If only Because Jewish experience has gone on for so long and in such differing circumstances, it is notoriously difficult to frame a satisfactory definition of what it means to be a Jew. But if there is no short cut, the sheer variety of Jewishness may perhaps itself be exploited for the task. This is what the publishers of a new series of brief biographies called Jewish Thinkers seem to have in mind in assembling a host of exemplars across the ages, each of whom has had a strongly individual approach to Jewish experience and has expressed it in writing. The first four books in the series have recently been published, with a long list promised for later; and the initial choice of subjects is certainly as diverse as one could wish.1
It is helpful, in a way, that the overall title Jewish Thinkers should contain an apparent ambiguity: Jews who have thought about Jewish life, or thinkers in general who happen to have been Jews. In the event, no such distinction emerges, and for an obvious reason. Jews do not exist in a vacuum. Even those most intensely preoccupied with things Jewish have been influenced by and have had a place—often a major place—in the general world of thought. In varying degrees, every book in this series is thus bound to reflect a symbiosis, or—to adopt a different metaphor—perhaps a double helix, with the story portrayed, as in the transmission of life itself, in the form of two interwoven spirals.
This is true even of the most distant and in many ways the most purely “Jewish” of the four, the great scholar known universally as Rashi (initials of Rabbi Shlomo Itzhaki), who lived in the 11th century in the small market town of Troyes in the Champagne district of northeast France. As we shall see, the setting had its own significance in contributing to Rashi’s importance; but first we must note the work itself, which might seem insubstantial for such a major reputation since it consists mainly of just commentaries, one on the Bible, the other on the Talmud.
Yet these commentaries have been indispensable both to Jews and to interested non-Jews since they were first written more than 800 years ago. The huge success they have enjoyed is not just a matter of their style, beautifully tailored in each case as it is to the purpose in view. Rashi on the Bible is a work designed for popular consumption, with virtually every word or phrase explained in a terse, simple way before the exegete adds, in many cases, a more freewheeling view of the meaning in the form of grammatical, legal, or anecdotal commentary drawn from tradition. Rashi on the Talmud, equally succinct, simplifies the immense complexity of legal discussion and thus becomes a basic guide to the Halakhah on which all subsequent scholars have built.
Intellectually, the huge commentary on the Talmud might seem to comprise the greater achievement; yet Rashi’s implicit approach to the Bible has, perhaps surprisingly, gained a new validity today. In the centuries during which the Bible was taken by its readers to be true in a literal sense, Rashi’s comments, appearing in all printed editions below the biblical text itself, were read in a similar spirit. This changed in the last century when scholars began to “improve” on the Bible, to look for corruptions, diverse sources, and ancient parallels, and thereby to chip away at the singularity of the text.
In recent years, however, a strong reaction has set in against the eagerness to adopt this sort of Bible interpretation, and we are being encouraged once again to read the text as it stands, recovering, in this way, the power which it had in its pristine form and which was precisely what kept it inviolate through all the centuries of faith. A striking illustration of the new method at work is Robert Alter’s well-known literary study, The Art of Biblical Narrative, in which the meaning of the text is unfolded in terms of the deliberate intent and skill of the original writer; Gabriel Josipovici’s The Book of God (Yale, 1988) also follows this new approach. Yet anyone who has ever read Rashi in the original (or for that matter in translation) will recognize the presence of just this very contemporary attitude in each and every one of his comments; and the recognition brings home the perennial centrality of the Bible in Jewish thought.
How was it, though, that Rashi emerged to impose such lasting cohesion on Jewish understanding? Allowing for the waywardness with which genius appears, one is still impelled to ask about the influence of his setting. A suggestion put forward by one scholar linked the wide range of Rashi’s knowledge to the trade fairs for which Troyes was famous in the Middle Ages. These fairs, the argument ran, would have brought learned visitors from far-off lands (as happened later in Poland) to engage in protracted argument and also to hold decisionmaking rabbinic synods when trading was done. Unfortunately, the great American historian Salo Baron has demolished this attractive idea, pointing out that the trade fairs of Troyes are known of only in the century after Rashi’s death.
Another suggestion similarly dismissed by Baron is that the huge volume of Rashi’s writing had to do with the great tanneries of Troyes, which could have provided him with unlimited supplies of parchment; it turns out that the tanneries, too, were a later feature of the townscape. Indeed, so expensive was parchment in Rashi’s day that Baron half-jokingly proposes its very scarcity as a reason for the succinctness of his writing style.
As it happens, the really significant factors in the case of Rashi lie in the quite remarkable development of Jewish community life and scholarship at this time in the towns of the not-far-off Rhineland. As Chaim Pearl explains, some small Jewish communities lying along the old Roman roads to the North (Cologne, Worms, Mainz, and others) suddenly began to grow in the 9th century with substantial Jewish immigration from Babylon, Italy, and Spain. Until the First Crusade at the end of the 11th century, the Jews of this area were virtually free of restrictions, busy in trade and agriculture and protected in a wide variety of financial and administrative roles. In this stable environment, study in all its forms had been given its head, making possible (though of course hardly guaranteeing) the rise of a Rashi.
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In later centuries there were to be many reprises in Jewish experience of what one might term the Rashi approach to life, an approach that, however tempered and even worldly, still in the end puts its primary energies on the Jewish side of the “spiral.” And of course there were to be many reprises as well of the very different approach taken by Rashi’s contemporaries in Spain, where Jewish intellectuals played leading roles in both Muslim and Christian society and moved into sophisticated forms of self-expression, especially in philosophy and poetry, far removed from anything Rashi knew or would have understood. The great Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik (1873-1934), who in some respects might appear to belong in the latter category, in fact is a type of the former.
Born into the teeming Jewish civilization of Eastern Europe, Bialik drew his life’s blood from his boyhood study of the Bible and Talmud, and in particular from their elements of folklore. It is true that, as David Aberbach shows, he was also very receptive to other influences. If the imagery of his poems is rooted in the Bible, we must note also his Wordsworthian love of nature, his sympathy for the surrounding atmosphere of revolution, and above all the sense in which he was “a Russian poet, with the energy, the moral sincerity and torment, the chiaroscuro moods and landscape which characterized the Russian poetry of his time.” Yet the whole was suffused by his undying obsession with the Jewish issue.
For Bialik, to be a Jew was to be engaged in a ceaseless struggle with God; it was the fight for life that Jacob had experienced in his nightlong struggle with the angel. Long before Auschwitz, Bialik decided that there was no answer in theological terms to the seemingly endless sufferings of the Jewish people, no comfort to be found in traditional study or in a mystical surrender to faith. Yet equally there was no doubt, for him, that such redemption as might be wrested from experience could only be expressed within Jewish forms, in his case through poetry forged in a Hebrew language that was even then in the process of being reborn in the ancient homeland.
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With the remaining two writers of the quartet we catch different facets of the interwoven spirals. Heinrich Heine, born in 1797 into a half-assimilated Jewish family of “liberal” instincts, took as the paramount themes of his writings the ancient magic of Germany and the transformation of society now called for in the wake of the Napoleonic upheavals. As Ritchie Robertson puts it in his excellent book, “for Heine, as for Hegel, the chief actors in history are ideas.”
Heine does give some weight in his writings to his own Jewishness, as in his treatment of the historical conflict between spiritualism and sensualism, the former most fully realized in the Hebrew Bible, the latter in classical Athens. It is a dialectical struggle, in which each principle holds a partial validity. For Heine the perfect synthesis of the two is found in Shakespeare, who was “both Jew and Greek,” while Christianity marks “the victory of Hebraism over Hellenism,” an overshadowing of the vibrancy of life itself.
But if Hebraism therefore has a place for Heine in the scheme of things, his true delight lies in the paganism and pantheism of the old Germany, immortalized in his poetry. In this connection Robertson quotes passages of the sheerest self-hatred, if pierced often with characteristic irony, as when Heine writes of Christianity: “A dismal religion, introduced by a pale bloodstained Jew with a crown of thorns on his head.” Heine is at his most sincere when he says, “I love everything that is G e r ma n more than anything else in the world.” Even his deathbed recovery of some kind of Jewish faith was ironic: “Thank God I have a God again.”
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There could hardly be a greater contrast in this respect than with Martin Buber. Though he, too, a century later than Heine, poured his ideas into the dialectical form which Hegel had imposed on German thought, and thus led Jewish consciousness along very unfamiliar paths, Buber unlike Heine was a deeply learned Jew, involved in the tradition from his earliest childhood.
Born in Vienna (1878), Buber was sent to Galicia at the age of three after the breakup of his parents’ marriage to live with his grandfather, a substantial businessman who was also a very active scholar and editor of rabbinic texts. The young Martin had a broad-based secular education at the Lemberg gymnasium, then moved on to the universities of Vienna, Leipzig, and Zurich. But although his studies no doubt contributed to the theological skills which were to find such original expression in his philosophy of “I and Thou,” the driving force in his life was the wish to communicate in new forms the models of Jewish religiosity which had surrounded him in his youth in Galicia.
In an early phase, this led to a creative interest in Zionism and a close collaboration with Chaim Weizmann. Later, Buber’s deep search into the ultimate sources of Jewish faith took unexpected shape in the massive translation of the Bible into German that he undertook in cooperation with Franz Rosenzweig at the age of forty-seven and which occupied him for nearly forty years. Yet overriding all this, as Pamela Vermes makes clear, was his sudden “encounter” at the age of twenty-five with the pietistic ideas that had surfaced in the 18th century among the Jews of Eastern Europe under the stimulus of the founder of Hasidism, a charismatic known as the Ba’al Shem Tov. Reading the life of the Ba’al Shem, Buber was immediately seized, after years of skepticism, by a new concept of Judaism. In his own words, the hasidic soul opened up “that most ancient of Jewish insights flowing into the darkness of exile with newly-conscious expression: man’s likeness to God as deed, as development, as task.”
A little later in the 20th century the force of mysticism in Jewish life would be explored with prodigious originality by a scholar younger than Buber, Gershom Scholem. For Buber himself, however, mysticism was not so much a subject of scholarship as an occasion of poetry and imagination. The many books which flowed from him in this field—starting in 1906 with The Tales of Rabbi Nachman—concentrated strikingly on devekut, or intense cleaving to God, on humility, holy intention, worship, ardor, and joy. The ideas that Buber evoked in his immensely readable explorations had clearly built up in his own mind an approach to man’s identity, and to man’s relation to God, that found theoretical formulation in I and Thou, a short book that has fascinated religious thinkers everywhere—except, it seems, among Jews themselves.
Jews in general rarely respond with enthusiasm to theological speculation, preferring to let their faith express itself through the authority and comfort of ritual. In Gershom Scholem’s lapidary formulation, “Judaism is a firmly circumscribed phenomenon in which impulses and aspirations capable of formulation have actualized themselves.” Buber, by contrast, was aiming to reach the heart of Jewish experience in terms rarely “capable of formulation,” or at least of clear formulation. Even with the help of the summaries and explanations of Pamela Vermes, one is finally left to wonder how far the philosophy of “I and Thou” is basically related to Jewish thought and how far it is, and may have been for Buber himself, a celebration, in his marvelously poetic style, of the glories of the German language.
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The tensions adumbrated in the thought of Heine and Buber (though held in fine balance, in the case of Buber, by profound Zionist and Jewish commitments) are emblematic of a familiar Jewish style, the style of the modern Jewish intellectual. One might imagine that the founding of the state of Israel would have put an end to such tensions, and hence to the style as well, at least for those Jews living and creating within the culture of the Jewish state. But the fact is that even in Israel the double focus continues to make itself felt, and on the whole in healthy ways.
The pioneer Zionist Ahad Ha’am saw in the prospect of a Jewish return to Zion not only the provision of a physical refuge—the major impulse behind the practical activities of Chaim Weizmann—but the establishment of a center of spiritual regeneration for the Jewish people as a whole. Weizmann himself dreamed of “a Jewish intellectual center” in Palestine that would be “a synthesis of [rabbinic] Yavneh and Europe”; for his part, the more single-minded Ahad Ha’am envisaged a one-way flow of purely Jewish ideas from the new Jerusalem to the Jewish communities of the Diaspora.
In the event, Israel has become an intellectual center beyond anyone’s dreams, but the standards developed there in science, music, and the arts reflect a nonstop and wide-ranging exchange of talent, with no boundaries between what flows in and what flows out. Ironically enough in the light of Jewish history, it is only in the field of military power that one can perhaps locate an achievement arising purely out of Israel’s own situation and character. In the spiritual field, by contrast, the Jewish thinkers and thinking Jews of Israel have indeed been regenerated in Ahad Ha’am’s sense, but in the style so widely prevalent in the Diaspora: to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the individual, they are Jews who are part of world civilization, giving and receiving in what has increasingly become a seamless pattern. And so the old story continues.
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1 Rashi, by Chaim Pearl (109 pp.); Bialik, by David Aberbach (140 pp.): Heine, by Ritchie Robertson (113 pp.); Buber, by Pamela Vermes (113 pp.). Grove Press, $15.95 each. Forthcoming volumes in the series are on Solomon ibn Gabirol (by Raphael Loewe), Moses Mendelssohn (by Arthur Hertzberg), and Chaim Arlosoroff (by Shlomo Avineri).
