Boycotts and Divestments

Now that there is a growing call for boycotts, divestment and other ostracizing of Israeli academic, I must pin my colors to the mast and say I am an Israeli citizen though living abroad.  It will be a great honor to be boycotted etc by nasty people and organizations.

See:  http://www.aau.edu/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=14859

Communications in an Electronic Age

I had a friend once who wrote his thesis on the value of oral testimony when writing about modern history—you have to understand this was a long time ago, perhaps thirty years or so: the external examiner did not pass the dissertation because he said the candidate used too much oral testimony.  It did not matter that what the witnesses said provided information that was not recorded in published documents, stored in government archives, or been collected by interviewers asking people to answer specific questions or tick boxes on a list.  The ebb and flow of conversations as they opened memories, raised old angers, anxieties, enthusiasms and interests, none of that mattered to the great professor brought up in the old school.  The arts of analysis and interpretation simply did not take into account the compilation of long recordings, allowing elderly people to ramble from what they thought they were being asked to say into re-entering the worlds of their youth and their prime, creating patterns of revelation and barriers of denial and distortion.  There was no way, this pontiff of historical method asserted, for consideration of hesitations, changes in the tone of voice, self-corrections or attempts to cover over delicate points, various versions of the same incident told at different times in the recording. 

It all seems so obvious now.  But then we have the contemporary debate over the value of the internet both as an instrument of scholarship and a source of information.  The arguments against usually fall into one or some combination of the following: there is no editorial control, anyone can put in his or her opinion, can make up whatever they like, ridiculous combinations or conjunctions of topics are created which make only superficial—or no—sense together by way of rational logic, chronology, or psychological rules.  But these supposed faults prove to be highly provocative, pregnant virtues.  Outside the official methodologies of academe the online researcher is able to put things together in new exciting ways, to discover facts that usually fly or float below the radar of what is considered important by the establishment, and opinions about the world people usually hide from official audiences are expressed—and it is good sometimes to study the nature of prejudice, enthusiasm, anxiety and fear.  Of course, once you start to locate information on the internet, you can begin to locate other evidence to verify these possibilities, to adjust current paradigms to a wider range of facts and opinions, and to identify people, events, and places mentioned, and to read books mentioned or alluded to. 

One of the opportunities opened up by the internet for me lies in the vast number of books, articles, images, and recordings that is otherwise available to someone stuck at the bottom of the world and in an obscure corner of it.  While not everything is there in the dark reaches of cyberspace, there are sufficient hints for me to try to find books in libraries, to prowl used bookshops and book fairs, to contact people whose existence was not conceived of before—or at least to have access to their addresses.  Especially now that I am retired from the university and no longer have students to talk to, colleagues to meet, and research funds to travel overseas, the internet and the email are lifelines to a somewhat imperfect but still important intellectual world out beyond the horizon.  

On the other hand, when I read about the increasing attempts by bigots and fools to take over academic associations, to engage in unseemly campaigns of boycotting Israel, to close-down debates and shut visiting speakers up with loud, unruly demonstrations, to substitute political correctness for free inquiry and discussions, well, then I am quite happy to be no longer connected to that scholarly universe.  The scholarly profession just ain’t what it used to be.

Instead, except for writing a few books every year or so, and a small number of essays and book reviews that get printed in journals whose editors I respect and vice versa, this Blog seems an acceptable substitute.  I wish there were more responses, but at my age perhaps it is best not to have too many engagements of that sort.  Seemly discussions are preferable to heated arguments at my age. 

Pompous Courses for the Epistemiologically Challenged

University of Pipi-Tipi-Woo-Hoo

THE DEPARTMENT OF POLITICALLY ABSURD CULTURE[1]

INTERDISCIPLINARY COURSES (1976)[2]

08.104 The Clyde Dam[3]

                       

Clearing away the bull shit.  Agreements never agreed to.  A study in government mismanagement and judicial repression.  Open to all first year students.

17.322 University Administration

Designed for chemistry majors with a flair for radioactive sherry.  This course will examine topics such as: suppressing letters, hiring under false pretenses, investing salary funds etc.  Not suitable for political science lecturers.

01.213 Cancer Labs as Lunch Rooms

                        How to increase your body weight by training your cells to grow free, at the same time as you study Goethe, Schiller and other Romantic poesy.  A variety of metathesizing nodes of personal growth.  A must for all German and journalism students. 

98.213 The Papist-Masonic-Jewish Plot

Taught by trendy lefties, Palestinian guerrillas and Jansenist mystics.  This course will trace the long history of al chemical intrigue that led up to the declaration of Western Samoans as New Zealand citizens.  Open to all second rate students.

36.36X Basic Laziness

                        All members of the university join in this special physical fatness program, which will meet weekly in the library toilets.  No special preparation required.  Bring an awl to open notches in your belt.

77.777 How to Close a Teachers College

Units in rumor, subterfuge and back-stabbing will be taught by a panel of experts flown in on cancelled Air New Zealand flights to the South Pole, including the Monster of Education, the Under-secretary of Price Gouging and the Prime Minister’s ex-tea lady.  Closed to all students.

43.133 Enzymes and the Empire

                        Fiscal responsibility with a human face; eczema for fun and profit; neuro-surgery for the backyard amateur.  Essential for psychology majors; may be substituted for any seven regular first year Deviant Psychology Courses.

06.546 The Gran Chaco War

                        Jointly taught by members of the department of Gherka studies and Hysterics.  This course will deal with a blow by blow, day by day, hillock by hillock account of the war that shook the world in the 1930s.  Field trips, re-enactments, casualties.  Loads of fun.  Bring a picnic lunch.

99.333 Normal Occurrences

                        Here physicists and philologists study everyday things.  Find out why chalk dust makes you sneeze; thrill to the revelations of how pencil sharpeners work; discover the mysteries of whisper campaigns; and delight in the satisfaction of knowing how to make an elevator work.  For flunking graduate-students in Business Studies only.

87.225 Making the Best of Your Overseas Leave

                        Not given in 1983, 1984, 1985 etc

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[1] This was actually written more than 25 years ago, at a time when, still somewhat youthful in my daring, I would leave copies around the tea-rooms in the university for the delectation and shock of colleagues, who suspected but never quite guessed who was doing it.

[2] Again I attempt to update or at least explicate the nature of the intellectual and aesthetic problems to be tackled in these spoof seminars.

[3] This was once a big issue in New Zealand.  Now it is all but forgotten.  But then both here in the Antipodes and upstairs in the real world there are many more, equally contentious if not more absurd projects to be studied.  Choose your own.

University-Level Courses for Idiots

University of Pipi-Tipi-Woo-Hoo

THE DEPARTMENT OF POLITICALLY ABSURD CULTURE[i]

COURSES FOR A SUMMER SCHOOL

98.101 Introduction to the Self

Each student will be given a small hand mirror and told to stare in it each morning.  At class, cellophane cut-outs of characters from popular novels, television drama and twitter-messages are distributed and students pass them around until each one has identified with at least three of the characters. The cut-outs are then pasted on the body.  Everyone guesses who he or she is supposed to be.  The winner may run for president.

98.102 Impacts and Constructivist Aesthetics

A course in pointless personal art and literary appreciation.  Second-rate poetry and short stories are hoisted into an aerial balloon above a large stadium or administrative office.  The books are dropped at random.  Students showing the greatest impact then express their emotions.  Only jargon and neologism may be used.

98.103 Literature and Anal Bromides

                        A special course for future ministers of education, members of associations based on BDS principles, and dysfunctional family heads.[ii]  Teams are chosen among students who read out long lists of clichés, commonplace and platitudes.  The first team to fall totally asleep is forced to have lunch with the vice chancellor.

98.201 The Sincerity of Nature

A tearful reading of all the minor poetry in Palaver's Golden Trashery. The entire   second term will be spent mooning over the inanities of Coventry Patmore, William Wordsworth’s later sonnets against railways and canals, and the complete political writings and other vacuous speeches of B.H.O.[iii]

98.202 Irony and Dish-Water

                        A unique course offered at no other university.  This presents intending nuclear physicists and grave-diggers with an opportunity to discuss the subtleties of dish-soap commercials.  An historical perspective is given by constant reference to the Abyssinian Talmud. 

98.203 Shakespeare's Double

                       

A reading of all the plays in the pseudo-Shakespearean canon attributed to Bacon, Marlow and Christopher Robin.  By dialectical analysis of Two Bumbling Locksmiths in Vienna,[iv] it is shown that Shakespeare was someone else of the same name, that his mother never served spaghetti on toast and that Ann Smith fell off the second best bed.  A silent film of the entire oeuvre may be submitted in lieu of a research essay.

98.207 Hypochondria and the Familiar Essay

                       

            Intensive study of four unwritten essays by the leading thinkers of the early Renaissance: Anonymous, Incomplete, Rob Muldoon and Chidiock Tichbourne.  Only available on the Scilly Isles and in Gigglesworth in England.

98.305 The American North

                       

Out of the sweeping history of the Dakota badlands come the searing novels and poetry of America's best known authors.  Why bother with women, blacks, Jews, intellectuals when you can sit back, light up a 5¢ seegar and enjoy the full repertoire of Farrago and Bismark. 

98.311 Early Literature

                       

A thoroughly footnoted, nose-wiped and arse-licked course in the kindergarten writings of major authors.  Thrill to William Blake’s infantile ramblings.  Weep with Henry Miller as he pees on the floor. Tremble as Keri Hulme begs for her mummy to cook her salty porridge.  Or you may choose any unknown, forgotten or inane winners of the Nobel Prize for Litter, the Man-Booger Prize, the Bullet Surprise, etc.

98.505 Graduate Research: Strategic Forgetting and Political Lies

A close rhetorical, structuralist and post-deconstructionist study of vice-presidential memos, leaked documents from the KGB, or the Unpublished Speeches of Yasser Arafat.  All lectures will be held in the lift in B-block, accompanied by stereophonic bagpipe music. 

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[i] This was actually written more than 25 years ago, at a time when, still somewhat youthful in my daring, I would leave copies around the tea-rooms in the university for the delectation and shock of colleagues, who suspected but never quite guessed who was doing it.

[ii] This can be adjusted in your own mind to fit whatever country’s bureaucrats (tischenkopfs) you feel appropriate.

[iii] Perhaps no one under fifty will recognize these names and I dare not attempt to wrack my brain for allusions to contemporary authors I have never read.  Suffice to say that when I was an undergraduate studying 19^th century poetry (which I loathed) the professor would have the same questions for each person: Was he (there were never she’s) sincere about Nature?

[iv] Other plays that might be studied are: Omlette, Kinky Leer, The Ten Pests, Flagstaff, etc. 

Fragments of a Memory

The Old Man on the Stoop

In this yellowing and blurry photo, taken sometime in late 1943, before he was too ill to go outside any more, my grandfather Moses is sitting on the stoop in front of his brick house.  He is wearing a winter coat and hat, so that we know it must be November or December.  He sits on the left of the steps, leaving a space, and I think there was another companion piece to this picture that showed me sitting next to him on that day.  I was a little more than three years old and my father had gone away into the army, not to return until late 1946.  Or perhaps, if you think about what the world was like then, someone else had been there with him, one of the grown-ups who loved him and wanted to give him comfort that afternoon, knowing it might be the last time he could enjoy the sun shining directly on him.  Or maybe it was no one at all and he placed himself apart, making room for someone to walk up or down the stairs.  Or perhaps in a different version of this context to the photograph, without his will to do so, he kept that space open in case one of his lost relatives returned, his first wife, his son already virtually disappeared into the military, or some more distant cousin or parent whom he had left so many hears before in the Old Country where already the Final Solution had probably already swallowed them up.

            There are many questions I have about this photograph.  It is almost too painful to look at.  Everything about the time and place is shrouded in sorrow and grief.  My grandmother, my mother, and everyone else who might have been in the house at that time is gone.  Other friends and relatives of the family could have provided some of the necessary background information.  But now no one is left for me to ask about it, except myself, and I was so young then it would be foolish to trust my memory.  What I do know is that we, that is, my mother and I, had moved into my grandfather and grandmother’s house on 48^th Street on the other side of Old New Utrecht Road, across the street from Pershing Junior High School, when my father went into the army.  Before that we had lived upstairs from a dress shop on 53^rd Street, where 13^th Avenue converges with Old New Utrecht Road, so that the El passed right by our window. 

My mother and I lived in that brick house with her parents, and then only her mother, until a year after the war ended in Europe and in the Pacific  when my father returned from the war and he bought our big house on 47^th Street.  Aside from a faulty memory, there are a few of these old photographs, at once warmly redolent of the world I have lost—not one of the people in these pictures, as I have said,  remains alive, except myself—and that lost world is frustratingly peopled by persons I cannot recall and buildings I can only vaguely identify.  Soon anyone looking at the pictures, even my own children, will see them as a complete stranger would: just old phot0graphs, like those you find in a tin box in a junk shop, curiosities of times gone by, nothing personal left to them.

            My grandfather Moses Herman was ill virtually the whole time I was aware of him.  However, he was still working a little as a cloth-cutter and tailor, so that, when my father started to wear his military uniform, I was given one also.  Then Grandpa stayed at home all the time, sometimes working in the small backyard where he grew roses, sometimes sitting on the front stoop to catch the sun, but more and more he stayed indoors the more ill he became, until it seemed to me he was always lying on the window seat in the front parlour and was dying.  I cannot recall when he actually passed away.  It just happened and I never saw him again. He was a short, very gentle, quiet man.  There is nothing I can remember that he ever said. 

            What I have subsequently learned about him is little enough.  He came originally from Hungary.  When he arrived in America shortly before the First World War, he had a European wife who bore him one son named Bertram. I never met him.  Nothing can be discovered about him except that he was old enough to have joined the Navy during the Depression.  He was, my mother always said, in Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked the US fleet in December 1941.  Bertram disappeared, missing in action.  He may or may not have been aboard one of the ships that were sunk.  My mother used to write to the War Department to find out if they had news, but they never did.  This was one more thing that made her always sad.  If she saw someone in a sailor uniform years later, she would tremble and often when she realized it was not her brother she would faint in the street.  Probably there is no one in the whole world now who remembers who he was or knows what happened to him. 

            After his first wife died, Grandpa Moe married my Grandma Molly, who was from Romania, and she was a widow with one son, my Uncle Jack Goldner.  Molly came from a family of great rabbis who lived in northern Romania and the border area of the Ukraine nearby, perhaps from the city of Czernowitz.  She claimed he was the Grand Rabbi of Dorohoi, so that when Queen Mary of Romania visited New York in the mid-1930s, Grandma was invited to have tea with her.  She had aristocratic pretensions and passed them on to my mother, who always felt she deserved more from life than she received and should.

            It could be that my mother was the one taking the photo.  That does not seem right, though; she was never able to deal with machines of any kind.  Maybe, instead, it was my grandmother, although that, too, when I think of it, seems improbable, for though she was likely to have been agile enough to work a camera, she might have deemed it below her dignity.  Obviously it was not me: not only was I too young but I was in the missing companion piece taken the same day and close in time.  Like so much else in my past, as recorded in my child’s memory, the answer is elusive, the concepts beyond my intelligence and experience at that time, and the resolution gone with all the people who may have enlightened me at any point in the last seventy years.  Photographs were taken and later developed, rarely were they annotated with dates or names of the people and places they reproduced.  The pictures were put in boxes.  No one looked at them from one decade to another.  When one person died, they were passed on to another, and so on, until they came to me.  For many years, I could not bear to look them, as they recorded a world of nostalgia and meaningfulness that had disappeared.  Now, more recently, as I approach the end of days, one or two can be lifted out of the box, laid on a table, and looked at, their mysteries all too evident.  Either nameless people in unknown settings, or one or two familiar faces in rooms or near scenes that I vaguely recall, but not the specific occasions that would let the experience fill up with memories.

            There are a few photos of Grandpa Moe, some of my Grandma Mollie, but nothing at all to indicate that Bertram ever existed.  Yes, there are images of Uncle Jack, his step-brother, and also of my mother.  Even the wedding of my parents has the whole mishpucha there, including an unidentified young woman, but again no Uncle Bertram.  What do you do when there is no one left to ask about him?  Perhaps there could be documents somewhere, if all that was needed were the kind of positivistic data one fills in a genealogical tree with; while that would confirm what he was—the son of Grandpa Moe and his first wife—it would tell us nothing about him, what caused him to run off to join the Navy, or why he was never heard of again.  How many ancestors whose names and vital dates can be placed on a chart remain totally without personalities or substance as living persons? 

His absence, in a sense, defines our family mother cared about him, yet no one else has left a record of their sense of loss.  I was for a long time too young to be interested in or understand anything that might have been said in whispered conversations, and later in my early adolescence had not the wit to question my mother when she passed on the few dribs and drabs of information I have just told you about. 

Yet when I try to imagine in my mind the ages of the people involved and the chronology of the events, few as they are, something begins to emerge that is totally unexpected.  Since my mother was born in 1919, her step-brother Bertram would have had to be a few years older than her.  Grandpa Moe was not drafted into the Army during the Great War, although he duly registered as a citizen, and it is likely that there would be a few years between the death of his first wife and his marriage to my Grandma Molly, even if his son was still relatively an infant and he felt he needed to marry quickly to give the young child a mother.  Let us therefore guess that Bertram was born in 1915, making him eighteen in 1933, an age when he might have decided, for various reasons, to join the Navy.  One reason, to be sure, was the Depression.  Another reason could have been rivalry with my mother’s other step-brother, Jack, the son of Grandma Molly and her first husband Mr. Goldner.  Jack and Bertram may have been similar in age and the tensions at home over the poor economy, perhaps exacerbated by Jack’s marriage to Bella and the birth of a daughter, my Cousin Bernice, around 1922.  Probably something else happened that stirred him into leaving home, cutting relations with his parents, and never contacting my mother again after he joined up.  He would have been around twenty-six at the time of Pearl Harbour on 6 December 1941.

Some speculations on the Modern Marrano Experience

The following paragraphs were pulled from an article I wrote a year ago but which had to be drastically cut down for the specifics of the anthology it was to go in.  Here it is fpr your perusal and comments.

One of the assumed truisms I grew up with in rabbinical Jewish tradition was that any Jew who becomes a Christian does so out of external pressure—threats to the individual or the family, to the community’s continued and its livelihood—or out of selfish ambitions—to open access to professions otherwise closed to Jews, to escape from an oppressive family, or to be free of the charges charged against all Jews which the individual has come to accept.  It was simply inconceivable that a Jew would or could forgo the ancestral religion as a matter of faith or theological preference.  Such a heretic, however, often remains technically—in halacha or rabbinical law—a Jew, albeit a bad one who has separated him- or herself from the community or, which amounts to the same thing, has not taken any opportunity following their baptism or that of parents or grandparents to return to the synagogue as a penitent, a baal teshuva.  In a more historical setting, this came to mean that in the case of Iberian or Sephardic Jews who were subjected to physical, financial and psychological threats by the Spanish or Portuguese Inquisitions or royal administrations to force their conversions each subsequent generation of individuals, families and communities must be seen to face the original question of whether to accept the relief of baptism or to continue in the new condition of a New Christian. 

            It would have been a more complex question in the past or in the present of my own growing to awareness to have discussed the related question of what as the halachic or community status of individuals and families of Jews who did not formally convert to Christianity (or some other religion or organized belief system, such as Ethical Culture or the Communist Party) but simply faded away, or the saying now goes who began to move under the radar.  During the persecutions of the Middle Ages, as during the wave of pogroms that were connected with the First and Second Crusades, for instance, people who wished to escape the need for forced conversion or Kiddush ha-Shem (martyrdom) would “separate themselves” from their former lives, move out into the surrounding society of Christians and away from their previous family ties, social obligations and religious duties, and for a number of years or for the rest of their lives adapt a mode of living that was neither that of a Jew (insofar as they never rejoined the old or attached themselves to a new congregation or kehilla) or made a formal conversion to Christianity—or even pretended to be a born-Christian from some far away land.  Such persons went from place to place from moment to moment, as it were, without any specific and continuous identity; they would be what was needed at any point of crisis—when stopped by church or civil authorities and asked who they were, where they were from and what confession they belonged to—and say what seemed most expedient, safest and non-committal.  Nomads they were, in the sense of traveling peddlers, musicians, dancing masters, criminals, going about along the roads in amorphous and inconsistent groups.  In a sense to be  discussed later, these individuals were Jewish insofar as they found themselves always living apart, peculiar, sceptical and distrustful of whatever authorities they encountered yet trusting to a degree in the ultimate justice of the universe, and always questioning themselves and their place in the world.  They could not rid themselves of the inner baggage of their educations, formal and informal, based on Talmudic procedures of argumentation and probing given opinions.

These quasi- or indeterminate-Jews might, in a romantic way, occasionally attempt to fit in with one group or another, sometimes Christian, sometimes Jewish, sometimes like themselves without formal identity, for the sake of sociability, nostalgic return to childhood experiences, or curiosity about the nature of the “other” so long as no embarrassing questions were asked.  They were therefore more than outlaws with anti-social tendencies.  They only by circumstance might be considered mentally ill in respect to their inability to conform to the cultural and spiritual norms of the various peoples they passed through.  They were a very small—a tiny—number of modern individuals lost in a world that had as yet no categories into which to fit them—that is, people who did not define themselves by the group in which they were born or the place in which they chose to live.  Unlike many Christians who were eccentric, emotionally disturbed or cast-offs from their families and communities because of other peculiarities in their character, appearance or circumstances, these former Jews could not enter monasteries or convents; they would, if they found themselves in certain off situations, take on the enclosed religious life—or more often the archaic practice of the hermit, although that was rare (except in literature) from the late medieval period onwards—without any true calling.  Men and women from the surrounding culture would themselves sometimes take on the habit for sincere reasons of devotion and piety, but many were sent their by their families, escaped from abusive experiences, and sought the peace and quiet of a contemplative life for purely intellectual reasons, not necessarily out of an intense faith.  The commitment to a regular life of prayer, meditation and shared devotional labours would not conform to the alien needs of those wandering Jews who had detached themselves. 

In the first instance, those who accept baptism under duress or who endure the forced conversion without seeking the sanctification of the name or martyrdom are known as anusim, those who have been violated in the same sense as a raped woman.  In the second, the renegades or opportunist converts are treated as though they were dead and are now mere ghosts walking about the earth.  From the Christian perspective, the former Jew can be called a converso, a neophyte, or a New Christian, and yet there remains a lingering doubt about the sincerity of the conversion, hence the use of a term such as Nuevo Christiano even after many generations. 

For those New Christians who seek a kind of compromise position there is the possibility of living an outward life within the ritual boundaries and public expectations of the Catholic religion while inwardly—in the closed parameters of the domestic home and in the confines of individual mental solitude—remaining a Jew.  The term Marrano, with all its pejorative denotations (swine, child of a pig, harlot) and  connotations (filthy, untrustworthy, faithless), is used both by still practicing Jews against relatives and neighbours who have betrayed the Law of Moses and the bonds of the community, and by their new co-religionist in the Christian world to mark them as inassimilable, insincere and demonic agents of a hostile power.  However, the name Marrano can also slide into the domain of Crypto-Jews in which by varying degrees of strategy and species of cunning the conversos seek to subvert the categories marking the boundaries between Christian and Jew.   To be a Crypto-Jew or secret believer tests the limits of Jewish law, particularly when the single person or the small group becomes increasingly alienated from communal knowledge, education, customs and spiritual directions.  A series of inner compromises, substitutions and rationalizations creates a condition of ambiguity that can be as creative as it is deleterious and dangerous to those who inhabit this realm of unrecognized legal identity.  I have chosen to use the term Marrano to designate a form of unstable identity that is different from the category of Crypto-Jew, insofar as these Secret Jews believe themselves to be sincerely Jewish in all that truly matters—their faith, their spirituality, and their ethical beliefs—with their behaviour, appearance, and public professions as Christians modified by subtle, cunning and coded innuendo and manipulations.  For the Crypto-Jew the dangers of being found out by some slip of the tongue or laxness in action or of being denounced by close family, friends, neighbours or rivals in the outer community constitute a dimension of their existence that constantly proves their adherence to the ancient Jewish faith.

The Marrano, as individual or as small group, remains ambiguous, unsure of who or what his or her true identity is, sometimes shifting from external allegiance to the Church to the Synagogue and back again, within one lifetime or within the living memory of the family generations.  While this also creates the thrill of living on the margins, playing teasing games with various ecclesiastical, civil and national institutions, the ambiguity itself can become a primary component of the way the single person, family or small group defines and evaluates itself.  This ambiguity will eventually become a hallmark of modernity in European civilizations but for many hundreds of years has no legal or credible dimension with which the persons involved can be satisfied. 

******

A series of amusing anecdotes from the Brooklyn (New York) Jewish milieu in which I grew up more than seventy years ago may bring into focus the existential reality of these dangers and ambiguities faced by the Marrano.  I start with a story about a conversion undertaken for business reasons.  In this narrative, a certain Jake Ginzberg, a tailor by profession, seeks to enhance his position in English society near the end of the nineteenth century, and thus decides to become an Episcopalian.  He duly begins to attend Church every Sunday and to stop attending synagogue on Saturdays.  After several months of taking instruction from the local priest, he is welcomed into the church and is properly baptized.  His wife and children observe all this with some scepticism, but out of respect for the father of the family, they make no objections.  Then the Sunday following his becoming a member of the Christian persuasion, his wife notices that it is nearly nine-thirty in the morning and Jake has not yet woken up.  “Jake,” she says, shaking her husband, “get up.  Have you forgotten what day it is?  You have to get dressed or you will be late for church.”  Jake opens his eyes, looks at the clock, then hits his hand against his forehead, “Oy, a goyisha kupf!”

 The point of this old joke, if we can be so uncouth as to unpack the problem in explicit terms, is that Jake cannot get away from his own instinctive Jewish habits of mind, although at the same time when his wife points out to him that he is ruining his chances of being accepted into the Christian community he has made the effort to join through his formal conversion, he now objectifies his new identity and blames his forgetfulness on the reputed stupidity of gentiles.  He has thus been transformed and not been transformed.  He is estranged from the very persona he has wished to take on as his own.  There is never a question, of course, about readjusting his beliefs or attitudes towards the spiritual and the religious.  Whatever he may have studied and professed in order to achieve the conversion appears as superficial at best and meaningless at worst.  In a sense, his wife, who has not been a party to this experiment in identity change, is more aware of the need for Jake to adopt new modes of behaviour than he himself.

In another Jewish anecdote, this one set somewhere in old Ukraine, there is imagined to be an aged Jewish father, Mendel Faigenbaum who, feeling himself reaching the end of his days, calls his three sons together to his bedside and announces that he plans to convert, and asks the sons to bring the local Orthodox priest as soon as possible.  Though grumbling and reluctant to go the three Faigenbaum boys do as they were bidden and bring Father Dimitri to the house.  The sons look puzzled and demoralized.  Mendel sends them out of the room, and explains to the young priest what is wanted.  The cleric is delighted to think of baptizing a Jew, so immediately goes out to bring the appropriate materials to carry out the ritual.  He asks no questions and gives no instructions: the prize is too valuable to risk being lost.  The next morning Father Dimitri returns, along with a young boy carrying censor and a small satchel with crucifix, a few consecrated wafers. and a vial holy water.  The three sons stand alone in the next room waiting for the ceremony to be completed.  They hint to one another that their father must be crazy, but not one of them has the courage to stand up against the old man’s wishes.  Half an hour later, the priest departs with a huge smile on his face, brushes past the boys, and returns to his church.  The sons enter the father’s bedroom.  “My sons,” Mendel whispers, his whole appearance looking more pale and weak than ever, “I will be departing this world very shortly. Before I go, it is better I explain to you why I have taken this extraordinary step of becoming a Christian.”  Each son starts to object, each bites his lips, each remains silent.  “Do not worry,” the father says.  “I have not lost my mind.  Mishuggah I am not.  I am going to pass away very soon, if not today, then tomorrow or maybe the next day, God willing.”  The tears come to the eyes of the three sons.  They almost stammer out their complaints.  “Shaa, shaa,” Mendel says.  “Look, it’s a hard world, nebech, and haven’t we Jews suffered enough for such a long time?  Now when I die, so what?  Better one of them than one of us.”

The whimsical turn here can be seen in the playing off of the sons’ concerns that their father has gone mad through his conversion and the sudden reversal of expectations wherein the old man plays an ambiguous trick on the gentile society he has pretended to enter at the crisis point of his death.  At such an extreme moment of spiritual decision-making, when a person is supposed to slough aside all concerns for the here and now and turn his or her attention to ultimate things, the disposition of the soul and the eternal placement of consciousness, Mendel Faigenbaum seems to place his attention on a final insult to the religion that has insulted him and his people throughout his own life and through all of European history.  In a bizarre manipulation of words and concepts, he presents his action as rescuing his own Jewish soul from death and instead adding to the list of dead among his enemies. 

A perverse variation can be seen in the character of Dr. Heinrich Bodenheimer in Sholem Asch’s Yiddish novel of the 1930s The War Goes On.  Bodenheimer is a Jewish intellectual who takes delight in writing essays and pamphlets on the virtues of Christianity as the means for universal peace, Judaism having become, since the Fall of the Temple, a useless nuisance in the world:

And yet Dr, Bodenheimer refused to let himself be baptized!  Certainly this was partly out of respect for the family tradition and out of fear of his dead father and willingness to hurt the feelings of his mother.  But there were other grounds also for his fidelity to the faith of his forefathers.  People must not be able to to say that a Dr. Bodenheimer had required baptism to aid him in making a career!  In spite of his great learning he had not been offered a chair at any university, though certain Christian circles in which his writings were highly regarded had hinted delicately that he could easily get a chair if he would only be baptized.[1]  

His reluctance to convert to Christianity to honour his dead father’s memory and his living mother’s feelings are common motifs even today, while the wish to maintain faith with his ancestors has taken on a stronger intensity for those who were born on the other side of the Holocaust.  But there is also personal pride involved, beginning with Bodenheimer’s refusal to be seen as someone dictated by the expediency of professional ambitions.  The reasoning that follows takes his position into the perversity of a self-hating Jew, albeit the narrator claims the motive is unconscious.

Still another consideration moved him, though he was unaware of it: what would Professor Bodenheimer become if he consented to be baptized?  Merely another converted Jew!  One among multitude, a drop in the ocean.  Himself an unbaptized, Dr. Bodenheimer held up Christianity as the only refuge for a doomed civilization; himself an unbaptized Jew, he proclaimed Christianity as the highest moral power in the world, and asserted that whoever remained outside its fold remained outside human society.

This paragraph, punctuated with repetitions of the word baptism instead of any synonym and with many exclamation points, exposes the irony of the self-justifying, self-congratulatory heretic, and reveals that the narrator here is paraphrasing Bodenheimer’s own voice, as well as making explicit what he keeps hidden from himself.  This is made more emphatic in the italicized word that follows:

Thus spoke an unbaptized Jew!  There was something original and unprecedented for you; not everybody had the courage to do that!

Though he is addressing himself in his own inner-speech, the you mentioned here is the whole world, including Christians he wishes to impress and Jews he knows he will cause to blush by his vaunting, and the primary Jew he is addressing here is himself.

 Those who Separate Themselves

The Crypto-Jews and Marranos should also be distinguished from those Jews who assimilate so far as to lose touch with what any rabbinical community would recognize as specifically Jewish.  The ambiguities can be seen to pitch in with those men and women who, though their parents had them baptized without always sharing in the ceremony or they converted themselves for a variety of reasons—cultural and social ambition, to be sure, but also a strong desire to “fit in” to the intellectual and milieu to which they feel drawn by temperament and spirit—remain identified as Jews by those around them, both friendly and hostile, and thus feel the sting of exclusion more or less throughout their lives.  While they remain apart from their ancestral communities and seem to take no interest in its history or beliefs, whenever the voices and violence of anti-Semitism raise themselves, these people feel compelled to come to the defence of their ancestors and contemporaries.  Once we move beyond the concept of the Marrano as a specific geographical and historical person in crisis—the Sephardim who were forced to convert by the Inquisition—we can think of marranism as a kind of Jewishness in itself, not always as ambiguous to the Marrano him or herself as to the outsider whether a practicing halachic Jew or a member of the dominant non-Jewish society. In other words, ambiguity in itself may be a desirable factor, even when it is painful to experience, because it creates a series of situations in the individual’s life, that of the family to which he or she belongs, and the community that basically thinks in terms of either/or choices—a series of situations that are creative insofar as they cause reflection on who one is, what one is supposed to be and do in the world and how one finds meaning in this tension-filled condition; reconsideration of the formal categories as valuable determinants of individual, communal and national identity; and reassessment of decisions already taken by one’s ancestors and oneself in regard to spiritual, customary and psychological relationship to what—if anything—lies beyond the material self. 

This kind of marranism or ambiguity is seen in a classical sense in Marcel Proust’s character Charles Swann.  After a lifetime of ingratiating himself with the elites who meet regularly in various Parisian salons through his manners and conversation and gaining a reputation as a connoisseur of art, ignoring the whispers of the anti-Semites that encroach on his supposedly safe assimilation, when the Dreyfus Affair begins, Swann realizes he is a Jew and withdraws from the places where ridicule and hostility become explicit.  It is, however, too late for him to rejoin the Jewish community, even if he so wished, and thus he finds himself very much left out in the cold, neither comfortable in his old haunts nor able to commit himself to the social world he long since departed from.  The narrator Marcel in A la recherche de temps perdu feels great sympathy for his older friend and mentor, Swann, he observes the changes in the man and in the society around him from a significant distance and watches the passions roused by the controversy gradually recede as the years pass.  Though Marcel Proust, the author and historical person, a Jew through his mother’s family, also felt roused enough by the Affair to pay close attention to its development and to become active in collecting signatures of intellectuals for the petitions that were circulated after Zola’s challenging J’accuse…, he did not take the opportunity to do more than note the rising tide of anti-Semitism and to read books on Jewish history and culture that could provide a degree of depth to his long novel.  Through his father’s heritage, Proust was brought up as a Catholic, at least nominally. His father, though a scientist and civil administrator, did not stress religion at home, and left his son two sons’ education to the mother. She never converted herself and with her mother continued to live a quietly Jewish life; yet she ensured that young Marcel received a formal Catholic education and went to first communion.  By halachic law, Proust was therefore Jewish, but in practice he was not brought up to be a Jew.  As a writer, Marcel Proust does not let religion intrude into his work nor into his public life. 

In his one great achievement as an author, his major themes concern his own identity problems as a homosexual and as an outsider to the social sphere to which he aspires.  However much one may consider the Dreyfus Affair to be one of the driving forces in the development in the career of the central characters and the allusions to biblical themes and images as part of the novel’s essential textuality, Jewishness remains at best a subsidiary consideration, and it would be a distortion to think of either the novel or its author as Jewish.  Had he lived another ten years at least, Proust may have found that being a Jew was not something he could put aside casually.

Though a professed Jewish writer like the Swiss-French Albert Cohen makes no attempt to hide his Jewish identity, and in both his novels and essays weaves in comic characters, situations, and themes, again we cannot call his work more than marginally part of the modern Jewish canon. Nevertheless, for all the success of his books at the time of their writing, what reputation he has in Europe has faded, and the memory of his Jewishness lies dormant. It may well be that his Jewish identity has ensured that an award-winning novel such as Belle de Seigneur does not resonate with subsequent audiences because of its minor Jewish characteristics. Similarly, Novel Prize winner Elias Canetti does not disguise his Jewishness; nor does he parade it as central to his own personality or his books, even his autobiography.  It is there and yet not there.  For instance, once he recalls in his personal narrative that he grew up in Rostok, Bulgaria among Sephardi Jews, he virtually never mentions his religious or historical identity again, not even when he is forced to take flight from Germany to England because of the Nazi persecutions.  Even Franz Kafka, for all his interest in Yiddish theatre in Prague, his dabbling in kabbalistic lore, and his interest in Zionism, does not speak of his Jewishness in his fiction and in  most of his other writings, and most commentators and critics treat his Judaism as vague background and something he moved away from during his relatively short life. 

---

[1] Sholem Asch (Szalom Asz, שלום אַש), The War Goes On, trans, Willa and Edwin Muir (New York, NY: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1936); the novel is entitled The Calf of Paper in its UK edition.  It was first published in Yiddish as Der Krieg geht weiter.

End of Year Message to Readers

After eight months on this Blog--I began on 11 May 2013--I have managed to place almost all the material backed up in my computer's memory, rewritten and expanded on a few of the essays, and even created some new poems, sayings and book-reviews.  What I haven't done is to retrieve all the old essays that I published many years ago in now rare or lost journals, newsletters and magazines; perhaps someday I will figure out how to do the proper scanning for that.  Similarly, though in the early days of the Blog I inserted illustrations, I soon forgot the method and all efforts since then have failed.  Not only can't you teach an old dog new tricks, but once you have there is no guarantee he will remember them.

There was a period when I could post three or or four items per day on the Blog, but now the lapses start to appear.  Illness and other commitments get in the way, to be sure, but also the need for time to think, rest and absorb all the books that I am reading.

Very few people have sent in their comments.  For those who have,  my deepest thanks.  One of the reasons for starting the Blog was, in addition to having a place to archive all my old writings and to reflect on ideas that are still churning about in my head after twenty, thirty or more years, is to have some feedback, to enter into conversations with readers--perhaps even readers who I don't already know.  Imagine that! a reader who I don't already know, and yes there are a few.

Let me add another invitation to those of you who publish books yourselves.  (They can be written in English, French, Italian, Spanish or Portuguese.)  If you have review copies sent to me, I will do my best to read and review them.  Contact me for a mailing address.

As we slow down for the end-of-year holidays, all best wishes for whatever you celebrate and good luck into the new year of 2014.  I will not bother you with predictions about what will happen on this Blog, what new books I hope to complete--at least four or five are in the pipeline to be more or less ready to send out to publishers next year--and what new events will happen that draw me in for comments.

To my one official "follower" and to everyone else, all best regards.

Norman Simms

New Sayings and Small Essays

In my catalogue of evils I inscribe three contentious agencies: first, the hypocrites who pretend to be the guardians of human rights and liberalism, but who rationalize the debauchers, the violators and the roadside bombers; second, the celebrities and super-rich in their displays of obscenity and ignorance; and third, the quiet, the passive and the indifferent who cannot see the evil all around them.

Someone said he had an uncle who lived in three centuries: born in the late 1890s and died soon after the third millennium began.  But what does it mean to have lived so long and never risked annihilation? Or to sit in silence counting the final months come by?

It takes six months or more for the chicks after hatching to decide amongst themselves who is female, who is male, and thus who goes out to the dinner table, who stays around to lay and brood. Until then, they don’t know what they are.  It is like that in so many things.

Years ago when I was young and healthy, the elderly around me seemed relics from another world.  Their youths belonged to the nineteenth century, as they did still.  In their sixties and seventies, they were already decrepit and needed help to get around.  I held one grandfather’s hand to take him to the doctor, to watch out as we crossed the street—and he had shrunk in height.  The other lay in bed always dying.  Now I have reached their age and also live in another century. 

Every morning I throw Wheatbix out to the birds.  Within seconds they gather to commence the feast.   Some days they arrive before I have completed the service.  On days when I am late, they strut around in front of the kitchen door to admonish me.  Other days they send scouts to fly past if they sense lurking cats in the bushes.  After all these years, they still don’t trust me.  

Review of Nancy Kobrin's latest Book

Nancy Hartveld Kobrin, Penetrating the Terrorist Psyche.  Multieducator.com , 2013.  246 pp.

Kobrin's latest book on the psychological discovery and preparedness to confront terrorists takes the game to a whole new dimension. She develops her thesis on the relationship between the mind of the terrorist and the domestic politics of abusive child-rearing practices along three lines that grow and develop around one another, making the book both a narrative of her scientific discoveries and history of her freeing of herself from a mad family and then an abusive husband.  Growing up with a father who rejects his own Judaism for Christian Science and a mother who seems to project her own vulnerabilty and confusions on to the daughter, and haunted by the painful memories of a brother who died before she was born but who is taken as the child who ought to have lived, as well as the ordeal of another brother who regularly rapes her and twists her attempts to report his actions at home and school into an allegation of her manipulative and fantasizing personality, Kobrin gradually comes to realize she herself lived in a virtual next of terrorism, her bizarre family a version of Palestinian-Islamicist dysfunctions, and her inability to disentangle herself from this mess—even her compounding of the victimhood through a poor marriage choice, acceptance of academic and later professional bullying—as the plight of modern society.  Yet in heroic terms, though much too late in her life for comfort, she overcomes these problems, emerges with intelligence, strength of character, and deep psychoanalytical insight into the means of profiling and treating terrorists and terrorism, without, naturally, making the whole phenomenon disappear.

Using her own childhood experiences with an abusive father and mother and analyzing her own struggle to overcome the trauma, she not only sees terrorists as dysfunctional individuals who are caught in a culture that exacerbates rather than ameliorates the pain and provides an ideological cover for the public projection of their rage, frustration and shame. As a psychohistorian, she discusses the organic trajectory of incomplete and distorted personality development: frightened, raging mother who seeks to draw from her male child the strength she does not have but in the process aborts full nerve reticulation and hormonal connectivities, leading to great deficits in the imagination, capacity to articulate in words and rational thoughts what then can only be expressed unconsciously in violent actions.   

Like Freud himself who gained most of his pertinent insights through self-analysis rather than only through the talking-cure with his patients—and indeed that style of treatment with patients worked best when he listened rather than talked down or at them—Kobrin’s confessional mode turns her book into an epic of self-treatment.  Each turning point in her life and career is seen as a powerful revealing mental image—such as her near-death accident in India; and her parsing of such images as midrashic conceits to make them yield layer upon layer of information about the ontology of mental illness and domestic breakdown, social malfunction and political violence.  Each step along the way, too, is marked by those in authority or trust who refuse to listen or understand, who deny and turn the charges against her—the replacement child who does not fit the bill, the daughter who is not a son, the Jew who is out of place in a mishmash Christian cult, the awkward and shy student whose attempts to articulate important questions and perceptions are brushed aside, the colleagues who turn into rivals and tormenters, the husband who lacks empathy, the friends who walk away in times of crisis—only to find eventually that she has beaten them all by her success. 

Her argument is perceptive, vivid and convincing. This is a remarkable and valuable achievement.  It is a book I highly recommend to all lay and professional readers.