Part 1
Not too long ago on a visit to Australia I went into a Jewish bookshop
in the traditionally suburb for Jewish residents. Looking around at their many religious books,
Israeli literature and Jewish history, I got to talking with the owner of the
place. I told him that I had recently
published three books on Dreyfus, with an emphasis on Alfred and his wife’s
Jewishness. “But was he a practicing
Jew?” asked the shopkeeper. “Not
really,” I answered, “but thanks to his wife’s family and some other relatives,
he certainly knew what he was and why he had been falsely accused, tried, found
guilty and sent to Devil’s Island. When
push came to shove, he asserted his proper identity.” The shop owner looked sceptical. “Dreyfus never begged for forgiveness from
the French Army or the Court. He never
prayed for mercy from God. He always
remained loyal to France and to his military professions. Most of all, he never wavered in his belief
in Truth and Justice.” Not only did the
bookshop owner remain with the same unconvinced look—he was after all wearing
not just a black yarmulka (skull cap)
on his head and a dark suit, white shirt with no tie, but had tsitsit (ritual fringes) dangling from
his waist, sure signs of his Orthodox faith; but he never asked for details of
my books when I pointed out that he was not displaying them on sale.
Just a few days ago, another very religious man visited my house, an old
friend from overseas, for whom my wife and I went out of our way to make
everything kosher—we bought new plates and utensils, pots to cook in, and lots
of aluminium foil to wrap the fish we bakes in our oven. After several hours of friendly conversation,
I mentioned a new project I was working on with a local historian. Since my old friend didn’t ask, I told him
anyway that my colleague and I were doing research on Sarah Bernhardt’s
visit—actually two brief visits—to Auckland in 1891.” I then tried to explain
how this interest arose out of my previous studies of Marrano or Crypto-Jews
and my research into Dreyfus’s Jewish background in the late nineteenth
century. And so came the inevitable
question: “Did she practice?” This meant
did she keep a kosher home, perform proper domestic and personal hygiene, and
celebrate the holidays and attend synagogue.
“Not quite,” I answered. Her
mother’s family were Dutch Jews, mostly wandering vaudeville and circus
performers, “which,” I added, “is one of the careers followed by many families
who didn’t live in the shtetls (small
rural towns and villages) or ghettoes in Eastern and Central Europe.” My old friend looked sceptical and a little
bored. “Even though her father was not
Jewish, Sarah’s mother was, and that at least made her a Jew, a bad Jew
perhaps, but a Jew nevertheless.” Then I
could see he was not all convinced.
“Well, here are some little details that make me treat her as an
ambiguous, sometimes a confused Jew. This is the first fact. When she was sent to a convent school by her
mother, she was about eight years old.
Only when she was twelve, a few days before she was to take her First
Communion, a visiting bishop found out that little Mademoiselle Bernhardt had
not been baptized. Though the great
spiritual lapse was quickly rectified at the baptismal font, one has to wonder
how (a) her godparents did not see to it as they by definition were duty-bund
to ensure that she was baptized and brought up a good Catholic and (b) how the
nuns in the convent let this lapse pass for nearly four years. “ I waited for some reaction from my
friend. There was none. “Well,” I continued, “in itself this fact may
not mean anything. But later during the
Dreyfus Affair, Sarah stood up against almost all the intellectuals, artists
and theatrical people she knew who were anti-Semites. They accused her of being a German, a Jew,
and therefore a traitor. Her reaction
was to say, fairly explicitly, that when you can show me some Christians who
are better than my people, I will consider agreeing with you.’”
I could see a twitch in the face of my old friend. So I tried one more little anecdote to win
him over. “There were many critics who
did not praise her as the Divine Sarah for her acting abilities and especially
her so-called golden voice in the way her public did. They mocked her appearance and her accented
French. She defended herself by saying
that she had inherited her way of speaking from her people’s long history of
wandering through the Galut (the
Exile and Diaspora).”
Needless to say, like the bookshop owner in Australia, this man would
only define a proper Jew by practice. I
can certainly see his way of thinking, and it is that of many Orthodox and even
Conservative rabbis past and present. It
is a legitimate point of view, just as it is legitimate to recognize
conversions to Judaism performed by Orthodox rabbinical courts. However, for me it remains an arguable point
of view. Without going to the extreme of
Jean-Paul Sartre who believed that Judaism only continued to exist because of
anti-Semitism, both in the way for hundreds of years Jews were isolated into
inward-turning communities and could not realize any alternative or in the way
in which individuals and families often react to prejudice and oppression by
stiffening their necks and being aggressively what their enemies accuse them of
being, my belief is that there can be the joy of studying and debating the
truths in Scriptures, Talmud, Mishnah Kabbalah without believing everything to
be consistently true and absolutely applicable in the contemporary world.
The Judaism that is here being described from my own experience should
not be confounded with some kind of Judeo-Christian faith where what one feels
in one’s heart matters more than what one does in the real world, the society
of history, with its political problems, its wars, its difficulties faced by
the poor, the ill and the deeply disturbed.
This is a Jewishness that expresses itself in social actions and public
attitudes, in ways that are guided by the precedents and interpretations of the
rabbis, that is rooted in a concern for ethics, morality and justice. My experience and life has mostly been away
from the centres of traditional synagogue life, from communities where there
are support networks, family ties, intellectual institutions and cultural
activities. It has been a constant
effort to make choices, do deeds, and feel emotions that are at several removes
from where I would have liked them to be, where I have had to make do through
as-if games, trying to convince myself that even though I have been unable and
sometimes unwilling to perform the mitzvot,
the mandated fulfilments of the Law, to shape my everyday activities around
customs remembered from childhood or read of in books, or to express myself
openly and frankly as a Jew, I have tried to give meaning that accords with the
primal values of Judaism.
In the many books and articles I have published, though my wife tells me
that these scholarly endeavours have been driven by an autobiographical need, I
think perhaps it might be better to say that I have come to concentrate my
aesthetic and intellectual efforts on persons, events and ideas that are like
what I would like to be, do and think.
Here is where it is important to examine the term Marrano, not as a nasty term often used as a synonym for a
Crypto-Jew, or as a specific historical type of Sephardic Jew who was forced to
convert and then could neither bring himself to return to Judaism or to accept
the baptism sincerely and pass on the new religious identity to the next
generation. Given that Marrano has been
sued by several recent historians and political activists to describe the
plight of men and women caught between assimilation, conversion and return to
Judaism in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the opening decades
of the twentieth when it was still possible, for a moment or two perhaps, to
think that the modern nations of the West and Centre of Europe would become
tolerant, liberal and secular, thus obviating the need to make a choice of
religious or ethnic identity at all, it pays to consider concept of Marranism
as that of ambiguity and confusion, in one sense, but much more of that kind of
Angst supposedly characteristic of
modernity itself. Certainly by the
trauma World War I and then by the rise of Nazi and Stalinist regimes, the
mental luxury of that ambiguity became impossible for most Jews: Angst replaced by outright physical
terror and suffering. Yet after the
Holocaust, if there was not a commitment to the new State of Israel and its
place in world history, there was only a less secure faith in the tolerance,
liberalism and secularism of Europe and North America, an illusion of
acceptance that grows harder and harder to sustain in the twenty-first
century. The Marrano stands somewhere
between Zionism, anti-Zionism, post-Zionism, Orthodox Judaism, and the mixture
of other Judaisms, religious, social and cultural. It is not indifference, which is something
else, a kind of delusion of security and denial of reality.
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