Imagining Jesus, imagining Jews

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

IMAGINING JESUS, IMAGINING JEWS

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

COMMITTEE ON JEWISH STUDIES

BY MELISSA SARAH WEININGER

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS MARCH 2010

UMI Number: 3397295

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Table of Contents Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………..iii Abstract………………………………………………….……………………………..…iv Introduction…………………………….……………………………………………...…..1 Chapter 1 What is a Jew? Jesus and the Construction of Modern Jewish Identity…………….......20 Chapter 2 Jesus and the Varieties of Jewish Identity………………...………….....……….………48 Chapter 3 Going Unhome: Jesus in the Yiddish and Hebrew Poetry of Uri Tzvi Greenberg…………………………………….………………………………………….71 Chapter 4 Jesus and Jewish Nationalism…………………………..………………………………115 Chapter 5 Jesus in Translation: Sholem Asch and the Pluralist Jesus…………………..…………156 Conclusion…………………………………..………………………………………….205 Bibliography……………………………………...…………………………………….211

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Acknowledgments No project of this scale is a solitary endeavor, and while I am responsible for any errors of fact or judgment, it would not have been possible without the help of many trusted advisors, colleagues, and friends. First, thanks goes to my committee, Menachem Brinker, Francoise Meltzer, and Jan Schwarz, who guided me with attention and care and constantly pushed me to clarify and improve my writing and my thinking. Many people helped by reading and offering thoughtful comments on numerous drafts, including Neta Stahl, Na’ama Rokem, and Rachel Seelig; Professor William Schweiker and the other Junior Fellows at the Martin Marty Center in 2007-8, Sean Anthony, Barbra Barnett, Adam Darlage, Erik Davis, Joel Harter, Jeff Israel, and Meira Kensky; and Professor Margot Browning and the other fellows affiliated with the Franke Institue in 2008-9. For financial support that was critical to my ability to work, thanks goes to the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Martin Marty Center, and The University of Chicago. Finally, this work could never have been completed without the help and support of my family. Throughout this long and arduous process, I have relied on the emotional and financial support of my parents, who, unlike me, never questioned my decision to pursue this degree and have always trusted me to do what I thought was right. And more than anyone else, I must thank my husband, Mark Mendelsohn, who always provided the time and space for me to work and encouraged me to go on when I thought I could not. Without him, I would not have been able to complete this dissertation, nor would I have produced my two most perfect creations, our beautiful children, Noam and Shayna.

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Abstract Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Jewish philosophers and theologians began to write about a topic that had been subject to a long-standing historical taboo in Jewish culture: Jesus. Spurred by a desire to enter into a dialogue with Christian theologians and to rebut Christian canards regarding both Judaism itself and the implication of Jews in Jesus’ death, many Jewish scholars began to reconsider the historical Jesus. This work opened the door to later Jewish writers of fiction and poetry, who began to use the figure of Jesus in their Hebrew and Yiddish work in the early twentieth century. Focusing in particular on three writers of the early twentieth century, this study examines how the figure of Jesus was appropriated by modern Hebrew and Yiddish writers in order to construct a modern, secular, Jewish identity. It shows that this literature was written not only as a response to living in the modern world, but also as a constructive project, part of forging a Jewish identity separate from traditional religious definitions of Judaism. Drawing on contemporary cultural theorists like Homi Bhabha, the complicated idea of “identity,” both as construed throughout Jewish history and as an abstract idea, is discussed and historicized. Modern literary works about Jesus are considered in the context of Jewish writing throughout history, beginning with the Talmud. The work of three writers in particular, who reflect the variety of languages and ideologies competing to define modern Judaism during the interwar period, is examined in greater depth: the bilingual poet Uri Tzvi Greenberg, the Hebrew novelist A.A. Kabak, and the popular Yiddish writer Sholem Asch. Each of these writers characterized his Jesus differently, iv

and through this characterization presented a model for the construction of modern Jewish identity.

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Introduction At first glance, the topic of Jesus in modern Jewish literature may seem to be an internal contradiction; it might be imagined as a kind of comedy sketch in which the project is presented as a book-length collection of blank pages. Until recently, with a few minor exceptions, it was a topic that had not been widely studied, despite a significant corpus of poetry and prose written in Jewish languages that focuses on Jesus as a central figure. This lacuna may seem appropriate: after all, why should scholarship about Jewish literature concern itself with representations of the Christian messiah? But in dealing with a sometimes taboo or vilified character in the Jewish world, these works about Jesus highlight certain historical, political, and cultural issues in the time periods and communities in which they were written. Certain Jewish writers chose Jesus to, in a sense, examine Judaism. More specifically, during the early twentieth century, a time during which Jews around the world were attempting to forge a lasting Jewish secular identity in the midst of both physical and metaphysical displacement, Jesus became a lens through which various Jewish writers were able to envision a workable secular Jewish identity. The writers examined in this study used Jesus in a constructive project to forge a modern identity for Jews. As we will see, many modern Jewish writers created their representations of Jesus as a form of counterhistory. Amos Funkenstein defines the polemical method of counterhistory as “systematic exploitation of the adversary’s most trusted sources against their grain” in order to distort the adversary’s self-image and identity.1 Modern Jewish

1

Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993): 36.

1

writers, however, most often did not have in mind a polemic against Christianity, but against Judaism. With their representations of Jesus, they sought to challenge traditional notions of Jewish identity and to suggest new ways of defining Jewishness in the modern world. The figure of Jesus in modern Jewish literature is such a potent and interesting object of study for several reasons. Historically, writing about (or even mentioning) Jesus has been a taboo in the Jewish world.2 Even mentioning his name was anathema: classical Jewish sources refer to Jesus by a variety of euphemisms, most prominently oto ha-ish, Hebrew for “that man.” Jewish writers in the modern period were making a conscious choice to challenge traditional Jewish notions of propriety and religious or social cohesion. Indeed, that may have been the attraction for some writers, whose avantgarde aesthetics mandated radical subject matter. But it also points to the importance of Jesus as a symbol or vehicle for exploring and formulating a new kind of identity: one that represented a break with the old traditional notions that created a taboo around Jesus and other figures. Similarly, the liminality or hybridity of Jesus as an historical figure, and in the Jewish imagination, made him an ideal figure for writers exploring their Jewish identity while simultaneously trying to create a space for themselves in the Western world both culturally and politically. The historical Jesus was born a Jew, yet became a symbolic representative of the Western Christian culture of which modern Jews hoped to be a part. 2

Both Dalia Dromi and David Roskies refer to a pre-modern “taboo” on writing about Jesus that was broken only in the modern period. See Dalia Dromi, Configurations of Christ in Jewish and Hebrew Literature, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California Los Angeles, 2000; and David Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984): 258310.

2

He was also born in the East, in the land of Israel, but had become representative of the West, a kind of cultural displacement sensed by many of the Jewish writers of Europe and America, who wrote in languages other than the vernacular but hoped to create in them a universal literature. Thus Jesus was divorced from his historical context and became both an easy and a complicated symbol for the plight of the modern Jew, who sought to retain his Jewish specificity while assimilating or at least becoming a member of a secular Western culture. Despite the connections of the topic of Jesus in Jewish literature to Jewish identity, modernity, and Jewish cultural production, until very recently, few scholars have engaged with the topic, and their studies are often partial or incomplete. These fall into several categories: works that examine the characterization and treatment of Jesus in pre-modern Jewish literature, from the Talmud through the Middle Ages3; those that focus primarily on work in only one language, usually Hebrew or Yiddish, rather than a broad comparison or consideration4; and those that focus on only one writer, usually Sholem

3

See, for example, Joseph Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth: His Life, Times, and Teaching, trans. Herbert Danby (New York: Bloch Publishing, 1989); Morris Goldstein, Jesus in the Jewish Tradition (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1950); Jacob Z. Lauterbach, “Jesus in the Talmud,” Rabbinic Essays (New York: Ktav, 1973): 473-570; R. Travers Herford, Christianity in Talmud and Midrash (New York: Ktav, 1975); and, most recently, reflecting renewed interest in the topic which I will discuss below, Peter Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999) and Border Lines: the Partition of Judeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 4

On Jesus in Hebrew literature, see Pinchas Lapide, Israelis, Jews, and Jesus, trans. Peter Heinegg (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979), Avigdor Shinan, ed, Oto haish: yehudim mesaprim al yeshu (That Man: Jews Write About Jesus) (Tel Aviv: Sifrei Hemed, 1999), Neta Stahl, Tzelem yehudi: yetzugav shel yeshu be sifrut haivrit shel hameah haesrim (The Image of a Jew: Representations of Jesus in Hebrew Literature of the 20th Century) (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2008), and Zvi Sadan, Basar mebesarenu: yeshua menatzeret behagut hatziyonit (Flesh of Our Flesh: Jesus of Nazareth in Zionist Thought) (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2008); on Yiddish, see Roskies and Matthew Hoffman, “Yiddish Modernism and the Landscape of the Cross,” From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007): 117-169. There are two brief studies that offer concise summaries and short discussions of both Hebrew and Yiddish literature; see Nahum Waldman, “Glimpses of Jesus in Yiddish

3

Asch, and analyze the representation of christological themes in his work.5 The early analyses of Jesus in modern Jewish literature often focus on the perceived “universality” of Jewish portrayals of Jesus, a universality that somehow neutralizes the Christian or profoundly secular content of such images. Pinchas Lapide contends, in his study of Israeli Hebrew writing about Jesus, that in the works he studies “it is precisely his [Jesus’] profound Jewishness which gives him his universality.”6 David Roskies has made similar claims for Jewish writing on Jesus, suggesting that Jesus became a symbol of universal suffering for Jewish writers between the two world wars.7 While this conclusion is certainly attractive in its simplicity, eliding the complexities of Jewish specificity within the larger context of Western (and Christian) culture, it falls short of a full, or satisfying, explanation of the role of Jesus in Jewish literature. Recently, however, there has been a tremendous surge of scholarly interest in the representation of and engagement with the figure of Jesus in Jewish culture. This is first indicated by several studies of the representation of Jesus in pre-modern Jewish literature and the relationship between rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity in the years after

and Hebrew Literature,” Jewish Book Annual 50 (1992-93): 223-239, and Hamutal Bar-Yosef, JewishChristian Relations in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature: A Preliminary Sketch (Cambridge: CJCR Press, 2000). 5

Examples of this type include Goldie Morgentaler, “Ecumenism in Sholem Asch’s Christian Trilogy,” Prooftexts 8 (1988): 219-244; and Hannah Berliner Fischthal, Sholem Asch and the Shift in His Reputation: “The Nazarene” as Culprit or Victim? Ph.D. Diss., City University of New York, 1994. 6

Lapide, 34.

7

Roskies, 262.

4

Jesus’ death and up to the establishment of the church.8 In addition, three new booklength studies of Jesus in modern Jewish literature and culture explore the connections between the representation of Jesus and the creation of modern Jewish culture, both in the diaspora and in Israel.9 These books explore the complicated relationship of Jewish thinkers, writers, and artists to the topic of Jesus, and by extension to Western culture, during the modern period. These studies reflect renewed interest in the way in which Judaism and Christianity are implicated in each other, in a period of global political and religious upheaval, in which Jews again seek other, non-traditional definitions of identity. In particular, many contemporary Jews in the established diaspora of the West, as well as in the state of Israel, find they must define themselves against the political narrative of territorial Zionism that so dominated the second half of the twentieth century.10 The rise of alternatives to the mainstream Zionist political lobbying organizations in the United States, like AIPAC, and the work of groups like Peace Now in Israel, demonstrate a contemporary desire for forms of Jewish identification that question the dominant narratives of Zionism.11

8

Peter Schäfer examines the representation of Jesus in rabbinic literature in Jesus in the Talmud; Daniel Boyarin examines the relationship of early Christianity and rabbinic Judaism in the first centuries of the common era in Dying for God and Border Lines. 9

See Hoffman, Stahl, and Sadan.

10

See, for example, Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity,” Critical Inquiry 19:4 (Summer 1993): 693-725. 11

On alternatives to American Zionist political organizations, see James Traub, “The New Israel Lobby,” The New York Times Magazine, September 9, 2009; on post-Zionism in Israel, see Menachem Brinker, “The End of Zionism?” Dissent 32:1 (Winter 1985): 77-82.

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In addition, the recent increase in Christian philo-Semitism and Zionism, particularly in the United States, makes more urgent the need to create a more nuanced and complicated picture of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, the place of Jews in Western Christian cultures, the continuation of specifically Jewish cultures both in Israel and in the lands of the diaspora, and the political uses to which religious symbols of all kinds have historically been, and continue to be, put. The rise of groups like Christians United for Israel, whose ideology is based both in Christian beliefs about the second coming of Jesus Christ and in hostility to Islam and “Islamic terrorism,” suggests a need for understanding, among both Jews and Christians, of the legitimate commonalities and differences between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.12 In addition, since September 11, 2001, religious symbols and language have been increasingly present in the political sphere. This project is meant to consciously add to this discussion and to provide new ways of thinking about the construction and continuation of modern Jewish culture and identity in a period in which fundamentalism of all kinds has sought to lay claim to religious, and religio-national cultures, and to define the authentic. In order to contextualize this project within the recent scholarship on this topic, a more careful review of the three most recent, and relevant, books on the topic is useful: Matthew Hoffman’s From Rebel to Rabbi, Neta Stahl’s Tzelem yehudi, and Zvi Sadan’s Basar mebesarenu. These three works examine a variety of Jewish thought, literature, and art on the subject of Jesus in both Hebrew and Yiddish from the eighteenth century to

12

For more about the rise of Christian Zionism and philo-Semitism, see Max Blumenthal, “Birth Pangs of a New Christian Zionism,” The Nation, August 8, 2006, and Gershom Gorenberg, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount (New York: Free Press, 2000).

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the present. The subject matter covered in these works represents a wide sample of the Jewish engagement with the figure of Jesus in culture and intellectual life. Matthew Hoffman characterizes his work as cultural history, and traces what he calls a “reclamation” of Jesus by modern Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals. He understands different ways of representing Jesus as different responses to the challenges of modernity. In particular, Hoffman is concerned the way Jewish writers and scholars used the figure of Jesus as a way of negotiating and understanding the Jewish relationship to the non-Jewish world, a question that became increasingly important after the haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment). Hoffman’s central argument is that “the ‘Jesus question’—how do modern Jews relate to the figure of Jesus?—is really a microcosm of the ‘Jewish question’—how do modern Jews define themselves in relation to the general non-Jewish environment?”13 Hoffman employs a largely historical methodology, tracing the various ways that Jews have answered this question in the modern period in works of philosophy, history, literature and art. Hoffman begins by demonstrating the ways that Jesus can be and has been used by Jewish thinkers and historians in the period of the Jewish Enlightenment to “reclaim” Jesus as a Jew and represent their own particular ideologies. The notion that Jesus became, in the hands of early Jewish thinkers, a malleable symbol who could be seen as representative of nearly any kind of ideological orientation is particularly useful in thinking about all kinds of Jewish cultural engagement with Jesus, and informs my own analysis of Hebrew and Yiddish literature. In this light, Jewish literature about Jesus can be seen, as much as history or philosophy, as a constructive ideological project in which 13

Hoffman, 3.

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Jesus becomes the figure through which various conceptions of Jewish culture and identity can be defined. Hoffman’s analysis is limited, however, by his choice of material. Although he draws broad conclusions about Jewish culture, in the chapters in which he considers literature, he conflates Hebrew and Yiddish literature while primarily considering only Yiddish poetry written between the two world wars. As I will show, there were significant differences between the way in which Yiddish and Hebrew writers used Jesus in their work, differences that were generally related to the kinds of ideological tensions that existed between those who wrote in Hebrew and Yiddish. As a result of the disproportionate focus on Yiddish and the elision of the ideological differences and conflicts between Hebrew and Yiddish writers, Hoffman’s analysis of Jewish literature about Jesus feels incomplete. In the chapters that follow I will consider some of the conflicts and tensions between Hebrew and Yiddish and their implications for Jewish writing about Jesus. Both Neta Stahl’s and Zvi Sadan’s books, by contrast, consider only Hebrew writing, although their claims, unlike Hoffman’s, are specific to Israeli and Zionist culture respectively. Stahl’s 2008 book is specifically a literary study of Jesus in Hebrew literature of the twentieth century. She examines the differences in pre- and post-state Hebrew literature about Jesus in order to show the ways in which Jesus was viewed as “brother” or “other” by Hebrew writers. Stahl begins from the philosophical dichotomy between self and other, adding the category of “brother” to describe an intermediate position that characterizes some of the ambivalent understandings of Jesus in twentiethcentury Hebrew literature. It is this theoretical framework for her analysis that is 8

particularly useful in identifying the ways in which various writers simultaneously identified with and distanced themselves from Jesus, and is a slightly more nuanced understanding of the literary representation of Jesus than that offered by Hoffman. Stahl’s framework also emphasizes the extent to which Jewish cultural identity has often been connected to the representation of Jesus by various writers. Stahl’s study is limited in scope to Hebrew writers writing in pre-state Palestine or the state of Israel, which has both advantages and disadvantages. With this limitation, she is able to consider Jewish writing about Jesus in isolation from, for example, the Holocaust, and this allows her to offer a somewhat broader perspective on Jewish writing about Jesus in the second half of the twentieth century. Where many scholars, including Hoffman, see the Holocaust as a turning point or even an end point of Jewish writing about Jesus, Stahl divides Hebrew writing about Jesus into pre-state and post-state stages instead. Indeed, from the Israeli perspective this division is perhaps more appropriate, and it also allows her to acknowledge and read post-state Israeli writing about Jesus as multivalent, rather than only relating its interpretation to the writer’s relationship to the Holocaust and the fate of European Jewish culture. However, in limiting the scope of her study to Hebrew and Israeli writing, Stahl may also sometimes miss both the important implications of the Holocaust, and, like Hoffman, the nuanced distinctions between Hebrew and Yiddish writing about Jesus. In particular, in her superb analysis of Uri Tzvi Greenberg’s early poetry about Jesus, Stahl fails to make a distinction at all between the Yiddish and Hebrew poetry, and the possible tensions between them. In Chapter 3, I will add to and offer alternative interpretations of some of Greenberg’s poetry about Jesus based on an analysis of the differences and 9

tensions between Hebrew and Yiddish and general, and Greenberg’s Hebrew and Yiddish poetry in particular. Finally, Zvi Sadan has recently published a study of Jesus in the work of modern Zionist thinkers and writers of various stripes, from Ahad HaAm to Uri Tzvi Greenberg. Sadan focuses on the period beginning with the First Zionist Congress in 1897, and ending in 1945, as the historical moment in which debates about how to define Zionism were most prominent. He claims that “the rise of new political movements, the tendency toward secularism and the shrinking of the place of religion in the modern Jewish experience allowed for a new assessment of the place of Jesus in the process of reorganization of Jewish society.”14 Sadan claims that he will argue that this reassessment of Jesus was crucial to the development of Jewish national identity, and specifically Zionism. However, although his survey of various Hebrew writers demonstrates the many ways that Zionist thinkers engaged with the figure of Jesus as a way of understanding Jewish national identity, he falls short of the larger claim that this engagement with the figure of Jesus “became a central motif in the crystallization of Zionist identity.”15 By his own admission, the writers he covers have little in common ideologically, and represent various understandings of Jewish nationalism and Zionism. His analysis of these approaches works better as a summary than a broad claim about the attitude of Zionist thinkers toward Jesus. However, Sadan’s claims about the centrality of culture to Zionist ideology as well as his analysis of the various ways in which Jesus was employed by 14

Sadan, 8.

15

Sadan, 232.

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Zionist thinkers in relation to their conceptions of Jewish nationalism and identity provide a useful framework for a more comprehensive study of these ideas. This project, in fact, engages with some of the same questions of identity development and constitution that are addressed by Sadan. First, it focuses on literature written during only the first half of the twentieth century. It encompasses the turbulent period between the two world wars, when many Jewish writers were searching for ways to define themselves and their Judaism within the context of the modern world. It also touches on the period at the beginning of World War II and the Holocaust, in which diaspora Jewry struggled with the meaning of the potential destruction of the Jewish communities of Europe. It is through the figure of Jesus that we see these writers engaging with some of the most important and catastrophic events of the twentienth century, and formulating responses to them that might ensure Jewish continuity in an uncertain future. Second, unlike many previous studies of Jesus in Jewish literature, this project examines works in both Yiddish and Hebrew, taking into the account the politics involved in the choice of language, as well as the politics of translation. At a time when, as we will see, language was crucial to Jewish identity formation and cultural politics, understanding the role of both Yiddish and Hebrew (and, in some cases, English and other vernacular languages) is paramount. The writers considered here form a very clear illustration of the role and importance of language to Jewish cultural politics. As we will see, they tend to fall neatly into the ideological categories into which Hebrew and Yiddish were divided in the early twentieth century: Yiddish diasporism and Hebrew

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Zionism. The languages in which modern Jewish writers chose to imagine Jesus were integral to the way in which they hoped to construct a viable modern Jewish identity. Finally, the dissertation will also consider the reception of these works of literature in the literary and Jewish communities of which the writers were a part. The widely varying responses to works of literature about Jesus in the Jewish community can tell us something about the current understanding of Jewish identity and the Jewish future in the communities in which they were written. It also gives a fuller picture of the debates surrounding competing visions of modern Jewish identity. The volatility and transgressiveness of the topic of Jesus within Jewish culture even in the modern period guaranteed debate and discussion of these works, and made them central to other debates about identity and culture for modern Jews. This project has two primary aims. The first is to offer an interpretation of Jewish literature about Jesus that takes into account its constructive nature, and the particular usefulness of Jesus to Jewish writers trying to suggest alternative modes of Jewish identity in modernity. The following chapters focus primarily on three writers: the Yiddish and Hebrew poet Uri Tzvi Greenberg, the Hebrew novelist A.A. Kabak, and the Yiddish novelist, essayist, and dramatist Sholem Asch. Each of these writers, in the same period, composed major works in which Jesus plays a central role as character, symbol, and even literary device. Though writing in roughly the same period, after the devastation and displacement of World War I but before the Holocaust, each writer composed his work on a different continent and in a different language. Uri Tzvi Greenberg wrote Yiddish poems about Jesus while living in Warsaw and Berlin; he continued to write about Jesus in Hebrew after making aliyah to Palestine in 1924. A.A. 12

Kabak composed his Hebrew novel about the youth and early life of Jesus in the Galilee while living in mandate Palestine; and Sholem Asch wrote his epic work on Jesus (and a trilogy on christological topics) in Yiddish while living both in Europe in New York, and saw it published in English translation before it appeared in Yiddish. Though by no means comprehensive, these writers represent a few of the various Jewish linguistic and geographical communities during the period under consideration. The second goal of this project is to show that Jewish literature about Jesus, in using him to construct conceptions of Jewish identity, challenged the division between the particularist and the universal and offered a middle ground that honored the claims of the particular while advocating the values of universal humanism. As indicated above, Jewish writers chose Jesus as the ground against which to define Jewish identity precisely because of his ambivalent status: the historical Jesus was unequivocally Jewish, yet Jesus had come to stand not only as a representative of Christianity, but as a symbol of Western culture as a whole. Modern Jewish writers, too, sought to retain their Jewish identities, their particular claims to “being Jewish,” while at the same time participating in and becoming part of a universal humanist culture. Sarah Hammerschlag, in her study of French thought about the figure of “the Jew,” notes a similar desire to negotiate the complexities of the particularist and the universalist. In her work, she suggests that “the answer to a homogenizing, universalizing rhetoric of humanism need not be a return to tribalism, and that the response to a rhetoric of ethnic or cultural separatism need not be the erasure of marks of difference.”16 I propose here that Jewish writers used Jesus in

16

Sarah Hammerschlag, “The Figural Jew: Uprooting the Discourse of Race in French Thought, Post1945” (Ph.D. diss., The University of Chicago, 2006): 10.

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much this way: in order to advocate for the maintenance of the signs of difference within the context of a universal humanism. In order to accomplish these goals, this project examines only literature in which the character of Jesus is represented literally, and not just metaphorically. This study is concerned with the way in which the historical Jesus has been re-imagined and represented by Jewish writers first in order to determine how certain values and ideologies have been transmuted onto the figure of Jesus in order to construct various conceptions of Jewish identity. Secondly, this project focuses on how those constructions of Jewish identity functioned to negotiate the very concept of a particularist Jewish culture and identity within a larger Western humanist culture. As a result, my readings of this literature are not solely literary, and focus largely on content rather than poetics. I read Jewish literature about Jesus not only as literature, but as cultural-historical documents that reveal something about the processes and politics of Jewish culture at a particular historical moment. As we will see in the first chapter, literature was often viewed by modern Jewish writers as a medium for a constructive cultural or ideological project, intended to convey a set of values related to the choice of language in particular. This project also discusses at length the idea of what I call “modern secular Jewish identity.” The notion of identity itself will be examined more closely in the next chapter, but at the outset I would like to define, or resist defining, my terms. In general, I use the term “modern” in relationship to Judaism and the Jewish world to describe the period after the haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, which began in the late eighteenth

14

century. The process of becoming “modern” was still being negotiated during the early twentieth century. In Judaism, the notion of modernity was also tied to what I call the “secular,” which I would define as a conception of Judaism that was not necessarily tied to the religious or to Judaism as a religion. The concept of “identity” is a difficult and slippery one. Indeed, the word “identity” itself may simply be an approximation of what is being discussed here. In her study of post-war French conceptions of Jewishness, Sarah Hammerschlag suggests that “[w]e must ask whether there is a formulation of ‘Being-Jewish’ that would contest the very structure of belonging that Judaism seems to exemplify despite representations of the Jew as an outsider.”17 It was exactly this notion of how to “be Jewish” in the modern world that Jewish writers of the early twentieth century were struggling with. In discussing Jewish “identity,” then, what is really at stake is a notion of how to define both the individual Jew and the community of people calling themselves Jews. As I will show in the next chapter, pre-modern Jewish communities did not wrestle with what it meant to “be Jewish,” because their Judaism was defined primarily by religious practice and observance. After the haskalah, however, the definition of “being Jewish” was destabilized by the turn toward secularism and the decreased importance of Judaism, as a religion, in Jewish life. In a sense, traditional religious practice had been the glue holding together both individual Jewish communities and klal yisrael, the “community of Israel,” the communities of Jewish dispersed across the globe. From the 18th century on, as the haskalah spread across Europe and traditional religious practice began to wane in 17

Hammerschlag, 7.

15

European Jewish communities, the absence of religion left a void that threatened the very idea of Jewishness through the disintegration of Jewish community affiliation. It was in Europe, and particularly Eastern Europe, that Jewish writers and thinkers during the 19th century began to try to find new ways to create group affiliation among Jews without the binding agent of religion. Most European Jewish writers and thinkers of the post-haskalah period felt that there was value in maintaining some kind of Jewish particularism and Jewish communal affiliation, but each had his own conception of how the maintenance of a discrete Jewish culture could be achieved. This sentiment is perhaps best expressed by Ahad HaAm when he wrote that Jewish nationalism should “have as its focal point the ideal of our nation’s unity, its renascence, and its free development through the expression of universal human values in the terms of its own distinctive spirit.”18 New models for “being Jewish” were constantly being formulated and proposed, debated and rejected, and as the Jewish community in America and in Palestine grew, particularly in the early 20th century, new ideas and models specific to those places and their social and cultural conditions arose. This led to the construction of many and various new conceptions of “being Jewish,” which is what I am calling “Jewish identity.” For example, early territorial Zionists like Leo Pinsker were determined that the Jewish people be constituted as a sovereign nation through “the creation of a Jewish nationality, of a people living upon its own soil, the auto-emancipation of the Jewsl their emancipation as a nation among 18

Ahad HaAm, “The Law of the Heart,” The Zionist Idea, ed. Arthur Hertzberg (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1997): 255.

16

nations by the acquisition of a home of their own.”19 Other Jewish nationalists, like the cultural Zionist Ahad HaAm, de-emphasized the territorial aspect of Jewish nationalism, but felt that “a complete national life involves two things: first, full play for the creative faculties of the nation in a specific national culture of its own, and, second, a system of education whereby the individual members of the nation will be thoroughly imbued with that culture.”20 And Russian Jewish socialists, although they considered “Zionism as a reaction of the bourgeois classes to the phenonmenon of anti-Semitism and to the abnormal civil status of the Jewish people in Russia,” nonetheless affirmed that “the term ‘nationality’ applies to the Jewish people.”21 For the Bund, it was the Yiddish language, as “the national language of the Jewish people,” which defined this national identity.22 These are only a few of the many ways modern Jewish ideological movements have defined “being Jewish,” or Jewish identity. As we will see in the chapters that follow, Yiddish and Hebrew writers in Europe, Palestine, and America continued to develop conceptions of “being Jewish” based on variations of these nationalist movements, and even occasionally advocating the virtues of the diaspora and assimilation. This is not to say that the modern, Jewish, secular identity being discussed here is at all singular, universal, or monolithic. Indeed, as I will show in the following chapters, the various writers and thinkers of the haskalah and the modern period often had very different and even competing notions of the constitution of Jewish identity. As we will 19

Leo Pinsker, “Auto-Emancipation,” The Zionist Idea, 198.

20

Ahad HaAm, “The Negation of the Diaspora,” The Zionist Idea, 273.

21

The Bund, “Decisions on the Nationality Question,” The Jew in the Modern World, eds. Paul MendesFlohr and Jehuda Reinharz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995): 420-1. 22

The Bund, 421.

17

see, even writers who were in ideological agreement, like the ardent Zionists Uri Tzvi Greenberg and A.A. Kabak, often had very different and sometimes incompatible ideas about what constituted modern Jewish identity and Zionism. Therefore, any discussion of Jewish identity presented here is understood to be varied, multivalent, and constantly shifting. I argue that each writer discussed in this thesis presented his own unique construction of Jewish identity through his representation of Jesus, and that taken together these characterizations of modern Jewish identity give us a picture of the answers that various writers gave to modern questions about what constituted Jewish identity and what characterized secular Judaism. In addition, the conflict and tension between competing claims about Jewish identity form a critique of the notion of a unitary identity itself. In using Jesus to negotiate the competing claims of Jewish particularism and universal humanism, these writers proposed a middle way that honored the claims of the particular while accepting universalist principles. But before we turn to modern literature and modern identity, we will start with an exploration of pre-modern representations of Jesus in Jewish literature. Most contemporary scholars of modern representations of Jesus in Jewish literature have neatly divided the pre-modern from the modern, suggesting that pre-modern representations of Jesus were largely negative, while modern representations have been largely positive.23 Rather than focus on this positive-negative polarization, which tends to automatically dismiss discussion of pre-modern representations and their relationship to the modern, as well as entrench constructed boundaries between pre-modern and modern that may be more fluid than this explanation would account for, I would like to complicate this neat 23

See Hoffman, 1, 4-5.

18

division somewhat, suggesting that the interest in hybridity is not uniquely modern and that there may indeed be some continuity between pre-modern and modern representations of Jesus in Jewish literature. In the first chapter, we turn first to this premodern literature, tracing the history of Jewish representations of Jesus in order to understand its implications for modern Jewish identity construction.

19

Chapter 1 What is a Jew? Jesus and the Construction of Modern Jewish Identity

As we will see, modern Jewish writers who wrote about Jesus were drawn to him as a figure for exploring the complexities of Jewish identity precisely because of his own symbolic hybridity: historically a Jew, symbol of Christianity. These modern representations of Jesus, however, were also informed by a long, if sporadic, Jewish tradition of writing about Jesus, which from the beginning wrestled with Jesus’ dual nature. The earliest written texts of the sages, the Mishnah and Talmud, contain a number of references, both clear and cryptic, to the historical figure whose life and teaching came to be the basis for Christianity, but whose background was inextricably tied to the tradition of the rabbis. That this dual identity presented complications for the rabbis of the Talmud is apparent in the confusion regarding references to Jesus in the ancient texts. There are both unreservedly negative and seemingly positive assessments of Jesus’ character and teaching contained in the Talmud, and many references whose referentiality is unclear. These representations of Jesus form the first glimpse of how Jesus was viewed by the rabbis and what a potent symbol he could be for the Jewish world. Clear references to Jesus in the Talmud that are agreed upon by scholars to refer to the historical Jesus are few and far between, and even fewer are those that offer a characterization of Jesus. Most scholars have been largely concerned with the historicity

20

of references to Jesus in the Talmud or the validity of its portrayal of the historical Jesus.1 But this approach has limited value: most scholars have concluded that the portrait of Jesus in the Talmud is largely ahistorical. A literary approach to these texts allows for a more meaningful reading, and provides a kind of continuity with later Jewish literature. Daniel Boyarin argues for reading the Talmudic texts “as a historian would read fiction,” to glean insight into the history of culture, in this case the culture of an emerging rabbinic Judaism seeking to define itself against Christianity.2 In this formulation the references to Jesus in the Talmudic text can be seen as literary representations, the creation of a fictional “Jesus” that points to the ways in which Jesus has always been a necessary symbol in Jewish thought and art, even for the rabbis of the Talmud. This approach allows us to read all of the Talmudic texts that reference Jesus, whether early or late, reliable or unreliable, as part of the representation of the character known as Jesus in the Talmud. The stories about Jesus in the Talmud represent him primarily as a sorcerer and a heretic, one whose legacy is false prophecy, prohibited magic, and immorality. One early passage describing the procedure leading to the execution of Jesus is illustrative of the way in which the Talmud both represents and constructs Jesus as a character. The passage reads: On the eve of the Passover Jesus was hanged. For forty days before the execution took place, a herald went forth and cried, “He is going forth to be stoned because he has practiced sorcery and enticed Israel to apostasy. Anyone who can say anything in his favor, let him come forward and plead on his behalf.” But since 1

See note 2 of the Introduction for references to studies of this type. There is also a long history of German Protestant criticism largely concerned with the historicity of references to Jesus in the Talmud, sometimes for anti-Semitic purposes. See Schäfer, 3-4. 2

Boyarin, Dying for God, 30. Also, as we will see later, many modern writers drew on even the most ahistorical Jewish references to Jesus in their own work.

21

nothing was brought forward in his favor he was hanged on the eve of the Passover. (Sanhedrin 43a)3 In a sense, this passage is procedural: it outlines the process for the trial and execution of Jesus according to Jewish sources. In doing so, it ignores the Roman context and Christian sources, and places Jesus squarely within the Jewish domain. This passage rewrites the story of Jesus’ heresy as a Jewish one, properly dealt with by Jewish authorities according to Jewish law. The prevailing characterization of Jesus here as sorcerer and heretic, one who “leads Israel astray,” is openly stated. But as Peter Schäfer has suggested, this passage, read in conjunction with Christian representations of Jesus’ execution in the Gospels, also represents Jesus as a false prophet on a deeper level. For if his execution was announced forty days in advance, then Jesus’ claims to have foreseen the manner and method of his own death are discredited and he is exposed as “a swindler and false prophet who makes a fool of himself in claiming to predict what everybody already knew.”4 Thus the text reveals Jesus as nothing but an ordinary man whose claims to special powers are void. This emphasis on the ordinariness of Jesus is reflected in a number of passages that lay claim to Jesus as a Jew, to include him in the community represented by the rabbis. As noted above, in describing the procedure leading to his execution the rabbis inscribed it within the context of Jewish law.5 Other stories that reference Jesus and his

3

All translations from the Talmud come from Soncino Classics Collection CD-ROM, Institute for Computers in Jewish Life (New York: Judaica Press, 2005). 4

Schäfer, 71.

5

Schäfer argues that the rabbis were proudly accepting responsibility for the death of the heretic Jesus without the “shame or guilt” suggested by the Gospel accounts of Jewish involvement in Jesus’ execution. Schäfer, 74.

22

followers further suggest a certain identification of Jesus and his teachings as Jewish. A story about Rabbi Eliezer’s encounter with a teaching of Jesus demonstrates the way in which Jesus was both viewed as representative of heresy and yet still part of the Jewish tradition. When Rabbi Eliezer was charged with heresy and cleared, his followers came to console him, and Rabbi Akiba suggested that perhaps Eliezer had been arrested because he approved of some heretical teaching. To this Eliezer replies with a story: He (Eliezer) exclaimed: “Akiba thou hast reminded me. I was once walking in the upper market of Sepphoris when I came across one of the disciples of Jesus the Nazarene, Jacob of Kefar-Sekaniah by name, who said to me: ‘It is written in your Torah, “Thou shalt not bring the hire of a harlot…into the house of the Lord thy God.” May such money be applied to the erection of a retiring place for the High Priest?’ To which I made no reply. Said he to me: ‘Thus was I taught by Jesus the Nazarene, “For the hire of a harlot hath she gathered them and unto the hire of a harlot shall they return.” They came from a place of filth, let them go to a place of filth.’ Those words pleased me very much, and that is why I was arrested for apostasy; for thereby I transgressed the scriptural words, “Remove thy way far from her”—which refers to minuth—“and come not nigh to the door of her house”—which refers to the ruling power.6 (Avodah Zarah 16a,b) Here the ambivalence about Jesus and his teaching is clear: Eliezer is both pleased by it, seeing it as a valuable Torah lesson, and admonishes himself for this pleasure. Daniel Boyarin suggests that in this type of story, the rabbis were “both recognizing and denying at one and the same time that Christians are us, marking out the virtual identity between themselves and the Christians in their world at the same time that they are actively seeking to establish difference.”7 In other words, Jesus is represented as both one of “us”—rabbis, Jews—and one of “them,” simultaneously Torah teacher and heretic.

6

Minuth is often translated simply as “heresy,” but has greater resonance in a passage like this, since the Rabbis often used it to refer to the beliefs or practices of early Christian-Jewish communities. 7

Boyarin, Dying for God, 32.

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This sophisticated, multivalent characterization of Jesus indicates the difficulties presented by a figure such as Jesus for the construction of a Jewish identity and culture, which the rabbis, in their own time, were also concerned with. As Jonathan Z. Smith has pointed out, “The issue of difference as a mode of both culturally encoding and decoding, of maintaining and relativizing internal as well as external distinctions, raises…the observation that, rather than the remote ‘other’ being perceived as problematic and/or dangerous, it is the proximate ‘other,’ the near neighbor, who is most troublesome.”8 In other words, Jesus the Jew is a much more difficult figure than Jesus the Christian. Beginning perhaps as early as the fourth century, some of these Talmudic stories about Jesus, as well as the Gospels and other source materials for the Gospels, were compiled into a popular literature that sought to retell the life of Jesus much as the rabbis had. Called by several different titles, including Toldot yeshu (Life of Jesus), Maaseh hatalui (Story of the Hanged), and Maaseh yeshu hanotsri (Story of Jesus the Christian), these works were reprinted in various editions, in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Yiddish, and sometimes even circulated surreptitiously in handwritten copies to avoid the censor.9 While the Toldot yeshu almost certainly had an explicitly polemical function, Yosef Dan has argued that parts of the story came simply from a literary impulse, “from an attempt to craft invented characters and to create a completely literary work.”10 According to this interpretation, the Toldot yeshu is then the first work of Jewish literature to reimagine the 8

Jonathan Z. Smith, “Differential Equations: On Constructing the Other,” Relating Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) 245. 9

Shinan, 62.

10

Yosef Dan, “Maaseh yeshu” (The Story of Jesus), Hasipur haivri beyemei habenaim (The Hebrew Story in the Middle Ages) (Jerusalem: Keter, 1974): 122.

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historical Jesus, and his representation points to the ways in which prevailing concerns among the Jewish communities of the time were reflected onto this Christian figure. The various versions of the Toldot yeshu almost invariably present Jesus in an unflattering light. The details vary from version to version, but the important elements are relatively consistent: rather than the child of a virgin birth, Jesus was a bastard, the result of an unsanctioned, and ritually impure, coupling; the miracles that he supposedly performed were the result of his stealing access to the shem hameforash, or ineffable name of God; instead of being resurrected, his body was stolen by one of the sages and reburied in his garden, then dug up and presented, or even paraded, as proof that he was only human.11 Unlike the Talmudic accounts of Jesus, Toldot yeshu reads as a strongly polemical, coherent parody of the Gospels, an attempt to expose the deceptions of Christianity. It was not as concerned with claiming Jesus as a Jew or revealing the ambiguity of his position. Rather, Toldot yeshu aimed to discredit the foundational legends of Christianity and deny the divinity of Jesus. The Toldot yeshu also presents a characterization of Jesus as a cunning manipulator, seemingly interested in power and glory rather than God or religion. For example, he claims, “I am the son of God and have come to the world at the command of my father in heaven, and everything the prophets prophesied about the messiah they prophesied about me.”12 Yet all of the signs he performs in order to prove to his followers that this is true are done not through some native power given him by God, but 11

For the sources and various versions of the Toldot yeshu, see Samuel Krauss, Das Leben Jesu nach jüdischen Quellen (The Life of Jesus According to Jewish Sources) (Berlin: S. Calvary, 1902). For other versions, see Klausner, 47-54; Dan, 124-132; and Shinan, 64-91. 12

Shinan, 67.

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through the help of the magical powers he has acquired through stealing the ineffable name from the Temple by nefarious means. Even his decision to present himself as the messiah and son of God seems to be for reasons of personal aggrandizement: when his rabbi puts together the evidence and realizes who he is, “he revealed the fact that Yeshua was a bastard. And when Yeshua heard that this fact was public, he fled to Jerusalem” where he subsequently steals the ineffable name in order to perform miracles.13 Rather than a paragon of morality and virtue, Jesus is portrayed here as a kind of craven outlaw, one who seeks the power and accolades denied him because of his humble birth. A slightly different approach to Jesus is seen in the writing and theology of the seventeenth-century Sabbatean movement. Sabbatai Tzvi, who declared himself to be the messiah, was “fascinated by the problem of his relationship to such earlier messianic figures as Jesus and Bar Kokhba.”14 Sabbatai saw Jesus as a kind of forerunner in his role as messiah, a perspective which again normalizes Jesus within the context of Jewish history and theology by invalidating any claim to the uniqueness or divinity of Jesus. Jesus, to the Sabbateans, was simply an earlier Jewish claimant to the messianic throne. However, since Sabbatai claimed himself as the true messiah, Jesus’s role was seen as that of a false messiah, much like his characterization in the Toldot yeshu. Nathan of Gaza, the prophet of the Sabbatean movement, hypothesized that Jesus was simply a husk (kelipa) of the messiah’s soul, meant to lead people astray, and Sabbatai was the true messiah stripped of the false husk. According to a complex “kabbalistic 13

Shinan, 66.

14

Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, trans. R.J. Zwi Werblowsky (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973): 284.

26

messiology, ….[t]he holy root of the messianic soul is surrounded by a particular ‘shell’ (namely, demonic power), which is none other than Jesus. The latter is thus intimately related to the soul of the messiah.”15 Thus, in the Sabbatean system, Jesus is both intimately related to the messiah, and thus reclaimed as part of a Jewish eschatology, yet at the same time a false messiah who led the people astray. The Sabbatean attitude toward Jesus, along with the Toldot yeshu and Talmudic representations of Jesus, share certain elements that persist in modern treatments of Jesus in Jewish literature: the characterization of Jesus as an ordinary Jew, which invalidates Christian claims to his divinity while simultaneously stressing his normative Jewishness; and the ambivalence concomitant with this characterization, which arises from the simultaneous recognition of Jesus (as one-of-us) and rejection of Jesus (as one-of-them). The Jewish writers who adopted Jesus as a figure in their work in the twentieth century, all of whom had deep and extensive knowledge of the Talmud and early Jewish literature, no doubt drew on historical Jewish writing about Jesus in their own portrayals. While the hybridity of the figure of Jesus in modern Jewish writing is typically assumed to be a function of modernism, it is clear that at least part of the turn to Jesus by modern Jewish writers was also a turn back to the sources of traditional Judaism.

The Historical Jesus With the rise of the European Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was a parallel “shift in attitudes of Jews toward their own religious

15

Scholem, Sabbatai Zevi, 285.

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tradition and the outside world,” one which began a process of disengagement with the absolute authority of Jewish religion and law.16 As a result, Jews in Western Europe became increasingly involved in European culture and decreasingly influenced by traditional religious authorities. The haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) movement sought to integrate Jews into European society and to educate Jews in secular subjects and practical professions. Many of the early maskilim (enlighteners), like Moses Mendelssohn, realized that engagement with the Christian majority was a necessary, even desirable, aspect of modernization and emancipation. At the same time changes in the Christian conception of Jesus created an intellectual atmosphere that allowed for a concomitant Jewish theological reconsideration. This provided the background against which Jewish scholars and theologians could consider the historical character of Jesus outside of his attachment to a religion that was responsible for centuries of Jewish persecution. At the same time that haskalah ideas were spreading through Western Europe, German Protestant theologians began to reconstruct what they felt to be a truer image of the historical Jesus than the one described by Church teachings.17 Yet in doing so, these scholars faced what Susannah Heschel calls a “terrible problem”: Jesus was Jewish.18 As a result, German Protestant scholars attempted to divorce Jesus from the Jewish

16

Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, “Harbingers of Cultural and Ideological Change,” The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995): 54. 17

For a summary of the major figures of this historicizing movement see Theodore Ziolkowski, Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972): 30-41 and Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998): 137-146. 18

Heschel, 127.

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background of the Second Temple Period in order to demonstrate the uniqueness and ultimate superiority of Christianity. They saw Jesus as a radical reformer whose teachings were wholly original, rather than grounded in a traditional observance of Judaism. Indeed, Second Temple Judaism was often viewed as corrupt or hopelessly legalistic by Christian scholars. This characterization of Jesus as the antithesis of a reviled Judaism provided the background against which Jewish scholarship on the historical Jesus emerged. Although earlier scholars like Mendelssohn had written about Jesus, it was in the nineteenth century, with the rise of the Wissenschaft des Judentums—literally, the “science of Judaism,” a movement for the scholarly investigation of Jewish culture and the precursor to modern Jewish studies—that German-Jewish thinkers, in particular, became interested in Jesus the Jew.19 The first Jewish historian to write a comprehensive Jewish history, I.M. Jost, did not depart significantly from classic Christian accounts of Jesus. In his Geshichte der Israeliten, published in the 1820s, Jost presented Jesus as a great thinker and reformer whose downfall was the rigidity and degeneracy of the rabbinic culture around him. But the very fact that Jost included Jesus in his history of the Jews indicates a changing attitude toward Jesus and an interest in his Jewish roots. Other nineteenth-century scholars included Jesus in their Jewish histories, but also revised the classic Christian assessments of his character. The French Jew Joseph Salvador both included a discussion of Jesus in his 1828 History of the Hebrew People and wrote the first modern life of Jesus by a Jewish author. Salvador described Jesus as a 19

For a survey of these thinkers and their ideas about Jesus, see Heschel, 127-137; and Hoffman,Chapter 1, “The Quest for the Jewish Jesus,” 13-60.

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loyal Jew whose ethical teachings could be traced to Jewish source texts. His account located the source of Christianity within Judaism as a way of arguing for the place of Judaism in Western culture and society. Two of the most prominent nineteenth-century historical considerations of Jesus came from the Wissenschaft scholars Heinrich Graetz and Abraham Geiger. Matthew Hoffman claims that while the earlier historians “set the stage for modern Jewish writing on Jesus, the work of Geiger and Graetz developed and crystallized these views for later generations.”20 Graetz included a chapter on Jesus and the origins of Christianity in his eleven-volume History of the Jews, in which he characterized Jesus as resolutely Jewish and linked him to the Jewish practices and beliefs of his time. Graetz also claimed that Jesus was not closely aligned with the dominant Jewish sects of the time but with the Essenes, a group characterized by Graetz as ascetic and apocalyptic. In this way, Graetz was able to explain the aspects of Jesus’ teaching that seem to run counter to normative Judaism. Geiger also emphasized the essential Jewishness of Jesus, but claimed that he was aligned with the Pharisees, one of the dominant sects of the time. He felt that contemporary Christianity had become disconnected from the faith of Jesus, who was a loyal Jew, not the founder of a new religion. Geiger wrote that Jesus “was a Jew, a Pharisean Jew with Galilean coloring—a man who joined in the hopes of his time and who believed that those hopes were fulfilled in him. He did not utter a new thought, nor did he break down the barriers of nationality….He did not abolish any part of Judaism; he

20

Hoffman, 34.

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was a Pharisee who walked in the way of Hillel….”21 Geiger used his analysis of the Gospels to demonstrate the essentially Pharasaic (and Jewish) origins of his ideas and to demonstrate that he had taught nothing new, but rather reformulated traditional Jewish teachings according to the needs of the time. These accounts of Jesus were an attempt to recast the image of Judaism presented by Christian theology, by retelling or reclaiming the Christian story.22 Like some of the pre-modern Jewish accounts of Jesus, the Wissenschaft scholars sought to characterize Jesus as normatively Jewish and contextualize him within his Second Temple Period milieu. In reclaiming Jesus for the Jews, these scholars hoped to rehabilitate Judaism in the eyes of the Christian world and establish its value as indispensable to the development of Christianity. But a side effect of their scholarship on the historical Jesus was to also rehabilitate him in the eyes of the Jews, establishing him as a viable subject for study and discussion in the Jewish community. The Wissenschaft scholars were interested in establishing the study of Judaism as a mainstream topic in Western European schools and universities, making it accessible to the wider European culture. To that end, they wrote largely in the vernacular, German, and saw their scholarship as aimed at, and part of, a European scholarly tradition. But the work of these germanophone scholars also opened the door to Jewish writing about Jesus in Jewish languages. The first comprehensive study of Jesus in a Jewish language was Joseph Klausner’s Hebrew Yeshu hanotsri: zemano, khayav, vetorato (Jesus of Nazareth:

21

Abraham Geiger, Judaism and its History (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985): 131.

22

Heschel, 19.

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His Life, Times, and Teaching), published in Jerusalem in 1922.23 Not only was Klausner an ardent Zionist dedicated to Jewish culture, he was also a devoted Hebraist, who felt that the revival of the Hebrew language as the primary language of modern Jewish culture was essential to the survival of the Jews as a people. Thus his work on Jesus, while made possible by the earlier work of the Wissenschaft scholars, also represented a departure in that it was not written in a European vernacular, but in a Jewish language, and was intended primarily for a Jewish audience. Herbert Danby, Klausner’s English translator, claimed that it was partially Klausner’s ability to write in Hebrew for a Jewish audience that allowed him to approach the topic at all: The Jewish nationalist historian, resident at last in Palestine, assured of the safety of his national life, feels himself free to scan the whole range of his nation’s life in Palestine, and he no longer thinks it a danger to look with open eyes at the persons and events which ushered in the Christian age. He can look upon them as specifically Jewish events….Or, from another point of view, the Jewish historian, seeking to display the national and cultural achievements of his people, is free to include in his gallery the person and life of Jesus of Nazareth (6). In turn, Klausner’s groundbreaking work opened the way for modern Jewish writers of poetry and prose to imagine Jesus in their languages of composition, both Hebrew and Yiddish, and marked the beginning of Jewish literary engagement with the figure of Jesus in the modern period. Klausner’s characterization of Jesus also provides an early example of the way that modern Jewish writers came to use the figure of Jesus as a way of exploring and constructing modern Jewish identity. First and foremost, this rests on his choice of 23

Klausner, Yeshu Hanotsri (Jesus of Nazareth) (Jerusalem: Shtibel, 1922). Parts of the book were published in the scholarly yearbook Heatid (The Future) as early as 1907, and continuing until 1914. The English translation of the book was published as Jesus of Nazareth: His Life, Times, and Teaching, trans. Herbert Danby (New York: Macmillan, 1925). All citations are from the 1989 edition and will appear in the text.

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language. In the preface, Klausner states his primary goal: “Above all things, the writer wished to provide in Hebrew for Hebrews a book which shall tell the history of the Founder of Christianity along the lines of modern criticism” (11).24 Klausner explicitly situates his book within a tradition of modern, which in this case might be read secular, criticism. He also openly declares his audience to be Jews, specifically Hebrew-speaking Jews, which, in 1922, were generally only committed Zionists.25 This situates the book within the context of cultural Zionism, to create a vibrant modern Jewish culture in the national language, Hebrew, in order to reconstitute the nation itself in modern cultural terms. Klausner’s conclusions about the character of Jesus and his teachings reflect this commitment to reviving Jewish national culture. Ultimately, he concludes, the aspect of Jesus’ teachings that was in opposition to Judaism, which caused Christianity to split from Judaism, was Jesus’ elevation of the spiritual and ethical elements of the religion to the exclusion of the civil and national aspects. As Klausner wrote in a chapter dedicated to the teachings of Jesus that disagree with the normative Judaism of his time, “he raised the nation out of its national confines: for is there not but one moral law for all nations alike?” (371) In other words, if Jesus’ ethics applies to all people equally, in the exact same way, what is left to distinguish Judaism? For Klausner, the moral leveling of Jesus’ teachings denied Jewish specificity and, therefore, the central importance of Jewish

24

With regard to the translation, it should be remembered first that the translator, Herbert Danby, was an Anglican priest, and second that since Hebrew has no capital letters, capitalization was at the discretion of the translator. 25

Indeed, in Danby’s “Translator’s Preface,” he includes a note indicating that Klausner actually hoped that the translation of the book into English might inspire English-speaking Jews to learn Modern Hebrew, making the translation of the book an actively Zionist project.

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nationhood. Klausner reinforced this notion in the final section of the book: “In the selfsame moment he both annulled Judaism as the life-force of the Jewish nation, and also the nation itself as a nation. For a religion which possesses only a certain conception of God and a morality acceptable to all mankind, does not belong to any special nation, and, consciously or unconsciously, breaks down the barriers of nationality” (391). While Jesus’ teachings, according to Klausner’s analysis, come straight from the Hebrew Bible and Talmud, and are thus normatively Jewish, it was his indifference to the Jewish people as a people, to Jewish specificity and perhaps superiority, that make his teachings anathema. In fact, Klausner even goes so far as to sketch an ideal type of Jesus, who, like a modern secularist, would say, “Instead of religion alone, I give you here science and art as national possessions independent of religion; instead of scripture commentaries— learning and poetry, likewise independent of religion; instead of ceremonial laws—grown so oppressive as to crush the warmer religious feelings—a practical and theoretical secular culture, national and humanistic” (373). The name of this Jesus, Klausner claims, would have “endured as a blessing among his nation” (373). This Jesus not only remains Jewish, thus erasing more than a millennium of Christianity and, by extension, Jewish oppression, but is also the kind of modernizer that Klausner and the other Jewish nationalists of his generation hoped to be. Klausner’s fantasy offers an alternate reality of the historical construction of Jewish identity, superimposing his ideas about the importance of secular Jewish culture to the survival of Judaism in the modern period onto the figure of Jesus. For Klausner, Jesus had the right idea, a new construction of Jewish identity, but went about it the wrong way. His book, like that of the many writers who 34

would come after him, was a way of rehabilitating Jesus in the service of an ideal of which Klausner felt Jesus himself should have, and could have, been the vanguard.

Borders of the Self: Modernity, Hybridity, and Identity Up to this point, I have been discussing the idea of “Jewish identity” with regard to the body of Jewish literature about Jesus, but what, exactly, does this category encompass, and how could literature have been such an integral part of its construction? The term “Jewish identity” tends to be one of those concepts that contemporary scholars in the field of Jewish Studies use frequently with the assumption that it has an agreedupon or commonly understood definition, but it is rarely defined. Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin have written, “Jewishness disrupts the very categories of identity because it is not national, not genealogical, not religious, but all of these in dialectical tension with one another.”26 It is precisely this quality that makes “Jewish identity” so difficult to define. At the same time, this elusiveness and resistance to definition was an invitation to writers and thinkers of all ideological and political stripes to put their own stamp on the idea of Jewish identity, and to attempt to quantify the unquantifiable. Identity itself is a slippery idea, one whose integrity has been called into question by contemporary thinkers critical of the notion of the “self-sustaining subject at the centre of post-Cartesian western metaphysics.”27 Instead, identity can be better understood as a process, a construction based in the collective conception of common origin, ideals, or 26

Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity,” 721.

27

Stuart Hall, “Introduction: Who Needs Identity?” Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London: Sage Publications, 1996): 1.

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characteristics of a particular group. Rather than a stable category, identity is a dynamic quality, actively constructed. A key element in the process of constructing identity is the construction of boundaries, the classification of “inside” and “outside,” of self and other. This negative definition of identity “entails the radically disturbing recognition that it is only through the relation to the Other, the relation to what it is not, to precisely what it lacks, to what has been called its constitutive outside that the ‘positive’ meaning of any term—and thus its ‘identity’—can be constructed.”28 The centrality of identity’s relationship to its other is part of what made Jesus such a compelling figure in the construction of Jewish identity. Historically, no internal definition of Jewish “identity” was required, because the idea of identity itself did not exist. While Jewish identity or Jewishness may have been defined externally, by non-Jews, in a variety of ways throughout history, until the modern period there was little need or desire for an internal Jewish self-definition. This was because Judaism, in a religious sense, defined both the Jewish individual and the community. The commandments were the boundaries of religious Judaism and thus also of any conception of Jewishness. It would be an oversimplification to claim that premodern Jewish culture was solely religious, yet it was “grounded in a social and cultural polysystem exclusive to the Jews—under the aegis of their religion—and encompassing all areas of life.”29 The definition and limits of Jewish identity were prescribed by the particular demands and responsibilities of Jewish religious life.

28

Hall, 4-5.

29

Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993): 33.

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It was only after the haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, that religious practice came to be seen as separate from a conception of Jews as a national, and later an ethnic, group. A new, “Jewish Secular Polysystem” arose, predicated on “the idea of an ethnic or national cultural autonomy, based on language rather than on territorial power.”30 This polysystem complicated the unitary understanding of Judaism that had persisted for millennia, creating an urgent need to define and conceptualize post-religious, and even areligious, Jewish identity. Benedict Anderson has described this process generally, noting of European history that as religious belief ebbed and the idea of salvation became obsolete, a new kind of continuity became necessary, and the idea of nationality was particularly suited to this role.31 Since biblical times, when the Jews were known as am yisrael, the people of Israel, Judaism has always contained both a religious and a national component, inseparable from each other until the modern period. “[T]he way of life of halakhic Judaism vouchsafed to Jewry an unambiguously distinct ethnic, indeed national, identity.”32 Before the political emancipation of European Jewry, The national significance of an individual’s membership in the Jewish people was enveloped within the religious-communal significance of membership and was not recognized as an independent factor. This situation changed dramatically when individual Jews and, following them, groups of Jews, rejected the authority

30

Harshav, Language, 34.

31

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983): 19. Note here the distinction between nationality, which stems from the conception of Jews as a nation and is the idea at work in the development of modern secular Jewish identity, and nationalism, which was not really an aspect of that process until the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 (and possibly the period immediately preceding its establishment). In other words, nationality is deterritorialized, whereas nationalism is territorialized. 32

Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995): 156.

37

of halakhah while still insisting that they were members of the Jewish people. This is the problem of “Jewish identity.”33 Since Judaism had historically conceived of itself as both a religion and a people, it was natural for modern Jewish thinkers to begin to conceptualize a Jewish identity based in this national idea. However, modern conceptions of Jewish identity, unlike the clear definition offered by traditional religious Judaism, was and is complicated, shifting, and never agreed upon. Zygmunt Bauman has noted that one of the impossible tasks of modernity has been to create order, to “struggle against ambivalence,” a struggle which is ongoing because “it creates its own problems in the course of resolving them.”34 This ambivalence and the struggle against it is reflected in the project of defining modern Jewish identity. The model of “struggle against ambivalence” accurately reflects the unstable nature of modern Jewish identity and the attempt to bound a constantly shifting category. Primarily, the inherent failure of this struggle against ambivalence is evidenced by the sheer number of ideologies that arose in an attempt to define the aspirations and goals of modern secular Jews. Socialism, territorial Zionism, autonomism, non-territorial Zionism, cultural Zionism, among others, were all ways of imagining Jews as a collective, as a political or cultural community, and thus concretizing a legitimate Jewish secular

33

Menachem Brinker, “Zionist Freedom,” The Jewish Political Tradition, vol. 2: Membership, eds. Michael Walzer, Menachem Lorberbaum, Noam J. Zohar, and Ari Ackerman (New Haven: Yale UP, 2003): 412. 34

Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1991): 3.

38

identity.35 Each of these movements was also intimately linked to language as a means of identity formation: in general, Yiddish became the language of the Eastern European socialists and others committed to creating a viable Jewish community and identity in the diaspora; Hebrew became the language of the Zionists and others trying to create a unique, politically sovereign homeland for the Jews; many autonomists, who advocated self-governing communities of Jews within the nations of the diaspora, saw the vernacular languages of Europe as Jewish languages as well. As Charles Taylor has noted, “We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.”36 For Jews in the modern period, thinking, writing, and speaking in Hebrew or Yiddish was central to their self-definition and identification. Thus, the construction of Jewish secular identity was inseparably connected to language. Because language became such an important marker of a distinct Jewish identity the creation of literature in Jewish languages also became important to the construction of that identity. With regard to European nationalisms, Anderson notes that newspapers “created an imagined community among a specific assemblage of fellow-readers,” reading in a common language about events and ideas which belonged to their particular linguistic community.37 Indeed, toward the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, a host of periodicals in Hebrew and Yiddish proliferated in 35

For a fairly exhaustive list of the various Jewish political ideologies and parties, see Harshav, Language, 30. 36

Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” Multiculturalism and the ‘Politics of Recognition’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992): 32. 37

Anderson, 62.

39

European Jewish communities: in Hebrew, for example, there was Hamagid, published in Berlin, Krakow, and Vienna from 1856-1903; Hamelitz, published in Odessa from 18601904; and Hatzefirah, published intermittently in Warsaw and Berlin from 1862-1931; in Yiddish, there were, among others, Kol mevaser, the Yiddish supplement to Hamelitz, published in Odessa from 1862-1873; Der yud, published in Krakow from 1899-1902; and Der fraynd, published in St. Petersburg and Warsaw from 1903-1913. Not only did this create and solidify language-based communal identity, but gave rise to a kind of “contemporaneous community” through the experience of sharing the latest Hebrew story or Yiddish serialized novel with others in the group.38 In many communities, even the periodical itself would be shared, circulated around an entire small neighborhood or village. But this construction of identity was far from passive; beginning with the haskalah, many writers were consciously trying to construct and shape modern Jewish secular identity through didactic literature in Yiddish and Hebrew. Language and literature were strongly implicated in the ideological and political projects of identity construction consciously undertaken by the various groups of Jewish modernizers. Eric Zakim has written about the role of literature in the promotion of territorial Zionism: The origin of a deterritorialized Zionism in eastern Europe during the nineteenth century self-consciously constructed itself on the basis of a culture of writing that worked to invent national expression as it simultaneously formed the national subject. But beyond the historical necessity of writing as national invention, literature offered the type of reflexive discursive opportunity that would

38

Anderson, 132. Anderson here refers specifically to the experience of singing songs, such as a national anthem.

40

accommodate the problems of a deterritorialized nation searching for environmental appropriateness and belonging.39 Similarly, other movements used literature not just in order to promote ideas but in order to actively construct the type of modern Jewish identity they deemed correct, necessary, or natural to the continued viability of Judaism, Jewishness, or the nation. At the same time, the creation of a specifically Jewish literature itself represented an attempt to create secular Jewish culture that could become the basis for a modern Jewish tradition. Traditional Judaism revolved around the Bible and Talmud, ancient texts that were read and re-read, interpreted and discussed. These texts had historically formed the basis of Jewish culture. The modern, secular Jewish intelligentsia hoped to create a body of texts that could be the secular counterpart to the Bible and Talmud, the basis of a vibrant modern Jewish culture not wholly beholden to the religious dictates of its history. At the same time, modern Jewish writers hoped to create a body of literature that would be seen as the equal of European literatures, thereby justifying modern Jewish culture as legitimate within the Western tradition. In doing so, Hebrew and Yiddish writers all aimed to construct a modern, secular Jewish identity that would earn Jews a place within the traditions of Western culture while maintaining Jewish specificity. However, that identity remained plural and resistant to any singular definition. Indeed, some Jewish writers, the very ones who by their production of Hebrew or Yiddish literature sought to shape modern Jewish identity, saw that identity as necessarily hybrid. In 1910, it was suggested by the Hebrew writer Yosef Haim Brenner that one need not continue to be Jewish, in a religious sense, in order to be Jewish in a cultural 39

Eric Zakim, To Build and Be Built: Landscape, Literature, and the Construction of Zionist Identity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006): 3.

41

sense. In an article entitled “Baitonut uvasifrut” (In Journalism and in Literature), written under the pen name Yosef Haver, he wrote that in the modern world it was possible to appreciate and accept the moral, literary, and cultural contributions of Christianity without endangering either an individual’s commitment to the Jewish people or the Jewish community as a whole.40 Brenner wrote that modern, secular, freethinking Jews like himself “have nothing to do with Judaism, and we are nonetheless part of the Jewish community (klal) no less than those who lay tefillin and wear tzitzit.”41 This sparked a furious debate both about the nature of modern Jewishness and about the proper relationship of the Jewish community to Christianity. According to Menachem Brinker, “Brenner dismissed the debates about how to draw a line between Jewish and non-Jewish worldviews as empty casuistry. In his opinion, there never were in the past clear and distinct dividing lines, whether theological or philosophical, between Judaism and nonJudaism. And the attempt to draw such lines in a secular epoch made no sense.”42 The Brenner affair revealed the extent to which Jewish identity in the modern period was and is a contested category. In addition, both the Brenner Affair and a similar debate at 40

For the story of the “Brenner Affair,” as it came to be called, as well as a reprint of the original article and other primary source material related to it, see Nurit Govrin, “Meora brenner”: hamaavak al hofesh habitui (The Brenner Affair: The Battle Over Free Expression) (Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi, 1985). For an English summary, see Hoffman, 90-112. The case of Brother Daniel, a Carmelite priest born a Jew in Poland who sought Israeli citizenship based on the Israeli Law of Return, caused a contemporary reconsideration of some of these issues on the part of the Israeli Supreme Court. For an excerpt from the court’s decision and a commentary, see The Jewish Political Tradition, vol. 2, 424-440. Another aspect of the continuing struggle to define Jewish identity is illustrated by the assertion of the Israeli Rabbinate that certain conversions to Judaism are invalid; this issue has caused equal controversy and raised similar questions about Jewish identity and belonging. See Gershom Gorenberg, “How Do You Prove You’re a Jew?” New York Times Magazine, March 2, 2008. 41

Yosef Haver [Yosef Haim Brenner], “Baitonut uvasifrut” (In Journalism and in Literature), Meora brenner, 139. 42

Brinker, “Zionist Freedom,” 414.

42

around the same time in Yiddish, known as the “Crucifix Question,” raised new questions about the appropriateness of Jewish engagement with Christian culture.43 It is against this backdrop that a new literature about Jesus emerged in Jewish languages. This literature, like most Hebrew and Yiddish writing in the early twentieth century, was part of the larger project to create secular Jewish culture and, by extension, construct a modern Jewish identity. The figure of Jesus provided an ideal palette for these explorations of a Jewish identity that, as noted above, appeared increasingly fractious, complicated, and hybridized. Modern scholarship about Jesus had tended to use his image in the service of whatever theology or movement the writer chose. 44 Jewish writers, too, saw Jesus as a figure who could represent their quest for self and community in modernity. In addition, Jesus’ Jewishness and simultaneous status as a Christian icon attracted many Jewish writers who also struggled with maintaining their particularity as Jews while engaging with European culture. This attempt at a kind of cultural hybridity was one of the things that drew modern Jewish writers to the subject of Jesus. As noted above, one of the defining features of the Jewish characterization of Jesus even in the pre-modern period was his hybridity: his dual identity as both historical Jew and symbolic Christian. The hybrid nature inherent in the figure of Jesus may also have been one of the qualities that drew modern writers to it, since modernism itself was characterized by a concern with hybridity. Homi Bhabha locates the hybrid in what he calls “the ‘in-between’ spaces” which “provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood—singular or 43

For more on the Crucifix Question debates, see Hoffman, 61-90.

44

Hoffman, 13.

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communal—that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself.”45 It is in these “in-between” spaces that Jewish writers of the early twentieth century found themselves as they attempted to create a specifically Jewish culture and identity but also sought to be part of the larger European culture.46 The result was a particular kind of hybrid aesthetics and politics that Homi Bhabha has referred to as “contra-modernity.” The contra-moderns “deploy the cultural hybridity of their borderline conditions to ‘translate,’ and therefore reinscribe, the social imaginary of both metropolis and modernity.”47 Modern Jewish writers were attempting to inscribe Jewish culture onto the palimpsest of modern European culture, indeed to question the boundaries between the two, and by extension the notion of the border itself. Borders, as Daniel Boyarin has noted, are places where identities are performed and contested: Borders…are also places where people are strip-searched, detained, imprisoned, and sometimes shot. Borders themselves are not given but constructed by power to mask hybridity, to occlude and disown it. The localization of hybridity in some others, called the hybrids or the heretics, serves that purpose.48

45

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994): 1-2.

46

An excellent example of this aspiration to create a specifically Jewish culture that was also part of the Western humanist tradition was Joseph Klausner’s Yahadut veenoshiut (Judaism and Humanism) (Warsaw: Toshiya, 1910). As his nephew Amos Oz recalls, this was also Klausner’s personal motto, and there was an engraved brass plate above the door to his house in Jerusalem that read “Judaism and Humanism” above Klausner’s name and title. See Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness, trans. Nicholas de Lange (New York: Harcourt, 2004): 45. 47

Bhabha, 6.

48

Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines, 15.

44

The metaphor of the border is a particularly potent one in the period after World War I in Europe, the period in which most of the literature we are considering was written: the accepted borders of empire had just collapsed and been reconfigured into the new borders of the modern nation-state. Along with the new states came nationalism: an ideology that translated those external geographical borders into internal cultural ones primarily based on linguistic and ethnic affiliation. In the midst of these new conditions were the Jews: nationless, they were scattered across the new national borders. As noted above, the concept of nationhood is built into the very fabric of Judaism: Jews were not only joined by religious, cultural, and social practices, but also by their status as am yisrael—the people of Israel. Thus, Judaism itself always contained its own internal boundaries of belonging, identity, and selfhood. This hybrid condition—belonging to the minor culture, excluded from the major nation—creates an “in-between” space of culture. According to the model of minor literature developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, minor literature is that which a minority constructs within a major language in order to critique the language, culture, and power of the majority.49 But this model is insufficient to understand the work of Jewish writers writing in their own, minor languages, which represented both a challenge to and an attempt to integrate themselves into Western culture. Rather, in attempting to negotiate this “in-between” space, the gap between minor and major, Jewish writers articulated an “intentional hybridity” that, as Robert Young describes the concept, appropriates elements of the dominant culture and makes them 49

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 30 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986): 16.

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minor through translation, subversion, and transformation. This hybridization, the space in-between, calls into question the authenticity of the borders that separate, divide, and classify. In pointing to the deficiencies of Deleuze and Guattari’s model, Chana Kronfeld has argued that “Hebrew modernism call[s] into question the simple opposition of minor and major literature, and expose[s] the fuzziness of the distinction between a deterritorialized and a reterritorialized language.”50 In other words, the very distinctions between major and minor are themselves unclear, suggesting the inherent hybridity of minor literatures. Hebrew and Yiddish writing about Jesus further calls into question the opposition between minor and major, not always in linguistic and stylistic terms, but in cultural and historical terms. Indeed, the Jewish tradition itself incorporates the idea of hybridity, calling into question the rigid boundaries between self and other. Benjamin Harshav has noted about the semiotics of Talmudic discourse that “[t]he ‘other’ was not just an enemy, he was an opposite alternative included in your self-definition and riding the same wave of change.”51 Jewish tradition did not insist on the distinction between the alien other and the familiar self, but blurred the boundaries between the two. The conception of the other as an aspect of self calls into question the very idea of the fixed and identifiable border and establishes hybridity as a particularly Jewish value. Or, as Young puts it, “Hybridity thus makes difference into sameness, and sameness into difference, but in a way that

50

Chana Kronfeld, On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996): 13. 51

Harshav, 16.

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makes the same no longer the same, the different no longer simply different.”52 This acceptance of the hybridity of culture would have been part of the world-view of most modern Jewish writers, many of whom were steeped in Jewish tradition. And Jesus, as a culturally hybrid figure himself, was therefore a particularly attractive, and possibly familiar, figure for modern Jewish writers seeking to define and shape modern Jewish identity. In the next chapter, we will turn to some of the earliest works by modern Jewish writers about Jesus, to see the variety of ways in which Jesus could be drawn upon by Jewish writers to critique and reformulate conceptions of Jewish identity, particularly in its relationship to Western culture and Christianity. Beginning in the very early twentieth century, a number of writers, mainly in the United States and mostly in Yiddish, began to publish short stories, poems, and plays in which Jesus figured prominently as character or symbol. These works provide the first glimpse into the Jewish writer’s engagement with the figure of Jesus and its importance to the construction of a modern, Jewish identity.

52

Young, 26.

47

Chapter 2 Jesus and the Varieties of Jewish Identity

In 1907, Joseph Klausner began to publish his Hebrew-language scholarly work on Jesus in the journal HeAtid (The Future). As we saw in the last chapter, this was one of the earliest attempts by a Jewish writer to use the figure of Jesus to advance a modern notion of Jewish identity. At nearly the same time that Klausner began publication of his Hebrew work in Europe, Yiddish writers, primarily in America, also began to turn to Jesus in their quest to explore modern Jewish identity, particularly in relationship to Western culture and Christianity. Just two years after Klausner began publication of Yeshu hanotsri (Jesus of Nazareth), Sholem Asch published a story titled “In a karnaval nakht” (On Carnival Night) in the New York Yiddish periodical Dos naye lebn (The New Life).1 The story, written soon after Asch’s first trip to Palestine in 1906, was his first attempt at a fictional characterization of Jesus, and one of the first published by any Jewish writer in a Jewish language. “In a karnaval nakht” is set in medieval Rome and has four distinct parts: in the first, young Jewish women are forced to weave the tapestries that will hang during the Christian carnival procession, at which the elder Jews of the community will be publicly humiliated. In the second part, on the night before the carnival, Jesus, mysteriously re1

The Yiddish version is reprinted in Sholem Asch, Fun shtetl tsu dergroyser velt (From the Shtetl to the Greater World), Musterverk fun der yidisher literature, vol. 51 (Buenos Aires: Literatur-gezelshaft baym yivo in argentina, 1972): 216-228. All citations are from this Yiddish text. An English translation, which omits the fourth part, is available as “The Carnival Legend” in Asch, Children of Abraham, trans. Maurice Samuel (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1971): 86-93.

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animated, descends from his cross in St. Peter’s basilica and visits the Messiah, who, according to legend, sits chained at the gates of Rome. There Jesus delivers an impassioned speech decrying Christian misinterpretation of his doctrine of peace and love that has made Christianity into the persecutor of the Jews. He declares his solidarity with the Jews and begs forgiveness from the Messiah. In part three, the elder Jews of the community are forced to run, almost naked, along the Corso, while being beaten and flogged in a public spectacle. During the running, the people notice that Jesus is among the Jews being humiliated and many of them either flee or kneel out of respect. Jesus raises the cross over his head and goes among the people. In the fourth and final part of the story, the biblical matriarch Rachel and Mary, mother of Jesus, sew shrouds for Jewish martyrs out of fragments of Torah scrolls, prayer shawls, and ark curtains. The Jesus of the story is unabashedly an apologia: a sympathetic character who identifies as Jewish and doesn’t understand or support the Christian vilification and persecution of the Jews around which the story revolves. Jesus is both externally identified as Jewish and self-identifies as such. When Jesus descends from his cross in St. Peter’s, in the second section of the story, he is carefully described as “the Jew from the city of Nazareth, which is in the Galilee,” identifying him by his origins, in Israel and in Judaism.2 He is repeatedly referred to by the epithet “the Jew of Nazareth,” a slight emendation of the traditional epithet “Jesus of Nazareth.” The narrator also carefully explains that although Jesus is a Jew, and should not be outside the ghetto walls after nightfall, “he had no yellow stain (flek) on his back, the sign of his brothers, and the

2

Asch, 221.

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watchmen of the city did not stop him.”3 Again, from this description it is clear that he belongs to the Jewish people, characterized as his brothers. After descending from the cross, Jesus comes to the gates of the city where the Messiah, according to legend, waits for his calling. The very presence of the Messiah and Jesus side by side serves to underscore Jesus’ inherent humanity, as well as his Jewishness: he is simply another of the Jews of the city awaiting the coming of the Messiah. Here he decries the misinterpretation of his teachings by Christians, whom he calls “strangers”: “My word of peace they have turned into war, my word of forgiveness they have turned into vengeance….See, they utter words in my name that I did not speak. They have not comforted the grieving. They have not wiped away the tears of the sorrowful.”4 His lengthy speech to the silent Messiah distinguishes the Jewish teachings of the historical Jesus from the later, inaccurate glosses of Christianity. Jesus, until now identified as Jewish only by the narrator, repeatedly identifies himself as Jewish, calling the Jews “my people” and “my brothers and sisters,” and asking the Messiah, “Was I not always found in our prayer houses? Did I not stand in the courtyards and spread my word among you and for you?”5 But perhaps the most striking illustration of Jesus’ Jewishness comes at the end of the third section of the story, when the Jews are being publicly humiliated as part of the carnival festivities. As the procession passes the spectators, they suddenly realize that “he, the Man-God, was

3

Asch, 221.

4

Asch, 222-3.

5

Asch, 222. Emphasis added.

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among the runners. They had whipped their God. They had chased their God.”6 This image plays on Jesus’ role as the embodiment of human suffering, a role ascribed to him by Christianity, and translates it into a Jewish context. Here Jesus assumes the suffering not of devout Christians, but of the Jews, simply by identifying himself with them and participating in the spectacle of their humiliation. This transposition redeems Jesus for the Jews by linking him to the historical suffering and martyrdom of the Jews at the hands of Christians—not as persecutor, but as victim. In the same issue of Dos naye lebn, the Yiddish writer L. Shapiro published his story “Der tseylem” (The Cross).7 This story, too, contained christological themes, and considered the question of Jewish martyrdom and suffering in relationship to Christianity and Christian symbols. “The Cross” begins with a frame story, of two Russian Jews traveling together across the United States; one of the men has an old scar in the shape of a cross on his forehead. The tale he tells about his past and the scar itself forms the body of the story. He was a medical student and a political radical in a southern Russian city, and it is clear from the historical context that he is talking about the period before the first Russian Revolution, in 1905. A pogrom breaks out in the city, and the student’s apartment, where he lives with his mother, is attacked. The student is overpowered by the attackers and tied to the foot of his bed while the pogromists proceed to rape and

6

Asch, 225.

7

L. Shapiro, “Der tseylem” (The Cross), Di yudishe melukhe un andere zakhen (The Jewish Kingdom and Other Things) (New York: Idish leben, 1929): 139-161. An English translation of the story can be found in L. Shapiro, The Jewish Government and Other Stories, trans. Curt Leviant (New York: Twayne, 1971): 114-130.

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attempt to kill his mother, who calls out, before she loses speech, “Oh, my son.”8 The pogromists then carve the sign of the cross into the student’s forehead, according to the peasant who does it, “to save his Yid soul from Hell.”9 Now the student, like Jesus, must perpetually carry the cross of suffering with him. And although it is the mother in the story who is martyred, her pointed reference to her son on her deathbed underscores the comparison with Jesus as the suffering servant, the son of God. Once the student regains consciousness and unties himself, he discovers that his mother is still, although barely, alive. His first act is to kill her—mercifully, it seems, since she is barely living. Next he goes out into the streets and finds himself variously fighting on both sides of the pogrom, barely aware of what he is doing. Then he goes to the home of a young woman who is part of his revolutionary circle, whom he had earlier described as a love interest. He tells her what happened to him, and then attacks her, repeating in reverse the pogrom scene with his mother: now he is the rapist and killer. Yet this act of violence liberates him somehow, and he feels that his mother’s soul has been put to rest. The phrase he uses to describe this feeling—gefunen a tikun; literally, “found redress”—implies, even, that his parallel crime has avenged her death. Here violence, rather than forgiveness or suffering, has a redemptive function. Before leaving the scene of his crime, the student considers cutting out the skin on his forehead in order to erase the cross, but chooses to leave it, quoting the commandment that is the source for laying tefillin on the forehead: “As frontlets between

8

Shapiro, 151.

9

Shapiro, 151.

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your eyes.”10 This links the cross carved into his head to Jewish ritual practice. This connection suggests that the symbol of the cross can serve as a kind of secular replacement for a religious ritual that means little or nothing to a modern Jew. Like tefillin, and the Shema which is on the scroll inside them, the cross can serve as a reminder of the bearer’s Jewishness and of its implications in a violent, anti-Semitic world. The suffering of Jesus as symbolized by the cross becomes a sign of Jewish suffering at the hands of Christians. Immediately afterward, the student leaves for America, where he wanders around like “a newborn child,” readying himself to properly return to civilization.11 Like Asch’s story, in “Der tseylem” the suffering of Jesus, here symbolized by the cross carved into the narrator’s forehead, is linked not to Christians, but to Jews. Again it is suggested that the true suffering servants are the Jews, and that Jesus and the cross properly belong to them. However, unlike Asch’s story, in which the perceived violence of Christianity is decried and declaimed by Jesus, here violence is reclaimed by the martyr-figure of the narrator. His acts of violence after being marked with the symbol of suffering serve to liberate and redeem him from what he has suffered. The story suggests that violence, Jewish violence, is the only appropriate response to Christian violence and persecution of the Jews. The publication of these two stories touched off a furious debate in the pages of Dos naye lebn. This debate, called Di tseylem frage (The Crucifix Question) after the 10

Shapiro, 160. The citation is from a section of Deuteronomy traditionally included in the scrolls within tefillin. The whole verse reads, “Bind them as a sign on your hand and let them serve as frontlets between your eyes” (Deuteronomy 6:8). 11

Shapiro, 161.

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title of one of the articles that began it, had nothing to do with the writers or the stories themselves but “consisted of a reassessment of the position of enlightened secular Jews toward Jesus and the entire Christian world, as well as the place of Jewish culture in the context of modern Western civilization.”12 In this sense, these two stories were the first in a long line of literary explorations of modern Jewish identity through representations of Jesus.

David Pinski: The Anti-nationalist Jesus Around the same time that Asch and Shapiro’s stories were being discussed in the pages of Dos naye lebn, the controversial Yiddish playwright David Pinski also took up both messianic and christological themes in his work. Pinski had immigrated to the U.S. from Russia in 1899 and wrote the majority of his plays while living in New York. He was known for his open treatment of sexual subjects, most notably in his 1906 play Yankel der shmid (Yankel the Smith).13 But Pinski also frequently addressed the topic of Jewish messianism, and several of the plays he wrote before World War I concern themselves with messianic subjects.14 Pinski’s interest in the subject of messianism is indicated by the title of one collection of his plays, Meshikhim (Messiahs), published in Warsaw in 1935. In addition to his short play Der eybiker yid (The Eternal Jew), the collection contains plays about historical figures like Shlomo Molcho and Sabbatai Tzvi, 12

Hoffman, 61-2.

13

David Pinski, “Yankl der shmid” (Yankel the Smith), Dramen, vol. 4 (New York: Poalei tsiyon, 1919): 7-122. 14

The connection between messianism and christological themes in Jewish writing will be explored more fully in Chapter 4.

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both considered false, self-declared messiahs, a status also accorded to Jesus by Jewish tradition. Der eybiker yid, written in 1906, is a short, one-act play based on a midrash on the books of Lamentations from Eicha Rabbah about the search for a boy born on the day of the destruction of the second Temple who is destined to become the messiah.15 The play takes place in the town of Birat Arba, an unspecified distance from Jerusalem, shortly after the destruction of the Temple. A stranger appears in the town seeking a child named Menachem born to a man named Hezekiah on the day the Temple was destroyed. He tells a story of having been visited by what he claims was a vision of an old man who told him that the Temple was destroyed but a child born on the same day would become the redeemer of the Jews. As atonement for having remained to tend his land while all the other men in the area have left to fight the Romans, he is charged by God with finding the boy who will become the messiah. The people of the town, having not yet heard the news of the Temple’s destruction, label him a false prophet and sentence him to stoning if his story is not proven. One of the town elders even refers to the prevalence of such false prophets during this period when he tells the stranger, “You are one of those who now infest our land.”16 The people’s resistance to the stranger’s tale indicates the atmosphere of messianic claims and hopes during the period just prior to the second Temple’s destruction. Eventually, the stranger’s story of the Temple’s destruction is confirmed by messengers, and the stranger himself finds the mother of Menachem, the promised 15

Eicha Rabbah 1:51.

16

David Pinski, “Der eybiker yid” (The Eternal Jew), Meshikhim: dramen (Messiahs: Plays) (Warsaw: Broza, 1935): 22.

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messiah. However, at the very end of the play the child’s nurse enters and tells a terrible story: she has lost Menachem. She was outside with the boy when a storm seemed to come up, and as she picked him up she felt him ripped from her arms as if by wind; when she opened her eyes, the sun was shining and there was no sign of the boy. Finally, the stranger vows to search the world for Menachem, the potential messiah, as punishment for not having gone to defend his people in the uprising against the Romans. Here the issue of messianism and its relationship to nationalism are central. The stranger is charged with seeking and serving the lost messiah as a punishment for insufficient communal or national feeling. When the uprising against the Romans breaks out, he decides to stay behind and tend his land rather than fight. The implication is that because he has abdicated his responsibilities to the nation, in their defeat it is his job to seek and find the redeemer who might reverse the fortunes of his people. Nonetheless, his message is greeted with extreme skepticism and it is only when he can prove his story of divine visitation that he is spared death. Pinski revisited the messianic theme in his 1911 play Der shtumer meshiakh (The Silent Messiah), which revisits the relationship between messianism and Jewish nationalism. The play is set in the year 1306, in the midst of a massive expulsion from the fictional land of Illyria, which Pinski, in his notes, claims to have modeled on the expulsion of the Jews from France in the same year. The expelled Jews of the play are led by Reb Menachem Penini and his daughter Rachel, who convince the skeptical exiles to travel to the land of Israel rather than resettle themselves in another European country. Penini has had his tongue cut out for inveighing against the king’s edict, and it is Rachel who serves as his interpreter and mouthpiece. In the second act of the play, as the 56

group of exiled Illyrian Jews wait near the sea for a ship that will take them to the land of Israel, Rachel reveals to her beloved, Hillel, that her father is the messiah: “He who comes and calls the Jews out of exile, and leads them out also, he is Messiah, he is the redeemer.”17 While this seems to leave open the possibility that Penini is not a divine messenger, but only one of many possible human redeemers who can lead the Jews to the land of Israel, she also claims that her father had a vision while imprisoned in which he heard a voice telling him, “You will not die. You will get out of here and lead the Jews out of exile!”18 Thus, it is not clear whether Penini is the historical messiah of Jewish tradition (no mention is made of his descent, which according to tradition should be Davidic) or simply one who believes that redemption for the Jews can come even from earthly leadership. The central conflict in the play arises when the king of Illyria dies unexpectedly and his son decides to rescind the expulsion order and invite the Jews back. The exiles are divided, although most favor returning to the home they know rather than continuing toward the unknown. Penini, through Rachel, exhorts the group to continue on to the land of Israel, arguing that it is a true homeland for them and that they will always remain strangers in Illyria. Indeed, when the king’s representative comes to announce that the king has invited the exiled Jews back, Penini insults him, and the rest of the group fears that he has brought down the wrath of the new king on them. The group wants to know whether he is the messiah, and demands that he perform a miracle to prove it. Immediately, the mute Leah, mother of Hillel, who has been silent since the day of the 17

David Pinski, “Der shtumer meshiakh” (The Silent Messiah), Dramen, vol. 3, 82.

18

Pinski, “Der shtumer meshiakh,” 83.

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expulsion, begins to yell, “He is the messiah!”19 The crowd is stunned, but only momentarily, for it immediately becomes clear that Leah is mad. She runs around to everyone yelling that each is the messiah and laughing maniacally. Penini, distraught, leaps into the sea. In Der shtumer meshiakh, the connection between messianism and nationalism is explicit: the messiah is the one who will make the Jewish people whole again by restoring them to their national homeland. However, this play also suggests that the messiah may not necessarily be a divine messenger, but simply a strong leader who can unite his people and lead them to the land of Israel. The ending mocks the people’s need for a miracle in order to prove that Penini is the messiah. As Rachel herself told Hillel, the messiah can be anyone who brings the Jews back to Israel. The argument for an earthly messiah is a rebuke to the notion of the divinity of Jesus, who appears peripherally in Pinski’s 1911 play Miriam fun migdala (Miriam of Migdal, or Mary Magdalene). Unlike the potential or potentially false messiahs of the other plays, the Jesus of Miriam is not portrayed as a nationalist or as connected to nationalism. That role is accorded to the Zealots, a group of anti-Roman Jewish nationalists. Rather, Jesus, who never appears as a character in the play, is linked to domestic concerns, and in particular sexual ethics and moral integrity. This play, like Der eybiker yid, is set during the Second Temple Period, and the tumult and politics of the time are crucial to its plot. Miriam, however, is the central character, and the play turns on her journey from unrepentant prostitute, open worshipper of Venus, to a repentant, modest woman who believes only in God. Jesus, of course, is 19

Pinski, “Der shtumer meshiakh,” 108.

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the vehicle for her transformation, and that transformation comes about only because of his unusual reaction to Miriam’s sexual charms. At the beginning of the play Miriam has been dragged off by a mob to be publicly stoned as punishment for prostitution. When she returns unharmed, she tells her client Eliezer, a leader of the Zealots, and the two other prostitutes she works with that she subdued the mob with the potency of her sexuality and, unable to carry out the sentence against her, they brought her before the “new prophet” for judgment. Instead of passing judgment on her, he utters his famous aphorism about guilt and hypocrisy: “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”20 When he looks at her, Miriam expects him, like the others, to be overcome with desire and do her bidding, but instead “he settled his eyes on me, with strange glances, not of this world,” and causes her, for the first time, to feel shame.21 The play uses this event to comment on hypocrisy and Jewish sexual ethics. The foil to Jesus in the play is the Zealot Amram, through which the hypocrisy of the ostensibly moral Zealots is revealed. After Miriam returns from her encounter with Jesus, the group of Zealots discover Miriam and Eliezer’s relationship and call for her stoning. Miriam goes to Amram and begs him to save her from her sinful life. In a parody of the Gospels, Miriam convinces Amram to let her wash his feet in order to prove her sincerity, but really intends to seduce him and prove his own hypocrisy

20

The quote, related through Miriam to her colleagues in the play, comes from John 8:7.

21

David Pinski, “Miriam fun migdala” (Miriam of Migdala), Dramen, vol. 5, 146.

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instead.22 As he becomes unable to hide his desire, she laughs wildly and says, “Neither your spirit, turned to God, nor your nose, which sensed in me the odor of wickedness, have helped you from the fire (of lust). I am the victor!”23 She vows to conquer Jesus similarly. It is clear that Miriam is not only unrepentant about her profession but revels in the power her sexuality gives her over men, and powerful men in particular. This power derives partly from her ability to arouse sexual desire in those who profess to eschew it, such as Amram the Zealot. As a result, she sees the potential seduction of Jesus as an ultimate coup, a way to prove the inherent immorality and hypocrisy of supposedly moral men. In the final act of the play, a group of clients come to visit Miriam to celebrate her release, but her colleague tells them that she has gone to see the “new prophet.” The reader knows that she has gone to Jesus with the intention of seducing him and confirming her notions of male hypocrisy. But when Miriam returns from her meeting with Jesus, it is she who has been conquered: she explains that Jesus has forgiven her sins and she intends to give up prostitution. Instead of finding lust in him and proving his hypocrisy, Miriam found that Jesus actually lived according to his moral principles. She describes how, in an inversion of the foot-washing scene with Amram, she cried at Jesus’ feet, washing them with her tears, and “felt that with them I washed away the old Miriam, and another, free from sin and guilt, took her place.”24 It is Jesus’ freedom from

22

The process of foot-washing appears twice in the Gospel of John: first, the clearest model for this scene, when Mary the sister of Martha anoints Jesus’ feet and washes them with her hair (John 12:3); and second, when Jesus washes his disciples’ feet as a gesture of humility and love (John 13: 3-12). 23

Pinski, “Miriam,” 182-3.

24

Pinski, “Miriam,” 200.

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inappropriate sexual feelings that converts Miriam both to an ostensibly moral way of life and to monotheistic belief. In contrast to Pinski’s messianic plays, Miriam describes a personal redemption that is not linked to nationalism. Pinski’s implication in his earlier plays that nationalism is a necessary component of messianism suggests that the Jesus of Miriam is not the messiah, and implicitly critiques his focus on morality as insufficiently nationalist. It is not clear that Miriam’s “conversion” is even desirable, since it turns her confident and satisfied character into a shamed, cowed woman. In contrast to the Zealots, who may be moral hypocrites but fight for their people, Jesus is shown to be concerned largely with domestic matters of little import. When read against Pinski’s other messianic plays, the character of Jesus in Miriam fun migdala appears to be irrelevant and possibly harmful to the nationalist drive of the Jewish people.

Jesus and Yiddish Modernism The teens and twenties of the twentieth century saw the emergence of the first self-consciously modernist Yiddish poetry, both in Europe and in America. Yiddish writers, primarily poets, came together in groups defined by their commitment to revolutionizing Yiddish, establishing it as a modern language suitable for the creation of the highest literary works, on par with the best literature of Europe. The manifesto of the inzikhistn, the group of introspectivist poets in New York, reads, “We look on Yiddish as a fully formed, mature, independent, distinct and individual language.”25 These writers,

25

Yankev Glatshteyn, A. Leyeles, and N. Minkov, “Introspektivizm,” In zikh: a zamlung introspective lider (Within: A Collection of Introspective Poems) (New York: N. Mayzel Farlag, 1920): 20-21.

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as well as their counterparts in Europe, were dedicated to a Yiddish modernist aesthetic. At the same time, they were highly conscious of the role of Yiddish as a Jewish language. They were trying to create modern literature that was simultaneously universal and particularist.26 Accordingly, Yiddish modernist poets were drawn both to apocalyptic and messianic imagery that accorded with their vision of radical change, as well as the symbols of the European culture they admired. The figure of Jesus, as a martyr, a messiah, and a symbol of Western Christian culture, was a strong draw for the Yiddish avant-garde.27 Some of the earliest Yiddish poets to use Jesus as a central figure in their work were members of a New York group called Di yunge (The Young Ones), which was a precursor to the avant-garde movements of the 1920s. Di yunge was concerned with the aesthetics of Yiddish poetry, and broke with earlier Yiddish poets in their rejection of exclusively political themes. In this sense, they were the predecessors of later avantgarde modernist groups like the Inzikhistn (Introspectivists) and Di khalyastre (The Gang). H. Leivick, one of the poets of Di yunge, published two major poems about Jesus. The first, “Yezus,” published in 1915, is a short poem that evokes a suffering, neglected Jesus. The setting of the poem is unspecified, but seems to be institutional and impoverished, a place where people lie sleeping “covered to their necks in gray” and 26

A. Tilo Alt has pointed out the ways in which this ongoing commitment to the particularly Jewish nature of Yiddish at times undermined the Yiddish modernists’ aesthetic commitments. See A. Tilo Alt, “Ambivalence Toward Modernism: The Yiddish Avant-Garde and its Manifestoes,” Yiddish 8:1 (1991): 52-62. 27

Seth Wolitz, “Di Khalyastre, the Yiddish Modernist Movement in Poland: An Overview,” Yiddish 4:3 (1981): 10.

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crowded “head to head and hand to hand.”28 Above this jumble of people is a crucifix “in some corner tangled in cobwebs” on which Jesus hangs “naked, his body cavernous, his shame unconcealed.”29 The nails piercing his hands and feet are graphically described. But as the passing reference to dust and cobwebs indicates, this crucifix, and by implication Jesus himself, has been long neglected. A lamp hangs below it empty of oil, with no one to light it.30 In the last stanza of the poem, one of the sleepers arises briefly, crosses himself, but does not get out of bed. The gesture is an empty one, as evidenced by the neglect of the crucifix. The scene described in this poem not only emphasizes Jesus’ suffering and alienation, but suggests neglect of Jesus even by Christians. Leivick’s second poem about Jesus, titled simply “Er” (He), is a long poem in which the narrator has a conversation with Jesus.31 The humanized Jesus of this poem, rather than suffering neglect, complains of too much attention of the wrong kind. He rejects Christian claims of divinity; hates his mother, whom he claims behaves incestuously toward him; and resents the expectation of his perfection, confessing his thoughts of matricide and participation in a pogrom. Presenting this Freudian, psychological portrait of Jesus accomplishes two things simultaneously: first, it presents Jesus as human, rather than divine, and even suggests that he is capable of choosing evil; second, it modernizes the character of Jesus. Leivick and other Yiddish poets of this 28

H. Leivick, “Yezus,” Ale verk (Complete Works), vol. 1: Lider (Poems) (New York: H. Leivick yubileykomitet, 1940): 32. 29

Leivick, “Yezus,” 32.

30

Matthew Hoffman suggests that this is an ironic reference to the Gospel of John, in which Jesus is referred to as “the light of this world.” For his slightly different reading of this poem, see Hoffman, 161-63. 31

H. Leivick, “Er” (He), Ale verk, vol. 1: 151-157.

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period were trying to update Yiddish and, by extension, Jewish cultural identity. By taking the pre-modern image of Jesus and representing him instead as a kind of contemporary, caught in all the dilemmas of modernity—sexual, political, religious— Leivick created a model for the modernization of identity itself. Leivick, however, was most famous for his 1921 verse play, Der goylem (The Golem).32 The play tells the story of the famous Maharal of Prague, who according to legend created a golem, a mystically animated creature, to protect the Jewish community. Leivick’s golem, while referred to as a “savior” by his rabbi creator, is a hopelessly human character, who craves attention, acceptance, and affirmation. In one scene, the Golem, the messiah, and Jesus (called “the man with the cross”) come together in a fantastical convergence. The Golem has been instructed to find and destroy blood planted in the synagogue by the local priest in order to justify claims of blood libel and incite a pogrom just before Passover. A series of apparitions appear to him and aid him in his quest, and the messiah, in chains, and Jesus, with his cross, join him in a dank cave where spirits and dead people dance and sing around them. The scene itself, as well as the songs of the spirits, mocks the very notion of a redeemer or redemption. One of the spirits of the dead who dance around the three impotent redeemers exclaims, “They did not delight, but fooled/He who awaited them./They did not reward, but punished/He who hoped for them./Just an excuse, just a joke/For the last fool on the street.”33 Here Jesus is presented as part of a pantheon of redeemers, all of them hopelessly powerless, even mythical. Yet as in Leivick’s other work about Jesus, his appearance in the drama 32

H. Leivick, Der goylem (The Golem) (New York: Farlag Amerike, 1921).

33

Leivick, Der goylem, 184.

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exposes the myth of messianic hopes, the inaccessibility of redemption, and the banality of suffering. Moshe-Leyb Halpern, another of the Di yunge poets, took a similarly cynical view of Jesus as god and savior in his long 1919 poem A nakht (A Night). He radically demystifies the story of Jesus’ birth and claims to divinity, mocking the story of the virgin birth: “And if your sister bore a bastard,/Shout that the soldier’s name is ‘Holy Spirit,’/And that the bastard is a god-to-be/Who, like Jesus, brings us only love and mercy.”34 This sarcastic reference to Jesus as representative of love and mercy is in stark contrast with the violence and pogroms referred to elsewhere in the poem. Like Leivick, Halpern suggests Jesus’ humanity, but much less sympathetically. In the latter half of the poem, the narrator, identified with the author, envisions himself as Jesus, reluctantly assuming the role of suffering servant. A group of soldiers “ask me by lantern light/If I want to be a king” and though he is silent, they crown him with thorns and nail him to a “huge black cross…/And they call this my throne.”35 The narrator proceeds to endure numerous tortures: attacks by lions and dogs, flaying, burning. Through this suffering, he is identified further with Jesus on the cross: “Through smoke I see myself/Mounted on the crosses…./I see myself hanging/Bloodily from every stone.”36 Through these images, Halpern suggests the parallel between European pogroms and the crucifixion. His own poetic identification with the figure of Jesus suggests that his suffering is not unique; that, in fact, Jewish suffering is comparable to or exceeds it. 34

Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, “A nakht” (A Night), In Nyu York, (New York: Farlag Vinkel, 1919): 269.

35

Halpern, 283-285.

36

Halpern, 287.

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Leivick’s and Halpern’s focus on Jewish suffering drew them to Jesus, the ultimate archetype of the innocent victim. The apocalyptic mood of their work also lent itself to representations of Jesus as the harbinger of apocalypse. In these poems, Leivick and Halpern were consciously using the figure of Jesus—a Christian symbol—to explore the modern Jewish condition. They did this both through envisioning Jewish suffering as comparable to or somehow emergent from the suffering of Jesus, but they also did so through expanding the very boundaries of Jewish literary representation. They saw Jesus as a figure who might embody the kind of hybrid identity that they themselves were trying to imagine, a Jewish identity that would be both particularly Jewish and at the same time humanist.

Itsik Manger and the Tragedy of Suffering Just after the first World War, the European Yiddish poet Itsik Manger began to publish poetry. In 1929, his early poems were collected in the volume Shtern afn dakh (Stars on the Roof), which includes several poems that focus on the figure of Jesus. Manger frequently used christological images and references to Christianity in his work throughout his career, but these early poems are some of the few in which he uses Jesus as a character or symbol.37 In fact, Manger classified the types of poems in the book as “Ballad(s), Christ-poem(s), and poem(s) of the Baal-Shem.”38 In these “Christ-poems,”

37

For a full discussion of the importance of Manger’s poetry about Jesus to his later development as a poet, see Janet Hadda, “Christian Imagery and Dramatic Impulse in the Poetry of Itsik Manger,” Michigan Germanic Studies 3:2 (Fall 1977): 1-12. 38

Itsik Manger, Shtern afn dakh: lid un balade (Stars on the Roof: Poems and Ballads) (Bucharest: Farlag Sholem Aleichem, 1929): unpaginated introduction.

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Manger develops the figure of Jesus as a universally accessible symbol of suffering, one who is both human and tragic. The poem “Ecce!” addresses the figure of Jesus only symbolically, using his suffering as a point of comparison with that of others. The poem describes a wild-eyed beggar who has nothing to offer but stories of his own sorrow in exchange for a bit of bread or a place to sleep. The narrator describes their location, whether literally or symbolically, as “at the foot of the cross,” where they “sing and laugh.”39 In the next stanza, the narrator declares, “All the paths on which we wander/lead us to this cross./Either Jesus was crucified,/or the night, or I, or you!”40 Here, the cross is a symbol not of redemption, but of universal suffering. The suffering of Jesus on the cross is no different, no better or worse, than that of the starving, dirty beggar, the narrator of the poem, or even its readers. Through this formulation Jesus is demystified and humanized, a tragic symbol of the human condition. Manger also uses Jesus as a way of highlighting human suffering and tragedy in his poem “Di balade fun dem leyzikn mit dem gekreytsiktn” (The Ballad of the LiceRidden and the Crucified). In this ballad, Manger’s signature poetic form, a lice-ridden man “wakes the crucified from his sleep” to discuss the issue of suffering with him.41 The lice-ridden man demands, “Who told you, oh Jesus, who,/that your crown is holier than my tear?”42 Jesus protests with an explanation of his terrible suffering, but the lice-

39

Manger, “Ecce!,” Shtern afn dakh, 15.

40

Manger, “Ecce!,” 16.

41

Manger, “Di balade fun dem leyzikn mit dem gekreytsiktn,” Shtern afn dakh, 68.

42

Manger, “Di balade,” 68.

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ridden man proceeds to enumerate all the reasons why his own situation is far worse than Jesus’: Jesus must live on the cross, but the lice-ridden man has no home at all; Jesus at least has two women to care for him, while the lice-ridden man is alone; Jesus is considered holy and worshipped, while the lice-ridden is chased on his way by dogs and shadows. This list of their comparative sorrows prompts Jesus to concede, “I believe,/that three times holy are your tear and dust!”43 Even Jesus himself admits that there are degrees of suffering, that his own tragedy is only one of many, some of which are worse than his own. In “Akeydes yitskhok” (The Binding of Isaac), Manger extends this analysis of Jesus’ suffering, suggesting that Jesus, as the paramount symbol of suffering in Western culture, has in a sense unfairly taken over that role from everyone else, including, or especially, the Jews. The poem, like much of Manger’s poetry, is a rewriting of a biblical story: the aborted sacrifice of Isaac by his father, Abraham.44 The poem is in the form of an imagined conversation between Abraham and Isaac. Abraham asks his son, whom he calls “my child and sacrifice,” what he sees, and Isaac reports seeing birds in the blue sky, while “on a cross hangs a dead man.”45 This vision is an inversion of the Christian practice of reading the Hebrew Bible for clues, hints, and prophecies of Jesus, by reading forward and literally inserting an image of the crucified Jesus into the biblical story. In the Bible story, Abraham is stopped from sacrificing his son at the last moment by an angel of God, who stays his hand. In the poem, Isaac’s vision stops Abraham, who 43

Manger, “Di balade,” 69.

44

Genesis 22:1-13.

45

Manger, “Akeydes yitskhok,” Shtern afn dakh, 63.

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drops his knife, telling Isaac, “Your beautiful death is destined for another.”46 Isaac demands to know who has usurped his position as an iconic sacrifice, noting, “Holy he must be and strange and fine—/or, what has taken away my sacrifice?”47 Even the very word Isaac uses, tsugenumen, to take away, indicates that the Jesus of this poem is seen as having forcibly deprived Isaac, and by extension the Jews and everyone else, of the right to the significance of their own suffering. Western culture, via Christianity, has fashioned Jesus into the sole symbol of human suffering and tragedy; here, Manger questions this status. And as in his other poems about Jesus, Manger uses him to underscore the universality of suffering and to break Jesus’, and Christianity’s, claim on it.

The Varieties of Jewish Identity In these early Yiddish works about Jesus, we see the emergence of a variety of Jewish literary responses to him that articulate the beginnings of the project of constructing a modern Jewish identity responsive to the claims of Western culture. These early twentieth-century stories, plays, and poems represent the figure of Jesus as Jewish brother, anti-nationalist, icon of universal suffering, and many things in between. In trying to define themselves within the broader confines of Western culture, Jewish writers began to engage with Jesus in order to find out who they themselves were. These early works, many of them written before World War I, also provide the background against which later writers began to develop more clearly articulated ideas of 46

Manger, “Akeydes yitskhok,” 63.

47

Manger, “Akeydes yitskhok,” 63.

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Jewish identity through literary representations of Jesus. The early poems by Leivick and Halpern, in particular, were the literary predecessors to the Yiddish Expressionists in Europe, the subject of the next chapter, who, like Di yunge, were also drawn to the figure of Jesus as a symbol of Jewish modernization. These writers, influenced by the German Expressionists, sought to create a new, contemporary language for expression in Jewish languages, and turned to mystical and messianic figures both within and without the Jewish tradition as representative of their poetics and politics. Their commitment to avant-garde aesthetics, as well as their interest in the messianic and apocalyptic, made Jesus the perfect figure around which to begin to form a modern Yiddish poetry that was at once particular and universal, that crossed traditional borders in order to fashion a new kind of Jewish identity. One of these poets in particular, Uri Tzvi Greenberg, created an extensive body of poetry first in Yiddish and later in Hebrew centered around the figure of Jesus. In the next chapter, we will see how Jesus became, for Greenberg and his contemporaries, a figure particularly suited to their search for an authentic Jewish identity, but also revealed the fallacy of such a rigid definition.

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Chapter 3 Going Unhome: Jesus in the Yiddish and Hebrew Poetry of Uri Tzvi Greenberg

In the early 1920s, a number of avant-garde Yiddish groups began to spring up in Eastern and Central Europe, as well as the United States.1 One of these groups, Di khalyastre (The Gang), operated in Warsaw and Berlin, and was run by the poets Uri Tzvi Greenberg, Perets Markish, and Melekh Ravtish. Di khalyastre espoused an Expressionist poetics similar to the dominant aesthetic of European Expressionism: the elevation of the subjective and individual experience and expression; an embrace of opposition, contradiction, and disharmony; an attraction to the characters of visionaries and prophets. This commitment to both radical poetics and radical themes drew them to characters like the false messiahs Sabbatai Zevi and Shlomo Molcho, as well as the figure of Jesus.2 Greenberg’s journal of these years, Albatros, indicates the centrality of Jesus to the self-definition of these Yiddish Expressionist poets. In the first issue, Melekh Ravitsh published an aesthetic manifesto of sorts, titled “Di naye, di nakete dikhtung: zibn tezisn” 1

These included the Eygns-grupe (Kiev, 1918-20), Shtrom (Moscow, 1922-24), Milgroym (Berlin, 192224), the Inzikhistn (New York, 1920-39), and Di Khalyastre (Warsaw and Berlin, 1919-24), which will be the focus of the rest of this chapter. 2

Uri Tzvi Greenberg published a poem entitled “Melekh shabtai tzvi” (King Sabbatai Zevi), under the pseudonym Yosef Molcho, which has many overlapping layers of wordplay. The Sabbatai Zevi of the title is the seventeenth-century kabbalist who proclaimed himself the messiah and later converted to Islam. But his name, of course, also includes Greenberg’s—Tzvi. His pseudonym, Yosef Molcho (under which name he also published other poems, including in his own journal), refers to the 16th century kabbalist Shlomo Molcho, who declared himself the messiah and was burned at the stake for apostasy.

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(The New, Naked Poetry: Seven Theses). The final thesis is titled “Vetalu oto al haetz,” Hebrew for “They hung him on the tree.” In it, he uses the crucifixion as a metaphor for the violent death of the old, romantic poetry. “Naked the word hangs on the cross. The proud INRI laughs at him. It wanted to be the king and redeemer of woe. From his hands and from his feet blood drips.”3 In the final words, mimicking Jesus’ unanswered final question, Ravtish suggests that God himself has abandoned aesthetically pleasing, beautiful poetry. And the crucifixion metaphor itself also suggests the subsequent resurrection, which we can only envision as a resurrection of Yiddish poetry through the adoption of avant-garde aesthetics that favor disharmony over harmony, contradiction over beauty. With these and other manifestoes, Di khalyastre consciously attempted to place themselves within the general Expressionist movement of the postwar period, in which “Jewish writers and artists were participating for the first time in the general European culture as conscious members of a universal avant-garde movement and with a specific Jewish cultural identity.”4 The metaphor of Jesus on the cross, an image at the heart of Western culture, allowed Ravitsh and others to ground their resurrection of Yiddish, a specifically and narrowly Jewish language, within the general culture. Yiddish marked them as Jewish, but appropriating Jesus marked them as human. Greenberg also published two literary manifestoes in the first issue of Albatros, which declare his dedication to the principles of European Expressionism and the universal possibilities of Jewish culture, but at the same time evince a concern with issues 3

Melekh Ravitsh, “Di naye, di nakete dikhtung: zibn tezisn,” Albatros 1 (1922): 16.

4

Wolitz, “Di Khalyastre,” 7.

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of Jewish identity and national politics.5 In fact, Greenberg begins the very first line of the first declaration of principles, “Proklamirung,” with a reference to the unique situation of the Jewish poet: “A bridge, four walls, and a rafter for the lone and homeless poets as they roam through foreign lands to the many centers of the Jewish people’s exterritoriality.”6 This opening serves as a kind of model for the functional space for the Jewish writer that Greenberg sought to create with his modernist poetics.7 It is a bounded space, but one that remains open, linked to the rest of the world but also separate from it. This four-walled room, open to the sky but offering some protection, stands as something for the homeless, extraterritorial Jewish poet to call home but not something that ultimately restricts his movement. The centrality of the bridge to this image of the place of the Jewish writer underscores the dedication of Greenberg and Di Khalyastre to the aesthetics of the new. Yet at the same time as they were trying to create a Yiddish avant-garde, these writers were also trying to work within the four walls of an ancient culture and language that defined them as Jewish. Greenberg describes this attempt to create a universal poetry that was also specifically Jewish in another of the manifestoes he wrote for the first issue of Albatros. “Because ours is the poetry: fruit of familiarity and pain, which we deliver

5

A. Tilo Alt, “Ambivalence Toward Modernism: The Yiddish Avant-Garde and its Manifestoes,” Yiddish 8: 1 (1991): 58. While Alt sees this as a betrayal of the aesthetic principles of the avant-garde, Wolitz actually sees “direct participation of artists in the socio-political culture of the people or nation” as one of the primary beliefs of the 1920s leftist avant-garde. Wolitz, “Uri Tzvi Greenberg’s Ideological Conflict with Yiddish Culture,” Jewish Affairs 53:3 (Spring 1997): 105. 6

Uri Tzvi Greenberg, “Proclamation,” trans. David Roskies, Prooftexts 15 (1995): 109.

7

Seth Wolitz claims that the first issue of Albatros “argues the thesis that a cultural autonomous space in the Diaspora is possibly feasible and proffers his new journal as evidence.” Wolitz, “Ideological Conflict,” 99.

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with the two-hundred-forty-eight singing limbs in our Jewish-human homelessness.”8 Here he claims an element of universal “familiarity” for the new Yiddish poetry while at the same time insisting upon its location in the Jewish body. In the image of Jesus, Greenberg found an ideal representative of these competing, and seemingly contradictory, claims of particularity and universalism. As an inherently hybrid figure, both Jewish and Christian, victim and perpetrator, Eastern and Western, Jesus neatly encapsulated the paradoxes of Jewish modernism. Greenberg also used techniques of translation, subversion, and transformation to deliberately hybridize the figure of Jesus as a way of allegorizing the Jewish experience of modernity. And, perhaps most importantly, Greenberg used the figure of Jesus in his poetry to suggest new and alternative identities for modern Jewry. Indeed, in comparing his Yiddish and Hebrew poetry about Jesus, we will see how Jesus functioned as a heuristic tool in his attempt to reconstruct an authentic Jewish identity, and the way in which his very characterization of Jesus suggests the fallacy of such an attempt.

Jesus in Greenberg’s Yiddish Poetry Uri Tzvi Greenberg’s literary attraction to the figure of Jesus, by his own account, was rooted in an early experience of violence. In 1918, Greenberg fled the Austrian army and returned to his hometown of Lvov. In November of that year, the Polish population of Lvov rose up against the Ukrainians in the city in protest of the reversion of Lvov to

8

Uri Tzvi Greenberg, “Manifesto tsu di kegner fun der nayer poesya” (Manifesto to the Opponents of the New Poetry,” Albatros 1: 2.

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Ukrainian rule. Once the Poles controlled the city they attacked the Jewish quarter, destroying it and killing nearly 80 people. Greenberg was an eyewitness to the pogrom. Greenberg’s experience of the Lvov pogrom made a deep personal impression on him. In a memoiristic essay published in Hebrew in 1929, when he was already living in mandate Palestine, Greenberg recalled the day of the pogrom: And in the year…such and such the Polish forces entered my city, where I learned alef-beys in the holy tongue in my childhood, and stood me and my father and mother, they should live, together with the small children—“on the wall” to be shot…why?—Because. They answer that we are Jews with “the blood of dogs” in our veins…so they said. Amen, I say: it was a miracle that I was not killed for nothing. It was a miracle that I was able to flee into hiding…so it is. I knew on that day that the symbol of terror is: the cross.9 In this passage, a discussion of space and boundaries forms a subtext to the description itself. Greenberg telescopes time in order to reflect his changed understanding of his own, and by extension, the general Jewish position in postwar Europe. If the temporal is also a topos, here Greenberg uses that surface both to challenge the traditional boundaries between events in time and to give his own shape to the shifting space he describes. The passage begins with a vague reference to the temporal, eliding the year as if it were of no concern, and then immediately moving back in time, to Greenberg’s childhood. This connects the present-day city, which Greenberg claims as his own, with the place of his childhood, a place identified as specifically Jewish through its association with language.10 The narrative then switches back to the past, and the past tense, since

9

Uri Tzvi Greenberg, “Min hagenizah shel paytan ivri chai…” (From the Archives of a Living Hebrew Poet), Kol ketavav (Collected Writings), ed. Dan Miron, vol. 15 (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1990): 180. Emphasis in original. 10

Later, I will show how Greenberg willingly abandoned his connection to the language and spaces of his childhood in an attempt to redefine his “authentic” self and outline a place for his belonging.

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the author is now remembering an event that happened some years before in Europe as he writes from Palestine. But as soon as he begins to recall the events of the pogrom, his narrative is interrupted, becoming increasingly broken with punctuation and interjections. These repeated breaks reflect and underscore the trauma of the pogrom itself, but also indicate the extent to which this experience separated him from his European Jewish childhood. Ultimately, Greenberg traces the source of this trauma and disruption to “the cross.” This is the final symbol, which provides a specific shape to the memory, a recognizable image that borders and encapsulates the space of his city, his childhood, and even his language. This shape, the cross, indeed became a preoccupation of his writing during the interwar period in both Yiddish and Hebrew. From the very disharmony of this passage, created through the interjections and punctuation, we can also see how the image of the cross was itself related to Greenberg’s avant-garde modernism. His interest in the cross and the man who hangs on it was linked to Greenberg’s dedication to creating a new mode of expression, the “new, naked” poetry Melekh Ravtish extolled in the first issue of Albatros. In the first essay in that issue, titled “Proklamirung” (Proclamation), Greenberg wrote of the modernist Jewish poets of the post-war generation, “the gifted ones are sparks, invisible in time of conflagration. They are but loners, confined in narrow places.”11 By contrast, Greenberg hoped to create a “free, bare, blood-seething human expression”12 that would escape the confinement of those “narrow places,” the stifling strictures of established culture. The

11

Greenberg, “Proclamation,” 109.

12

Greenberg, “Proclamation,” 112.

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new poetry, Expressionist, avant-garde poetry, would allow the poet to break the bonds of culture, to move beyond the confined space of the expected. Greenberg’s Expressionist poetics were also expressly linked to his ideological project. In general, “The ecstatic expressionistic poet—and Greenberg undoubtedly fell under this category—saw himself as a social agent, a castigator and a prophet who communicates the suffering of the masses.”13 As such, his poetics are intimately tied to the ideas expressed in his poetry, and his prose and poetry taken together form a kind of “literary unity” such that “the aesthetic element in poetry could be copied into the functional-ideological sphere of the essay.”14 As I will show, Greenberg used this symbiosis between poetry and prose, aesthetics and ideas, not simply to create a new kind of Yiddish literary expression. With his poetry about Jesus, he also explored and exploded the “narrow places” of Jewish identity, challenging its boundaries and suggesting new definitions linked to language, land, and politics. As we have seen, Greenberg’s literary representations of Jesus had precedents: the poetry of Leivick and Halpern, as well as the scholarly work of Klausner.15

Greenberg

concentrated on the figure of Jesus as a hybrid himself: both a victimized, exiled Jew and father to an alien religion. He used language and rhetorical techniques that clearly attempt to reclaim Jesus for the Jews, to bring Jesus back into the Jewish tradition

13

Avidov Lipsker, “The Albatrosses of Young Yiddish Poetry: An Idea and its Visual Realization in Uri Tzvi Greenberg’s Albatros,” Prooftexts 15 (1995): 90. 14

Lipsker, 102.

15

Shalom Lindenbaum also claims that Greenberg’s ideas about Jesus were influenced by the European Expressionist movements and by Polish literature of the period. Lindenbaum, Shirat uri tzvi greenberg: kavei metaer (The Poetry of Uri Tzvi Greenberg: An Outline) (Tel Aviv: Hadar, 1984): 130.

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symbolically. As noted in Chapter 1, one of the characteristics of Talmudic discourse was the understanding that the Other was an aspect of the Self, an idea which challenges the notion of a fixed, bounded identity. In Greenberg’s (re)construction of Jesus as Jew, we see this discursive principle at work, exposing the Other of the Self and the inextricable relationship of Self to Other. The revelation of Jesus as a Jew, the unmasking of the Other, is clear from Greenberg’s repeated references to Jesus as “brother.” In Hebrew Jesus is referred to as akhi, my brother; in Yiddish, as bruder yeshu, brother Jesus. In “Bemaarav,” the narrator of the poem claims, “I have one condemned brother,/…who hangs/on a foul pole.”16 By referring to him as brother, the narrator establishes his familial relationship with Jesus, suggesting his Jewish roots and reclaiming him for the Jewish “family.”17 In the Yiddish prose poem “Golgotha,” one of Greenberg’s earliest poems in which Jesus appears, this brotherhood of Jesus with the Jews is carried even further. The first-person narrator of the poem, identified with Greenberg himself, describes a kind of prophetic journey. “On the way, as the sun rose, I met a man. The man had my form…. On his shoulder he carried a black cross-pole….” Here, the Jewish narrator-prophet is explicitly identified with Jesus, who resembles him in form and appearance. Immediately after their meeting, the narrator, in a moment of mystical or dream-like transfiguration, actually becomes the 16

s¨j¤t hk g¨eUn j¨t hUk¨T©v 'hkhk±D j¨t ©jUk¨S x²bIkF kg

Uri Tzvi Greenberg, “Bemaarav” (In the West), Kol ketavav, vol.1, 44. 17

Seth Wolitz has called this poem a “satiric monologue” and suggests that the address “brother” is used mockingly. While this is certainly one aspect of the poem, this reading flattens the complicated relationship of the narrator to the Jesus of the poem, whom he seems to simultaneously embrace and reject. Wolitz, “Ideological Conflict,” 103.

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Jesus figure: “The man in my form disappeared in a moment./I stand all alone with the black cross-pole.”18 Later, the narrator imagines himself “hung on a burning red cross” and crying out “Eli, Eli, lamah azavtani?” from the cross, just as Jesus did.19 In “Golgotha,” Jesus is not only brother but alter-ego, a component of the identity or personality of the Jewish poet himself. Greenberg also attempts to translate Jesus into a Jewish context by rewriting the places and characters of Jesus’ life story. In the poem “In malkhes fun tseylem,” the narrator goes so far as to assert, “Beys-lekhem is a Jewish village!/Ben-yosef is a Jewish son!”20 In “Uri tsvi farn tseylem,” the narrator asks Jesus about his upbringing: “Do you remember, brother, the holy village of Beys-lekhem? Do you remember going with Miriam through Galilean fields….A white Hebrew prayer shawl on your body and a cerulean prayer belt girding your loins?”21 The Christian Mary is called by her Hebrew

18

i³h³hn y©tvgd y¨tv aybgn rgs /ybdgd©tc aybgn ©t lht c¨tv 'db©tdphutbuz o³h³hc 'dguu iht ///Pukx-okm imr©tuua ©t id¨trygd rg y¨tv kxe©t iphut////yk©tyagd /ir¨tuugd okgb gdr ©t iht zht yk©tyagd i³h³hn iht aybgn rgs/// /Pukx-okm imr©tua ogs yhn ihhk©t rgbht hya lht Uri Tzvi Greenberg, “Golgotha,” Gezamlte verk: ershter band (Collected Works: Volume One), ed. Khone Shmeruk (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University, 1979): 304. 19

Greenberg, “Golgotha,” 305. Jesus’ cry was in Aramaic (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34): Eli, Eli, lamah sabachthani? (My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?) This is a literal moment of translation. By rendering the ancient Aramaic—the language the historical Jesus spoke and the language used by the Gospels to convey his last words—into Hebrew, Greenberg makes his Jesus into a more modern character, and a specifically Jewish one. This translation is also a rewriting of history, a new version of the Gospel account. 20

!ojk-,hc ;r¨tsbs°hh zht xg !;xuh-ic iuzbs°hh zht xg Uri Tzvi Greenberg, “In malkhes fun tseylem” (In the Kingdom of the Cross), Gezamlte verk: tsveyter band (Collected Works: Volume 2), ed. Khone Shmeruk (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University, 1979): 464. 21

rgkhkd iphut ohrn yhn ahbgdgd©tc i³h³hs uyxebgsgd ?;r¨ts-ojk-,hc gehkhhv1x 'rgsurc uyxebgsgd isbgk gb³h³hs phut ,kfT iup kyr©td ©t iut ;ud i³h³hs phut ;r©tuurgcht-rggrcgv rgx³h³hu ©t////dguurgskgp ?yr¨tdgd Uri Tzvi Greenberg, “Uri tsvi farn tseylem” (Uri Tzvi in Front of the Cross), Gezamlte verk: tsveyter band, 431.

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name, Miriam; Bethlehem by its Hebrew appellation, Beys-lekhem; and Jesus by his Hebrew patronymic, son of Joseph. Again, Jesus is placed in a Jewish setting, specifically the Galilee, in the land of Israel, dressed in the garments of a religious Jew. By translating Jesus into his Jewish context, Greenberg attempts to reconstruct an originary Jewish identity for Jesus, now lost. This transformation, like any other reconstruction, relies heavily on memory. Here it is Jesus’ memory of his Jewish roots that is in question. As just noted, in “Uri tsvi farn tseylem” the narrator interrogates Jesus, repeatedly asking, “Do you remember?” In “Bemaarav,” it is the shepherds of Jesus’ native Galilee who want to know: “And the etrogs, the grapevines, the almonds/and date tree poking her reddish head/into the incense of evening/until the gold of sands/turns to silver/in the light of the moon/has our brother forgotten?”22 The answer? In “Uri Tsvi farn tseylem,” the narrator finally accuses Jesus: “Oh, you’ve forgotten everything. Your hardened mind does not understand: at your head a star of David, over the star of David—hands in priestly benediction. Under them groves of olives, and etrog gardens.”23 Not only is this an accusation, however, but a reminder—to the reader, and to the character of Jesus himself—of his family, his mode of dress, his home: all the things that connect him to a Jewish identity. 22

oh¦s¥e§A©v 'oh°b7p±D©v 'oh°dIr§,¤t¨v ,¤t±u k7kfªj§n V¨at«r ,¤t ,g©eIT r¨n¨,±u c¤r;g¨v ,¤r«y§eC ,IkIj c©v±z h¥s=g ;¤x;fk Q?p¨v¯h - ©j¥r²h r©v«zC ?Ubh¦j¨t jf¨a£v

Greenberg, “Bemaarav,” 45. 23

irgcht 'sus-idn ©t xbP¨teum rhs :yahb yf©try rgb³h³hs jun rgyrguuhkdr©tp /.k©t ixgdr©tp yx¨tv 'lg /rgbyrgd-ohur,t iut 'oh,hz-ign©tkp hhz rgybut /ybgv gehsbfus - sus-idn Greenberg, “Uri tsvi farn tseylem,” 431.

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Having established Jesus’ Jewish identity, Greenberg is also concerned with subverting the traditional Christian symbols with which Jesus has come to be associated, dechristianizing them, and in some cases drawing them into the Jewish realm. In “Bemaarav” Greenberg writes of Jesus, “And he will return to the land of Israel in a tallit,/which was on his shoulders as he went to be crucified.” Instead of carrying the cross on his shoulders, Jesus is represented as bearing a tallit, the prayer shawl that marks him as a practicing member of the Jewish community. Similarly, the crown of thorns is transformed into a specifically Jewish one, as Jesus is envisioned returning to Israel as a Jewish messiah, with “the crown of the son of David/on his holy head.”24 Christian symbols of Jesus’ victimization and humiliation—carrying the cross and wearing the crown of thorns—are re-imagined as positive images of Jesus’ Judaism. Even the cross itself is subverted. Most graphically, Greenberg accomplished this by printing the poem “Uri tzvi farn tseylem” in the form of a cross in his journal Albatros, making the cross into an artifact rather than a religious icon.25 But he also accomplishes this subversion linguistically. In “Yerushalayim shel mata,” the narrator asks Jesus, “if you also remember Golgotha, where they hung you on a tree.”26 Here Jesus hangs not on the cross, but on a tree, ilan in Hebrew. The word suggests a living thing, not the dead

24

',hK¨yC k¥t¨r«a±h .¤r¤tk cUa²h tUv±u /v7chkmk Is§n7gC uh7p¥,F kg v¨,±h¨v¤a s°u¨S-i;C r®z®b±u/// aIs¨e©v Iat«r kg

Greenberg, “Bemaarav,” 46. 25

For a more thorough examination of the importance of images and graphical experimentation in Albatros, see Lipsker, 89-108. 26

///i7kh¦t h?k=g WUk¨, h¥t 't¨Tk²Dk´D o²D r«Fz¦T o¦t±u Uri Tzvi Greenberg, “Yerushalayim shel mata” (Earthly Jerusalem), Kol ketavav, vol. 1, 68.

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“foul pole” of “Bemaarav.” Indeed, although Greenberg often uses the word tslav in Hebrew and tseylem in Yiddish, the proper words for the cross of the crucifixion, he just as often uses quasi-synonyms that carry other associations, assigning new meanings to the symbol of the cross. In Hebrew, not only does he use ilan, but also etz, which can be a living tree or a piece of wood, and klonas, or pole, a word with no religious connotations; in Yiddish, he uses the word slup, or pole, again without religious associations. These words desanctify the cross and crucifixion, allowing it to function as a universal symbol and emptying it of its specifically Christian meaning. The cross, which Greenberg himself identified as the ultimate symbol of violence, is reduced to a life-giving element of nature. Indeed, the tree is a prominent symbol of Jewish cosmology, in which the Torah is represented as a “tree of life.” While using the word for pole simply dechristianizes the cross, calling it a tree actually brings it into the Jewish realm. Using common words in place of tslav or tseylem also renders the cross less fearful, robbing it of some of its violent power (a power which Greenberg elsewhere emphasizes), and shifting its emphasis from death to life, accomplishing a kind of Jewish revaluation of Jesus.

The Kingdom of the Cross These thematic similarities among Greenberg’s Jesus poems represent the attempt to translate, transform, and subvert the dominant, Christian reading of Jesus in order to create a hybridized Jewish Jesus. In doing so, Greenberg also suggests a new way of thinking about Jewish identity: as inclusive of traditionally Christian symbols, as part of a humanistic tradition. But in these poems this reclamation of the person of Jesus coexists 82

with a heated critique of Jesus as associated with Christian Europe. By focusing on Christian Europe, Greenberg foregrounds the importance of borders, territory, and nationalism in the modern world, a concern that would eventually lead him to political Zionism and aliyah.27 While Greenberg’s reclamation of Jesus and Christian symbols suggests a broad view of Jewish cultural identity, the rejection of Christian Europe in favor of Zionist Palestine reflects a closed, narrow view of Jewish identity. Greenberg’s Yiddish poems about Jesus reflect this disjunction between the redemptive possibilities of a Jewish Jesus and the violence of Christian Europe, and declaim both the possibility and impossibility of a modern, secular, humanistic Jewish culture. The title of one of Greenberg’s major poems on christological themes, “In malkhes fun tseylem,” refers to a geography of alienation, a Europe explicitly identified with Christianity. The poem itself declaims: “Great Europe! Kingdom of the cross!”28 This Europe, the kingdom of the cross, is a place of “woe and violence,” a place unsafe and unkind to the Jews. In the same issue of Albatros in which this poem appeared Greenberg published a farewell essay explaining his decision to emigrate to Palestine. He wrote, “Europe has not, even today, taken to the Jews and she cannot bear Jews on her 27

Seth Wolitz has attributed this turn largely to the censorship of the second issue of Albatros. He claims that Greenberg composed and published both the poem “In malkhes fun tseylem” and the essay “Veytikn heym af slavisher erd” as a response to what he saw as the utter lack of autonomy and freedom for minorities in Europe and the untenable situation this created for the Jews. See Wolitz, “Ideological Conflict,” 104. While there may be some truth to this assessment with regard to Greenberg’s choice of when to publish the poem, Wolitz’s analysis seems to be at least somewhat oversimplified. Avrum Sutzkever, in an introduction to a reprinting of the poem “In malkhes fun tseylem” in his journal Di goldene keyt in 1976, claims that Greenberg told him personally that he had composed the poem two years before he published it. See Avrum Sutzkever, “Der aleynflier” (The Loner), Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain) 91 (1976): 6. Accordingly, I will discuss the poems published in Albatros without emphasis on the order in which they were published. 28

!okm-,ufkn

Greenberg, “In malkhes fun tseylem,” 457.

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!gP¨trhht-xhurd

land.”29 This sentiment reflects the disjunction in Greenberg’s Yiddish poetry between the redemptive and constructive possibilities of a Jewish Jesus and the violence and degradation of Christian Europe. The tension between Greenberg’s Jesus and the Western culture he in some ways represents suggest the instability of any fixed or authentic description of Jewish identity. In the Yiddish poems of the Albatros era (1922-24) and earlier, Europe’s inability to “bear” the Jews on her land is played out in scenes of violence. In these poems, Jesus is often implicated in this violence, but is characterized both as perpetrator and victim. Jesus’ association with Europe as a Christian realm makes him guilty by association of the violence associated with that place. In “Uri tsvi farn tseylem,” the narrator accuses Jesus: “Hardened eyes see nothing: at your feet: a pile of cut-off Jewish heads. Torn tallisim. Ripped parchments. White linen with flecks of blood.”30 The image is one of Jesus mutely presiding over a pogrom. This is a very different image of Jesus from the man Greenberg elsewhere refers to as brother, and it points to the difficulty of completely transforming Jesus into a hybrid character. His association with a realm of violent contestation resists translation. After declaring Europe the “kingdom of the cross” in the poem “In malkhes fun tseylem,” Greenberg actually expresses a complete disavowal of Jesus. “The dead man in the church is not my brother, it is Jesus.” Here Greenberg uses the Latinate version of Jesus’ name, yezus, not the Yiddish yeshu that usually appears. This is an instance of 29 30

Uri Tzvi Greenberg, “Veytikn heym af slavisher erd” (Foreign Home on Slavic Soil), Albatros 3-4: 27. /oh,hkhy gbgxhrgm

/Pgebs°hh gbgyhbagdP¨t gPue ©t :xbxupum rhs :yahb iggz idhut gyrguuhkdr©tp /iegkpyukc yhn iybuu³h³hk gx³h³hu /iygnr©tP gbgf¨tyagm Greenberg, “Uri tsvi farn tseylem,” 433.

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deliberate non-translation, which emphasizes the border that separates the European, Christian Jesus from Jews and Judaism. The poem goes on, “Bethlehem is Latin, not my hometown Beyslekhem./Maria Magdalena is not my Miriam of Migdal.”31 “Bethlehem” and “Maria Magdalena” are even spelled in Latin characters rather than Hebrew characters, isolating both names physically within the space of the poem. This linguistic and visual isolation emphasizes the way that these names have been divorced from their geographical etymologies in the land of Israel. At the same time, an equivalence is established between these Christian, Latinate names and their Hebrew origins, which are claimed by the Jewish elders described in the poem. The simultaneous disavowal and reclamation of these names underlines the extent to which the Church and Christian Europe have removed Jesus physically and geographically from his own Judaism, to the point where he may be beyond translation. But, as I have shown above, Greenberg does use techniques of translation, transformation, and subversion to make the major (Jesus) minor (Jewish). And while aspects of these poems suggest the impossibility of reclaiming the Christian Jesus, they also overwhelmingly represent Jesus as a victim of the very violence in which he is also implicated. In “Mephisto,” one of Greenberg’s first Expressionist poems, an epic reflection on the chaos of postwar Europe, he presents a sympathetic, even touching, portrait of Jesus’ victimization.

31

/xuzgh zht 'yahb rgsurc i³h³hn zht rgyxhuke ogbht rgyhuy rgs /ojk-,hc ;r¨tsrgy¨tp i³h³hn yahb 'ahb³h³hy©tk zht Bethlehem ,hksdnv ohrn i³h³hn yahb Maria Magdalena zht1x

Greenberg, “In malkhes fun tseylem,” 464.

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And woe is the cross-hung Yeshu ben-Yosef In dark churches, or even on village poles When midnight comes and he opens his eyes in darkness— He sees Pilate suddenly, the master of Golgotha— “Ah, are you the king of the Jews? You certainly deserve a crown!” And lays on the place-for-head a new garland of thorns And laughs and laughs…32 This antithetical characterization demonstrates both a deep ambivalence and the difficulty of creating an unequivocal hybrid. Nonetheless, this dual characterization also demonstrates the difficulty of maintaining a fixed border between Jew and Christian, Self and Other. The porousness of this border and its association with the violent realm of Christian Europe is also apparent in one of Greenberg’s early, pre-Albatros Yiddish poems, “Golgotha.” Indeed, the very circular logic of the poem exposes the artificiality of the fixed border, which, as noted above, blurs the boundaries between Jew and Christian, Self and Other, even past and present. In this poem, as noted earlier, the narrator, also identified with the poet himself, undergoes a kind of mystical transformation in which he becomes Jesus carrying his cross to Golgotha. This literal transformation, coupled with the use of the narrative “I,” blurs the boundaries between poet, narrator, and Jesus, as well as Jew and Christian. The figure of Pilate also forms the 32

;xuh-ic uah ogbgdb©tvgd-okm rgs zht hhuu iut 'xgPukx gahpr¨ts hs ;hut r¨td hm 'xrgyxhuke grgymbhp iht -lauj iht idhut hs ybpg rg iut yf©tb gck©tv ynue1x iguu --tTkdkd iup r©tv ogs 'ogmukP ixuy©tkhP rg ygzrgs H!l¨ts ihure ©t rhs ynue ¨ty ?ish°h iup lkn rgs yxhc us ©tI rgbrgs .b©tre og³h³hb ©t oht atr-ka-ouen iphut ydhhk iut ///ygfhf iut ygfhfiut Uri Tzvi Greenberg, “Mephisto,” Gezamlte verk: tsveyter band, 340. The phrase used here, “mokem-shelrosh,” refers to the placement of phylacteries, one of which rests against the forehead and is called, simply, “shel-rosh.” Again, this subverts the traditionally Christian crown of thorns by connecting it with an element of Jewish ritual. Shalom Lindenbaum suggests that this passage is also an attempt at another kind of hybrid—a historical corrective to the Gospels, in which Pilate behaves with historically accurate cruelty rather than compassion, and is clearly responsible for the death of Jesus. Lindenbaum, 121.

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ground for questioning the borders of both identity and nationality, even the dualistic categories of “self” and “other.” Pilate, a symbol of tyrannical power and violence, is the subject of narrative speculation: “Which race is Pilate from?/In his face I see the form of 70 world peoples. Various noses and various eye colors. Pilate speaks in 70 tongues.”33 On one hand, the mention of Pilate is a reminder that even in ancient times, the time of Jesus, the Jews were a colonized people, subject to the brutality of the Romans. On the other hand, this meditation universalizes the power and violence that Pilate represents and demonstrates the inadequacies of ethnic, national, or racial identifications to explain or avert that violence. Not only character, but time itself is used to question established boundaries. The poem “Golgotha” telescopes time, obscuring the borders between past and present to advance what Yehuda Friedlander has called a “synoptic perception of history.”34 Throughout the poem, the use of conflicting verb tenses suggests the fallacy of linear time. For example, at the moment when the narrator meets Jesus, the action is in the past tense—“I saw,” “I asked,” “he disappeared”—but as soon as the Jesus figure has disappeared and the narrator is left carrying the cross, the action is represented in present tense—“I stand,” “I don’t know,” “sunset burns.” The switch of tenses at a critical moment suggests that the legendary past, in the form of the story of Jesus, is alive and relevant even to the present. 33

gbgshar©tp iut zgb gbgshar©tp

?xuy©tkhP zht ek¨tp rgx¨tuu iup /rgekgpykguu ehmgchz iup yk©tyagd1x lht gz ohbP i³h³hz iht /xuy©tkhP ysgr ,ubuak ehmgchz iht /icr©tpdhut

Greenberg, “Golgotha,” 305. 34

Yehuda Friedlander, “Poetry and History: The Case of U.Z. Greenberg,” Israel Affairs 7:1 (Autumn 2000): 64.

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In particular, a scene in which the crucifixion of Jesus is conflated with twentieth-century victimization of the Jews conveys this synopsis of history. The section begins with the year the poem was written, “Nineteen-twenty…,” a phrase that becomes a kind of refrain repeated throughout. A description follows of the narrator hanging on the cross. This narrator, who is also the “I” of the poem, is conflated with both Jesus and the Jewish people, hanging above while “50 million writhing together sit at my feet and put ash on their heads.”35 The collapse of past and present both animates the historical moment of the crucifixion and allows Greenberg to translate it into a modern Jewish context, a way of representing and understanding the historical and present victimization of the Jews. The collapse of the borders between self and other, past and present, Jew and Christian, narrator and Jesus is mapped onto the very location of the crucifixion: Golgotha. The poem ends with an image of violence and brutality that recalls these antinomies and locates them at the site of Golgotha. In another mystical twist, the narrator has an out-of-body experience after the scene of his own crucifixion and sees an ecstatic vision: the Temple where the throne of glory (kisey-koved) stands is hung all around with red curtains (parokhesn), and on the throne of glory sits a green thing with a horrible snake head. And on the head is a crown of knuckles and human fingers. And at the feet of the throne of glory on the wide step lie crumpled hands, holy hands begging for mercy—/and severed Jewish heads—/many, many— 36 35

//Pge hs ;hut a©t idhhk iut gbgayr¨tegdphubum i¨thkhn impup xbxupum i³h³hn um imhz/// Greenberg, “Golgotha,” 305. 36

©t ymhz sucF-txF iphut iut 'igdbtvgdnur©t i,furP gyhur yhn zht yhhya sucF-txF rgs Uuu kfhv rgs /rgdbhp-iaybgn iup iut xbf¨tbe iup ihure ©t zht P¨te iphutiut /P¨tebdb©tka iehsk©tuugd ©t yhn xbhrd gehsbygc-ohnjr 'ybgv gbgf¨trcgdphubum idhk Pgry gyhhrc hs ;hut sucF-txF ogs xbxupum iut

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At first glance, this image is a perverted vision of the glorious room in the ancient Temple known as the Holy of Holies, into which the High Priest would enter once a year, on Yom Kippur, to perform an expiatory ritual of sacrifice. But here the high priest is replaced by a reptilian creature, and his sacrifices are not repentant, but a triumph of absolute power. The mutilated Jewish victims lying at his feet are a parody of a religious sacrifice. In other words, the redemptive value of the allusion is inverted, turned into a meaningless martyrdom. Setting aside the religious perversion represented in this vision, it also functions to break down the same boundaries that the rest of the poem has called into question. The reptile on the throne wears a crown, an object that alludes to the kingship of the messiah, but also to the crown of thorns Jesus wore as he went to be crucified. This crown, made of human fingers and bones, refers to both the messiah and to Jesus but also to the senseless violence perpetrated on the Jews by the Christian kingdoms of Europe. The narrator, who has functioned in the role of Jesus throughout the poem, lays his own head down among the “severed Jewish heads” at the foot of the throne, suggesting a concordance between the crucifixion and Jewish martyrdom, or even the crucifixion as a variety of Jewish martyrdom.37 Lying among the martyrs, he sees the word “Golgotha”

-- ybgv-ohause --Pgebs°hh gbgyhbagdP¨t iut --lx ©t 'lx ©t Greenberg, “Golgotha,” 307. The word that Greenberg uses here for “curtain,” parokhes, actually conveys a more complicated, and specifically Jewish, meaning. The parokhes is the curtain used to cover the ark holding the Torah. The use of this word here resonates with the earlier use of kisey-koved (the throne of glory), a Yiddish word of Hebrew origin that refers to God and also conveys a sense of God’s omnipotence. 37

Of course, in its time, crucifixion was a Roman punishment that was used extensively on Jews in Roman Palestine.

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flaming on the red curtains. Golgotha, the hill in Jerusalem that was the location of Jesus’ crucifixion, is relocated to Europe and becomes the site of Jewish destruction. This is the place in which the hybrid is realized, a space “in-between,” a place where borders no longer make sense.

The Exile Within During the years Greenberg spent in Warsaw and Berlin (1921-24), where he published Albatros and wrote much of his expressionist Yiddish poetry, he began to undergo a change in his political thinking. “Before I came to Berlin,” he told the scholar Shmuel Huppert, “I was a different man. I was not a Zionist.”38 But at the 13th Zionist Congress in 1923, Greenberg began to identify with the nationalists. Huppert writes that Greenberg then “stopped having doubts and returned to Berlin as a Zionist, who knew which side he was on.”39 This political transformation led to Greenberg’s decision, in late 1923, to make aliyah, to emigrate from Europe to the land of Israel. And his personal transformation from “a radical Yiddish cosmopolitanism to an equally radical Zionism” also led, as Arnold Band has noted, to a concomitant shift in his Yiddish poetry from “the nihilism of expressionism to the messianism of traditional Jewish longings for a return to the ancestral homeland.”40 This longing for an external place to belong, the 38

Shmuel Huppert, Kodkod esh: bemechitzato shel hameshorer uri tzvi greenberg (Fire-crown: In the Company of the Poet Uri Tzvi Greenberg) (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2006): 158. 39

Huppert, 161.

40

Arnold Band, “The Rehabilitation of Uri Tzvi Greenberg” Prooftexts 1 (1981): 321. Shalom Lindenbaum claims that a political-messianic element was present even in Greenberg’s earliest Yiddish poetry, published between 1912-1919. Lindenbaum, “Between the Pole of Existence and the Pole of History: The Poetry of Uri Zvi Greenberg,” Jewish Affairs 53:3 (Spring 1997): 111.

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“four walls and a rafter” of his proclamation, led Greenberg to interiorize his geographical move. Greenberg’s shifting understanding of exile, his own and that of the Jews, and the concomitant shift in his politics, led to his rejection of his European, diaspora Jewish identity. At the same time, Greenberg sought a “return” to an ancient, authentic Jewish identity. As he rejected Yiddish and began to write almost exclusively in Hebrew, Greenberg’s shifting characterization of Jesus reflects his attempt to construct an authentic, independent, modern Jewish identity reterritorialized by Zionism and his own settlement in the land of Israel. In the final issue of Albatros, Greenberg explicated his philosophy of Jewish diaspora as a final farewell to Europe before he left for Palestine. There he claimed that “Europe disavows my birth here. She affirms, after long generations, my pedigree: Orient, so it is!”41 This passage encapsulates Greenberg’s feelings about the confusion, or even hybridization, of his own identity as a modern eastern European Jew. He claims Europe as the land of his birth, yet feels not just rejected but disavowed and erased by European society and culture as a Jew. As Yaron Peleg has noted, this sense that the Jews were not part of Western culture, that they stemmed from the Orient, was historically held by both Europeans and Jews themselves.42 Indeed, Greenberg’s sense of rejection confirms his status as a European outsider, one who challenges the boundaries of established identity in his dual existence: as European, and as Oriental. He goes on to claim that “In my veins runs Hebrew-blood, Arab-blood, Egyptian-blood. So it is! I

41

Greenberg, “Veytikn heym,” 27.

42

Yaron Peleg, Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2005): 4.

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hand over to Europe my frock coat, my necktie, my patent-leather shoes.” 43 He sees his external adoption of Western dress as a mere disguise for his true self, his Oriental self, which dwells in his blood. Thus, Greenberg claims for himself an originary identity as easterner despite his western birth, rejecting completely his European, diasporic, and even Yiddish self. This rejection of one’s inherited identity in favor of a consciously constructed self that is perceived to be more authentic is an internal transformation that requires the creation of an interior boundary, beyond which lies the longed-for space of home. This internal split confuses the question of authenticity: who is the true self? Greenberg’s writing reflects this ambivalence, for on the very same page that he rejects his European self, Greenberg affirms the importance of Yiddish to both his identity and legacy. “I want my child to say ‘mame’ instead of ‘matushka.’ It (es) should speak like me: woeful Yiddish. It should be the living naysayer to the crucifix-Europe.”44 Greenberg refers to his imagined offspring with the neuter pronoun es, instead of the masculine er, indicating that he is referring not to flesh-and-blood children (he had none until late in life), but to his art. This “child” should use language as a protest and a means to create a Jewish space within Christian Europe. The role of the Jew in Europe, then, is still important to Greenberg, despite his apparent rejection of the western and diasporic in favor of the

43

Greenberg, “Veytikn heym,” 27. Greenberg’s claim that Arab blood runs in his veins probably also explains his attitudes toward actual Arabs living in Palestine, and later, the state of Israel. For if Greenberg is a true Arab, then what are the Palestinian Arabs? This claim is another blurring of the boundaries of identity, although one made ominous by Greenberg’s later association with the Revisionist movement, which held as one of its political goals the expulsion of the Arab population from Palestine, and, later, the state of Israel. 44

Greenberg, “Veytikn heym,” 27.

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oriental. This passage argues powerfully for the continued existence of a hybrid Jewish European culture and claims value for the diaspora. Homi Bhabha has noted that “[t]he social articulation of difference, from a minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of social transformation.”45 The Khalyastre movement, Greenberg’s Yiddish poetry about Jesus, the creation of a Jewish modernist culture in the midst of Christian Europe, could all be said to be attempts at creating a space for the Jew, like Greenberg, who only wore a “dress coat” to cover the “Hebrew-blood” in his veins.46 Nonetheless, Greenberg continued to search for an external solution to his internal exile. At the time this essay was published, in Berlin in 1924, Greenberg was already in Palestine. Though he may have maintained an ambivalent attachment to Europe, and seen the Yiddish language as a tool for creating a kind of protest culture, a contra-modern response to the violence and victimization of the Jews, he chose to remake himself in the image of the Oriental like the one he described poetically in the same issue of Albatros and in almost the same words at the end of “In malkhes fun tseylem”: “Dress me in an ample Arab tunic, a tallis thrown over my shoulder,/ the once-extinguished East blazing suddenly in my impoverished blood/and—here, have the frock coat and necktie and patent-leather shoes/that I bought in Eu-ro-pe.”47 Again, an idealized East here is 45

Bhabha, 2.

46

See note 22 above.

47

',hky ©t kxe©t i³h³hn ;hut ypr©tuur©tp 'gh©tc©t-rgc©tr©t rgyhhrc ©t lhn i¨t yuy rhn yukc igngr¨t iht jrzhn rgbr¨tuugd-ia¨tkr©tp rgs k¨tn ©t yhn ;hut yrge©tkp lhae©tk hs iut xPhba ogs iut e©trp ogs l³h³ht y©tb - iut /gP-¨tr-hht iht yphuegd c¨tv lht x¨tuu Greenberg, “In malkhes fun tseylem,” 472.

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represented as his origin, his true home, which was erased during his exile in Europe.48 And again, it is the clothing, the outward symbols of culture, which distinguish identity. But that transformed identity is also a hybrid identity, this time a mix of the traditional dress of the native Arab population and the ritual Jewish garment. This exterior symbol of the East will be accompanied by an internal change as the place enters his blood and he casts off, with his European dress, the internal bonds that keep him in exile. Greenberg’s need to separate himself from his European roots and claim the East as his home precipitated a change in his relationship to Yiddish and to his fellow Yiddish poets. Several years after his arrival in Israel Greenberg described this split in an article in Davar: My friends, the Yiddish poets, went to Moscow, to the gentile “truth” [emes, spelled phonetically], and the Hebrew spelling is nothing but peripheral. There they recast their souls and forgot their Jerusalemite origins. And I went to Jerusalem: to the Jewish truth [emes/emet, in the correct Hebrew spelling].49 Here Greenberg characterizes the socialist project as represented by Moscow, to which he had previously been sympathetic, as a purely gentile notion. This is symbolized by the Soviet style of Yiddish orthography, in which words of Hebrew origin were spelled phonetically so as to divorce them from their “bourgeois-nationalist” Hebrew roots and render them fully Yiddish, which was considered a proletarian language. For Greenberg this also represents the severing of the poets themselves from their own “Jerusalamite,” 48

The image of the East, the Orient, advanced here and elsewhere by Greenberg also functions, as Edward Said has theorized, as an image of the Other—in this case, a glorified image but one that describes what Said calls the author’s “strategic location” with respect to the Orient. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979): 20. This allows Greenberg to construct the Orient, with its Arab tunics (but not actual Arabs) and its passion and heat, as home, as belonging to him, as the location from which he has been exiled, even though he has never been there. For a complete treatment of Orientalism in Hebrew literature, see Peleg. 49

Uri Tzvi Greenberg, “Mehatam lehakah” (From There to Here), Kol ketavav, vol. 15, 157.

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Jewish origins. In a sense he sees this as a kind of conversion, if not to another religion, then to a “gentile truth.” Similarly, he sees his aliyah to Palestine as a movement toward “Jewish truth,” a becoming more authentically Jewish. This, too, is represented for Greenberg by language, for, as noted above, he writes the word for truth in its traditional Hebrew spelling, symbolizing his embrace not only of political Zionism, but a kind of cultural nationalism as well, in which he will trade the emes of Yiddish for the emet of modern Hebrew. The idea that a writer would have to choose between the two primary languages of European Jewish cultural production was a relatively new one at the time Greenberg wrote these lines. Up until the late nineteenth century, and even as late as the beginning of the first World War, a tradition of bilingualism flourished among European Jewish writers. 50 Historically, many Jewish writers did not see one language as their first and the other as their second, one authentic and the other adopted, but both as their own, native mode of expression. As the Yiddish literary critic Shmuel Niger noted of the period in which Yiddish came to be a literary language, in the Middle Ages, “…when people began to write in Yiddish, this did not bespeak a switch from an alien language to a language that was one’s own. No, here it was a case of a desire to add a second language of one’s own to a first.”51 Such iconic writers as S.Y. Abramovitsh (Mendele 50

For a complete historical treatment of Jewish vernacular and literary bilingualism, see the chapter titled “Internal Jewish Bilingualism” in Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, trans. Shlomo Noble (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980): 247-314, as well as Shmuel Niger, Bilingualism in the History of Jewish Literature, trans. Joshua A. Fogel (New York: University Press of America, 1990) and Bal Makhshoves, “One Literature in Two Languages,” What Is Jewish Literature?, ed. Hana Wirth-Nesher (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994): 69-77. 51

Niger, 17. Bal Makhshoves expressed a similar sentiment. See Bal Makhshoves, 70. Niger also notes that having a national literature in two languages has been part of the Jewish cultural tradition since ancient times, when Hebrew and Aramaic coexisted in Jewish communities. Niger, 42.

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Mokher Sforim), Y.L. Peretz, and even the Hebrew poet laureate H.N. Bialik wrote extensively in both languages and even translated their own works between the two. But in the years leading up to and after World War I, the two languages began to separate into camps identified with social trends (in particular, Yiddish with socialism and Jewish life in the Diaspora, and Hebrew with Zionism and Jewish life in Palestine). Shmuel Niger attributed the decline of bilingualism after the war to the difficulties of Jewish cultural continuity after the migrations and displacements of the war as well as the increasing polarization between the “Jewish homeland” in Palestine and the Soviet Union.52 It was a feature of political Zionism that the search for a more authentic Jewishness linked to a return to the land was also associated with language.53 And the embrace of the “true” language of the Jews, Hebrew, was contingent upon the rejection of the “adopted” language, Yiddish, and its location in the diaspora. Naomi Seidman notes that “Hebrew was revived at least partially by tapping into a strong distaste for the disempowered diaspora existence…; this distaste reflected itself, above all, in the rejection of the mame-loshn that both expressed and was the product of the objectionable Eastern European past.”54 For Uri Tzvi Greenberg, the return from exile was deeply,

52

Niger, 107-8.

53

In his 1918 article on bilingualism Bal Makhshoves explicated the link between land and language when he noted that “[t]he literature of oppressed peoples has always been their own territory, where they feel entirely at home. At the very least it has proved a kind of ex-territoriality, something like Franz Josef’s palace or an English embassy in a foreign land. On the threshold of the building the foreign country’s authority ends. Behind the walls of such a building, be it in Turkey or Persia, a man could live as if he were entirely at home, with no one having any power over him except his own national community….our earth, our very home, has always been literature.” Bal Makhshoves, 75. 54

Naomi Seidman, A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997): 110. Many Yiddish critics lamented this rejection. Shmuel Niger made an impassioned case for the continued coexistence of Hebrew and Yiddish in 1941, when he wrote, “Yiddish in no sense diminishes the honor of Hebrew. Both are Jewish languages; both help Jews achieve

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traumatically linked to language. In his Hebrew literary manifesto “Klapei tishim veteisha” (Against the Ninety-Nine) Greenberg wrote of his embrace of Hebrew, “Indeed, there must be a reason that a man arises and cuts his mother-tongue from his mouth and begins ‘just because’ in a blood-language immersed in the ancient nation. Indeed, this is not begun ‘just because’….”55 The violence of this image is startling. First, it expresses the desire to forcibly remake the self through language. Greenberg will abandon the language of his mother, who represents the world of home and childhood, as well as his identity as a European. For this kind of trauma, he writes, “there must be a reason,” and his reason is to transform himself, even translate himself, into the culture of his “ancient nation.” This translation of the self, however, is more than just linguistic. Greenberg’s language suggests an anti-Oedipal desire to kill the mother and return to the father, God, who spoke to the “ancient nation” of Israelites in the “blood language” of Hebrew. As Shmuel Huppert notes, In his movement from Yiddish to Hebrew he adopted the national values embodied in the historical “pure” language of the nation of Israel and abandoned the exilic language, Yiddish. In this demonstrative act he decreed himself separate, or according to his figurative definition “cut,” from his mother-tongue, the language of his childhood and youth and the language of his early poetic creation. The split symbolizes the cutting of the umbilical cord that connected him to the intimate language of his mother.56

literary and general cultural enjoyment in life; both are pillars upon which stands the great national edifice of Judaism.” Niger, 47. 55

Uri Tzvi Greenberg, “Klapei tishim veteisha” (Against the Ninety-Nine), Kol ketavav, vol. 16, 195.

56

Huppert, 56.

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By cutting this “umbilical cord,” Greenberg was also trying to dissociate himself from the negative connotations of writing in Yiddish: as the language of the subjugated European Jew, it was represented as weak, denigrated, and feminized. Writing in general of the Hebraists in Palestine, Naomi Seidman claims that “the growing Hebrew-speaking culture derived a sort of psychic momentum from actively stigmatizing what it saw as the womanly tongue and distancing itself from it.”57 In Greenberg’s formulation, that distancing is absolute—he hopes to cut his Yiddish tongue from his mouth, and cut himself off from his subjugated diaspora existence at the same time. The characterization of the Jewish people in the land of Israel as ancient and Hebrew as part of the blood legitimates both the presence of the Jews in Israel and its status as the authentic homeland, and also interiorizes that geography, claiming it as an integral part of the self. If we take the image to its logical conclusion, however, we see that it also results in the silencing of a part of the self—the Yiddish, European, diasporic part, the part associated with home and childhood—and the creation of an exile within. Sander Gilman has written of the German-Jewish context that “the Jewish writer…must establish his or her dominance over the language and discourse of the culture in which he or she lives. The image of the language of the Jews and the idea of a ‘Jewish’ language and discourse is central to any self-definition of the Jew.”58 Gilman was writing of the Jew as a minor figure attempting to establish dominance over the major, non-Jewish vernacular. But in his move to Zionism and the land of Israel, Greenberg had to establish his dominance over a Jewish vernacular in which he 57

Seidman, 110.

58

Sander Gilman, Inscribing the Other (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1991): 298.

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functioned as a minor writer, unable to shed fully his European clothing. His own ambivalence is apparent elsewhere in “Klapei tishim veteisha,” where he writes that the “ultimate basis for the new Hebrew poetry” is redemption of the land and the fertilization of the desert in accordance with the doctrine of the Israeli spirit. A revolution in itself: the return to Zion. Otherwise—why should we write in translation-language and not in the diasporic mother-tongue that saturated the ground of the soul and whispers like a fire from under the platform of ideas?59 In other words, why write in Hebrew at all? Hebrew is characterized as vastly inferior— a mere “translation-language”—to Yiddish, rich and saturating, fiery and emotional.60 Political expediency, in the form of the “return to Zion” in all its forms—geographic, linguistic, spiritual—is presented as the only reason to abandon Yiddish. Writing in Hebrew is linked to the land, to the need for a legitimate, authentic Jewish space, but only of necessity. Indeed, Hebrew is not even characterized here as an originary, authentic language, only as a voice that refers back to the original “diasporic mother-tongue” but can never be the mother-tongue. The desire to cut himself off from Yiddish and diaspora, with all its implications, represents a wish to move from the marginal world of the mother to the powerful world of the father, to abandon minority in favor of majority. But even the title of the manifesto in which this characterization of Hebrew appears, “Against the Ninety-Nine,” also suggests that Greenberg continued to place himself in a position of minority. The title of his manifesto positions Greenberg as one writer facing off against the other 99 out of 100. 59

Greenberg, “Klapei tishim veteisha,” 199.

60

Historically, the phrase “translation-language” (targum lashon) was “a synonym for a language that one could not understand,” a connotation that arose from the custom of reading the Aramaic translation of the week’s Torah portion even when Aramaic was no longer spoken or understood. Niger, 42.

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Even choosing Hebrew, with its Zionist associations with political power and masculinity, over Yiddish, with its denigrated connections to the Diaspora, could not eliminate the exile within. Following Chana Kronfeld, it is clear that Greenberg’s bilingualism and his “translation” into Hebrew calls into question the stability of the very categories of minority and majority themselves.61 Indeed, Greenberg’s inability to completely translate himself into a Hebrew writer exposes the very inauthenticity of the distinctions made between Hebrew and Yiddish by Hebraists and Yiddishists. As Greenberg himself told Shmuel Huppert, “When I arrived in Israel I was afraid to speak Hebrew, but Hebrew was in my mouth even when I spoke Yiddish.”62 This statement reflects the complicated reality of the “translation-language” that underlay Greenberg’s absolutist claims about “mother-tongue” and “blood-tongue.”63 Even after making aliyah and claiming publicly his switch to Hebrew, Greenberg continued to defend Yiddish and the Diaspora. In one of his first published manifestoes in Hebrew, his ambivalent and complex attitude toward both of his languages is clear: “The literature of Israel in Yiddish has suffered a blow. That is its fate: the nation and not the territory is its backbone. And woe to the spiritual invalids, the ‘Hebraists,’ who take comfort in the joy of this blow.”64 Indeed, Greenberg was a supporter of the

61

Kronfeld, 13.

62

Huppert, 54.

63

The fallacy of this distinction with regard to Greenberg’s actual writing was also noted by Avrum Sutzkever, who wrote that mame-loshn “is also, as his poetry attests, the language of his blood.” Sutzkever, 5. 64

Uri Tzvi Greenberg, “Manifest lebitui” (Manifesto for Expression), Kol ketavav, vol. 16, 13. Arye Pilovski notes that “on one side the poet called for, with extreme ardor, a total return to the homeland….From the other side, Greenberg’s journalism was permeated with deep compassion and sympathy for the Jews in Poland.” Arye Leyb Pilovski, Tsvishn yo un neyn: yidish un yidish-literatur in

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establishment of a Yiddish Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at its inception, and in a letter expressing his support to Judah Magnes he characterized himself as “one who is counted as one of the young Yiddish poets of the Diaspora, but also a Zionist Hebrew.”65 This ambivalent position with regard to Hebrew was not only internal but was reflected in Greenberg’s reception as well. For Huppert also notes that when Greenberg first began to write in Hebrew, he was actually viewed as an oleh hadash, or new immigrant, an outsider to the language.66 The fact that Greenberg was perceived as an outsider even when writing in Hebrew could be attributed to the fact that his Hebrew itself retained aspects of Yiddish. Huppert notes that Greenberg originally wrote in the Ashkenazi accents of Eastern European mame-loshn, and only after he had been in Palestine for some time did he switch to the preferred Sephardic accents. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the progenitor of the Modern Hebrew vernacular in the land of Israel, had chosen the Sephardi accent for the new language because of its perceived association with the beauty and authenticity of the Orient, as opposed to the perceived ugliness of the Diaspora.67 As Naomi Seidman describes it, “The preference for the Sephardic or Oriental accentual system was often described as a rejection of a weak and ‘whining’ intonational pattern for a forceful accent

erets-yisroel, 1907-1948 (Between Yes and No: Yiddish and Yiddish Literature in the Land of Israel, 19071948) (Tel Aviv: World Council for Yiddish and Jewish Culture, 1986): 137. 65

Quoted in Hanan Hever, “Shira ufublitsistikah beshnato harishona shel U.Z. Greenberg beerets yisrael” (Poetry and Journalism in U. Z. Greenberg’s First Year in Erets Yisrael), Mekhere yerushalayim besifrut ivrit (Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature) 9 (1986): 187. 66

Huppert, 57.

67

Harshav, 105.

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as far removed from the Yiddish-inflected Hebrew as possible.”68 Although he had hoped to end his personal exile by cutting himself off from the Diaspora physically and culturally, Greenberg’s writing itself indicates the impossibility of separating the two languages that comprised his literary identity.69 The condition of exile was not a problem that could be solved through a simple linguistic or geographical move. The condition of exile, in fact, is inherent to the situation of the bilingual writer. George Steiner writes of what he calls the “language revolution” after the first World War: A striking aspect of this language revolution had been the emergence of linguistic pluralism or “unhousedness” in certain great writers. These writers stand in a relation of dialectical hesitance not only toward one native tongue—as Hölderlin or Rimbaud did before them—but toward several languages. This is almost unprecedented. It speaks of the more general problem of a lost center.70 While Steiner connects the problem of linguistic “unhousedness” to a “lost center,” in the case of the Jewish bilingual writer, it might be more accurate to see it simply as the absence of an originary “center,” or to go even further, the Jewish bilingual writer might call into question the very notion of a “center” itself. As Naomi Seidman has noted, “Jewish bilingualism, from very early on, contributed to a sense of authorial subjectivity

68

Seidman, 113.

69

Yael Chaver claims that Greenberg effectively separated the Hebrew and Yiddish parts of his oeuvre, and self, by only publishing Yiddish work in Europe, a claim that is clearly false. See Yael Chaver, What Must be Forgotten: The Survival of Yiddish in Zionist Palestine (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2004): 112. For more on Greenberg’s publishing history in Yiddish in both Europe and Israel, see Khone Shmeruk, “Yetsirato shel uri tzvi greenberg beyidish beeretz yisrael vepolin besof shnot haesrim uveshnot hashloshim” (The Yiddish Work of Uri Tzvi Greenberg in the Land of Israel and in Poland at the End of the 1920s and the 1930s), Hasifrut 29 (1979): 82-92. 70

George Steiner, Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1972): viii.

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as fissured and cut off from its ‘natural’ linguistic expression.”71 This is the state that Homi Bhabha has called “unhomeliness”: “the estranging sense of the relocation of the home and the world…that is the condition of extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiations.”72 Unhomeliness belies the existence of the center, denies the possibility of the authentic. Uri Tzvi Greenberg, for one, continued to believe in the possibility of this authentic language and national center. But his own work exposes the inaccessibility of the authentic or central in language and identity: voluntarily cut off from his native tongue and the place of his birth and education, he sought a place of his own, a national center, in Palestine and in Hebrew. But this “home” was never home: Hebrew remained, for him, a “translation-language.” The persistence of this “unhousedness” is everywhere apparent in Greenberg’s Hebrew writing; the uneasy tension between “mother-tongue” and “blood-tongue” expresses itself again as a map of antinomies stretched between West and East: Yiddish/Hebrew, diaspora/Zion, exile/redemption.73 Greenberg is profoundly invested in

71

Seidman, 10. Shmuel Niger could not accept that a writer could be truly bilingual, even in a bilingual Jewish culture. “A genuine writer has only one genuine language, just as he possesses only one self.” Niger, 56. This claim expresses the problem precisely, for if a writer does have more than one “genuine language,” does he also have more than one self? It also begs the question, what is “genuine”? 72

Bhabha, 9. Although he does not credit Freud, Bhabha’s notion of “unhomeliness” seems to rely at least partially on Freud’s discussion of the uncanny (unheimlich, literally “unhomely”). Written at the end of World War I, during the same period of dislocation in which Greenberg began to publish his Expressionist Yiddish poetry, Freud wrote that the frightening feeling of the uncanny “is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.” It is that which has become detached from its origins and returns in another guise. See Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey with Anna Freud, Vol. 17: An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955): 241. 73

Naomi Seidman has noted that in general the opposition Hebrew/Yiddish has corresponded to other cultural oppositions, like sacred/profane and men/women. Seidman, 6. Yaron Peleg has argued that Zionism actually defies simplistic categorizations of East and West and exposes their instability, much as I

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maintaining clear boundaries between the two poles of these oppositions, yet in each case they break down, suggesting the porousness of the borders between them. As in the Yiddish, in Greenberg’s Hebrew poetry Jesus becomes a figure uniquely suited for expressing these antinomies, and he is also the site at which the borders break down. Ultimately, Jesus comes to represent a specifically Jewish redemption, one that crosses all the borders set out by history, geography, religion, and tradition.

The Return to the East As we saw above, Greenberg’s search for his own “lost center” focused on a return to a glorified East, a masculine, Hebraized space that would erase the taint of diaspora, the alienation of Christian Europe. But Greenberg was disappointed by the actual East he encountered, a problem he described in a manifesto published in the first issue of his Hebrew literary journal Sadan: “This nation is tattered and wounded from its exodus from Europe. It has not yet entered into the Orient and its glow and has not yet been freed in its blood, an introspective freedom, from Europe.”74 Although Greenberg himself hoped that the external transformation of the Jews as a nation—the move to the East as symbolized by the donning of the Arab tunic and the abandonment of European dress—would lead to an internal one, what he found was that the West, after such a long period of communal exile, had permeated Jewish culture and had helped to form modern

am arguing that Greenberg’s poetry about Jesus does, although it also exposes the instability of some of Zionist discourse, particularly about language. Peleg, 12-13. 74

Greenberg, “Manifest lebitui,” 17.

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Jewish identity. Indeed, despite the geographical move to the land of Israel, western values had become inextricable from Jewish culture. Greenberg saw this infiltration of the West and the exile it represented as dangerous to the Jewish body politic and contaminating to the very land of Israel. In an essay in Sadan written not long after his own immigration, Greenberg observed, We fled because of a vision to Eretz-Yisrael. We nurtured an idea in blood. We trembled from a dream of redemption. For the Odessa of Palestine we did not pray. And for the sight of Nalevkes on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea we did not dream. Nalevkes in Eretz-Yisrael! Meaning that it is impossible to separate from the diaspora because it is deep within us: part of the body!75 Nalevkes, the name of the main market street in Warsaw where many Jewish merchants did business, symbolized the commercial-capitalist values of the Jews of Europe which Greenberg had hoped to replace in Palestine with a more “masculine,” oriental agrarian culture. But, on arriving in Israel, Greenberg was disappointed by the overreliance on commerce to the detriment of agricultural projects. Here the culture of the diaspora is not simply an external manifestation; it is represented as embodied, inseparable from the individual or the community as a whole, part of the body politic. The movement of individuals, emigration and immigration, the crossing of borders geographical, psychic, and spiritual, cannot eliminate the influence of the West: like the Body Snatchers, it has taken up residence inside, abducted from within. The sense that the West has abducted the East, corrupted the values of the glorified Orient, and tainted Jewish identity, was represented by Greenberg in the figure

75

Greenberg, “Odessa defalestina venalevkes” (Odessa of Palestine and Nalevkes), Kol ketavav, vol. 16, 47.

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of Jesus.76 In an early article in his journal Sadan, Greenberg wrote of Jesus, “At the moment he is theirs: Christ. Theirs is Jerusalem. Theirs is the holy land.”77 Just as, he implies, the Christian possession of Jerusalem and Israel is inappropriate, so too is the Christian appropriation of Jesus. However, this ownership is momentary: Greenberg suggests that just as the Jews will take back Israel, so too will they reappropriate Jesus, who belongs both in Israel and with the Jews. Less concretely, this passage suggests a cultural association between the Christian adoption of Jesus and the infiltration of western, Diaspora cultural values in the land of Israel and in modern Jewish culture more generally. The abduction of Jesus by the Christian West is the focus of the Hebrew poem “Bemaarav” (In the West). Though the title suggests a perspective in the West, its focus is on the East, viewing Jesus as a native of Israel forcibly exiled from his rightful home. The narrator of the poem calls Jesus his “Galilean brother,” an appellation that reinforces his origin in the ancient land of Israel and constructs his identity as associated with the land itself. But this Jesus has, like the Jews, been exiled. In this poem, Jesus’ exile and displacement from the East is exposed through the narrator’s conversation with a group

76

Even Greenberg’s choice of Jesus as a symbol, however, was fraught by the idea of western corruption of an original, Oriental Hebrew culture. Greenberg denigrated the persistence of western cultural values in Jewish writing, criticizing Hebrew writers, like Shaul Tschernikhovski, who chose to write in traditional western forms like the idyll and sonnet, because he felt that western forms could never properly represent the collective Jewish experience (“Tishim veteisha,” 197). Yet David Weinfeld has noted that Greenberg himself relied on “mythic examples of western culture” like Jesus and Socrates in order to prove that Judaism “does not stand in opposition to the other spiritual revelations of man” and can support an equally valuable culture. David Weinfeld, “Shirat uri tzvi greenberg beshnot haesrim al reka haekspresyonism” (The Poetry of Uri Tzvi Greenberg in the 1920s Against the Background of Expressionism), Molad 39-40 (1980): 70. At the same time that Greenberg wanted to deny the value and importance of the West and western culture to Jews and Judaism, he needed it in order to legitimate the very Jewish culture he was trying to build. 77

Uri Tzvi Greenberg, “Yerushalayim ir hakodesh” (Jerusalem the Holy City), Kol ketavav, vol. 16, 11.

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of Galilean shepherds and with Jesus himself. The shepherds, who “remember” Jesus as if remembering fondly a young man from the neighborhood who has left the area to seek his fortune, ask the narrator about their old friend. “[O]f the exile of the world/you certainly have much to tell—do tell,/what is the lot of our condemned brother Jesus/on several poles/in the exile of the world.”78 The narrator, who is described as having “in my eyes no memory of the flame of an eastern sunrise/rather bright splinters of the sunset,” having been himself exiled to the West, is seen by the shepherds as being in the same situation as Jesus.79 Both are originally of the East, exiled to the West, and now trying to return. The desire to return from exile is expressed by the figure of Jesus in answer to the narrator’s questioning. Addressing the narrator directly, the Jesus of the poem tells him, speaking in the third person of himself, “great is his longing for the land of Israel,” and, as noted before, that he will return to Israel wearing a tallit (prayer shawl).80 Like the narrator, and Greenberg himself, Jesus feels himself displaced and yearns for his own land and culture. Mimicking Greenberg’s abandonment of his European dress in favor of the Arab tunic of the East, Jesus also throws off the external trappings of his exile in the realm of Christianity, adopting the tallit as a way of returning to his original place in 78

o7kIg¨v ,Uk²D¦n/// 'v¨sh°D©v - - r?P©xk ,IC©r Wk a¯h i¥v g¨eUN©v Ubh¦j¨t Ua¯h k¤a Iek¤j v©n ,It¨x±bIkf v¨NF kg ///o7kIg¨v ,Uk²dC

Greenberg, “Bemaarav,” 45. 79

,h¦j¨r±z¦n v¨jh¦r±z k¤a v¨rUs§n r;f®z ih¥t h¯bh?gcU/// ///v7gh¦e§A¦n oh¦r¨v±z h¥rUrc©a t7K¤t

Greenberg, “Bemaarav,” 44-5. 80

Greenberg, “Bemaarav,” 46.

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Judaism. In fact, this Jesus claims that he wore this very garment to his own crucifixion, up to the moment at which he was claimed, or abducted, by Christianity. In “Bemaarav” Jesus is envisioned in direct conversation with the wandering narrator, not only answering in his own voice, but speaking of action, of his own triumphant return to his homeland. In the Yiddish poems, by contrast, Jesus is largely silent, a mute witness to the degradations perpetrated in his name, even his voice usurped by the Church and the West. In “Uri tzvi farn tseylem” the narrator says to Jesus, “You have become silent. You have peace on the cross./I—do not. I do not.”81 Even the moments when Jesus does speak in Yiddish reveal his impotence. In the first part of Greenberg’s long Yiddish poem “Velt barg arop” (World Downhill), Jesus is hounded by a diverse gang who encourage him to get down from his cross, since “you are a man, in the same image as we!” Jesus refuses, answering them directly: “I cannot/take a step on the earth…I don’t know. It is sunset,/I don’t know the way to Beyslekhem…/I have not been in Galilee for two thousand years…/And I have not prayed in the temple for so long….”82 In contrast to the Jesus of “Bemaarav,” who “will return to the land of Israel,” the Jesus of Christian Europe cannot even take a step for fear of losing his way back. He has been so thoroughly co-opted by the West that he has forgotten the route to 81

Greenberg, “Uri tsvi farn tseylem,” 433.

82

'okm ogbup P¨tr©t/// !igbgz rhn huu yk©tyagd ickgz ogs iht 'aybgn us yahb ige lht/// 'vghea zht1x /yahb xhhuu lht///iuy srg rgs ;hut yhry ©t ///ojk-,hc ihhe yrhp rgfkguu dguu ogs yahb ige lht ///khkd iht izguugd yahb r¨th ybzhuy hhuum ihc1f ///asen iht ybguu©tsgd yahb db©tk huz©t c¨tv1f iut

Uri Tzvi Greenberg, “Velt Barg Arop” (World Downhill), Gezamlte verk: tsveyter band, 410.

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Beyslekhem, his birthplace, and the Jewish liturgy. Like Greenberg and the Jews, this Jesus is captive on the cross, estranged from the East by geography, time, and even religion. In the Hebrew poems about Jesus, by contrast, the largely silent captive of the Yiddish poems not only speaks, but acts. This activity is itself constructive, suggesting the figure of Jesus as a model for the renewal of Jewish identity in the land of Israel. Unlike Jesus’ speech in “Velt barg arop,” in which he is confused and impotent, here Jesus actually enacts change through his very speech. In “Bemaarav,” an entire section of the poem is devoted to Jesus’ speech; titled “Hamaaneh” (The Answer), it provides a practical answer to the mystification of the figure of Jesus. The narrator has asked Jesus what he should tell the shepherds of the Galilee when he returns to the land of Israel. Jesus responds by telling the narrator, “do not say:/he hangs there/dead/on a tree.”83 In denying his own death, the character of Jesus in this poem stands in contrast to the poetic characterization of “Uri tsvi farn tseylem,” in which he is passive and silent. He negates the passivity of death, insisting instead on an active position, and denies, by extension, the cult of his death, the redemption through suffering. By insisting on his own animation, Jesus accomplishes a Jewish resurrection for himself, in contrast to the Christian one of myth. Within the poem, the isolation of the word met, “dead,” on its own line emphasizes this symbolic resurrection.

83

:sh°D©T k©t±u o¨a hUk¨, tUv ,¥n /ikh¦t h?k=g

Greenberg, “Bemaarav,” 46.

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Instead of hanging “dead/on a tree,” Jesus tells the narrator that “he hangs in the midst of the world and sees/to the end of all generations.”84 Unlike the Jesus of “Uri tzvi farn tseylem,” whose “hardened eyes see nothing,” this Jesus sees everything, extending himself temporally and geographically. Most importantly, however, this Jesus is no longer a captive of the Christian West; instead he states with certainty that “he will return to the land of Israel.” Indeed, Jesus is explicitly envisioned here as the Jewish messiah, who “will rise for the time/of redemption of the world” wearing David’s crown, a symbol of the messiah.85 This Jesus envisions his own redemption, sees himself as a new kind of Jew, a harbinger of redemption not just spiritual but practical: a renewal of the land and the Jewish people. The poem “Yerushalayim shel mata” (Earthly Jerusalem) presents a particularly Jewish vision of how Jesus is to accomplish this messianic redemption by bringing him back to the land of Israel, translating him into a Zionist context. The last section of the eight-part poem begins with the exhortation, “…And now, my brother, leave the monasteries, for the time has come, and go to Mea Shearim.”86 In other words, Jesus must take the same route as Greenberg himself, leaving Christian Europe for Jerusalem. Specifically, he must leave the Christian space of the monastery and go to the Jewish part of Jerusalem. Even better, the narrator instructs, would be to travel to the Jezreel Valley, 84

v;pIm±u o7kIg¨v g7mn¤tC hUk¨, tUv ,IrIS©v k7F ;Ix sg

Greenberg, “Bemaarav,” 46. 85

s?gInk v;=g³h tUv

o7kIg¨v ,7kªt±D

Greenberg, “Bemaarav,” 46. Emphasis in original. 86

…oh¦¦r7g§a v¨t¥nkU's?gIn t7c hF 'oh¦r²z±b¦N©v i¦n t?m 'h¦j¨t 'v¨Tg±u///

Greenberg, “Yerushalayim shel mata,” 68.

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in the Galilee, in the clothes of a pioneer. “Go and arrive at the valley and find there brothers plowing the earth, say hello to them, my brothers, and they will answer you: hello./Say: take me to the plow, they will take you; and if you work they will love you like a brother, you will eat your bread in holiness.”87 It is this agricultural work, and not a mystical religious process, that will lead to what Greenberg’s Zionist ideology considered the only true redemption: rebuilding the land of Israel. This, finally, is the new Jewish identity that Jesus represents, the Hebrew pioneer who will redeem not only the land, but the Jewish people as well. This active redemption is marked by a clear boundary. The narrator asks, “Day by day do you not hear the cutting thunder:/for a third time they build the city beyond the Via Dolorosa!”88 The Via Dolorosa, Jesus’ route to the crucifixion, has ossified into the border between Judaism and Christianity, marking out the actual territory of Jerusalem. But to achieve his modern redemption, the Jesus of “Yerushalayim shel mata” must go beyond the suffering symbolized by the Via Dolorosa; instead, he must leave the cloistered inaction of the “monasteries,” the silent passivity described in the Yiddish poems, to participate, like other Jews, in working the land. In doing so, he violates the literal and symbolic boundaries of the faith that has adopted him. In the nationalist characterization of the Hebrew poems, Jesus’ death does not redeem; rather, his life does. The images of cultivation and active rebuilding undercut the notion of suffering as the

87

/oIk¨a :Wk Ub=g³h o¥v±u 'h©j©t 'In7k oIk¨a r©nt«T 'v¨n¨s£t¨v oh¦a§rIj oh¦j©t ¨,t7m¨nU e¤n?g¨v k¤t tIc¨,±u v7fk /a¤s«EC W§n§jk kft«T 'oh¦j©t InF WUc¨v¡t®h s«c=g©T o¦t±u `WUj¨E°h 'v¨a¥r£j©Nk h°bUj¨e :r©nt«T Greenberg, “Yerushalayim shel mata,” 68. 88

!ohcItf©N©v-,ImUv r;c?g¥n rhg¨v ,¤t ,h¦Jhk§J oh°bIC :ohg§eIC r¤J£t oh¦n7g§r¨v ,¤t g©n§a¦, tO o¦t©v oIhC oIh Greenberg, “Yerushalayim shel mata,” 68

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key to redemption.89 It is not the pain represented by the Via Dolorosa that will redeem, but something above and beyond, yet simultaneously less lofty and elevated than suffering: the common, everyday work of the average man. This quotidian messianism was characteristic of Greenberg’s Hebrew poetry. Hanan Hever has noted that the “mystical perspective returns again and again to the national eretz-yisraeli context of the pioneering accomplishment, and locates in it a clear spiritual legitimacy that is akin to the process of the appearance of the messiah.”90 This messianism, like that of many other Hebrew writers of the pioneer generation, was strongly linked to Zionism, and the pioneer functioned as a representative of the messiah in modern times. In “Yerushalayim shel mata” we see a conflation of the pioneermessiah with Jesus, a hybrid construction that turns Jesus into a modern Jewish messiah who redeems not through the Christian value of suffering but the new Hebrew value of agricultural work and building the land. The hopes of the “unhoused” writer, longing for his own linguistic and cultural center, are embodied here in the figure of Jesus, another wanderer loose from his moorings seeking a home and a path to redemption. Most importantly, the Hebrew poems about Jesus represent an evolution, pointing to Greenberg’s shifting conception of modern Jewish identity. The Yiddish poems saw Jesus as an ambivalent, sometimes contradictory figure, prisoner and exile, victim of his own fate, and therefore kin to the Jews. The Hebrew poems, on the other hand, use Jesus 89

David Roskies has noted that “the Jewish Jesus…stands as the icon of universal suffering,” but Greenberg’s characterization of Jesus raises questions about the value of suffering itself. In Greenberg’s version, Jesus’ resurrection comes not through suffering, but through nationalism and Zionism. Roskies, 263. 90

Hanan Hever, Beshevi hautopia: masa al meshikhiut vepolitika bashirah haivrit beeretz yisrael bein shtei milkhamor haolam (Captives of Utopia: An Essay on Messianism and Politics in Hebrew Poetry in Eretz Yisrael Between the Two World Wars) (Sde Boker: Ben Gurion University, 1995): 55.

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to construct an alternate story of Jewish triumphalism and redemption through Zionism. Jesus is the literary lens through which Greenberg expressed his own search for an authentic Jewish identity, one that would, in turn, redeem the Jewish people.

Going Unhome Why would a Jewish writer choose Jesus, the Christian messiah, to represent a specifically Jewish hope for redemption? The need to reconfigure the borders—both artistic and personal—that confined him to “narrow places” required that Greenberg choose a figure from outside the Jewish tradition in order to demonstrate the very instability of those boundaries. His embrace of Jesus, the ultimate Other, collapsed the boundaries between Self and Other and called into question this and other binary oppositions, suggesting a more complicated understanding of modern art and identity. As David Weinfeld has noted, “Greenberg’s heroes in this period [between the two World Wars], like many Expressionists, are the far-off searchers and sufferers (Job, Jesus, Socrates), not masters of the truth but seekers of it.”91 Indeed, by translating Jesus into a Jewish realm, intentionally hybridizing cultural symbols, Greenberg destabilizes the category of “truth” itself, revealing the constructed nature of the “authentic.” At the same time, Greenberg used the instability of authenticity in order to suggest a new kind of identity for modern Jews. As the shift in his characterization of Jesus from Yiddish to Hebrew shows, this notion of modern Jewish identity was predicated upon a Zionist privileging of agricultural work, reclaiming the land of Israel,

91

Weinfeld, 69.

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Hebraism, and a kind of secular messianism. This secular messianism—a belief that redemption of the land would lead to redemption of the people—found full expression in Greenberg’s Hebrew poetry about Jesus. In Jesus, Greenberg saw a figure, like the Jews, in forcible exile, taken from his “true” home and assigned an identity marked by alien modes of dress, speech, and worship. By uncovering Jesus’ original Judaism, Greenberg also sought to unmask the original Jews: oriental, Hebrew, sovereign. Yet his own struggle with language belies the very possibility of authenticity for the bilingual Jewish writer or the bicultural diaspora Jew, “unhoused” in geography, culture, and language. The longing, not just for the messiah, but for Jesus as the messiah, represents a desire for the stability of a unitary identity, buttressed by language and land. But as Greenberg’s characterization of Jesus reveals, this identity is predicated on a rejection and denial that renders it unstable. The Other can never be eradicated from the self, the mother-tongue never fully cut from the mouth. Redemption for the writer comes only in the form of expression, as he stands at Jesus’ feet “to tell him my searing confession”92— the poem that is the poet’s only home. In the next chapter, we will explore the work of a writer who conceptualized a very different kind of redemption for modern Jews. The Hebrew writer A.A. Kabak, in his novel Bemishol hatsar (The Narrow Path), constructed a slightly different type of Zionist Jesus, one who incorporated the ethical and religious obligations of Judaism into his philosophy. As we will see, Kabak’s Jesus represented yet another construction of modern Jewish identity, which I call ethical Zionism.

92

Greenberg, “Bemaarav,” 44.

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Chapter 4 Jesus and Jewish Nationalism

In the mid-1930s, the Hebrew writer A.A. Kabak suffered a debilitating stroke, and while recuperating experienced a religious epiphany. Several years later, Kabak described the moment of his epiphany, while he lay in bed recuperating and looked out the window at the cypress trees beyond: A great compassion arose in me for my cypress: all his days his top swayed alone in the breeze. And afterward I thought about myself, and recalled my life, my turbulent youth and many wanderings, and thought: in all the turbulence of my youth and in all my spiritual and physical wanderings, there was not a moment in which I was not alone among friends and colleagues, like the top of that tree; and now I lie on my sickbed and still I am alone; alone I will leave here as alone I arrived.1 At this thought he became afraid, but soon heard a voice, which he identifies as coming from deep within himself, reminding him that God had always been with him and would be with him always, even though he hadn’t known it until that moment. He then vowed, “if God raises me from my illness, I will write a book in which I will explain to a man miserable as I had been that he is not orphaned and abandoned in the world of the Holy One Blessed Be He, and that he is not dust in the wind.”2 Kabak, since his youth a secular Jewish nationalist, turned toward religion and became an observant Jew.

1

A. A. Kabak, “Lamah katavti et sifri ‘bemishol hatsar’?” (Why Did I Write My Book “The Narrow Path?), Masot vedivrei bikoret (Essays and Criticism), ed. Meir Hovav (Jerusalem: Achva, 1974): 269. 2

Kabak, “Lamah katavti,” 269.

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It might seem strange then, that Jesus was the hero he chose to convey his message about the presence and importance of God in human life, and, more importantly, in the life of the Jewish people. Indeed, his choice of Jesus as the hero of his next novel, Bemishol hatsar (The Narrow Path) remains somewhat mysterious, despite Kabak’s own attempt to explain it. This chapter offers a partial answer to the question of why Kabak chose an explicitly Christian figure to express his newfound Jewish religious feeling and to convey that religiosity to his reading public. Kabak’s Jesus, though full of deep spiritual and ethical feeling, was completely divorced from his Christian context and instead represented as a Zionist. Kabak’s characterization of Jesus, then, was an attempt to re-envision modern Jewish national identity as inclusive of the national, cultural, and religious elements of Judaism, a position I will call “ethical Zionism.” Kabak’s life prior to his religious revelation followed a typical trajectory for an early twentieth-century Zionist. Aharon Avraham Kabak was born in 1881 in the shtetl Smorgon, just outside of Vilna (now Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania). His father was a rabbi, and he was given a traditional Jewish religious education. But like many young men of his generation, Kabak was influenced by the ideas of the haskalah and began to study Russian. Eventually, he abandoned the religious world of his youth and went to live in Odessa, then a hotbed of Jewish literary and intellectual activity. Kabak began to publish stories, first in Yiddish and then exclusively in Hebrew. Later, he went to Berlin to study, but eventually made aliyah to Palestine in the early 1900s, where he taught at the Herzliya gymnasium in Tel Aviv. Kabak returned to Europe before World War I, and remained for thirteen years, eventually completing a doctorate in psychology and philosophy at the University of Lausanne. After completing his studies he returned to 116

Palestine and resumed teaching at a gymnasium in Jerusalem, a post he held until the time of his illness. Despite his other pursuits, Kabak wrote and published novels in Hebrew from 1905 to the time of his death. His novels are typically divided into two periods: his early romantic Zionist novels and his later historical novels. His early novels are typical of the European coming-of-age novels written by other Hebrew writers, like Brenner or Gnesin. In Levada (By Herself), for example, the young heroine, Sarah Margalit, flirts with socialism and other Jewish movements before settling on Zionism as her personal path to a kind of modern redemption. In the 1920s, however, Kabak turned to historical fiction, publishing an epic fictionalized life of the medieval figure of Shlomo Molcho, Bemishol hatsar, and the first of a projected series of novels chronicling the history of one family throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kabak and other Hebrew writers were influenced by the European historical novelists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, like Anatole France, Leon Feuchtwanger, and Thomas Mann. In the 1920s, many Hebrew writers, including Kabak, turned to historical fiction for Zionist purposes. Zionist historiography inspired them to create plots grounded in earlier periods in order to point out the necessity of national revival and a return to the land of Israel.3 As Georg Lukács has noted, historical fiction has a particular connection to nationalist movements like Zionism: “The appeal to national independence and national character is necessarily connected with a reawakening of national history, with memories of the past, of past greatness, of moments 3

Ruth Shenfeld, Min hamelekh hamashiach vead hamelekh basar vedam (From King Messiah to the King of Flesh and Blood) (Tel Aviv: Papyrus, 1986): 49.

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of national dishonour….”4 This was particularly true for the various forms of Zionism— secular, religious, territorial, cultural—which sought a return to a glorious past, a historical moment at which the Jewish people were both physically robust and selfgoverning. Historical fiction was a way of constructing that moment, which had never really existed, in order to gloss over the history of the Jews in Diaspora that those Zionists wanted to repudiate. Many Zionist writers hoped to provide a model for the Jewish future by representing a triumphal Jewish past. Lukács recognized this connection between the fictional representation of the past and its function in the present: The point [of the historical novel] is to bring a past period near to a present-day reader. And it is a universal law of great narrative art that this results from plastically presented events; that in order to understand the psychology of people in distant ages we must understand and feel ourselves close to their social and natural conditions of life, their customs etc.5 In a review of Kabak’s novel, Joseph Klausner, whose own historical work on Jesus and the Second Temple Period had influenced Kabak, wrote, “The historical novel connects the current account of the past with the modern idea of the present. For this reason alone the historical novel is written—in order to reflect in the ancient or near past those aspirations and ideas that still live in the present or whose vitality is more prominent in the present.”6 By referring to a past in which the Jewish people lived as a nation in the 4

Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press, 1962): 25. 5

Lukács, 195-6.

6

Joseph Klausner, “A. A. Kabak ve‘bemishol hatsar’ shelo” (A.A. Kabak and His “Bemishol hatsar”), Sedarim: maasef sofre eretz yisrael lesifrut uledivrei makhshavah (Typesets: A Collection of Israeli Writers in Literature and Thought) (Tel Aviv: Ahadut, 1942): 410. Shalom Kramer claims that Bemishol hatsar is not a historical novel in the classical sense, because “In the classical historical novel the period and the uniqueness of the present are the center, but in ‘Bemishol hatsar’ the personal spiritual formation of Jesus is

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land of Israel, Kabak could bolster the Zionist attempt to build a contemporary homeland for the Jews in the same place. Additionally, by referring to a moment of what Lukács called “national dishonor,” Kabak could use the genre to suggest remedies for the contemporary situation of the Jews. During the time of the novel, the Second Temple Period, the land of Israel was a colony of Rome, and the Jews were subject to economic and political oppression at the hands of the Romans. This situation was familiar to the Zionists of the early twentieth century, who had experienced a similar kind of oppression either while living as second-class citizens in Europe and Russia, or under the British Mandate for those who had moved to Palestine. In addition, the world political climate at the time the novel was published resonated with its setting. Kabak himself pointed out the parallels between the Second Temple Period, in which his novel was set, and the contemporary situation in which it was written, noting, “A time of disorder like that which is passing over the face of the world at this moment raged over humanity once already, in the last century of the Second Temple.”7 The setting of the novel was integral to conveying an array of contemporary ideas about Jewish nationalism and modern identity. At the same time, the fictionalization of history allows for manipulation of that history, and gives the author leeway to reformulate the historical record for his own purposes. Through historical fiction Kabak was also able to remove any suggestion of Christianity from the figure or teaching of his Jesus. Indeed, the novel ends with Jesus’ the center. And not only that, but this formulation is built upon the decisive personal subjective experience of the writer himself.” Shalom Kramer, “Aharon Avraham Kabak,” Realizm ushevirato (Realism and its Decline) (Ramat Gan: Masada, 1968): 109. 7

A.A. Kabak, “Lamah katavti,” 262.

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crucifixion, neatly sidestepping the issue of what happened to him or his legacy after his death. It encapsulates the action within the historical moment it describes, thus skipping over nearly two thousand years of conflict between Judaism and Christianity and any attendant persecution. And just as it skips over tricky questions about Christianity, the novel also can be seen as a form of shlilat hagalut (the negation of exile), in which the difficult history of the Jewish people in exile from the land of Israel is simply ignored. Kabak returns to a time before any of these prickly questions existed, before Christianity existed, when the Jewish people still lived, albeit under Roman rule, in their homeland. The novel itself it a complete psychological and historical treatment of the character of Jesus, drawing on evangelical accounts, Jewish sources, and pure invention. Kabak, unlike many other writers, began his story with a purely imaginative account of Jesus’ youth, a period not described in the Gospels or historical accounts. Jesus is a dreamy, wayward youth, who likes to wander in the fields rather than work and is known around the region of Nazareth as a kind of amateur healer. He is also outspoken about his opposition to Roman rule, advocating armed resistance to the regime. In the first part of the novel, Jesus’ family and friends are also a central part of his life. He is very close to his uncle Hanina, who lives on a farm nearby with his daughter, Miriam. Miriam, through a tragic series of events, will become the famous courtesan of the town of Migdal, known in the novel as Miriam of Migdal, or Mary Magdalene. Jesus’ best friend is the young Hellenized son of a tax collector, Nakdimon (Nicodemon). But perhaps the most interesting relationship introduced in the first part of the novel is that between Jesus and another peer, Yehuda Ish-Kiriot (Judas Iscariot). Yehuda’s father was killed in a previous revolt against the Romans, and he leads a 120

miserable existence with his sick mother and mentally disturbed sister. He is everything Jesus is not: cynical, depressed, angry. Jesus tries his best to befriend him, and they enter into a somewhat uneasy, on-again-off-again friendship. However, Yehuda is the only friend of his youth who remains with him later, after he has become a teacher and leader of a group of disciples, and his role as confidant is key to the twist Kabak puts on the traditional Gospel plot of betrayal.8 Soon, a number of townspeople, including Jesus’ father and uncle, set out for the mountains to launch another revolt against the Romans. Eventually, Yehuda joins them as well. When Yehuda returns from the front after the Romans have put down the revolt, he reports that both Jesus’ father and uncle have been killed, along with many others. Because he advocated and encouraged armed resistance to the Roman regime, Jesus feels responsible for their deaths, and begins to revise his opinions about struggle and violence. After hearing a preacher in his local synagogue, Jesus decides to travel to the desert, where a radical teacher, known as Yochanan (John the Baptist) is preaching a novel interpretation of Jewish thought and practice. The first part of the novel ends with a description of Jesus’ sojourn with John and his disciples in the desert. When the novel reopens, Jesus has returned north to the Galilee, and has attracted a huge group of followers eager to hear his lessons and be cured of their various physical ailments. The second half of the novel largely follows the outline of the Gospel 8

Interestingly, although Kabak could not have known of its existence, since it was not discovered until after his death, there is an extant ancient text called The Gospel of Judas that describes a similar relationship between Jesus and Judas (Yehuda in the novel): “He [Judas] is instead Jesus’ closest intimate and friend, the one who understood Jesus better than anyone else, who turned Jesus over to the authorities because Jesus wanted him to do so.” Bart D. Ehrman, “Christianity Turned on its Head: The Alternative Vision of the Gospel of Judas,” The Gospel of Judas from Codex Tchacos, ed. Rodolphe Kasser, Marvin Meyer, and Gregor Wurst (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2006): 80.

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narratives, chronicling Jesus’ ministry and eventual journey to Jerusalem.9 It is in the second part of the book that the importance of both the setting of the novel and its genre finds its expression in the central character: Jesus. Kabak wrote, “This Jesus I took for the hero of my novel because he is a modern man; he will always be modern, he has been stripped of the clothing of his time, brought out of the local scenery, and knows a place in every land.”10 It is this ability to “be modern” that gives the historical novel its potency, and allows Kabak to offer a revisionist characterization of Jesus, one that could represent a new kind of Jewish national identity. In Bemishol hatsar, Kabak offered a unique characterization of Jesus as a contemporary religious man of action, a characterization that accorded with Kabak’s particular moral philosophy. Kabak’s Jesus was an example of the moral man who would speak out against injustice and oppression in the midst of a tumultuous and distinctly immoral historical moment. At the same time, through his characterization of Jesus, Kabak offered a new model for Zionism and for modern Jewish identity. The Jesus of Bemishol hatsar suggests a kind of Jewish nationalism that would be inclusive of the ethical imperatives of religion, yet also closely linked to the land. It was a call for both individual spiritual redemption and national political redemption. Finally, this ethical Zionism was intended as an example, a beacon of morality in the midst of a

9

While the first half of the novel is entirely imaginative, the second half conforms loosely to Ziva BenPorat’s definition of “prototypical rewriting” as the retelling of a familiar story in such a way that it is both a familiar recounting of the source but at the same time an original work. In prototypical rewriting, “An author is undertaking the writing down of a story that has been told—and for us, written!—before, claiming that his version clarifies the true meaning of the story with which his reader is already familiar.” Ziva BenPorat, “Saramago’s Gospel and the Politics of Prototypical Rewriting,” Journal of Romance Studies 3:3 (Winter 2003): 93. 10

Kabak, “Lamah katavti,” 262-3.

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distinctly immoral historical moment. These qualities—emphasis on individual spirituality, ethics, and communion with God; a quasi-messianic hope for both individual and national redemption; and upholding an exemplary morality—characterize the variety of Jewish nationalism exemplified by Jesus in Bemishol hatsar.

Reception Although Kabak published his novel about Jesus in 1937, a time when Jews in Europe were again being persecuted in the West, the reviews were largely positive. Unlike the Yiddish writer Sholem Asch, whom we will consider in the next chapter, Kabak and his novel were largely praised by the community of Hebrew writers. The positive reaction to Kabak’s work about Jesus provides a clue to reading Kabak’s novel. Reviews of the novel point to the ideological acceptability of its message, even if its central character was not an obvious choice for conveying it. In reviews, Asher Barash wrote that the novel revealed Kabak as a “gifted epic poet”11 and Shimon Halkin praised it as a rare achievement.12 The novel also achieved canonical status when it was included on the list of required reading for Israeli high-school students from the late 1950s to 1979.13 And Kabak himself remained a celebrated Hebrew writer. Less than a year after

11

B. Fliks (Asher Barash), “Bemishol hatsar,” Moznayim 6 (1937): 272.

12

Shimon Halkin, “Besadeh hasefer: bemishol hatsar,” Gilyonot 6 (1937): 104.

13

The inclusion of the novel on this list is referred to by a number of scholars, but no citation is ever given. See Lapide, 27; Ketsia Alon, “Notsrim, yehudim, ve‘akherim’: iyun bemoreshet hasifrutit shel avraham aharon kabak veshel sholem asch” (Christians, Jews, and “Others”: An Investigation into the Literary Legacy of Avraham Aharon Kabak and Sholem Asch), Teoria ubikoret 26 (Spring 2005): 183n.10; Stahl, 212n.78.

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his death, an entire issue of the Hebrew journal Bitzaron was dedicated to his memory, with articles focusing on his life and work, including Bemishol hatsar. Even critics who did not think that Bemishol hatsar was a great novel had high praise for it. In the review cited above, Asher Barash noted that it was only an average book, but extolled many aspects of the novel and Kabak himself. Moshe Carmon wrote in Haolam, “Bemishol hatsar, for all its faults, is a work of great artistic merit.”14 Joseph Klausner’s review was quite negative, accusing Kabak of denigrating Judaism with its positive portrayal of Christianity, failing to explain how Christianity came to supplant Judaism, and dismissing a militarist solution to Roman oppression. Despite these seemingly significant criticisms, Klausner concludes that Bemishol hatsar is a great novel, and highly praises Kabak’s stirring descriptions of the natural and social environment of the Galilee during the Second Temple Period.15 Indeed, many of the reviewers seem to go out of their way to praise the novel despite serious criticisms of it. The reasons for the positive critical review of Bemishol hatsar seem to lie both with its nationalist conception of Jewish identity and with its relevance to contemporary historical events. As we will see, the novel suggests that Jewish nationalism has the opportunity to become an ethical beacon for the nations of the world. This strong sense of Jewish ethical superiority and the justification of Zionism that it implies is certainly one reason for the positive reception of the novel, particularly among Hebrew-language critics. The literary historian Aharon Ben-Or expressed this sentiment when he wrote of the novel, “‘Bemishol hatsar’ is an historical-homeland novel, and the spirit of the nation 14

M. Carmon, “Bemishol hatsar,” Haolam 11 (November 18, 1937): 199.

15

Klausner, “A.A. Kabak vebemishol hatsar shelo,” 412-14.

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at the end of the days of the second temple shines out from it. And this spirit is a great accumulation of moral-redemptive energy, of strength of spirit and sacrifice, and this spirit also lives in the simple people, and because of this we are promised, our nation, eternal life….”16 The novel was seen as a triumphal confirmation of the political and moral rectitude of the Zionist idea. But the relevance of Kabak’s novel about Jesus to contemporary events cannot be discounted as a contributing factor in its success. In his review, Shimon Halkin noted that “this Jesus of Kabak seems to the Hebrew reader near to him, of his generation, despite the efforts of the writer to place him in the center of his own period.”17 As we have seen, Kabak himself noted this quality in Jesus when he referred to him as a “modern man,” and the immediacy of historical fiction was one of the aspects of the genre that gave it potency for Zionist writers seeking models for Jewish nationhood and identity. The clear association of the character of Jesus with the contemporary archetypal Zionist pioneer, and of his teachings with a form of Jewish nationalism, resonated positively with the public. A. Tzahal, writing several years after the publication of the novel, describes a typical reaction to the novel among reviewers. Upon receiving the book, he asked himself, And why did a Hebrew writer take up “that man,” who came from Israeli origins, who preached a love on whose altar millions of the children of Israel were later sacrificed and whose memory alone embitters the Hebrew heart? But when one engages in reading and becomes one with the pages of the book one slowly 16

Aharon Ben-Or, “A.A. Kabak,” Toldot hasifrut haivrit hahadashah (History of Modern Hebrew Literature), Kerekh gimel (Volume 3) (Tel Aviv: Yizrael, 1972): 172. 17

Halkin, 104.

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forgets all kinds of hesitations, doubts, and questions and you find yourself submerged in a wondrous world, far and near at once, and feel that you are nestled within your own people.18 The novel, which at first inspires skepticism, wins over the Hebrew reader both with its artfulness and through the identification it establishes between the reader and the character of Jesus and his world. It is this identification that wins over the heart of the reviewer, and by extension the public, allowing him or her to not only accept the taboo subject matter of the novel, but to actually enjoy it. As we will see in the next chapter, when we examine Sholem Asch’s contemporaneous Yiddish novel about Jesus, Der man fun natseres, this positive reaction to Jewish literature about Jesus was by no means universal. While Kabak’s novel was seen as bolstering Jewish national identity even while it revised its content, Asch’s novel was seen as a threat to the continued existence of Jewish cultural identity itself.

Jesus the Zionist The Jesus of Bemishol hatsar is resolutely Jewish, steeped in the culture and tradition of his community, and yet also serves as a critic of that community. Jesus’ Jewishness is conveyed both through external descriptions—of his appearance and behavior—and through reference to Jewish law and custom. The very first sentences of the book place Jesus within Jewish tradition: “This was his custom every day. He got up with the dawn, recited the Shema, ate something, or did not eat at all, and went out into

18

A. Tzahal, “Bemishol Hatsar,” Hadoar 21 (March 31, 1939): 353.

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the fields.”19 This daily recitation of the Shema, along with references to hand-washing before meals and the long prayer shawl he typically wears, all create a picture of an observant and dedicated Jew. However, it is also made clear that Jesus is not a scholar of the law; he is relatively uneducated. “Jesus was no scholar (talmid-hakham); he knew but little of the Torah” (18). Instead, he feels a personal connection to God through nature and a deep and abiding, though vague, faith. Despite his deep connection to Judaism, Jesus challenges normative religious traditions. His anomalous personal code of conduct is conveyed through small illustrations of his religious practice. One story related early in the novel describes Jesus as he wanders through the fields on Shabbat. It is a warm day, and he becomes very thirsty. He passes a well and, no longer able to stand his thirst, draws water and drinks. When others who see him accuse him of violating the Sabbath prohibition against work, he replies, “Are we dedicated to the Sabbath? The Sabbath is dedicated to us” (37). At another moment, Jesus gives a hungry child his bread, but the starving child becomes distraught when he realizes there is nowhere nearby for him to ritually wash his hands before eating. Jesus encourages him not to wait, saying, “Eat if you are hungry, God will forgive you” (97). These unusual interpretations of Jewish law distinguish him from other Jews and earn him their scorn. At the same time, Jesus is portrayed as a social and cultural outsider. Jesus is a loner who has separated himself from his family by choosing not to work, as he should, in the family carpentry shop with his father and brothers. Local craftsmen and workers

19

A.A. Kabak, Bemishol hatsar (The Narrow Path) (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1965): 12. Further quotations will be cited in the text. All translations are my own.

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tease him for his idleness, which is seen as an anomaly. When he tells them he’s just come down to town from the surrounding hills, they joke, “Surely you worked there and wearied your flesh with labor,” and laugh at him (40). When he replies sheepishly that he has not worked that day or the days before, they tell him, “You are like one of those wild animals who eats without laboring” (40). Jesus does feel guilty about his lifestyle, thinking to himself as he lies down to sleep one night, “Woe! Woe! I am ashamed of my idle life…I am disgraced among men” (28). Nonetheless, he is unable bring himself to conform to familial and social expectations by becoming a full-time carpenter. “Tomorrow, without doubt, he would begin anew, working and assisting his father and brothers…but that tomorrow would never come” (28). Instead, as always, Jesus will wander the fields contemplating creation and his purpose in life, playing with children, chatting with townspeople, and visiting with friends and family. Indeed, it is even suggested that Jesus is literally an outsider. In a plot line derived from the medieval Jewish polemic about the life of Jesus, Toldot yeshu, the novel hints that Jesus may be the illegitimate child of his mother and a Roman soldier. Women gathered at the well in town “still remember when Jesus was a nursing infant they used to gossip that the face of the boy was too similar to Pandura, a Roman officer, who was stationed with a platoon of his men in Nazareth” (35-6). One of Jesus’ painful childhood memories is of overhearing two women talk about the alleged rape of his mother by the soldier Pandura (60).20 These rumors and innuendos serve to characterize Jesus as a consummate outsider.

20

The name “Pandura” is drawn from Talmudic accounts that appear to refer to Jesus as Pantera, Pandera, or Ben Pandera. See Joseph Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth, 23.

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Jesus’ outsider status, coupled with his implicit critiques of Jewish cultural and religious norms, serve to associate him with a contemporary model, that of the archetypal Zionist. Like A.A. Kabak and other Jewish writers and thinkers born after the haskalah, the Jesus of Bemishol hatsar, while educated and raised wholly within Jewish tradition, criticizes and reimagines it. He feels alienated from his home, his family, and his tradition, yet feels deep sympathy and communion with his people, and outrage at their oppression by the Romans. Kabak’s Jesus, like many Jewish nationalists of Kabak’s own time, is an outsider from traditional Judaism who is nonetheless dedicated to the Jewish people, a leader in the Jewish people’s fight for freedom from oppression. Most importantly, he is willing to sacrifice his own well-being and comfort for the sake of his people, the people of Israel. This is first evident in his sense that he is not suited to the usual lifestyle of his peers. When his uncle suggests that he marry his cousin Miriam and take charge of the family farm as his livelihood, Jesus protests, “I cannot…it’s not possible…I was not made for it...others would be better than I…” (146). The narrator comments that “God did not create him to love and marry a woman, to make a home and have children” (181). A quotidian life of work, family, and pleasure is incompatible with Jesus’ self-conception. There is also a sexual, or more accurately, asexual, component to this self-denial. Jesus is characterized as vehemently asexual, even antisexual. This is first hinted at early on: “At the very thought of permanent intimacy with a woman, of the life of matrimony, his whole being stiffened and went into itself… Because of this the company of children delighted him” (77-78). By associating himself with children, Jesus avoids the intimacy that sexual maturity would require. Later, this fear is expressed as disgust. When he 129

hurts himself working in the carpentry shop his mother and his cousin Miriam tend to him, but he cannot stand their ministrations: “He was disgusted by the touch of women; he shrunk into himself away from the closeness of their bodies and the breath of their mouths on his face” (95). This arrested sexual development is also consistent with the typical Zionist or proto-Zionist protagonist of modern Hebrew literature. An excellent example of the sexually immature Zionist protagonist is that of Elimelech ben Yonah, the young student at the center of Micha Yosef Berdiczewski’s novella Urvah Parakh (Nonsense). He describes himself as a bookworm, a loner who nonetheless longs for love. But every time he has the opportunity to interact with a woman, his nerve fails: “I try to befriend them [the young women in his classes]. I force myself to approach them, but I always miss the goal….”21 Finally, a young woman whom he knows from his hometown arrives and over the course of time, he becomes quite close to her. Nonetheless, he notes, “I must emphasize that the closeness between us was only that between a brother and his sister and without any untoward thoughts. All my thoughts and dreams of love left me as we became close, and I thought in my innocence that such a relationship was the purest of pure and would remain so forever.”22 In fact, he is quite satisfied with their sexless relationship, because he is unable to find her attractive, despite his stated desire to find love. He thinks, “If only she were always beautiful, because then I would have silenced these thoughts by force and loved her without thinking; but now that her beauty revealed itself only occasionally, why should I 21

Micha Yosef Berdiczewski, “Urvah Parakh” (Nonesense), Kol sipure micha yosef bin-gorion (berdichevsky) (Collected Stories of Micha Yosef Bin-Gorion [Berdiczewski]) (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1971): 38. 22

Berdiczewski, 40.

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put shackles on my wrists?”23 His knowledge and ideal of love comes only from books, but Elimelech is actually turned off by the presence of a real woman, even one with whom he has a close emotional and intellectual relationship. Whereas Elimelech is turned off by the realities of sexual love even as he is attracted to the idea of it, Yitzhak Kumer, the young Zionist protagonist of S.Y. Agnon’s Tmol shilshom (Only Yesterday), substitutes his nationalist urges for erotic desire. In his youth in Europe,“Yitzhak had never given a thought to women. When such thoughts bothered him he turned his heart to the fields and vineyards of the land of Israel.”24 Here Yitzhak literally replaces sexual feeling with nationalist feeling, turning to semi-biblical fantasies in which he helps a group of young women water their sheep either by removing a stone from their well or by driving away a group of Arabs who are preventing their access. Later, when he has moved to Palestine, this substitution persists: “In two matters did Yitzhak differ from most of his friends. He didn’t join any party and he did not court women. He didn’t join a party because his heart was full of Zionism in its perfection, and he didn’t court women because he didn’t court.”25 Again, it appears that the perfect image of Zionism that fills his heart leaves no room for a healthy sexuality. Likewise, the Jesus of Bemishol hatsar sees himself as wholly dedicated to his people, at great personal cost to himself. He often helps and serves people even at his own physical expense. Every day he tends to the physical, emotional, and spiritual

23

Berdiczewski, 40.

24

S.Y. Agnon, Tmol Shilshom (Only Yesterday) (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Shocken, 1998): 21. The word used here to describe his thoughts about women, yitsro, refers to the concept of the “evil inclination,” which emphasizes the negative aspect of his sexual feeling. 25

Agnon, 64.

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difficulties of hordes of people who seek his help, without concern for his own wellbeing. “As each person passed before him it was as if an invisible burden descended upon him by degrees and became heavier and heavier, his shoulders sinking and his face becoming more and more pale as the last drops of blood drained out” (340). Despite his declining strength and obvious physical discomfort, he continues to offer aid until everyone is satisfied. Even Jesus’ final sacrifice, of himself, can be understood within this Zionist framework. The Zionist pioneer of the early twentieth century left his home and family in Europe and embarked on a new life of hard work and danger, going to an undeveloped land where his future was uncertain. These pioneers knew they risked death from disease, starvation, or violence, and their sacrifices were seen as necessary to the development and revival of the nation. Like these dedicated pioneers, Jesus comes to the conclusion that his mission of national redemption can best be served by his own death. He reaches this conclusion in conversation with Yehuda, his closest confidant. Jesus is concerned that his followers have become more focused on him than on his message, that he has created a kind of cult of personality that has obscured his mission. When Yehuda suggests that he must die in order to quash this cult of personality, Jesus agrees, and Yehuda tells him that the choice is “Either your life or your teaching” (528).26 His teaching, which we will turn to next, has been in the service of national liberation through personal redemption, and it is for his people that he ultimately sacrifices himself.

26

This plot twist is also represented in the ancient Gospel of Judas, in which Judas betrays Jesus at Jesus’ behest. According to Bart Ehrman, “In handing him over, Judas performed the greatest service imaginable.” Ehrman, 80. However, in the Gospel of Judas, Jesus wants Judas to betray him so that he will be killed not as a sacrifice, but in order that he can return to his rightful place in heaven.

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Jesus and the Political Theology of Redemption While the Zionists of the early twentieth century sacrificed themselves for a national revival of the Jewish people in the land of Israel, and worked both to create and bolster Jewish culture and a viable political entity in Palestine, Jesus’ mission in Bemishol hatsar is less clear. As we will see, the character of Jesus advocates for a new kind of nationalism, one that I call “ethical Zionism,” and proposes a new mode of Jewish national identity. Although Jesus resembles a typical territorial Zionist of Kabak’s generation in his life path and personal philosophy, he also differs from the Zionist model in his emphasis on God, individual spirituality, and personal redemption. It is this key difference that makes Kabak’s Jesus exceptional, and also makes the variety of Jewish national identity presented in the novel unique. Through Jesus, the novel suggests that the ethical aspects of religious Judaism that were neglected or cast aside by mainstream Jewish nationalist movements after the haskalah are actually essential to Jewish identity and to the Zionist project. Additionally, the novel suggests that by returning this ethical component to Zionism Jewish nationalism could be a moral model for the modern world. The Israelites of the Second Temple Period suffer under the political and economic oppression of the colonial Roman government, which extracts heavy taxes from the people and constitutes a formidable military presence. Jesus is constantly reminded of and angered by this oppression, and his description of it could as easily apply to tsarist Russia, Nazi Germany, or even the British Mandate governing interwar Palestine: “The evil of the government, the heavy taxes, the innocent who sat locked in prisons, the blood of the righteous that had been spilled…” (120). The oppressive nature of the government is evident every time that Jesus brings up the Romans and his 133

opposition to their governance. “Every time that he aired these concerns people were afraid. Danger accrued not only to those who spoke, but to those who listened” (42). Much like the contemporary examples, the control of this government appears to be absolute and to work as much through fear as through power. Throughout the course of the novel, Jesus undergoes a kind of political education and evolution. The first part of the novel focuses on Jesus’ youth and coming of age through tragedy. He advocates a military solution to Roman oppression, supporting the secret efforts of Galileans to mount an armed revolt. But he also advocates a vague kind of spiritual resistance, claiming, “If we believed and wanted with all our souls we would be redeemed from the hands of the pagans” (23). It is not exactly clear how this spiritual desire would translate into political freedom, although, as we will see, it seems to reference messianic hopes for redemption. In the same conversation, comparing the desire for redemption to a baby’s impetus to be born, Jesus says, “‘Thus we must desire redemption…If we only longed for it thus, that palace’—he moved his head in the direction of the palace of the ruler that already cast its shadow over the square— ‘would already be a ruin and these whores and soldiers would not walk our streets…’” (26). The implication is that individual action can bring about collective results. As the novel progresses, this political philosophy of active resistance to the Roman regime develops into a political theology based on individual spirituality and communion with God. Jesus’ developing theology is explicitly Jewish, based on Hillel’s classic lesson: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, who am I?” As Jesus explains to his rabbi, he has realized that “the true freedom is not outside of us, but within us” and that this internal freedom can be achieved by both 134

spiritual repentance and recognition of the image of God in the self (219). Finally, rather than emphasizing the importance of active revolt or resistance to the Romans, Jesus begins to believe that liberation is internal rather than external. This new understanding connects personal to political redemption. As Jesus tells his friend Nakdimon, “Believe me when I tell you: the whole world can change!...If only you yourself will change…if you change yourself…” (138). This makes explicit the relationship between the personal and the political: it is incumbent upon each individual to purify himself through devotion to God and Torah, and through this individual, internal redemption, the outside world will be collectively affected. By the second half of the novel, in fact, Jesus has renounced violence entirely. After returning from time spent in the desert with John the Baptist and his followers, Jesus makes a speech in the Nazareth synagogue in which he regrets his previous stance. I came here to admit to you a sin that I sinned against everyone. All my life I have talked to you about war with the regime and instigated this shameful event [a revolt against the Romans]…I sinned against the living and the dead, against those who left this world on the field of battle, far from their homes and loved ones. They went to spill blood needlessly and found their own lives ended (308). Because of his perceived slight against those considered martyrs by the Galileans, he is beaten and run out of the synagogue. His new message is one of personal redemption without immediate regard for the collective. Instead, Jesus’ teaching is predicated on individual self-worth and communion with God as an ethical basis for redemption. Jesus becomes a kind of ancient self-help guru, going from town to town and preaching a gospel of self-esteem. In the words of the narrator, “…gradually, he aroused their spirits and planted in the hearts of these poor people the belief that they are the children of our father in heaven, and love for 135

life and God” (423). This individual redemption is predicated on what Jesus refers to as the “I,” the self that is made in the image of God. As Jesus himself describes it, “The path to redemption and salvation is open to every man of Israel in the heart of each one of us!...Only in charity and compassion does a man find the image of God within him” (122). Jesus’ teaching, and his final sacrifice, are focused on the redemption of the individual through this intimate communion with God.

The Landscape of Zionism Jesus’ message of personal redemption is also linked to broader national concerns through the mediation of the very land of Israel itself. The abundant natural descriptions in the novel, and Jesus’ deep connection with the natural world, form a link between the God of the self and the God of the land of Israel. Thus the individual redemption that Jesus describes is also, implicitly, a redemption of the land. And this redemption of the land is connected, in turn, to a Zionist ideology that saw “the fate of the land and the people tied together” and linked “the invention of the ‘new Jew’ to the rejuvenation of this devastated landscape.”27 The deep connection between Jesus and the natural landscape of Israel both establishes his identity as a Zionist and articulates the Zionist ideology that the land is necessary to a healthy modern Jewish identity. From very early on in the novel, it is clear that Jesus himself is closely linked to the land. The opening of the novel describes his deep communion with the natural world: “The solitude did not frighten him. There was no solitude in the world. He and the world

27

Zakim, 183.

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were one, breathed as one” (9).28 Jesus is portrayed as an outdoorsman, who prefers to commune with nature rather than people. Jesus also points to nature as the purest expression of God in the world. When he first encounters the angry, unhappy Yehuda, Jesus recommends that he spend some time, like himself, in the mountains communing with nature. Yehuda does, and the experience changes him. He tells Jesus, That day, when I went out suddenly into the mountains, I saw for the first time the breadth and greatness of the world. It seems to me that from the six days of creation the world had not been so joyous or beautiful as at that moment. It was as if He himself took great pleasure from its glory and splendor. The ants, the flies, the insects, the lizards, the birds—they were all wonderful and they all knew it and were happy. Gladly, a gentle breeze blew, the wheat fluttered, the grasses nodded, the light clouds hanging in the sky glowed…my God! My God! (190) Recognition of the beauty of nature leads directly to recognition of God’s existence and compassion. Later in the novel, Jesus tries to impress this lesson upon his followers, who claim that he has worked miracles. He berates them, “A miracle!...Everyone expects miracles…and isn’t life miracle enough? Is not the sun that shines in the sky a miracle?” (327) He goes on to list several familiar miracles from the Bible, pointing out the miraculousness of the natural elements that we don’t generally recognize. Of Moses splitting the sea, he asks, “And was the sea itself not a miracle?” Of Joshua stopping the sun in the sky, he asks, “And is the revolution of the sun itself as it cuts through the sky not a miracle?” (336) The implication is that the miraculous and divine inhabit the everyday, particularly in nature.

28

This comfort in solitude is in marked contrast to Kabak’s own feelings about his existential loneliness and isolation, described in his epiphany on the first page of this chapter. However, the vehicle of Kabak’s realization, the cypress outside his window, suggests the comfort of nature described in the novel.

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It is precisely the miraculous in the natural world that gives Jesus part of the power that is later claimed as otherworldly: he is familiar with the herbs and plants that promote healing, and it is known that “there were always in his pocket remedies and different herbs…that healed various illnesses” (14). On one level, this explanation counteracts any implication that Jesus is a faith healer, attributing his healing powers instead to medicinal plants. However, it also points to the very source of his formidable power as the land itself, and specifically the land of Israel. Jesus’ healing powers are generally attributable to his connection to the natural world, but it is specifically the landscape of the Galilee depicted in the first half of the novel with which he is intimately familiar. It is his very ability to recognize and cultivate the power of the indigenous plants of his homeland that make him the great and powerful leader he becomes. At the same time, the notion that Jesus’ power comes from the land promotes the very Zionist ideology that tied the identity of the “new Jew” to the landscape of Palestine. The fact that the healing power of Jesus is actually the healing power of the land itself suggests the potential of the land of Israel, through proper understanding and cultivation, to “heal” the Jewish people. One of the foremost Zionist proponents of the healing power of the land itself was the pioneer Aharon David Gordon, who wrote, “Every one of us is required to refashion himself so that the Galut [exilic] Jew within him becomes a truly emancipated Jew; so that the unnatural, defective, splintered person within him may be changed into a natural wholesome human being who is true to himself.”29 The mechanism for this reconstructive effort? Cultivation of the land of Israel through 29

A.D. Gordon, “Some Observations,” The Zionist Idea, ed. Arthur Hertzberg (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1997): 377.

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manual labor. As Gordon saw it, “This kind of labor binds a people to its soil and to its national culture, which in turn is an outgrowth of the people’s soil and the people’s labor.”30

In other words, the healing power of the land resided in its ability to restore

Jews to their ancient, pre-Diaspora identity as a people who lived off the land. At the same time, working and cultivating the land of Israel like their ancient forebears bolstered contemporary Zionist claims of possession, giving the land a Jewish identity just as it imbued the Jews who cultivated it with a healthy, “natural” identity. However, Kabak’s Jesus also adds a spiritual element to the programmatic Zionist connection between land and Jew. As noted above, the individual communion with God advocated by Jesus is rooted in nature, and specifically, in God’s presence in the land of Israel. This makes any individual redemptive action necessary and prior to political liberation. But at the same time, that individual spiritual redemption is predicated on a connection to the land that requires liberation. Jesus tells Yehuda, “Many say: ‘Defend the soil of our country that strangers may not defile it!’ and do not worry about or defend the soul of man that is vanquished by impure spirits and destroyed. What does the soil of a man’s country matter at the moment when the world within him is being destroyed?” (314) In other words, the best defense of the land is an individual communion with it that heals the damaged Jewish soul and leads to a connection with the land that constitutes, in and of itself, liberation both for the individual—through communion with God in nature—and for the nation—through the reconstitution of individual identity through the link to the land.

30

Gordon, “People and Labor,” The Zionist Idea, 373.

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The association of the land with the Zionist “new Jew” through a messianic redemptive relationship is also apparent in other Hebrew literature of this period. As we saw in the last chapter, Uri Tzvi Greenberg, in his poem Yerushalayim shel mata, envisions Jesus himself as a pioneer in the Jezreel valley, redeeming the land not through any mystical messianism, but through labor. The poet Avraham Shlonsky, too, used christological symbols and references to Jesus to convey the practical redemption offered through the daily sacrifices of Zionist pioneers. “Who is great here, who is small/in the kingdom of work and flesh?/Land is a scroll here—the book of the New Covenant,/And we—the twelve!”31 In Shlonsky’s formulation, the flesh of man is made manifest through work, and in a kind of Zionist transubstantiation, the flesh, through labor on the land, becomes bread: “Man is flesh, and he labors here in sanctity,/and for the land— bread.”32 It is the land that confers both sanctity and life, and replaces the old covenant, the “scroll” of the Torah, with its new covenant of redemption through labor on the land. The last line of the stanza is deliberately ambiguous, referring both to the twelve disciples of Jesus and to the twelve tribes of Israel, now returned to their homeland. As in Kabak’s novel, here it is the connection to the landscape of Israel that provides both the individual and communal redemption of Zionist ideology.

31

i¨y¨e h¦n 'v«P kIs²d h¦n ?r¨«a7C©v±u v¨sIc=g¨v ,Ufk©nC 'v¨a¨s£j-,h¦rC ,Kd§n - v«P v7kUk±d v¨n¨s£t !r«¨a7g¤v-oh¯b§a - Ub¨t±u Avraham Shlonsky, “Yizrael” (Jezreel), Shirim (Poems), Kerekh alef (Volume 1) (Merhavia: Hashomer Hatzair, 1954): 184. 32

'a¤s«eC v«P k¥ng tUv±u 'tUv r«¨a7C o¨s¨t¨v /o¤j;k - v¨n¨s£t7k±u

Shlonsky, 183.

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Halakha and Aggada in Jewish Nationalism Another connection to the ideology of Jewish nationalism is represented in the characterization of halakha and aggada in the novel. At the same time, Kabak’s understanding of halakha and aggada also suggests a new model for Jewish identity. As we have seen, Jesus himself has little respect for the letter of the law, halakha, and is not learned. Similarly, his followers, who are drawn from the masses of illiterate and unschooled working people, have no knowledge or understanding of Jewish law. When a group of Pharisees point out that Jesus’ followers do not even perform the minimal task, required by Jewish law, of washing their hands before a meal, Jesus replies with a question: “Which is worse: uncleanliness of the hands or uncleanliness of the heart? It is better not to wash one’s hands and have a pure heart than to wash one’s hands and not purge the heart of ill intent and thoughts of transgression” (372). The clear message is that the spirit of the law is far more important than the letter of the law. This opposition between letter and spirit is represented through the contrast between halakha, law, and aggada, lore. The experience of Thomas, one of Jesus’ followers, points to this privileging of aggada over halakha. Thomas is born into a secular family in Heliopolis, but has a religious epiphany when he hears some of his own workers discussing the Messiah and decides to move to Israel. He becomes a kind of religious seeker, eventually becoming a disciple of John the Baptist, and, after John’s death, of Jesus. When he first began his religious journey, he studied with Jesus’ rabbi and spiritual guide, Rabbi Hananiah, who is described as favoring halakha over aggada. But Thomas feels that halakha is like “heavy catapult rocks, like the steps of Roman

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soldiers in their nailed boots” (273). These similes point to the association of halakha in the novel with a violence and oppression comparable to that of the Romans. Aggada, on the other hand, draws Thomas closer to God. “When Rabbi Hananiah answers him and opens before him the fine silk curtains of the aggada, behold, he hears the voice of God surrounding him, and the secrets of the world are revealed to his soul” (273). Much like Jesus in defending his disciples’ unlawful behavior by referring to their good intentions, Thomas longs for a spiritual path that is not caught up in the rule of law, but based in the transcendence of aggada. He criticizes the learned scholars of Judaism, who “seek refuge from the Holy Name behind the exactitude of the commandments, as if behind a wall!” (277) According to this formulation, Jewish society is corrupted from within by an overemphasis on Jewish law to the exclusion of Jewish spirituality. This critique is reminiscent of haskalah criticisms of traditional European Jewish culture and bears a resemblance to Ahad HaAm’s “cultural” or “spiritual” Zionism. In his essay “Torah shebalev” (The Law of the Heart), Ahad HaAm criticized the Jews for having become the “people of the book,” revering the written word, the law, over all other things. This situation, he argued, caused the “book,” or halakha, not “to enrich the heart with new strength, but rather to weaken and abase it until it no longer dares to function on its own power and according to its own needs, but only according to what is written.”33 Rather, as noted in the Introduction, the Jewish people should strive for the “vital aim of unification of the nation, its free revival and development, according to its

33

Ahad HaAm (Asher Ginzburg), “Torah shebalev” (The Law of the Heart), Kol kitve ahad haam (Collected Writings of Ahad HaAm) (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1947): 52.

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own spirit, on general humanistic foundations.”34 According to Ahad HaAm, it is the ineffable spirit of Judaism, based in culture, that should form the basis for Jewish nationalism. The critique of halakha offered by Kabak’s Jesus is similar to that of Ahad HaAm and other maskilim, but with an important difference. The proponents of Jewish enlightenment were concerned that the devotion to the minutiae of Jewish law kept Jews from assimilating and becoming full members of European society; Ahad HaAm was additionally concerned that the ossification of tradition was an impediment to the development of a modern, humanistic Jewish culture. By contrast, Thomas and Jesus, in Bemishol hatsar, feel that the emphasis on halakha keeps Jews from being fully Jewish, by distancing them from communion with God. Through his characterization of Jesus, Kabak offers a constructive vision of a modern Jewish identity that incorporates the traditional without abandoning the modern, offering a kind of secular-spiritual model that incorporates religious elements of Judaism without insisting on halakhic behavior. This message represents an alternative model for the construction of modern Jewish identity: not exclusively nationalist, like the Zionist or territorialist model; not exclusively cultural and linguistic, like the socialist model; not exclusively religious, like the Orthodox model.

Messianism and Redemption Another component of the ethical Zionist philosophy advanced in the novel that links personal redemption to a larger national goal is its reference to messianism. Historically, the Jewish messianic idea married the individual and national through the 34

Ahad HaAm, “Torah shebalev,” 53.

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idea of redemption. As Gershom Scholem has noted of the biblical prophets of messianism, “Their eschatology is of a national kind: it speaks of the future glory of an Israel returned to God; also of everlasting peace and the turning of all nations toward one God of Israel and away from heathen cults and images.”35 This kind of messianic idea points to the inextricable interrelationships between personal and national redemption in Jewish tradition. Again, the historical setting of the novel furnishes an ideal atmosphere for the exploration of the messianic idea. In general, Scholem has noted the importance of historical circumstances to the development of the messianic idea, and emphasizes that the historical context of suffering was as important to messianic hopes as was “an abstract proposition regarding the hope of mankind for redemption.”36 The Second Temple period, a moment of great Jewish suffering, was also a time of great messianic hope. Joseph Klausner lists the various catastrophes that occurred in Judea in the last century before the Common Era: the reign of tyrannical kings, a devastating earthquake, fierce battles with other inhabitants of the region, famine and the plague that went with it. “And these appeared to the people to be the veritable ‘pangs of the Messiah’ which presaged the advent of the redeemer. Consequently there were aroused among the people of this time strong messianic longing….”37 The Jewish people found comfort in the messianic idea, in which the savior of the Jewish people would descend from heaven to

35

Gershom Scholem, “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism,” The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (NY: Schocken Books, 1995): 6. 36

Scholem, “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism,” 4-5.

37

Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth, 152.

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offer both individual salvation and national unification and freedom from political oppression. Walter Benjamin, writing during the same period that Kabak’s novel was published, also suggested the messianic nature of the kind of synoptic view of time that, as previously noted, characterizes the historical novel. “A historian who takes this [a synoptic view] as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.”38

In suggesting the

correspondence between the present and the ancient past depicted in the novel, between Jesus and contemporary Zionists, Kabak was working from a messianic conception of time not as a continuum but as a “constellation” of moments related to and influenced by one another. Through this vision of messianic time, Kabak reinforces the underlying messianic potential of his Zionist philosophy. Thus, the synchronic element of messianism also forms a link between the historical setting of Bemishol hatsar and the historical moment in which it was written, between the despair of Roman oppression and European persecution, between the hope for a Jewish messiah and the hope for a Jewish state. The grounding of the messianic idea in Jewish suffering is also what made it endlessly applicable throughout Jewish history. Scholem writes that because of its utopian element and its nod to a more perfect future, messianism “always retains that fascinating vitality to which no historical reality

38

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1977): 263.

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can do justice and which in times of darkness and persecution counterpoises the fulfilled image of wholeness to the piecemeal, wretched reality which was available to the Jew.”39 According to this formulation, of course, Jewish messianism is also distinguished from Christian messianism, which anticipates a return, not an arrival, of the messiah. Despite the seeming contradiction of Kabak’s turn to Jesus as the paragon of Jewish messianism, in his telescoping of Jewish history Kabak conveniently bypasses both Christianity itself and two thousand years of Jewish exile, both of which presented theoretical and ideological problems for his ethical Zionist philosophy. In linking the present moment and the ancient past, Kabak returns to the moment before the creation of Christianity, in which Jews occupied what he saw as their proper place in the land of Israel unmolested by the existential threat of Christianity (though still politically oppressed). By ending the novel with Jesus’ crucifixion, without even a suggestion of his return or of the movement that was to follow him, Kabak distills his constellation of time to an unproblematic, or less problematic, historical moment. This moment, Kabak seems to suggest, full of anticipation for the redemption, represents a kind of ideal, a world without exile or diaspora, without Christianity. This is the type of messianic promise offered by Jesus in Bemishol hatsar. This turn to the messianic idea during dark times may have prompted a general interest in the messianic during the interwar period, in which Kabak wrote the novel. In 1927, Kabak himself published a novel titled Shlomo Molcho, about the sixteenthcentury kabbalist and false Messiah who was burned at the stake by the Inquisition. Kabak makes clear that Molcho’s mission to seek redemption is not personal, but national. 39

Scholem, 14.

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“Molcho didn’t believe in himself but believed in the nation; the nation didn’t believe in itself but believed in Molcho.”40 At the end of the novel, as he goes to his death, Molcho realizes that he himself will not bring about the redemption, that he is not the messiah, yet he has nonetheless played an important role in the messianic drama: “He did not redeem the nation, but awakened in it a sorrowful longing for the redemption.”41 Like Jesus in Bemishol hatsar, Molcho’s struggle for redemption was associated with the contemporary Jewish struggle for national renewal and redemption. The critic A. Epstein characterized Molcho as “a burning symbol of the Israeli soul in every generation.”42 Kabak was not the only writer interested in the messianic in this period. As we have seen, Uri Tzvi Greenberg and other avant-garde Yiddish poets were interested in the messianic and apocalyptic possibilities of Jesus and other messianic figures like Sabbatai Tzvi and Shlomo Molcho. Hanan Hever has also noted the interest in messianism and messianic figures among Hebrew poets between the two world wars.43 And only two years after Bemishol hatsar, Isaac Bashevis Singer published his novel Sotn in goray (Satan in Goray), which focuses on the impact of the fervor surrounding Sabbatai Tzvi on a small town in Poland, and has its own host of prophetic and messianic characters. At the same time, writers like Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin were exploring the philosophical, historical, and intellectual meanings of messianism. Perhaps the attachment to messianism after the devastation of the first World War and during the rise 40

A.A. Kabak, Shlomo Molcho, vol. 3 (London: Haolam, 1927): 259.

41

Kabak, Shlomo Molcho, 317-8.

42

A. Epstein, “Hevlei geulah,” Bitzaron 12:10 (August-September 1945): 253.

43

Hanan Hever, Beshevi hautopia.

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of fascism before the second is best summed up by Benjamin, who wrote, “The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist.”44 In other words, the messiah represents the hope for victory over oppression and evil. Through the constellation of their own dark historical moment with another like it, these writers and thinkers sought an idea that might liberate them from present difficulties, a hope for a redeemed future in which evil would suffer its messianic defeat. For Kabak and others, their messianic hopes centered on the redemption of the land of Israel as a homeland for the Jews. Scholem noticed this tendency to equate Zionism with a kind of modern messianism: “Little wonder that overtones of Messianism have accompanied the modern Jewish readiness for irrevocable action in the concrete realm, when it set out on the utopian return to Zion.”45 The messianic hopes of many of the novel’s characters were a reflection of contemporary longing for a political salvation akin to the overthrow of the Roman government. Jesus’ message of personal redemption in the novel, then, when viewed through the lens of Jewish messianism, also reflects a longing for national liberation, a desire that resonated with the motives of the twentiethcentury Zionist project. While the character of Jesus and the novel’s setting suggest a messianic theme, the novel nonetheless explicitly rejects the notion of Jesus as messiah. The negative

44

Benjamin, 255. Sadly, Benjamin seems to have lost faith in the promise of his own conception of messianism, and killed himself not long after the publication of this essay. As Robert Alter notes of Benjamin’s apocalyptic vision of the “angel of history”: “It is hard not to construe the final sentence, ‘This storm is what we call progress,’ as a bitter irony, though the Marxist and the messianist in Benjamin would desperately want to give it a more positive meaning.” Robert Alter, Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991): 115. 45

Scholem, 35.

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consequences of the longing for salvation are made very clear. Jesus’ followers, who are drawn from the working masses, begin to believe that he is the messiah they have been waiting for. In particular, certain seemingly miraculous events spark this suggestion: Jesus calming a storm on the sea, Jesus walking on water, and Jesus communing with the prophet Elijah and Moses on a mountaintop. These three events, drawn directly from Gospel accounts, are taken by some of the disciples as evidence that Jesus is the messiah. In the novel, however, these “miracles” are portrayed as anything but, emphasizing the humanity of Jesus. According to Ben-Porat’s notion of prototypical rewriting, the innovation of the retelling is related to its success in subverting the original meaning of the source: “the successful achievement of complex subversive rewriting stands in direct relation to its innovation: the changes imposed on the original material (characters, events, order, wording) and faithful representation: the fidelity of the rewriting to its origin at the points of diversion.”46 It is through the internal legitimation of the retelling that the author presents a different reading of the original. The scene in which Simon Peter becomes convinced that Jesus walks on water is a case in point. Near dawn Jesus goes by himself to walk near the shore of the Sea of Galilee. The light is just beginning to come up over the mountains to the east, and as Jesus walks home, he meets Simon, obviously agitated. Simon is angry that Jesus is concealing what he believes to have seen: Jesus walking on the surface of the water. Jesus rebukes him, “Is it not enough for you that I walk with you on land, that you want to see me also walk on water?” (384) Simon’s description of what he has seen makes

46

Ben-Porat, 99.

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clear that his vision was born of a trick of the light and sheer desperation.47 He tells Jesus that he knows he is “ben elohim,” a son of God, as opposed to himself, who is “yalud isha,” born of a woman. Jesus again rebukes him, claiming that all people are both “banim lemakom,” sons of God, but also human. He makes a distinction between the literal and the metaphorical in the concept of “son” that his disciples are unable or unwilling to make. Another incident, this from the early descriptions of Jesus’ youth, underscores the metaphorical meaning of “son of God” that Jesus attempts to convey. Jesus is remembering an incident from his childhood in which his father got into an argument with friends over the messiah and one of them rebuked him, saying, “You don’t know, Joseph, in which house at this moment he who will be our righteous savior (meshiach) plays” (77). Later, when he was going to sleep, his mother caressed him and said, “My messiah, my dear messiah…” (78). This democratic conception of messianism—that any child, any person, might be the savior—argues against Jesus’ divinity (whether he is or is not the messiah). However, it also points to the importance of the messianic idea to the aspirations of the Jewish people at the historical moment of the novel, throughout history, and in the contemporary moment. While Jesus denies that he himself is the messiah in the novel, messianism is integrally important to his conception of individual redemption and to its resonance with modern Jewish national identity.

47

Joseph Klausner originally theorized that certain of the miracles of the New Testament (of a type he called “illusions”) were the product of autosuggestion. See Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth, 269.

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Ethical Zionism As we have seen, the type of salvation that Jesus advocates is predicated on individual communion with God, a spiritual relationship that is made communal through God’s presence in nature that ties him to the land, and through the hope for messianic redemption. This message, along with Jesus’ characterization as an archetypal Zionist figure, suggests a nationalism integrated with the religious, but without the halakhic requirements of traditional Judaism. It is this emphasis on the ethical-religious aspect of Judaism as a necessary component of Jewish national redemption and renewal that departs from mainstream Zionist movements. Secular Zionists had separated themselves from religious Judaism, devoting themselves to the cause of Jewish nationalism and, in some cases, the establishment of a sovereign Jewish state. Religious Zionists sought the establishment of a settlement for Jews in the land of Israel according to Jewish religious precepts, which would serve as a “secure fortress for our Torah,” in the words of the Mizrahi manifesto.48 Rather, the version of Zionism represented by Jesus in Bemishol hatsar is something new, which I have called ethical Zionism. The ethical Zionism presented in the novel was not only a new construction for modern Jewish identity or Jewish nationalism. This re-integration of Jewish morality and ethics into Jewish nationalism was meant to serve as an example, a modern “light unto the nations.” Kabak’s reworking of Jesus’ teachings suggests that with proper guidance, the Jewish people can become a moral example to the world, both of just government and

48

The Mizrahi, “Manifesto,” The Jew in the Modern World, eds. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995): 546.

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ethical national revival.49 In the novel, the character of Simon operates as a foil for Jesus, advocating a military solution to Roman oppression and arguing with him about the meaning of his message of personal redemption. When Simon asks Jesus if there can be any practical purpose in glorifying the individual will, Jesus replies, “Man is like a synagogue that stands at the top of a high hill, above all the houses of the city, which radiates its glory and sanctity on the houses and their inhabitants, and all creatures revere and worship it” (450-1). In other words, if each person strives for personal rectitude and sanctity, he becomes an example to those around him, those below him on the moral ladder, to emulate. By extension, if an entire people lives by the ethical and moral dictates of religious belief and practice, they can become, as a whole, an example for the world. This image of the moral man as exemplar goes beyond simple religious nationalism and suggests also a moral justification for Zionism. At the time that Kabak was writing the book, fascism was on the rise in Europe, the Spanish Civil war was raging, and the Nuremberg Laws had just been enacted in Germany. Although Kabak never cites the political events of his own time as influential in his characterization of 49

This utopian element of Kabak’s ethical Zionism was not new. Theodor Herzl, the originator of political Zionism, proposed at the end of his practical treatise for Jewish settlement of Palestine, Der Judenstaat (Leipzig and Vienna: M. Breitenstein, 1896), “By our freedom the world will be freed, by our richness enriched, by our greatness ennobled. Whatever we attempt over there for our own prosperity will have a powerful and life-enhancing effect on all humanity.” Theodor Herzl, The Jews’ State, trans. Henk Overberg (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, Inc., 1997): 206. In 1902 Herzl elaborated on this idea in his utopian novel Altneuland (Leipzig: H. Seeman, 1902), which envisioned the nearly perfect “New Society” built by Jews in Palestine. Herzl, too, suggests that the Jewish experience has conferred a kind of moral authority. As one of the main characters, David, says, “It [the New Society] could have come only through us, through our destiny. Our moral sufferings were as much a necessary element as our commercial experience and our cosmopolitanism” (82). And another character imagines the New Society as an exemplary government that could (and should) be replicated around the world: “The New Society can exist anywhere, in any country” (291). Theodor Herzl, Old New Land, trans. Lotta Levensohn (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1997).

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Jesus, he does allude to it obliquely. In an essay explaining his decision to write the novel, Kabak wrote, Every one of us has his own cave, in which he hides [from God]. And in the moment that winds and storms uproot nations, displace communities, and destroy states; that human ideals and accepted moral ideas return to chaos, and the whole world, it seems, goes up in flames, in times such as these the cells are opened and the prisoners break out. The prisoner in the soul of man also escapes. So virtuous individuals hear that soft, fragile voice (d’mama dakah) in which God speaks to man.50 Kabak notes that the Second Temple Period, the time when Jesus lived and in which his novel is set, was also a moment of political oppression and upheaval. He suggests that Jesus was the man who heard the voice of God and because of it his message attracted the abject people of Israel suffering under the oppression of the Roman government. Thus, through the figure of Jesus, Kabak wove together the religious and national threads of Jewish life that had been separated by the Enlightenment. He saw the individual’s spiritual life as essential to the development of a viable national entity. As he wrote, “This is nothing but a certain change in our hierarchy of values. Not from the society to the individual, but from the individual to the society. You can’t build a social, national structure on the dust of a man, on people whose inner lives are empty, burned souls, blurred icons.”51 This conception of nation-building accounts for a Zionist model of Jewish sovereignty while maintaining aspects of Jewish ethics as necessary to the continuation of the Jewish people and the success of the Zionist project.

50

Kabak, “Lamah katavti,” 262.

51

Kabak, “Lamah katavti,” 266-67. Kabak’s imagery of dust and burning was oddly prescient, since the essay was composed before the Holocaust.

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Kabak’s vision of ethical Zionism, however, did not only advocate the revival of the nation through individual redemption or suggest a moral basis for Jewish nationalism. Rather, it also included a universal mission, what Shimon Halkin called “redemption of the general human spirit from its oppression.”52 It is this aspect that helps to explain Kabak’s choice of Jesus in particular as the model for modern Jewish national identity. Jesus’ image of the Jewish people as a shining synagogue on a hill suggests not only Jewish ethical superiority, but also stands as a reminder of the biblical characterization of the Jewish people as a “light unto the nations,” a moral example to the world. In the world of the novel, the moral authority that Jesus wants the Jewish people to cultivate is intended as a rebuke to the Roman oppressors, a non-military revolt against their victimization, and an assertion of their own religion and culture in the face of colonization. In Kabak’s world this claim of moral authority for Zionism necessarily placed Judaism and Jewish nationalism in dialogue with the other nations of the world. By choosing the ultimate representative of Western Christian culture as the exemplar of ethical Zionism, Kabak constructed a modern, specifically Jewish identity that was also engaged with Western culture, society, and politics. This representation of Jesus also suggested the necessity of a universal morality in a world that seemed both increasingly immoral and increasingly fractured along ethnic and national lines. In his representation of Jesus, Kabak not only looked inward, to revise and reshape conceptions of modern Jewish identity, but also outward, to the world at large, to try to envision a central place for a Jewish nation in a changing world.

52

Halkin, 104.

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Similarly, the Yiddish writer Sholem Asch sought a permanent home for the Jews in a turbulent world, but envisioned one of a very different type. Asch’s novel about Jesus, Der man fun natseres, presented a pluralist vision of modern Jewish identity, one in which Jewish specificity was de-emphasized and universalism was a priority. As we will see, this pluralist notion of Jewish identity was unpalatable to many of Asch’s American Yiddish writer colleagues, who reacted strongly to the universalizing message of Asch’s Jesus.

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Chapter 5 Jesus in Translation: Sholem Asch and the Pluralist Jesus

In 1957, the writer Sholem Asch left his home in Israel for a trip to England to visit his daughter and her family. Asch had already suffered one stroke, from which he had mostly recovered, and while in England he collapsed and died. He was buried there, in the cemetery of the West London Synagogue. As described by his great-grandson David Mazower, “Asch’s funeral in north London was a low-key affair attended by relatives, friends, a handful of well-wishers, and London’s dwindling circle of Yiddish writers—a few dozen mourners at most.”1 While the small size of his funeral could be attributed to the sudden nature of his death in an unfamiliar locale, it was likely also the result of an informal excommunication of Asch by the worldwide Jewish community in general, and the community of Yiddish writers in particular. Melekh Epstein notes that of all the Yiddish cultural organizations in New York, where Asch had lived and worked for nearly two decades, only the Bund, the Yiddish-speaking socialist organization, organized a memorial meeting for Asch.2

1

David Mazower, “Sholem Asch: Images of a Life,” Sholem Asch Reconsidered, ed. Nanette Stahl (New Haven, CT: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 2004): 30. 2

Melekh Epstein, “Abraham Cahan,” Profiles of Eleven (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1965): 106. Epstein attributes the official shunning of Asch to the continuing influence of Abraham Cahan, despite the fact that Cahan himself had died in 1951. The relationship between Cahan and Asch will be discussed later in this chapter.

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This indifference to Asch’s life and legacy was not in keeping with his early importance and popularity, both in the Jewish community and in the wider American culture. In 1936 Asch was the only writer included on a list in The New York Times of the “World’s 10 Greatest Living Jews,” and his own son recalled that his column in the weekly Yiddish Forverts (Forward) “became that week’s sermon for the Yiddishspeaking Jews of New York. When he walked along the streets of the Lower East Side, his name was whispered among the people with a kind of awe.”3 Given this acclaim, why was Asch, once one of the most popular living Yiddish writers, consigned to a nearanonymous burial? This question can be partly answered with a comparison to one of Asch’s literary colleagues and heirs, Isaac Bashevis Singer. Singer, too, had a quiet funeral, and he, too, is buried in a largely anonymous spot in New Jersey, far from other Yiddish literary lights and centers of Jewish culture. As Irving Saposnik characterizes his burial: New Jersey is no place for the Jewish dead. Yet that is where Bashevis lies, forever removed from the Poland of his dreams and the New York of his destiny. Neither Manhattan nor Warsaw, New Jersey offers little Jewish memory, and therefore no fitting memorial….Unlike Sholem Aleykhem, whose New York funeral was a massive outpouring of a hundred and fifty thousand, Bashevis died in loneliness and was buried with little ceremony. Even those few who came to see him buried were late for his death.4 Like Asch, Singer was a controversial figure in the world of Yiddish letters, both admired and vilified for his subject matter and the wide translation of his works into English and other languages. Both Asch and Singer were extremely popular and widely-read Yiddish 3

Ludwig Lewisohn, “World’s 10 Greatest Living Jews,” The New York Times (February 22, 1935): 19; Nathan Asch, “My Father and I,” Commentary 39 (January 1965): 57. 4

Irving Saposnik, “A Canticle for Isaac: A Kaddish for Bashevis,” The Hidden Isaac Bashevis Singer, ed. Seth L. Wolitz (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001): 3.

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writers who also suffered harsh criticism of their work. Their quiet funerals and out-ofthe-way burial places is a sign of their marginalization despite their popularity; the debates and controversies sparked by these two writers have also been left behind in the wake of the twentieth century and the process of Jewish assimilation and acculturation in America. As we will see, the controversy over a series of christological novels published by Asch between 1939 and 1949, which in certain ways parallels the controversies over work by that of Asch’s contemporaries Singer and Yankev Glatshteyn, was at least partly responsible for this physical sign of his excommunication from the Yiddish world. This chapter will address the furor surrounding the first of Sholem Asch’s christological novels, Der man fun natseres, in light of the cultural, linguistic, and social conflicts it exposed. Published only two years after Kabak’s Hebrew novel about Jesus, Der man fun natseres (The Man of Nazareth) also offered a fictional account of the ministry of Jesus. Although Asch was exclusively a Yiddish writer and the novel was originally written in Yiddish, through a series of unusual events entirely related to the subject matter of the book, it was published first in English translation, in New York in 1939.5 Der man fun natseres was, like Bemishol hatsar, a historical novel rich in period detail. However, both its form and its content differed significantly from Kabak’s novel, and the Jesus it portrayed represented an entirely different modern conception of Jewish identity, one that was not dependent on strong nationalist ties. 5

Sholem Asch, The Nazarene, trans. Maurice Samuel (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1939). The Yiddish original was published in two volumes as Der man fun natseres (New York: Kultur Farlag, 1943). It should be noted that the English title obscured the explicit denial of the divinity of Jesus implied by the Yiddish title.

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Der man fun natseres presented what many critics and scholars have labeled an “ecumenical” treatment of the life of Jesus, aimed at encouraging co-existence between Judaism and Christianity.6 But the term “ecumenical” misrepresents Asch’s characterization of Jesus and his personal philosophy, as expressed in numerous essays. Ecumenism implies a belief in the importance of co-existence and cooperation, generally within various denominations of one faith, but also between different faiths. Asch’s vision, however, was less focused on the external, or the interaction between Judaism and Christianity, and more focused on the internal, or Judaism’s self-definition in the modern era. In other words, like Kabak and Greenberg and other writers we have examined, Asch chose Jesus to represent a model for modern Jewish identity, in particular in twentieth-century America. The model for Jewish identity Asch presented in his novel is represented by what I will call the pluralist Jesus, a character who symbolizes the simultaneous coexistence of various and conflicting religious and cultural positions. As noted above, Asch’s novel was not simply an ecumenical project, designed to bring Judaism and Christianity into cooperation. Rather, Asch’s Jesus was a figure who embodied the contradictory, complicated, multi-faceted identity of a modern Jew who wished to be a full participant in the life and culture of the Western world, and specifically America. Asch’s characterization of Jesus suggested a Jewish identity that was not in accordance with any of the contemporary mainstream Jewish movements, which all sought to preserve, in one way or another, a unique and discrete Jewish culture. Rather, Asch’s Jesus, as well as the 6

See, for example, Morgentaler, Fischthal, and Anita Norich, “Sholem Asch and the Christian Question,” Sholem Asch Reconsidered, ed. Nanette Stahl (New Haven, CT: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 2004): 251-65.

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way in which the novel was published, advocated Jewish Americanization and even assimilation, and suggested that Jewish identities predicated on national, cultural, or linguistic bonds were doomed to failure. As such, Der man fun natseres was at the nexus of a larger cultural debate about Jewish and Yiddish life in the diaspora at a moment of historical crisis, when the future of the Yiddish language was not at all certain. This chapter will consider the form and structure of the novel itself, as well as the characterization of Jesus offered by Asch. I will first show how the novel itself constructed the image of a pluralist Jesus, and then examine how Asch viewed the contribution of his book. Finally, I will consider the reaction to the book in both the Anglophone and Yiddish press in America in order to trace anxieties about the model for Jewish identity suggested in Der man fun natseres and its place in twentieth-century America and the world.

The Historical Novel Destabilized Strictly speaking, Der man fun natseres was a historical novel, set in the Judaea of the Second Temple Period. It contained a wealth of period detail and vivid descriptions of the Galilee, Jerusalem, and the Temple, as well as the dress, food, and customs of the time. Unlike a typical realist novel, however, and in sharp contrast to Bemishol hatsar, the form of Der man fun natseres challenges the very notion of historicity itself. The novel is divided into three parts that roughly correspond to the testimony of three different ancient first-person narrators and proceed chronologically. This ancient story, which makes up the bulk of the novel, is framed by a contemporary one, set in twentiethcentury Warsaw just before the Second World War. Asch begins the novel by 160

introducing the mystical mechanism by which the ancient story comes to be told: reincarnation.7 Both of the main characters in the contemporary frame story of the novel are revealed to be reincarnations of figures who witnessed some part of the story of Jesus, and most of the novel is a recounting of these characters’ “memories” of the Second Temple period. The frame story of the novel, set in 1930s Warsaw, consists of a recounting of the scholarly partnership and tenuous friendship between Pan Viadomsky, an elderly, antiSemitic scholar of antiquity, and an unnamed Jewish narrator, a young man who has been referred to the Pan to help him translate an ancient document from the Hebrew. As their partnership progresses into a kind of wary friendship, or at least mutual respect, the Pan begins to allude to his past life as Cornelius, the Ciliarch of the Antonia Fortress of Jerusalem, known to his Jewish subjects as Hegemon. At first, the young man thinks the Pan, old and sickly, has become delusional, but he agrees to listen to and record the older man’s narration of his story. The first part of the novel consists of the supposedly transcribed accounts of Cornelius’s recollection of how he came to Jerusalem with his longtime colleague Pontius Pilate and eventually came to know of the Rabbi of Nazareth, as he is most often referred to by Cornelius. The second part is a “translation” of the mysterious manuscript for which the young scholar had originally been hired; it turns out to be a lost Gospel written by Judah Ish-Kiriot (Judah, man of Kiriot, the Hebrew for 7

Shloyme Rosenberg, Asch’s secretary during the period in which he wrote Der man fun natseres, claims that Asch really believed in reincarnation. Asch told him two anecdotes that had confirmed his belief in the existence and residual memory of past lives: one about a shoemaker from his hometown of Kutno, Poland, who went out into the street marching and giving orders every time the Russian army came through; and another, perhaps more relevant to the novel, about a young man at an exhibition he had attended in mandate Palestine in 1936 who had greeted the British High Commander by introducing himself as Pontius Pilate. Shloyme Rosenberg, Sholem ash fun der noent (Face to Face with Sholem Asch) (Miami: Farlag Shaulzon, 1958): 231-2.

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Judas Iscariot). The final section of the novel is a transcribed account of the memories of Jochanan, a young Jewish pupil of a Pharisaic rabbi of the Second Temple Period called Rabbi Nicodemon, given by none other than the young Jewish scholar himself, who discovers that he, too, is the reincarnation of an ancient personality. The narration of this third part of the novel alternates between his point of view and that of Cornelius as it suits the story, which includes the arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem, his trials, and the crucifixion. This multi-layered structure is one of the most distinctive elements of the book, distinguishing it from a typical historical novel. The unique form and the use of the mechanism of reincarnation to explain the first-person narration of ancient episodes was clearly a deliberate device. This conceit allowed Asch to tell the story from a variety of perspectives and in a variety of voices: that of a Roman officer, a disciple of Jesus, and a Jewish observer. In doing so, the narration suggests its pluralist project, a democratic representation of events, accepting of contradiction and conflict, of multiplicity. While the events of the novel and the teachings of Jesus are taken almost verbatim from the Gospels of the New Testament, the multiple perspectives constitute the kind of translation, subversion, and transformation of those foundational texts that, as I explained previously, characterize an “intentional hybridity” that challenges the constructed borders of identity. The most transparent of these techniques of translation is the use of the Hebrew versions of the Hellenized names by which the characters and places of the story are known in the Gospels. Jesus is called by his Hebrew patronymic, Yeshua ben Joseph (Yeshua son of Joseph), Judas Iscariot is Judah Ish-Kiriot, Mary Magdalene is Miriam of 162

Migdal (although she is also referred to as Miriam Magdalena); Capernaum is known by the Hebrew K’far Nahum (Village of Nahum), the garden of Gethsemane as Gat Shemen (Garden of the Oil Pressers).8 Similarly, the particularly Jewish atmosphere in which Jesus lived and taught is emphasized. In a description of the spiritual leader Jochanan (John the Baptist) given by Cornelius, his normatively Jewish appearance is described in passing: “On his hairy forehead he wore a small leather box, tied with a leather strap, like I had often seen the learned wear on their head and on their hands....On the sackcloth that he wore, he, like all the other Jews, had tied fringes that they call ‘tsitsis.’”9 As we will see later, Jesus is similarly described. Another way in which Asch transforms and subverts the Gospel texts is through rewriting their narrative from different perspectives with different emphases and implications than the Gospels. Two examples of this rewriting of the Gospels in particular illustrate Asch’s use of this technique: an account by Judah Ish-Kiriot of the miracle of walking on water, and a first-person description by the young student Jochanan of Jesus’ attack on the moneychangers in the Temple court. In each of these stories, Asch expands the sketchy Gospel accounts with details that ground them historically, correspondingly decreasing their mystery and reconnecting them to Jewish tradition. These episodes are examples of the type of prototypical rewriting the Kabak also used in Bemishol hatsar: as we will see, in embellishing these Gospel stories Asch offers a new reading of the old material. 8

I have chosen to retain the English translation’s transcriptions of these names for convenience. In Yiddish, Jesus is actually Yeshua ben Yoysef, Judah is Yehuda, etc. 9

Sholem Asch, Der man fun natseres (The Man from Nazareth), Ershter band (Volume 1) (New York: Kultur farlag, 1943): 174. All citations are from this edition and will be cited in the text with volume and page numbers. All translations are my own.

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The Gospel accounts of the miracle of Jesus walking on water found in Matthew, Mark, and John vary slightly but contain several common elements: the episode occurs in adverse weather conditions and stormy seas, the vision of the miracle appears to all of the disciples collectively, and Jesus himself calms the disciples when they become afraid after seeing the miracle.10 In addition, two of the accounts (Matthew and Mark) note that the miracle occurs “early in the morning.” Other than these small details, little information is provided. In Der man fun natseres, this episode is related within the text of the lost “Gospel” of Judah Ish-Kiriot, narrated by Judah himself, which makes up the second part of the book. The most immediate difference here is that only one of the disciples, Simon bar Jonah (Simon Peter), witnesses the miracle.11 And in a short prologue to the actual episode, we are given a backstory that provides a possible explanation for his vision: And the faith of Shimen bar Yoyne in our rabbi grew stronger and stronger. He believed that our rabbi could do those things which no man of flesh and blood had ever done before, that the power had been given to him not only over men, but over the spirits and elements, and the angels stood ready to do his bidding. And he heard voices and saw visions that none of us saw (I:348-9). Before the ostensible miracle is even described, the reader understands that it is likely just the solitary vision of a passionate believer. Indeed, the description of the event that follows reads very differently from the Gospel accounts. The details of setting in the Gospel story, that the hour was very early and the sea was rough, become central. Having visited Israel and the Sea of Galilee, 10

Matthew 14:22ff, Mark 6:47ff, and John 6:16ff. All translations from the New Testament are taken from the New Revised Standard Version and will be cited in the text. 11

This scenario is not unlike Kabak’s description of the same story, recounted in Chapter 4, and also seems to owe something to Klausner’s theory of autosuggestion.

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Asch would likely have known that due to the extremely low elevation and the climate, thick mist often hangs in the valley in the early morning. Judah describes this mist in the novel: “the sea was enveloped in a cloud of dew that lay heavy over it. The cloud blocked the light of heaven, and it seemed to us that heaven and earth had been woven together and joined in one body” (I:349). Not only is there a tremendously thick mist, but “the darkness hid everything from us, as if a heavy net hung before our eyes, and we saw nothing but the denseness around us” (I:349). It is in this atmosphere that Simon calls out for the disciples to look, and although they strain to see, nothing is visible. Indeed, the story suggests that even if there had been no mist or darkness, they would not have been able to see what Simon saw. Rather than a literal depiction of Jesus walking on water, as in the Gospels, Simon’s vision is metaphorical: “I see my Rabbi, how he fills the space of the world, his head lifted up into the heavens, and with his naked feet he strides over the waves on the sea! He touches them with his feet and they lie down like tamed sheep under him and let him step on them!” (I:349) Rather than a miracle, this seems to be one man’s ecstatic vision of the symbolic power of his rabbi. In rereading the Gospel story, the novel demystifies it, suggesting an alternate, more quotidian interpretation of the events described in the Gospels. By providing the details of setting and character, Asch also internally justifies his own rewriting of the story.12 While this transformation of the Gospels demystifies the miraculous, Asch’s rewriting of the story of Jesus and the moneychangers in the Temple emphasizes Jesus’ specifically Jewish piety and works against any anti-Jewish sentiment encoded in the 12

Again, this corresponds closely to Ziva Ben-Porat’s definition of the prototypical rewrite, which is “characterized not only by the faithful deployment of many and/or major original components but also by sophisticated mechanisms for legitimizing lack of fidelity.” Ben Porat, 99.

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Gospel story.13 The Gospel versions of the story describe Jesus driving those selling sacrificial animals and changing foreign currency—in other words, anyone engaging in commerce—from the Temple courts. In support of his action, he quotes from the book of Isaiah, indicating that this commercial activity has corrupted the Temple’s spiritual purpose: “for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples” (56:7).14 In Mark and Luke, the story also contains a coda indicating that the priests are trying to find a way to kill Jesus but haven’t yet figured out how to do it.15 Rather than the few lines accorded this story in the Gospels, Asch devotes five pages to his account, which is greatly embellished. Again, he adds a backstory: as the narrator Jochanan enters the Temple court with his rabbi, Nicodemon, the rabbi designates one student to be the treasurer of the group and instructs him to wait outside the gates with the money, “for one should not enter the court of the Temple when one carries a purseful of money” (II:213). Not only that, but when they enter the Temple court and see the buying and selling going on, one of the students asks Rabbi Nicodemon why such activity is allowed when the rabbi just indicated that it was contrary to Jewish practice. Nicodemon answers that commerce has been allowed in the Temple court by the priesthood, not the rabbis, admonishing him that “those, however, who heed the pronouncements of the sages—they buy their doves in the marketplace and bring their sacrifices to the Temple. They do not fill the house of God with the noise of commerce, 13

See Mark 11:15ff, Luke 19:45ff, and John 2:14ff.

14

It is interesting to note that even in the Gospels Jesus uses this prooftext in a very rabbinic way—that is, he takes it out of context. 15

The account in John varies slightly from the other two, in that Jesus bears a weapon, does not quote the prooftext from Isaiah, and the story lacks the coda about the intentions of the priests.

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as you see here” (II:214). This backstory and the speech of Rabbi Nicodemon, who has been characterized as an honored Pharisaic sage, establish Jesus’ teaching as normative Jewish conduct of the period. Thus, when Jesus scatters the merchants and money changers, the students and common people watching are exhilarated, both because of his righteousness and because he seems to inspire fear in their oppressors—both the priests and the Romans. However, unlike the Gospel account, here the priests are characterized as surprised, fearful, even admiring, but not explicitly hateful. In the novel, when Jesus confronts the priests faceto-face, “Even among them passed an enthusiastic murmur, of wonder at the daring of this man and his certainty in himself” (II:219). Jesus curses the priests aloud, and they decline to confront him, leaving him in the company of an adoring crowd. By aligning Jesus with both normative Judaism and the Jewish community of Jerusalem, and by recharacterizing the priests’ reaction to him, Asch creates a counternarrative to the Gospels’ somewhat anti-Jewish tone. Asch’s rewriting of these Gospel stories and others is enabled by his use of multiple perspectives, which adds nuance to the sketchy outlines provided by the Gospels. In doing so he softens the tone of the Gospels, flattening their explicit Christianness. As the critic Shmuel Niger put it, Asch doesn’t try to answer the question of who Jesus was, or is, but rather “Who and what was he in the eyes of various kinds of Jews?”16 Perhaps more importantly, however, by allowing previously minor or unvoiced characters to become the narrators of the story of Jesus, Asch calls into question the very stability of

16

Shmuel Niger, Sholem asch zayn leben zayne verk (Sholem Asch: His Life and His Works) (New York: Alveltlekhen yidishn kultur-kongres, 1960): 286.

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historical, and by extension religious, truth. In doing so, he sets the stage for the exploration of pluralism, the acceptance of multiple, even conflicting, perspectives as all containing an element of truth. Within the novel, the contemporary character Pan Viadomsky makes this very point explicitly. He tells his young Jewish colleague, “There are many truths, and all truths have verity in them. Truth is flung into the heart by a thousand means, by the sword and the word, by tradition and faith. Only that truth is the real one which is anchored in its time, in the immediacy of its being” (I:38). Through the perspectives of narrators from Jesus’ own time, the novel itself illustrates this point, and suggests that there is no one authoritative narrative of Jesus’ life and death.

The Pluralist Jesus Just as there is no single narrative of Jesus’ story presented in the novel, the character of Jesus himself remains somewhat shadowy. As we saw in the previous chapter, Kabak attempted to construct a backstory for his Jesus, a psychological portrait of his youth that would explain his religious and political philosophy. Asch deliberately refrains from filling out the vague outlines offered by his sources. The Jesus of Der man fun natseres lacks an individual or personal psychology, his motivations are somewhat mysterious, and his voice is largely reproduced from the Gospels. Goldie Morgentaler has ascribed the thinness of Jesus’ character to the problems inherent in portraying a human Jesus, noting that in this novel he is mostly a compendium of Gospel quotes.17 I would argue, however, that this shadowy portrayal and incomplete characterization is intentional. Just like the device of multiple perspectives, reproducing the mysterious 17

Morgentaler, 228.

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Jesus of the Gospels also suggests that understandings of his character have historically been based more on interpretation than “history” or “reality” and that, in fact, any attempt to reconstruct this authentic original is hopelessly obscured by centuries of interpretation. Again, by emphasizing the multiplicity of interpretation over “truth,” Asch emphasizes the pluralist nature of his project. The Jesus of Asch’s novel is given some general tendencies and characteristics, however, even if only superficial. First, as is evident from the title, he is clearly characterized as a man, not a god. And as a man, his concerns lie largely with the political and economic oppression around him. As his mother tells Judah Ish-Kiriot, recalling Jesus’ youth, “Often I heard him speaking bitterly against the rich and learned who oppress the poor and do not take not up the cause of orphans” (I:326). It is suggested that this sympathy for the poor and subjugated, rather than any political or religious impetus, drives his spiritual message. More precisely, Jesus is characterized as a Jew, and his spiritual message and practice as specifically and normatively Jewish. This is conveyed by his appearance, as described for the first time in the novel by Cornelius: A young black beard, which mingled with his long peyes (earlocks), which he wore according to the Jewish manner, framed his longish face and emphasized its whiteness. His garment that he wore—according to the manner of the learned— was white from the opening at the throat down to the feet. Over the garment he wore, according to Jewish custom, a kind of sleeveless tunic with blue-white stripes, on which was tied four long tassels, “tsitsis” (prayer fringes), and they reached down to his feet. Thus he stood under the naked fig tree and enlightened them in their Aramaic jargon (I:195).

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Jesus here exhibits all the markers of a religious Jew recognizable to a contemporary audience: the beard, peyes (earlocks), and tsitsis (prayer fringes). He speaks in the vernacular, marking him again as a common man. Jesus’ adherence to Jewish law in terms of both his own behavior and his teaching is also emphasized. The fact that he makes the proper benediction before eating is always mentioned, as are less common practices. For example, when he visits the Jerusalem congregation of Rabbi Nicodemon, he is called to read from the weekly portion of the Torah. “The prayer-leader handed him a tallis, and he wrapped himself in it, closing his eyes and whispering a prayer. Then he went to the Torah, made the blessing over it, read his passage, ended with a blessing, —and he stepped down from the pulpit, according to the law” (II:111). Even the aspects of his personal conduct that might be considered unusual for a Jewish sage are explained. For example, the fact that Jesus never marries is justified by a description of Rabbi Nicodemon: And when the sages asked him why he had not taken a wife, he answered: “I have already married the Torah.” In this he was not alone in Jerusalem. There were many rabbis who scorned wives as a temptation from the right path. They loved to remain in eternal bachelorhood, dedicated to their teaching and to a pure life, which they called “betrothal to the holy maiden.” (II:35). This provides an indirect comparison with Jesus, including him in the category of those pious teachers who choose not to marry. Jesus’ teaching, too, is characterized as normatively Jewish, even when it is radical. One passage describing a sermon given by Jesus in the synagogue of Nicodemon encapsulates the described attitude toward Jesus’ doctrine: first, it appears to be radical or even anathema, but eventually it becomes clear that even his most radical interpretations have roots in the tradition. 170

They were already prepared to forgive him the bitter disappointment that the beginning of his sermon had caused them, for he had begun with his own words, not in the way of the sages when they preached or taught a group, who began with a verse from the Torah, or from the Prophets, or from Psalms, or even Ben-Sira, and who mentioned the names of the rabbis from whom they had learned. The learned men thought that this was simply his own style, his own way of preaching, but in the course of the speech itself he in no way separated himself from the other rabbis and sages. (II:113) This pattern is repeated over and over in the many interrogations Jesus weathers by the sages and scribes of Jerusalem. In general, it is noted that “the sages forgave him his sharp speech against them. They even became accustomed to them. It was known that the rabbi from the Galilee fulfilled all the commandments of the Torah, even the smallest ones that were only a matter of custom” (II:168). And while his doctrine might appear to be radical, in a certain way it is characterized as respectful of existing scholarly and religious hierarchy. For “even though he spoke harshly against the Pharisees, he nonetheless urged everyone in his sermons to fulfill all the commandments according to the Pharisees, and to heed them, ‘for they sit on the throne of Moses’” (II:168-9). By repeatedly characterizing Jesus as normatively Jewish, Asch transforms the historical Jesus by claiming him for the Jews. But Asch’s transformation of Jesus also emphasizes his pluralist message, by revealing the multiplicity of potential interpretations and representations of Jesus, and indicating that his Jewish version of Jesus is not incompatible with Christian understandings of Jesus. Asch also takes pains to demonstrate that Jesus was loved and accepted by the common Jewish people, if not by their priestly leadership. This both counters historical canards implicating the Jews in Jesus’ death and returns him to the Jewish community. This is most evident in the scene outside the procuratorium after Jesus’ conviction by the 171

Romans. When Pilate asks the crowds outside the procuratorium what he should do with Jesus, only the members of the priesthood cry out for his crucifixion. The rest of the crowd defends Jesus, saying “He is our brother!” and blaming the verdict on the priests, claiming, “This is their revenge!” Finally, “the people began to crowd around Hanan [the High Priest],” angry and ready to attack him, but he is saved at the last moment by the Roman guards, who attack the crowd (II:337-8). The reaction of the Jewish people to both the verdict against Jesus and the priesthood indicate a general disapproval of the priests’ behavior and sympathy for Jesus’ cause. By rendering Jesus both normatively Jewish and beloved by the masses, Asch argues for a sympathetic Jewish attitude toward Jesus. At the same time, by Judaizing Jesus Asch points clearly to the Jewish origins of Christian doctrine and, ultimately, Christianity itself. By demonstrating their common origins, Asch stresses the possibility not just of co-existence and reconciliation, but also a pluralist philosophy that accepts the multiple truths referred to by Pan Viadomsky. In Asch’s formulation, the figure of Jesus can mean something, although possibly something different, to both Jews and Christians simultaneously.18 His representation of Jesus suggests that Jews do not have to reject Christianity or its offshoots (Western culture, for example) out of hand. Both systems of thought can be “true,” can be meaningful and relevant at the same time. Near the end of the novel, there is a brief, almost cursory, discussion of the “messianists,” those who believed in Jesus’ resurrection. Cornelius/Viadomsky asks Jochanan whether these messianists were persecuted after Jesus’ death. Jochanan 18

In this, Asch’s characterization echoes Y.H. Brenner’s idea that a Jew could appreciate the New Testament and the ethical teachings of Jesus and still remain wholly Jewish. See my discussion of Brenner’s position in Chapter 1.

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wonders incredulously why that should be the case, asking, “What difference was there between us and them that we should persecute them?” (II:364) Not only does this emphasize the commonality between the early Jews and Christians, but it serves as an example for peaceful coexistence and mutual understanding between the two groups. Perhaps Viadomsky himself states it most clearly near the beginning of the novel. He tells the young scholar, “in the beginning…this entire matter of the new faith was a Jewish affair. Both the followers of that faith and its opponents were cut from the same cloth out of which God created the chosen people” (I:15). All of Asch’s careful literary devices and innovative rewriting of the Gospels was designed to demonstrate the inextricable relationship between Christianity and Judaism in order to advance a democratic notion of mutual understanding and acceptance of the potential truth inherent in the two faiths and cultures.

The Failed Messiah The Israelites’ affection for Jesus in Der man fun natseres goes far beyond sympathy, however, to faith. The Jewish masses of the novel, like those in Bemishol hatsar, desperately await the arrival of the messiah, and at every turn they hope that Jesus is their redeemer. Specifically, the people hope for the political salvation promised by the coming of the messiah, which will liberate them from Roman oppression and taxation. After Jesus has driven the moneychangers from the Temple, Jochanan explains that now that Jesus had confronted the priesthood, everyone watching thought that so too “he would now destroy the greatest enemy, the source of wickedness, the evil of the world, the fist that held God’s people in its vise, —the Lord of Edom [i.e., Rome]” (II:220). 173

This desire for freedom from political subjugation and Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel comes up at every instance in the novel in which it appears that Jesus will be revealed as the messiah. But this hope is constantly disappointed; Jesus is only a failed messiah, and the dream of freedom is perpetually deferred. Time and time again, Jesus fails to confront Roman power or perform the miracle that would indicate the inception of his kingship. The scene in which Jesus makes his way up to the Temple Mount riding on an ass, as it was prophesied that the messiah would, encapsulates this cycle of expectation and disappointment. When Jesus first sets out, he is followed only by his disciples, but slowly collects a crowd who expects him to be crowned king when they reach the Temple, thus ending the rule of Rome and ushering in the time of messianic reign. The group is described as a “procession of people hungry for salvation, thirsty for redemption, an oppressed and tormented people who in their desperation clung to their faith in their God and followed a prophet and redeemer to the holy place in which the longed-for wonder of their redeemer would become real…” (II:194). On their way, they encounter a Roman procession, and the people’s expectations of a confrontation are raised, but he lets the Romans pass without incident, and “the rabbi’s withdrawal from the might of Edom [Rome] disappointed the believing masses” (II:201). Finally, they reach the Temple, and the procession is sure that Jesus will be revealed as the messiah, but are again disappointed: But how astounded and disappointed they became when the procession reached the bridge leading to the Temple, and the rabbi, like every other Jew, descended from his donkey, entered the path leading to the Temple, and mixed with the great masses of strangers who filled the Temple court, —and he did not perform a 174

single miracle! —The heavens did not open, no heavenly host descended, and everything was as it was yesterday and the day before. (II:202) Again and again this pattern repeats itself: when Jesus is arrested in the garden of Gat Shemen, at his trial in front of Pilate, when he is ultimately crucified. Even until the very end, the narrator Jochanan relates, “everyone waited for the miracle, even Bar-Abba’s followers, even the messengers of the High Priest” (II:334).19 Finally, though, there is no miracle. Jesus does not reveal himself to be the messiah, but dies like a mortal man, saying the Shma, the foundational Jewish prayer recited before death. The people remain disappointed, oppressed by Rome and the priests. The failure of Jesus to deliver on his apparent promise conveys a kind of cynical lack of faith in the potential for national redemption, and perhaps even an implicit critique of the longing for it. While Kabak had portrayed Jesus as the leader of a noble nationalist cause, Asch’s Jesus is a well-meaning but ultimately ineffectual leader. In addition, in Jesus’ failure to emerge as the messiah, the novel critiques the notion of a simplistic, easy national redemption.20 Instead, it suggests that such a project may be doomed to failure or simply impossible. Again, this is consistent with Asch’s pluralist message and philosophy: the separatism and insularity consistent with the longing for the messiah and national redemption works against the notion of many truths, and against the idea of the acceptance and coexistence of many faiths and creeds. This universalist message is in direct opposition to the kind of Zionist and particularist ideals expressed in the work of Kabak and Greenberg. 19

Bar Abba (Barabbas) and his followers are characterized in the novel as violent revolutionaries seeking the overthrow of Rome. 20

It is also significant that this element of Asch’s characterization of Jesus makes the book very clearly not a pro-Christian polemic, which was one criticism later leveled against him.

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At the same time as Jesus’ failed messiahship conveys an implicitly antinationalist message, it also disparages the notion of Jewish martyrdom. For it is clear from the end of the novel that Jesus’ sacrifice has been in vain, at least for the Jews. It accomplishes nothing except splitting the Jews into various factions (some of whom will, of course, become Christian). Sholem Asch had long been interested in the topic of Jewish martyrdom. His 1919 novel Kidesh hashem (Sanctification of the Name), about the Chmielnicki uprising in Poland in 1648, is explicitly concerned with the topic. The title itself is the traditional Hebrew word for martyrdom, which literalizes the notion of sanctifying God through suffering. This novel, too, in its bleak conclusion, disparages the notion of religious martyrdom. Coming back to the city of Lublin after the Chmielnicki pogroms, which he has survived after being sold as a slave in Turkey, Shloymele, a young scholar and rabbi, discovers that his parents have been murdered by the Cossacks, and his wife is missing and presumed dead. At first, “the meaning escaped him, —he could not understand, and he fell in a state of melancholy. And this caused him deep grief, for it is a matter of common knowledge that melancholy is only one degree removed from doubting.”21 But he soon comes upon a small stall in the commercial area of Lublin. An old man is calling buyers into the booth, but the stall is completely empty. Shloymele asks the man what he is selling, since there is no merchandise in the booth. The old man replies, “I sell faith.”22 At first glance, this ending seems uplifting: despite the loss of everything and everyone dear to him—despite his emptiness, as it were—Shloymele can still cling to his faith, which has no physical 21

Sholem Asch, Kiddush Ha-Shem: An Epic of 1648, trans. Rufus Learsi (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1926): 227. 22

Asch, Kiddush Ha-Shem, 227.

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manifestation. On the other hand, the emptiness of the old man’s stall is ambiguous. At the same time as it suggests the possibility of faith, it also suggests the possibility that faith is a chimera, a figment, and not worth dying for. Indeed, the old man in the stall appears familiar to Shloymele, and the implication is that he is the same mysterious old man who was once his tutor and later urged the people of his hometown to take any measures possible to save themselves from the Cossacks. Since, earlier in the novel, this character suggested that life was preferable to martyrdom, his claim that his empty booth is full of faith seems even less credible, and even more ironic. The ambiguous ending of Kidesh hashem casts a critical shadow over the Jewish glorification of martyrdom. Asch continued his exploration of martyrdom in his 1926 novel Di kishefmakherin fun kastilen (The Witch of Castile), a story of a Jewish girl martyred during the Spanish Inquisition. In the introduction to this novel Asch explicitly linked the themes of martyrdom and messianism: “Two elements in Jewish history have always interested me: martyrdom (kidesh hashem) and the messianic aspirations that used to follow from that martyrdom. These two elements of Jewish history have long teased my fantasy and my literary desire.”23 In Jesus, the mutual dependence of these two ideas found their clearest expression. But the end of Der man fun natseres suggests that neither messianism nor martyrdom, in the end, should define Judaism, since they have so often failed. Rather, Jesus’ death appears to have been in vain, as it does not bring about either messianic redemption or any other kind of salvation for the Jews. And the cooperative partnership between the young Jewish scholar and Pan Viadomsky in the frame story

23

Quoted in Yitskhok Turkov-Grodberg, Sholem ashs derekh in der yidisher eybikeyt (Sholem Asch’s Path in Jewish Eternity) (Bat Yam: Beit Sholem Asch, 1967): 115.

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suggests that catharsis comes only through mutual recognition and appreciation, through knowledge and understanding, and not through the willful ignorance and division that leads to violence.

Asch’s Pluralist Philosophy This pluralist model for modern Jewish identity was espoused by Asch in numerous essays, books, and interviews in which he expounded on his ideas both about his novel and modern Jewish life. It was this philosophy that emerged in his characterization of Jesus and which also, ultimately, led to the controversy over the book. Asch’s brand of pluralism was based in a deep sense of the inextricable connection between Judaism and Christianity, a link that led to their mutual dependence. This connection demands that both Judaism and Christianity accept the truth of the other’s position. In other words, Asch suggests, as Pan Viadomsky expresses in the novel, that there are multiple, co-existing truths. Asch’s pluralist philosophy demanded that they be acknowledged and accepted. This idea, for Asch, is also deeply tied to the idea of America and to his own strong patriotic Americanism. Asch first became interested in Jesus as a hybrid figure who might demonstrate the fallacy of the artificial boundaries of “truth” on his first visit to Palestine, in 1906. Of that trip, he later noted in an interview, Walking through the narrow streets of Jerusalem, climbing on her hills and walls, I saw in my imagination the things which happened in this holy city, which became a cornerstone of our modern civilization. Since that time I have never thought of Judaism and Christianity separately. For me it is one culture and one

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civilization, on which all our peace, our security, and our freedom are dependent.24 Here, Jerusalem, which the Zionists of Asch’s time saw as the future capital of their sovereign state, becomes the site from which both Judaism and Christianity emerge, and the very cornerstone of Western civilization. In envisioning Jerusalem as a capital of Western civilization, Asch claims Western culture for Judaism and Judaism for Western culture. Asch carried this idea even further when he wrote, “If men speak today of a Christian civilization, I, a Jew, feel myself a part of it.”25 For if Judaism and Christianity share a common heritage, then it follows by extension that the civilization spawned by that heritage, Western culture, belongs equally to the Jews. It is this melting pot of Western culture that Asch saw as the foundation of modern Jewish identity. Asch explicitly described what he saw as the artificiality of the separation between Jew and Christian, and perhaps any categorical separation between human beings based on identity: “We are woven into one another through the garment of ‘life’ which we weave in common….For there is no empty space, there is no fence, behind which we can find separation.”26 Unlike Greenberg, who sought a definition of an authentic, bounded Jewish identity that would maintain Jewish specificity and even separation, Asch uses this notion of the inauthenticity of borders to advocate for the inclusion of Jews in the general culture: “The Jewish-Christian idea makes us equal partners in your Christian ideal, just as it make [sic] you equal partners in our Jewish one,

24

John K. Hutchens, “Mr. Asch at 75: Prophet with Honor,” New York Herald Tribune Book Review (November 6, 1955): 2. 25

26

Sholem Asch, What I Believe, trans. Maurice Samuel (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1941): 136. Asch, What I Believe, 40.

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in spite of the fact that we belong to separate faiths.”27 The idea of this deep partnership, based in a common Judeo-Christian idea, requires the acceptance of coexisting truths, of multiple correct interpretations, of a pluralist philosophy of democratic cooperation. And what better place to symbolize this pluralist flourishing of ideas than America? Asch had long been interested in the experience of American Jews, and in 1917 his novel Onkl Mozes (Uncle Moses) was serialized in the Yiddish daily Forverts (Forward). Set in New York City in the early twentieth century, the novel focuses on the garment factory owner Moses Melnik, and charts “the transformation of Eastern European Jewish culture in America.”28 Asch also publicly declared his extreme admiration and nearly religious faith in American values. In his book What I Believe, Asch suggested that the Declaration of Independence “should be taught not only in our schools but also in the churches and synagogues, in the catechisms and in the religious primers; and it should be entered as one of the prayers in the Jewish siddur.”29 This is a literalization of Asch’s profound belief in democratic pluralism: the insertion of the foundational principles of American democracy into the Jewish liturgy. Asch also suggested that America and its ideals were an inspiration and condition for his pluralist philosophy. He wrote that in contrast to Europe, where Jews were oppressed by Christians, “In our own blessed America it is not difficult for a man of

27

Sholem Asch, One Destiny: An Epistle to the Christians, trans. Milton Hindus (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1945): 83. 28

Ellen Deborah Kellman, The Newspaper Novel in the Jewish Daily Forward (1900-1940): Fiction as Entertainment and Serious Literature (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2000): 131. 29

Asch, What I Believe, 178.

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Jewish extraction to regard his fellow Christian as a brother in God.”30 This embrace of the individual American Christian Asch extended to American institutions in general. When he donated his papers and collection of rare and valuable books and manuscripts to the Yale University Library, Asch wrote, “America is no longer our temporary home, it is our permanent home, and we must plant our tree in its soil. Our contribution to human civilization through our contribution to the Jewish-Christian idea must be represented in the general American institutions of learning.”31 Asch’s use of the pronoun “our” indicates that he saw not just himself, but all Jews, as Americans, and insisted that as such they were also part of his “Jewish-Christian ideal” that necessitated their participation not only in specifically Jewish institutions—like, say, Yiddish newspapers—but in great American institutions like Yale University. Conversely, while Asch saw himself and other Jews as belonging to the “us” of America, he also venerated the American ideal of the individual, and Der man fun natseres can also been seen as an example of this veneration. The critic Isaac Rontch, in his survey of American Yiddish literature, wrote that “the primary theme of all his [Asch’s] work is always—the man, the love of the individual.”32 The elevation of the individual is, of course, a typically American theme. It also calls into question the value of community and communal bonds and identity of the type which closely bound both the 30

Sholem Asch, “Dedicatory Forward: One of Six Million,” From Many Countries: The Collected Short Stories of Sholem Asch (London: MacDonald, 1958): ix. 31

Sholem Asch, “A Word About my Collection of Jewish Books,” Catalogue of Hebrew and Yiddish Manuscripts and Books from the Library of Sholem Asch (New Haven, CT: Yale University Library, 1945): xvi. 32

Isaac Rontch, “Sholem Asch,” Amerike in der yiddisher literature (America in Yiddish Literature) (New York: Y.A. Rontch bukh komitet, 1945): 55.

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Yiddish literary community in America and Jews throughout the diaspora. Asch’s emphasis on the unique individual was both an affirmation of his Americanism and a repudiation of the communal bonds of Judaism. It may seem unsurprising, then, that Asch also ascribed his ability to write his christological works to America. He told an interviewer for a Christian magazine: “And will you say this for me, to your American readers? I could never have written ‘The Nazarene’ and ‘The Apostle’ had I not come to America. In this great land is the understanding I had to have; here the Jew has never been persecuted. Here, and only here, are two such books as mine possible.”33 Thus, Asch linked his residence in America, and even identity as an American, to his christological works. This almost religious dedication to American pluralism is an important theme in Der man fun natseres, and Asch’s characterization of Jesus represented a model for this Americanized vision of Jewish identity.

Democratic Pluralism and its Discontents In the winter of 1938, Sholem Asch sent a copy of the first two parts of Der man fun natseres for publication in the Yiddish Forverts in New York, where many of his novels since 1914 had been serialized.34 Soon after, as recalled by Asch’s secretary, 33

Frank S. Mead, “I Had to Write These Things…: An Interview with Sholem Asch,” Christian Herald (January 1944): 14. Indeed, Fischthal speculates that Asch made dramatic changes to his manuscript of Der man fun natseres once he arrived back in the United States because he “felt more free in his adopted country, in which he was very hopeful that Jews and Christians could reconcile their differences” (171). Rosenberg confirms that major changes were made, at least, in the beginning of the draft of the first two parts that he had completed in Europe, and that he wrote the whole third part in the U.S. Rosenberg, 231. 34

For a detailed publication history of Asch’s serialized novels in the Forverts and his early relationship with the editor, Abraham Cahan, see “The Advent of Weekly Serialization, besere literatur, and the Novel of Jewish Life in the Forverts,” in Kellman, 100-207.

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Shloyme Rosenberg, a letter arrived from Abraham Cahan, the editor of the Forverts, in which he “ordered Asch to ‘forget’ his Christ-novel and not to continue writing it.”35 Asch, incensed, continued to write the novel, but was unable to find a Yiddish newspaper or press to publish it. Ultimately, Asch’s Yiddish novel about Jesus was published first in English translation.36 The fact that the novel was first published in English, rather than its original Yiddish, became a point of contention among some Yiddish critics. Anita Norich has gone so far as to suggest that “Asch’s primary sin was not that he accepted Jesus (which he did not), but that he published first in English translation.”37 The English publication of this Yiddish novel came at a time of difficulty for the Yiddish literary community in America. At the moment that Der man fun natseres was published, the onset of the war in Europe and continued news of the persecution of Jews there was causing a crisis in the American Jewish community, and in particular for the Yiddish literary community, for

35

Rosenberg, 234. Rosenberg also notes that the novel was also sent for publication to Haynt (Today) in Warsaw, and was rejected by its editors for the converse reason: not because it was too Christian, but too blasphemous to pass muster with the Polish censor (235). 36

Maurice Samuel, Asch’s longtime collaborator and a highly respected translator, did the translation. Asch was eventually able to find a Yiddish publisher: the novel was serialized in the Communist Morgn frayhayt (Morning Freedom) and published in Yiddish (New York: Kultur Farlag) in 1943. That it was eventually published in a Communist periodical is itself a testament to the complex and shifting allegiances during the Second World War. While Asch was not a Communist, after the demise of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in June 1941 and the entrance of the Soviet Union into the war on the side of the Allies, he, like many Jews, came to see Communism as an ally rather than an enemy, and voiced support for the Soviet Union. In addition, it seems likely that elements of Asch’s pluralism were appealing to a Communist paper interested in de-emphasizing the strongly nationalist aspects of Jewish particularism and attempting to articulate their own notion of Jewish identity and belonging in America. Like some of the cultural debates of the time, including those over Asch’s novel, these shifting political allegiances indicate the extent to which the war and the Holocaust influenced conversations about Jewish identity and the Jewish future. 37

Norich, “Sholem Asch and the Christian Question,” 252.

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whom it meant the demise of their readership and the very culture that had given rise to and sustained their literature. This crisis and anxiety is also apparent in the discussion and debate that occurred over the work and ideas of some of Asch’s contemporaries in the American Yiddish literary world. In 1938, the same year that Asch’s manuscript was rejected for publication in the Forverts by Abraham Cahan, the poet Yankev Glatshteyn published the poem “A gute nakht, velt” (Good Night, World) in the journal In zikh (Introspectivism). The poem appeared in April 1938, just as events in Europe appeared to be reaching a crisis point, and it represented a sea change in Yiddish culture. As Anita Norich writes, “the poem quickly became a touchstone for Yiddish intellectuals in America faced with increasingly frightening news from Europe and seeking new ways to understand their own relationship to modernity.”38 The poem was an apparent condemnation of Western culture and an indictment of modernity itself. Glatshteyn wrote of “slam[ming] the gate” on Western culture and going “back to the ghetto.”39 He wrote, “A curse, world, on your treyf [unkosher, impure] cultures” and claimed his preference for kerosene over electricity, Jewish religious books over modern literature, simple traditional melodies over opera and symphony.40 Glatshteyn, who as one of the founders of In zikh and the Yiddish Introspectivist movement, had always been an originator and champion of Yiddish modernism, now suggested that Yiddish writers abandon cultural modernism, which was treyf through its 38

Anita Norich, Discovering Exile (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007): 42.

39

Yankev Glatshteyn, “A gute nakht, velt,” Gedenklider (New York: Farlag Idisher Kempfer, 1943): 41.

40

Glatshteyn, “A gute nakht,” 41-2.

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association with a Western culture that was now revealing itself to be barbaric and antiSemitic, and turn back to Jewish cultural roots, which lay in the past, in Europe, in the metaphorical and literal ghetto. Anita Norich has written of the poem, “Good Night, World” asks whether the modern Jew can still count on the promises of the Enlightenment: whether Jews, and even Yiddish, can live in the Western world, be nourished by Western culture, produce world Jewish cultures, whether Jews can live as citizens of their countries of residence, whether “liberty, equality, and fraternity” applies to Jews too. The poem seems to answer the question in the negative.41 Although this interpretation may overemphasize Glatshteyn’s rejection of Western culture, Ruth Wisse suggests that the poem reflects a more ambiguous position: that of the modern Jew, and in particular the poet, who is both part of that culture and feels resistant to it.42 In practice, Glatshteyn did not wholeheartedly reject either modernism or the “flabby democracy, with your cold/compresses of sympathy” that he slights in “A gute nakht.”43 Indeed, he continued to live in the United States and publish modernist works in the form of both fictionalized autobiographies and poetry. However, in certain ways Glatshteyn did retreat into the Jewish past in terms of both subject and form. In 1935, he had published an essay in which he equated the greatest literature with its untranslatability and therefore its national insularity. Two years later, he published a volume of poetry, Yidishtaytshn, that was itself not easily translatable. Ruth Wisse writes of this book, “Burrowing into Yiddish, Glatstein 41

Anita Norich, Discovering Exile, 46.

42

Wisse notes that the poem recalls the “Shfoykh khamoskho,” a moment in the Passover seder in which the Jew invites “God to pour out His wrath on gentiles who do not recognize Him.” Ruth Wisse, “Language as Fate: Reflections on Jewish Literature in America,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry XII: Literary Strategies: Texts and Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996): 141. 43

Glatshteyn, “A gute nakht,” 41.

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[Glatshteyn] felt that he was not only closing the door on a potential international public but burying himself in the fate of the most threatened part of the Jewish people.”44 This retreat into an untranslatable Yiddish was Glatshteyn’s way of slamming the gate without fully renouncing either literature or modernism. Similarly, Glatshteyn’s two autobiographical novels, Ven yash is geforn (1938) and Ven yash is gekumen (1940), retreat into the Jewish past in an autobiographical mode. The books chronicle Glatshteyn’s journey back to Lublin in 1934 to see his dying mother, and recount scenes from his European past in flashback. This actual and imagined return to Poland “unhinges and essentially deconstructs any univocal notion of himself as American, for a more complicated dialogue between the urge for a free universal self, and one that is ethnically bound.”45 As such, the novels questioned “the basic assumption of integration and abandonment of ethnic difference in the American melting pot.”46 As these readings suggest, the questions Glatshteyn poses about identity and art in both “A gute nakht, velt” and the Yash books have no obvious answers, and were therefore subject to discussion and debate. Glatshteyn’s literal and metaphorical trip back to Europe allows him to articulate “the excruciating, inescapable bind that he and his contemporaries are in and his ambivalence about any imaginable ‘solution.’”47 It is the

44

Wisse, 143.

45

Leah Garrett, “The Self as Marrano in Jacob Glatstein’s Autobiographical Novels,” Prooftexts 18:3 (September 1998): 208. 46

Jan Schwarz, Imagining Lives: Autobiographical Fiction of Yiddish Writers (Madison, Wis.: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2005): 99. 47

Norich, Discovering Exile, 73.

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very idea of a “solution” to the problem of the Jewish and Yiddish future in the wake of the Holocaust that precipitated the conflict over Asch’s novel. The literary retreat into the Jewish past was also the subject of a controversial article by Isaac Bashevis Singer published in the journal Svive in 1943, in the midst of the war. Like Asch, Singer in his later work, after 1950, “thrived on translation,” and even worked closely with his translators to purposely craft English versions of his work that would be more palatable to both Jewish and non-Jewish American audiences.48 But in his essay “Problems of Yiddish Prose in America,” Singer argued that it was ridiculous to try to write in Yiddish about the present, and particularly the American present, because the language itself was completely unsuited to the contemporary environment. He wrote, “A great number of Yiddish words and phrases are so tightly bound to the old country that, when used here, they appear not only to be imported from another land, but borrowed from a completely alien conceptual system, half obliterated by time.”49 Therefore, Yiddish writers, even in America, were bound topically to the European past, where Yiddish made sense. In other words, the Yiddish writer is unable to properly write about the time he lives in or to write anything truly modern, an anti-modernist sentiment that was unique in Yiddish literature of the time. Singer’s essay acknowledged that the way of life that gave rise to Yiddish language and literature was vanishing, but nonetheless suggested that the language was forever tied to its origins. By extension, he suggested, “When turned towards ‘universal’ 48

Saposnik, 4.

49

Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Problems of Yiddish Prose in America,” Trans. Robert H. Wolf, Prooftexts 9:1 (1989): 8. Originally published in Svive 2 (March-April 1943).

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ends, Yiddish becomes a caricature of a language.”50 Nonetheless, Singer, though he continued to generally favor the past as his setting, became, in some ways, an American writer, widely translated and perhaps primarily read in translation, especially in English. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi suggests that although Singer was “avowedly an exile, never an immigrant, in America, …in some ways he became an exile in his own community as well.”51 This was partly due to controversial, sometimes sexual, subject matter, but also to a perceived aversion to writing about the realities of the Holocaust and its impact on Yiddish. His writing, so firmly rooted in the past, “suspends the awful finality of endings fictive or true” by simply not acknowledging or mourning the disaster that came after.52 Both Singer’s essay and “A gute nakht, velt” were received with some critical controversy, which in some ways presaged the debates over Der man fun natseres. The poem provoked debates in the Yiddish press and the conflicting interpretations of the poem reflected the ambivalence expressed by Glatshteyn himself. At least one critic attributed the controversy over the poem not to the crisis in Europe and in the Yiddishspeaking world, but to the problem of how to live in the diaspora.53 In that sense, Glatshteyn’s poem is a useful touchstone for considering the critical responses to Der man fun natseres and the backlash against Sholem Asch himself. As we have seen, Asch, too, through his characterization of Jesus, proposed a “solution” to the problem of Jewish 50

Singer, 11.

51

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000): 200. 52

Ezrahi, 215. She also speculates that “the scorn heaped on him [Singer] by the Yiddish critical establishment was spurred by this perceived delinquency no less than by the sexual license and the presence of the supernatural in his stories and by the uneven quality of his Yiddish prose” (208). 53

Norich, Discovering Exile, 47.

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identity in the diaspora: Americanization. Although Asch’s solution was the opposite of those offered by both Singer and Glatshteyn, and touched on different concerns in the American Yiddish world, in the light of both Singer and Glatshteyn we can see that the attacks against Asch were at least partly reflective of the extreme anxiety in the American Jewish community, and specifically in Yiddish-speaking America, about the future of Jewish culture and identity at a moment of historical crisis. To some, Asch’s positive view of assimilation and acculturation appeared to be a parallel destructive process to that which was taking place in Europe. If Yiddish was being eradicated in Europe through violence, and in America through assimilation and attrition, where could it continue to exist and thrive? To others, of course, Asch’s assimilationist view represented a natural progression; they saw the decline of Yiddish in America as perhaps lamentable, but inevitable nonetheless. After Der man fun natseres was published, there was an immediate and widespread reaction in both the English and Yiddish press, both in the form of book reviews and in the form of articles about and interviews with Sholem Asch. On the whole, the English-language reviews of The Nazarene were positive, both in specifically Christian publications and in the mainstream press. Karl Chworowsky, writing in the nondenominational Christian Century, praised Asch’s balanced treatment of the difficult subject matter: “Here is a Jew dealing with the sacred records of another—almost a hostile—religion, picturing the central figure of that religion with a sense of reverence, delicacy and tact which cannot possibly offend even the tenderest sensibilities of the most

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orthodox Christian.”54 This specifically Christian audience welcomed Asch’s novel about Jesus.55 Mainstream press reviews generally praised the novel as well. A headline in the New York Herald Tribune Book Review proclaimed it a “Great Novel”; Ernest Sutherland Bates, writing in the Saturday Review of Literature, called the novel a “masterpiece.”56 Even more revealing, however, were the terms on which the English reviewers judged the novel and the aspects of it that they found most compelling. Every major Englishlanguage reviewer of the novel mentioned its unique style, praising Asch’s ability to incorporate many perspectives into the novel. In his review in the New York Herald Tribune, Milton Rugoff noted the diversity of both sources for the novel and the points of view it represented: “The method is a masterful piece of scholarship in its fusion of pagan, Hebrew, and Christian sources and a narrative tour de force in its many-sided view of each event.”57 Philip Rahv, writing in The Nation, noted the explicit attempt of the novel

54

Karl M. Chworowsky, “Jesus the Jew,” Christian Century LVII: 6 (February 7, 1940): 180. As I will show, the fact that Asch was so inoffensive to Christians was one of the primary accusations leveled against him by his critics. However, not every Christian reviewer felt that Asch had done a good job with the material. William J. McGarry, writing in the Catholic weekly America, criticized Asch for not adhering closely enough to the Gospels in matters of Jesus’ divinity and resurrection and for blaming Jesus’ death on Rome, whom he claims was “coerced.” William J. McGarry, “Historical Fiction that Misrepresents Facts,” America LXII: 4 (November 4, 1939): 105. 55

Indeed, some critics accused Asch of pandering to a Christian audience specifically for financial gain. Yankev Glatshteyn, who was also a respected literary critic, imputed certain egotistical and materialistic motives to Asch’s christological work, suggesting, among other criticisms, that he wrote Der man fun natseres only because he wanted a bigger audience. Yankev Glatshteyn, “Sholem ash un zayne kristlekhe bikher” (Sholem Asch and his Christian Books), Prost un poshet: literarishe eseyen (Plain and Simple: Literary Essays), ed. Berl Cohen (New York: Knight Printing Co., 1978): 157. 56

Milton Rugoff, “Great Novel About the Life of Jesus Christ,” New York Herald Tribune Book Review, 22 Oct. 1939, 3; Ernest Sutherland Bates, “The Gospel in a Modern Version,” The Saturday Review of Literature 20:26 (October 21, 1939): 5. 57

Rugoff, 3.

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to present a pluralistic view of Jesus: “his [Asch’s] purpose was to restore Jesus to the Jewish tradition, but in such a way as not to dispossess the Christians.”58 Alfred Kazin even employed a kind of double entendre to describe this aspect of the novel when he wrote in reference to Asch’s reclamation of Jesus for Judaism, “It is this sense of rediscovery, of an emotion frankly and almost exaltedly patriotic, that gives the novel its intensity.”59 Here the “patriotism” to which he refers is a Jewish allegiance, but given the context he could as easily be referring to American patriotism. The slippage between the two concepts reveals the extent to which the novel’s pluralistic message resonated with its English-language reviewer and its American audience. It is worth noting that two of Asch’s English-language reviewers, Philip Rahv and Alfred Kazin, were native-born American Jews. Ruth Wisse writes, “For their part, the native-born American Jewish writers and intellectuals typified by Rosenfeld and Bellow and Kazin assumed as a matter of course that an altered and desacralized world could only be for the better, because it would no longer require the kinds of divisions that kept Jews and Christians apart.”60 Their positive reviews of Asch’s novel reflect a certain comfort among American Jews with its pluralist and assimilationist message. At the same time, they also reflect the multifarious nature of the American Jewish community at the time the novel was published: rather than one monolithic culture, it contained many

58

Philip Rahv, “The Healing of a Wound,” The Nation 149:18 (October 28, 1939): 470.

59

Alfred Kazin, “Rabbi Yeshua ben Joseph,” The New Republic (November 1, 1939): 376.

60

Wisse, 134.

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subcultures, including those represented by the Yiddish literary community and those represented by Anglophone Jewish intellectuals like Rahv and Kazin. Indeed, Anita Norich has suggested that the positive reaction to Asch’s novel among English-language critics in a sense typifies American culture. She writes, “Most Anglophone readers at the time—Jewish and non-Jewish—were more likely to accept Asch’s christological themes as merely another expression of the hybrid culture in which modern Americans lived, a turn to a figure whose historical significance in shaping Western culture could not be ignored.”61 As we have seen, the novel itself was a particularly American production, and its Jesus represented a particularly American vision of Jewish identity: as a vibrant, integrated part of Western, and American, culture, not necessarily set apart by language or custom. American reviewers and readers of the novel recognized this conception of identity as familiar, while, as we will see, the Yiddish reviewers were far more skeptical. Kazin also noted, in his review, the beginnings of the controversy over The Nazarene and speculated about its sources. He began his review by noting, The Jewish Daily Forward, which usually serializes Sholem Asch as proudly as The Ladies Home Journal serializes Faith Baldwin, did not publish ‘The Nazarene.’ The Jewish masses simply will not read novels about Jesus, and even the East Broadway intelligentsia have a profound distrust of novels that attempt to dispel some of the more obvious fears and to break up the catchwords (and they are not their catchwords) that keep the Jewish mind from the Christian experience.62 Here Kazin points to one of the central issues that informed the polemical debates about Asch and his novel in the Yiddish press: that the book attempted an original 61

Norich, “Sholem Asch and the Christian Question,” 264.

62

Kazin, 375.

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characterization of Jesus that sought to bring both the man himself and the “Christian experience” to the attention of the Jewish reader. Kazin suggests that it was this attempt to present a non-polemical account of Jesus to Jewish readers that incurred the resistance of the Yiddish-speaking community in New York. Indeed, some of the reaction in the Yiddish press was both harsh and personal. Almost immediately after the novel’s publication in English, Abraham Cahan began to publish a series of attacks against Asch in the pages of the Forverts.63 The subtitle of Cahan’s first article makes his polemical intent clear: “A literary work or a holy book? A critical examination.”64 Cahan sets out to prove that Asch, by sticking so closely to the narrative arc of the New Testament, has produced a Christian religious work rather than a work of literature. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, Cahan seems to misunderstand the clearest evidence of the book’s self-conscious fictionality—the narrative framing device. First, he conflates the main character of the young PolishJewish scholar with Asch himself, which makes it seem as if the story is documentary or journalistic rather than fictional. At the same time, he ignores the clear fictionality of the framing device, repeating his central claim that the novel “smacks of propaganda or

63

I call them attacks, rather than reviews, because they are largely ad hominem condemnations that do not generally resemble literary criticism. For a summary of the reaction to The Nazarene in the Yiddish press, see Hannah Berliner Fischthal, “Reactions of the Yiddish Press to The Nazarene,” Sholem Asch Reconsidered, 266-278. The publication of The Nazarene in English, in particular, caused a more practical problem for the Yiddish reading public. As Fischthal notes, the fact that it was not published at all in Yiddish until 1943 “distanced Asch from his audience, provided excuses for people to argue about the book without having read it, and caused interested Yiddish readers to rely on the vicious, slanderous articles by Cahan and others” (277). 64

Abraham Cahan, “Sholem ashs bukh vegn yezusn” (Sholem Asch’s Book About Jesus), Forverts (November 4, 1939): 8.

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advertising and not of art.”65 As many of the English-language reviewers of the novel noted, much of the book’s literary merit lies in its unique framing device, as does its central message of pluralism, as I argued above. Cahan calls the narrative device a “technical ‘scheme,’” and appears unwilling to recognize the novel as a novel, much less as a work of literary merit. Several months later, Cahan published another article, this time focused on an interview Asch gave to the French literary journal Le Nouveau Littéraire. From his article, it is clear that Cahan could not read French, and that he relied on a report about the interview in the Yiddish Morgn zshurnal (Morning Journal). Among other things objectionable to Cahan, the Morgn zshurnal quoted a translation of one passage in which Asch had talked “about the religion of humanism that France itself represented; about the great lesson of the French Revolution, which influenced the American Revolution.”66 The Morgn zshurnal’s translation of Asch read, “This very religion [of humanism and freedom] is the natural and logical result of the highest moral power that humanity has generated: the Bible and its prophets, whose strongest expression crystallized in the doctrine of the Nazarene: Christianity.”67 While Asch’s statement (or its translation) is somewhat ambiguous, he again seems to be expressing the pluralist sentiments at the center of the novel itself, connecting the moral traditions of Judaism and Christianity and seeing that tradition as the foundation for modern democracy. Cahan, however, took

65

Cahan, “Sholem aschs bukh vegn yezusn,” 9.

66

Abraham Cahan, “Sholem ash zogt aroys zayn shtandpunkt vegn kristlekher religye” (Sholem Asch Declares His Standpoint on the Christian Religion), Forverts (March 22, 1940): 4. 67

Abraham Cahan, “Sholem ash zogt aroys,” 4.

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exception both to the idea that Christianity might be an expression of morality and to Asch’s reverence for the humanistic principles of the French and American Revolutions.68 Indeed, Cahan declares, “When you see how Sholem Asch developed the idea of the French Revolution as a religion of idealism, …the feeling grows in you that he, Sholem Asch, has a hidden agenda in mind.”69 Cahan sees this hidden agenda as the promotion of Christianity, but we could just as easily read Cahan’s accusation as discomfort with associating Christianity with the development of Western humanism, pluralism, and democratic values, ideas in which Cahan himself was also very much invested. There were many other detractors from Asch’s work, including the Forverts editor Chaim Lieberman, whose articles, later published in book form, outlined some of the major charges against Asch and his novel as they appeared in the Yiddish press: bad writing, a critique that had been leveled at Asch in the past; various corruptions of Jewish thought and practice; proselytizing for Christianity, particularly to Jewish youth; and, finally, the assertion that Asch had converted to Christianity and left the Jewish community.70 However, Asch also had his defenders in the Yiddish press, including the

68

In a typically nitpicky passage, Cahan exposes what he sees as Asch’s incomplete grasp of history, noting that the American Revolution preceded the French Revolution and therefore could not have been influenced by it. 69

Cahan, “Sholem ash zogt aroys,” 5.

70

Chaim Lieberman, Sholem ash un kristentum: an entfer oyf zayne misyonerishe shriftn (Sholem Asch and Christianity: An Answer to His Missionary Writings) (New York: Um, 1950). The book was translated as The Christianity of Sholem Asch: An Appraisal from the Jewish Viewpoint (New York: Philosophical Library, 1953). Two significant notes about the English translation of Lieberman’s book: first, the title has been sanitized in the English, eliminating any reference to missionary activity, but also suggesting that Lieberman speaks for all Jews, or that a general “Jewish viewpoint” exists. Second, no translator’s name is indicated on the translation, a particularly interesting development since, in the early 1930s, Sholem Asch himself had been roundly criticized by Yiddish literary critics for failing to indicate in his translations that

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respected critic Shmuel Niger, who called The Nazarene “a romantic-realistic portrait, which in its scope and significance has no equal in Yiddish literature.”71 Asch’s former secretary Shloyme Rosenberg devoted the second half of his memoir of working with Asch, nearly 100 pages, to his defense against the charges leveled against him in the Yiddish press of the 1940s. The fact that the reaction to the book in the Yiddish press was not uniformly negative attests to the fact that, as in the case of Glatshteyn’s poem, the controversy overt Der man fun natseres was part of a larger debate in the Yiddish literary community. In the face of the destruction of the Yiddish-speaking communities of Europe, the Yiddish literary world was forced to grapple with questions of its survival and legacy. As Ruth Wisse notes, “Jewishness might or might now matter to the Jew who was writing in English, because with the English market expanding, he had a guaranteed artistic future….But ‘Jewishness’ had to matter to the Yiddish writer, who depended on Jews to keep his language alive.”72 Therefore, the very nature of what “Jewishness” is was also at stake in the debates about the future of Yiddish literature. The many reasons typically offered to explain the poor reception of Der man fun natseres among its critics are either circumstantial or personal. I would like to offer, in addition to the valid explanations offered by many other scholars and critics, two new ones: the genre and style of the novel and, ultimately, its democratic pluralist message, which offered a uniquely American idea of modern Jewish identity. Timing, personal his books were translated from the Yiddish, making them appear to be works in the original of whatever language they were printed in, and thus removing any specifically Jewish, or Yiddish, identification. 71

Niger, Sholem asch, 287.

72

Wisse, 139.

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animus over Asch’s success, and his difficult personality all explain the personal nature of the attacks against him. But the strength and depth of the polemics that followed the book’s publication must also be attributed to a deeper set of issues at stake. Many critics have noted that the debate about the novel was also “an argument about erasure—not only the erasure of Judaic beliefs, but of Yiddish within Jewish-American culture and, more profoundly, the erasure of the Eastern European Jews.”73 However, it was also a debate about the future direction of modern Jewish identity in general, particularly in America. It is clear that the polemic surrounding Asch in the Yiddish-language press was the result of more than simple opposition to the subject matter of the novel. By the time Asch published his novel, many other works about Jesus and Christianity by Jewish authors had appeared in both Yiddish and Hebrew, including the American poets MosheLeyb Halpern and H. Leivick discussed in Chapter 2. Those authors had suffered occasional criticism, but no personal attacks or professional backlash, and “the invective [against Asch] was much harsher than that aimed at such Jewish authors as Claude G. Montefiore, Chaim Zhitlowsky, Joseph Klausner, or Martin Buber for their reappraisals of ‘Jesus the Jew.’”74 Many critics have speculated on the reasons for this unprecedented reaction, and have attributed it to one or another, or a combination of, circumstances: bad timing, existing personal animus and envy toward Asch, his history of antagonizing Jewish readers, and his perceived pandering to a Christian audience. Each of these events 73

Norich, “Sholem Asch and the Christian Question,” 253.

74

Ben Siegel, The Controversial Sholem Asch (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1976): 140.

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likely played a role in Asch’s eventual excommunication from the community of Yiddish-American writers, but Asch’s commitment to the American ideal, even if it meant the dilution or disappearance of historical elements of Jewish culture—like Yiddish itself—was also a source of the conflict. Asch’s Jesus represented a new kind of Jewish identity—pluralist, fully Westernized and Americanized, even assimilated—that offered one “solution” to the problem of defining the “Jewishness” that was at stake in the debates over the future of Yiddish. The genre and style of Asch’s novel is a variety of historical fiction that, as we have seen, calls into question the notion of absolute truth of any creed and the veracity of any one-sided account of history. I argued that the style of the novel itself was part of its pluralist message about the co-existence of multiple truths and the possibility of accepting the truth of the other. At least one English-language critic saw little problem with the genre, accepting the books fully as literary creations: “Our concern here is their [the christological novels] value as literature, for there are some who would hold that books so dedicated ought not to be considered literature at all. The issue can be sharpened as to whether or not a historical novel is literature, and once so sharpened, disappears.”75 This analysis suggests the need to consider the novel solely as a fictional literary work, and the historical piece as background. Although there had been many Yiddish historical novels before Der man fun natseres, and many approaches to the genre among Yiddish literary critics, some of Asch’s detractors seized on the genre of his novel as another avenue for criticism. In

75

Oscar Cargill, “Sholem Asch: Still Immigrant and Alien,” College English 12:2 (November 1950): 74.

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1924 Abraham Cahan had questioned the ability of an author to write a novel about a historical period that he did not personally experience. He felt that such a novel would be lacking in accurate historical detail and could never aspire to art, but would always remain “shund,” or trash.76 With regard to Der man fun natseres specifically, there was little agreement over what an historical novel is and on what basis it might be critiqued. Chaim Lieberman, one of Asch’s most vociferous critics, took the genre of the novel as evidence of Asch’s lack of literary integrity and Jewish authenticity: Sholem Asch apparently has made no distinction in approach and treatment between the Jesus story and an ordinary novel….In handling ordinary fiction, one may employ any twist of the imagination and direct the plot hither and thither. But one may not capriciously invent in a world historical theme, every detail of which has been duly recorded, thoroughly plumbed, and overlaid with meaning which itself acquired world historic significance.77 Lieberman casts doubt on the genre of historical fiction itself, suggesting that Asch’s attempt to create a fictional story, and to attach to it new meanings, meanings other than, or even in contradiction to, those assigned by history, is simply impossible. Lieberman’s insistence on the inviolable historicity of the Jesus story, then, also allows him to ignore any alternative readings of that history that the novel may have tried to accomplish, and any critique of historical “truth” implied by its structure. This particular criticism of the novel clings to the very ideas about historical veracity and cultural absolutism that Asch

76

Abraham Cahan, “Ken a historisher roman hobn an emesn literarishn vert?” (Can a Historical Novel Have Real Literary Merit?), Forverts (June 8, 1924), section 2, 14. Also see Kellman’s discussion of Cahan’s article with regard to Asch’s earlier novel Kidesh hashem, 194-6. It should be noted that despite Cahan’s profession that one could not write an historical novel about a period one did not experience, he nonetheless had published novels of this type in the pages of the Forverts. 77

Lieberman, 10.

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attempted to dissolve with his book, and suggests that the novel’s pluralist philosophy was both difficult to grasp and to accept for some Yiddish writers in America. Some Yiddish critics did have a more nuanced understanding of the genre. In response to this charge, Shmuel Niger wrote, “It is first of all a story. Built on parables, legends—not a description of real historical events, and certainly not a book of religion, or religious politics.”78 While Niger may have overemphasized the novel’s fictional nature to the detriment of its historical nature, his emphasis on explaining the fictional nature of Asch’s historical novel seems clearly designed as a response to critics who Niger felt had misunderstood, either intentionally or unintentionally, the genre. In addition, Niger’s denial of any religious content in the book whatsoever also points to the subtext of the debate about the novel, which was about Jewish secular, not religious, identity. In addition to the other personal and professional factors involved, it was at least partly the threat of pluralist America that seems to have motivated the attacks against Der man fun natseres and Asch himself. As we have seen, Asch was committed to the idea of America and envisioned the Jewish future in America. Not only that, he saw the future of Jewish culture as part of American culture. When he recommended that the Declaration of Independence be taught in synagogues or that Jewish literature and scholarship be represented in American universities (and presumably in English), he described a particularly American future for Judaism. This future did not necessarily include an exalted, or even protected, role for the Yiddish language, nor did it champion Jewish specificity. Rather, like the character of Jesus who Asch felt belonged equally to Jews 78

Niger, Scholem asch, 274.

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and Christians, Asch’s view of the Jewish future in America was one in which America belonged to the Jews and the Jews belonged to America. In other words, Asch saw Jewish assimilation and acculturation in America as a positive ideal, both for the Jewish community and for American culture. This sense of the American Jewish future, with or without Yiddish, that was represented both by his characterization of Jesus and by the complicated publication history of the novel, placed Asch outside his own community. Indeed, for years Asch himself had held himself slightly removed from the community of Yiddish writers, and the Jewish community in general, even in Europe. In 1909, Asch published a pamphlet in Warsaw in response to the Jewish community’s decision not to bury an uncircumcised infant who had died in the city’s Jewish cemetery.79 In this essay, Asch addressed what he saw as the barbarity of circumcision as a religious practice, encouraging the intelligentsia to abandon it altogether as a practice unsuited to the modern world. In the Jewish world, this was seen as a nearly blasphemous position, and after the publication of Der man fun natseres some Yiddish critics saw the pamphlet as early evidence that Asch was opposed to the tenets of Jewish practice. It demonstrates that even early in his life and career, Asch’s feelings about the practice and continuation of Judaism in the modern world were not in line with those of the rest of the Jewish community, even progressive writers and thinkers. Asch had also seen his share of controversy in the Anglophone American cultural realm. In 1907, Asch had released the play Got fun nekome (God of Vengeance), about a

79

Sholem Asch, An efener briv tsu der yudisher inteligents (Warsaw: Y. Edelshteyn, 1909).

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Jewish brothel-owner and his daughter’s lesbian relationship with one of his prostitutes. The play was translated into a number of European languages and performed widely. But in 1923, when an English-language version debuted on Broadway, the entire cast was convicted of “giving an immoral performance.”80 The producer of the play, Harry Weinberger, alleged anti-Semitism had driven the ruling, noting that the play had been performed since 1907 on European stages “without question from public officials or police,” and that several prominent members of New York’s Jewish community had supported the production.81 However, The New York Times also reported that Rabbi Joseph Silverman of Temple Emanu-El had been a witness against the play in front of the grand jury. The reaction to the play in New York further illustrates the way in which Asch inspired controversy both within the Jewish community and in the wider culture, and underscores his outsider status in both. Even Asch’s choices about where to live and work reveal his oppositional ideas about the future of Jewish life and culture. Once he had achieved a degree of fame and fortune, Asch never lived in the centers of Yiddish culture in Europe. During the interwar period Yiddish writers’ circles centered around the large cities of Europe, particularly Warsaw and Berlin. At this time Asch was living in a villa in the south of France, far removed from both other Yiddish writers and the major Jewish centers of Europe. Later, after the outbreak of World War II had made his move to the United States permanent, Asch settled in Connecticut, close to yet slightly removed from New

80

“‘God of Vengeance’ Players Convicted,” The New York Times, May 24, 1923.

81

“‘God of Vengeance’ Star is Fined $200,” The New York Times, May 29, 1923.

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York, the center of Yiddish cultural activity in America. It was clearly not a priority for Asch to be at the center of Yiddish cultural life. It is this perspective, in which Jewish culture is simply one small part of a larger mosaic of Western culture or American culture, that Der man fun natseres represents and that became a touchstone in the larger debate about the future of Yiddish in America. While to some critics Asch’s vision of Jewish identity may have suggested a kind of erasure in the wake of the Holocaust, there is evidence that Asch saw his vision not as obliteration, but rather as both consolation and foundation. His son Nathan suggested that the novel was actually Asch’s response to the events of the 1930s, noting that around the time he began writing the book in 1936, he began leaving the Jewish world, the world that was moving toward extinction, and withdrawing himself into the past, into that queer moment in Western history two thousand years ago when the Jews had split, and he started accounting for the split, explaining it from the Jewish point of view, began to retell the Christ story as it appeared to those whom, though they were of good will, Christ was leaving.82 This account suggests that the “bad timing” of the novel may have been intentional, that the book was meant to offer a kind of messianic consolation for the suffering of contemporary Jewry, as well as a return to a foundation that might offer a solid basis for the future. The nature of this messianic consolation, however, was not embodied in a person, religious or spiritual salvation, or Jewish nationalism, but in America. Near the end of The Nazarene, the famed sage Jochanan ben Zakkai is described giving a lesson

82

Nathan Asch, 60.

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explicating one of his sayings, “It is not the place that exalts the man; it is the man who exalts the place”: It is not this or that earthly corner that is the cornerstone of the world, but the whole world is the footstool of God. The life of the Jewish nation—he said—is not dependent on any place or any time. It can thrive in all places and at all times under all circumstances. Because the life of the Jewish nation is not tied to any material possession, as is the life of other peoples, but is purely spirit. The Jewish homeland does not confine its spirit to the borders of a certain area, so that if the people are exiled from the place, the nation dies, as is the case with other peoples. The Jewish homeland is borderless, because it rests not on earth but in heaven. (II:67). So, too, Asch hoped that America might be a Jewish homeland, a place where the borders of identity were fluid, where being American was as important as being Jewish. In the period in which Asch’s novel was published, it was rapidly becoming clear that America was going to have to serve as an important center of Yiddish culture and literary production. Der man fun natseres presented one possible solution to the “problem” of Yiddish in America, but the debates about the novel suggest that, within the American Jewish community and Yiddish literary circles in particular, the future of American Jewry, and Jewishness in America, was far from settled.

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Conclusion From the time of the Talmud, Jesus has been a malleable symbol for representing concerns about Jewish identity and the relationship of the Jewish community to the wider world. Modern writers picked up on the symbolic usefulness of Jesus as a hybrid figure who could represent their own complicated cultural positions, and at the same time they used the figure of Jesus to construct various models for a viable modern Jewish secular identity. As we have seen, a broad variety of writers, from avant-garde Yiddish poets to Zionist Hebrew novelists, whether deeply secular or somewhat religious, whether living in America, Europe, or mandate Palestine, saw in the figure of Jesus as potent symbol for their own situations and ideologies. Many of these writers, themselves often dislocated and displaced both geographically and linguistically, identified themselves with Jesus and felt the need to reclaim him for the Jews. Some, like Uri Tzvi Greenberg, simultaneously identified with Jesus and vilified him, expressing ambivalence about themselves as well as the wider Christian culture in which they lived. Many also seized on Jesus as a symbol of the kind of suffering with which they themselves, or the Jewish community as a whole, was well acquainted, and used the figure of Jesus as a way to dramatize or understand human tragedy. Often, as in the case of the Crucifix Question and the publication of Sholem Asch’s The Nazarene, these works touched off heated debates in the Jewish community about the propriety of Jewish representations of Jesus, discussions that reveal a great deal about the particular anxieties and concerns of the Jewish community at the time.

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As Matthew Hoffman has noted, the figure of the historical Jesus “served contemporary needs as theologians and historians tended to craft an image of him that was in their own likeness; various theories as to who Jesus was and what he taught helped to legitimate modern theologies and movements.”1 Likewise, Jewish writers reimagined the historical Jesus to their own ends, as a way to reconceptualize themselves, their communities, and Jewish identity itself. As we have seen, the writers considered here used Jesus to represent, among other things, a search for an authentic, originary Jewishness, to offer an alternative to secular territorial Zionism, and to celebrate assimilation and Americanism. During the first half of the twentieth century, when world Jewry sought to redefine itself for the modern era, Jesus became a potent tool for writers searching for a viable modern conception of Jewish identity. These writers chose Jesus precisely because he was, to them, an ambivalent figure, and through him they could express their own ambivalence about both Jewish particularism and universal humanism. By writing in Yiddish and Hebrew, Jewish writers were self-consciously choosing to create a particularist modern Jewish culture in Jewish languages, and at the same time advocating for the inclusion of that culture within the Western cultural tradition. How could they retain their Jewishness, the particular quality of identity that could be called “Jewish,” while at the same time becoming part of a universal culture? As a hybrid figure, historically Jewish but symbolically Christian, Jesus was an attractive figure to Jewish writers exploring their own hybridity. The very hybridity of modern Jewish identity and culture, which these writers seized on the figure of Jesus to dramatize, calls into question the notion of a unified or 1

Hoffman, 13.

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unitary group identity itself, and therefore exposes the fallacy of the “authentic,” which many modern Jewish writers and thinkers sought to construct and define according to their own ideological or philosophical positions. Uri Tzvi Greenberg, in his conscious move from Yiddish to Hebrew, from Diaspora to Israel, from avant-garde poet to Revisionist Zionist, hoped to re-create an originary Jewish identity. His Jesus, too, returned to his roots in Judaism and the land of Israel; Greenberg used Jesus to suggest an authentic Jewish identity to which he and all other modern Jews could also return. But the hybridity of the figure of Jesus, with which Greenberg identified the Jewish experience, defies this neat categorization, and slips out of the boundaries created for him by the poet. In what Bauman described as the “struggle against ambivalence” that characterizes modernity, Jesus remains resolutely ambivalent and multivalent, and resists the attempt to define a fixed and unitary identity for the Jews. We also see this resistance to definition in the work of Kabak and Asch, both in the diversity of their representations of Jesus and their understandings of Jewish identity, and in the responses to their work. Kabak’s Jesus, while characterized as a prototypical territorial Zionist, a heroic pioneer who sacrificed himself for the Jewish people, also incorporates an ethical component that suggested a place for religious Jewish life even in modernity. The characterization of Asch’s Jesus, on the other hand, suggested a pluralist approach to the varied truths of different traditions, like Judaism and Christianity, and seems to advocate for an assimilationist position in which being American might also be a way of being Jewish. As noted in the Introduction, Sarah Hammerschlag suggests that “[w]e must ask whether there is a formulation of ‘Being-Jewish’ that would contest the very structure of 207

belonging that Judaism seems to exemplify despite representations of the Jew as an outsider.”2 Writing about the figure of Jesus provided these modern Jewish writers with a way to conceptualize “being-Jewish” in the modern world in such a way that it contested both historical internal definitions of Judaism and external perceptions of Jews. Both the internal historical understanding of Judaism as a commitment to fixed religious precepts and the observance of the law and external characterizations of Judaism and Jews as separate from or external to Western culture had confined and constrained modern writers. These writers had to find a way to be both Jewish and Western, particularist and universal, in a world of strictly bounded identities, nations, and cultures. This dilemma is reflected in their myriad characterizations of Jesus, and in the resistance of the hybrid figure of Jesus to a unitary representation or construction. The tension between Jewish particularism and universal humanism has not ended, of course. As noted in the Introduction, recent scholarship on the subject of Jesus reflects both a renewed interest of the issues of particularism and universalism raised in Jewish discussions of Jesus and, perhaps, a desire to resist any fixed or unitary characterization of Judaism. And continued Jewish cultural engagement with the figure of Jesus also indicates a continued need to engage with the questions of identity and culture that are raised by the figure of Jesus in Jewish writing. Although some scholars have contended that Jewish writing about Jesus declined or disappeared after the Holocaust, in reality Jesus has continued to be a topic of interest

2

Hammerschlag, 7.

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for Israeli poets, novelists, and dramatists.3 As Neta Stahl has shown, while these writers may have had a slightly different view of or interest in the figure of Jesus than their preState predecessors, Israeli writers nonetheless continue to engage with the figure of Jesus in their work. Such prominent writers as Natan Zach, Yona Wallach, and Pinchas Sadeh have written about Jesus, and contemporary writers like Yoel Hoffmann continue to do so.4 Even Uri Tzvi Greenberg himself continued to refer to Jesus in his post-Holocaust collection of poems, Rehovot hanahar (Streets of the River). This continuing engagement with Jesus indicates an ongoing need for engagement with Jesus as a way of exploring the multivalence of Jewish identity and culture.5 Finally, continued contemporary Jewish engagement with the figure of Jesus reflects the increased interest in and concern over the use of religious figures and symbols in political discourse. Particularly since 1967—and more recently, since the failure of the Oslo peace accords and the start of the second intifada—many young, liberal Jews of the diaspora have sought new definitions of identity that reject or ignore Zionism and the State of Israel. Some, like David and Jonathan Boyarin, have proposed Diaspora itself as an ideal model for contemporary Jewish identity: What we wish to struggle for, theoretically, is a notion of identity in which there are only slaves but no masters, that is, an alternative to the model of selfdetermination, which is, after all, in itself a Western, imperialist imposition on the 3

David Roskies suggests that the symbol of Jesus lost its usefulness to Jewish writers after the destruction of the Holocaust. Roskies, 310. Matthew Hoffman implies, in the epilogue to his book, that Jewish writing about Jesus slowed or ceased entirely (with the exception of Philip Roth’s short story “Conversion of the Jews”) after the Holocaust. Hoffman, 252-256. 4

For a full discussion of Israeli writing about Jesus, see Stahl, Chapter 3, 107-164.

5

Within American pop culture, there has also been a great deal of contemporary engagement with the figure of Jesus, from Kinky Friedman’s satire of bigotry, “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore,” to Sarah Silverman’s recent comedy routines. See Kinky Friedman, “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore,” Varese Vintage, 1974, and Sarah Silverman, “Jesus is Magic,” 2005.

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rest of the world. We propose Diaspora as a theoretical and historical model to replace national self-determination.6 However, the Diaspora poses its own problems for identity, in the form of assimilation and acculturation. In this sense, Jesus has continued to be an important icon for Jews attempting to define a Diaspora Jewish identity that is both particularly Jewish and engaged with a universal humanist culture.

6

Boyarin and Boyarin, 711.

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