A Conversion
The Pillar of Fire.
by Karl Stern.
Harcourt, Brace. 316 pp. $3.50.
This book is the story of the conversion of a Jew to Catholicism. The author, a German Jewish psychiatrist presently residing in Montreal, has not given us his complete life story because, in all humility, he does not believe his readers will be interested in it, as such. Instead, he has constructed here a continuous, but somewhat impressionistic, narrative of those autobiographical elements which, in retrospect, seem to explain the motives that impelled him to his “spiritual voyage” to the baptismal font.
Surely, the acquisition of an overpowering religious faith has always been a fascinating spiritual phenomenon. And today one may legitimately ask—whether with concern, sympathy, or mere curiosity, but always with a kind of fascination—why does a Jew convert to Christianity, assuming, as one clearly must in Dr. Stem’s case, the authenticity of the religious impulse? And why, above all, a Jew who is a practicing psychoanalyst; who fancied himself, at one time or another, an Orthodox Jew, a Zionist, and a Marxist; whose rather typical German Jewish family background produced a younger brother who became a schoolteacher in a Palestinian kibbutz; and the rest of whose family perished at the hands of the Nazi murderer?
Dr. Stern has said in the foreword: “To write the story of a conversion is a foolish undertaking, for the convert . . . is a fool . . . in the sense in which Saint Paul uses this word. All stories of conversion appear to have something subjective-arbitrary, some tragic secret. The communication contains something incommunicable.” However, since Dr. Stern has attempted this communication, we must in fairness to him attempt somehow to evaluate it on the basis of criteria which he would himself accept. If we cannot approach his problem on the level of faith, we can at least attempt to discuss it in a spirit of charity.
In a strictly autobiographical sense, Dr. Stern presents a series of rather charming scenes of what appears to have been a quite idyllic childhood and adolescence. There is the apparently devoutly observant and completely Orthodox grandfather who is rather glad that his children are “emancipated” (Dr. Stern does not speculate on the reasons for this strange attitude, beyond reasserting that grandfather was sincerely Orthodox); there is the rest of the family, the parents and uncles, all of them typically marked by the more or less cultured liberalism and tolerance of the “emancipated” middleclass German Jewish household; and there is the ironically amusing scene, following his visit home for his Bar Mitzvah celebration from the Gymnasium in Munich—where he had been influenced by the complete Orthodoxy of the family with which he had been boarding—when his entire family, including his pious grandfather, horrified by his new religiosity, converges upon him and finally persuades him to return to “sanity.”
Superficially, his young manhood followed a relatively normal course: medical studies, interneship, psychological specialization. But there was also intellectual, political, and social ferment: his confrontation with poverty, disease, and dialectical materialism; the variety of youth movements and groups through which he passed—religious Zionists, Marxist Zionists, liberal German Jewish groups, etc.; and the variety of social types whom he met and was influenced by: the doctors, psychiatrists, musicians—and pious Catholic housemaids.
His religious influences were surprisingly varied. In 1933, at the age of twenty-seven, he had a Guggenheim fellowship at a famous German psychiatric institute (and because of the American source of the foundation, he thus occupied a privileged position in an otherwise Judenfrei environment). He used to spend Friday nights and Saturdays in the home of a pious and learned Jewish doctor, whose religious spirituality deeply impressed him—he was once again turning to the observance and some of the learning of Orthodox Judaism. At the same time, he was equally impressed by the piety and faith of a Japanese Christian couple at the Institute. And, over a span of a number of years, Stern was overwhelmed by the simple but firm piety and faith of several elderly Catholic housemaids whom he had encountered in various households. There seems to be a relation—between the recurrent theme of devout housemaids and of his self-effacing mother and the all-embracing but virginal motherhood of the Church—which Stern, for all his being a psychiatrist, did not probe.
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All these developing experiences and impressions were brought to a spiritual climax by an anti-Nazi, or rather, “pro-Semitic” sermon delivered by Cardinal Faulhaber in 1933, in which he very simply but clearly stated that Jesus was a Jew and that his God, and the God of the Church, is none other than the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In a flash, meaning and coherence were suddenly given to Stern’s previous thoughts and beliefs. He already believed in revelation, and in the Messiah. Now he saw that the piety and spirituality of his Orthodox Jewish friends and his Christian friends were closely related. In fact, they were essentially the same—in fact, the Christian God is the Jewish God, and Christianity is Judaism. Only—
Only, they are, after all, not the same, since Christianity is, for Stern, clearly a higher form of Judaism. This is to say—Christianity affirms and believes everything of essential importance in Judaism, it possesses the same God, the same ethics, the same piety and spirituality. But it is Judaism “. . . cleansed of its ethnic elements . . . its racism,” and all this through the medium of the Messiah who has already come.
Now this is of course common Christian apologetics, and Stern does not neglect to proliferate further the elaborate Christian argumentation concerning the spiritual relationship between Judaism and Christianity, the meaning of Jewish “election,” the role of the Messiah, and Jewish ethnicism. The interesting thing is that Stern, so to speak, became a Christian in order to be a better Jew, for he contends that Christianity’s basic doctrines are virtually explicit in Judaism and that his arguments are based on specifically traditional Jewish concepts and traditional interpretations of such concepts.
It would be futile to undertake a detailed refutation of the misunderstandings from which this point of view flows, a point of view based on the kind of half or quarter-knowledge (it is as common among Jews as among Christians and converts) that parades as easy familiarity and that is more dangerous than total ignorance. Suffice it to remark here that the Jewish “election” was never taken by the Jews to be for the purpose of spreading the Revealed Word among the nations; it was, rather, a contractual undertaking of responsibility to live the Revealed Word, as individuals, and as a group. Furthermore, the Jewish people never understood its acceptance of revelation in terms of its future production of someone, a Messiah, whether he would be the son of God, God Incarnate, or not; this notion can only by the wildest stretch of the imagination be derived by pious Christians from completely distorted and mistranslated texts. It is folly, similarly, to assert that the Jews were the founders of nationalist ideology, in any sense: a spurious nationalism was given up no less by Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai than by Jesus; and let it not be forgotten that Jesus did not repudiate the title of King of the Jews.
In a final section entitled “Letter to My Brother” (the chalutz), which, for all its being an attempt merely to “explain” himself, barely misses being an effort to “persuade,” Stern sums up his conclusions. He rejects in turn, before finally arriving at Catholicism, four possible solutions to the problem of Jewish suffering: despair, dialectical materialism, Jewish nationalism, scientism. (He does not seriously consider a fifth alternative—Judaism.) One must certainly accept the sincerity of his faith, but one thing is clear: he has not turned out to be the Paulinian fool he promised to be in his foreword. He has communicated but little of the tormented mind and soul that accompany that type of “foolishness”; he has certainly not shown us a man touched in any way by the passion and the power, the tragic drama, and the pathos of an Augustine, a Tertullian, or of a Saul of Tarsus. He has, in fact, retained too much of the sophistication of the middle-class and professional German Jew to have shown us the religious fool.
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