My Two Latest Books: An Intimate View
Norman Simms
Jews in the Illusion of Paradise: Dust and
Ashes, Volume I,
“Comedians and Catastrophes”. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2017. 426 pp.
Jews in the Illusion of Paradise: Dust and Ashes, Volume II,
Falling out of Place and into History
Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
2017. 553 pp.
Jews
in an Illusion of Paradise is not the title I chose for my
book, the second volume of which is scheduled to appear in November of 2017,
but that which an editor at Cambridge Scholars Press suggested, afraid for some
reason that potential purchasers of the study would not be able to understand
what it was about. The name of the book,
now standing as a sub-title, Dust &
Ashes, comes from my wife who wished to give the book a snappy cachet,
after admonishing me for always giving obscure and overly ironic titles. The
last three studies of Dreyfus are a case in point.
Alfred
Dreyfus: Man, Milieu, Mentality and Midrash. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2012.
In the Context of his Times: Alfred Dreyfus as Lover, Intellectual, Poet
and Jew.
Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2013.
Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus: In the Phantasmagoria. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2013.
Obviously
it was too difficult for reviewers to work out by these names that the books
were not about the Dreyfus Affair in all its legalistic, social and political
aspects about which the number of studies are legion. I did not write the book they wanted to read.
When
I thought the new manuscript was completed enough to send off, it had a very
long and complicated name, something like “The Four who Entered Paradise and
didn’t all come back, along with modern instances drawn from nineteenth- and
twentieth-century French, German and other European Cultures, who similarly
thought they had entered Paradise but actually found themselves in Sheol, the ancient Jewish afterlife of
Shadows.” Admittedly a mouthful, but
surely part of the joke: the terrible Jewish joke played by God or the Fates or
their own Self-Images on a group of intellectuals, artists and other critics
and theatrical people.
While
of the original Talmudic Four who Entered Paradise (or PaRDeS, the acronym for four kinds of exegetical games they played—pshat, the common meaning; remez, the analogies to be drawn; drash, the meanings expounded in
conversation and applied in social situations; and sod, the secrets created by delving into the unconscious of textual
and visual traditions), one died of fright as soon as he crossed over to the
other side of textual life; the second went mad because it was too much for his
traditionally-trained mind to take in; the third suffered a different kind of
shock so that when he returned to the Land of Israel in the days of the Second
Temple he became a cynic, a sceptic and thus a heretic, the very embodiment of
otherness to his former rabbinical colleagues; as for the fourth, his future
career and reputation was shaped by a distrust of speculative innovations and
hence a guardian of a very conservative school of exegetical commentary. My book thus conceived, so I thought, would
find examples and analogues among various once famous journalists (Marcel
Schwob), actors (Sarah Bernhardt), novelists (Thomas Mann), art historians
(Bernard Berenson and Arthur Meyer), literary critics (Georg Brandes) and so
forth, most of them recognizably Jewish, others less so, and a few mistakenly
so identified. Despite their
achievements and influence, they ended up dead or forgotten—or at least some of
them—in the ultimate Sheol of the Shoah.
The most problematic, of course, are women such as Gertrude Stein and Alice
B. Toklas, and their neighbour’s daughter Rose (who is a Rose is a Rose).
In
what is now the first volume of Jews in
an Illusion of Paradise: Dust & Ashes, the sub-title “Comedians and
Catastrophes” signals the emphasis on certain key images, themes and rhetorical
tricks. Since there is nothing new about
the notion that Jewish reputations suffered because of anti-Semitism and that
the importance of Judaism has been neglected, denied or challenged, with the
consequence that much of European historiography not framed by explicit Jewish
interests simply ignores that influence, my book does not present itself as a
part of that major school of thought. In
fact, it is neither history proper, social science or philosophy; if anything,
it is a midrash, a witty commentary
in the rabbinical way on the careers and works of a small group of Jewish
intellectuals and artists. The
discussions, usually sparked by seemingly irrelevant episodes (including dreams
and infantile memories) or remarks (casual or later contradicted), weave in and
around one another, always coming back to the story of the Four Ancient Sages
who Entered PaRDeS.
If
the first volume stresses themes and images, the second, whose subtitle is
“Falling Out of Place and into History,” pays more attention to the
personalities and artistic style of the main Jewish exemplars. The place they fell out of can be seen to be
at least double (in all sorts of complicated and complex ways indicated in
nineteenth-century novels, such as Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Phantom of the Opera, The Picture of Dorian Grey),
in that after liberation and assimilation Jews no longer had a traditional
place to hide in or offer protection or, if they believed they had actually
passed over into a tolerant, secular bourgeois society, they duped themselves;
in another sense, too, when they felt themselves finally comfortable and safe
in their reputations as successful writers, scholars and theatrical people,
they were usually wrong, although they didn’t always realize it. When they fell into “proper” history, that is,
found themselves subject to and interested in the social and cultural life, the
academic and scientific institutions they had often helped found, the political
and military actions of their age—places they had been excluded from by law and
custom—they eventually, if they lived long enough, were persecuted, expelled
and murdered; otherwise their names were erased and their achievements
forgotten or assigned to “real Europeans.”
Who now can recall the names Catulle Mendès,
André Suarès or Marcel Schwob, let alone see them as representatives of
pre-Holocaust Sephardic cosmopolitanism?
But not only are the
life stories—dreams, letters, diaries, memoirs and other private texts—of each
of the dozen or so Jewish subjects wound in and around one another to bring
into focus aspects of their Jewishness hidden for strategic purposes, but these
key details are saturated in the popular literature, dramatic entertainments
and artistic images of the period, with the effect, often quite surprising and
psychologically shocking, of revealing qualities in the host society that were
then and now too unconscious. Some of
these key moments thrown up by the midrashic method are an account of Sarah
Bernhardt being lowered down a cliff into the swirling sea and imagining she
was seeing ghosts and monsters or newspaper reports of Catulle Mendès’s death
in an accident in a railway tunnel when he mistakenly opened the carriage door
while the train was still moving or of an evening with Bernard Berenson amongst
sophisticated Jewish friends whom he swore he and they waxed nostalgic for
their mommas’ kosher cooking and joked in Yiddish to one another, something the
others later vehemently denied ever happened.
Since these two
volumes, like the three books on Alfred Dreyfus, his wife Lucie and their
respective families, were written after my retirement, long after my struggle
for promotion and professional recognition abandoned with great relief, and therefore any need to conform to academic
protocols, these new kind of exercises in the history of mentalities,
psychohistory and rabbinical explorations of the other side of assimilation,
they handle sources, paradigms of proof and scholarly objectivity in ways that
will, I hope, entertain as well as instruct the reader. Given two other factors in the current world
of letters, on the one hand, the supercilious seriousness of post-modernism and
its political correctness, on the other, the snobbish belittlement of Judaism’s
refusal to kowtow to hierarchical authority as well as the fashionable
anti-Zionism that demonizes Israel and its achievements, these bizarre books (as
one critic called them) may also poke fun at self-righteousness and the
arrogance of worldly power. Here I rely
on, though don’t always cite, José Faur, Jonathan Sacks and David Shasha, as
well as my own deepest memories and feelings.
