A Jew Among Romans

by Frederic Raphael

  In the forty-three years between the day when Walter Benjamin went halves with him on those morphine tablets and his own death, Koestler produced not only several durable works but also a few that verged on the cranky.h Unable to forget his days in the condemned cell, he was a dedicated opponent of the death penalty and (along with Victor Gollancz) petitioned for the reprieve of Adolf Eichmann. He also campaigned for the enlightened treatment of prison inmates. Darkness at Noon and his contribution to The God That Failed—a collection of essays on communism by disillusioned ex-Communists—were said to have led to his being put on a list of those whom the Soviet secret police were eager to murder if given the chance. Koestler was successfully assassinated only posthumously, when David Cesarani lent circulation to the charge (never brought against Koestler during his lifetime) that he had been a rapist. Cesarani’s “biography” came out in 1999, almost two decades after Koestler joined the long list of survivors who chose to take their own lives. Suffering from Parkinson’s disease and lymphocytic leukemia, he had for several years been an outspoken exponent of the right to die when one chose. He was widely blamed for allowing, or even insisting, that his third wife, Cynthia, die with him. It has been alleged recently that she too was terminally ill, but her suicide note says only that she did not want to live without him.i Koestler’s own exit, as theatrical as Cicero might have wished for, seems linked, if only symbolically, with the suicides of so many of the middle-European Jews who, sooner or later, chose the fate they seemed to have escaped. Although they were not the means of his death, it was as if Koestler had treasured those twenty-five morphine tablets for when he would need them.

  Benjamin killed himself because he was told that, since he could not produce a French exit visa, he was forbidden to remain in Spain and would have to return to France the next morning. He knew that the Gestapo were waiting for him. Fanciful accounts claim that they murdered him in the hotel. The cruel comedy of an impractical man is that he could, in fact, have had the visa, if he had arrived a day sooner or waited a day longer. He could not summon up the energy or the will to cross the Pyrenees illegally, as Heinrich Mann and his wife, Nelly, and nephew Golo had done less than two weeks earlier.j There was no lack of venal passeurs who could have led Benjamin over the mountains. His resignation is of a piece with his refusal to concede that he had been wrong to cleave to his Marxist illusions rather than, as Gershom Scholem had been begging him, to accept the particularist solution of emigration to Israel. The belief that there was a cure for Judaism was implicit even in Benjamin’s unofficial Marxism.

  David Bergelson, a Ukrainian Jewish novelist, offers another variant of the consequences of willful transgression. The fate of Arthur Koestler’s Rubashov (the central character in his 1940 novel, Darkness at Noon) prefigures that of the writer who was executed, by order of Stalin’s politburo, in 1952. Rubashov’s long interrogation forces him to realize, as Bergelson eventually would, that he is doomed by the logic of the ideology he volunteered to serve. Like Saturn, the Communist revolution had a habit of eating its own children, with Jews a specialty.

  Born in the czarist province of Kiev in 1884, David Bergelson was the youngest of the nine children of wealthy, pious parents, both of whom died by the time he was fourteen. An accomplished amateur violinist, he failed in his efforts to enter university, even—in the last resort—as a dental student. Like Mirel Hurvits, the heroine of his 1913 novel, The End of Everything, Bergelson combined intimations of rare destiny with lack of clear focus. He and Mirel shared an appetite for something beyond the shtetl world, in which even the “enlightened” young were liable to be clamped, but neither shows any definite sense of what it should be. Mirel’s confinement recalls the chimpanzee who, so Vladimir Nabokov once said, was taught to draw by its keeper: its first picture was of the bars of its cage.

  Ambiguity was implicit in the young Bergelson’s literary versatility: he wrote first in Hebrew, then in Russian and finally in Yiddish. His decision to remain enclosed within the language of parochial familiarity clashed with an ambition to distinguish himself from, in particular, Sholem Aleichem, whose “volubility” implied folkloric, hence timeless, resignation. Bergelson was split between a desire to remain true to his Yiddish roots and a craving for artistic liberty and success. Unlike Isaac Bashevis Singer (and his brother), he lacked the luck which virility and vanity can sometimes procure. Nazism and Stalinism were the rough beasts that would wrestle for the spoiled world into which the author of The End of Everything made his precocious entry.

  The novel is said by its editor and translator, Joseph Sherman, to have been a “sweeping departure from the conventions for modern Yiddish literature.” Its most evident quality, in its English version, is alienation. Bergelson is at once faithful to his roots and chafed by their entanglements. Like his heroine, he belongs nowhere in particular and has no distinct personality. Neither assimilated nor Zionist, his characters are specimens trapped under the bell jar of Yiddishkeit. Bergelson hoped that Yiddish could be the “central component of a secular, modern culture”; yet Yiddishkeit itself “perceived the Jewish people as a world nation whose essential characteristic was extra-territoriality.”5

  During its last, callous years, the czarist regime disrupted and dispersed the shtetl society of which The End of Everything is the inadvertent obituary. After the murderous post-1918 pogroms, the prospect of Jewish liberation, first in a briefly independent Ukraine and then under the ideological tyranny of the Bolsheviks, was a delusion that led Bergelson eventually to deliver himself to his own executioner. His style is too squeamish to be aggressive or poisonous. If he pities his Jews, he can neither love them nor leave them. Like Mirel, he tries to pull away, but he and she are stuck on the same flypaper.

  After writing The End of Everything, Bergelson himself became a lifelong victim of circumstances and, as Marxists would say, of his own contradictions. In the 1920s, he visited America but found it to be an immoral country of “selfish opportunism.” He preferred to deliver himself, in 1934, to the Soviet Union and to the literary dictates of “socialist realism.” He was richly rewarded, for a while, but the Yiddish culture with which he chose to identify was doomed. During the war he served on Stalin’s Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, liaising with British and American sympathizers, and received a state medal for “Valiant Labor.” But after it, when his fellow committeemen accumulated details of the specifically anti-Semitic nature of, in particular, the massacres at Babi Yar, they fell foul of Stalin’s insistence that Jews and other Soviet citizens had suffered equally.

  The Kremlin’s last pro-Jewish act was to endorse the partition of Palestine in November 1947. In early 1948, Stalin determined to eradicate Yiddish culture in the USSR under the rubric of “chauvinistic-Jewish deviation.” What had been heroic during the war became treasonous after it. Along with twelve other defendants, Bergelson was accused of the Zionism he had never endorsed and of spying for America by favoring a Jewish homeland in the Crimea. He spent three years in prison and was then sentenced to death after the usual rigged trial. Like Rubashov, he served the regime that betrayed him to the very end, when he confessed to his judges that he was “headed towards attaining the level of a real Soviet man, but did not quite reach it, and of that I am guilty.” His fate, like that of Franz Kafka’s Josef K., was to die “like a dog,” at the hands of Stalin’s secret police, of whom one of the most notorious mass executioners was the Jew Lev Zakharovich Mekhlis.k Bergelson was a Josephus of a kind—the kind that fails to find hosts as coldly and consistently indulgent as the Flavians.l

  The cases of both Walter Benjamin and Bergelson stand in contrast with the nerve and determination of Joseph at Jotapata. Benjamin too furnishes a counter-Josephus, a man incapable of renouncing what was no longer ever going to be available to him, the old country. He lacked the nerve, however, to remake himself, to take the step from being a critic of a civilization that was disintegrating into a future that defied Marxist prediction. Josephus prefigures Benjamin
’s circuitous thinking: his God plays a regular part, adjacent to human affairs, but in a cyclic, never linear or progressive, sense. He seems to have been alert to the rabbinic renunciation of interest, at and after Yavneh, in general human progress. By concentrating on sacred texts, and their meanings, overt and concealed, the Jews gave up on mundane “history.”m The idea of universal laws that was so important to Freud, in his wish to be seen as the discoverer of concealed universal truths, both replaced and, to some degree, mimicked the Yavneh revision of Judaism. Tradition extends itself only by rehearsal and recall.n

  Walter Benjamin’s suicide at Portbou, however pitiable, was more resigned than theatrical. It conceded, almost, that he had been “wrong from the start” and that Gershom Scholem, Benjamin’s friend who had immigrated to Palestine, had been right. Scholem, who made a lifelong study of the Kabbalah and of the false messiah Shabbetai Zevi, had written, repeatedly, asking Benjamin in effect to renounce modernism and Marxism and repair to the particular virtue of a Jewish life. For more than a decade, the two men had been playing metaphysical chess by correspondence. In that four-square white hotel, Benjamin knocked over his own king. He is commemorated, curtly, in Portbou’s blanched cimetière marin overlooking the Mediterranean.

  Benjamin could not grasp, or fight for, the liberty that would oblige him to concede that he had wasted his ingenuity on detaching himself from being a Jew in order to be a piece—one that would never quite fit—on the warped board of European culture. There is incidental irony in Benjamin’s choosing to die on the threshold of Spain. The Holy Inquisition is still defended on the grounds that its viciousness was sporadic, its officers methodical and its papers invaluable. Historians are grateful to those who keep tidy records.

  The comfortable social position of Joseph ben Mattathias’s family may have made him complacent; it hardly made him a premeditated traitor. The assistance he rendered the Romans, after his surrender, was offered in order to continue to save his skin; but it was never at the direct expense of other Jews, as has been said of some of the “leaders” of European Jewry. The defiance shown by the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 is beyond praise or reproach. Joseph’s Jerusalem was not a similar case. Polish Jews had no hope of being allowed to live, in peace or in any other way. They confronted the killers who had come to murder them all. No great principle was at stake in first-century Judaea, certainly not the physical survival of the Jews. All-out war with the imperial power was not the only course available.

  Whatever the moral refinement of the anti-Zionist case, and whatever the flaws or follies of Israeli policy, critics of the existence of Israel offer no practical recipe for what the remnants of European Jewry should have done in 1945, still less of where else they might have gone or been allowed to go. The British solution was to return survivors of the Shoah to the camps in Germany from which they had been liberated. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt claims that the surviving Jews would better have sought to reintegrate themselves into the societies from which they had been evicted. However, as Christopher R. Browning shows, a good many Polish Jews who sought to repossess what had once been theirs were either killed or driven away.o In 1945, neither the United States of Harry Truman nor Great Britain under Clement Attlee opened its gates to the remnants of Europe’s Jews. As David Cesarani revealed (it was the theme of his 1992 book Justice Delayed), the British preferred to admit a Baltic SS division to work in the mines rather than to allow “displaced persons”p to come into the country.

  Ever since the triumph of Christianity, the allegation that all Jews are innately devious has justified the severity of those who have conspired to degrade or murder them. The bad conscience of the Christian sees in every new Jew the same old Jew, whose vengeance he dreads. In this light, Josephus typifies the Jew who got away: a traitor in the eyes of his own people and for Gentiles, as for Hannah Arendt, a typically “oily, adroit” customer who makes his deal with the enemy for his own private salvation. Arendt’s phrase proved infectious: her close friend Mary McCarthy described the playwright George S. Kaufman and his New York friends as “oily.” Prejudice is as much mimetic as “psychological.” The poverty of language in almost all anti-Semitic literature is a symptom of the superficiality of the “ideas” which inform it.

  The rage of faction against faction inside beleaguered Jerusalem diffused itself throughout the centuries of the Diaspora. The same ferocity was rarely unleashed against Gentiles. Karl Marx, who came from a rabbinic family, reserved his most unforgiving animus for “the Jews,” whom he arraigned, holus-bolus, as a “huckster race.” The Jews took the fall for the bourgeoisie as a whole. Seeking on many occasions to dissociate himself from his origins, Marx made it a habit to refer to his fellow (but sometimes dissentient) socialist Ferdinand Lassalle as a “Yid.” Shucking Jewishness onto another, the rabbinically bearded Marx set out to identify himself with an irresistible majority, the Workers of the World.q

  The promise to eliminate difference, often through the agency of some new and selfless elite, is an ingredient of all universal gospels. A Communist as sophisticated as Leon Trotsky continued to believe, or at least to maintain, that in the ultimate pseudo-Hegelian synthesis, all humanity would be homogenized—and polyvalent—without distinction, as if in a meta-Pauline redemption. In the lifetime of Josephus, the Jew Saul of Tarsus, transfigured into (Saint) Paul, was the prophet of an undifferentiated future bliss in which there would be “neither Jew nor Gentile”; all would be united in Christ Jesus. The young Saul’s estrangement from his masters in the Jerusalem Sanhedrin is clear from Paul’s letters. By the zeal with which, in his early days, he “persecuted” the small minority of Jews who made a hero, but not yet a Savior, of the recently crucified Jesus, Saul had tried to be holier than the High Priests and so to recommend himself to them. Saul’s infiltration of the “Christians” had something in common with that of the czarist police who, in the course of associating with Decembrists and Communists, emulated their revolutionary zeal. The double agent can mimic single-mindedness to such good effect that he becomes half-infatuated with the cause he has been commissioned to sap.

  On the Damascus road, Saul / Paul had an electric vision of another way to go: he converted to a line of conduct, and then of belief, diametrically opposed first to the hierarchy and then to “the Jews.” A composite of Jew, Roman citizen and provincial, Paul reconciled his confusions—created his “ego-ideal,” some might say—by proposing a superhuman Jesus, a Savior with a mix of attributes, some lifted from Oriental mystery religions. Detached from his human origins, Jesus was revised into the true incarnation of the Dionysian dying god who figures in any number of Hellenistic cults, not least Asiatic Mithraism, with its ritual of blood-drenched resurrection. The resurrection has become the one miracle that Christianity can never suffer to be subject to Spinozan question. It confirms God as a Christian partisan.

  Once Saul of Tarsus had signaled his breach with the Jerusalem authorities by adopting a Greek version of his Jewish name, he was no longer bound by any kind of orthodoxy. As he set out to take the Gospel to the Gentiles, elements of Greek and Zoroastrian cults were assimilated into the Good News. The promised afterlife of the body was exemplified by Jesus’s own escape from his “three-day tomb” and his subsequent revelation to the disciples at Emmaus.r Paul’s subsequent differences with the Jerusalem “church” can be read as functions of provincial distrust of central authority. In this, Paul prefigured the leaders of the pending Jewish rebellion, men such as Simon son of Gioras and John of Gischala, who detached themselves from subordination to the Second Temple power structure and became candidates for outright hegemony. They then proceeded to murderous competition between themselves, as Lenin and Stalin would, first with the Mensheviks and then with the Old Bolsheviks.

  To judge from the crispness of Josephus’s counterpunching, in response to critics such as Justus, the main thrust of their charge must have been that he was, from the beginning, a self-interested and treas
onous leader. “Anyone who blames me for the accusations I bring against the party chiefs and their gangs of bandits, for my laments over the misfortunes of my country, must excuse my breach of the rules of historical composition. Of all the cities under Roman rule, our own reached the highest summit of prosperity and then fell into the lowest depths of misery.”6

  Jesus of Nazareth is reported, in the Gospels, to have repeated Isaiah’s forecast of the fall of Jerusalem, and (so it seems) with relish. Like Saint Paul, Jesus was a provincial with no native fealty to the city that had “stoned the prophets,” among whom, by implication, He rode in to be numbered. To Josephus, the misfortunes of all other races might be small by comparison, but the Judaean Jews had only themselves to blame. The possibility of atonement was a key aspect of the covenant; it made adversity tolerable. Religion is less a way of describing the world than of reading meaning, and hope, into it.

  Despite everything, Josephus preserved the myth of Jewish election, and hence of redemption. Christianizing Jews would do something similar when they attached their hopes to a resurrected messianic figure who, in Gentile imagery, would evolve into the vengeful and majestic Cristo Rey. The Father had jettisoned the Jews and become the universal God of everyone else. In his retort to Apion, to whom he owed no tactful deference (what did it matter to Flavian censors what was said to a dead Alexandrian academic?), Josephus asserted that the covenant remained unbroken. Jews were used to taking any amount of punishment without flinching. Since they had no graven images, and did not demean themselves by worshipping animals, as Egyptians did, the imagery of their faith was ineradicable and could travel everywhere with them: invisible treasure, sewn into their minds, could never be confiscated. Killing Jews became the only way to obliterate their long memories.

  The end of the Jewish War left Jews with no recourse but to expiate their sins and wait for Yahweh to abate his displeasure. The exemplary biblical instance of endurance is in the Book of Job, one of the latest in the canon. There is something of Job’s obstinate faith, despite all his adversities, in the figure of Ahasuerus, the shoemaker who, in Christian myth, abused Christ on his way to Calvary and was sentenced to wander alone until He returned. Over time, the pariah was transformed into a man of mysterious, perennial powers, armed with a God-given warrant of survival. The double-edged proverb “the Jew stands at the graveside of his persecutors” both chides and, to a degree, exonerates the anti-Semite (since his activities, however murderous, are always abortive). The persecution and the preservation of the Jews are recurrent elements in Christian pontification. In Pascal’s Pensées, despite the author’s Jansenist animus, Jews are emblematic of human nature itself: “Man must not see nothing at all; nor must he see enough to believe that he possesses it; he must see enough to see that he has lost it; for, to know his loss, he must see and not see; and that is precisely his natural condition.” Judas Iscariot, to whom some Jews compare Josephus, and to whom some Christians have compared all Jews, has undergone similar sublimation. He progresses from standing for the archetypal traitor to being a victim of undeserved malice.s