Inside Jewish History
The Springs of Jewish Life.
by Chaim Raphael.
Basic Books. 288 pp. $16.50.
“Oh, for a slim, elegant little book about the Jews,” cried Chaim Raphael in a 1980 review in COMMENTARY. The book he was longing for has now appeared, and it turns out to be his very own. This is a stroke of good fortune, since Raphael is uniquely equipped to write such a volume on the historical experience of the Jewish people, and the book he has produced is a gem.
The Springs of Jewish Life displays to the full the special qualities one has come to associate with Raphael’s writings on Jewish history, from The Walls of Jerusalem, which deals with the midrashic interpretation of the book of Lamentations, to A Feast of History, focusing on the Passover Haggadah, to his many essays in COMMENTARY and elsewhere on various aspects of Jewish life and thought. As a historian, Raphael has always sought to give proper due both to the facts emerging from the sources and to those insights that arise when Jewish history is “experienced internally as myth.” “The truth we encounter in myth,” he once wrote, “illuminates an area of knowledge that starts and ends in mystery, but carries conviction within it at every stage.” The Springs of Jewish Life, then, is a book marked both by a high order of scholarship and by deep, passionate feeling. It is also beautifully written.
The book is organized in a strikingly original way. An opening discussion of the elements of Jewish consciousness in the contemporary world is followed immediately by a chapter on the Bible, setting forth the “nature of its appeal and how this was sustained in the social life of the Jews.” Then comes an examination of the “long dark period after the exile in Babylon” when the Jews rubbed shoulders with Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, etc., yet emerged with “a religious faith and a social purpose all their own.” Raphael next turns to rabbinic Judaism and shows how religious law, Halakhah, came to function as a “secular and humanistic force in Jewish life” while still carrying with it the “holiness and authority of the Bible.” An extended discussion of the Jewish-Christian rift—a subject usually passed over quickly in surveys of Jewish history—provides additional insight into the “common faith and purpose” that have bound Jews together over time, as does an examination of the religious beliefs and practices that developed among Jews in the Diaspora. Finally, closing out Raphael’s analysis are two chapters on “wanderings and settlings” which provide a “bird’s-eye view of the physical disposition of [the] Jews throughout the twenty centuries of the Diaspora” as they have engaged in their “unique dialogue with the rest of the world.”
A number of themes clearly emerge from Raphael’s presentation. One, underscored time and again, is that Jewish history is determined from within; it has its own inner dynamic, its own “essential generative power.” Raphael comes down hard on those historians who treat the Jews as objects of history “operated on by others.” But this does not mean that he conceives of Jewish history in a vacuum. On the contrary, in chapter after chapter he takes note of the profound ways in which the Jews have been affected by their historical surroundings. What Raphael rejects is any attempt to make a “datum” out of the Jews—to turn the historical subject into an object.
Closely linked to the theme of the Jew as subject is Raphael’s stress on the positive nature of Jewish existence. (He observes at the very start of this book that he was tempted to call it A Cheerful Look at the Jews.) Although it is true that a lachrymose view of Jewish history can “easily be justified by the facts,” such a view completely misses what is most important in Jewish experience, namely, the “unique kind of fulfillment” it provides. The Springs of Jewish Life seeks to convey a sense of that fulfillment, and is much given over to talk of how this or that aspect of Jewish life is “inspiring, intellectually and emotionally.”
In his analysis of Jewish history Raphael gives equal weight to life in the Jewish homeland (both ancient and modern) and in the Diaspora. He goes so far as to say that “something miraculous, close to Redemption” happened with the establishment of the state of Israel; but he declines to follow the lead of those Zionist historians who look upon Diaspora living as an abnormality. For him, “Israel and the Diaspora . . . are a joint expression of Jewish identity.”
Raphael’s inclusive approach to the Israel/Diaspora theme is carried over into his treatment of the issue of particularism vs. universalism. On the one hand, he relishes everything that is special about the Jews, and can wax lyrical in describing the “distinctiveness” of their inherited religious tradition. On the other hand, he looks with complete favor on the Jews’ active participation in every general aspect of society and culture, wherever they may have happened to find themselves through the ages. It would be difficult to imagine a more cosmopolitan perspective than Raphael’s on the question of the Jewish contribution to world culture:
[The drive to create] always seems to carry forward, to some extent, the passion generated in early times by a feeling among Jews that Providence has made them “special.” It finds new form when they discover that there are things in the world undreamed of in their Jewish background. Emerging, they are captivated by what they see, reach out for points of contact, and gradually, as they find their feet, become an active part of the scene, often with originality and distinction, but always—inevitably—within the context of the host culture. If the record of achievement by Jews, in these terms, is extraordinarily high in many fields, the debt is owed, paradoxically, by the Jews. Without the stimulus of their unique sense of identity, the story would have been thin and poor; yet the ultimate enrichment is not Jewish but a mark of civilization itself.
The title of Raphael’s book is intended in part to echo a verse in Job (38:16): “Hast thou entered in the springs of the sea? Hast thou walked in search of the depth?” Raphael sees in these words a “reproof and a challenge” to the historian who would venture to fathom the mystery of Jewish existence over the ages. Still, the central question concerning Jewish history—“[What] is it that kept the Jews going against all odds, surfacing from tragedy with an inextinguishable sense of courage?”—will not go away, and he does attempt to confront it.
Raphael’s answer, stated in a quiet but confident manner, is that Jewish survival is compounded of two elements: kinship and aspiration. The “affection and fellowship . . . at the core of Jewish life” make for extraordinarily powerful social bonds that are able to stand up to the severest pounding of history. Of equal importance, however, is the fact that in Jewish consciousness, kinship is always linked to a “sense of aspiration”; it “always carries with it memories or echoes of the stirring issues in which kinship first took shape,” in biblical times. There is, in short, a “sense of urgency” about Jewishness, and this is the “secret energy” that sustains the Jews’ “indomitable will to live.”
Raphael would surely admit that his is not necessarily the last word on the subject of Jewish survival. Still, he has provided a significant opening statement on a matter that, quite incredibly, is almost never broached in contemporary Jewish historical writing. For this, as indeed for the whole enterprise of The Springs of Jewish Life, we are very much in his debt.
