Metaphor and Memory

by Cynthia Ozick

  In all this Bialik shows us that he is addressing his matter with a post-Enlightenment mentality. His view of the Halachic thinkers is tinged with secularity, anthropology, ambiguity: these rabbis, despite or because of their attention to “trifling points,” are “artists,” their work is “creation.” Not for one moment does Bialik contend that the Sabbath is from Sinai, that the Sabbath is a divine gift. In short, Bialik is engaged in a modernist literary contemplation, and he has, moreover, seized on a post-Enlightenment choice: the choice of the fusion of secular aesthetic culture with Jewish sensibility. Aggadah, pre-European, pre-Christian, is, in its lightning and mercurial way, a prefiguration of the European Christian Enlightenment— i.e., an ideal of imaginative freedom that is nevertheless more compassionate than any purely Hellenic ancestry would allow. The ideal of Fraternity, for instance, inevitably suggests humanitarianism more than aestheticism; and Greek democracy, it should be recalled, though it might be fraternal among patricians, was not humanitarian, lying as it did across the backs of slaves and barbarians.

  So it might be argued that the Enlightenment “Judaized” Europe when it granted equality to Jews and agreed to offer them citizenship. On the one hand, it was redolent of Jewishly cherished ideals of messianism. On the other, it was a welcoming, humane, and compassionate act of brotherhood toward real and living Jews. But the Jews, in accepting Emancipation (rather, in rushing fervently toward it), agreed on their side to de-Judaize themselves. To be enthralled by Bach, it is necessary to suspend disbelief in, or at least distrust of, Christianity—one must enter the music with an opening of the heart to Bach’s exaltations: and Bach’s exaltations belong to Christendom. The cathedrals and all the splendors of European art exacted from Jews a degree of self-negation. But this self-negation in the face of the majority culture—the price of participation in it—was trivial compared to the larger cost implied in the formulation of “a man abroad and a Jew at home.” What this meant was the privatization of the Jewish mind, a shrinking of its compass. In political terms, the price of citizenship was the loss of corporate self-government, the relinquishment of the sovereign rights and privileges of internal autonomy. All this was concrete and measurable, the product of a bargain sealed by Napoleon’s amazing call for the renewal of the Sanhedrin, which delivered itself up wholly to Napoleonic control, and finished off Jewish life as a self-reliant force, however otherwise restricted. From that moment forward, the idea of the kind of cultural realm in which a Jew is situated began to diminish: the opportunities of citizenship were desperately valued and welcomed, but in mind and in humanistic scope, the physically and socially delimited closet of the ghetto was broader than national citizenship, which critically reduced Jewish self-definition. From an abundant and spacious theory of civilization embracing the whole range of human culture, post-Enlightenment Jewish intellectual territory withdrew to the narrow claims of “religion,” “persuasion,” “faith.” The Enlightenment and the Emancipation, in their offer of breadth, reduced and cramped Jewish creative space.

  For some, that space narrowed and darkened so radically that it vanished. Such Jews chose to live entirely within the acreage of Enlightenment. Some made that decision immediately upon Emancipation, and their progeny have not been Jews for two centuries. Others have taken longer, or are just beginning the journey toward radical Jewish abandonment.* But for all Jews everywhere, the idea of what it meant to be a Jew was crucially altered. Jewish meaning, from its origins in the widest understanding of civilization, withered to an “ism.” Judaism: the mere denominational (from which, in an atmosphere of nearly universal Western secularism, it is not only easy but logical to fall away). The effects of this “ism-ization,” and its even more one-dimensional American issue, “ethnicity,” have been an irritation ever since. In consequence of the reduction of Jewish intellectual authority to a “persuasion,” the sense of a Jewish national civilization has been denigrated as “tribal,” and the re-establishment of a sovereign and autonomous Israel has been seen as an affront to the Napoleonic bargain that demanded the surrender of autonomy. The idea of a wider Jewish heritage, moreover, is regarded as a betrayal of the Jewish promise of “good behavior”: the promise to turn culture itself into the mere marginal sliver of an “ism,” hanging, so to speak, from the synagogue lintel. “Ete a man in the street and a Jew in your tent, / Be a brother to your countryman and a servant to your king,” Judah Leib Gordon sang, not in the France of Voltaire, but in the Russia of 1863.

  Everywhere in the Diaspora today this promise is still being meticulously kept, held in place by the ongoing vestige of Napoleon’s threat against what—in pluralist and ethnic America!—is designated, in acerbic tones, as “dual loyalty.” Recently a post-Enlightenment American citizen of the Jewish persuasion wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times, complaining that Israel is a Jewish country with Jewish institutions, including the effrontery of a Jewish army—a “ghetto,” in fact, for Jews only. (Just as, presumably, the Indian subcontinent, with its multiple Indian institutions, including its Indian army, is a ghetto for Indians only.) The revolutionary is taken for the stereotyped; the larger daring and the wider culture are judged to be the smaller and the narrower. Much of Europe’s growing fury at the State of Israel, we may be sure, is the frustrated post-Enlightenment realization that the Jews have after all reneged on the Napoleonic bargain, and have dared to move boldly out from being a sometimes tolerated “persuasion” to becoming once again an amply developed concentration of varied human behavior. Europe “humanely” welcomed the State of Israel as long as it was misconstrued to be simply a “haven” for the broken survivors of Europe’s own abattoir; but once it begins to be recognized that a more fundamental program is in hand, and that what the founding of Israel represents is, rather, a declaration of the renewal of an entire civilization, un-contained by the self-confining politesse of the Napoleonic bargain, the heirs of Napoleon detect insolence. The Jews are escaping from their normal condition and place into the transcendence of full national expression—a privilege owed to all peoples but the Jews.

  Paradoxically, however, Zionism as an Emancipation movement was itself cradled in the Enlightenment, and only provides a new arena for the problem of Jewish cultural allegiance. For the last two hundred years—the period since the promulgation of the Grand Principle—each Jewish intellectual generation, wherever it has lived (and this of course includes Jerusalem and Tel Aviv), has had to make the decision anew: whether or not to pass wholly into the majority civilization and to cut the Jewish tie; or the alternative.

  What is the alternative? Remember that we are speaking of Jewish writers and intellectuals. Only for a very tiny minority has the alternative been to remain within what nowadays we think of as the “Jewish world.” And let us remind ourselves once again that it was the Enlightenment itself that was responsible for the narrowing of that Jewish world in the mind of modern Jews. Before the Emancipation, Jews might live politically enclosed in a segregated society—but the content of the Jewish mind, through the all-inclusive reach and memory of Talmud, hardly felt itself to be separated from the whole range of human experience, and daily took the pulse of every human concern, from ethics to hygiene to adjudication. If I hammer too much at this, if I pull at your sleeve too decisively in emphasizing all this, it is because such a reminder cannot be urged too often—and because the idea of Talmud as a civilizing and spacious force is not only unpopular with many post-Enlightenment Jewish intellectuals, but repellent to some, and remote from nearly all. An understanding of the unique content of Jewish genius has been forfeited by the great majority of modern Jews. It is the Enlightenment that has made us forfeit the understanding and forget the content.

  And it was the Enlightenment, in letting Jews “in,” that defined them as having been “out.” Of course they were out, from the point of view of the nations they inhabited. In a Europe of farmers Jews alone could not work the land; Jews were not permitted to own land. In daily occupation Jews
alone were bitterly restricted: in some regions Jews were confined to the sale of old clothes and nothing else. Looking for a loophole in a still-feudal economy that was closed to them, an enterprising fraction, eschewing ragpicking and inventing capitalism, became moneylenders, and were hounded and castigated for having developed the rudiments of banking, which the Church called “usury”—though only until the rise of the Christian bankers. Given a thousand strangling restrictions, enthusiastic popular pogroms, steady persecution, and unending general revilement, it is an absolute fact that the Jews were out. But what European historians overlook, or perhaps do not know, what the bigots of the Enlightenment (and the radiant Voltaire was such a bigot, deeply contemptuous of Jews, whom he viewed as obscurantist) deliberately shut themselves off from, was what the inner life of the Jewish community consisted in. In an illiterate Europe, ordinary Jews were not simply literate but text-obsessed. In an idolatrous Europe, ordinary Jews were resolutely monotheist. Jewish history as a record of oppression is only a quarter history. “History is about the positive and not the negative,” Benedetto Croce puts it. “Man’s action combats obstructing beliefs and tendencies, conquers them, overcomes them, reduces them to mere stuff for his handling; and on this man rears himself up.” And: “Creativeness, and it alone, is the true and sole subject of history.”

  Jewish history is overwhelmingly an instance of Croce’s dictum; Jewish history is overwhelmingly intellectual history; and the heroes of the Enlightenment, with whom it might be said modern intellectual history began, were cut off from the energetic and brilliant culture that lived side by side with them, in the same towns, in the despised Jew-streets. In releasing the Jews from the crushing grip of the Church’s Judas-views, which declared the Jews to be a murderous, traitorous, obsolete, and superfluous vestige, the Enlightenment nevertheless did not abandon the idea that the Jews were a people without a worthy culture. The thinkers of the Enlightenment believed that in allowing the Jews entry into European culture, they were offering a dazzling gift—and indeed they were. But they could not conceive that there might lurk, in the shadowy possession of the Jew-streets, an alternative culture with a luminousness of its own, residing in a thousand brains; and no one, Gentile or Jew, understood at once that the Enlightenment was the beginning, for Jewish intellectual life, of a new alternative never before possible.

  What, let us ask again, is that new alternative? Its premise is, first, the recognition that no contemporary writer, Gentile or Jewish, Israel-bred or Diaspora-born, remains untouched by the Enlightenment—i.e., by the conditions of modernism. Moreover, for a Jew to continue to move toward Enlightenment values exclusively—and politically these include such later structures as socialism and Marxism—is, by now, not to dissent but to conform. By now, to feel oneself an integral member of the great matrix of European-American arts-and-letters is surely to slide down the greasy pole. In literature, the chief post-Enlightenment value is “originality”; but nothing is less original, by now, than, say, Parisian or New York novelists “of Jewish extraction” who write as if they had never heard of a Jewish idea, especially if, as is likely, they never have. “Be a man abroad and a Jew at home” is finally truncated to “Be a man abroad”—and of these there are a hundred thousand and more, all alike, all purged of Jewish understanding. Consequently it becomes increasingly tedious to read about these hopelessly limited and parochial characters in so-called Jewish fiction whose Jewish connections appear solely in the form of neighborhood origin or played-out imitative sentence structure or superannuated exhausted Bolshevik leaning. By now, for writers to throw themselves entirely into the arms of post-Enlightenment culture is no alternative at all. It is a laziness. It is the final shudder of spent thought: out of which no literature, Jewish or otherwise, can hope to spring.

  The new alternative, then. Bialik catches hold of the first strand: the transformation of certain cultural elements of the Enlightenment into Jewish substance and substantiality—belles-lettres, for instance, signifying, for Hebrew, an extraordinary innovation and modernization. This is what Bialik means in urging that “the value of Aggadah [belles-lettres] is that it issues in Halachah [Jewish cognitive substance].”

  The new alternative—call it Bialik’s hint—leads us back to another period when elements of an influential foreign civilization were converted into Jewish substance—a huge and resplendent precedent, as awesome and finally as immanent as a stroke of nature, worthy of conscientious attention but calling—alas—for genius.

  Consider: the protagonists of the great tales of Scripture are in most important respects recognizably Jewish. But in one respect—and for us it is indissoluble from what we think of as Jewish temperament, character, or sensibility—they are not: they appear to be unconcerned with Text. They are indifferent to the sublime passion for study.* They may be the subject of a holy text—the People of the Book is Mohammed’s inspired ascription—but the people in the Book are, it is entirely clear, not a bookish sort. They are not, but latter-day Jews are; for two millennia Jews have known themselves to be text-centered above all. How is it, then, that such a discontinuity of character should arise? We read that Esau went hunting—but what was Jacob doing in his tent? It is a charming back-construction to imagine that he was probably studying Torah.

  The idea of the holiness of study is an idea born of fusion. The holiness is Jewish; the study—the majestic elevation of study—is Greek and Platonic. Formal study—a master and his pupil—is not to be found in Scripture. Scriptural heroes, even the poets among them, Moses, Deborah, David, and Solomon, are not heroes rooted in the grandeur of intellectual power, no matter how gifted or ingenious they may be. One of the vastest minds of Scripture is surely the brilliantly original Joseph, wily dreamer and inspired dream-interpreter, salvational economist, and, no doubt, scientist and architect. Surely Joseph is what we mean when we speak of genius. But when we try to imagine what the heroism of intellectual power might be, we do not think of Joseph; we think of Socrates.

  What altered Jews and Jewishness forever was, of course, the destruction of the Temple, the ruin of Jerusalem, the long bitter fact of Exile; and, simultaneously, the turn to study as substitute Temple, substitute Jerusalem, substitute flowering homeland. When Zechariah called for the greater might of spirit, he was prophesying the turn to the Jewish text. But the source of study-consciousness, the source of intellect as the paramount tool of right conduct, is the Socratic, not the biblical, font. It was the gradual superimposition of the Socratic primacy of intellect upon the Jewish primacy of holiness that produced the familiar, and now completely characteristic, Jewish personality we know. Because the Jewish mind has wholly assimilated the Platonic emphasis on the nobility of pedagogy, on study as the route to mastery and illumination, there is no Jew alive today who is not also resonantly Greek; and the more ideally Jewish one is in one’s devotion to Torah, the more profoundly Greek.

  Bialik’s hint (and it is only a hint, a hunch; an imaginative construct; an invention; a fiction) is this: as with Greece, so with the Enlightenment.

  The new alternative that lies before us now, astonishing in its daring and seeming insurmountability, is the fusion of the offerings of the Enlightenment—which, in any case, we cannot avoid, forgo, or escape— with Jewish primacy. If the opportunity is set aside—and for two hundred years it has, by and large, been set aside, or at least not been seized in all its potency and heat—the result will be either loss or triviality. The loss we have already glimpsed: the ennui that follows the swallowing-up by the aftermath of the Enlightenment. It is true enough that many Jewish writers and intellectuals (in whatever language they write, including Hebrew) prefer the swallowing-up and have chosen it. They may prefer it, they may freely choose it; but what they may not do is delude themselves that they are choosing largeness over narrowness, dissent over establishmentarianism, originality over tedium. In fact they are choosing precisely the opposite: the trodden path and the greased pole. In the name of the Enlightenment cry of
“universalism,” they are the herd choosing the herd. And triviality: there is small invitation to distinctiveness in that blending, and smaller opportunity for genius along the greased pole. Heine and Disraeli discovered this, and responded by roughing up the pole with ironic Jewish romanticism.

  The other way—the new alternative, the high muse of fusion, Bialik’s hint, the dream delivered up in shadowy shapes by the later writers of the Haskalah movement and by the feverish lost tide of Yiddish—opens out to riches: originality, the astonishments of the unexpected, the explosive hope of fresh form. Only genius can conceive it—and it may require several geniuses, or, to put it otherwise, a collective genius developed over generations. It took generations—a handful of centuries—for the Socratic emphasis on pedagogic exertion to infiltrate the Jewish emphasis on divinely inspired communal responsibility. Undoubtedly it will take another handful of centuries—the two hundred that have elapsed so far are plainly not enough—for Enlightenment ideas of skepticism, originality, individuality, and the assertiveness of the free imagination to leach into what we might call the Jewish language of restraint, sobriety, moral seriousness,* collective conscience. Such a hugely combining project is the work not only of generations, but of giants. It will require fifty Bialiks, each one resplendent with the force of Halachic reverence for the minutiae of conscientiousness. “But where is duty?” Bialik cried into the enchanting face of love and poetry.