And what makes The Goy such a societally pressing book is that it reflects with static precision a mentality we had thought the freedom of America—and certainly the advent of Israel—should by now have wiped out: what the shtetl used to call “fear of the goy.” Harris retains that fear; though a child of America, he has not lost the tremor of suspicion that characterizes an immigrant five minutes out of steerage. It is a nervousness that is probably not untypical of many Jewish Americans; and it is hard to decide whether it is Jews or Gentiles who should be more shamed by its persistence.
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Essay published in Commentary, November 1970.
1 agape, not eros.
2 Twelve years after Bech: A Book, he is beginning to try. In a review of Bernard Malamud’s God’s Grace (The New Yorker, November 8, 1982), Updike ponders what “Jewishness” might be. It seems, he reflects, “in part a religious condition but . . . not negated by irreligion, as, say, a disavowal of faith removed a person from the lists of Christianity or Islam. A Jew, like Jehovah, simply is, in some realm beyond argument.” Since the entire rabbinic tradition is argument (as opposed to credo), and since, consequently, nearly all varieties of Jewish intellectuality, including the Bechian secular-modern, are heirs to a mode of discourse wherein nothing is “beyond argument,” it is hard to guess what Updike is imagining here. Having brilliantly assimilated the major texts of contemporary Protestant theology, he strangely does not assume (after millennia of Jewish texts) equal or greater (because more weightily cumulative) nuance and complexity in Jewish self-definition; what emerges for him is the naive, faintly mistrustful, vaguely poetic, puzzlement implicit in the phrase “A Jew, like Jehovah, simply is.” This formulation, even if it does just manage to escape meaninglessness, slides nevertheless into the exotically intergalactic. “Jehovah” is a foreign word to the Jewish ear; so is “faith” in its Protestant sense. All the same, on the evidence of these two sentences, Updike appears to be getting interested in, or at least self-conscious about, the notion of the Jewish sacral; he may even be on his way to insight into the historicity of the idea of Jewish Peoplehood.
3 In Hebrew: Bech, Baal-T’shuvah (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Hapoalim, 1992).
4 In Bech’s beat-up old American College Dictionary, from college, this surprise: “pertaining to nations not Jewish or Christian; heathen or pagan; as, ancient ethnic revels.”
Mark Harris, The Goy (The Dial Press, 1970).
Book review published in Commentary, June 1971.
5 I know of only two other works of fiction hung on this premise. One is Norma Rosen’s Touching Evil (1969), wherein a young woman follows the Eichmann trial on television and becomes Judaized. The other is, of course, Malamud’s The Assistant. Both of these books harbor miracle plays in that the premise is allowed to stand.
The Fourth Sparrow: The Magisterial Reach of Gershom Scholem
Gershom Scholem is a historian who has remade the world. He has remade it the way Freud is said to have remade it—by breaking open the shell of the rational to uncover the spiraling demons inside. But Freud, in fencing himself off from tradition, was hobbled by the need to invent everything on his own, through case history, trial and error, drug research, venturesome ingenuity, hunch and speculation above all. The little gods he collected, and the vocabulary he borrowed, took him partially and intuitively to Greek and primitive sources. All the same, in purposefully excluding himself from Hebrew origins—in turning Moses into an Egyptian, for instance—Freud inevitably struck loose from an encompassing history of ideas, ending in sensation and in a thesis of individuality suitable to the ardent physician he was; his new formulations stuck close to biology and family drama.
If Freud is regarded as an engine of thought and a sorcerer of fresh comprehension—as one of the century’s originals, in short—there are nevertheless those who, without necessarily reducing Freud’s stature, think the oceanic work of Gershom Scholem envelops Freud’s discoveries as the sea includes even its most heroic white-caps. Or, to alter the image: Freud is a peephole into a dark chamber—a camera obscura; but Scholem is a radiotelescope monitoring the universe, with its myriads of dark chambers. This is because Scholem’s voyage brought him past those boundaries Freud willfully imposed on himself. Freud dared only a little way past the margins of psychology; whereas Scholem, whose medium was history, touched on the very ground of human imagination. Freud claimed Hannibal as his hero, but Scholem delved beyond the Greek and Roman roots of the classical European education common to them both. Scholem went in pursuit of the cosmos—and that took him straight to the perplexities of Genesis and the Hebrew language. Freud shrugged off religion as “illusion,” and ended his grasp of it with that word. Where Freud thought it fit to end, Scholem begins.
In his restrained little memoir, From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth, Scholem recounts how even in boyhood he was drawn by mysterious magnets to the remote heritage his parents had deliberately denied him. The elder Scholem was a Jew who, like many Jews in the Germany of his generation and afterward, longed for a kind of social invisibility. The proprietor of a print shop, he thought of himself as a properly bourgeois German; he intended his four sons to distinguish themselves by growing up indistinguishable—he required them to be turned out as educated Germans with no recognizable Jewish quirks of intellect or passion. The two older boys obliged him; the two younger, Werner and Gerhard, were infected by a powerfully Jewish desire to repair a morally flawed world. Werner became a Communist, and, to his father’s outrage and shame, was court-martialed for treason, having taken part in an anti-World War I demonstration while wearing a German military uniform. Gerhard Hebraized his identity fully, called himself Gershom, sought out the Yiddish-speaking East European Jewish intellectuals he was expected to scorn, and became a Zionist. In the father’s eyes the activities of both sons were “anti-German.” The Marxist was unreachable in jail. The Zionist the father threw out of the house. The Marxist died in Buchenwald. The Zionist chose Jerusalem, and emerged as the monumental scholar of Jewish mysticism whose huge researches and daring insights have infiltrated and significantly enlarged the religious imagination of our age.
Scholar, yes—but also rediscoverer. When Scholem began his investigations, the antirational elements in Judaism had long been deliberately suppressed, both by tradition itself and by the historians. Though there are mystical moods in the vastnesses of Talmud, they are almost by-the-by: what dominates is the rabbis’ ethical and juridical genius, in the intellectual and rationalist sense. Scholem set out to rescue from distaste and neglect, indeed from ill-repute and shame, those wellsprings of metaphoric vitality that lay in Kabbalah, a proliferating system of symbolic descriptions of creation and revelation deemed capable of seizing the quality of holiness itself. These ancient ideas, some of them bordering on a kind of Jewish Gnosticism, were hidden away in numbers of texts, some forgotten, some misunderstood, some condemned, some—like the Zohar—ringed round with traditional strictures. Scholem cut through disdain and rejection to begin, single-handedly, his life’s task of reconstructing the story of Jewish mysticism.
Kabbalah—grounded in a belief in divine disclosure and the irrepressible hope of redemption—was historically both an inward movement and an outward one. When joined to messianic currents, it exploded the confines of esoteric reflection and burst into real event. The most startling event occurred in the seventeenth century, just after the massive Chmielnitzki persecutions of Polish Jews, when a popularly acclaimed redeemer, Sabbatai Sevi, and his prophet and theologian, Nathan of Gaza, set their generation on fire with the promise of an imminent return to Zion and an instantaneous end to exile and its oppressions. Scholem’s inexhaustible masterwork on this subject, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, divulges with philological, historical, and psychological force the amazing tale of that Sabbatian adventure: how it broke out spectacularly among the Jewish masses, and how it launched reverberations that penetrated into the next two centuries. The would-be
deliverer, broken by threats of execution by the Turks—who held the Holy Land—saved his life and abandoned his followers by converting to Islam, bringing a furiously spreading cataclysm of redemptive fever to a tragic and bewildering anticlimax.
Sabbatai Sevi is a titanic investigation into the substance and effect of illusion. It explores the rise, in the years 1665 and 1666, of a messianic movement among a profoundly subjugated people, only just recovering from the Inquisition and the Iberian expulsion, thrown into yet another devastation—the catastrophic massacres of the Jews of Poland that began in 1648 and continued until 1655. But the Sabbatian movement was not merely the response of hope to cataclysm. Sabbatai Sevi, born in Smyrna, Turkey, did not declare himself the true messiah of the Jews only to abolish their dispersion and restore to them their historic territory; the idea he represented was a cosmic redemption, the cleansing and renewal of all things, the retrieval of the sparks of holiness from the husks of evil which, according to Kabbalistic thought, bind them fast.
In the wake of Sabbatai Sevi’s annunciation came an incalculable penitential wave. The messiah’s work could not be completed until the world was cleared of sin, and everywhere—over the whole face of Europe, in Turkey, Morocco, Palestine, Egypt, wherever Jews lived—sanctification made vivid claims in the form of an astonishing spiritual roiling characterized by penitential exercises and charitable works. While the Gentiles around them gaped, Jews stopped in their daily tracks, gave up their livings, sold their possessions—the city of Leghorn, which had a large Jewish merchant class, nearly came to a halt—and prepared to journey to Jerusalem. Though there were doubters, no community of Jews went untouched by the messianic fervor. Legendary reports of the redeemer spread from land to land—a pandemic of ecstatic expectation.
The personality of the messiah himself is remarkably well-documented. He was plump, young, attractive. He had a beautiful singing voice, which he liked to show off in the synagogue, chanting psalms. An undistinguished writer, he was poetic in act rather than word. He was not intellectually notable, although the study of Kabbalah, which formed his character, demands unusual conceptual gifts: Kabbalah is a kind of Einsteinian mysticism—the brilliance of its inventions is precisely the brilliance of an original physics. It is no easy, amoral occultism, rather the vision of a universal moral restitution willed so acutely that only an alteration in the perception of the cosmos can account for it. Without the Kabbalah, Scholem explains, there could have been no Sabbatai Sevi to inaugurate the messianic dream, and no messianic dream to inaugurate the career of Sabbatai Sevi.
But he was, above all, a man of afflictions, subject to periods of “darkness,” which then gave way to phases of “illumination.” In short, a classic manic-depressive; and, worn and perplexed by his suffering during the cycle of bleakness, he traveled from Jerusalem, where he was tolerated as peculiar though harmless, to Gaza, to receive a healing penance from a twenty-year-old Kabbalist named Nathan. Nathan was a young man of genius—a natural theologian, given to bending Kabbalah with the craft of a chess master plying new openings. Sabbatai Sevi confessed that now and then, in moments of exaltation, he conceived himself to be the messiah—and Nathan, all at once irradiated, confirmed him as exactly that, conferred on him his mission, and theologized his madness.
The madness expressed itself in what was termed “strange acts.” When the mania came on him, the messiah’s face grew rosy and glowing, and, lifted up by glory, he would compel his followers to engage in unprecedented and bizarre performances. He made changes in the liturgy, pronounced the unutterable Tetragrammaton, called women to the Ark, married himself to the Scrolls of the Law, turned fasts into feasts; once he crammed three holidays into a single week; another time he declared that Monday was the real Sabbath. The glad tidings of the messianic age began to supersede the Law by eroding its strict practice—prayerbooks were amended to include the new messiah—and meanwhile the awakening to redemption burgeoned among all classes of Jews. One widespread group was especially receptive—those refugees called Marranos, who had survived the Inquisition in the guise of professing Christians, all the while secretly maintaining themselves as Jews. Their Catholic inheritance had inclined them toward worship of a Redeemer, and their public apostasy prepared them for the strangest of Sabbatai’s strange acts: his conversion to Islam.
The political meaning of the ingathering of the exiles into Turkish-held Palestine was not lost on the sultan and his viziers, who smelled, in so much penitence and prayer, a nuance of insurrection. Sabbatai Sevi was arrested in Smyrna, where he had come home under the triumphant name of King Messiah, Savior and Redeemer. He was offered one or the other: execution or apostasy. He chose to save his life, and with that one signal tossed thousands of his shocked and disillusioned followers back into the ordinary fact of exile, to be swallowed up once again by unmediated, unmiraculous history. But masses of others, the “believers,” continued to nurture their faith: for them the messiah’s act was a sacred mystery shielding an arcane purpose. An underground literature and liturgy sprang up; Nathan promulgated a new theology of paradox to account for the apostasy, wherein the inward reality of belief was held to be more forceful than the outer reality of happening. The “true” truth is always the concealed truth. The holiness-at-the-core is the real revelation even when it is clothed in seeming evil. The sacred and the profane change places. The Sabbatians came at length to an astounding prayer: “Blessed art Thou, Lord of the Universe, who permittest that which is forbidden.”
The crisis of theology brought on by the messiah’s apostasy led the believers to abandonment of traditional rabbinic Judaism, and from there with astonishing directness to Reform Judaism, anarchism, Enlightenment, revolutionary utopianism, nihilism, antinomianism, orgiastic excess—all the stupendously complex, often contradictory, strands of ideology that are implicit in the imagination released from the yoke of Commandment. All this was the effect of illusion. We are not finished with Sabbatianism yet, nor with the bafflements it suggests about the mentality of its heirs (Justice Brandeis was descended from a Sabbatian family), or the antiquity of the impulse nowadays called Zionism, or the psychological atmosphere surrounding the development of Christianity in its earliest years, or the whole history of Christianity over the centuries. The career of Sabbatai Sevi hints that every messiah contains in himself, hence is responsible for, all the fruits of his being: so that, for instance, one may wonder whether the seeds of the Inquisition somehow lie even in the Sermon on the Mount.
Scholem’s interpretations of these extraordinary matters were in themselves shockwaves for those who depended on the conventional histories. Instead of being merely a false messiah and mystagogue who inflamed a desperate people with his maniacal delusions, Sabbatai Sevi was now seen as a forerunner of the impassioned idealist Zionism of the nineteenth century; and Nathan of Gaza’s formulations, instead of being mere popular nonsense, were revealed as the heir to a deep poetical tradition, dense with luxuriant imaginings and an inspired fecundity of moral feeling: the Kabbalists’ yearning was to release the encapsulated divine sparks that would cleanse the world of evil. And beyond all that, Scholem maintained that the disintegration of orthodoxy through the development of Sabbatian mysticism led indirectly to circumstances that favored eighteenth-century Enlightenment and nineteenth-century Reform Judaism. This last—rational stirrings growing out of the heart of an intensely nonrational movement—is only one of Scholem’s innumerable contributions to fresh seeing. Scholem’s magisterial historical intuition, his capacity to enter and overwhelm several philosophical traditions at once, above all his reclamation of Kabbalah, empowered intellectual-rationalist Judaism to reharness the steeds of myth and mysticism, and to refresh the religious imagination at many wells and springs along the way.
These immense ideas, spilling over from Scholem’s histories into literature and even into literary criticism, have made Scholem into one of the great modern masters: a knower who, through the scrupulous use of knowledge, re
fashions and dominates the way we look at ourselves and our notions of the world.
But even these perplexities are not all. The major wonder is about mysticism itself, about human imagination itself, and how it runs free in religion. Scholem and Deuteronomy do not agree; for Scholem, mysticism is endemic in the sacral orchestration of the human mind, and should not be set aside. But Deuteronomy’s agnostic wisdom (29:28) concerning the effort to penetrate the nature and purposes of God is antithetical: “The secret things belong to the Lord”—which is to say, they are not for us.
About the paradoxical personality of Gershom Scholem himself, I once speculated in a story:
The draw of the irrational has its own deep question: how much is research, how much search? Is the scientist, the intelligent physician, the skeptical philosopher who is attracted to the irrational himself a rational being? How explain the attraction? I think of that majestic scholar of Jerusalem sitting in his university study composing, with bookish distance and objectivity, volume after volume on the history of Jewish mysticism—is there an objective “scientific interest” or is all interest a snare? Is the hidden cauldron not an enticement and a seduction to its investigator?—Or, to say it even more terribly: it may be that the quarry is all the time in the pursuer.
Accordingly, when I set out to see Scholem,1 I went with his memoir under my arm, impatient to put a single question—that notorious conundrum all readers who are fascinated by his explorations surrender to: Does the scholar of Kabbalah possess a hidden self (as Kabbalah speaks of a hidden “true” God)? Is there some secret sharer within, an unrevealed soul? Is there, in brief, a shadow-Scholem?
Scholem is quick to answer: “The scholar is never the whole man.” Then he does a thing that seems ordinary at the moment, but will turn out to be as tantalizingly wily as a reply from the Delphic oracle—he crosses to his wide scholar’s table and hands me a piece of paper, a newspaper review. It concerns Scholem’s relations with his great friend, Walter Benjamin. Who Benjamin was, and what he was to Scholem, can be surmised from the dedication prefixed to Scholem’s seminal volume, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism: “To the memory of the friend of a lifetime whose genius united the insight of the Metaphysician, the interpretive power of the Critic and the erudition of the Scholar.” Benjamin, a breathtaking essayist, a literary thinker drawn to Marxism, unable to share Scholem’s Zionist convictions all the way, remained in Europe until it was too late. To avoid being murdered as a Jew he took his own life in 1940, at the age of forty-eight. (Scholem, a Zionist since his teens, arrived in then Palestine in the 1920s.) The two brilliant polymaths pursued their mutually enriching exchanges for years; when they were separated, the talk went on copiously, in stunning essaylike letters. The German edition of their correspondence was reviewed in the London Times Literary Supplement by George Steiner. “Perhaps you will find the shadow-Scholem here,” Scholem says; it is Steiner’s review he has put in my hands. Among other stringently mournful speculations, I am astonished to read: “Scholem cannot forgive.” I am astonished to read it because it has been delivered over to me as a kind of confession. Or perhaps not. The allusion, in any case, is to the Jews of Germany who deceived themselves into believing Germany would accept and absorb them. Presumably Benjamin was among them.
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