The Beard is Not the Jew
A Treasury of Jewish Letters.
Edited by Franz Kobler.
Farrar, Straus and Young. 2 vols., 750 pp. $9-00.
These letters are disappointing. Knowing that they extend from the 15th century before the Common Era to the 17th century after it, one is prepared to find ample evidence of the piety that has played so large and distinctive an element in our culture, and that of the world as a whole, during those three millennia. But one hopes for other things besides religiosity: ideas, sentiments, or insights capable of relating the pre-Emancipation world of the letter writers to our own world. Unfortunately, the Treasury of Jewish Letters before us is based on no such historical principle, and no such vital relationship between the past and present emerges from its two volumes and 750 pages. Instead, the editor has preferred the conventional, static approach; he has selected representations of “traditional,” i.e. conformist, Jewish attitudes. The image of the Jews that comes through these letters, reinforced by the editor’s copious introductions, footnotes, and running comments, is that of an undifferentiated body of like-minded individuals living their lives on a high safe plateau of faith bounded by reason.
Inevitably, the result of this concentration on the virtues and values of “normative” Judaism makes very dull reading indeed. The bulk of the Treasury consists of antiquarian or scholarly curiosa: the legalistic Responsa of eminent rabbis, notably the Babylonian Geonim, to questions of ritual determination; letters of admonition, or ethical wills, which pious parents, like the much overrated Glueckel of Hameln, addressed to their children; learned letters produced by eminent theologians like Maimonides; polemical letters composed by Jewish sectarians in refutation of one another’s dogmas, or those of their Christian opponents; businesslike letters to and from communities, dealing with local affairs; naive travelers’ letters; the stylized productions of professional letter writers, like the elegant Leon de Modena; euphemistic Biblical paraphrases written during the early Hebrew Renaissance (Haskalah); and, for good measure, a few folksy Yiddish notes and one florid love letter.
All these letters are edifying, high-minded, and tell us something about particular historical moments. But in both subject and tone they are almost invariably irrelevant to our present situation. For the simple fact is that, like the rest of the contemporary world, Jewry can no longer be contained (if ever it really could be) within the description of a religious, or even a religio-national society. Certainly, whatever may have been the case in the past, nowadays our religious institutions are vestigial forms, our personal faith inconsequential. We wish the State of Israel well, but few even of our most fervent Zionists are willing to sacrifice their citizenship to become Jewish nationals. Hence, any collection of letters that depicts the Jewish group as a homogeneous community devotedly realizing its ethical destiny in history is altogether out of accord with the reality of our present character. That is not what we are; and it does not help us in the least to understand what we really are to say, as the Treasury does, that that is all that our forefathers were.
Besides—and more important—we do not believe it. We have written and living evidence in Jewish proverbs, jokes, stories, songs, and mores from Biblical times to the present proving beyond a doubt that those whose epigones we are supposed to be were never so noble and boring as these letters would seem to indicate. The people who invented the saying Beser a Yid on a bord eyder a bord on a Yid (“Better a Jew without a beard than a beard without a Jew”), had something important to tell us about both piety and the Jew that is not in the Treasury, something that aids us immeasurably in our search for an identity as unpious Jews. The absence of these hardheaded wits from the genteel pages of the Treasury convinces us of the work’s failure as meaningful cultural history.
Finally, the letters in the Treasury fail as letters. After all, unless one is a professional sociologist (for whom the Treasury was presumably not intended), one does not read letters primarily for expression of a public temper. Reading letters printed in a book is the same as going through other people’s mail in the hope of finding out their secrets—only these envelopes have been opened for us, and our reading is sanctioned. Even official correspondence is chiefly read for unofficial ideas and private feelings when it appears in print.
Now one cannot expect a great deal of self-conscious breast-baring in an anthology of Jewish letters that ends before the Emancipation. For it is undeniable that the best minds within our tradition suppressed their egos because of a strongly felt bias against tampering with written formulae that had long expressed the religious truth succinctly and completely. Still, there were bound to be important exceptions to that self-negation; there were letters that bore the imprint of their authors as individuals, not merely as recording types. The editor’s omission of such letters is a serious one. But even more unfortunate was the imperception that brought him to neglect the possibilities in the very letters that he did print.
For, despite the manifest limitations of the Treasury, there are many letters in it that fairly cry for the hand of a cultural historian. Take for example one by Sahal ben Mazliah, a 10thcentury Karaite sectarian. Ben Mazliah is quoted as writing: “Know that every one of our brethren is responsible. . . . We are not obliged at all to walk in the paths of our fathers.” True, this early protestantism was violently opposed and put down by the dominant traditionalists. Nevertheless, it was symptomatic of an anarchistic tendency in the supposedly monolithic Jewish group; and anyone at all familiar with the Jews recognizes a definite strain of individualism in our group that crops up time and again, in the unlikeliest of places. (Thus an outsider like Pepys, visiting a 17th-century synagogue in England, marveled to observe the lack of decorum during the religious services. He described the worshipers as talking and moving about freely—just as they do nowadays in all but the High, Gentile-like synagogues.) Sahal ben Mazliah’s outburst was clearly rebellious and at odds with the common norm. But for purposes of understanding our culture it could well serve as an important counterpoint to the confidence of his more celebrated foe, the Babylonian Hai Gaon, that the Lord would give his strong-minded conservatism “a happy time and prosperous issue, because I deserve it well.”
But the Treasury contains large doses of the Hai Gaons and only fleeting mention of the underground Ben Mazliahs. In addition, it is quite unaware of the peculiar significance of the Hai Gaons themselves when viewed objectively. For example, the editor records straight-faced the labors of Menasseh ben Israel to convince Cromwell that by admitting the Jews into England he would be hastening the Christian millennium. What a wonderful opportunity to examine the mentality and modus operandi of a Jewish type that is still with us in a more up-to-date version—the shtadlan intergroup representative! What a prime example of Jewish political improvisation! And how characteristic! (Think of Herzl trying to buy an ideal national homeland from the Sultan of Turkey.)
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One could go on citing the unminted riches of the Treasury: Maimonides, who devoted his considerable powers to elevating Judaism through reference to Aristotelean philosophy, nevertheless seriously advising potential martyrs to their faith that they could convert in all good conscience if their lives depended on it; or Spinoza, ingeniously and indignantly denying that his teachings might lead to the atheism which it palpably adumbrated. Letters such as these, examined subtly and freely, for what they fail to say as well as for what they say, for their lapses as well as for their acumen, could be invaluable to us. They might not afford us a consistent system of Judaism; but they could discover for us all kinds of leading ideas: ideas about how our fathers viewed themselves and their time in comparison with how we view ourselves and our times; ideas about what they thought of their past, and what we may think of ours. And certainly any sophisticated reading of these letters should convince us that we can no longer tolerate the simple judgments about their authors to which we have been subjected. Like ours, their lives were not simple, on their solutions.
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