This is the revised and expanded text of a talk I was to give in New York at the CUNY Graduate
Center Laura Simms , the famous storyteller, along with her
friends and colleagues at City College.
Nu, so what happened? I appeared
in the room in the evening and saw it was definitely not a seminar room or a
lecture theatre. There were more than a
hundred people present, which is something does not happen for scholarly papers
,let me assure you. Then, as there were
several other speakers, I patiently waited my turn. It very soon appeared that these other people
were storytellers, badchin (traditional
wedding entertainers) and stand-up comedians.
What could I do?
There
I was,a saucy pedantic academic wretch, having travelled thirty-two hours by
plane and at God know what expense to get from New Zealand to New York, and the
audience was waiting. So up on the stage
I went, waved about my paper, and said:
“I thought I was supposed to give a scholarly paper”. They all laughed. The paper was folded up,
put in a pocket, and I said: “ I haven't
seen so many Jews laughing in one place for twenty years.” They laughed harder. Everything I said was a joke, even the story
of the little Jewish man on the bridge.
Maybe
I shouldn't tell you this secret: secret shmeekret—a
week later the Village Voice reviewed
the Conference and the evening of entertainment. By and large the reviewer was not impressed
by the storytellers, the badchin and
the stand-up comedian, except for one spontaneous well-timed comic from New Zealand
Though Jews are sometimes called the People of
the Book, they have not only an extensive oral folklore, like all other human
communities, but they have a problematical relationship to the book as an
incomplete text. This kind of
relationship and problematic is embedded moreover in a matrix of linguistic
confusion, the consequences of which are, among other things, to infuse even
the most casual conversations with a sense of both anxiety and the absurd. Let me explain these points, adding that my
own perspective is a rather strange one:
it is scholarly, to be sure, but also from a place in which the main
texts, let alone the lesser ones, are rare or inaccessible; and where the
normal voices of Jewish discourse are not to be heard, or only through my own
close and doubly alienated friends. To
live in New Zealand Korea , we
few Jews in Hamilton
With
that said, let me go on to explain my opening points. Judaism is based on a dialectic of the
present and the absent, the actual revelation of Torah in the written text of
the Pentateuch and the revelation of the oral Torah, the text which is still
coming into being, which exists orally, even when inscribed as Talmud and
further commentary. Even cumulatively
viewing all of Scripture and mischna and
talmud as the "book", there
is still the sense of incompleteness that requires the Jewish community to keep
adding more, to keep trying to complete the written text. That sense loads every oral statement, no
matter how casual, with at least the potentiality of being part of the missing
text. As Susan K. Handelman indicates,
instead of the Jewish Bible being a metaphoric substitute for the Word--the
perfect truth and reality behind or beyond the text--Torah in its written form
is a metonym, a displacement and a portion of the perfection, the Word not as
name but as process. The deity in fact
has the name suppressed, just as his or her form is denied by eternal
spirituality, and is known only as the verbal "I AM". To speak a part of the Word, then, whether by
intoning a ritual "reading" of the holy text or one its manifold
commentary extensions and supplements, or by continuing the commentary through
formal or informal interpretation is both to participate in the originary act
of creation and to continue that act towards perfection, rectification, and
ultimate completion.
But
Jews are not all Biblical scholars, talmudists, or Yeshiva buchers. Still, deep in European history, where the
shape of modern Judaism crystallizes, Jews are distinguished by two factors at
least. Two factors at least other than
their being Europeans who are not Christian:
and these are, first, that they have an extremely high ratio of literates,
among men and even among women, at a time when for the Christian community
literacy remained a special, enclaved privilege of the priestly and monastic
casts, and the gap between bookishness and the ordinary or festival life of
most of the population, particularly in rural areas, remained oral; and second,
that Jews were multi-lingual, further than those Western or Catholic Christians
who recognized Latin as a liturgical and learned language embedded in a
protected area of their more normal vernacular experiences, in that for Jews
the liturgical role of Hebrew spilled out, as it were, into the daily and
weekly prayers of ordinary people, and was ancillary too, as well, Aramaic,
Yiddish (or Ladino, or some other Jewish language), and one or more European
national languages and dialects.
Though
often superstitious and narrow, the folklore of Jews distinguished itself from
that of Christian Europe in its relationship to books, literacy, and
bookishness. No Jew could be unaware of
the sacred books, of the talmudic enterprise, of the contents, no matter how
watered down, of intellectual debate that went on in the Yeshivas. The sanctity of the family dinner table as a
space of religious worship--and therefore ipso facto bookish religiosity--and
the weekly ritual of Sabbath, with worship in a schul, a school of reading and comment each provide the essential
core of Jewish life. The whole range of
sad and comic types of Jewish humour distribute themselves on a scale of
intellectual participation in and understanding of the interpretative
enterprise. A Jewish wife was very much
aware that she ought to encourage and support her husband in his duties as a
student of the book, and each male would at least to some degree of
intentionality recognize his role to be a husband both to his wife at home and
to the Torah itself in the synagogue.
The gatherings of men in the schul
on Friday night and most of Saturday provided the scene for and the actual
content of the emotional binding/bonding of the community, just as much as the
domestic circle at home.
The
multi-lingualism of the community and the home was only intensified in the
encounters between the different Jewish communities and between, of course, the
Jewish and the Christian peoples of Europe .
Commercial and bureaucratic dealings with the ruling powers required
familiarity with the official national languages, sometimes Latin as well, in
addition to the market place languages and dialects of the cities and rural
areas where Jews lived and worked. This
kind of sensitivity to language combined with the problematic of the book to
give a sense of reflexive and critical awareness to the Jewish mentality and to
invest normal and ordinary discourse with a density usually missing in
analogous situations for Christian Europe.
But
this density creates both a feeling of anxiety and a sense of the absurd in
that mental space of Jewish identity, along with an awareness of theological
choice, the burden of responsibility for carrying out the six hundred and
thirteen mitzvot and the desire to
participate in the extension and completion of the oral Torah. Anxiety arises, primarily, of course, because
there is a manifest threat in the situation of Jews across Europe
of pogrom, persecution, expulsion, or discrimination at a variety of subtle and
not so subtle levels. The Jew feels
distinctly apart from the hegemonious society of the feudal or national state,
enjoying that apartness as simultaneously privilege and threat. And as toleration and cosmopolitanism become
options particularly in Western Europe ,
especially over the past two hundred years, the anxiety comes to include the
dissolution of the Jewish community from within, the loss of those very customs
and decrees of persecution coming to be seen as a protective fence against
social and ideological contamination.
The anxiety becomes that of not being able to sustain the interpretive
enterprise, an enterprise which requires the efforts by the whole community to
support a general respect for study of the sacred books and to finance the
intensive efforts by a few to devote their whole lives to intellectual
debate. For the Jewish community to
integrate into and become a normal part of the contextual society those
individuals and those skills cultivated for preservation of a distinct social
identity become required for other matters:
for professional training in secular arts, for administrative office,
and for creative developments within the covering civilization. This kind of anxiety registers in the
ambiguous exclamation of the Jewish comedian who responds to a child's
statement of what he wants to be when he grows up: "A rabbi! This is a job for a nice Jewish boy?"
The
anxiety also deepens to include the threat of a loss of intensity in the terms
of talmudic comment itself, an anxiety which articulates itself in a
restriction on the flow of new interpretation, thus beginning to lock the oral
tradition within the parameters of the already given written version, hence an
internal collapse of the spiritual essence of that activity. The attempt to bridge the gulf between
Christian scholarship, coded in the objective and scientific methods of
historical research and textual criticism, also seems to pose a threat, in that
such an approach devalues the flexibility, relativity, and dynamic of the oral
Torah; and yet to deny that methodology is to deny the very forces within the
Christian civilization which begin to release the bonds of persecution for
Jews. Similarly, the transition from
sacred commentary to artistic expression is, for the Jewish community, a
threat, but one which at the same time, allows for the bolstering up of those
forces within the national state that generates tolerance, multi-culturalism,
and secular civility.
There
is thus a concomitant sense of the absurd with this anxiety. It may, in part, also rest on another typical
Jewish insight which is often expressed both crudely and obliquely, in jokes
against the foolishness, obstinacy, or unreflective consciousness of the goy, the insight of the Jew into the
illogical and self-contradictory nature of the Christian mythos itself. The Jew stands aside and shakes his head at
the madness of the Christian's worship of a poor persecuted Jew, wonders at the
literalism of the church's reading of Holy Scripture or at the fantasies of its
allegorical interpretations, stares at the fissiparous antagonisms of its
reformations and counter-reformations.
Yet the Jew both knows and doubts at the same time the nature of a world
in which such silly stories become the gospel truth, and where reason and
common sense have to fight their way into small and tenuous clearings of peace
and order. For how many ages, the Jew
wonders, will this madness go on? And so
too he asks, maybe I'm wrong, why not?
Even
in the midst of the secular and humanist institutions and philosophies of Europe the Jew feels somewhat out of place, and that even
when he or she is an honoured participant in the situation. This is because, I would suggest, the grounds
for such secularity rest on a distancing of the hegemonic community from its
own Christian base, just as its humanism defines itself as other than a
Christo-centric ideology. The Jew
embraces the secular and the humanistic to be sure but only as those ideals
hold Christianity and the Church at bay, not as they in any way privilege
Judaism. That is because, insofar as the
Jew still necessarily identifies him or herself with Judaism, it is to mark out
a space within the total society which is neither Christian nor secular or
humanist. And even further, what is
particularly Jewish in thought and custom still maintains a respect for a
bookishness problematically related to oral tradition that does not fit into
the dominant scheme of things.
More
than ironic reversals and inversions, characteristic of the univocal and
dichotomous way of thinking which underpins the Hellenic-Latin synthesis of
Christian Europe, the Jewish sense of argumentation, logic, thought follows the
processes of oral speech. Words, seen
less as the names of persons, things, and places, and more as processes,
movements, relationships, call for a logic that does not situate truth in a
place: truth is, for Judaism, an
act. To act in a world of absurdity,
which is very much the absurdity of univocal schemes of all or nothing, syllogism
and dualistic options, means to be relativistic, to question even the rules of
logic, to measure means more than ends, to seek opening rather than closure to
debate.
Just
as truth is revealed in both the written and the oral Torah, so life unrolls
its scroll through the textuality of religious duties--the duties and
responsibilities at home and in synagogue--and the endless adjustments of those
prescriptions to the absurd and hostile realities of day-by-day life,
adjustments made in a variety of languages, a profusion of sub-texts. The case of the Marranos in Spain Europe
could be carried out with less obvious tension.
Still what is revealed in the oral culture of Yiddishkeit is the
never-ending awareness of the ragged line at the interface, the awkwardness,
embarrassments, and innuendoes of interpenetration.
In
clothing, language and custom, as well as in the shape and appearance of the
page itself, Jewish life could be radically different from that of the
Christian. And yet for the Jew, with the
chutzpa to remain different in this
way, it was the surrounding culture that was wrong, absurd, not his or her
own--or not only his or her own. At the
same time, especially as the Jew became self-conscious of the differences from
what an enlightened--secular and humanist--society presented as normal, there
was a shame of the Orientalism, backwardness, and fanaticism of the old way, of
the Ostjuden. Self-consciousness, however, also often mixed
with nostalgia, and the Yiddish imagination peopled itself increasingly,
especially as it imitated the Romantic and nationalist literatures and literary
folklores of Eastern Europe, with a pantheon of shlemiels, shlamozzles,
and yentas, not to mention
wonder-working rabbis, crafty and adventurous young people, and demonic
creatures.
All
this could and did enter into the music hall version of Jewish humour and the
narratives of the first generations of Yiddish writers in Europe and America
A
typical joke would go like this: A Jew
is walking over a bridge in Germany
The
joke thus reveals the inversion and reversal of positions within the text of
the telling, insofar as the Jew is in control, if not of real life, than at
least of the joke, of the text of speaking.
In that text, as in all minor rhetorics, the powerless use irony to gain
the power of language and logic, usurping the dominant position from those in
control of politics and reality, and, like a Judo-artist, manipulating the
momentum of the stronger person's threatening gestures. The more the joke is expanded, the more the
strength and aggressiveness of the German are described, and the more the
weakness, vulnerability, and timidity of the Jew are emphasized: all this allows for the greater collapsing of
the distinctions when the gesture of civility reverses the power-relationship,
the power not of physical prowess but of control over the text.
The
joke also recalls many facets of Socratic irony and wit, the charismatic power
lurking under the trivial and rumpled appearance of the philosopher which
Alcibiades, the great Athenian politician, feels in the presence of Socrates
and his drunken speech. This kind of
irony functions to destabilize the dominant person's sense of self-knowledge
and self-satisfaction, reducing them into an admission of ignorance, an ignorance
which is made to be the grounds for climbing the ladder of wisdom, from
particular things to ideal awareness of pure thought. Like the Silenus, the ugly statue of an old
satyr, once the outside is removed, Socrates is beautiful, strong, and
charming: his strange speech and
ridiculous behaviour are illusions, masks for his inner and pure spiritual
reality. They are metaphors,
substitutes, which function as deflectors, as mirrors which dazzle the eyes of
the beholder, force him to refocus his eyes,
and so come to see past the confusion to the order within. But this is where the Jewish joke draws away
from the hellenistic irony, the maieutic method of philosophy. The little old Jewish man who confronts the
strong brown-shirted Anti-Semite does not seek to reform or restructure the
real relationship between them, to instruct the Nazi in the methodology of
philosophic enquiry, or to reveal any other strength within himself than that
which is indicated by his appearance.
The Jew is weak, timid, bent-over because of all the time he spends
studying Torah; his physical condition derives from and is an indication of his
intellectual concentration. It is not an
illusion, a metaphor denied with the exposure of the beautiful inside. It is because he is weak that he is
strong. But strong only inside the joke,
the text he constructs, the trap he lays for the non-Jew who misreads the
situation as real rather than textual.
But
when we see that there is more, we start to approach an inner revelation of
what really distinguishes the Jew from the Christian, and what therefore acts
to threaten the Christian and make him react so violently against the Jew. We have indicated that normally the Jewish
sense of a word is an act or process of being rather than a naming, an
establishment of a person or thing within a category, a space of mental
recognition, or logical designation.
When the German thug insults the Jew on the bridge by calling him a Schweinhund, he is using language to
transform, through the sympathetic magic of naming, the little man into an
inhuman thing. His statement is not
propositional, an utterance which is held up for proof or denial, but an
action: by calling the Jew a Schweinhund, he moves him from the
place of humanity to the place of bestiality. It is an illocutionary act--an assertion, and
therefore a taunt. The response of the
Jew misreads the act as a more simple locution, the act of introduction, the
identification by the German of his own name:
that is, even further, the opening of himself from a general category,
stranger, German, man in a brown shirt, Anti-Semite--all of which are coded
semiotically into his uniform and traditional gesture of aggression--to a
particular individual, and consequently friendly category. To give himself a personal name before the
Jew, the German strips away the outer protective covering of his generic place
in the dominant society. It also implies
that, when the Jew answers with his own personal name, he too is individualized,
made equal with the other. But, of
course, the Jew is not really misunderstanding the intentions, the signals of
the Anti-Semite. He is only pretending,
adapting an ironic posture. When he
gives away his own name, Silberstein, apparently making himself the more
vulnerable by stripping away the protective layer of Judaic impersonality, the
fence of traditional subservience, he actually inverts the illocutionary-locutionary
process: by naming himself Silberstein, he names the German Schwein-hund. The simple act of the German is complicated
by making him the agent of his own transformation: he becomes what he called the Jew--he becomes
a Jew in his own category of Jewishness.
By pretending to Germanic civility and politeness, the Jew becomes a
citizen of the secular Christian state.
In so
doing, reverberations of satire and burlesque are set in motion, and these, as
we have indicated, echo with traditional minor rhetoric and Socratic
irony. But in terms of the Jewish view
of a written, incomplete text and a verbal not yet perfected commentary, the
joke requires a silent commentary to be accomplished. This also opens a problematic of the Jewish
conceptualization of God, of poor little God, Gottenyu, who ought to be ashamed of the world that he has
created. God, Master of the Universe,
the powerful I AM who acts with an outstretched arm and a mighty hand, is
dependent upon men and women, on Jews, to correct, complement, and sustain the
creation of the as yet imperfect world.
It is God who is at once all-powerful and weak, all-knowing but
forgetful, the creator of all things and the unfinished hidden One. Faced with a world of absurdity and anxiety,
the Jew rages against the injustices, the inanities of the experiences
inscribed across history, his personal life and his mythic experience of Jewish
history. He praises God, whimpers and
tries to flatter and cajole; he reminds God of his suffering and of the grief
which is the burden of the whole community.
With that special relationship to the deity, the Jew meets the
Anti-Semite as a manifestation of God's failure, and he manipulates the text of
experience to correct the situation in order to help God out, to show God what
ought to be done. The joke is a
sub-text, a possible variant inscribed in wit but held out as an index of what
ought to be done in history.
To do
this, however, the Jew risks revealing to the Christian the relationship
between God and the Jewish people, a special relationship in which God is as
dependent upon them as they on him. As
the wonder-working rabbi in Bernard Malamud's "The Silver Crown" says
to a sceptical Jewish biology teacher:
"Doubts we all got. We doubt
God and God doubts us. This is natural
on account of the nature of existence..."
The Christian believes that God is beyond doubt, is pure Truth behind
all texts, and that Holy Scripture is a sustained metaphor--an
allegory--standing in place of God, revealed in Jesus Christ, the Word made
flesh. For the Jew, supposedly the
people of the book, supposedly as well too stiff-necked to rise above the literalness
of the text to see the metaphoric Truth it substitutes for, to hold that the
text is incomplete, must forever be supplemented by an oral commentary always
already there from the originary moment of revelation, a commentary moreover
that already always overtakes the literalness of God's presence as a powerful
textualized truth and reality, that is infuriating. Jews do not believe in Christ as the
mediation between the literal text and the spiritual truth because for them the
text is already always more and other than what it inscribes--it is what the
commentary extends, as an act, into the process of perfecting the universe and
God. Again, the statement of this
quintessential experience is necessarily oblique and witty. In Arthur A. Cohen's prose anatomy, In the Days of Simon Stern, when Simon's father Abram leaves
his job as a tailor to devote his life full-time to study of the Talmud, his
boss Reb Yonah says he wishes he had the time.
"There's so much to do speaking
to God. It's not that He says a lot, but
He wants to be noticed. You can't blame
Him?" Reb Yonah always spoke of God
like a neglected parent.
This intimacy with God is not the same, of
course, as the mystical interanimation of souls of Christian tradition. The manifold diminunitives and suffixes of
endearment which make Yiddish bespeak this familiarity supplement the discourse
of awe, celebration, and praise we find in Hebrew, and it is the juxtaposition
of both the Hebrew and the Yiddish text which transgress the vernaculars of Christian
speech and writing.
The
joke we have been talking about thus reveals at its core another
dimension. The little old Jew of
traditional anecdotage not only acts out the role of God--Gottenyu, my dear sweet little God, what kind of a world did you make
for us? You should be ashamed. You shouldn't know from the troubles we live
through, but let me tell you, if it was up to me, I wouldn't hesitate to give
those Anti-Semites a little knock on the head.
But the little Jew does what God doesn't do: he transvalues the names of the text. He mirrors back the abuse against himself on
to the head of the Nazi thug. Bent over
and weak from so much study, Mr Silberstein nevertheless has learned his lesson
well, and you should expect that God, with all the time in the world could at
least do as much. Still, it's only a
joke, nebech, and at least you and I
understand this, so we laugh--but also we could cry. From suffering also we laugh--that is another
Yiddish saying.
Telling
this joke is not an act of total transformation, but each joke is part of the
continuing, cumulative tradition of commentary.
Gershom Scholem suggests that if there were to be an absolute sudden
revelation of the total truth all at once it would destroy the world. He says:
Revelation is, despite its
uniqueness, still a medium [what I
have been designating a text]. It is (the) absolute, meaning-bestowing, but
itself meaningless that becomes explicable only through the continuing relation
to time, to the Tradition. The word of
God in its absolute symbolic fullness would be destructive if it were at the
same time meaningful in an unmediated way.
I am suggesting that Jewish oral tradition is not
divided into a distinct sacred and a profane discourse or suite of discourses,
but that these oral textualities are variants of one another, each significant
in the continuing process of revelation, even when they appear to be confused,
hostile, and ignorant of one another.
Again I cite Scholem as my authority, here in his definition of tradition:
Tradition as
a living force produces in its unfolding another problem. What had originally been believed to be
consistent, unified and self-enclosed now becomes diversified, multifold and
full of contradictions. It is precisely
the wealth of contradictions, of differing views, which is encompassed and
unqualifiedly affirmed by tradition...
If as Susan Handelman pointed out, the Torah is
not an artifact of the universe, but the universe an artifact of Torah, then
traditional commentary, including oral traditions--jokes and anecdotes,legends
and bubah meisas--all function to
sustain, complete, and perfect God, in whose image humanity was made, and in
whose voice the Jewish commentator speaks.
And, maybe, too, alright, vice versa.
[1] The earliest printed version of this paper—and even
that was a revision of the original oral presentation I never delivered in New
York—was first published as “The Little Old Jew at the Bridge, or The Dependence
of God on Jewish Jokes and the Place of Witzenschaft in Modern Jewish
Fiction” Journal of Literature & Aesthetics 8:2 (July-December 2000)
37-49 In the printed version I was
reshaping my talk for readers in India where the journal is published.
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