gershon, we met at a recent festival in riga celebrating the centenary of isaiah berlin’s birth, where i heard you talk about “berlin and the jews of eastern europe”. I asked for an interview and you very kindly offered to put together a short list of recent books reviewing the “metanarrative” of Jewish history. but before talking about them, could you tell me what the meta-narrative of Jewish history consisted of in the first place?
I can’t! all the thing? what I tried to do was pick a few books that would change the story in some fundamental way, or at least call it into question. but to give a summary of the entire metanarrative of Jewish history? That’s too much to ask!
You are reading: Books on jewish history and culture
That’s a great question, but the reason I’m asking it is that the books you’ve chosen are revising a received story, and that received story, I guess, depends on a stereotype that can actually be summed up, right? it is the stereotype of the Jew as the foreigner, the ‘other’, the intruder and saboteur, from the perspective of established Western Christian culture and established Islamic culture. I don’t want to provide any kind of coercive structure to this, but it seems to me that the books you have chosen revisit that point of view by showing how Jewish culture has grown simultaneously with Christian and Islamic cultures and how each has influenced the other. so the first book on his list shows how Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism emerge at the same time; and that arise as solutions to the same problem.
yes, the border lines of daniel boyarin. the standard story is that Christianity is the daughter religion of Judaism. I don’t know why they use female metaphors, but in any case… what is happening in that field is a rethinking of the whole history of the evolution of Judaism and Christianity. two thousand years ago several groups of people who accepted the hebrew bible and the god that is represented there and believed that he resided in the temple, saw that temple destroyed. and once the temple was destroyed, they had to find a way to maintain their beliefs. and there were many, many people trying to figure out how to do it in various ways.
daniel boyarin is the most open and interesting historian of all this, not always accurate, but he offers a picture of all the questions that are now open. people would say, once the temple was destroyed, that the rabbis created judaism and saint paul broke away from the rabbinic and pharisaic jews and created this new religion. but, in fact, it took a long time for these two groups to make fun of each other.
so the idea is that there has been some retrospective cleaning, which in terms of cultural history is a familiar pattern. But his second book, by Steven Wasserstrom, shifts the focus to Islam. it is called Between Jew and Muslim: The Problem of Symbiosis Under Early Islam. what does that mean? Does the same retrospective refinement theme continue; that just as Jews and Christians had much more in common for much longer than we have been taught to suppose, so did Jews and Arabs?
Well, if you had to say “Jews and Muslims”, that would be absolutely true. one of the things that emerges from boyarin’s book is precisely the great difference between christianity, which can say “surrender to caesar…” and separate church and state, and judaism and islam where there is no such conception. And that’s really the bottom line. those divisions do not exist. there is no word for religion in the traditional Jewish language. and that is something shared by Islam. the head of state is the defender of the faithful.
What is the central thesis of the book?
wasserstrom is talking about some notable parallel developments between Muslims and Jews in the 7th, 8th, and 9th centuries, one of which is an attempt by the Persians to reassert their cultural independence in the face of domination by Mecca, Damascus, and later Baghdad this attempt takes the form of religious dissent, so it is no accident that the center of Shiism is Persia.
but at the same time that Shiism was coming, which was often messianic, there were messianic movements among the Jews, one of which lasted four or five centuries. the name of the messiah in question was “abu isa”, which means “father of jesus”. it’s hard to get at the message of it because it was only recorded by people who didn’t like it, but it seems to have preached a tolerant or even synchronistic approach to religion. but everything is resisting the centralizing efforts of the rabbis who want to unify and homogenize rabbinical Judaism. there is all sorts of resistance to that attempt.
The idea that these two trends of Judaism and Islam emerged simultaneously is consistent with the first book. the idea of separate, competing, and yet curiously similar strands emerging from… what? we are talking about a very sociological reading of these events, I suppose. but these religions arise from a common root, that is, from a single god. do you think that’s relevant? that if one follows all these threads backwards, then he is seeing a group of patriarchal religions competing for a single father figure?
well you’re not getting too Jungian for me there. no, it’s not the kind of language I’m comfortable with. what is happening here is that religious language is being used, because I am a sociologist, as you have rightly pointed out, religious language is being used to mask other types of resentment and resistance. And what is striking is that the Muslim dissidents, the Shiites, etc., are rejecting the oral traditions of the Sunnis, of the orthodox Muslims. and Jewish dissidents are rejecting the orthodox traditions of the rabbis.
Also, this abu isa I was talking about was depicted as illiterate. now the idea of an illiterate Jewish messiah is unthinkable unless you accept the traditional biography of the prophet. Mohammad is said to have been illiterate; that he was merely a vessel through which the voice of god was transmitted… what he said was memorized by people and then written down in the quran a generation later.
something similar there, too, to the descent of the holy spirit to the disciples of the new testament in the form of a pentecostal flame? and of course the advantage of simply being a recipient of the word of god is that one does not defend a point of view, but an absolute truth.
yes, the quran is considered the most perfect book in arabic. It’s divine that it’s a nice transition to Brann’s book, which deals with Muslim Spain in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. in Jewish history this is regarded as the golden age. a very prosperous Muslim empire, and the Jews were deeply involved in this society. there were Jewish foreign ministers, Jewish prime ministers, and Jewish commanders of armies, etc. they were very involved in this society.
what brann is working on, whether he is a historian of ideas or a literary historian, are texts in arabic and hebrew that were written in spain. in that culture, poetry was the social currency of the time. if you were a cultured man, then you wrote poetry or at least you were the patron saint of poets. And of course Muslim poets wrote in Arabic and imitated the style of the Koran. So, as we’ve said, the Jews were part of this culture, and they had the wine gardens and the little boys and the little girls and everything else like everyone else, but they weren’t Muslim. and of course they couldn’t write in the style of this someone else’s holy book. So they invent Hebrew poetry, in a way, imitating the metrical patterns of Arabic poetry, but in Hebrew and based on the style of the Bible, which for them, equally, was divine and perfect.
what does brann think of all this?
Brann uses the word “understanding” to describe his state of mind. for one, they are absolutely comfortable. on the other hand, they are not. they are not really the powers in the state. the greatest of the hebrew poets was this man, judah halevi, who lived that life and eventually rejected it and said, ‘you are fooling yourselves, you are only being used by these muslim rulers.’ your idea of a kind of sion in Spain is a chimera….
then poetry keeps in itself something of that uncomfortable or regretful relationship. but does poetry survive?
not. it survives for a time in the south of france, but eventually fades away. and you don’t really get more poetry until modern times.
so here you’re talking about the two titles you recommend for brann (the compulsive poet and the power in the portrait) at the same time, and what I’m taking is the idea of a heterogeneous culture, of two cultures coexisting and of find pragmatic ways to do it. but on the other hand from a notion of cultural relativism that is not enough to describe or sustain the identity of the Jews. what we get is the notion of a compromised identity, an identity that is rescued by the rejection of that compromise.
correct, there is a dialectic. I don’t usually use that word. but there is a kind of dialectic. brann wants to see how muslims talk about jews and how jews talk about muslims, but he has a hard time finding jews talking about muslims. they were very careful. they produced thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of literature. all kinds of philosophy and poetry and legal writing but they were very very discreet with their neighbors.
the fourth book you have chosen is the two nations in one womb by israel jacob yuval. an extraordinary title.
well this is a translation of yuval’s hebrew book, which in turn is a translation of a long article he published many years ago in israel. caused a tremendous scandal. it even appeared in the daily press. Very rarely does a historical magazine article appear in the daily press, but this happened. and yuval said—before he tells you about what he wrote—yuval said that his article could only have been written once the jewish state had been established. because what he talks about are Jewish fantasies of revenge against his Christian neighbors. he discovers this and once he points it out you see it everywhere. these elaborate fantasies of revenge by the powerless. they are fantasies they are powerless. we are talking about christian western europe, not muslim spain, so it is a totally different power relationship. you don’t have jewish army commanders or anything like that. then, in their powerless situation, you get these very elaborate visions of what will be done to Christians at the end of days.
then this caused a tremendous scandal…
yuval speaks of Jewish messianism, the messianism of revenge and on the other hand the messianism of conversion, that is to say that everyone will see the light and convert to Judaism. what caused the scandal was this: in 1096, during the first crusade, the Jews, once trapped, committed suicide and murdered their families rather than see them converted. then you have infanticide. Jewish infanticide. now yuval affirms that what it is about is messianism. that they had a tradition, which is a royal tradition, that once enough blood is spilled, god will take revenge. and he says that the jews were murdering their children to bring about the messianic age, to force the hand of god to take revenge. I don’t believe that, but that’s what he said. so that’s pretty bad. but what he says next is that Christians, seeing this “evil behavior,” began to think, “if the Jews are willing to kill their own children, then they are probably willing to kill ours.” and this is the beginning of the accusations of ritual murder, ‘blood libel’.
Is that really the beginning?
well, that’s yuval’s argument. that’s what caused the fuss. he was attacked from all sides for saying this.
And what do you think about it?
I don’t think you need the behavior of the Jews in 1096 to explain the blood libel. after all, the first blood libel was in norwich a few years later…
norwich, england?
yes. william of norwich It’s just a story, but a monk recorded, shortly after William’s death, that this twelve-year-old Christian boy had been murdered as part of some sort of world Jewish conspiracy. each year they chose a village, murdered a Christian child, and re-enacted the crucifixion. And this monk, Thomas of Monmouth, claimed to have had an ancient Jew tell him all this. now yuval had a problem, because these crusader attacks that happened in 1096 did not affect england or english jews. there is no connection. so he tries to deal with it, but he’s a little skinny. But in any case, the beginnings of the Christ child doctrine and the Christian Mass—the notion of eating God, or of God somehow living and dying at the same time—really begin in that period. the same new testament presents the Jews as responsible for suicide. I don’t think you need 1096 to explain the blood libel.
but are we saying that the events of 1096 are historically accurate?
What we have are several Hebrew chronicles written a generation later by the survivors. and we have some Christian chronicles that also mention this. so it is reasonable to assume that this happened. how widespread it was is a different story. there may have been two cases or five or seven, we don’t know. but I’m not skeptical that it happened.
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I don’t want to go all Jungian again, but if only one were to get a bit textual, the idea of killing your child is not such an uncommon theme in all sorts of lore and mythologies. and it has all sorts of different connotations. But in Old Testament terms, the most obvious parallel that comes to mind is that Abraham is asked to sacrifice his son, Isaac, as a test of faith.
The chronicler actually expresses it this way. he says, “we are actually greater than abraham. we actually sacrificed our children.” and he describes the slaughter as a temple ritual. they behaved like temple priests sacrificing animals and that kind of language is used.
So, an act of faith and a show of force?
is a rhetorical gesture. they are saying, “we are greater than you in our piety and our faith.” that’s what they’re telling their attackers.
transcending yourself by destroying yourself: faith over genealogy. incredible. Which brings us to his fifth book, right? that he is the founder of murray jay rosman hasidism. I vividly remember you talking about the origins of Hasidism in Riga and I thought it was fascinating. this is an attempt at something like a biography of the founder, if I’m not mistaken?
I think the subtitle is a search for the historical baal shem tov. rosman wanted to echo albert schweitzer and his search for the historical jesus. thus the founding figure of a historic movement to arouse religious enthusiasm. rosman goes all the way. where there is no solid evidence for an idea, he discards it.
what we have about the baal shem tov is a body of hagiographical material and quotes that appeared in print many years after his death. actual contemporary evidence that could be used to construct who this person was is very, very scant. so that’s what the book exposes. but more than that, it shows how this religious movement, a movement that is still with us, created this founding figure in his own image.
rosman shows the evolution of this man from the earliest times after his death to later, and he is totally transformed. he starts out as a kind of shaman, a mystical shaman but still a shaman, and then he transforms into a Hasidic leader, a Hasidic rabbi.
so this was all happening posthumously, after the fact. But does Rosman really manage to peel back the layers for a more accurate historical picture of the founder of Hasidism?
well it does. I mean, I think he probably pushes too hard. he is a stubborn historian. then the religious or mystical message is not the focus of it. his focus is on something else. the key text is a letter that we have from this man, but the problem is that we have it in several different versions… the key passage, which continues to affect Jewish life to this very moment, is where he has a vision and goes to heaven where he meets the messiah. now if you meet the messiah, everyone will ask him the same question: “when are you coming?” and he gets an answer: “when your teachings have spread like…” —I forgot the precise metaphor— “…when everyone can perform the same mystical practices as you”. now, in the letter itself, or at least in one version of it, the baal shem tov says “and that made me very sad”, because of how long it would take. but others, the Lubavitch Jews you see walking around with prayer shawls actively trying to get Jews to repent, accepted this as their task.
I want to be direct. One of the central themes of our discussion has been a sense of growing frustration that in the context of Hasidism this superman produces, who can ascend, alive, to heaven and return again. So what does this man represent? What hope does he embody for his followers?
what the baal shem tov does is change the proper conduct before the god of the Jew. that is, before his time, proper behavior was stern; sadness for living in exile and its extension, and for having to live in such an immoral and terrible place. and what it teaches, instead, is that one should be happy to do the will of god. there is joy available to everyone if they are keeping the commandments. and that God is in everything. that there is no place where god is absent. and that this is a reason for joy and not sadness. in fact it says that sadness is an obstacle to the worship of the creator. this is not a messianic creed. the baal shem tov is not a messiah and he is not a messianic figure. there is no active messiahism in his teaching. the thing about him and the people who follow him is that they are turning mystical doctrines into a kind of psychology. God and joy are always within you, and you can find them within yourself.
So, do you have this belief in common with, for example, Quakers?
Already before the end of the 18th century they were compared to the Quakers. and in this sense they are very much part of the eighteenth century. They empower people to make decisions. you can choose to become the follower of this or that rabbi, of this or that path. you don’t have to follow the ways of your ancestors.
an emancipation; part of the lighting?
exactly.
to remember what we have been discussing here. it seems that the books you have chosen have a lot to say about commitment, but they do not support a superficial cultural relativism. nor would you encourage any kind of psychoanalytic or Jungian reduction of the history of Judaism that strips its various strands of their respective historical integrity.
I think most, if not all, of the books I’ve mentioned restore a kind of agency to the Jews. and they are concerned not with reducing, but with restoring all the heterogeneity, all the multiplicity that this civilization has embraced. and yet there are, of course, continuities.
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