Meanwhile, the High Priest and his entourage, who had practiced the spectacular rituals of the Second Temple, were succeeded by the collegiate style of teaching agreed on by the rabbis who met in disconsolate conclave at Yavneh after the sack of Jerusalem. As Yosef Yerushalmi puts it, in Zakhor, “the rabbis who founded the Judaism that we know.… lost all interest in mundane history. They had the written and the oral law, and they trusted in the Covenant, which assured them the future.” In their eyes, all pragmatic history—Roman, Parthian, even contemporary work, like Josephus’s, on the Jewish past—did not merit rabbinical scrutiny. Memory was the vessel of Jewish solidarity, but that was also its prime purpose: “the injunction to remember was felt as a religious imperative to an entire people.”
For fifteen centuries after Josephus, no Jew can be rated a secular historian until Azariah ben Moses dei Rossi, who was born in Mantua around 1513. His ancestors were said to have come from Jerusalem with Titus; if so, it may be that they, like Josephus, belonged to the Romanizing class, which no longer dared stay there. Azariah’s masterwork, Me’or Einayim (Light of the Eyes), subjected Talmudic lore to scientific and linguistic analysis. For instance, he rejected the myth that Titus’s death was caused by a bite from a vengeful gnat dispatched by the Holy One. Deeply influenced by Renaissance humanism, his books were deemed heretical and condemned by the Jewish authorities to be burned. This inquisitorial sentence was later modified to a decree, not widely obeyed, that Azariah not be read by anyone under twenty-five. His work exemplified an unresolved problem for modern Jewish historians: if academically respectable to the world at large, their work is bound to butt against premises that were basic to all Jewish conceptions of the past: or, as Yerushalmi puts it, “the belief that divine providence is an actual causal factor in Jewish history, and in the related belief in the uniqueness of Jewish history itself.” Although Yerushalmi stops short of saying so, from this springs the temptation to find reasons for the Shoah within Jewry itself. Extreme orthodoxy has been known to put the blame on assimilation,16 just as pluralists and assimilationists, such as Hannah Arendt, can point a righteous finger at traditional “leaders” and the docility of their congregants.
The temptation to find one or another of these “sins” to be endemic has been eagerly taken up by Gentiles who have always read the inner uncertainty of Jewry as evidence of corporate guilt. This guilt or “self-hatred” is not, in most cases, “psychological” but implicit in the logic of Judaism itself (Solomon ibn Verga, a Spanish refugee forcibly baptized in Portugal in 1497, said that it was pointless to pour holy water on Jews since Judaism was “one of the incurable diseases”). What would suit the world’s scheme better than to discover that the Jews are guilty of all the things they’ve been accused of, not least by the Christian churches? By that means, the terrible possibility can be avoided that everything done to “the Jews” in the last millennium was unjustified. In 1942, in Fascist Rome, the German Jesuit Peter Browe wrote of the “manifest failure of the Christian mission to convert the Jews.”17 He sets out reasons for the impasse from both sides, but cannot convince himself that he has said the last word. He then comes to “the reasons from God’s side” and dares to guess that “perhaps in the end God Himself did not want Judaism to be obliterated.” Yerushalmi wonders whether any sophisticated modern Jewish historian can be imagined attaching an explicit “reasons from God” coda to a work of scholarship. Nor is it conceivable in any work written in the twentieth (or twenty-first) century, other than one seeking some worthy answer to what the cant has been pleased to call “the Jewish question.”
In today’s civilized world at least, “I am a Jew” sounds like a straightforward declaration. But what exactly is being declared? The practice of Judaism now has a diversity of forms, but Orthodox rabbis do not hesitate to disqualify the deviant or those whom Saint Paul—always more of a Jew than he cared to recognize—accused of “blowing neither hot nor cold.” The question remains: is it for individuals to decide whether they are Jews or is there some objective test? The Nazis sought to reconcile a state of law with a murderous ideology by defining a Jew as a person with at least two Jewish grandparents. Circumcision was evidence, but not proof, of a man’s Jewishness; lineage was determinant. In earlier centuries, and with varying degrees of coercion or welcome, Jews had been encouraged to purge their inherited taint by converting to Christianity. Under the Nazis, no such salvation was available. The Protestant Victor Klemperer survived to publish his diaries more because he had a “natural” Christian wife than by virtue of his chosen creed, which was dismissed as a camouflage. In Hitler’s Germany, ancestry, not faith, determined a man’s doom, and a woman’s, and a child’s.
The legalistic conundrum persists. Jews dispute among themselves, and in public courts, the criteria for admission to full community rights, in particular when it comes to qualifying for “faith” schools. As recent cases in Israel and in Britain have shown, the more Orthodox the judge, the more inflexible his criteria. Even in twenty-first-century England, the Orthodox chief rabbi, in his wisdom, could decide that a mother’s conversion to Judaism, however thoroughly supervised, did not automatically certify her son to be a Jew. Yet, in civilized practice, it is not left to a rabbi, however learned, or a judge, however impartial, to determine whether a man is warranted, or obliged, to declare himself a Jew.
“The Jew,” as perceived (or defined) by his enemies, is feared or hated as much for his mutability, his capacity to appear in many guises, as he has been, by Christians, for being the reincarnation of Judas. Marx’s “huckster race” seemed to have no choice but to practice the mean arts of haggling and usury, whether in the form of the peddler or the plutocrat. Seeking to escape that fate, the assimilated Jew, with his accurate mimicry of whatever society will admit him, is feared and hated, if he is, not least for putting on the style in a way he has hoped will leave him undetected. The Jewish writer, in particular, can become so fluent that his rivals accuse him, if successful, of dominating and perverting the culture in which he parades his excellence.
Josephus, the exile, the traitor, the witness, the reasonable patriot, the pious Jew, the alienated solitary, the sponsored propagandist, melts into and disappears into his textual persona as if it were an alibi. Words supply his coat of many colors. It is, of course, very improbable that he ever returned to Jerusalem—unless, in a flight of fancy, he took ship, perhaps under yet another name, and sailed to Alexandria and then, like Yehuda Halevi a thousand years later, made his way to the city that itself no longer bore the same name it had when he was born. If unlikely to be recognized by whoever still remained whom he had known in his old life, he would be an alien in his own land, even more alone, and more vulnerable, for having come back to where once he belonged.
In truth, no one records when Josephus died or by what means. A modern novelist, if commissioned to supply a plausible or ironic end to his life might fancy that, like those who survived the concentration camps only to kill themselves many years later, he was borne down by the guilt of merely being alive when so many others were dead. The lure of suicide as a form of decisive autonomy, involving a man’s own choice of how and when to end things, haunted Seneca, comforted Cicero and dignified Cato.
Josephus’s transgression from Jerusalem to Rome would be imitated, mutatis mutandis, by any number of Diaspora Jews. Few gained admission to Gentile society without a measure of guilt or even a deathbed reversion; Benjamin Disraeli is said, perhaps maliciously, to have muttered in Hebrew in his last hours or minutes. By converting to Christianity, Heinrich Heine profited in terms of fame and fortune but was never at ease with the price he had had to pay for social emancipation. Toward the end of his protracted illness (after eight years of agony), someone asked Heine how he imagined God would treat him. “Il me pardonnera,” the dying poet said. “C’est son métier.” Josephus was not an ironist of the same quality; nor did his God, Yahweh, specialize in letting people off. The author of The Jewish War more resembled th
e unredeemed victim-hero of Albert Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus, which ended with words of hopeful despair: “Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.” As he toiled on in support of what kept rolling back on him, the many instances in his work, and in his memory, of Jews who preferred death to humiliation crowded his consciousness, if not his conscience. Alienation became his way of being at home with himself. Suicide was not his style. Condemning himself to life, he made writing the sentence from which he sought no reprieve.
a Until very recently, classical scholars rarely went to Greece. Any texts that might have blighted their idealization of “the Greeks” were omitted from the canon, as the history of the Maccabees and other inappropriate books were from rabbinic consideration.
b Elie Wiesel was tactless enough to point out that the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, poorly armed and outnumbered, resisted for longer than the French army after the German breakthrough in the Ardennes in May 1940.
c Nowhere in her work does Arendt reply or even make reference to Strauss. Heidegger says nothing about Wittgenstein, nor Wittgenstein about Heidegger.
d With appropriate casuistry, however, irrational antagonisms could become axiomatic. Schmitt’s precedent for the Nazi program of ideological homicide was Oliver Cromwell’s speech of September 17, 1656, which declared the Spaniard to be “the great enemy of the National Being”; so too “the Jew” of Germany. See Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, p. 20 and following. Leo Strauss denounced Heidegger’s lack of “philosophical prudence in mistaking ‘the politics of National Socialism for a new stage in the manifestation of Being.’ ” (Kielmansegg et al., Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, p. 111.)
e In the same spirit, Hannah Arendt cites René Char: “Notre héritage n’est précédé d’aucun testament” (Our heritage is not preceded—i.e., validated—by any testament). The attempt to sever the present from the past by stepping away from their own shadows is common to Europeans of all kinds. The European Union, with its attendant contradictions, can best be understood only in the light of its authors’ willful negation of inconvenient distinctions, which, as recent events prove, cannot be eradicated by fiscal homogenization. Isaiah Berlin’s sympathetic reading of the philosophy of Johann Gottfried Herder is decorously alert to inescapable incongruities among nations and cultures. It also suggests a sly way of endorsing “national” particularism that only incidentally lends Gentile (and civilian) support to the more pacific forms of Zionism.
f “Mixed Transport” was published in a special number of Cyril Connolly’s magazine Horizon in October 1943.
g Peter Green has told me that when Koestler delivered his first book written in English, his publisher (Hutchinson) was dismayed to find that he had mastered every trite trope in his new language. He soon learned better, as he makes clear in Arrow in the Blue (New York: Henry Holt, 1984).
h His wish that science could supply a full explanation of human nature and conduct led him to seek a quasi-holistic scheme to account for the irrational, the paranormal and the coincidental.
i According to a profile of Koestler by Peter Kurth (in an article commissioned, but not published, by Vanity Fair [1991] and accessible on the Internet):
All their friends were troubled by what Julian Barnes calls “the unmentionable, half-spoken question” of Koestler’s responsibility for Cynthia’s actions. “Did he bully her into it?” asks Barnes. And “if he didn’t bully her into it, why didn’t he bully her out of it?”
Because, Kurth claims, the evidence that Cynthia’s life had been ebbing with her husband’s was all too apparent. Barnes’s own widely published dread of death is likely to have colored his reading of the Koestlers’ suicides.
j Evelyn Juers recounts, in House of Exile, how the obese Franz Werfel and his wife, Alma Mahler-Werfel, wearing “a voluminous white dress,” tottered along with them.
k According to Simon Sebag Montefiore, in Stalin (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), Mekhlis ran a form of institutional Murder Inc., killing preconceived quotas by order of the Kremlin.
l Another, more copious Jewish novelist and journalist, Ilya Ehrenburg (1891–1967), survived Stalin and wrote The Thaw, in celebration of the end of the period in which he had served, with a smile, as Russia’s unofficial cultural ambassador to the West. He atoned for having gone along with Stalin’s refusal to acknowledge the specific sufferings of the Jews in the Holocaust by collaborating with Vasily Grossman on The Black Book, which anticipated, in print, the redemptive work of Claude Lanzmann in his film Shoah. Ehrenberg evidently had the Josephan charm, and buoyancy, that Bergelson lacked.
m The post-Yavneh deletion of the books of the Maccabees from the “authorized” Bible was due to the “uninspired,” mundane nature of their story, which, in its edited form, Maurice Sartre, in D’Alexandre à Zénobie, likens to a Hellenistic novel. The romance of rebellion/revolution begins with the embellished success of the Maccabean uprising, which in fact never achieved full independence even from the declining Seleucid Empire, whose rulers allowed the Jews de facto self-government without ceding territorial overlordship. This explains Pompey’s presumption of the same authority when he entered Jerusalem in 63 B.C.E.
n Franz Kafka’s 1919 Letter to My Father can be read as a post-Yavneh Jew’s letter to his God. Jesus Himself, in the mood of “Father, why hast thou forsaken me?,” might have written something along the same lines.
o In Remembering Survival. See also, for firsthand evidence, Anna Bikont’s Le crime et le silence, passim.
p The phrase was routine code for slave workers and concentration camp survivors, mostly Jews. The Western Allies’ use of the anonymous “DPs” echoed Stalin’s reluctance to allow the Jews to seem to have suffered more than any other group. The British foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, mentioned Jews only to say that they were not to be permitted to “push to the front of the queue.”
q Stalin is reported to have reproached Sergei Eisenstein for his filmed portrayal of Ivan the Terrible because the style of the czar’s beard made him look Jewish.
r Celebration of the divinity’s triumph over death (and escape from human bondage) was a key element of the worship of Dionysos. The cult of Mithras featured a son of the sun god Ahura Mazda, who died, was resurrected and had twelve disciples. The similarities made Paul’s message more plausible and also led to a competition between the two faiths, which lasted until Mithraism withered away with the adoption of Christianity as the official, if never the only, religion of the Roman Empire.
s In Robert Graves’s King Jesus (New York: Creative Age Press, 1946), Judas is the brave zealot who is disappointed by the other disciples’ lack of guts, a view somewhat endorsed by the recently discovered manuscript of the so-called Gospel of Judas. The most vindictive elaboration of Judas as “arch-knave,” and the impersonation of all Jews, was written by the seventeenth-century German “discalced” (unshod) Augustinian Abraham a Sancta Clara. It took ten years to compose and even today is declared, by The Catholic Encyclopedia, to be his masterpiece, “varied with many moral reflections.”
t To the indignation of, in particular, Simone de Beauvoir, in his old age Sartre fell under the influence of Benny Lévy, a Maoist who later became an Orthodox rabbinic student. Lévy reminded the old atheist of his possible roots in Alsace and wished Sartre into believing himself some kind of a Jew. This was regarded by Simone de Beauvoir as a devilish “détournement de vieillard.” After Sartre’s death, Lévy himself went to live in Israel and attended a Yeshiva.
u Robert Fisk, for instance, asserted that there had been a “massacre of civilians” in 2002 at Jenin, where Israeli special forces sought to dismantle a terrorist base and suffered casualties almost as great as those of their militant enemy. No evidence of any massacre was ever unearthed. The Internet still records partisan “evidence” that a massacre did take place.
v Frank Morison’s Who Moved the Stone?, first published in 1930 and often reprinted, makes divine agency the only possible means
of rolling aside the boulder that blocked access to Jesus’s tomb and volatilizing his body.
w The fundamental nostalgic book of Western literature is, of course, the Odyssey. Israel has, in some ways, been the Jewish Ithaca, the never forgotten homeland to which “the Jew” (James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom not least) hopes one day to be headed. Yet as Michael Pieris puts it in an essay in Ancient Greek Myth in Modern Greek Poetry (London: Psychology Press, 1996), “there is another version of this Odyssean experience.… which presupposes the return to and a new exile from Ithaca (or any other homeland), due to the hero’s inability to accept.… the realities of his old country.…. The ‘recognition’ of the native place is linked to.… disappointment and despair [and so] leads the hero (whether or not he is called Odysseus) into a second, and this time deliberate, Odyssean adventure [and exile]” (emphasis added).
x Berlin never abandoned his Jewishness, but he can scarcely be said to have worn it without reluctance. He became the very model of an Anglicized academic grandee and, during the war, diplomatic civil servant. His black coat and striped trousers, the carnation in his buttonhole and the air of groomed discretion promised that England, his second home, was a theater in which he was delighted to star. He wrote trenchant prose, but without the serrated edge of his fellow Oxonian philosopher A. J. Ayer. Appearing to make a hobby of high intelligence, clever in making no parade of his cleverness, he was British enough to have little time for French intellectuals, of whom he admired only Raymond Aron, an assimilated mandarin of a rather more abrasive, no less meticulous order. Ignatieff says that Berlin was “one of those Jews who, as he remarked of Proust, ‘turns his rootlessness into the kind of Archimedean point outside all the world, the better to assess them from.’ ” It is hardly an epigram for the ages (nor is Proust markedly rootless), but the description is apt for members of the cosmopolitan mandarinate to which Berlin and so many clever Jews have rallied, since the European Diaspora was detonated by the Nazis. Berlin put his wit and brains at the service of the British and managed both to amuse and to instruct them. Attached to the British embassy in Washington, he became Winston Churchill’s favorite source of White House gossip. See “Berlin Revisited” in my The Benefits of Doubt (Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press, 2003).
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