I first heard of actual Jews as a child, at a cocktail party in Santa Fe, New Mexico just before World War II. Unnoticed by my father and his Masonic guests, I wandered idly among the adults, small, inconspicuous, furtively tasting half-empty drinks while homing in on snatches of a peculiar discussion. The remarks were what I later came to know as anti-Semitic clichés: about money, noses, ambition, slyness, and all the rest. The tone of this suburban billingsgate was chummy, almost chortling, as if passwords or signs of mutual recognition were being exchanged.
About two years later, at a similar gathering, I overheard the same pattern of chat—but the remarks had acquired a context. In recent months I had chanced across a couple of books that described a prejudice called anti-Semitism, and made it sound very unpleasant, not to say evil. The text of these books was very specific about the received ideas which informed the prejudice, and—precocious as I was, and given to annoying grown-ups—I now recognized these concepts in our living room, nodded to myself, and waited for a pause in the conversation.
“Why,” I demanded in an abrupt and deliberately piercing voice, “is everybody talking about the Jews? What’s wrong with the Jews?”
My father, a lawyer from Ohio who prided himself on his sense of fairness, flushed scarlet and hustled me out of the room, muttering through his teeth, “Nothing. Nothing’s wrong with the Jews. Go outside and play.” He never did give me a proper answer to my half-shouted query, but then I never really expected one. For me, the idea was to make an embarrassing scene, and my success produced a warm feeling which later rose inside me whenever I overheard or read even neutral references to Jews or to a Jew.
In due course, like most of my American generation, I did acquire a more rounded (and grimmer) sense of what it meant to be on the wrong end of anti-Semitism. But, as a young goy raised in a provincial Wasp environment, I drew my idea of what a real Jew might be mainly from newsreels and books. There seemed to be no obvious connection between what I learned and my real-life schoolmates in New Mexico and California who said they were Jewish (the suffix “-ish” seemed to dilute the force of the adjective); to me, they were just kids I knew with German- or Russian-sounding names, some even called after colors, like Green.
I never thought of these Jewish kids as Jews, as in the newsreels and books. Essentially I felt that a Jew in that sense was something ethereal, quasi-fictional, a lean or scrawny but innocent personage with haunted eyes who was likely to be hounded, oppressed, and/or killed by Nazis—that is, thugs and/or black-uniformed officials who talked about Jews being subhuman, while insisting that the same Jews were fiendishly clever and omnipotent in finance and certain areas of politics (like conspiracies and Communism), yet also easily recognized by their glittering eyes, slightly olive skin, and very prominent noses.
Being a moderately bright boy, I noticed the contradiction between subhuman and omnipotent, and it did not escape me that all kinds of obviously un-Jewish people were nasally aquiline, including a couple of my Armenian friends from Fresno, an Italian neighbor in Los Angeles, and quite a few of the Navajo, Cochti, and Hopi Indians who came into Santa Fe on weekends to make jewelry for tourists. The whole business was very confusing when I thought about it, which was less often as time went on. Still, being something of a loner myself, and frequently under threat from bullying, I more or less unconsciously nursed that original and rather vague warm feeling into a clear-cut solidarity with “the Jews,” who were by definition under threat all the time.
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After moving to London in the 1950’s, I discovered a curious fact. Where I had come from, Jews as such were taken for granted. True, they were considered more or less defective, so to speak, but still they were part of the American context. The English, however, saw them differently—as more exotic, not totally British; and very few of my English friends seemed to get the point of Jewish jokes.
In the London suburb of Hampstead, where I lived, Jews tended to be older and very obviously foreign, with German accents and sometimes (especially among the older women) a haunted look I remembered from films. Some of them—quite a few, in fact—were refugees from Hitler, with grim family stories that matched nothing in my own background and experience. Their quality of belonging to an utterly foreign past aroused a sympathy in me which was subtly unpleasant. I was shut out of the exotic world of these people, and this put my fellow-feeling under a certain pressure, without quite destroying it.
In the library of the British Museum I used my spare time to search out a more intellectual and historical dimension of the vague and personal term, Jew. After reading the Bible twice, I went on to the Roman-era historian Josephus and then to much more recent works, delving particularly into the immigrant experience in America and Britain, and also exploring the peculiar fabric of ritual which divides the Jewish year. I began to reexamine the special Jewish ingredients in American literature: Yiddish slang, which somehow I had never connected with Jews, along with familiar echoes of humor and ironic Weltschmerz. This research of mine was very chaotic and unsatisfactory, and it had a paradoxical effect: not of making me feel “Jewish” (such an idea never occurred to me) but of confirming and deepening my American identity.
In my desultory reading I happened across an interesting story by the American writer Paul Goodman (later to become famous as the author of Growing Up Absurd). It concerned a naive young man caught up in a street incident in which a Jew is hounded and harassed by a gaggle of louts. The naive young man protests mildly, suggesting that they leave the Jew alone. Instantly the louts turn on the young man and accuse him of being a Jew. He tells them he is not, but they insist, and continue to insist, until the young man, giving up, realizes that in some sense, yes, he really is a Jew, whether Jewish or not, and admits as much to the louts. This story made a deep impression on me.
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In the 60’s, again in Hampstead, I acquired a neighbor and friend, the Israeli sculptor Menashe Kadishman. He and I saw a lot of each other, and I spent some time in his circle. Constantly hearing Hebrew conversation, I began, tourist-fashion, to pick up scraps of the language, along with an intense partisanship on the side of Israel. This came to a white heat during the Six-Day War of 1967, when I seriously considered volunteering for service, or at least journalistic employment in the Middle East.
My inquiries opened a brief prospect of working as a cameraman for NBC; but on the day before I was scheduled to leave, the war ended. Menashe, observing my rather excessive indignation at the missed opportunity, laughed and called me an “amateur Jew”—in Hebrew, yehudi hovev.
From then on I used this term in a jocular way when talking to other Israelis, who I found had not heard it before and tended to laugh tolerantly. Although I had not the slightest intention of converting to Judaism, or of emigrating to Israel, the phrase gave me a pleasant sense of belonging.
But I still had no clearer sense of what a Jew really was. Dissatisfied with catchwords like “the chosen people,” and finding the biblical covenants a bit abstract, I began to harass my Jewish friends with questions. In conversation I discovered Jewish Americans and other Jews in England and elsewhere who surprisingly had no better idea of the answer than I had already acquired with my reading. (“If your mother is a Jew, you’re a Jew, and that’s it!” said Menashe, which only set the question back a generation.) But they could take the thing-in-itself for granted in a way that I could not. They also took anti-Semitism for granted, and I soon saw that the reality of Jewishness was perversely confirmed by the hostility, subtle and not so subtle, of goyim, even sympathetic ones like me.
One evening in Berlin quite a few years later, speaking to an acquaintance, a famous American Jewish intellectual, I threw out a jocular reference to my status as a yehudi hovev. Unlike my Israeli friends, he did not smile. On the contrary, he recoiled visibly, and looked away. “Of course,” he said finally, “those were secular Israelis.” I felt a bit like the tramp in the joke who tries to establish his Catholic credentials by confiding to a monsignor that his father was a priest and his mother a nun.
True, I had not pretended to be a Jew, not really. Nevertheless, a door was closed in my face that evening, and I understood well enough that this not-very-serious auxiliary tag of mine was in fact quite problematic—at least in an American context, where a deeper and more dangerous tension seemed to be at stake, deeper even than among my Israeli friends. I decided that it would be best to lay my nickname (and whatever went with it) aside for a while, and maybe for good.
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I was now living in Manchester, England. Coming out of the theater one night in early December, I was accosted in the street by two young men. They were dressed in dark suits and tieless white shirts, with pale intense faces that I remembered from somewhere, and they were friendly. As they spoke to me, the image came back: a painting by the American artist Bernard Perlin in London’s Tate Gallery: “Orthodox Boys.” But the hats in front of me were not yarmulkes, just ordinary black trilbies.
“Are you a Jew?” asked one of the young men. He was carrying a large clear plastic bag which seemed to be full of metal objects. I was startled, but smiled. “Not really,” I said. “Just a yehudi hovev.”
He blinked at me. “What?”
“You know writ?” I asked. “Yehudi hovev. It means amateur Jew.”
The young man was not at all upset; he seemed genuinely puzzled at my use of Hebrew. “What do you mean, amateur Jew?” he asked. Before I could explain, he pressed another question. “You know Hanukkah?”
“Of course I know it,” I said, thinking that this was becoming very odd, because I also knew that Jews did not proselytize.
“So you’re a Jew?” asked his friend. Both of them were giving off what in the 60’s were called very warm vibes.
“Honestly,” I said, “I’m not really Jewish. Actually I’m Irish-American, a Celt. My name is Greer, from the Scots name Macgregor. Let me explain.” And I told him briefly about my secular Israeli friends in London, how I had picked up scraps of Hebrew, and so on. The two young men listened intently. As I told the story, I began to realize that they did not quite believe me about being Irish. This was, sort of, the Paul Goodman story turned inside out.
Remembering Berlin, I felt it was important to convince them, and for several minutes we continued to chat. Other religious terms came up which I explained that I knew, but from books, because as an American Gentile I had grown up more exposed to Jewish culture than the normal Englishman. Still, the more I denied it, the more they seemed convinced that I was a sort of lapsed or secular Jew, and the friendlier they became.
It was awkward, because I liked them. They were nice boys, and they were sympathetic, and appeared to be concerned about me, and I wondered how I was going to extricate myself from this tangle. In the end, at a loss, I gave up, but without saying that I was Jewish. Finally the first young man reached into his plastic bag and brought out a small clear sack containing a tin menorah, a box of candles, and a leaflet.
“You know what this is?” he asked, obviously sure that I did know.
“Certainly,” I confirmed. “It’s a menorah for Hanukkah.”
“Do you have one at home?”
“No. Because—”
But he was holding it out. “I know,” he said, “you’re not a Jew. But I’m going to give it to you anyway. Please.”
I felt hideously guilty. “Look—”
“No, please. It’s all right. Some people have forgotten some of these things, and we want to remind them.” He held out the little plastic bag. “You have it.” I accepted the gift sheepishly.
“Thank you,” I said.
“That’s all right.”
“Take care. Good night.” I shook hands with one and then the other, but they were already checking out the rest of the thinning theater crowd.
At home I took out and read the leaflet, which contained many details about Hanukkah, including the historical background, the meaning of the lights, and even a recipe for potato latkes. I saw that it was published by the Lubavitch Foundation of Great Britain. Later I made inquiries and learned about their work, and what had happened outside the theater fell into place—except that I was more than ever only a yehudi hovev. By persisting in their mistake, they had given real force and meaning to my Hebrew epithet.
Why, I asked myself, had they approached me in the first place? In my surprise it had not occurred to me to put the question to them. I knew there was nothing about me, prima facie, to suggest Jewish origins, but through all those years of wondering and, so to speak, spiritual exploring, had something rubbed off after all? Or was there a subtle echo from somewhere back in the immense geometric spread of my ancestry?
Of course my Berlin acquaintance would have disapproved of such speculation, perhaps damning it as playing with things that I did not begin to understand. But this delicate strength which drew me, this intangible force—unofficial, secular, whatever—was quite genuine, and despite anything it seemed important and valuable.
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There was one frontier left where I might explore the mystery a little further: Israel itself. When, suddenly, an invitation came from Tel Aviv to write a film script, I jumped at it. What would I discover—about Jews, about myself, about this half-humorous amateur status of mine? My old friend Menashe Kadishman, now internationally famous, was in Tel Aviv. Looking down from my El Al jet at the torn and tangled patterns of snow on the summits of the Alps, I wondered what he would make of his joke now.
Tel Aviv was a shock because it was not a shock. Walking down Dizengoff Street, not looking at the Hebrew signs, I might have been on the main drag of a French Mediterranean port. Later, as I toured cafes and a disco, the impression was the same. The night life, even in November, was warm, vibrant, exuberant. It did not matter that I understood almost nothing of what was said around me (except for the occasional snatches of American tourist conversation). This was a world I knew and belonged to, it was Europe. I had not expected to feel at home, but I did.
Part of that was the women. My God, so many beautiful women! On Dizengoff and Ben Yehuda they passed, heads up, dark, blonde, redheaded, superb, cocky, open, almost brash in the southern European fashion. Could I possibly be in the Middle East?
I met Menashe at his apartment, and after more than twenty years it was as though we had said goodbye the day before. He painted my portrait, and we discussed personal things, like how the city of Tel Aviv was screwing him over his studio. Ward-heeling, money, municipal bureaucracy—it sounded about as exotic as New York. And yehudi hovev? Yes, that was still good for a laugh, for him and for the visitors who trooped through his apartment while I was there. They smiled at the idea; again, none of them seemed to find anything shocking or strange about it.
Menashe’s daughter Maya—dark, stunning, a film actress in her own right—drove me to Jerusalem to see the Old City. An army checkpoint was stopping cars in the street toward the eastern ramparts, so we returned to the other side and walked up through the Zion Gate, into the Jewish quarter, down to the Western Wall. And there I stood, at what in the Middle Ages was called the navel of the world, placing the flat of my hand against those great cold stones the color of onion skin. The back of my neck prickled. Déjà vu would be too corny for words, but I knew this place, and not just from television pictures.
Maya came back from the women’s section, and we walked from the Wall through the western arcade of the Arab market, stopping once at a stall to ask directions to the Tower of David. As Maya spoke to the elderly Arab shopkeeper, he looked away sullenly and would not reply. His son, a bit embarrassed by the father’s bad manners, spoke shyly, in bad Hebrew, and pointed us on our way. Maya hurried. She was nervous and wanted to get out of there. I took her arm. “Take it easy. You’re safe with me.”
But I did not really believe that. The old man had unsettled me, too, the arcade seemed suddenly rather dark, and I was grateful when we were out in the open air again, making our way down the twisting walk outside the walls and across the valley to where the car was waiting in the gathering dusk.
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In fact nothing dramatic happened to me in Tel Aviv, or Jerusalem, or Akko, or anywhere else. I spent most of my days in a hotel room doing the job I had come to do. In the evenings there was time for visiting my old friend, eating out, and occasionally for talking with people I met in taxis and cafes.
No one brought up politics; I had to ask about it. But when I did, I found not a single person, not one, who believed in the so-called peace process. It was described to me as a game of footsie played by politicians who—especially on the Arab side—did not speak for their people. (“Five years ago,” I was told, “Arafat was big. Now he is small.”) The whole “process” was seen as a charade for the benefit of Americans, Europeans, and other spectators outside the Middle East, people who had no life-and-death stake in what happened here.
There was something else in Tel Aviv: a curious air which I had experienced before, in the mid-60’s, in West Berlin. No one spoke of it, at least not to me, but there was the unmistakable tacit sense that—whatever the smiling politicians might say—everything, all of this, was in danger; deadly danger. This feeling was not always easy to sense in the modern streets of Tel Aviv; it was closer to hand in the south end of town around the clock tower and the older quarter of Jaffa. Here, the walls and buildings showed that I was in the Middle East after all, that Israel stood precariously on the very rim of my world, the European world.
On the highway to Ben-Gurion airport for my flight back to England, I gazed into the glow of a burning orange sunrise over the mountains which once marked the visible eastern frontier of Israel. With terrible vividness I remembered the eyes of the Arab shopkeeper in Jerusalem—a spark from the furnace of a corrosive and immutable enmity smoldering in millions of hearts beyond those mountains. It came to me that I too, even as a “goy,” was an object of that hatred, and that it encompassed the whole of my world, as far as Europe, New York, San Francisco, Hawaii. How depressing, I mused, that so many of our politicians and journalists spend so much time and naive good faith trying to hide or obscure this adamantine fact!
This was the other side of my role as yehudi hovev, which, I saw now, was a little more real than either Menashe or I had imagined, and was far more widely shared.
