A Jew Among Romans

by Frederic Raphael

  z With unsurprising symmetry, the charges of infanticide and cannibalism were leveled first against the early Christians; see H. S. Versnel, Ter Unus: Isis, Dionysos, Hermes—Three Studies in Henotheism, volume 1 of Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman Religion (Leiden: Brill, 1990).

  aa According to Jonathan Sumption, in The Hundred Years War (vol. 3: Divided Houses), the Scots said the same of their allies the French in the 1380s, when the latter landed north of the border and failed to bond with the rugged clansmen. Scots continue to speak, if sometimes, ironically, of the “Auld Alliance.”

  bb In HHhH, Laurent Binet reports that when the Germans decided to remove Mendelssohn’s statue from the roof of the Prague opera house in 1941, they selected the image with the biggest nose, only to discover that it was Richard Wagner’s.

  cc Martin Luther also suffered excruciatingly from piles, which may account for his obsessive use of excremental imagery, often at the expense of the Jews.

  dd The quotations are from Steven Nadler (Spinoza: A Life), on whom I rely in this account of da Costa’s life and death.

  ee Carl Djerassi’s Four Jews on Parnassus (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) makes play with the convergence of Jewish and classical culture in imagining a posthumous (often acrimonious) meeting between Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Gershom Scholem and Arnold Schoenberg on the mountain the Greeks took to be sacred to the Muses.

  ff In a similar spirit, the Annales school of French historians, led by Fernand Braudel, adopted a policy of looking at history in the slanting light of the “longue durée.” What mattered was what transpired in the long run. In this way, the blips of actuality (for instance, what happened in France, not least to its Jews, during the Occupation) became negligible. As if by coincidence, the annalistes favor the long-term play of patterns over the bumper-to-bumper traffic of cause and effect.

  gg See Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

  hh In the view of some Christians, “the Jews” had to return to Zion, prior to being converted to Christianity, before the Second Coming could take place. This synthetic idea has led some right-wing Christians (who might, before the Shoah, have had Fascist sympathies) to be enthusiastically, if not belligerently, pro-Israeli.

  ii Only Alain Minc, in his Spinoza: un roman juif (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), has the naughty impulse to suggest otherwise. Minc’s novel was the subject of a lawsuit, won by the provincial author of a study of Spinoza that Minc was said to have admired to the point of assimilation.

  jj Spinoza’s London-based friend and admirer Henry Oldenburg, the German-born secretary of the Royal Society, abstained from any such veiled condescension (see Nadler, Spinoza: A Life).

  kk Isaac D’Israeli, the book-loving father of Benjamin Disraeli, decided to have his son baptized after a doctrinal quarrel with the elders of Bevis Marks, the oldest synagogue in London. Isaac’s commonplace books were Byron’s favorite reading. His admiration for D’Israeli probably inspired the poet to write Hebrew Melodies and to favor the national liberation of the Jews as he did of the Greeks, though neither of these ancient peoples had had a “nation” for thousands of years, if ever.

  ll Louis-Ferdinand Céline maintained, with his customary snarl, that Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu was written in a profuse Hebraic argot that was nothing like authentic French.

  mm Byron’s Venetian gondolier servant and boyguard, Tita, found employment with Disraeli after the poet’s death.

  nn Eric Roussel’s Pierre Mendès-France (Paris: Gallimard, 2007) shows that, as France’s prime minister, Mendès-France almost achieved similar status, but he lacked the panache—sartorial, literary and rhetorical—that made Disraeli not only a leader but also an entertainer. In the wake of the Dreyfus affair and the anti-Semitic legislation of Vichy, which licensed the deportations of 1943–44, French Jews have had reason to be skeptical of their countrymen’s unwavering allegiance to the much-vaunted Rights of Man.

  XVIII

  JOSEPHUS WAS ONLY THE FIRST of countless Jews for whom the accumulation of pages creates a secret province. By himself, the author can be sovereign. Like Marcel Proust in his cork-lined room, he can mete out retrospective justice or, like Stefan Zweig marooned in Brazil, give vent to incurable, if elegantly composed, nostalgia. In the Passover service, the loss of Jerusalem was formalized in annual longing for a place that, over the centuries, few Jews expected to see. While the lost splendor of their city supplied a myth to match that of Atlantis,a the indelibly alien nature of “the Jews” became a central ingredient of European mythology. They were, for centuries, Christendom’s scapegoats of choice. In the 1380s, civil discord inside Paris was resolved with the cry “Aux juifs,” and the consequent pillage and massacre of the Jewish quarter, although the contentious issue, in which Jews played no part, was between the citizens and the Crown.b

  A post-Christian derivative of theological anti-Semitism has been the stigmatization of Israel. Its right to exist is questioned in accordance with a revision of the same logic that was applied to the insolence of Judaism by Muhammad, Loyola and Luther. The last, in his tract The Jews and Their Lies, repeated that the Romans were “God’s instruments, punishing the Jews for their delusions regarding their false Christ and their persecution of the true one.” He advocated that they should be deprived of normal civil rights, their property and books burned and they themselves herded into forced labor camps.

  Nietzsche remarked that the Germans were “a people who had subordinated themselves to a man like Luther!” Evelyn Juers points out that Thomas Mann’s 1937 gloss on Nietzsche’s observation was that Hitler was directly in line with Luther and so “a truly German phenomenon.”1 Yet some Christian apologists persist with the convenient notion that murderous anti-Semitism was generated only by the Enlightenment. By a perversion of Lutheran logic, the killings and brutality of Kristallnacht in Germany in November 1938 were sanctioned by Joseph Goebbels as righteous “revenge” for the assassination of Ernst vom Rath, the third secretary of the German embassy in Paris.c

  The punitive pursuit of heresy marks every monotheism. Islam automatically condemns apostates to death.d Ideologists nurture hatred of schismatics who appear, to rational outsiders, to be scarcely distinct from those who consign them to hell. There were divisions between Jews from the moment Moses turned his back on the refugees he had led out of Egypt in order to trudge up Mount Sinai (it is a long climb to the top), there to seal the covenant with the God who came to be known as Yahweh. Moses descended to find that a good many of the Hebrews were dancing in worship of the golden calf. His first task was to wed them to the singular worship of Yahweh; their uniformity was to be the reflection of His unity.e It took forty years in the wilderness to make them into a cohesive force ready, under Joshua’s leadership, to take out the Amalekites and assume the lease of the promised land. Its inhabitants’ history, and that of their supposed descendants, would be replete with factions, schisms and feuds.

  The archetypal theologico-ideological dispute arose between Pauline Christianity and “the Jews” who, in their stiff-necked obstinacy, refused to recognize Jesus of Nazareth as the only son of God. It is a status that Jesus never claimed and that was at odds with Judaism’s unbreachable monotheism, which He never questioned. The murderous hostility between early Christian homoousians, who believed that God and Jesus Christ had exactly the same nature, and homoiousians, who maintained that Jesus was of only similar stuff to God the Father, matches the controversies that set Essenes against Pharisees and Zealots against their Hellenizing brethren. The stand-off between Sunni and Shia Muslims has claimed many more lives than all the wars between Israel and the Arab states.

  For centuries, Jesus was contrasted with “the Jews,” quite as if He belonged to a different race. At the same time, He was authenticated because He was descended, as the Messiah was forecast to be, according to Isaiah’s prescribed genealogy, from
the royal family of David.f The attribution of divine status to Jesus was in line with the practice of Hellenistic monarchs and pretenders since the time of Alexander the Great. The first Roman to flaunt his descent from an immortal was Venus’s favorite, Julius Caesar. The latter’s jealousy of the great Alexander was among his motives for invading Gaul (money was a more pressing one). Caesar’s adopted son, his nephew Octavian, went one better: he agreed to be worshipped, in his lifetime, as the deified Augustus, and even to have temples built in his honor and in that of the goddess Roma, although at first, at his own instruction, he was the object of cult only in the eastern provinces, where Hellenistic kings had established a tradition of self-elevating pretensions to divinity. Subsequent emperors consented to be universally worshipped as a way of deserving their subjects’ loyalty (and their tribute). The tradition of assuming their own divine election was resumed, slightly less presumptuously, in the Middle Ages, by the Holy Roman emperors, who were often neither holy nor Roman and had no empire.g

  However refined Christian apologetics became, especially after the millennium of 1000 C.E. (when Jesus failed to make His expected return), the righteous disparagement of the Jews has always been validated by their mundane humiliation. The archetypal prophet Elijah the Tishbite set the style for assuming that God was a player in the world’s game when he mocked the Philistines’ deity Baa-Shamin because he failed to set fire to a pile of wood, which Yahweh then had no difficulty in igniting, even when it was drenched by rain. By the same logic, Christians maintained, the failure of the Jews to prevent the incineration of Jerusalem had to be the proof that Yahweh had deserted them.h

  The degradation of the synagogue, literal and metaphorical, remained integral to the practice and rhetoric of Christian Europe. Jesus and His church were custodians of the unique gate through which man could secure access to redemption. Christ’s personal history was revised to prove that He had been repudiated, wickedly, by his own people. Accordingly, He and His followers were exempt from the shame of defeat in the Jewish War. Within a short time, they found ways to revel in it. Since the earth had proved to be the undeniable realm of the Roman emperor, Jesus Christ was elevated into an otherworldly Lord who had never laid claim to a terrestrial domain: He was a Redeemer of souls, not a practical rebel. The man who had been crucified under the mocking rubric “the King of the Jews” was, in due time, said never to have wanted a Jewish kingdom. If He brought “not peace but a sword,” it was to be wielded against his own unbelieving and treacherous kin. Judas became the surrogate, despicable king of the damned Jews. The battle for the theocratic high ground, symbolized by Jerusalem, persisted between Jews and Christians who laid claim to the same God, mystified, in the case of the latter, by the intrusion of the Trinity.

  After the sixth century C.E., the rise of Islam (with its many mimetic elements, including a claim to Jerusalem) served to make the struggle triangular. The most keenly observed Judeo-Christian tradition remained that of unforgiving recrimination between contending sects, not least between schismatic popes. Adherents of Christianity kept re-enacting the stasis that Josephus had deplored between Jewish factions in the Temple precincts. During the Thirty Years’ War, in 1618–38, those who took different views of Christ’s message and worship were often more repugnant to each other, dressed as Catholics or Protestants, than even the Jews, with whom Protestants, not least Puritans such as the Pilgrim fathers, were apt to identify. The Treaty of Westphalia, in 1638, dressed the exhaustion of central Europe’s contending Christian factions in the mantle of tolerance. The Jews were not relevant to the treaty, but their acceptance, as citizens of a kind, trailed in its wake.

  Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Vienna had some of the cosmopolitan allure of Alexandria in Josephus’s time. It gave shelter and a measure of emancipation to a growing number of Jews, many of whom thrived in the artistic and professional liberty of a city that never quite admitted them to parity. The Jews were, in many regards, Vienna’s good fortune: they generated both wealth and art. Yet their contributions (and their numbers), even when they enriched or entertained their fellow citizens, fomented rather than allayed the hostility that would lead their audience and beneficiaries to turn against them. The facility with which so many Jews adapted themselves to Gentile culture gave them, for a while at least, the confidence to speak out more unguardedly than ever before. Among the intelligentsia, they were particularly to be drawn to journalism, of which Josephus was the prototype. The journalist cannot often affect the selflessness of the scientist, but he profits from the putative neutrality of his profession: he describes or pictures what is happening without, in theory, intruding his own personality, even though his prose has almost always to pander to the tastes of the public and (as Karl Kraus stingingly insisted) accommodate the timidities of his editor. Joseph Roth (1894–1939) was perhaps the greatest, because the least cautious, of Jewish journalists to spring from the Germanic world. Never a “success,” with a tenured byline, he was an anguished nomad who combined prolific facility with rare accuracy of observation; for example: “Jewish doctors are a kind of atonement for the crucifixion.”2 Roth’s novels have a desperate panache unmatched by the works of Jewish writers who have made happy careers in Anglo-Saxon literature.

  The personal history of Sigmund Freud reflects specificities and ambiguities he sought to discount or sublimate. His notion of repression, as a feature of all human psychic operations, had a practical correlative in the experience of many Jews in Christian Europe. It could be said that Freud’s emphasis on the neurotic consequences of, roughly speaking, sexual repression was a Josephan ruse. Donning a scientist’s, rather than a historian’s, mask, Freud chose, like Spinoza, to indict Christianity caute, with argued caution rather than with overt polemic.i The Oedipus complex replaced original sin by cursing all men with the same psychological mark—mental circumcision, as it were. Freud’s trick could not be won decisively: like the return of the sexually repressed, assimilation excited neurotic reactions; anti-Semites who could not accept the loss of their distinction insisted that the divide between Jew and Gentile was elemental.j In neo-Talmudic style, Freud’s emphasis—even in the context of his meta-Spinozan naturalism—is on states of mind and their leakage into human activity, rather than on any notion of historical or economic progress.

  Freud would never forget how an arrogant Gentile knocked his father’s hat into the gutter, and with what obsequiousness he retrieved and replaced it. It is a rare Jew who can absolutely deny the smallest wish to get his own back. Zionism is its geopolitical expression. As J. J. Lawlor has put it, writing about the Platonic myth of Er, “Homesickness has become the proof of the existence of a home.” It is also evidence of its loss. Er and errancy have a sweet, if accidental, affinity: both involve interplay between the living and the dead. Walter Benjamin would make a virtue of the Jews’ Irrkunst, the art of getting lost.

  Before their reluctant emancipation by Gentile majorities, the Jews had been forced into ghettos, but there was also a certain acquiescence in the tight domestic consequences: as shtetl life illustrated, Judaism was a communitarian faith.3 The Viennese psychoanalytic community, under its jealous, if laicized, chief rabbi, the Herr Doktor Freud, mimicked the tradition of the minyan: its social history is of a series of conferences and colloquies, almost always dominated by an authoritarian elder. Josephus reports a similar style of supervision among the Essenes, for whom to be a good Jew required the surveillance of other, better Jews.

  In the Christian imagination, the ghetto created a home for covens of bogeymen, a furtive den for necromancy and plots. In anti-Semitic fantasy, the elders of Zion were too cunning to emit any evidence of their plans for world domination. Evidence of their schemes had to be fabricated, as had been the Christological passages in Josephus. Norman Cohn’s Europe’s Inner Demons offers a cool tabulation of how repression of the weak (women as well as Jews) generated fear, among those who crushed them, that they were plotting revenge by the use of arcane
powers.4 The burning of witches and Jews, supposedly a vindication of faith, can be interpreted as an involuntary confession of doubt. Dread of the return of the persecuted disturbed the sleep of the dominant majority.

  In a mutation of the same ambivalence, the logic (and vanity) of Jewish guilt persists among, for instance, anti-Zionists who blame the indignation of Islam against the West on the existence of Israel and Israel’s existence on the aberrations of Zionism and its lobbyists. The corollary, eagerly embraced by Israel’s unsubtle enemies, is that the extinction of the Jewish state, if not of all Jews, will bring world harmony. This modification of pariahdom can be seen as a transposition to geopolitics of various schemes of Christian redemption and rationalizing “science” and historicism. Universal solutions are proposed or “discovered” in order to flush away aberrant, literally disconcerting, exceptions.

  From the Enlightenment onward, science seemed to supply an inside track along which clever Jews might transcend “racial” limitations. In physics (and with a white coat), an equation was an equation, a formula a formula, no matter who formulated it. Truth was discovered by genius and confirmed by experiment and by peer review; it had nothing to do with apocalyptic revelation. This impersonalized scheme did nothing to inhibit Nazis from speaking of “Jewish science” when it came to psychoanalysis. Freud had been eager, even before the Great War, to recruit Gentile adherents, Carl Jung in particular, in order to advertise his theory’s universal claim.k