The Ideal of Culture

by Joseph Epstein

(2017)

  In 1925, at the age of twenty-eight, Gershom Scholem wrote from Israel to his friend the philosopher Ernst Simon: “I am now busy writing extremely obscure essays, placing my trust in the immortality that comes to those who are not read, only praised.” This was a joke, of course, but one that turns out to have a high truth quotient. Fair to say that Gershom Scholem (1897–1979), author of Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, The Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, and other works, owing to the complexity of his arcane subject, has been more lauded than read, let alone understood, but this has not got in the way of his acquiring an international reputation as one of the past century’s leading thinkers.

  Born among the ill-fated German-Jewish bourgeois—his father was a successful printer in Berlin—Scholem was precocious not alone in his thinking but in his independent spirit. Early in his adolescence he sensed the implausibility of anything resembling serious assimilation among Germany’s Jews, and turned to Zionism as not merely an alternative but as a way of life. As he later told an interviewer who asked what motivated him to emigrate to Israel:

  I believe that if there was any prospect of a substantive regeneration of Judaism, of Judaism revealing its latent potential—this could happen only here, through the Jewish person’s reencounter with himself, with his people, with his roots.

  Scholem was not observant in his Judaism, and declared that he “never did care for traditional national Jewish theology.” He was nonetheless unflagging in his belief in God, claiming that he failed to understand atheism. Morality without religion behind it seemed to him a chimaera. He early discovered a predilection for mysticism, which he made the subject of his life’s work. “If humanity should ever lose the feeling that there is mystery—a secret—in the world, then it’s all over with us,” he told an interviewer. “But I don’t believe we’ll ever come to that.”

  The richness of Gershom Scholem’s thought, its sometimes paradoxical nature, his impressive erudition, combined to give his writing moral authority. Owing to this authority, during the great controversy in the early 1960s about Hannah Arendt’s book on the Adolph Eichmann trial, he, Scholem, crushed the book by accusing its author, formerly his friend, of want of “tact of the heart,” love for the Jewish people, and of hatred of Zionism.

  As a professor at Hebrew University, Scholem had many brilliant students, but no true disciples. No one has had the combination of wide learning and deep culture required to carry on his scholarship. Since his death, Scholem’s reputation has grown greater. Cynthia Ozick, George Steiner, Harold Bloom have written about him and his work in the most elevated language. His friendship with Walter Benjamin, who was five years older than Scholem, and when both were in their twenties was a strong influence upon him, further heightened Scholem’s aura as a major twentieth-century thinker. “His work on Jewish mysticism, messianism, and sectarianism, spanning now a half century,” wrote Robert Alter in Commentary in 1973, “constitutes . . . one of the major achievements of historical imagination in our time.”

  Little wonder that the figure of Gershom Scholem has inspired younger generations, especially among those with a taste for metaphysics, yearning to find a religious center in their lives. Enter George Prochnik, born in 1961, the author of Impossible Exile, Stefan Zweig at the End of the World, and himself something of a specialist in exile. “When I moved to Jerusalem, at the age of twenty-seven, in the summer of 1988,” Mr. Prochnik writes,

  I brought with me a battered paperback copy of Scholem’s On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism. . . . I was one of those for whom Scholem loomed as a kind of prophet. I found in his work if not faith, yet something closer to revelation than anything I could discover in normative Judaism.

  The son of a mixed marriage, George Prochnik found no succor in traditional Jewish religious practice—“I hated praying,” he notes—and discovered excitement in what he took to be Scholem’s religious anarchy. “Gershom Scholem helped plant the seed for this contrarian yearning,” he writes, “the wish for a Godless god, and an outlaw’s Law, and a revelation that could be stolen from the gilt vaults of orthodoxy, broken up, and redistributed among the poor in faith.”

  We are here in the realm of theology, that “spurious offspring of faith and reason,” as Theordor Mommsen called it, deploring its “tedious prolixity and solemn inanity.” Mr. Prochnik has a proclivity for swimming in these muddy waters, which make for the murkiest pages in Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem, his combined biographical portrait of Gershom Scholem and chronicle of his and his wife’s own desire “to immerse ourselves in a more Jewish existence on every level. . . .”

  Mr. Prochnik’s portrait of Gershom Scholem is largely drawn from Scholem’s From Berlin to Jerusalem, his autobiography of his early years; his Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship; and the vast quantity of his letters (he wrote some 16,000 of them). He records Scholem’s early passion for all things Jewish, a passion all the more remarkable for its coming from within a strongly assimilationist German-Jewish family in which the flame of Jewishness was guttering. Gershom—then Gerhard—was the youngest of the family’s four sons. The two oldest sons went along with the assimilationist program and into their father’s business; the third son Werner, became a radical, briefly a Communist, and was murdered in 1940 by the Nazis at Buchenwald.

  Off by himself, the young Scholem read Heinrich Graetz’s multi-volume History of the Jews and Martin Buber, both of whom he would later firmly reject. (“Buber’s glory and fame are assured,” he wrote, “but he certainly has a talent for making cloudy anything clear.”) He learned Hebrew, joined Zionist youth groups, hunted down ancient Jewish books. He argued with his father over the falsity at the heart of the Jewish assimilationist solution in Germany, holding that Germans viewed Jews as “at best with indifference, at worst with malevolence,” noting that no middle-class German gentile had ever visited their home.

  Scholem seems never to have been without the polemical spirit. While still a student he wrote a letter opposing Germany’s participation in World War I, which caused him to be ejected in his final year from his secondary school. He worked up an act—reminiscent of that portrayed in Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull—pretending to severe mental illness to avoid conscription, and ultimately was able to have himself declared an incurable schizophrenic. His persistent Zionist activities finally caused his father to disown him, announcing the decision in a registered letter containing 100 marks, adding that this was the last money he would receive from him. He was able to sustain himself as a university student, and eventually completed a doctorate at the University of Munich. When in 1923 Scholem finally emigrated to Israel, in what is known as the Third Aliyah, or emigration of Diaspora Jews to Palestine, there were fewer than 100,000 Jews there.

  Apart from his engagement with Jewish mysticism, the most decisive event in Gershom Scholem’s life was his meeting, in 1915, at the age of eighteen, with Walter Benjamin. Benjamin “put questions to me in his wholly original and unexpected formulations” that caused Scholem to concentrate more intensely than ever before. “What thinking really means,” he wrote, “I have experienced through his living example.” He described his friendship with Benjamin as “the most important of my life,” and later dedicated a book to him as “the friend of a lifetime whose genius united the insight of the Metaphysician, the interpretative powers of the Critic and the erudition of the Scholar.” The two exchanged ideas, read each other’s work in draft form, and a subtle two-way influence passed between them. In later years Scholem persistently attempted to get Benjamin to emigrate to Israel, but Benjamin dithered and dithered. His fine mind, with its sublime subtlety and depth of perception was toward the end coarsened, in Scholem’s view, by Marxism. In 1940, fearful of being returned by Spanish officials to France and the awaiting Nazis, Walter Benjamin committed suicide in Spain at the age of forty-eight.

  In 192
5, two years after Gershom Sholem’s arrival in Israel, he became a professor, specializing in Jewish mysticism, at Hebrew University. The rest, one might say, is history, also historiography, as he went from success to success, strength to strength, acquiring a worldwide reputation solidly based on a large corpus of significant work.

  George Prochnik did not fare so well. Israel, the Promised Land, withheld its promise from him. One sees this coming early in his pages on his and his family’s life in Israel. Marked by a strong tone of self-dramatization, not free from overwriting, particularly in the descriptions of landscape (“A pomegranate dangled its big red fruit like mumpy cheeks”), these pages are entirely shorn of humor. As soon as Mr. Prochnik begins his account of his own life in Israel, unhappiness sets in, then festers, finally exploding in his and his wife’s return to America, where they were divorced. The autobiographical sections of Stranger in a Strange Land reveal that it is George Prochnik and not Gershom Scholem who is the true stranger of his book’s title.

  We first hear of Mr. Prochnik’s dissatisfaction with Judaism’s “failure to be inclusive of women.” The peacenik in him soon enough reveals itself. The Soviet dissent Natan Sharansky is described as having turned into “a right-wing zealot in Israel.” He is of course anti-Jabotinsky, the militant revisionist and founder of the Jewish Defense Organization. He is put off by the ultra-orthodox, the sight of whom “left me more and more estranged.” Consumerism, which he sees as a strong feature of Israeli life, depresses him. Fancying himself a seeker after the highest truths revealed by religion and philosophy, Mr. Prochnik seems not to have realized that his is the standard outlook of the American progressive, finding as always the world falling short of his utopian standard.

  Mr. Prochnik’s identification with Palestinians becomes more and more complete. He quotes Edward Said on the wretchedness of the Palestinians’ condition as a result of the “Versailles” treaty that gave Palestine to Israel. He describes an idyllic setting in Jerusalem, noting that Palestinians are missing from it and thus from sharing in the enjoyment of it. Of his own economic troubles—he never found a good job, his dissertation at Hebrew University was rejected, he and his wife had three sons—he notes:

  All the little natural pleasures the city offers seem to carry a price tag we can’t afford. And I wonder if this sense might be an inkling of what the dispossessed Palestinian would feel.

  He profoundly feels the death of Prime Minister Rabin, and with it the squashing of the hope for peace through the Oslo Accords. The gravamen of his complaint is that the Israelis are to blame for “maintaining the exile of another people.” The election of Benjamin Netanyahu eventually drove him from the country.

  Gershom Scholem remarked that “I share the traditional view that even if we [the Israelis] wish to be a nation like all other nations, we will not succeed. And if we succeed—that will be the end of us.” Israel is different from all other nations—in its history, its rebirth, its precarious place in the world—and always will be. To ask it to be better, to ignore its enemies, to exist on a higher moral level than every other nation in the history of the world, which George Prochnik asked of it, is to be certain of the disappointment he found on his misguided sojourn there.

  Dreaming of a JewishChristmas

  (2015)

  The first of the few fights I ever had with my father was over a Christmas tree. I was five or six years old, he and I were returning from the 400 Theatre on Sheridan Road in Chicago where we saw a movie—I cannot recall its title—that had to do with Christmas. Walking the four or so blocks home, I asked my father if we couldn’t have a Christmas tree. I didn’t imagine getting one might be a problem. In my memory our conversation went roughly like this:

  “That’s not possible,” he said.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because we are Jewish,” he said, “and Christmas is about the birthday of Jesus Christ in whom we Jews do not believe.”

  “Why do we need to believe in him to get a tree?” I asked.

  I called this a fight, but it was no match, for I lost on a TKO in the first round.

  “All I want is a tree,” I said.

  “Jews don’t have Christmas trees,” he said. “I don’t want to hear anything more about it.”

  “That’s unfair,” I said. Kids, then and now and always, are great collectors of injustice, and I was no exception.

  “Unfairness has nothing to do with it. Discussion ends here.”

  I remember walking the rest of the way home in silence, sulking, unable to grasp my father’s unreasonableness, when he was always so generous and reasonable about everything else.

  Years later my father told me that, on Christmas Eve when he was five-years old, he put up his long white stockings—boys in those days wore knickers, requiring long stockings—on the mantle of his family’s apartment in Montreal, and woke the next morning to discover that one of his six older brothers had filled them with coal.

  Before going further, I ought to make plain that my father wasn’t in the least observant of Jewish ritual. This despite the fact that his father was a Jewish erudit, a man who obeyed all the dietary laws of Kashrut (or kosher) and prayed with regularity, each morning strapping on his phylacteries, as on various occasions I watched him do when he visited us in Chicago. I don’t know what my grandfather thought of his son’s want of Jewish observance, which extended to our never having belonged to a synagogue all the years I lived at home, though I and my brother were bar mitzvahed and pork was never served in our house.

  Later in life my father declared himself, on religious questions, an agnostic; on brave days, he announced himself an atheist. On the large questions he never referred to God but supplanted God with the word Nature. Only Jews, I suspect, can be both atheists and yet be so intensely Jewish on all questions that do not touch directly on God. My father was one of these. God apart, he was chauvinistically, one might almost say relentlessly, Jewish. He gave large sums to Israel and to Jewish charities: the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish United Fund, Hadassah, B’nai Br’ith, et alia. Unobservant in his own life, he nonetheless required, without being tyrannical about it, his two sons go to Hebrew School four afternoons a week, have rabbinically officiated circumcisions for their own male children, themselves remain stalwart in their pride in being Jews. He was always on the qui vive for anti-Semitism. “Some people may just hate you for your name,” he told me when I was ten or eleven. The notion of avoiding this by changing one’s name was beyond unthinkable. Jewishness was a club from which, after all that had happened in Europe, it would be a disgrace to resign. Besides, he was proud of his membership. The club, as he often pointed out, also happened to be filled with an inordinately large proportion of people of extraordinary achievements, and the people themselves had survived against momentous odds.

  The problem for me as a kid was that Christmas didn’t seem so much a Christian as an American holiday, perhaps the American holiday, and to be excluded from it made me feel, somehow, less than fully American. As for Christianity, in those days and perhaps until I was ten or so years old, I thought Christianity and Catholicism were coterminous. This was in good part owing to the neighborhood in which we lived, Rogers Park, where most of the not obviously Jewish kids on our large block went to St. Jerome’s and then on either to St. George or St. Scholastica High Schools.

  Chicago in those days was a very Catholic city. Ask someone where he lived, and he was likely to mention his parish: St. Nicholas, St. Rita, St. Leo. (Non-Catholics would mention the nearest public park: Chase, Indian Boundary, Green Briar.) Priests and nuns were plentiful and ubiquitous in the 1940s and early 1950s and taught the Catholic schools. Priests in collar and nuns in habit walked the streets, rode the buses, els, and streetcars, and were part of the urban landscape. As a seven- or eight-year old boy, I can remember, on the Sheridan Road bus, asking, “Sister, would you like my seat?” Or: “Morning to you, father
?” in unconscious imitation of Barry Fitzgerald.

  I mention Barry Fitzgerald because he played a priest in some of the popular movies of my movie-going boyhood years, those of the 1940s and ’50s. Movies generally during those years seemed dominated by priestly stories, notably Going My Way (1944) and The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945), in both of which Bing Crosby plays priests. Earlier there was Boys Town, with Spencer Tracy straightening out the intransigent Mickey Rooney. In a great many movies the actor Pat O’Brien, in the part of a priest, seemed to be walking killers down the last mile to the electric chair before they offered him a balling confession. Later there was Miracle on 34th Street (1947). In 1954 Crosby returned, this time in mufti, in White Christmas. In 1959 Audrey Hepburn turned up in The Nun’s Story. The movie It’s A Wonderful Life (1946) is properly described as a Christmas fantasy. One couldn’t, in those days, go to the movies without Christmas turning up, with large Christmas trees in supporting roles.

  In the building just to the north of ours on Sheridan Road lived the Cowlings. I have heard a stray psychological theory—it’s closer to a notion—that at some point in their lives all children believe, however briefly, that their parents cannot be their true parents. What they believe instead is that if they are not in fact royalty, they are surely higher born than to the rather ordinary people with whom they have been assigned to live. I don’t give this theory much credence, but I do know that, at age nine, if I were asked to trade my parents for Sam and Dale Cowling I would have done so without the least hesitation, and no kindly uncle to be named later.

  Sam Cowling, the father, was a comedian, and appeared every morning on a then nationally famous show called Don McNeill’s The Breakfast Club, which ran for more than thirty-five years (1933–1968) on ABC radio. He did a regular bit, announced with great fanfare, called “Fiction and Fact and Sam’s Almanac.” A small man, stocky, handsome, he was kind to everyone and played 16” softball on Sundays on the fields behind our buildings along the lake. Dale Cowling was beautiful, in a motherly way; the very name Dale was pleasing, and also the name, it will be recalled of Roy Rogers’s wife. The Cowlings’ two sons, Sammy and Billy, were blondish and crew-cutted, and both came to be good basketball players. The boys went to Chicago Catholic schools and then, I believe, to Georgetown. The Cowlings had a Christmas tree that took up a good part of their living room. One year all the lights on the tree were blue. They were a wonderful family, and couldn’t have been less Jewish, or should I say more goyesque?