à côté des rails pour les wagonnets’. 67 Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 215. 68 Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 215. 69 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 79–80. 70 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 77–9. 71 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 80, 85, 90–1, 94–6, 103–4, 108–9. 72 See Paul Williams, Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities (Oxford: Berg, 2007). 73 Avner Shalev, “ ‘I Too Had a Face’—The Yad Vashem Museum,” www.yadvashem. org/exhibitions/museums/histmuseum/avner_shalev.html (accessed April 4, 2014); and in Harel, Facts and Feelings, 8–15 (12). 74 Bardgett, “The Use of Historical Film and Photographs”. 75 Wilfried Windemann, “ ‘Earth Conceal Not the Blood Shed on Thee’: The New Information and Documentation Centre at Bergen-Belsen,” in Bergen-Belsen, ed. Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2010), 13–19 (17). He notes that this methodology is that advocated by the historians appointed to review the historical accuracy of the Verbrechen der Wehrmacht exhibition.

17 Adorno and the Prohibition of the Image The Case of Music Lars Fischer

There are at least two reasons why a discussion of Adorno’s grappling with the prohibition of the image, the Bilderverbot, in the context of music is worthwhile. First, it is well suited to help complicate and enrich the very notion of the prohibition of the image, and touches directly on the question of what might (still) be specifically Jewish about it. The second reason, though one that will do little to convince those who consider Critical Theory a dead end anyway, is that Adorno’s grappling with music, far from being a mere side show, was absolutely central to the evolution of the entire project of Critical Theory.1 Indeed, music emerges from this project as the most likely site of subversion and hope (however slight).2 In the beginning, as so often, was a footnote. The footnote that aroused my interest in this particular topic belongs to Gerhard Scheit’s discussion, in his marvellous book on the functioning of drama, opera and film in antisemitic discourse, of Schoenberg’s much discussed Survivor from Warsaw.3 Explaining Adorno’s critique of this piece, Scheit explains that ‘for the Adorno of “Commitment”, a total Bilderverbot applied—hence he accused Schönberg’s piece of a certain aestheticization of the horror’.4 In the passage in question, Adorno stated that there was something ‘embarrassing’ about the Survivor from Warsaw. Adorno clarified that he (obviously) did not mean the irritation felt by people in Germany ‘because it will not let them repress what they want at all costs to repress’. Adorno’s concern lay elsewhere. ‘All its harshness and irreconcilability notwithstanding’, Adorno argued, Schoenberg’s Survivor: [. . .] turns [that which people in Germany would like to forget] into an image [emphasis added] and thus the sense of shame vis-à-vis the victims is violated after all. Something is made out of them, [namely] art works put out to be gobbled up by the world that killed them. The so-called artistic rendering of the naked physical pain experienced by those who were bludgeoned with rifle butts has the potential, however remote, to facilitate the extraction of pleasure. [. . .] By resorting to aesthetic stylization, and particularly through the solemn prayer of the choir,5 the inconceivable fate is presented as though it had some sort of purpose.6

Adorno and the Prohibition of the Image   295 Yet as Scheit goes on to point out in his footnote, with this statement Adorno was in fact contradicting himself—in his earlier essay on Schönberg we read about the Survivor: ‘Never has horror sounded so true in music and as it becomes audible the negation allows the music to regain its ability to deconstruct. The Jewish hymn with which the “Survivor from Warsaw” ends represents music as the human objection to myth’.7 What are we to make of this apparent contradiction? When discussing problems of representing the Shoah with students, I regularly use the Survivor and these two passages.8 My suggestion to the students, really just a hunch, has always been that the contradiction between Adorno’s two statements is indicative not so much of genuine confusion on his part, but rather of the complexity of the issue and the subtlety of his mind in grappling with it. I should add that my focus in class has always tended to be on Adorno’s critique of the arguably redemptive message of Schoenberg’s piece rather than its transgression of the prohibition of the image (not that these two issues can be neatly separated, of course).9 On the latter count, which will be the main focus of this discussion, it seems hard to refute Adorno’s observation. As Scheit has rather aptly put it, with the roll call and the concluding rendering of the shema, what the narrator of the Survivor sets out to report ‘suddenly “really” happens’.10 One might very well wonder whether there is really anything more to be said on all this. Following my initial reading, I was rather sceptical. From among the relevant scholarship of the last decade I  would point to the texts by Elizabeth Pritchard,11 Richard Leppert,12 and Dan Webb,13 not because I agree with them on every count, but because they have, each in their varied way, done an exemplary job not only of rendering accessible Adorno’s stance and some of the problems it raises, but also of making comprehensible why all this matters. Yet, just as I was at risk of settling into a false sense of security, The Cambridge Companion to Schoenberg made its appearance on the shelf at the Cambridge University Press Bookshop. The only sustained discussion of Adorno’s grappling with Schoenberg in this volume is offered in Richard Kurth’s chapter on the locus classicus for the debate on Schoenberg and the prohibition of the image, his opera Moses und Aron,14 seen by many as ‘a meta-opera, an opera about the nature of opera’ that ultimately ‘only affirms the untenability of what it puts to the test’.15 In some ways I owe Kurth an apology for the way in which I will pick on him in this chapter. I certainly would not have done so had his text appeared as an individual contribution to some other publication. Yet the Cambridge Companions are not just any publication, they are (often quite rightly so, of course) one of the first ports of call for many students and scholars approaching a (new) topic. It is the significance of his text as a contribution to the Cambridge Companion to Schoenberg, rather than the shortcomings displayed in this text by Kurth as an individual scholar, that concern me. On Kurth’s account, his chapter ‘offers a counterpoise to the Adornian polemic, by questioning some of its fundamental assumptions, and

296  Lars Fischer by contextualizing and reinterpreting others’.16 Yet Kurth’s account is perplexing, to say the least, and clearly predicated on some fairly fundamental misunderstandings of Adorno’s stance. It seems evident that these misunderstandings result in part from a rather simplistic and literalist reading of Adorno’s statements about Moses und Aron and in part from a very narrow focus almost exclusively on the one text that Adorno wrote specifically about this opera.17 There is an added irony to this insofar as this approach, by defining its focus so narrowly, ultimately ignores, in grappling with Schoenberg’s music and Adorno’s critique alike, what Robert Witkin has called the ‘part-part and part-whole relations’ so central to Adorno’s thought.18 Witkin suggests that ‘a basic formulation of part-part and part-whole relations [. . .] recurs in all Adorno’s discussions of form and structure from social formation to the musical formation of the sonata or rondo’. Form, as Adorno sees it, is ‘the non-violent synthesis of the disparate that it nevertheless maintains as that which it is, in its diversity and contradictions’. Form’s ‘relationship to its other that it preserves even though it mitigates its strangeness makes it the anti-barbaric aspect of art’. It is through form that art ‘partakes of the civilization that it criticizes by its very existence’.19 Yet inevitably, anything that is formed is also limited in the process. The artistic activity of imposing form ‘always selects, cuts away, foregoes: there is no form without rejection. Hence the guilt of domination is extended into the works of art that seek to rid themselves of it’.20 Truth in music, on Adorno’s account, resides in the degree to which it succeeds in relating its various elements both to one another and to the whole without subordinating them to it. Bach’s sense of form, Adorno argues, sprang ‘not from respect for traditional forms but from his ability to keep them in flux or, more correctly, to prevent them from consolidating in the first place’.21 The ‘non-violent quality’ of Mozart’s music resulted from his ability to create an equilibrium between disparate elements without subjugating them.22 As is well known, Adorno was particularly fascinated with Beethoven’s late string quartets ‘because they reside on the verge of disintegration’ and ‘disintegration is the truth of integral art’.23 Conversely, as Adorno saw it, Moses und Aron was characterised by ‘integrative force’24 and a ‘primacy of the whole over the details clasped by the composer’s iron hand’.25 This judgement may be right, it may be wrong, but it certainly cannot be refuted by pointing, as Kurth does, to individual details within the opera as though their existence, in and of itself, could sway the evaluation of the opera’s ‘part-part and part-whole relations’ one way or the other. Kurth’s line of argument is fundamentally predicated on the assumption that Adorno’s critique can be refuted by showing that Schoenberg did not intentionally set out to achieve what Adorno describes as the outcome of Schoenberg’s endeavours. Schoenberg’s intentions, in other words, take centre stage in judging the validity of Adorno’s critique. ‘Schoenberg’s own conception of the twelve-tone technique notwithstanding’, for instance, Adorno had the temerity to evaluate it in a way that partly differed from Schoenberg’s own assessment.26 We are told that ‘Schoenberg began “The Relationship to the Text” ’, a text written in 1912,

Adorno and the Prohibition of the Image   297 ‘by refuting the notion—nevertheless belabored by Adorno—that music must conjure up images’.27 On closer inspection of the passage cited, it transpires that Schoenberg in no way refuted this notion but simply posited that it was ‘as widespread as only the fallacious and banal can be’.28 More importantly, though, why should Schoenberg’s claim to the contrary prevent Adorno from ‘nevertheless belaboring’ this notion? According to Kurth, remarks by Schoenberg about his relationship to his (as Schoenberg saw it, inexistent) audience supposedly ‘totally undermine’ Adorno’s claim that Schoenberg’s music adheres to a frame of reference that goes beyond Schoenberg’s own subjective motivation (more on this later). Likewise, to give just one further example, according to Kurth, ‘Adorno’s assumption that Schoenberg tried to represent the unrepresentable clashed badly with Schoenberg’s declared aesthetic position’.29 The obvious problem with this line of argument is that, for Adorno, artists’ intentions are only one among a complex set of social, historical and artistic factors that determine artistic production, and hardly a crucial one, at that, arguably quite the opposite. ‘What makes works of art hum’, he wrote in his posthumously published Ästhetische Theorie, ‘is the friction between the antagonistic elements that it seeks to bring together’.30 Artists’ intentions were only one of these antagonistic elements and artists’ objective and structural inability simply to implement these intentions at will formed a crucial source of the tensions that made works of art ‘hum’. Likewise, ‘to perform a play or a piece of music correctly is to formulate it correctly as a problem’, Adorno argued, ‘so that the irreconcilable demands it places on the performing artist are recognized. The task of adequate rendition’, consequently, was ‘infinite on principle’.31 According to Adorno, ‘art seeks to emulate a form of expression that is not implanted human intention. The latter is merely its vehicle. The more consummate a work of art, the more it sheds its intentions’.32 Adorno also argued that qualitative differences that become evident in the afterlives of works of art ‘by no means coincide with their degree of modernity in their own time. [. . .] Even creations that had not attained the technical standard of their time [. . .] communicate with later periods and this precisely because of that which set them apart from their own era’.33 It is a very long way from here to the notion that individual artists in general and composers in particular could in any straightforward way be held personally responsible for getting it ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. Yet this seems to be very much the level on which Kurth seeks to engage Adorno’s critique. It is perhaps worth adding that one by no means needs to focus on the wider context to grasp this. It is patently clear from Adorno’s “Sakrales Fragment”, the text specifically about Moses und Aron, that Adorno is concerned with what he considers the objective dynamics of Schoenberg’s works rather than Schoenberg’s subjective intentions. There too, Adorno argues that ‘the innermost [. . .] objective intention’ of a piece remains unknown to the composer and refers to the opera’s ‘classicity contre coeur’.34 Now, my point here is obviously not that Kurth needs to agree with Adorno’s analysis. I would argue, however, that he cannot try to refute it without actually

298  Lars Fischer taking it seriously on its own terms in the first place. The contention that Schoenberg unwittingly or in spite of himself produced a particular sort of music obviously cannot be refuted by establishing that this was not what Schoenberg set out to do. How wide Kurth is of the mark becomes evident when he sets out to demonstrate that the music of Moses und Aron ‘is not a naïve attempt to depict and manifest the ineffable or the Divine’35—something Adorno never suggested in this form in the first place—in order subsequently to consider his job done when he concludes that ‘Schoenberg’s ability to observe the Bilderverbot extended much further than Adorno imagined’.36 What Kurth seems to have missed entirely is the fact that for Adorno, Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron goes both not far enough and too far in this respect. Kurth shows no appreciation of what Elizabeth Pritchard has called ‘Adorno’s critique of the political liabilities of the Bilderverbot’.37 Pritchard offers an enormously engaging account of Adorno’s grappling with the Bilderverbot. On her reading, ‘Adorno envisions the Bilderverbot as a constant reminder that a given referent (divine or mundane) must never be reduced to our representations of it’,38 and he ‘distributes the privilege of resisting representations, i.e., the Bilderverbot, to all referents. No longer the purview of the divine, Adorno casts this lifesaving buffer to all that is at risk of being summoned and named by the ruling elite’.39 Adorno’s fundamental concern, Pritchard argues, is ‘not the maintenance of the transcendent character of the absolute, but the maintenance of its imperative character’.40 Descriptions or images, in other words, have the potential ‘to turn what should be regarded as yet to be fulfilled ethical imperatives into nice-sounding slogans’41 and thus to ‘conceal the reality of damaged life by anticipating, indeed pre-supposing, its self-correction’.42 Yet Pritchard also argues compellingly that ‘Adorno’s endorsement of the Bilderverbot’ was in fact ‘a qualified one’.43 Pritchard cites a passage from Negative Dialektik in which Adorno comments on what he identifies as a modern intensification of the Bilderverbot. Where it had once extended to naming the name, the mere thought of hope was now seen to violate it. Instead of applying selectively to the deity or the redeemed world to come, any thought of change for the better, however limited, now seemed to fall under the ban, thus rendering everything but the status quo illegitimate and, paradoxically, becoming affirmative. With this intensification of the ban, demythologisation was devouring itself, much as the mythical gods liked to devour their offspring, and recoiling into myth.44 In short, Adorno ‘consistently warns that modern appropriations of the Bilderverbot [. . .] atrophy critical thinking and utopian longing, and thus underwrite the continuation of “damaged life” ’.45 Consequently, ‘for Adorno the ethical and political potential of the Bilderverbot is fully exploited only when it includes the demonstration as to why various identifications of the absolute are insufficient’.46 What is needed, in other words, is ‘determinate, as opposed to abstract, negation’.47 This form of determinate negation Adorno expressly identified as springing from Jewish tradition. As Pritchard points out, Horkheimer and Adorno wrote in Dialectics of Enlightenment that ‘the Jewish religion [. . .] associates hope only with the prohibition against calling on

Adorno and the Prohibition of the Image   299 what is false as God, against invoking the finite as the infinite, lies as truth’, a form of negation, in other words, that ‘is not abstract’.48 Pritchard thus concludes that Adorno was propagating ‘a specific, Jewish, deployment of the Bilderverbot’ that ‘entails not an indiscriminate negation of any and all images of the divine, but rather a judicious analysis of and denunciation of that which would feign to pass for the absolute’.49 None too surprisingly, Adorno’s “Sakrales Fragment”, his critique of Moses und Aron that is at the heart of Kurth’s engagement of Adorno, features prominently in Pritchard’s discussion of ‘Adorno’s wariness of the ideological implications of the modern enforcement of the Bilderverbot’.50 As she points out, Adorno argues there that ‘in Schoenberg’s development [.  .  .] expression as negativity [.  .  .] gets carried away to the point where it becomes negative theology’. By resorting to negation in so radical but indeterminate a fashion, in other words, Schoenberg’s approach ultimately ‘assumes positivity’ again.51 Arguably, Adorno’s critique at this point is borne out not least by Bluma Goldstein’s careful analysis of Schoenberg’s treatment of the relevant biblical material in Moses und Aron.52 Goldstein makes a compelling case that, compared with the biblical accounts, Schoenberg’s Moses ‘adopted a conception of the deity far more abstract and rigid than the deity himself holds; and that Moses’s demands for conformity to his ideas exceed even God’s expectations’.53 Indeed, on several occasions, ‘Aron’s views and insights’, as Schoenberg portrays them, ‘conform more closely to the biblical text than do those of Moses’.54 For instance, Schoenberg’s Moses considers the pillars of cloud and fire that lead Israel through the desert a violation of the Bilderverbot.55 In the opera, it is Aaron, not Moses, who strikes the rock with his rod rather than speaking to it (Numbers 20) and it is Aaron, not God, who promises an actual land to the people, and in both cases he is subsequently criticised by Moses for doing so.56 ‘The Bible notwithstanding’, Schoenberg’s Moses also castigates Aaron for performing the wonders that God had instructed Moses to perform should the people not believe (Exodus 4).57 Schoenberg’s Moses destroys the tablets not the moment he sees the goings on around the golden calf but in response to Aaron’s claim that the tablets too are ultimately an image.58 As Goldstein puts it, ‘Moses’s dedication to the mutual exclusivity of idea, word, and image has imprisoned him in a conception of unmitigated aniconism and austerity’.59 She speculates that this stark portrayal of Moses may reflect both Schoenberg’s desire to distance himself from his own previous Christian affiliation and his response to the National Socialists’ ‘preoccupation with images and symbols’.60 Yet whatever his motivation, there is much to indicate that Schoenberg’s treatment of the biblical material did indeed tend towards the sort of intensified and indeterminate negation with which Adorno took issue (and that Adorno did not consider representative of Jewish tradition). Towards the end of his critique of Moses und Aron in “Sakrales Fragment”, Adorno states that there was in fact more to the Bilderverbot than even Schoenberg wanted to acknowledge, and this despite the fact that few had heeded it as Schoenberg did.61 Given the issues just outlined, this is clearly an extremely complex and paradoxical statement and one to which Kurth’s contention that

300  Lars Fischer ‘Schoenberg’s ability to observe the Bilderverbot extended much further than Adorno imagined’ does not even begin to do justice.62 What, then, of Kurth’s attempt to refute what he understands to be Adorno’s critique with Schoenberg’s intentions? I have to admit to a certain puzzlement at his general approach, even on its own terms, for much of the material he introduces hinges on the notion of music as a uniquely ‘direct, unpolluted and pure [. . .] mode of expression’ (Schoenberg’s words), as a language that is incomprehensible even to the composer, as an artistic medium that ‘should also remain incomprehensible—at least to human cognition’ (these paraphrased notions Kurth attributes to Schoenberg’s reception of Schopenhauer).63 Kurth’s reliance on these notions seems strangely at odds with his emphasis on Schoenberg’s agency. I appreciate that these assumptions are not strictly speaking contradictory, but the contention that composers work their magic by deploying a mode of expression that is, and should remain, ‘incomprehensible [. . .] to human cognition’ surely raises serious questions about the credibility of their own attempts to explain the meaning of what they have created in cognitive terms. Yet it is precisely on Schoenberg’s attempts to render explanations of this kind that Kurth’s case fundamentally rests. What Schoenberg has to say, specifically on the matter of the Bilderverbot, is in any case more contradictory than Kurth suggests. He proceeds to quote at some length from ‘an important letter’ that Schoenberg wrote to Kandinsky on August  19, 1912.64 Schoenberg’s premise in this letter is that humanity is surrounded by puzzles (Rätsel) that it needs to confront by learning to decipher them without insisting on solving them. Works of art are themselves puzzles designed to mirror these real-life puzzles, ‘so that our souls may endeavour—not to solve them—but to decipher them’.65 The crucial passage for the discussion here then reads as follows: For the puzzles are an image [Abbild] of the incomprehensible [Unfaßbaren]. And [sic] imperfect, that is, a human image [Abbild]. But if we can only learn from them to consider the incomprehensible [das Unfaßbare] possible, we get nearer to God, because we no longer demand to understand him. Because then we no longer measure him with our intelligence [Verstand], criticise him, deny him, because we cannot reduce [auflösen] him to that human inadequacy [Unzulänglichkeit] which is our clarity.66 Kurth infers from this that: For Schoenberg, the artwork-Rätsel provides an ‘imperfect, that is, human image’ of das Unfaßbare (the incomprehensible); it shows Unfaßbarkeit (incomprehensibility), and indicates the human inability to grasp the ineffable. Understood in this way, the music in Moses und Aron does not contravene the Bilderverbot: it does not represent God, but only the associated qualities of Unfaßbarkeit and Unvorstellbarkeit, and it does so with a Rätsel, not a Bild.67

Adorno and the Prohibition of the Image   301 On at least two counts, this is surely a staggering exegetical leap. Firstly, Kurth simply switches from ‘das Unfaßbare’ to ‘Unfaßbarkeit’ and then treats these two concepts as interchangeable. Indeed, the following section of his text then begins with the question: ‘How does Schoenberg’s music signify Unfaßbarkeit?’ This is akin to treating the terms ‘the ineffable’ and ‘ineffability’ as interchangeable. The only aspect of Schoenberg’s letter that points even remotely in the direction Kurth is suggesting is his emphasis on the need to ‘learn [. . .] to consider the incomprehensible possible’ in order to avoid measuring God by inadequate human standards. Yet this cannot change the fact the Schoenberg consistently refers precisely to ‘das Unfaßbare’ and not to ‘Unfaßbarkeit’ and suggests that the works of art he envisages render an image of ‘das Unfaßbare’. To be sure, he acknowledges that these images fail to provide the full picture but at the same time he clearly suggests that they are in fact conducive, provided one remains aware of their limitations. Whether this amounts to an acknowledgement of the Bilderverbot obviously depends on how one defines that prohibition. Ironically, one could interpret Schoenberg’s statement as calling for precisely the sort of determinate negation Adorno had in mind. Yet Kurth’s frame of reference does not seem to allow for a differentiation along these lines and, even if Schoenberg was thinking in these terms in 1912, there is much to suggest, as indicated above, that he was committed to an altogether less determinate form of negation when working on Moses und Aron. Secondly, and perhaps even more puzzlingly, the passage from Schoenberg’s letter to Kandinsky that Kurth cites refers twice to the puzzles as being images, albeit an Abbild rather than a Bild. As is well known, Adorno himself maintained a ‘sharp distinction’ between these two terms, using Abbild to denote the straightforward visual depiction or reflection of something and Bild to denote an altogether more sophisticated form of representation.68 Irrespective of Adorno’s specific take on this, it seems fair to say that even on a casual level German speakers are likely to draw a similar distinction. They are likely to associate Abbild with a straightforward visual representation or likeness whereas the term Bild can be understood to mean the same but also allows for a wealth of metaphorical meanings in a way that Abbild does not. In short, on balance the term Abbild signifies a less mediated form of representation than the term Bild and Schoenberg’s description of pieces of art as puzzles that are an Abbild rather than a Bild of the incomprehensible is therefore not less but more problematic from the perspective of the Bilderverbot. It is probably fair to say that Adorno’s use of terminology in discussing these issues is confusing insofar as he uses the term Bild with slightly differing meanings, depending on the context, no doubt in part because the German language gave him only so many options. It is worth noting that it does not have a proper separate term for ‘picture’, a term arguably much more closely associated with the visual sphere than the broader term ‘image’. This makes Kurth’s portrayal of the matter all the more remarkable. For in his attempt to denounce Adorno as oblivious to the specificity of music as an aural medium, he characterises Adorno as ‘preoccupied with images’, crediting him with a ‘fixation on image rather than sound’. He also claims that ‘Adorno cleaves to the idea that music must be

302  Lars Fischer pictorial’, describes him as ‘preoccupied [. . .] with the pictorial, rather than the sonorous’, and translates Adorno’s term ‘Bilderwesen’ as ‘pictorial essence’.69 Whatever room there may be for misunderstandings regarding Adorno’s deployment of the term Bild, this is clearly a misrepresentation. To be sure, the extensive use of the term ‘image’ implies a visual imperialism of sorts, but it is quite obvious that Adorno did not use the term to refer exclusively to visual phenomena, nor is there any reason to assume that images need to be visual, at least no more than human imagination as a whole may or may not (have come to) function visually; and that music has ‘a peculiar ability to activate the imagination’ is surely not in dispute. As Matteo Nanni has put it, ‘Anyone who hears music is confronted with an enormous flood of images [. . .] whose materiality cannot be perceived visually’.70 I would suggest that if, for Adorno, ‘artworks are non-conceptual because they do not conform to the communicative model of language, whereby an object is subsumed and reified by its concept’,71 and ‘artistic truth’ is ‘dialectical, disclosive, and nonpropositional’,72 at the most basic level images are what works of art, irrespective of their particular medium, produce instead of propositions.73 Yet works of art are also ‘process and moment in one’.74 On the one hand, the open-ended, and potentially infinite, negotiation of its ‘part-part and part-whole relations’ represents the process. On the other hand, the work of art as such can only come into being as an object by cutting this process short and reifying its ‘part-part and part-whole relations’ in one specific guise. In so doing it extends, as already indicated, the ‘guilt of domination’ into the work of art itself. It is the violation of the process by the moment, as it were, that creates the discrepancy within the work of art that discloses its truth. Paradoxically, this violation needs to take the form of a partial synthesis for the work of art to be produced in the first place, yet the ultimate failure of that synthesis is also the precondition of art’s ability to ‘hum’. If I understand it correctly, Adorno repeatedly uses the term ‘image’ to refer to the reified object rather than the disclosive potential that it has in spite of itself. He introduces the French term apparition (which sounds distinctly alien in the German text) to designate ‘that which lights up, the experience of being touched’, whereas ‘the image is the paradoxical attempt to capture this most fleeting experience’.75 Clearly, then, as far as Adorno is concerned, without image there is no art and any suggestion that he subscribed to a comprehensive Bilderverbot would render his entire aesthetics absurd. Nor, needless to say, was Adorno oblivious to the specificity of music. He repeatedly refers to it as arguably the least conceptual and least propositional of all art forms.76 Nowhere other than in his discussion of Moses und Aron, Adorno states that ‘Music is the imageless art and as such was exempt’ from the traditional Jewish Bilderverbot. Yet he then adds that it had since become entangled in, and learnt to emulate, the production of images characteristic of all European art.77 Here as elsewhere, far from making essentialist normative statements about the nature of music, Adorno is trying to assess the ways in which it is shaped by the complex configuration of social, historical and artistic factors mentioned at the outset.

Adorno and the Prohibition of the Image   303 It is here too that Adorno grounds his claim, disputed by Kurth as we saw, that Schoenberg’s opera adheres to a frame of reference that goes beyond Schoenberg’s own subjective motivation. In Ästhetische Theorie, Adorno argued that the fact ‘that the work of art takes on a life of its own vis-à-vis the artist is no excrescence of the megalomania of l’art pour l’art but the most straightforward expression of its character as a social relationship that carries within itself the law of its concretization’.78 It was for this reason, he added, that ‘a “we” and not an “I” [. . .] speaks from the works of art and all the more purely so, the less it superficially adapts itself to a “we” and its idiom. [. . .] It immediately says “we”, regardless of its intention’.79 There may be many good reasons to question this contention but it surely cannot be refuted simply by establishing that Schoenberg felt sufficiently misunderstood by his audience to conclude he effectively did not have one. Nor is it entirely clear how Kurth hopes to dispel Adorno’s notion of the ‘we’ by pointing to Schoenberg’s use of polyphony, given Adorno’s claim that Western music’s entire harmonic deep structure, ‘including all its counterpoint and polyphony, is the “we” that has penetrated from the choral ritual’.80 Once again, I am not suggesting Kurth need agree with Adorno’s notions, but one can surely only refute, let alone discard, them by actually engaging them on their own terms in the first place. The same goes for Adorno’s identification of Moses und Aron as a sacred work. That Schoenberg chose to use sacred forms on other occasions but opted for the form of an opera in this case does little to dispel Adorno’s claim that ‘as a simile, any music designed to create a totality has its theological aspect, even if it knows nothing of it’.81 Let me reiterate that my issue here has been with the portrayal of Adorno’s grappling with Schoenberg that emerges from the Cambridge Companion to Schoenberg, much more than with Kurth as an individual scholar, and this goes for my concluding remarks too. What makes Kurth’s rather perplexing account particularly worrying is not least the fact that it makes all the more difficult any attempt to counter a rather sinister current trend identified by Scheit and Svoboda in their recent book.82 On this reading, Adorno-bashing has come to replace Mahler- or Schoenberg-bashing as one of the principal lines of defence for those who would have us believe that we already live in the best of all possible worlds. Those of us still committed to the development of those perspectives Adorno called for in the concluding section of Minima Moralia, perspectives ‘that displace and estrange the world and reveal it, with its rifts and fissures, to be as indigent and disfigured as it will appear one day in the messianic light’,83 would do well to resist this trend. NOTES   1 See most recently Gerhard Scheit and Wilhelm Svoboda, Treffpunkt der Moderne. Gustav Mahler, Theodor W. Adorno, Wiener Traditionen (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 2010), for example 18, 131–2. Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination. A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950, 2nd ed.

304  Lars Fischer (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1996), originally published in 1973, still offers a good introduction to the evolution of the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory.   2 See, for example, Richard D. Leppert, “Music ‘Pushed to the Edge of Existence’ (Adorno, Listening, and the Question of Hope),” Cultural Critique 60 (2005): 92–133.   3 Schoenberg completed A Survivor from Warsaw for Narrator, Men’s Chorus and Orchestra op. 46 in the summer of 1947 and it represents his most direct musical response to the Shoah. It was first performed in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in November  1948. The reference of its title to the Warsaw ghetto notwithstanding, its narrative is principally concerned with the experience of a roll call of the kind that regularly took place in the camps. For an introduction to the background and context, see Michael Strasser, “ ‘A Survivor from Warsaw’ as Personal Parable,” Music & Letters 76, no. 1 (1995): 52–63.   4 Gerhard Scheit, Verborgener Staat, lebendiges Geld. Zur Dramaturgie des Antisemitismus (Freiburg: Ça ira, 1999), 508 note 162.   5 The Survivor from Warsaw concludes with, indeed culminates in, a rendering of the shema.   6 Theodor W. Adorno, “Engagement” [1962], in Gesammelte Schriften 11, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998), 409–30 (423).   7 Scheit, Verborgener Staat, 508 note 162. The quotation is from Theodor W. Adorno, “Arnold Schönberg, 1874–1951” [1952/53], in Gesammelte Schriften 10.1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998), 152–80 (180).   8 Not least, the Survivor is short enough to be played in class, indeed, depending on the student response and the course of the discussion, more than once.   9 Scheit, Verborgener Staat, 495, makes the interesting suggestion that Schoenberg’s focus here may have been more on the possibility of collective resistance than specifically on the recovery of religious identity. Needless to say, both these emphases would be equally redemptive. 10 ‘I remember only the grandiose moment when they all started to sing as if prearranged, the old prayer they had neglected for so many years—the forgotten creed!’; quoted in ibid., 493. 11 Elizabeth A. Pritchard, “Bilderverbot Meets Body in Theodor W. Adorno’s Inverse Theology,” Harvard Theological Review 95, no. 3 (2002): 291–318. 12 See note 2. 13 Dan Webb, “ ‘If Adorno Isn’t the Devil, It’s because He’s a Jew’. Lyotard’s Misreading of Adorno through Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus,” Philosophy & Political Criticism 35, no. 5 (2009): 517–31. 14 Richard Kurth, “Immanence and Transcendence in ‘Moses und Aron’,” in The Cambridge Companion to Schoenberg, ed. Jennifer Shaw and Joseph Auner (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 177–90. Schoenberg worked on this opera, on and off, from the mid-1920s until 1937 but did not ultimately complete it. For the background and context, see Bluma Goldstein, Reinscribing Moses. Heine, Kafka, Freud, and Schoenberg in a European Wilderness (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1992), 149–67. 15 Gary Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song. An Essay on Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 149. 16 Kurth, “Immanence and Transcendence,” 178. 17 Theodor W. Adorno, “Sakrales Fragment. Über Schönbergs Moses und Aron” [1963], in Gesammelte Schriften 16, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998), 454–75. Adorno dedicated this text to Gershom Scholem. 18 Robert W. Witkin, “Composing Society in Sonata Form: Music Analysis and Social Formation,” in Musikalische Analyse und Kritische Theorie. Zu Adornos Philosophie der Musik, ed. Adolf Nowak and Markus Fahlbusch (Tutzing: Hans Schneider,

Adorno and the Prohibition of the Image   305 2007), 85–101 (88). ‘The state of part-whole relations that Adorno viewed as healthy’, Witkin argues, ‘is one in which the whole structure—for example a society or a work of art—develops out of the interactions among its elements. The elements in such a formation are all open and responsive to each other, changing each other and being changed by each other; the totality or whole that emerges from these relations remains open and responsive to them. Thus, while Adorno’s model of moral responsibility and freedom rests upon the free and spontaneous initiative of the elements or parts of the system—whether these are the individuals in a social system or the musical motives in a sonata—it also rests equally upon the responsiveness of these parts or elements to each other, their mutual mediation, and their reflexive relationship with the emergent whole that they are in the process of forming. [. . .] The conjunction of overall unity (totality) and manifold diversity is the problematic which recurs throughout Adorno’s analyses’, ibid., 88–9. The corpus of Adorno’s writings is, of course, vast and they hardly make for easy reading. I too can claim familiarity only with a fraction of these writings but I hope to be able to show that even a relatively limited amount of strategic reading around Adorno’s “Sakrales Fragment”, along with a more careful reading of the text itself—or to put it slightly differently, a modicum of attention to the ‘part-part and part-whole relations’ within the corpus of Adorno’s writings—is sufficient to reveal grave weaknesses in Kurth’s discussion. 19 Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, in Gesammelte Schriften 7, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998), 216. 20 Ibid., 217. 21 Ibid., 327. 22 Ibid., 454. 23 Ibid., 454. 24 Adorno, “Sakrales Fragment,” 463. 25 Ibid., 465. 26 Kurth, “Immanence and Transcendence,” 181. 27 Ibid., 183. 28 Cited in ibid., 183. 29 Ibid., 184. 30 Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 264. 31 Ibid., 277. 32 Ibid., 121. 33 Ibid., 67, 68. 34 Adorno, “Sakrales Fragment,” 457, 464. 35 Kurth, “Immanence and Transcendence,” 182. 36 Ibid., 189. 37 Pritchard, “Bilderverbot Meets Body,” 296. 38 Ibid., 312. 39 Ibid., 313. 40 Ibid., 296. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 304. 43 Ibid., 297. 44 Theodor W. Adorno, “Negative Dialektik” [1966], in Gesammelte Schriften 6, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998), 7–412 (394). 45 Pritchard, “Bilderverbot Meets Body,” 299. 46 Ibid., 302. 47 Ibid. 48 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, in Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften 3, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998), 40.

306  Lars Fischer 49 Pritchard, “Bilderverbot Meets Body,” 302. 50 Ibid., 299. 51 Adorno, “Sakrales Fragment,” 463. 52 Bluma Goldstein, “Schoenberg’s ‘Moses und Aron’: A Vanishing Biblical Nation,” in Political and Religious Ideas in the Works of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Charlotte M. Cross and Russell A. Berman (New York and London: Garland, 2000), 159–92. 53 Goldstein, “Schoenberg’s ‘Moses und Aron’,” 175. Blumstein already hinted in this direction in her earlier discussion of Moses und Aron; see Goldstein, Reinscribing Moses, 154. 54 Goldstein, “Schoenberg’s ‘Moses und Aron’,” 167. 55 Ibid., 166. 56 Ibid., 173. 57 Ibid., 174–5. 58 Ibid., 180. 59 Ibid., 181. 60 Ibid., 186. 61 Adorno, “Sakrales Fragement,” 470. 62 Kurth, “Immanence and Transcendence,” 189. 63 All ibid., 183. 64 Ibid., 183–4. 65 Arnold Schoenberg in Wassily Kandinsky und Arnold Schönberg. Der Briefwechsel, ed. Jelena Hahl-Koch (Stuttgart: Hatje, 1993), 55, as translated by Kurth. 66 Ibid., 55, as translated by Kurth. In Ästhetische Theorie, Adorno also characterised works of art as puzzles, albeit in a rather different context: ‘All works of art’, he wrote, ‘and art in its entirety, are puzzles’. Formulated in cognitive terms, they were puzzles insofar as ‘works of art say something and in the same breath hide it’. When one was ‘inside the works of art and goes with them, this quality becomes invisible’, yet as soon as one looked at them from the outside again it instantly resurfaced; Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 182, 183. 67 Kurth, “Immanence and Transcendence,” 184. 68 Matteo Nanni, “Die imaginative Kraft der Musik,” Rheinsprung 11—Zeitschrift für Bildkritik 1 (2011): 47–55 (53). 69 All in Kurth, “Immanence and Transcendence,” 181, 182. Kurth does something similar when citing Schoenberg’s “The Relationship to the Text” of 1912 (see note 29). As we saw, Kurth stated that Schoenberg began this text ‘by refuting the notion—nevertheless belabored by Adorno—that music must conjure up images’. The relevant word in the original is ‘Vorstellungen’, a much broader term that need by no means have visual connotations. 70 Nanni, “Die imaginative Kraft der Musik,” 51. 71 Webb, “Lyotard’s Misreading of Adorno,” 525–6. 72 Lambert Zuidervaart, “Theodor W. Adorno,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/ entries/adorno (accessed February 5, 2014). 73 Adorno’s point of reference is Kunst, namely the generic term for all the arts, rather than bildende Kunst, which would narrow the focus specifically to visual and plastic art. 74 Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 154. 75 Ibid., 130. 76 For example, Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 148: ‘All significant works of art [. . .] have conceptual elements running through them; literally in the case of language, indirectly even in a medium as remote from concepts as music’; and 154, 183. 77 Adorno, “Sakrales Fragment,” 458. 78 Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 250.

Adorno and the Prohibition of the Image   307 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid. 81 Adorno, “Sakrales Fragment,” 461. 82 Scheit and Svoboda, Treffpunkt der Moderne, 9. 83 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia [1951], in Gesammelte Schriften 4, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998), 283.

18 Ari Folman’s Other War Animating and Erasing the Holocaust in Waltz with Bashir Giulia Miller

The representation of war in Israeli cinema has for the most part followed a fairly clear trajectory; this trajectory is both chronological—following the course of the major wars fought in Israel—and thematic—reflecting shifts in public opinion regarding these wars.1 Intertwined with this is a further trajectory, namely the representation of the Holocaust within Israeli cinema. Whilst several films exploring the impact of the Shoah are unrelated to the subject of war, namely those that focus upon the survivors’ experiences in Israel, others are pointedly concerned with the interrelationship between the trauma of the Jewish experience in Europe and the conduct of war in Israel. Understandably, this interrelationship has evolved and developed over the years in conjunction with shifts in cultural and social responses towards the Holocaust taking place within Israel. In the late 1940s and 1950s, the predominant representation of the Holocaust was in terms of ‘negation of exile’ (shlilat ha-golah), whereby the old Diasporic way of life was eradicated in favour of the new Israel.2 Thus, for example, in Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer (Giv’a 24 Eina Ona, Thorold Dickinson, 1955), which is set during Israel’s War of Independence, the figure of the Sabra officer is momentarily replaced by that of a meek ghetto Jew precisely at the moment when the same officer is about to kill his enemy. Although much could be said about this particular scene, the essential message is that the trauma of the Holocaust experience has to be contained and repressed in order to survive and to build a new Jewish homeland. During the 1960s and 1970s there were very few references to the Holocaust in Israeli cinema and even less to its significance with regard to modern Israeli warfare.3 The two exceptions are Operation Jonathan (Mivtza Yonatan, Menahem Golan, 1977) and The Wooden Gun (Roveh Khuliot, Ilan Moshenson, 1979). The latter is of particular interest for this chapter because it reverses the message of Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer and condemns the use of brutality in combat, revealing that this brutality is futile and immoral. The 1980s and 1990s marked the emergence of second-generation Israeli cinema, specifically produced by children of survivors. This chapter later addresses various examples of this wave; at this stage it is important to note that second-generation films, whilst not explicitly addressing the subject of war, often

Ari Folman’s Other War  309 critiqued the Zionist project, intimating that it had simply replaced the trauma of the Holocaust with a new and different kind of Israeli trauma.4 The representation of the Holocaust in Israeli cinema during the first decade of the new millennium, the period most relevant to our discussion, suggests ambivalence towards the legacy of the Holocaust within modern Israeli identity. According to Ilan Avisar, this ambivalence centres on the theme of revenge, more precisely, Jewish Israeli revenge on Nazi war criminals and questions whether this revenge is at all useful or justified.5 Whilst I do not focus specifically on the question of revenge, I do address the nature of ambivalence with regard to the Holocaust and modern Israeli identity. This chapter will analyse Waltz with Bashir (Vals im Bashir, 2008), an animated documentary produced by second-generation film-maker, Ari Folman. Folman was born in Haifa in 1962 and began his career as director with the short documentary Comfortably Numb (Sha’anan Si, 1991) and the feature film, Saint Clara (Klara Hakadosha, 1996). In 2001, he directed Made in Israel, his first film to deal directly with the Holocaust. Between 2001 and 2008 he worked primarily for Israeli television as a screen writer, and, in 2008, he made the highly experimental animated documentary Waltz with Bashir, a portrayal of his quest as narrator-protagonist to make sense of his experiences during the 1982 Lebanon war. Since its release, Waltz with Bashir has been heralded as a highly original exploration of Israel’s self-perception regarding its role in Lebanon in 1982, in particular the Sabra and Shatila massacres.6 Although the film is focalised through the eyes of one soldier, ostensibly the film-maker himself, and although this focalisation is portrayed using highly experimental forms of animation, this has not prevented Waltz with Bashir from being endowed with an implicit collective significance that relates specifically to recent events in the Middle East. Indeed, in 2008 it was awarded Best Feature-length Film by the International Documentary Association, and in 2009 it was awarded Best Documentary by the Writers Guild of America.7 This reception permeates nearly all scholarly discussion related to the film. In his essay ‘A Soldier’s Tale’, Ali Jafaar, who concludes with the accolade ‘laced with the uncertainty of a bad acid trip’, nevertheless begins his argument by suggesting that Waltz with Bashir is ultimately indexical, an ‘excoriating autobiographical account of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon’.8 Similarly, Garrett Stewart, at the other extreme argues for psychic realism whereby the merging of animation and live footage in Waltz with Bashir creates ‘a document of disavowal’.9 Nurit Gertz and Yael Munk assert that Waltz with Bashir takes ‘Israeli guilt one step further’ and stands out from other Israeli films that address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict precisely because it depicts the Lebanon war ‘as it was experienced by the director’.10 In all instances, the documentary format is given priority over the animation with the result that there is an implied responsibility on the part of Folman regarding his alleged subject, namely Israel’s role in the massacres. This in turn creates an implied discourse, rich but nevertheless limited to questions such as the effect

310  Giulia Miller of trauma on testimonials, or the value of psychiatry in recovering memory loss, or the ethical protocols of interviewing. Indeed, Ella Shohat, in the postscript of her seminal work Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation mentions Waltz with Bashir within the context of documentary and criticises the film for limiting focalisation to the Israeli soldiers and not extending it to the Palestinians.11 This criticism reveals expectations normally—although not always—associated with documentary rather than fiction. Furthermore, Jafaar, Stewart and Gertz all suggest that the documentary format is supported by the final live footage scenes, that there is a clear trajectory from memory, false or otherwise, to the ‘real’. This assumed trajectory further limits possible responses to the film because it imposes a specific teleology that completely ignores the ambiguity of documentary as animation. I would like to consider an alternative reading whereby the film’s explicit discourse concerning the Sabra and Shatila massacres is destabilised by an oblique Holocaust narrative. This duality, I argue, is intimated during key points within the film and is also sustained by the film’s mode of representation. It is precisely this mode that distinguishes Waltz with Bashir from other Israeli films that address the events of 1982—Cup Final (Gmar gavia, Eran Riklis, 1991) and, more recently, Beaufort (Joseph Cedar, 2007) and Lebanon (Samuel Maoz, 2009)—films that use narrative fiction rather than documentary or animation, and do not go beyond Israel’s very recent political and military past.12 Indeed, the film’s sporadic and fleeting references to the Holocaust in conjunction with Folman’s own biography possibly place it within another filmic tradition, namely that of documentaries made by second-generation film-makers such as Orna Ben Dor’s Because of That War (B’Glal Hamilhamah Hahi, 1988), Tzipi Reibenbach’s Choice and Destiny (Habechira vehagoral, 1993) and Asher Tlalim’s Don’t Touch My Holocaust (Al Tigou li BaShoah, 1994).13 The intertwining of the two filmic traditions represented by Waltz with Bashir—fictional portrayal of the events of 1982 and second-generation documentary centring on the Holocaust experience—is in itself not surprising: post Zionist revisionism, which revisits Israeli historiography and criticises Zionism’s collective appropriation and standardising of Holocaust memory, was partly triggered by the unnecessary and ill-fated Likud invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and had a significant influence upon second-generation culture. Thus, as I shall discuss at a later stage, the narrator-protagonist’s desire to relate to his parents’ experiences at Auschwitz, and which generates guilt towards his own activities in Lebanon, encapsulates some of the anxieties associated with second-generation Israelis. Of course, the three documentaries mentioned above—Because of That War, Choice and Destiny, Don’t Touch My Holocaust—deal directly with the Shoah and are not animated and, as such, Waltz with Bashir could only be regarded as an experimental example of this tradition. However, I  would argue that the investigation of the Holocaust through testimony intrinsic to Because of That War, Choice and Destiny and Don’t Touch My Holocaust exists as a subtext in Folman’s film, and that this subtext is largely sustained by the film’s use of animated documentary.

Ari Folman’s Other War  311 This chapter also considers what the function of this dual discourse might be. Does referencing the Holocaust, however briefly, imply that the protagonist’s personal engagement with his role in Lebanon is always mediated by and therefore compromised by his status as a so-called second-generation Israeli? In this sense, can Waltz with Bashir be regarded as a film where the past is revealed as a spectre that forever haunts the present and which uses animation as a way of making this haunting manifest? This outlook is possibly rather static and fatalistic inasmuch as it implies that, first, nothing can be done to relieve the burden of history and that, second, the present is always doomed to sway under this burden. Alternatively, do references to the Holocaust demonstrate how our understanding of the distant past can actually be revised and reworked through the present, and that both, past and present, are in fact mutually beneficial? Although I  do not offer a definitive answer as to the function of Holocaust memory as represented in Waltz with Bashir, I  am inclined towards a reading whereby the distant past overlaps with the present, causing small ripples in both directions. I  plan to support this reading with analyses of various elements in the film, such as particular imagery, and, of course, the film’s unusual mode of representation. Firstly, Waltz with Bashir is only masked as an interactive documentary, one in which there is a clear encounter between the film-maker and the film’s participants.14 It is structured around 10 interview scenes, eight of which are presented as conversations or dialogues between the narrator and the interviewee, and two in which the narrator is either entirely absent or exists solely as a disembodied voice off-camera. Whilst these interviews are frequently juxtaposed with surreal imagery and flashbacks, the film is essentially presented as a well-meaning quest for truth in documentary form. As such, the viewer is invited to take the words and comments of the interviewees more seriously than if the film were presented as pure fiction.15 He or she is also invited to infer congruence between what is happening in front of the camera—that is, the scene depicting the Israeli soldiers’ jovial entry into Lebanon—and historical reality. This is true of any documentary, yet it should also necessitate an understanding on the part of the spectator that the truth or reality under investigation will never be accurately described—only approximated. More importantly, the documentary creates its own reality.16 The putative function of Folman’s film is therefore less about describing the narrator’s role in Lebanon and more to do with constructing an image concerning Israel’s self-perception of its role in Lebanon as focalised through a myriad of individuals. The interactive mode is especially effective in the film inasmuch as it highlights the alleged effect made by the interviewer upon these individuals, namely trauma and guilt, the witnessing of which by the spectator serves a precise function. Secondly, the interactive documentary format is rendered more complex by animation, a medium that is already ‘informed by self-evident principles of construction’.17 It is clear that the use of animation facilitates the representation of dreams, visions and flashbacks in the film. Its function is penetrative, allowing the spectator into an internal space that would normally be inaccessible.18 In some instances, this space is depicted in a hyper-realist manner—the sinewy black dogs

312  Giulia Miller in Boaz’s dream that run through shop-lined streets littered with rubbish and over puddles in which street signs are reflected—and in others the space is seemingly depicted using symbolism, as in Folman’s recurring water flashbacks. However, the fact that animation is used to represent almost everything—dreams, flashbacks and ‘live’ interviews—and everyone, including Folman himself, is of particular interest. First, it underscores the fictive qualities of the documentary genre: the more realistic the conversations and interviews appear, the gestures, the settings, the language, the more one wonders why animation is used at all, thus calling into question the realist motives of the film.19 Second, it also suggests a distance between Folman, the director, and Folman, the represented cartoon character, and further undermines the function of the aforementioned interactive documentary. Thirdly, there is a subtle inconsistency inherent in Waltz with Bashir: the nature of the interviews and conversations appears at odds with the film’s central hypothesis. In other words, the narrator’s investigation leads to the conclusion that not only was the Israeli government entirely complicit in the massacres but also that the Israeli soldiers—Folman included—were aware of atrocities taking place. However, the majority of witnesses in Waltz with Bashir are not only friends of the narrator but are presented favourably, as though they were simply victims of circumstance. Indeed, there is only one interview towards the end of the film that is conducted in true interrogatory form whereby the witness, Dror Harazi, is repeatedly asked to ethically justify his actions. In this particular scene, Folman does not feature as a character within the film but simply as a voice and as an imaginary face that Harazi addresses. It is clearly noteworthy that this should be the case; after all, nearly everyone Folman interviews should theoretically undergo the same treatment but they do not. Meanwhile, Folman’s own amnesia protects him from any kind of cross-examination. In any case, such inconsistency of inquiry method versus overall hypothesis is further complicated by references to the Shoah. Folman’s psychiatrist friend, Ori Sivan, suggests that Folman’s amnesia regarding events in Lebanon stems from his preoccupation with the Holocaust and that in order to overcome this amnesia Folman should carry out an investigation based on testimonies from other Israeli soldiers: Your interest in those camps is actually about the ‘other’ camps [. . .] your only solution is to find out what really happened [. . .] get details and more details. [. . .]20 Although Folman’s sole response to this is a bemused smile, the analogy has been made and is firmly embedded both in the text and in the spectator as a possible discourse. Consequently, there is a perpetual and unsettling dialogue between very recent and distant history. The process of Folman’s historical inquiry into the responsibility of those who participated, either wittingly or unwittingly, in the Sabra and Shatila massacres is mediated by another pressing historical investigation, namely that of witnesses—both victims and perpetrators—to the Shoah. The verdict reached via this process is revealed by the psychologist towards the end of

Ari Folman’s Other War  313 the film and, inasmuch as Folman does not protest, it remains in the mind of the viewer as viable: At age 19 you felt guilty—unwillingly you took on the role of the Nazis.21 Unsurprisingly, this verdict casts each of the previous interviews and conversations in a different light: rather than simply asking individuals to retrace their steps, Folman is also querying to what extent they are different from those who carried out orders under Nazism. This query is largely obfuscated by displays of ‘humanity’ that are central to eight of the ten testimonies: for instance, Boaz Rein-Buskila suffers recurring nightmares about the 26 dogs he killed during the war; Carmi Canaan, ‘the only nerd, good at chess and maths’, left Israel altogether and moved to the Dutch countryside; Ronny Dayag describes how whilst in hiding all he could think about was his mother and how she might suffer if something were to happen to him. Folman’s investigation is also coded as both civilised and rational, and this is evident from the highly orchestrated settings in which each conversation or interview takes place. This, of course, occurs in live-action documentary, but in animation, where each and every detail has to be drawn, it is even more pronounced. In the opening scene, for example, Boaz recounts his horrific experiences in a cosy, dimly lit bar surrounded by music and film posters where other customers are sitting quietly chatting amongst themselves; Folman’s psychiatrist friend reassuringly always has a chessboard or a New Yorker magazine next to him, and Carmi recounts frightening episodes by the fireside in an old European-style room with a leather sofa, wooden table and glass book cabinets filled with books. Even Folman’s voiceover account of a particularly bloody episode during which Frenkel is shooting in all directions is softened by the comparison to a waltz. Indeed, Chopin’s Waltz in C Sharp Minor begins even as Frenkel’s interview comes to a close. Consequently, the present-day interview scene seems to overlap with the past, to a balletic sequence where he is dancing amid bullets whilst Lebanese civilians are watching from balconies, as though at the theatre.22 These various juxtapositions of present-day civility and past atrocity reminds the viewer that the Lebanon war, like the Shoah, has to an extent been naturalised as past history, even if, like the Shoah, it still affects those individuals that were involved. It is also clear from these scenes that Folman’s own identity in relation to the Holocaust—that of a second-generation Israeli—is similarly mediated by his involvement in Lebanon and that of his comrades. After all, it is only when visiting Ori Sivan that the protagonist considers the impact his background might have on his psyche. Indeed, reading the film as first and foremost an exploration of Folman’s (second-generation) identity rather than a personal documentary account of the Sabra and Shatila massacres is actively encouraged when considering the fact that he visually appropriates each and every testimony. Unlike live-action documentary whereby a testimony is mediated by the camera alone, the construction necessary in animation highlights its purely subjective character. Furthermore, in a

314  Giulia Miller live-action documentary the narration or testimony is either accompanied by live footage or photographs, or it is re-enacted by actors. The paradox in Waltz with Bashir is that most of it is represented as ‘live’ but in cartoon form. Consequently, in Waltz with Bashir, whenever an interviewee describes an event, a memory or a dream it is translated immediately into a particular and highly stylised image so that in spite of the wide range of voices and opinions, there nevertheless exists a visual flatness and conformity. A pertinent example of this can be seen when Folman, troubled by his amnesia regarding Lebanon, first visits his psychiatrist friend, the previously mentioned Ori Sivan. During this scene Sivan demonstrates the process of false memory by describing a well-known experiment whereby a group of people are shown 10 childhood images relating to a visit to Luna Park.23 Although Sivan does not give examples of these images, the spectator is presented with a selection that seems completely incongruous both to the term ‘Luna Park’ and also to the film’s imagery in general: we see a rural European landscape gradually being filled with an array of figures. A small selection of these are dressed in clothes typical of 1950s America—a young girl in a sailor’s suit eating candy floss with her boyfriend, a large man in T-shirt and trousers eating an ice-cream and a man in a suit next to a ‘shoot house’. Yet, most of the figures appear to date from 1940s Europe—men in dark double breasted suits, women in long coats and cloche hats—whilst the person hypothetically undergoing the experiment is presented as a little boy in old-fashioned knickerbockers carrying a pink balloon. Furthermore, whilst the American figures are completely expressionless, those from Europe are staged in a comparatively dramatic manner: one of the men is staring into the distance, seemingly at a very mournful mother and daughter; next to him, a woman in a grey outfit is standing with her back to the viewer as though looking for someone. In other words, the imaginary childhood that appears to the spectator is one that Folman could never have experienced, inhabited by individuals from his parents’ generation, from wartime Europe and postwar America. Thus, the psychiatrist’s words are completely subordinated to Folman’s own unexpected vision. Moreover, it is both interesting and apt that during an experiment concerning false memory the imagined childhood should contain so many scenes of wartime Europe. A  fundamental characteristic of those belonging to the second generation is that whilst they may have inherited a devastating sense of exile, they will never know or understand the Europe from which this exile took place and so their mourning will always be incomplete.24 They mourn for something for which they have no memory and they can only retrieve this ‘memory’ via their imagination. Waltz with Bashir is premised upon the significance of recovering memory, although it is only later that this is connected to the Holocaust. Yet again, the use of animation allows for two concurrent processes: that of the interview with Ori Sivan, in which Folman confesses an inability to locate his exact whereabouts and activities at the time of the massacres, and that of the hypothetical experiment in which, unbeknownst to Sivan but not to the spectator, Folman attempts to inhabit a scene that he could never have experienced in the first place. At one point during the conversation, animation allows the two

Ari Folman’s Other War  315 processes to overlap and behind Folman we see the imagined fairground scene through the window. The two processes are crucially different: the former suggests denial; the latter, a false recollection, the mournful and nostalgic nature of which could be construed as a contribution to an over-determined Zionism—that is, because Jewish life in Europe has been irreparably damaged, there is no choice but to establish a Jewish state—and as a consequent justification for both Folman’s past activities and the way in which he subsequently deals with these activities. The juxtaposition of the two processes thus suggests an overarching narrative within the film: the desire to reconcile a long lost past with recent history both validates and decries Zionism and Israeli military activity. Further examples that demonstrate the pervasiveness of Folman’s identity within the film and the consequent circularity of the film’s hypothesis can be seen in the editing of the interviews, especially the final two. As I  have previously mentioned, the first eight interviews are conducted as informal conversations whereby the implied film-maker, Ari Folman, is a character within the animation. The style of conversation is polite and non-confrontational and each of the witnesses’ testimonies is privileged with its own animation sequence. Thus, we see Carmi Canaan’s hallucination upon the ‘love ship’ and Shmuel Frenkel’s flashback to the moment he killed a young Arab boy. Similarly, Folman’s meeting with post-trauma expert, Professor Zahava Solomon, who uses the metaphor of the camera lens that finally snaps, ties in neatly with the film’s concluding sequence and functions as a possible meta-commentary on Folman’s own film-making process. However, the final testimonies are of particular interest, not least because unlike all the other interviews, they are filmed against a completely bare background as though to minimise distractions. The first is with veteran war journalist Ron Ben-Yishai, and is notable because Folman is completely absent; not only do we not see him but we do not hear him either. Ben-Yishai’s testimony is thus a monologue rather than an interview. Moreover, his strikingly confident mannerisms create the impression that he has been given completely free reign to describe events as he chooses, with not the hint of interference from Folman and is by extension excluded from the rigour of historical inquiry. The second interview under scrutiny is completely the opposite: an Israeli soldier, Dror Harazi, clearly not a friend of Folman, stares nervously out at the spectator and is ruthlessly interrogated by a disembodied voice, apparently that of Folman, who is now in ‘investigative film-maker’ mode rather than ‘troubled friend’ or ‘patient’ mode. The discrepancy between the two interview styles is curious; Ben-Yishai relates how upon hearing of possible massacres in the camps he simply returned home and made dinner for his friends. Then, whilst at dinner, the regiment commander also tells him that a massacre has taken place. Ben-Yishai recalls this episode in a surprisingly casual way: He mentioned one or two incidents, saying a family was seen shot [. . .] we talked about it over dinner later.25

316  Giulia Miller Then, when Ben-Yishai finally does question Defence Minister Ariel Sharon about the massacres, he patiently waits until the next morning before investigating further. Not only does Folman neglect to question Ben-Yishai’s passivity but he treats the journalist’s testimony of entering the destroyed camps—a testimony that expresses disgust and dismay—as a catalyst for the entire film. This catalyst, which is expressed in the form of live footage, and which seemingly embodies Folman’s sudden recollection of events is rendered problematic by Ben-Yishai’s previous trust in the Israeli army and by his failure to honour his role as investigative correspondent. In other words, the film’s entire trajectory seems to move from a purely subjective or private mode to an allegedly objective and public one in the form of news footage; it is ostensibly a move from the opaque to the transparent, and yet this move is grossly over-determined precisely because the footage is not as spontaneous or as radical as it purports to be. This circularity is similarly inscribed in Folman’s own personal narrative, which is, of course, carefully and meticulously structured to describe an initial amnesia leading to total recall. The true source of this recall is unknown, although in narrative terms it is shown to coincide with the use of footage at the end. Alongside this circuitous discourse concerning Israel’s involvement in the massacres, exists yet again a subtle though pertinent dialogue with Holocaust memory. When Ben-Yishai describes those Palestinians that survived the massacres he says the following: You know that picture from the Warsaw ghetto? The one with the kid holding his hands in the air? That’s just how the long line of women, old people and children looked.26 Because the Warsaw photo in question belongs to imagery associated with the Nuremberg trial and with visual evidence of the Shoah, it has become an established icon of post-Holocaust memory and a testimony to the eventual victory of ‘good’ over ‘evil’. The fact that Ben-Yishai refers to this photo precisely at the moment when he and his cameramen are about to film the aftermath of the massacres endows his footage with an exaggerated and inauthentic gravitas that potentially exonerates him from any responsibility. By extension, it endows the Israeli media with similarly exaggerated noble qualities. The question remains: how do these final sequences affect the two principal inquiries that I have argued to be central to the film? Is it possible that the narrator’s personal quest to recall his activities during the Lebanon War, which, as we have established, is structured to progress from the opaque to the transparent, is transformed into a moral victory by virtue of the reference to Warsaw? Or, conversely, is it the film’s subtextual inquiry into the events of the Shoah that is impacted by virtue of the final scenes in which we see both animated and live images of the surviving Palestinians as well as the corpses? If it is the latter then perhaps these final scenes function as a compensatory gesture that temporarily alleviates the trauma of never being able to bear witness to the Holocaust.

Ari Folman’s Other War  317 I would argue that both interpretations are central to the film, but only as starting points for discussion rather than as fixed readings. As I suggested earlier, the dual interrogation—the explicit attempt to recall recent events in Lebanon and the implicit desire to understand the Holocaust—permits greater understanding of modern Israeli identity and allows this identity to be contextualised within a wider Jewish history. For instance, Folman’s journey from amnesia to recall can be read alongside another journey in which his identity as Israeli citizen and soldier expands to that of a second-generation Jew. Nevertheless, I  do not believe that the film is quite so simplistic, or that it would offer such a diplomatic way out. It is not simply the case that the young 18-year-old Folman identified with the Nazis and consequently repressed his involvement in the Sabra and Shatila massacres, thereafter coming to terms with this equivalence. After all, the film is forthright not only in its portrayal of Israel’s responsibility for the massacre, but also in the brutal and horrific nature of this massacre. By contrast, the horrors of the Shoah are barely touched upon. On the other hand, as I discussed earlier, the nature of the interviews, with one exception, are sympathetic and favourable towards the witnesses, and even more so to narrator-protagonist Folman, who is of course portrayed as an intelligent and sensitive investigator. Rather, Waltz with Bashir embodies the complexities inherent within modern Israeli identity without pronouncing a final judgement. This fluidity is maintained both through the film’s subject—an historical inquiry in which personal and collective histories are blurred—and form whereby investigative journalism and therapy are queried via animation, which in turn is seemingly undermined by live footage. In a sense, the political implications of this film are startling and disappointing: whilst striving for a comprehensive representation of historical and personal complexity is admirable, it is also safer than outright blame or regret. Fleeting references to the Nazis only problematise Folman’s personal inquiry into the Lebanon war; they do not constitute full engagement with the trauma and significance of the Holocaust. Similarly, a few minutes of live footage showing murdered Palestinians cannot constitute engagement with the horrors of the massacre. Perhaps the ultimate significance of Waltz with Bashir lies in its technical achievements—its employment of animation juxtaposed with live news footage to represent dreams, hallucinations, memories, ‘reality’ in such a way that a multitude of discourses is successfully contained, however unsatisfactorily. NOTES   1 Uri S. Cohen, “From Hill to Hill: A Brief History of the Representation of War in Israeli Cinema,” in Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion, ed. Miri Talmon and Yaron Peleg (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 43–55. See also: Nitzan Ben-Shaul, Mythical Expressions of Siege in Israeli Films (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1987); and Judd Ne’eman, “The Death Mask of the Moderns: A Genealogy of New Sensibility Cinema in Israel,” Israel Studies 4, no. 1 (1999): 100–28.

318  Giulia Miller   2 Ilan Avisar, “The Holocaust in Israeli Cinema as Conflict between Survival and Morality,” in Talmon and Peleg, Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion, 151–67 (153).   3 Ibid., 155.   4 Ibid., 159–60.   5 Ibid., 160–4. Moreover, Avisar describes Waltz with Bashir as a revenge narrative, although he does not explain why and it is for this reason that I do not address his thesis in my chapter.   6 On September  14, 1982, Lebanon’s newly elected Christian President Bashir Gemayel was assassinated; his loyalists accused the Palestinians and, on the night of September 16, 1982, by way of revenge the Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia entered Sabra and Shatila, two Palestinian refugee camps based in Beirut, and carried out a three-day massacre leading to the slaughter of 1,700 Palestinians. The IDF provided military cover for the Phalangists and was therefore complicit in the slaughter.   7 Haaretz Service, “U.S. Writers Guild Names Israeli War Film ‘Waltz with Bashir’ Best Documentary,” Haaretz, February  8, 2009, www.haaretz.com/ news/u-s-writers-guild-names-israeli-war-film-waltz-with-bashir-bestdocumentary-1.269661 (accessed February 27, 2011); and Nirit Anderman, “ ‘Waltz with Bashir’ Earns Best Documentary Award at International Film Festival,” Haaretz, December  8, 2008, www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/waltz-withbashir-earns-best-documentary-award-at-international-film-festival-1.259040 (accessed February 27, 2011).   8 Ali Jafaar, “A Soldier’s Tale,” Sight & Sound, December 8, 2008, 28–31 (28).   9 Garrett Stewart, “Screen Memory in Waltz with Bashir,” Film Quarterly 63, no. 3 (2010): 58–62 (62). 10 Nurit Gertz and Yael Munk, “Israeli Cinema Engaging the Conflict,” in Film in the Middle East and North Africa: Creative Dissidence, ed. Josef Gugler (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 164. 11 Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 286. 12 In spite of its documentary tendencies, Shohat locates Waltz with Bashir more generally within the tradition of Palestinian Wave cinema, which is characterised by references to the Arab-Israeli conflict and by presenting Palestine from an Israeli perspective. Shohat’s categorisation is based primarily on how focalising in the film is limited to the Israeli viewpoint, but there are other aspects that align it to this genre, such as the artistic and creative personality of the main protagonist. See Shohat, Israeli Cinema, 230 and 286. 13 Folman locates himself as a second-generation film-maker: ‘You can’t come from a home of survivors and not be aware of where you come from [. . .] it influences everything in your life. [. . .] And it’s in the movie’. Quoted in Joan Dupont, “Ari Folman’s Journey into a Heart of Darkness,” The New York Times, May 19, 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/arts/19iht-ari.1.13005821.html (accessed March  6, 2011). 14 Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 44–56. 15 Ibid., 21. 16 Ibid., 10. 17 Paul Wells, Understanding Animation (London: Routledge, 1998), 25. 18 Ibid., 122. 19 Paul Wells describes this kind of animation as ‘animation with documentary tendency’; Wells, Understanding Animation, 27–28. 20 Ari Folman, Waltz with Bashir, time code 01:02:38. 21 Ibid., 01:13:55. 22 Ibid., 57:22–58:22.

Ari Folman’s Other War  319 23 In the English subtitles, ‘Luna Park’ is translated more generally as ‘fairground’; Folman, Waltz with Bashir, time code 09:53. 24 Yosefa Loshitzky refers to Marianne Hirsch’s theory of ‘postmemory’ in Yosefa Loshitzky, Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 15–31. See also Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1997); and, more recently, Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 25 Folman, Waltz with Bashir, time code 01:11:26. 26 Ibid., 01:14:37.

This page intentionally left blank

Contributors

Devorah Baum  is Lecturer in English Literature and Critical Theory at the University of Southampton. She is also a member of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations. She has published a number of articles on the interrelations between literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis and the modern ‘return of religion’. Markus Bockmuehl is Dean Ireland’s Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture and a Fellow of Keble College, University of Oxford. He previously taught at the universities of Cambridge and St Andrews. His books include The Remembered Peter (Mohr Siebeck, 2010), Paradise in Antiquity: Jewish and Christian Views (co-edited with Guy G. Stroumsa, Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Redemption and Resistance: The Messianic Hopes of Jews and Christians in Antiquity (co-edited with James Carleton Paget, T&T Clark, 2007). Maria Diemling is Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at Canterbury Christ Church University. She has published on Early Modern Jewish history and has a particular research interest in Jewish-Christian relations. She is the co-editor (with Giuseppe Veltri) of The Jewish Body: Corporeality, Society, and Identity in the Renaissance and Early Modern Period (Brill, 2009) and (with Hannah Holtschneider) of the online teaching resource Jewish–non-Jewish Relations: www.jnjr.div.ed.ac.uk/. Todd M. Endelman is Professor Emeritus of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. A  specialist in the history of Anglo-Jewry and the social history of modern European Jewry, he is the author of The Jews of Georgian England (Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979), Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History (Indiana University Press, 1990) and The Jews of Britain, 1656–2000 (University of California Press, 2002). His most recent books are Broadening Jewish History: Towards a Social History of Ordinary Jews (Littman Library of Jewish Civilisation, 2011) and Leaving the Jewish Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (Princeton University Press, 2014). He is currently working on a biography of Redcliffe Nathan Salaman (1874–1955), Anglo-Jewish communal notable, race scientist, plant geneticist and historian of the potato.

322 Contributors Hannah Ewence is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Chester and an Honorary Fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton. Her research interests focus upon the social and cultural history of Jews in Britain from the Victorian period to the present day. She is the co-editor (with Tony Kushner) of Whatever Happened to British-Jewish Studies? (Vallentine Mitchell, 2012). She is currently undertaking research into the suburbanisation of Jews in Britain across the interwar and postwar periods. Lars Fischer was educated at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, and University College London. He is currently a Teaching Fellow in the Department of History and Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at UCL. Previously he was the Academic Director of the Centre for Jewish-Christian Relations in Cambridge, and held lectureships in German and Modern European History at UCL and King’s College London. He is a Councillor of the Royal Historical Society. Miri Freud-Kandel is a Fellow and Lecturer in Modern Judaism at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, and teaches in the Oriental Institute and Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford. Her primary research interests are: the development and theology of  Orthodox forms of Judaism, especially notions of a Modern Orthodoxy; British-Jewry, and the British chief rabbinate; gender issues in Modern Judaism; and the theology of Louis Jacobs. Garth Gilmour is a biblical archaeologist based at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the archaeology of early Israelite religion, and eastern Mediterranean trade in the Bronze Age. His most recent publication is Gezer VI. The Objects from Phases I and II (1964–1974) (Eisenbrauns, 2014). He is a Research Associate at the Department of Old and New Testament at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. James Jordan is Karten Lecturer at the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/ non-Jewish Relations, Southampton, where he is researching the role and representation of Jews in British television, 1936–1979. He is the author of From Nuremberg to Hollywood (Vallentine Mitchell, forthcoming), and co-editor (with Jan Láníčk) of Governments in Exile and the Jews of Europe (Vallentine Mitchell, 2013); (with Tony Kushner and Sarah Pearce) Jewish Journeys: From Philo to Hip Hop (Vallentine Mitchell, 2010); and (with Tom Lawson) The Memory of the Holocaust in Australia (Vallentine Mitchell, 2008). He is editor of the journal Holocaust Studies. Patrick Benjamin Koch has studied Jewish Studies and Religious Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and holds a PhD in Jewish Thought from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is currently a Prins Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Jewish History

Contributors  323 in New York City. His research interests include Jewish mysticism, Jewish moralistic writings (musar), and the comparative study of spiritual guidance in the Abrahamic traditions. Clare Le Foll is Lecturer in East European Jewish History and Culture in the Parkes Institute at the University of Southampton. She is the author of L’école artistique de Vitebsk (1897–1923). Eveil et rayonnement autour de Pen, Chagall et Malevitch (L’Harmattan, 2002), as well as of numerous articles in English and French on the history and culture of Jews in Belorussia. She is currently preparing for publication Juifs et Biélorussie(s) (1772–1905). Une identité collective en construction? (Honoré Champion, forthcoming). Anne Lloyd was awarded a doctorate by the University of Southampton in 2010 for her thesis ‘Jews under Fire: The Jewish Community and Military Service in World War I Britain’. She has previously published aspects of this research within Whatever Happened to British Jewish Studies? (edited by Tony Kushner and Hannah Ewence, Vallentine Mitchell, 2012). Giulia Miller is Affiliated Lecturer in Modern Hebrew at the University of Cambridge. From 2007 until 2009 she was a Malvin and Lea Banks Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her monograph, Reconfiguring Surrealism in Modern Hebrew Literature: Menashe Levin, Yitzhak Oren and Yitzhak Orpaz, was published by Vallentine Mitchell in 2013. She is currently working on representations of the environment in contemporary Israeli fiction and cinema. Leena Petersen undertook an MA and PhD at the University of Sussex. She has held Research Fellowships at the Franz Rosenzweig Minverva Research Centre in Jerusalem and at the Centre for German Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex. Currently, she is teaching and researching at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Her research interests include philosophies of language, the visual image and negativity in modernity. Israel M. Sandman is a Research Fellow at University College London’s Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, and an affiliate of UCL’s Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. His research focuses on mediaeval Hebrew manuscripts, text transmission, and mediaeval Jewish thought. He teaches mediaeval Jewish thought and literature, as well as comparative Jewish, Christian and Islamic thought and literature from this period. Helen Spurling is Ian Karten Senior Lecturer in Jewish Studies and Outreach Fellow at the University of Southampton. Helen has research interests in midrashic literature, Jewish-Christian relations in Late Antiquity and apocalypticism. She has published (with Emmanouela Grypeou) The Exegetical Encounter between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity (Brill, 2009) and The

324 Contributors Book of Genesis in Late Antiquity: Encounters between Jewish and Christian Exegesis (Brill, 2013), and is currently working on the development of Jewish apocalypticism in the Roman and Byzantine Empires. Isabel Wollaston is Senior Lecturer in Jewish and Holocaust Studies, Department of Theology and Religion, University of Birmingham. She was editor of Reviews in Religion and Theology (1997–2005). Her publications include A War against Memory? The Future of Holocaust Remembrance (SPCK, 1996); Suffer the Little Children? Reflections on the Cross, Urban Violence and Sacred Space (co-edited with Kay Read, University of Birmingham Press, 2001); and “Negotiating the Marketplace: The Role(s) of Holocaust Museums Today,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 4, no. 1 (2005): 63–80. Irene Zwiep is Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests include the history of Hebrew linguistic thought, Jewish Enlightenment and Wissenschaft des Judentums, with a focus on the Netherlands and an emphasis on conceptual history. Recent articles include studies on the conceptual frameworks and methodologies of Leopold Zunz and Moritz Steinschneider, as well as explorations of the epistemology, strategies and infrastructure of the early Dutch Wissenschaft des Judentums.

Index

NB italics are used for titles and words in other languages Aaron 158, 299 abbild 11, 300, 301 abomination 186, 188, 196n44 acculturation 9, 12n4, 122, 191, 199 actions 50 – 5, 182, 192, 218, 235, 312; corporal 60n38; divine 4, 5, 49 adam 43n8, 50 – 1, 53 – 6, 58n20, 59n34, 60n36 Adam and Eve 166, 179n65, 68, 69, 76, 157, 166 – 74, 179n62 Adams, Mary 250, 260 Adorno, Theodor W. 11 – 12, 85, 206 – 8; 294, 304n17, 305n18, 306n66; art 301 – 3, 304 – 5n18, 306n66, n73 and n76; Bilderverbot 294, 298 – 302; form 296; image 301 – 3; on Moses und Aron 296 – 303; on Survivor from Warsaw 294 – 5, 306n69 Adrian, Johann 190 aesthesis 203 aestheticism 1, 2, 6, 7, 9 – 11, 78 – 80, 86n8, 130, 138, 146, 200, 204, 209n11, 294, 297, 302; beauty 105, 113; Bilderverbot 294, Boston 124 – 6, 133 – 4; film 237, Jewish 80, 85n2, 86n9 and n14, 123 – 4, 199, 200 Aesthetic Theory 199, 207, 297, 303 Agamben, Giorgio 83, 85 Albertz, Rainer 99 Alderman, Geoffrey 138, 148n3 Alderman, Naomi 137, 141, 148 Allenby, Gen. Edmund 219 – 20 Allgemeine Einleitung 109, 111, 118n5 Alphabet of R. Akiva 37 – 40, 46n43 Alvarez, Al 141 Anglo-Jewry 9 – 10, 66, 132, 134, 149n, 18, 259; Anglo-Jewish Association 248; education of 215 – 16;

exhibition of 1887 110; identity 261; place of Louis Jacobs 62, 66, 76n43 (see also Louis Jacobs); responses to First World War 9, 213, 216 – 21; response to Russian Jews 221, view of Jewish poor immigrants 138 – 40; see also British Jews aniconism 2, 6 – 7, 9, 12, 98, 104, 110, 117, 119n28, 121n57, 123 – 4, 199 – 208, 208 – 9n4, 209n7, 299 animation 309 – 15, 317, 318n19 antisemitism 9, 129 – 30, 196 – 7n61, 200, 275; on British television 248; in First World War army 219; related to aniconism 204, 208; Russian 234; Soviet 230 – 1, 233, 236 Apocalyptic literature 3, 5, 32 – 47 Arabs 32 – 5, 42n6, 133 Arad 95 – 7 Arcades Project 207 archaeology 6, 91, 112, 115 – 17, 126; excavations 95 – 7; inscriptions 91 – 2, 95, 97, 99; Jerusalem sherd 91 – 100; architecture 107, 110, 113 – 14, 123, 143, 159, 204, 208 – 9n4 Army Volunteer Movement 214 art 2, 7, 8, 84, 87n30, 122, 126, 133 – 4, 205, 208 – 9n4 and 11, 296 – 7, 300 – 1; Adorno (see also Theodor W. Adorno); art history 205; auto-destructive 84 – 5; collectors 126, 132; dealers in 124, 128 – 31; Jewish 7, 8, 80, 104 – 17, 117n1 and 2, 119n29, 120n37, 121n57, 123, 134, 155 – 65, 174, 199, 208n3, 247; medieval 155 (see

326  Index also manuscript illuminations); representations of the Holocaust 269, 294; secularisation of 202 – 3; theology of 2; void 78, 80, 81 Artless Jew, The 2, 123 Asherah 7, 91, 92, 94, 100n2, 101n5; association with YHWH 95 – 6, 99 – 100, 102n24; image of 97, 102n25; removal from Temple 98 assimilation 126 – 8, 133 – 4, 141, 142, 237; of the Bible 19; Bolshevik policy 230 – 1; effect of suburban migration 142 – 3; eruv as threat 144 – 7; in Late Antiquity 36; radical 124, 126 – 7, 134 Astarte 94, 96, 101n5 atrocity photographs 11, 267 – 70, 286 Auerbach, Erich 83, 87n25 Augsburg 189 Auschwitz 11, 85, 265 – 72, 281, 283 – 4, 289n9, 310; Hungarian Jews 280 – 5, 292n49; photographs of inmates (see Auschwitz Album) Auschwitz Album 265, 280 – 5, 287 – 8, 292n49, 293n58; illustration 282 – 4 (figures 16.12 – 15) Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and State Museum 270, 271 – 2, 286 Avisar, Ilan 309, 318n5 Avnei, Zikkaron 111, 112, 113 Bach, Johann Sebastian 296 Baldachin 157, 162 Bar-Levav, Avriel 49 Bardgett, Susan 267 – 8, 269, 287, 288 Barnes, George 250 – 1 Barnet Eruv Objectors Group 144, 145 Barnett, Henrietta 140, 146, 151n54 Baroque art 202 Basola, Mosha 49 – 50 BBC 10, 222, 247 – 9, 251, 252, 262n11; Men Seeking God 250, 253 – 61, 263n45; Omnibus: Dame Henrietta’s Dream 151n50; reporting the North West London eruv dispute 150n38 Beethoven, Ludwig van 296 Behrman, Samuel N. 132 Beiträge zur Sprach- und Altertumskunde aus Judischen Quellen 108 – 9 Belgoskino 10, 229, 232 – 3, 244n26; film output 233 – 41, 244n27 Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic 10, 229; cinema 232 – 3; film output

233 – 41; multiculturalism in 231 – 2; nationalism in 236 – 7 Benjamin, Walter 84, 206 – 8 Bense, Max 201 Ben-Yishai, Ron 315 – 16 Berenson, Bernard 7, 124; antisemitism toward 129 – 30; conversions 124 – 5; dealer in art 128 – 9, 131; Jewishness and 124, 131 – 4; radical assimilation 126 – 8, 134 Berenson, Mary 125, 131, 132 Bergen-Belsen see Information and Documentation Centre BergenBelsen Berlin, Isaiah 131, 132 bet ha-midrash 5, 34, 35, 37, 39, 44n16, 47n48, 68 Beyond Reasonable Doubt 67, 73n8, 76n43, 77n48 Bianco, Eliezer 253 Bible 17, 19, 156, 159, 177n35, 221, 299; art and 108, 116, 199; divine dictation of 64, 65; first word in 20; Hebrew Bible 28n16, 39, 45n29, 83 – 4, 96, 100n2, 174; Tanakh 1, 4, 20, 23, 27; see also specific books of the Bible and divine revelation Bible moralisée 158 – 9, 177n27 Biblical Scholarship 63, 64, 65, 74n14 bild 11, 108, 300, 301, 302 bilderverbot 11, 294 – 5, 298 – 302 bildung 105 – 6, 110 – 11, 122 Birobidzhan 229, 230; in film 239 – 41, 246n60 and n63 Bland, Kalman 2, 123, 199, 208n4, 209n7 Bleibtreu, Philipp Johann 188 Blumenthal-Tamarina, Marion 240 Bols, Gen. Louis 219 – 20 Boyarin, Jonathan 4 Brandon, S.G.F. 251, 260 Brenz, Samuel Friedrich 190 British Jews 10, 12, 137 – 40, 254; assimilation 142; East End London 138 – 9, 142; Eastern European immigrants 212, 217 – 18; eruvim 147; establishment of Barnet eruv 143 – 7; identity 8, 141, 148; migration to suburbs 140 – 3; military service 212, 214 – 21; Orthodox Jews in North London 143 – 8; VCs in First World War 217; see also Anglo-Jewry Brodie, Israel 66, 254 Brotz, Howard 141, 142 – 3, 149n25

Index 327 Brudno, Ezra 128 Bruna, R. Isaac 185 Bryan, Julien 265, 275, 277 – 8; illustrations 278 – 9 (figures 16.9 – 10); photographs of Polish girl 272 – 80, illustrations 273 (figure 16.3), 274 – 80 (figures 16.4 – 11), 289n3, 292n43 and n44 Buber, Martin 109, 111, 114 Caesar’s Friend 248 – 9, 261, 261n8, 262n11 Cambridge Companion to Schoenberg 295, 303 Canaan, Carmi 313, 315 Canaanite 94, 96, 99, 100, 101n5 captions see photograph Carmilly-Weinberger, Moshe 199 Cartier, Rudolph 247 – 8 cemeteries 110, 111 – 14, 120n44, 187 Central Rabbinical Congress of the United States and Canada 248, 249 Cesarani, David 140, 149n18 Cheltenham College 215 – 16 Chief Rabbi 66, 69, 70, 216, 254; in fifteenth century German lands 185; in Jerusalem 10, 253 Christianity 5, 17, 74n18, 122, 125, 134, 201, 250, 251; converts to 9, 124, 183, 186 – 8, 190 – 1, 192; iconography of 114, 115, 116, 166, 204; Jewish responses to imagery of 8 – 9, 181 – 92; Judaism and 155, 156, 162, 165, 174, 183, 184, 191, 201n7 Christmas 189, 196 – 7n61; Jewish responses to 190 – 2, 197n66, n68 and n71 Church bells 181, 187 – 8 Church music 188 – 9 cinema 1, 10, 86n16; Belorussian 10, 229, 232 – 41; Israeli 308 – 10; Palestinian Wave 318n12; Soviet 230 – 1, 239 – 41, 243n13, 245n48 City Imperial Volunteers 214 Clark, Kenneth 129 – 30, 131 Clendinnen, Inga 284 – 5 Clifton College 215 – 16 Cohen, Hermann 200; ethical aniconism 203 – 4, 208 Cohen, Jack 147 Cohen, Shaye 36 Colossians (Letter to) 19, 30n39

Community Rule 21 – 2 Connegliano Veneto Synagogue 258 conquest: Arab 32 – 3, 40, 41, 42n6; Assyrian 99; Persian 42n6; Roman 87n18 Conservative Judaism 64, 69, 76n43; see also Masorti converts see Christianity Cordovero, R. Moshe 5, 48 – 56 cosmogony 17, 21 cosmology 17, 20 Costelloe, Mary see Berenson, Mary Cousineau, Jennifer 144, 145 Crane, Susan 268 creatio exnihilo 4 – 5, 17 – 31, 81, 178n56 creation 1 – 2, 4 – 5, 17 – 31, 33, 58n16, 106 – 7, 156, 174, 178n56; of Adam 51, 56, 60n36; of Eve 166 Critical Theory 206 – 7, 211n39, 294, 303 – 4n1 Cross 9, 157; Jewish responses to 183 – 6, 192, 195n35 culture critique 200, 201, 202, 204, 206 – 8 Davies, William 37, 46n37 Dayag, Ronny 313 Dead Sea Scrolls 4 – 5, 20 – 3, 26 – 7, 29n29 Decalogue 2, 204, 207 Demiurge 5, 17, 19 demut 5, 48, 50 – 6, 59n31, 79 Derrida, Jacques 78, 83, 85n1 determinate negation 207, 298 – 9, 301 Deuteronomy (Book of) 45n29, 74n15, 94 Deutschkreutz 185 Dialectics of Enlightenment 206 – 7, 298 – 9 Didi-Huberman, George 270, 288, 291n40 dispersion 139 – 140, 255 Divine Feminine see God Divine revelation see revelation documentary (film or television) 3, 11, 151n50, 246n60, 247, 249, 259, 265, 275, 291n34, 309 – 14, 318n12; see also Men Seeking God, Waltz with Bashir Donolo, Shabbtai Ben Abraham 51 – 2, 59n33 Duveen, Joseph 124, 129, 130 – 1, 136n39 Dybbuk, The 247 – 8 East End London see London Easter 165, 178n51, 189 – 90, 248 – 9, 262n11 East Metropolitan Rifle Volunteers 214 Ecclesia 156 – 8, 162, 166, 174, 176n23

328  Index

Factory of the Eccentric Actor 237, 245n48 Farr, Raye 270 Federation of Synagogues 140, 148n14, 149n16 figurines 94, 96, 97, 99 – 100 First World War 9, 212 – 16, 221 Fisher, Alexander 189 Flügel, Katharina 203 Folman, Ari 11, 309 – 17, 318n13; see also Waltz with Bashir Fonrobert, Charlotte 146 Forest of Martyrs 258 formlessness (state at creation) see void Frank, Jacob 199 Frankfurt School 9, 200, 206 – 7, 304n1 Freedberg, David 199 Freedman, Jonathan 123 Frenkel, Shmuel 313, 315 Frojmovic, Eva 163

Galton, Francis 213 Gardner, Isabella Gardner 127 garlic 190 – 1, 197n64 Gee VC, Robert 217 Gehenna see Gehinnom Gehinnom 24, 25, 33, 38 – 40, 43n8, 44n20, 46n44 and n45 Genesis (Book of) 1 – 2, 5, 8, 17 – 18, 20 – 1, 168 – 71, 173 Genesis Rabbah 5, 20 – 1, 24, 25 – 6, 30n35, 43n15, 179n65 German lands/states 3, 8 – 9; Jews in 122 – 3, 181 – 2, 187, 191 Gertler, Mark 134 Gertz, Nurit 309, 310 Ghetto Fighters House Museum 257, 264n54 Ghettoisation 132, 142 – 3, 145 – 6; Belorussian 231, 236; East End of London 8, 138 – 9, 141; mentality 142, 145, 308; nazi 257, 304n3; photography and 266 – 7, 269 – 70, 280 – 1, 290n19, 291n34, 316; survivors of 257, 292n49 Ghetto photographers 266 – 7 Gilbert, Martin 277 Gimpel, René 124, 130 Gnosticism 5, 19, 27 God 1 – 2, 3, 5 – 6, 8, 48, 56, 62 – 77, 79 – 80, 82, 85, 86n2 and 14, 94, 97 – 8, 100, 106 – 8, 110, 114, 146, 155 – 80, 190, 252, 255, 259, 299 – 301; Elohim 52; Holy One 23 – 5, 32 – 47; Shekhinah 54, 55, 61n57 and n58, 176n19, 178n48, 179n72; Divine Feminine 54, 55, 61n58, 170 – 1, 176n19, 179n72; YHWH 7, 23, 91 – 100; see also imitatio dei Golden Haggadah 8, 156, 174; Adam in 167 – 70; Miriam in 157 – 62; illustrations 158 (figure 10.1), 161 (figure 10.2), 167 (figure 10.6) Goldie, Grace Wyndham 250, 262n25 Goldstein, Bluma 299 Goldstein, Jonathan 25 – 6 Graetz, Heinrich 108, 111 Grayzel, Solomon 184 Green, A.L. 214 Greenberg, Leobold 216, 224n40, 225n68 Greif, Gideon 281 Grosman, Mordechai 266 – 7, 289n12

Galicia Jewish Museum 266, 268 Gallantry awards 217

Had Gadya 189 Hadot, Pierre 49, 57n12

Eden 25, 33, 39 – 41, 43n8, 44n20, 56 Einwohner, Rachel L. 182 Elat 94 election 5, 8, 23, 32 – 4, 41, 156, 162, 166, 176n22 Elijah 37 Elyada, Aya 192 Engelberger, Franz Ferdinand 184 Enlightenment 6, 9, 199, 202 – 4 Epicureanism 17 – 18 epistemology 200 epitaphs 107, 110 – 13, 121n56 Epstein, Marc 157 – 9, 179n69 eruv 8, 143 – 8, 150n37, n38 and n40; 151n48, n50 and n56 eruvim see eruv Eschatology 33, 36 ethnography 59n34, 110, 115, 194n17, 236, 238 Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur 104 – 6, 115, 117n2 Etwas von Jûdischer Kunst 115 eugenics 213 – 14, 222, 275 Eve 157, 159, 166 – 74, 176n23, 179n62, n68 and n76 Exodus (Book of) 2, 8, 43n10, 58n22, 79, 94, 156, 158 – 61, 164, 177n30, 299 Eytan, Walter 261 Ezekiel (Book of) 34, 43n12, 165, 178n48 Ezra 65, 74n15 Ezra (Book of) 45n27

Index 329 Haggai (Book of) 45n27 Halter, Roman 283, 284 Halter-Hurn, Aviva 283, 284 Hammâm-Lif mosaics 116 Hampstead Garden Suburb 146 Hampstead Synagogue 10, 253 – 5 Harazi, Dror 312, 315 Harel, Dorit 269, 288 Hasidic Movement 199 Hebrews (Letter to) 19, 30n39 Hegel, Georg Willhelm Friedrich 6, 78 – 9, 82 – 3, 85n1, 87n21 Heine, Heinrich 122 Hellenistic art 107, 108 Hellenistic creation myth 17 – 22, 31n45 Henriques de Castro, David 112 – 14, 116, 120n41 Hertz, Joseph 216 Herzog, Jacob 252 – 4, 258 – 9; Men Seeking God and 254 – 8, 263n41 Hess, Ernst Ferdinand 190, 197n66 Hestrin, Ruth 94 Higgins, Ken 252, 255, 256, 257 Hilberg, Raul 266, 270 Hildegard of Bingen 166, 176n23 His Excellency 10, 233 – 6, 239, 245n32 and n34 Hodayot 22 Hoffman, Ernst 281 Hollander, Jocelyn A. 182 Holocaust 10 – 12, 145, 258, 261, 265 – 88, 289n5; Israeli identity and 309 – 13, 316 – 17; memorial museums 3, 266, 286; representation in Israeli cinema 308 – 9, 313 – 14, 316 – 17; see also Shoah Holocaust Exhibition Imperial War Museum 265 – 70, 272, 275, 278, 280, 286 – 8, 289n12, 291n39, 292n43 and n46, 293n58; ethical considerations 267 – 9, 288; personalising the Holocaust 287 – 8 Holocaust History Museum 265 – 6, 269, 283, 286 – 8, 289n12, 291n27, 292n50; see also Auschwitz Album Holocaust Memorial Centre Budapest 285 Holocaust photographs 257, 265 – 70; ethical considerations on exhibiting 267 – 9, 286 – 8; ghetto photographers (see ghettoisation); perpetrator photographers 267 – 70, 280 – 5, 286; see also Auschwitz Album

Holy of Holies 6, 78 – 9, 81, 85n1, 98; Pompey’s unveiling 82 – 3 Horkheimer, Max 206 – 7, 298 Horowitz, Bela 131 Horowitz, Elliott 184 House, Francis 250 Hungarian Jews 281 – 5 iconoclasm 9, 80, 98, 209n7 iconography 6, 94, 105, 113 – 14, 201; Christian 115, 156, 166, 179n62; Holocaust 265, 269; Jewish responses to 9, 176n14 idol 79, 82; worship of 186, 192 idolatry 2, 185, 187, 192, 199, 200, 204, 208, 209n9 identity 1 – 2, 10, 12, 151n48, 192, 203, 205; British 222; Christian 189; divine 94; Israeli 11 – 12, 253, 261, 309, 313, 315, 317; Jewish 4, 7 – 10, 12, 12 – 13n5, 84, 104, 128, 174, 183, 239 – 41, 255 (see also British Jews); Soviet 240 image 1 – 2, 12n4, 79 – 81, 87, 200 – 1, 270; of Asherah (see Asherah); Canaanite 94, 96; community image 8; difference 139, 142, 146; of God (see God); human and divine 5, 48, 56, 94; of Jews 9, 10, 140; music and 11, 298 – 302; prohibition of 7, 11, 80, 294; racialised 9; responses to Christian 8 – 9, 183 – 92; Schoenberg 300 – 1; shtetl 236 – 9, 241; theological 3 – 6, 12, 18, 32, 41, 51, 79, 82, 155; of Torah min ha-Shamayim 62 – 72, 76n43; see also tzelem image management 2 – 12, 12n4, 32, 104, 138; Jewish identity and 104 imitatio dei 5, 48, 51; means to 52 – 6 Imperial War Museum see Holocaust Exhibition Imperial War Museum indigenisation policy 230, 231, 233, 243n7 Industrial Removal Office 140 Information and Documentation Centre Bergen-Belsen 286, 287 – 8 inscriptions 91 – 3, 95, 97, 99, 100n2, 114 integration of Jews 122, 139; of Tomer Devorah 50 Iron Age II 93 – 100 Isaiah (Book of) 28n16, 33 – 5, 39 – 40, 43n9, 45n26, 57n7, 96, 188, 190 Islam 5, 32 – 3, 41, 199; on television 251 – 2, 262n14

330  Index Israel (state of) 7; cinema in 308 – 10; depiction in Men Seeking God 253, 256 – 8; Holocaust memories 313, 316 – 17; identity and the Holocaust 12, 309 Israelite 6 – 7, 91, 98, 100, 157 – 8, 161; imagery 94 Jablonski, Darius 269 – 70, 291n34 Jacob, Lili 281, 292n49 Jacobs, Alan 145 – 6 Jacobs, Joseph 110, 214 Jacobs, Louis 6, 62 – 77 Jacobs Affair 66, 67, 69, 75n23 Jafaar, Ari 309 – 10 Jakobovits, Immanuel 69 – 70 Jellinek, Adolph 37, 39, 42n4, 43n9 and n12, 44n21 and n24, 46n43 and n44, 51, 59n33 Jeremiah (Book of) 18, 21, 43n8, 57n7, 96 Jerusalem 6, 7, 10, 24, 33 – 6, 39, 42n6, 44n20, 45n26 and n29, 78, 86n17, 91, 97 – 100, 155, 193n2, 252 – 8, 261, 263n41 Jerusalem sherd 91 – 100; illustrations 92 – 3 (figures 6.1 – 2) Jewish Agricultural and Industrial Aid Society 140 Jewish art see art Jewish Chronicle on television 3, 247 – 9, 259; on divine revelation 63, 71; on eruvim 144, 148n3, 151n56; on First World War 217, 224n40, 225n68; on Jews in the East End 138 – 9 Jewish Dispersion Committee 140, 148 Jewish Lads Brigade 215 – 18, 223n29, 226n96 Jewish Luck 230, 238 – 9, 245n42 Jewish warrior 214 – 16 Jewish War Services Committee 221 Jewish/non-Jewish relations 4, 8, 9, 199, 208; see also Christianity, eruv, First World War, German lands/ states Jews College 63, 66, 71, 254 Jews Free School 215, 223n29 Job (Book of) 21 John (Gospel of) 19 Johnson Smith, Geoffrey 254 – 6 Joshua (Book of) 164; figure of 65, 70, 74n15, 163 – 4 Jubilees (Book of) 20, 22 – 3 Judah (Kingdom of) 6 – 7, 95 – 9

Judaica 109, 115 1st Judeans 219 – 21, 225n63 Judgement (at end of time) 2, 5, 32 – 3, 35, 39 – 41, 43n8, 44n20 and n21 Judges (Book of) 61n54, 161 Kabbalah 6, 20, 48 – 61, 74n20, 175, 203 Kadish, George 266 Kafka, Franz 80, 84, 87n27 Kalman, Matthew 148 Kandinsky, Wassily 300, 301 Kant, Immanuel 203, 204, 210n26; see also neo-Kantianism Karmi, Hassan 252 Kauffmann, David 110 – 11, 114 – 17, 120n37, 121n52, n56 and n57, 199 Keneset Israel 156 – 62, 165 – 8, 170 – 1, 174 Keur van Grafstenen 111 – 14 Khirbet el-Qom 95, 97, 99 Kimhi, David see Qimhi, David 1 Kings (Book of) 96, 98 2 Kings (Book of) 43n8, 96 – 8, 100, 103n25 Klages, Ludwig 201 – 3, 205, 209n14 Klausner, Joseph 37, 46n38 Klein, Arthur 138 Kliefoth, Maria 201 – 2 Kobets, Grigori 240 Kogman-Appel, Katrin 156, 158, 166, 174, 176n15, 178n56 Kook, Rabbi 199 Korsh-Sabline, Vladimir 239 – 40 Kossoff, David 248 Kritik 105 – 6, 111, 117, 118n10 Kugel, James 65 – 6, 69 – 71, 74n19, 75n21, 76n46 Kugler, Franz 108 Kulturnation 106 – 7, 109, 117 Kuntillet ‘Ajrud 95, 97, 99 Kurth, Richard 295 – 301, 303, 305n18, 306n65, n66, n69 Labour Corps 218 – 19 Lacan, Jacques 81 Lachish 94 – 6, 101n7 Lambert, Johann Heinrich 203 Landwehr, David 257 Lanzmann, Claude 270 Laski, Neville 249 Last Journey, The 284; illustration 283 (figure 16.15) Lawrence, Elizabeth 144 – 5 Leader, Darian 80 – 2, 86n16 Lebanon 310

Index 331 Lebanon War 11, 309 – 14, 316 – 17, 318n6 Lebensphilosophie 200, 201, 206 Lees, Susan H. 145 – 6, 150n32 Lees-Milne, James 130 – 1 Lekert, Hirsch 233 – 6, 245n35 Leppert, Richard 295 Leviticus (Book of) 53 Lévy, Léopold 115 Levy, Isaac 10, 252 – 6, 259 – 61, 263n42 and n44 Liberal supernaturalism 63, 71 likeness, see demut Linder, Amnon 182 Lipton, Sara 158 Lissack, Albert 217 Lódz 266, 267, 270, 291n34 Loeser, Charles 126, 128, 130, 133 luftmentsch 230 – 1, 236, 239 – 40 logos 20, 166 – 7, 179n62, 203 London 3, 74n9, 124 – 5, 129, 131 – 2, 134, 148n11, 252, 254, 258, 263n38 and n41, 264n52; eruv debate 8, 143 – 8, 151n56; immigrant quarters 8, 138 – 40, 216, 220, 224n57; Jewish suburbs’ 137 – 8, 140 – 3, 149n27; Judaica exhibition of 1887 109 – 10 Luzzatto, Samuel David 111 ma’aseh bereshit 20 Maccabees 115, 216 – 17 2 Maccabees (Book of) 19, 25, 28n17, 30n39 McGivern, Cecil 250, 253 Magnitogorsk 237, 239 Maimonides, Moses 65, 67 – 9, 75n31, 76n36; principles 62, 64 – 5, 68 – 9, 73n3, 74n16 manliness 9 – 10, 212 – 13, 221 – 2 manuscript illumination 107, 111, 116, 120n37 Maoz Zur 189 Markish, Peretz 237 martial race theory 9, 212 – 13 masculinity 9, 212 – 13, 215, 221 – 2; see also manliness Masorti movement 66 – 7, 73n1; see also Conservative Judaism Massebah 95 materialism 17, 119n26, 122 – 4, 131, 206 – 7 materiality 23 – 6, 302 May, Gerhard 19 – 20, 27 Mayhew, Christopher 247 – 64; preparation for Men Seeking God 250 – 3; responses to series 259 – 61

Megiddo 95 – 7 Men Seeking God 10, 247 – 61; programme background 249 – 52; reviews of 253, 259 – 61 Messiah 25, 33, 36 – 40, 165, 185, 190 Messianic age 32 – 5, 37, 41, 47n48, 155 – 6, 176n15, 206 – 7, 210n33, 303 Mettinger, Tryggve 98 Metzger, Gustav 84 – 5 Micah (Book of) 52, 96 microcosm 51 – 2, 141 Middelburg 112 Midrash 3, 5, 20 – 21, 23 – 7, 32 – 47, 74n15, n16 and n20, 108, 175n11, 179n65, n66, n68, 195n35 Mika, Kazimiera 265, 272 – 80, 287; illustrations 273 – 80 (figures 16.3 – 11) Mikhoels, Solomon 237 – 8 Military Services Act 218 Milton Sybil 11, 265 Mintz, Moses 185 Miriam 156, 157 – 62, 174 modernism 72, 80, 84, 86n8; modernity 80, 84, 86n8, 146, 202 – 3, 206, 240, 297; postmodernism 72 Mona Lisa 80 – 1 monotheism 69, 91, 107, 110, 117 Modigliani, Amadeo 80 Montagu, Samuel 140 Moore, Deborah Dash 4 Moses 65, 68, 70, 74n16, 75n31, 157, 158, 163 – 4; see Moses und Aron Moses, Stéphane 84 Moses und Aron 295 – 303 Mount Zion 255, 258 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 296 Muiderberg 112 Mulder, Samuel 112 – 13 Müller, David Heinrich 116 Munk, Yael 309 musar 48 – 52, 54, 56, 57n7, 59n32 music 11, 107, 110, 115, 122 – 3, 126 – 7, 159 – 60, 177n37, 187 – 9, 238, 245n48, 257, 294 – 307, 313 Muslims 5, 32, 41, 184, 188, 196n47, 199, 251 – 2, 260, 262n14 mysticism 20, 83, 199, 203, 205, 210n20; see also kabbalah Namier, Lewis 131 Nanni, Matteo 302 Nathan Becker see The Return of Nathan Becker

332  Index National Holocaust Centre and Museum 284 Nationalism 104 – 9; in USSR 230 – 1, 233, 235, 236 – 7, 239, 241, 243n10 negative aesthetics 9, 199 – 208 Negative Dialectics 206, 207 negativity 200, 201, 202, 204, 206 – 8, 299 neo-Kantianism 9, 200, 203 nitl 189, 197n62 Noahide commands 204 Norton, Charles Elliot 124 – 6 nothingness 6, 25, 79 – 85 Novitch, Miriam 257 – 8, 264n54 Numbers (Book of) 45 – 6n32, 50, 74n15, 158, 164, 299 Olsen, Stanley 134 Or Yaqar 48, 53 Origen 18, 28n17 Orthodox Judaism 4, 6, 8, 66 – 72, 73n1, 99 – 100, 137, 248, 253 – 6, 260 – 1; divine revelation and 62 – 5, 67 – 8; eruv 143 – 7, 151n48; First World War and 217 – 18; modern 68 – 70, 72, 76n35; ultra-Orthodox 66, 144, 261 orthopraxy 76 – 7n46 Ostjuden 9 – 10 ‘other’ 1, 3, 8, 9, 12n4, 142, 199, 204, 260, 267 Ouderkerk cemetery 112 – 14, 120n41 Palestine 19 – 20, 26, 32 – 3, 44n16, 133, 219, 246n63, 262n11, 318n12; archaeology in 91 – 100; art in 108 Palestine Exploration Fund 91 Palestinians 309, 318n6 and 12 Pardes Rimmonim 48, 54 Pass VC, Frank de 217 Passover 162, 165, 176n15, 178n51,189 Passover Haggadah 8, 111, 116, 155 – 80, 189; see also Golden, Sister and Sarajevo Haggadah Pathos formula 206 Paul 25, 201 Pearce, Sarah 2 Pearl, Rev. Chaim 249 Pearson, Karl 213 Pelt, Robert Jan van 267 Peruggia, Vincenzo 80 – 1 Petticoat Lane 138 – 9 Pfefferkorn, Johannes 183, 186, 190 Philo of Alexandria 18, 19 philology 104 – 5, 111, 113; Jewish 105 – 6, 108, 113, 116

photographs 1, 11, 206, 263; captions 270, 275, 280, 283 – 4, 287 – 8, 289n9, 292n43 and n47, 293n57 and n58; cropping 270 – 2, 280; iconic 265 – 70 see also Holocaust photographs Pilinszky, János 285 pillar figurines 96, 100 Pirqe Mashiah 3, 5, 32 – 47 Polak, Gabriël 112 – 13 Poland 181, 223n28, 231, 254, 266; see also Mika, Kazimiera Pollins, Harold 214 Pompey 78 – 80, 82 – 4, 85n1, 86n17 Pozner, Valérie 230 – 1, 234 Principles of the Jewish Faith 64 – 5, 67, 73n8 Pritchard, Elizabeth 295, 298 – 9 Protestantism 206, 251, 252 Proverbs (Book of) 20, 26, 28n16, 55, 57n7, 187 Psalms (Book of) 21, 29, 35, 94, 161 public space 144 – 7; Jewish responses to Christian 182, 186 – 7 Qimhi, David 167 – 70, 175 Qumran see Dead Sea Scrolls Rabbinic literature 4, 23 – 6, 32, 44n16, 49; Zunz on 105 – 7 Rachel 157 Raphael, Melissa 2 Rashba (Shlomo ben Aderet) 185 Rashi (Shlomo Yetzchaki) 159 – 60, 175n1 and n11, 177n37 rationalism 64, 72 Rayner, Claire 141 Regensburg 185, 192 Reinach, Salomon 127 – 8 Rein-Buskila, Boaz 313 Renan, Ernest 109 – 10, 115, 119n26 Rentoul, Robert 213 representation 2 – 7, 9 – 12, 79, 80, 82, 85, 114, 155, 199, 203 – 4, 301; in film 229, 230 – 1, 234 – 6, 238, 308 – 11, 317; of the Holocaust 268, 270, 288; on Jerusalem sherd 98, 100; theological 1, 32, 59n34; see also bild, image, images Reshit 20 – 1 Reshit Hokhmah 54 resistance 9, 182 – 3; to eruv 140; to Holocaust 264n54, 266, 271, 272, 304n9 (see also eruv); passive 189 – 92

Index 333 Resnais, Alain 269 – 70 resurrection 19, 25, 30n38, 184 Return of Nathan Becker, The 10, 236 – 9 revelation (divine) 6 – 7, 36, 56, 62 – 72, 73n1 and n8, 74n20, 76n43, 77n48, 83 – 5 Roma 266, 289n9 Romans (Letter to) 19, 25, 28n15, 30n39 Roshal, Grigori 233 – 4, 245n38 Ross, Tamar 66, 67, 69, 71 – 2 Roth, Cecil 117 Roth, John 284 Rothschild, Lionel de 221 Rozencwajg-Ross, Henryk 266 – 7, 289n12, 290n13 Rubenstein, Richard 284 – 5 Russian Jews 9, 127, 217 – 20, 224n57; military service in Russia 212, 218; responses to 218, 219, 221 – 2 Sabra and Shatila massacres 309, 310, 312, 313, 315 – 17, 318n6 Sack, Bracha 50, 58n20 Sachs, Michael 108 – 11, 115, 119n20 Sacks, Jonathan 70, 71 Safed 48, 49, 50 Salaman, Redcliffe Nathan 220 – 1 Salerno ivories 166, 168 – 9, 172, 179n62 Salinger, Alfred 214, 223n28 Salmons, Paul 268 1 Samuel (Book of) 108, 114, 163 Santayana, George 126, 130 Sarah 19, 157, 179n60 Sarajevo Haggadah 8, 116, 156 – 7, 162, 167, 169, 170, 172, 174, 176n15; analysis of 163 – 5, 178n56, 179n62; illustrations 163 – 5 (figures 10.3 – 5), 173 (figure 10.8) Schäfer, Peter 37, 46n40 Scheit, Gerhard 294 – 5, 303, 304n9 Schlosser, Julius von 116, 121n57 Schoenberg, Arnold 11, 294, 295, 304n3 and n9; analysis of Moses und Arun 296 – 303, 304n14 Schofer, Jonathan 49 Scholem, Gershorn 53, 84 Schubert, Gotthilf Heinrich 203 Scott, James 182 Second Commandment 2, 6 – 7, 80, 84 – 5, 86n9, 104 – 5, 108, 113 – 14, 116 – 17, 123, 199, 204 second generation (of Jewish immigrants); in Britain 218; in Israel 11, 308 – 11, 313 – 15, 317, 318n13 secularism 9, 62, 63, 69, 104 – 5, 199, 204, 205, 208, 210n33; of images 2,

202; amongst Jews 4, 8, 12, 126, 144 – 5, 147, 150n38, 152n57 secularisation 141, 200, 202 – 3, 204, 208, 241 Seekers of Happiness 10, 239 – 41, 244n27 Sefer Elima Rabati 48, 49 – 50, 52 – 3 Sefer Hasidim 188 Sefer Yetzirah 20, 29n19, 46n44 Sefer Zerubbabel 36, 42n1, 45n28 Sefirah; Binah 55; Gevurah 52, 53; Hesed 52, 53; Hod 53; Hokhmah 54; Keter 49; Malkhut 53, 55, 60n43, n47 and n52, 61n54; nezah 53; Tif’eret 52, 53, 54, 55, 60n43; Yesod 53 Sefirot 51 – 6, 58n16, 60n44 Segal, Anshel 185 self-hatred 132 Send und Warnungs-Brieff 190 septuagint 19, 20 Serek 21 – 2 sermon 44n16, 187, 249 Shalev, Avner 281, 284, 287 – 8 Shalev-Eyni, Sarit 163, 174 Shapiro, Marc 62, 75n28, 75n33, 190, 191; on Maimonides 67 – 9 Sharon, Ariel 316 Shekhinah see God Shoah 11, 270, 295, 304n3, 308, 310, 312 – 13, 316 – 17; see also Holocaust Shoah (film) 270 Shohat, Ella 310, 318n12 Shpis, Boris 237 – 9 Shternshis, Anna 240 – 1 shtetl 126, 138, 247; cinematic portrayal 230, 236 – 9, 241 Siege 275 (figure 16.9), 278, 280, 292n44 Sims, George 139 Sinti (Settela Steinbach) 266, 289n9 Sister Haggadah 8, 156, 158, 162, 166 – 7, 169, 179n70, 180n77; depiction of Adam and Eve 170 – 4; illustration 171 (figure 10.7) Sisters of Our Lady of Sion 184 Sitz im Leben 44n16, 48 Sivan, Ori 312 – 15 Smith, Dan 80 Smith VC, Issy 217 Solomon, Norman 62 Solomon, Zahava 315 Sonderkommando photographs 265, 266, 267, 283, 287; analysis of 270 – 2; illustration 271 – 2 (figures 16.1 – 2) Song of Songs (Book of) 156, 159 – 61, 172, 175n11

334  Index Sontag, Susan 267, 286, 290n25 Spain 8, 156, 178n40, 187 Spielberg, Steven 145, 269, 270 spirituality 49, 52, 107, 110 Steinbach, Settela see also Sinti Steiner, Zara 222 Steinschneider, Moritz 42n4, 109 – 12, 115, 117n2, 119n29 and n32, 121n56 stereotypes 2, 85n2, 216 – 18, 221 – 2, 248 Stewart, Garrett 309, 310 Stokes, Adrian 134 Strauss, Joseph 115 Struk, Janina 285, 286, 289n12 suburbs 144, 150n31, 151n50; migration to 8, 140 – 3, 149n18 and n21; North London 143 – 8, 149n27 Survivor from Warsaw 11, 294 – 5, 304n3 and n5 symbolism 94, 116, 145, 312; Christian 157; chivalric 213, 221; medieval 155 – 6; Zoharic 53 Synagoga 157 – 61, 166, 174 Ta’anach 96, 97 Tanakh see Bible Targum on Genesis 20, 29n21; on Isaiah 44n19, 46n33 and n37; on Song of Songs 44n17, 46n32 – 33, n37, n40, 47n48 television 1, 144, 261n4; Israeli 309; Jews on television 10, 247 – 61, 261n8, 262n11; see also Men Seeking God Temko, Ned 144 temple 6 – 7, 20, 25, 32 – 3, 35 – 6, 44n20, 45n26 and n29, 78 – 9, 84, 85n1, 86n17, 91, 114 – 15, 155 – 6, 164, 176n15; future 5, 33 – 7; image of God in 96 – 8, 100, 103n25; Temple Mount 33, 42n6 Ten Words see Decalogue Tertullian 17, 25 Thirteen Principles of Faith 62, 64, 65, 67 – 70; see Maimonides throne 157, 162 Through Tears 231, 238 Toledot Yeshu 190 Tomer Devorah 5 – 6, 48, 55, 58n18 and n19, 58n24, 60n44, 61n54; textual origins 49 – 50; tzelem and demut in 50 – 5 Topography of Terror Documentation Centre 268, 286 Torah 3, 5, 21, 25, 29n21, 32 – 47, 54, 62 – 3, 82 – 4, 86n17, 87n18, 155,

162 – 5, 189, 190 – 2, 197n66 and n71, 254, 258 Torah min ha-Shamayim 6, 62 – 77; Jacobs on 62 – 7, 70 – 1; Shapiro on 67 – 9 Traces of Memory 266, 268, 269 tzelem 5, 48, 50 – 6, 59n31 and n34, 60n37, 185 – 6; see also image Ukrainian Soviet Republic 230 Umsiedlung der Juden asu Ungarn see Auschwitz Album United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 266, 270, 275, 289n12 USA 62, 123, 137, 140, 237 – 8, 240, 248 – 9, 265 USSR 229; cinema 230 – 1; Jewish culture in 229 – 33 Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 268, 293n75 Victor of Carben 9, 183, 184 – 8, 190 Victoria Club for Working Lads 216 Victoria Cross 217, 224n49 Vidas, Elijah de 54 – 5, 58n18 Vishniac, Roman 266 void 6, 78, 80 – 2; state at creation 17 – 20 Wagner, Richard 123 Walter, Bernhard 277 Waltz with Bashir 11 – 12, 309; analysis of 311 – 17; use of animation in 310, 311 – 12, 313 – 16 War Scroll 22 Warburg, Aby 205 – 6 Warsaw 270, 274, 275, 316; ghetto 257, 269, 276, 290n19, 304n3, 316 (see also ghettoisation); siege of 265, 274 We have Reason to Believe 64 – 6, 73n8 Webb, Dan 295 White VC, Jack 217 Wildenstein, Nathan 124 Wisdom of Solomon 18, 28n17 Wissenschaft des Judentums 7, 104 – 7, 115, 117 Witkin, Robert 296, 304 – 5n18 Wolf, Lucien 110 Wolsky, Nathan 55 – 6 Woodward, Geoffrey 252 – 8, 264n52 world to come 5 – 6, 29n20, 32 – 3, 35, 41, 69, 188, 298; see messianic age Yad Vashem 265, 266, 277, 279, 291n39, 292n49; usage of photographs 286 – 8

Index 335 YHWH see God Yiddish culture 127, 131 – 2, 189, 229 – 32, 234, 236 – 8, 241, 245n32 and n34, 246n50 and n52; language 139, 187, 192, 220, 223n29, 230, 231, 246n62 Young, Frances 17, 18 – 19, 20 Zechariah (Book of) 36, 45n27, 193n2 Zangwill, Israel 130, 132 Zeltser, Iogan 240 Zerubbabel 33, 36 – 8, 45n27 Zionism 4, 12,132 – 3, 221, 230, 234, 237, 256, 309, 310, 315; post

Zionist revisionism 310; Zionist Congress 109 Zohar 48, 54 – 5, 60n43 and 52, 87n25, 166, 170, 179n74, 180n83; feminine dimension in 171 – 5 Zunz, Leopald 7, 104 – 8, 110 – 12, 114, 117n1, 118n5 – 7; influences on 115 Zur Geschichte und Literatur 108 – 9, 111, 118n3 and n4 Zuskin, Veniamin 240 – 1 Zwi of Aufhausen, Salman 190 – 1