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All in the Family
Stuart Schoffman
A monumental collaborative project celebrates the wide varieties of Jewish experience
Everyone knows that Jews are the People of the Book, and many are aware that the familiar epithet originates in the Koran, where it refers to Christians as well as Jews. But what I didn�t know, until I read one of the heftiest and most nourishing Jewish books I�ve encountered in my time, was that the common Hebrew expression alav hashalom -- "peace be upon him," said of one who has died -- derives from the Arabic alayhi al-salam. In today�s conflictual climate, it�s rather arresting to be reminded by Raymond Scheindlin, literature professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, that a millennium ago roughly 90 percent of the world�s Jews "were inhabitants of the Islamic empire and beneficiaries of its success," and Arabic language and culture were integral to every aspect of Jewish life.
Jewish and gentile culture also mingled in medieval Ashkenaz, where Jews did not live in ghettos, but in close proximity with Christians. "On the one hand," observes historian Ivan Marcus of Yale, "hostile conflicts sometimes pitted members of one community against the other. This is what we usually think Jewish life was like in this period. On the other hand, members of each culture lived literally face to face with members of the other on a daily basis. This is the part of the story that is generally unappreciated." Marcus argues that Jews coped with their minority status by practicing "inward acculturation," by "internalizing or transforming various genres, motifs, institutions, or rituals of Christian culture in a polemical, parodic, or neutralized manner." Thus the mythical Rabbi Amnon of Mainz, who (in a famous tale) refuses baptism, has his limbs cut off on the bishop�s orders, and, while bleeding to death, composes the sobering who-shall-live-who-shall-die High Holiday prayer "U�netaneh Tokef," is a Jewish Jesus figure. Three days after his death, the legend goes, he appears to a leader of the community and instructs him to spread the prayer far and wide.
Scheindlin and Marcus are among the team of 23 scholars assembled by David Biale, professor of Jewish history at the University of California at Davis, to co-author the monumental "Cultures of the Jews." Biale sees the book as the successor to two classic collaborative works: "The Jews: Their History, Religion, and Contribution to Civilization," edited by Louis Finkelstein of JTS in the late 1940s, and a staple of every synagogue library in North America; and H.H. Ben-Sasson�s "A History of the Jewish People," written by scholars at the Hebrew University in the 1960s, and translated thereafter into Eng-lish. Finkelstein�s very title reflects the "Judeo-Christian" ethos of postwar America, and the Ben-Sasson project, in Biale�s words, is "characterized by a distinct, if muted, nationalist teleology, reflecting the post-1967 atmosphere in Israel."
Insofar as "Cultures of the Jews" has an agenda, it is one of creative subversion. Biale, one of the most imaginative and influential Jewish historians of his generation -- his books include "Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History," "Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History" and "Eros and the Jews" -- has made a career of challenging the assumptions and pieties of his professional forbears. "Ours is a self-conscious age, when we raise questions about old ideologies and �master narratives,�" he writes in his preface. "We are like voyeurs peering into a world not our own... The task of the contemporary historian of Jewish culture is... to find commonalities between past and present, but also to preserve all that is different and strange in that past. The singularly modern questions of Jewish identity -- what it is that defines a Jew and where are the borders between what is and is not Jewish -- preoccupy each of us as we reconstruct the variety of Jewish cultures."
Variety is indeed the watchword of this book. Its authors are North Americans; Israelis, native and otherwise, including American-educated immigrants; and one Moroccan-Jewish-French woman, Lucette Valensi. They are mainly historians but also literary scholars and folklorists, each with his or her own distinctive voice and interpretive bent. Some of the articles -- which range in venue from Biblical Israel and ancient Babylonia to Ethiopia, Afghanistan and Hollywood -- aim to treat their subjects comprehensively and some do not; all display a high degree of erudition but some, inevitably, are more original and stimulating than others.
Any reader expecting encyclopedic coverage of Jewish history will come away disappointed: Such central topics as kabbalah and Sabbatianism are treated intermittently, even tangentially. An authoritative distillation of Maimonides is not to be found here, though Benjamin Gampel�s exploration of Jewish faith and apostasy in Christian Iberia places Maimonidean philosophy in an important cultural context. The Holocaust -- focus of thousands of other books -- figures here barely at all, appropriately enough in a project that aims to describe the ways that Jews have lived their lives.
But the robust, complex worlds that were shattered by the Nazis are richly limned by Moshe Rosman and Elliott Horowitz, writing respectively about Poland-Lithuania and Italy in the early modern period; and by Richard Cohen and David Biale, who in turn cover Central and Western Europe, and Eastern Europe, in the 19th and 20th centuries. Rosman, author of a path-breaking biography of the Ba�al Shem Tov, offers a fine, brief summary of the origins of hasidism but devotes more space to the role of Hebrew and Yiddish printing in the formation of religious culture and the concomitant improvement in the education and status of Jewish women. Horowitz, a prolific practitioner of the "micro-history" of Jewish behavior, ranges from funerary ritual to sexual mores to banking in describing the worldliness of three venerable Italian Jewish families. Cohen, who has written widely about Jewish art, adduces three architecturally imposing synagogues of the 19th century -- Oranienburgerstrasse in Berlin, Rue Victoire in Paris, Doh�ny in Budapest -- as evidence of "the dramatic change already taking place in the self-consciousness of Jews in the region -- their unmistakable and uncompromising demand to be visible."
The authors of this book were encouraged to build their articles around specific texts, anecdotes or material artifacts. Horowitz brings huge white candles known as doppieri, generally used in Catholic rites but in this case held aloft at a rabbi�s funeral. Reuven Firestone, writing about Jews at the dawn of Islam, leads off with a traditional Muslim tale about the conversion of one "Rabbi Abdallah." Biale begins his chapter with an autobiographical passage penned by S. Ansky, author of the Yid-dish play "The Dybbuk," who was also a peripatetic folklorist engaged, like many of his literary contemporaries, in what Biale terms "anticipatory nostalgia" for Jewish life -- a sense that the traditional culture of Eastern Europe needed to be recorded before it was trampled by modernity.
Eli Yassif, professor of Hebrew literature at Tel Aviv University, punctuates his essay, entitled "The �Other� Israel: Folk Cultures in the Modern State of Israel," with testimonies extolling the wondrous deeds of such Israeli "saints" as the Moroccan-born Rabbi Israel Abuhatzeira, known as the "Baba Sali." In "The Ottoman Diaspora," Aron Rodrigue of Stanford University describes the "rise and fall" of Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) literature, noting that nearly 400 Ladino newspapers existed in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This Sephardi press, influenced by the Ashkenazi Haskalah ("Enlightenment"), was often engaged in "attacking �obscurantist� and �superstitious� habits and spreading new ideas about dress, food, and hygiene," as well as promoting liberal Ottomanism, Zionism and other political positions. Biale declares in his introduction that "Cultures" strives to correct the "highly Eurocentric" emphases of the Finkelstein and Ben-Sasson histories, and the book also includes chapters that discuss Jewish life in North Africa, and the Jewish cultures of Western Asia, from Yemen to Bukhara.
What�s especially satisfying is to savor the commonalities among far-flung Jewish cultures, not because they necessarily bolster the useful political notion of Jewish unity, but rather as they testify to the resiliency of a Jewish family resemblance over time and space. In a chapter called "Childbirth and Magic," Israeli art historian Shalom Sabar describes how shtetl Jews in Russia and Poland would "slip a mysterious book" under the pillow of a woman in labor -- the very same "Sefer Raziel," a classic manual of practical magic, that Persian, Iraqi and Kurdish Jews would place upon the "chair of Elijah" to help ensure a trouble-free circumcision. To this day, Sefer Raziel affords the recipes for Israeli aficionados of mystical amulets and, notes Sabar, is available "in miniature format (or on microfiche the size of a credit card) to be kept in one�s pocket or car as a means of personal protection."
For Jewish farmers in Ethiopia, according to folklorist Hagar Salamon, physical contact with Christians was forbidden: "When a Christian wished to give a Jew money (as payment for handicrafts, for example) he or she might place the coin on animal droppings, and the Jew would take it from the dung. The droppings, they explained, canceled out the impurity." After reading those lines, I went back 800 pages to a passage I recalled from Eric Meyers�s "Jewish Culture in Greco-Roman Palestine" about the Qumran sectarians of Dead Sea Scroll fame, who believed in the imminence of a messianic apocalypse and therefore lived in a state of scrupulous ritual purity.
The Iberian (also known as "Portuguese") conversos who returned to the ancestral faith and formed Sephardic communities in northwestern Europe held up the ideal of bom judesmo, or "worthy Judaism," writes Argentine-born historian Yosef Kaplan of the Hebrew University. Thus the London community did away with dancing with Torah scrolls on Simhat Torah, and, along with their brethren in Hamburg and Amsterdam, banned the pounding of hammers on Purim. "However," notes Kaplan, "the cultural pretensions of the social elite were not restricted to the desire to present the congregation�s religious services in a grand and dignified fashion before strangers. Let us not forget that, from the moment Judaism ceased to serve as a comprehensive way of life and became restricted increasingly to the religious sphere, the synagogue service gained central significance in the lives of the Portuguese Jews." Here in the 17th century, it seems to me, we find not only the antecedents of Reform Judaism, but an intriguing historical analogue of the retreat from ethnicity and stress on private religiosity characteristic of many American Jews today.
I leave it to the experts to debate the fine points of scholarship that arise in "Cultures of the Jews," save two. It�s true that the American Jewish poet Emma ("Give me your tired, your poor") Lazarus was friendly with Ralph Waldo Emerson, but not, as Stephen Whitfield improbably contends, that she was, in 1876, the first Jew the well-traveled Transcendentalist (then 73 years of age) had ever met; for one thing, Emerson met Isaac D�Israeli, the unbaptized father of the (baptized) future prime minister, in 1848 in London, shortly before the older man�s death. (Emerson and Lazarus first met in the late 1860s.) I also feel duty-bound to remark, in defense of the fragile prestige of my grandmother�s White Russian hometown of Chashniki, that it was there that S. Ansky was born in 1863, and not in nearby Vitebsk, as Biale has it.
But it is not mainly for the professionals that Biale and company have produced this wonderful book. Lay readers already hooked on Jewish history will be endlessly fascinated, and those seeking a solid, state-of-the-art introduction to the field will find it here, with ample reference to other, more specialized or canonical works. What you won�t find here is consensus. As Ilana Pardes of the Hebrew University argues in the book�s first article, "Imagining the Birth of Ancient Israel": "Biblical historiography points to the complexity of national imagination. It offers penetrating renditions of national ambivalence, resisting the temptation of endorsing idealized epic narratives of devoted ancestors who had no qualms." If that notion is not to your liking, "Cultures of the Jews" may not be the book for you. If it is, listen to David Biale, summing up on the very last page: "It is the cacophony of the Bible -- the complaints of the people vs. the admonitions of Moses -- that most resembles the state of Jewish culture today." Not to mention, of course, the state of the Jewish state.
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