Judaism “Not Cricket”
The Gentleman and the Jew
by Maurice Samuel.
Knopf. 325 pp. $3.75
Mr. Samuel has written a fascinating and provocative book. In the framework of an autobiographical discussion of his own intellectual development, he discusses Jewish history and ideals, the nature and value of the Bible, and the complicated problem of Jewish nationalism and its relation to the present position of Zionism and the State of Israel. He relates his whole interpretation of Jewish history to a formulation of the difference between Hebrew and non-Hebrew ideals which I for one find untenable. This formulation, which is suggested in the book’s title, The Gentleman and the Jew, is at best an oversimplification, at worst a total misunderstanding. That it does not detract in any serious degree from the book’s merits can be ascribed to the fact that his other arguments depend on this assumption less than Mr. Samuel thinks, as well as to the general brilliance and honesty of his thought.
The formulation with which I quarrel is that the Western tradition of the gentleman, which can be traced through Plato and Castiglione and Shakespeare’s Henry V to Tennyson, Kipling, and the English public school code, is based on competition and an exaltation of conflict and is therefore fundamentally immoral, to be opposed to the Jewish conception of cooperation based on a common striving after ethical values. “The gentleman is the noblest ideal of man possible in a society that immorally accepts competition and rivalry as the basis of life,” and against this “pagan competitive code (hate)” we must set “the prophetic co-operative code (love)”: the former derives from the Greeks, the latter from the Hebrew Bible.
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Mr. Samuel’s account of his first discovery of the pagan competitive code is done with great charm and wit. He tells of his childhood in Manchester, England (whither he had come from Rumania as a very small boy), his discovery of and initial enthusiasm for the English boys’ magazines which exalted the code of fair play with its contempt for cads and rotters, its emphasis on gay loyalty and camaraderie, its postulate of a life of cheerful magnanimity where nothing that is “not cricket” is ever done except by outsiders. At the same time he was studying the Pirke Avoth, the “Ethics of the Fathers,” at cheder, and side by side with “Play up, play up, and play the game” he was reading “The more the study of the law, the more the life” and “Who is wise? He that learns from all men. Who is mighty? He that subdues his evil nature. . . . Who is honored? He that honors mankind.” He did not at first appreciate the basic conflict between what he later calls “the great sporting ritual” and the Jewish ethic: his book is in part the record of his discovery of that conflict and his total rejection of the former ideal in favor of the latter.
The book is written autobiographically, and perhaps it can best be reviewed in an autobiographical tone. I feel very sympathetic toward Mr. Samuel’s description of the dual ideals which surrounded his childhood and youth. I know what he is talking about, having grown up in Scotland as the son of an Orthodox rabbi. One major difference between my background and Mr. Samuel’s is that my father, while thoroughly Orthodox, was dedicated to the reconciliation of rabbinical Judaism with the best in Western thought: he wrote both Hebrew commentaries on the Talmud and a book on David Hume; he took an equal pride in my Hebrew studies and in my ability to read Homer in Greek; he would thrust “Baba Metzia” at me one day, the poems of Bialik the next, and Herbert Spencer or Matthew Arnold the next (I am here recalling specific incidents). I was therefore predisposed from childhood to consider the two ideals of which Mr. Samuel speaks as both requiring reconciliation and able to be reconciled. I could, in fact (and perhaps some day I shall), write an autobiography of the kind that Mr. Samuel has done that would be a counter autobiography to his. For in large measure we see what the pattern of our life leads us to see.
I see with Mr. Samuel that much of the British code of fair play was designed to give ease and grace to the habits and manners of a ruling class; but, unlike him, I draw the conclusion that one should admire and imitate the ease and grace without necessarily admiring or imitating the social and political philosophy from which in some degree it sprang. It was a Jewish sage who, when challenged because he sat at the feet of an apostate, remarked: “When I see a pomegranate I eat the pulp and throw away the skin.” The charm, the gallantry, the social ease which the concept of the gentleman brought into daily life were wholly admirable things, and do not in themselves necessarily imply an underlying code of competition and hate, even if it is true that historically they emerged in conjunction with such a code.
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The association of the gentlemanly ideal with competition (and so with war and hate) is insisted on by Mr. Samuel, but I think that the historical facts can be interpreted quite otherwise. There is considerable ground for claiming that the ideal of the gentleman, with its insistence on what Castiglione called sprezzatura, “nonchalance,” was deliberately non-competitive: like “the effortless superiority of Balliol men,” true gentlemanliness implied a concealed self-confidence that disdained the vulgarity of competitive striving. It is true that the notion of honor is bound up with that of mutual striving, but, in the first place, that notion as we find it in, say, Spenser or Sidney is a deliberately romantic view based on a stylization of a non-existent chivalric code, and, secondly, any concept of striving after an ideal implies some sort of struggle and competition. The notion of “fight the good fight,” of a struggle to be moral, is not classical but Christian: Aristotle could not concede that a man who had to struggle against temptation in order to be virtuous could be truly virtuous—if he was, he wouldn’t be tempted; the relation between the Christian psychomachia and the knightly view of honor achieved through struggle may not be of the closest, but the link is there. There is, that is to say, more of the Hebrew-Christian ethic in this “pagan” concept of honor than Mr. Samuel concedes.
And is the idea of honor so un-Jewish? The term kovod (honor) is common enough in Jewish discourse, and is not always used in a context of cooperative love. When I was at school at Edinburgh the Orthodox Jewish parents were keener than anybody else to have their sons and daughters distinguish themselves by getting school prizes and scholarships, which were always awarded on a competitive basis. Community leaders were always seeking kovod of one kind or another. The struggle over who should have maftir Yonah on Yom Kippur was intense. Mr. Samuel may reply that this is a different kind of honor from the honor of the Castiglione-Kipling tradition, and of course it is different. But is it so different that it rejects the very notion of competition? Perhaps Mr. Samuel would answer that if it does not reject that notion, so much the less Jewish it is.
We might say that competition in scholarship, for example, is quite different from the elaborate pattern of gentlemanly striving after honor in the manner of Sir Philip Sidney or the English cricketer. Perhaps so; but we should also point out in any discussion of the subject that the former kind of competition has a long history in Europe as something like a counter-ideal to that of the Kipling hero. The Renaissance ideal courtier was, of course, both soldier and scholar; but what of the Renaissance humanist, represented by Erasmus and Colet and Sir Thomas More? What of the tradition of Christian humanism, of which Milton in England was such a conspicuous example? Mr. Samuel maintains that the notion of a Christian gentleman is a contradiction in terms: one can be a Christian (which, on his view, is to fall into what is basically the Hebrew pattern) or a gentleman, but never both. I think that within the tradition of Christian humanism he might have found the two concepts reconciled.
And what of the traditional British collocation, “gentleman and scholar”? Surely there is a bridge there between the pagan and the Jewish ideal? A gentleman, as defined in a book of etiquette published in England in 1834, is essentially one who treats others as he wishes that they would treat him—and we know who first said that. A sense of honor, that notion so much derided by Mr. Samuel, can mean not preeminence in martial exercises but that habit of self-respect that leads one to treat all persons with courtesy and dignity. I quote the concluding paragraph of the early 19th-century book on etiquette: “Gentility is neither in birth, manner, nor fashion—but in the MIND. A high sense of honour—a determination never to take a mean advantage of another—an adherence to truth, delicacy, and politeness towards those with whom you may have dealings—are the essential and distinguishing characteristics of a Gentleman.” It takes a great deal of special pleading to link this definition with a tradition that begins in Plato and ends with Hitler and with a view that implies “that life is, au fond, an unspeakable abomination.”
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The most sustained effort to portray the character of a Tory English gentleman in modern English literature is represented by the character of Tietjens in Ford Madox Ford’s recently republished novel sequence, Parade’s End Tietjens is almost pathologically opposed to all form of competition—he resents the whole idea as ungentlemanly. “He couldn’t tell the fellow that the idea of a competition was loathsome to him. Any sort of competition was loathsome to Tietjens. Even competitive games.” (Page 593.) It is the crude and ungentlemanly who are most competitive. In Scotland, which has hardly been touched by the English public school ideal, where educational ideas stem directly from Protestant humanism, education is more fiercely competitive than in England: poor scholars wrestle with each other for prizes and scholarships. When I left Edinburgh University to do graduate work at Oxford I was struck by the complete difference in manner among the English public school boys from anything I had known in either Scottish or Jewish circles. There was much more “gentlemanliness”—and much less of the competitive spirit; in Scotland, where the educational atmosphere at least had been more democratic and less dominated by notions of honor and fair play in the Kipling sense, there had also been much fiercer competition. This fact does not destroy Mr. Samuel’s thesis, but it weakens it, and it represents one of the many aspects of the subject that he does not take into consideration before forming his grand generalization.
In spite of its title, however, the Jew-Gentleman antithesis does not dominate the book, and the later discussions, though not always relevant to the presentation of this thesis, dealing with the Bible, Jewish history, and the Jewish future, are wholly admirable. I wish I had space to quote some of his perceptive remarks on the Hebrew prophets, or on the relation between the Old and the New Testaments, or his cogent and clear-sighted comments on the problems of Israel. But it must suffice to recommend the book most warmly to Jews and Christians alike as a brilliant and searching analysis of some of the values of civilization. If I do not altogether agree with the author’s main thesis, I certainly recognize the value of this kind of discussion and welcome the clarity, force, and self-searching honesty that are so conspicuous in it.
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