But this is not the real burden of the accusation; modes of technique are not the real issue. What is regarded as exhausted in nineteenth-century fiction is not simply the worked-out vein of characterization and storytelling, but something beyond mere devices: call it History, call it Idea. The novel at its nineteenth-century pinnacle was a Judaized novel: George Eliot and Dickens and Tolstoy were all touched by the Jewish covenant: they wrote of conduct and of the consequences of conduct: they were concerned with a society of will and commandment. At bottom it is not the old novel as “form” that is being rejected, but the novel as a Jewish force. The “new” novel, by contrast, is to be taken like a sacrament. It is to be a poem without a history—which is to say an idol. It is not to judge or interpret. It is to be; it is not to allow anything to happen or become. “Happen” implies history, “become” implies idea; both imply teshuvah, a turning. But the new fiction is to be the literary equivalent of the drug culture, or of Christianity. It is to be self-sustaining, enclosed, lyrical and magical—like the eucharistic moment, wherein the word makes flesh. “Life,” one of the most praised of these practitioners writes, “is not the subject of fiction.”4 Fiction, he says, “is where characters, unlike ourselves, freed from existence, can shine like essence, and purely Be”—and he quotes from Ortega y Gasset in a passage despising those who will not “adjust their attention . . . to the work of art; instead they penetrate through it to passionately wallow in the human reality which the work of art refers to.” But it is above all the Jewish sense-of-things to “passionately wallow in the human reality.” Covenant and conduct are above decoration. The commandment against idols, it seems to me, is overwhelmingly pertinent to the position of the Jewish fiction-writer in America today. If he feels separate from the religion of Art in the streets, he can stay out of the streets. But if the religion of Art is to dominate imaginative literature entirely, and I believe it will in America for a very long time, can he stay out of American literature?
If he wants to stay Jewish, I think he will have to. Even as a writer, especially as a writer, he will have to acknowledge exile. If what I have called aesthetic paganism is to be a long-range thesis of American culture, then it is not the kind of literary or social culture he can be at home in. The problem of Diaspora in its most crucial essence is the problem of aesthetics. This no doubt sounds very abstract, despite those social particulars I have tried to illustrate with. But it is not abstract. The German Final Solution was an aesthetic solution: it was a job of editing, it was the artist’s finger removing a smudge, it simply annihilated what was considered not harmonious. In daily life the morality of Germans continued as before, neighbors were kindly, who can deny it? From the German point of view, getting rid of the Jew had nothing to do with conduct and everything to do with art. The religion of Art isolates the Jew—only the Jew is indifferent to aesthetics, only the Jew wants to “passionately wallow in the human reality.” Among the ancients it was the Greeks, not the Jews, who contemplated pure form. Even now, in the whole planet of diverse cultures, the Jew is the only one who stands there naked without art. The Jewish writer, if he intends himself really to be a Jewish writer, is all alone, judging culture like mad, while the rest of culture just goes on being culture. Earlier I quoted George Steiner’s view that the Jew has “recast much of the politics, art and intellectual constructs of the age.” No. He has recast nothing, least of all art. He has judged what he found. If he does not judge what he finds, if he joins it instead, he disappears. Those Diaspora Jews who survive and transcend alien cultures—Steiner cites, among others, Freud and Kafka—are precisely those who judge what they find. Critics, interpreters, summarizers of culture who are Jews can at least breathe, if only transiently, in Diaspora. If they are giants, like Freud and Kafka, they may endure, though one becomes less and less assured of the long-term survival even of Freud.
But for those who are less than giants—and culture is what happens every day, culture is normality, culture is dependent for its sustenance not on its major but on its minor figures—for those Jewish summarizers and literary and cultural critics and observers who do not tower over but, rather, hope merely to sustain, history promises little. The culture they buzz round like honeybees drops them. They become nonexistent. This is not because they are minor figures to begin with; as I have said, a culture is fed chiefly by its diligent second rank. But the diligent second rank, when it is Jewish, does not survive even as minor. Compare Chesterton and Israel Zangwill. Both were of what we now call a “minority faith,” one a Catholic, one a Jew; born ten years apart, they had, in a literary way, similar careers. But everybody knows that Chesterton is an English writer and that Zangwill is not. Chesterton is not much read, except in school assignments. Zangwill is not read at all, and the last place you would expect to find him is in a textbook. Chesterton is a minor English literary figure and is noted as such among specialists. Zangwill is only a Jew who lived in England. For some Jewish historians he survives as a producer of documents, or as himself a document. For English culture he does not survive at all.
But go further and consider those who do not intend to be Jewish. Consider Isaac D’Israeli and his contemporary, Charles Lamb. Both are gifted minor writers, of rather similar charm. But everyone knows Charles Lamb, and if anyone has ever heard of Isaac D’Israeli it is because he is the father of a Jewish Prime Minister. Yet Isaac D’Israeli was the perfect English man-of-letters, easily comparable to, in America now, Lionel Trilling. He was not notably Jewish in his concerns, as, of course, Zangwill was. In literature his fate is the same as Zangwill’s—no, worse. Even Jewish specialists find him uninteresting. He does not exist, even as a document. Lamb survives, Hazlitt survives, De Quincey survives, Leslie Stephen survives, George Saintsbury survives—all minor. But Isaac D’Israeli is wiped out of the only culture he was able to breathe in, as if he never breathed at all.
One can move through history from culture to culture and discover equal dooms. In the Italy of the Renaissance, cultivated Jews, like others, wrote sonnets in Italian in imitation of Petrarch. They did not endure even in a minor way—not as a minor note in Jewish culture, not as a minor note in Italian culture. In the so-called Golden Age of Spain, which—as Richard Rubinstein pointed out at an earlier Dialogue—is considered Golden only by Jews, was there not some gifted Jew of Toledo who wrote verses in Spanish? If so, try to find his name. So if Philip Roth still wants to say “I am not a Jewish writer; I am a writer who is a Jew,” the distinction turns out to be wind; it is precisely those who make this distinction whom Diaspora most determinedly wipes out.
And it is especially to the point that one has to look to minor writers for historical examples. There are no major Jewish writers, unless you insist on including two French half-Jews, Montaigne and Proust. The novel at its height in the last century was Judaizing in that it could not have been written without the Jewish Bible; in America especially, Hawthorne and Melville and Whitman are Biblically indebted; but there never yet lived a Jewish Dickens. There have been no Jewish literary giants in Diaspora. Marx and Freud are vast presences, but they are, as I observed earlier, analyzers and judges of culture—they belong to that awkward category known as “the social sciences.” Imaginative writers, by contrast, are compelled to swim in the medium of culture; literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it. Consequently there are no major works of Jewish imaginative genius written in any Gentile language, sprung out of any Gentile culture. Talmud speculates that when the Jews went into exile, God too was exiled. Is this a metaphor of incapacity? The literature of the Bible—very nearly our only major literature—issued from out of the Land. When we went into exile, did our capacity for literature abandon us also? Why have our various Diasporas spilled out no Jewish Dante, or Shakespeare, or Tolstoy, or Yeats? Why have we not had equal powers of hugeness of vision? These visions, these powers, were not hugely conceived. Dante made literature out of an urban vernacular, Shakespeare spoke to a small island people, To
lstoy brooded on upper-class Russians, Yeats was the kindling for a Dublin-confined renascence. They did not intend to address the principle of Mankind; each was, if you will allow the infamous word, tribal. Literature does not spring from the urge to Esperanto but from the tribe. When Carl Sandburg writes in a poem “There is only one man, and his name is Mankind,” he is unwittingly calling for the end of culture. The annihilation of idiosyncrasy assures the annihilation of culture. It is possible to write “There is only one ant, and its name is Antkind”; anthood is praised thereby. The ants are blessed with the universal brotherhood of instinct. But they have no literature. Whenever we in Diaspora make a literature that is of-the-nations, relying on what we have in common with all men, what we fashion turns out to be a literature of instinct, not of singularity of culture; it does not deserve perpetuation. What is there of culture in Shylock’s cry “Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions”? Very liberal of Shakespeare to grant this, very socialist of him, and humanitarian, and modern, and priest/minister/rabbi-American of him—nevertheless what Shylock’s formulation signifies is that Shakespeare even at his moral pinnacle does not see the Jew as a man, but only as Mankind—which is to say as Ant, natural creature rather than culture-making creature. In our modern Diasporas we have consistently followed Shakespeare in this diminution of our civilizing qualities: as makers-of-literature we have by and large been possessed of organs and dimensions rather than of culture. We are all Shylocks proclaiming our resemblances: “allee samee,” we say, insuring the obliteration of our progeny.
The fact is that nothing thought or written in Diaspora has ever been able to last unless it has been centrally Jewish. If it is centrally Jewish it will last for Jews. If it is not centrally Jewish it will last neither for Jews nor for the host nations. Rashi lasts and Yehudah Halevi lasts: one so to speak a social thinker, the other a poet: they last for Jews. Leivick will last, and Sholem Aleichem: for Jews. Isaac D’Israeli did not last for Jews or for anyone; neither did that putative Jew of Toledo who wrote good Spanish poetry; neither will Norman Mailer. “Our cultural account in the Diaspora,” Bialik said, “is all debit and no credit.” Even a Heine does not right the balance. After so long a sojourn among Germans, didn’t the Jews owe Germany at least a poet? For a while Heine pretended he was a German poet, though his private letters repeatedly said something else. But Germany would not keep him; Hitler struck him from the ledger and returned Heine permanently to the Jewish people. If he lasts, he lasts for us.
By “centrally Jewish” I mean, for literature, whatever touches on the liturgical. Obviously this does not refer only to prayer. It refers to a type of literature and to a type of perception. There is a critical difference between liturgy and a poem. Liturgy is in command of the reciprocal moral imagination rather than of the isolated lyrical imagination. A poem is a private flattery: it moves the private heart, but to no end other than being moved. A poem is a decoration of the heart, the art of the instant. It is what Yehudah Halevi called flowers without fruit. Liturgy is also a poem, but it is meant not to have only a private voice. Liturgy has a choral voice, a communal voice: the echo of the voice of the Lord of History. Poetry shuns judgment and memory and seizes the moment. In all of history the literature that has lasted for Jews has been liturgical. The secular Jew is a figment; when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew. This is especially true for makers of literature. It was not only an injunction that Moses uttered when he said we would be a people attentive to holiness: it was a description and a destiny.
When a Jew in Diaspora leaves liturgy—I am speaking now of the possibilities of a Diaspora literature—literary history drops him and he does not last.
By “last” I mean, very plainly, sub specie aetemitatis. If it is enough for any novelist or poet to have the attention of three decades and then to be forgotten, I am not speaking to him. But no committed writer seriously aims to be minor or obscure. I offer a tragic American exemplar of wasted powers and large-scale denial. Why, for instance, does Norman Mailer, born in the shtetl called Brooklyn, so strenuously and with little irony turn himself into Esau? Because he supposes that in the land of Esau the means to glory is Esau’s means. Having failed through inadequate self-persuasion to write the novels of Esau, Mailer now swings round to interpretive journalism, a minor liturgical art: with old Jacob’s eye he begins to judge Gentile culture. But even while judging he is allured, and his lust to be Esau grows. One day he will become a small Gentile footnote, about the size of H. L. Mencken. And the House of Israel will not know him. And he will have had his three decades of Diaspora flattery. Esau gains the short run, but the long run belongs to Jacob.
How do these admittedly merciless reflections—history confers realism, not consolation—affect the position of Jewish culture in the American Diaspora?
I spoke earlier, in that sociological hump I had to get over, of fear of an American abattoir. This may stem from the paranoia of alienation; or from a Realpolitik grasp of scary historical parallels. Never mind. Let us say it will never happen, or not for a long time. And that despite every other kind of domestic upheaval the Jews of America have a good space of future laid out before them. What then? Will cultural news come out of American Jewry?
I have a curious vision, transient but joyous. It has to do with two deeply obvious circumstances. The first is that of all Jews alive today, 45 percent live in America, and perhaps 50 percent have English for their mother tongue. This is not so much a datum as an opportunity, and I will return to it. The second is that there has been, from America, no Ingathering of Jews into the Land of Israel. But why not? What are our reasons, our actual and truthful reasons? Is it that we don’t want to leave our houses, jobs, cars, yards, fences, language, fleshpots? Yes. Is it that despite occasional dark frights we are in love with the American idea, and trust it after all? Also yes. “This is a good Diaspora,” I heard someone say the other day, “as Diasporas go.” So is it that in the meantime we are nevertheless living spectacularly productive and reasonably happy lives? Also yes. These are all our true reasons: reasons in praise of the American Diaspora: reasons of antlike instinct rather than culture. But sometimes I wonder whether there is not another reason too—not our reasons, but history’s. The Nazi period teaches us how not to be disposed of; also how not to dispose of ourselves. We always note how in Germany we wanted to be German. In America something else is happening. By now I have probably uttered the word “history” a hundred times; it is a Jewish word. But turn now to Joseph Brenner, who in a furious essay called “Self-Criticism” spits it out like a demon-shriek—
History! History! [he cries.] But what has history to tell? It can tell that wherever the majority population, by some fluke, did not hate the Jews among them, the Jews immediately started aping them in everything, gave in on everything, and mustered the last of their meager strength to be like everyone else. Even when the yoke of ghetto weighed most heavily upon them—how many broke through the walls? How many lost all self-respect in the face of the culture and beautiful way of life of the others! How many envied the others! How many yearned to be like them!
All this is of course applicable to numbers of American Jews behind their silken walls. Diaspora-flattery is our pustule, culture-envy our infection. Not only do we flatter Gentiles, we crave the flattery of Gentiles. Often in America we receive it. We have produced a religious philosopher who can define himself as Jew only by means of the pressure of Christian philosophies—he cannot figure out how to be Jewish without the rivalry of polemics, because polemics produce concern and attention, and attention flatters. Our indifferent disaffected de-Judaized novelists are finally given the ultimate flattery of mimicry: a celebrated Gentile novelist writes a novel about an indifferent disaffected de-Judaized Jewish novelist. Our rabbis no longer learn or teach: they have become pastors, ersatz ministers who are flattered by invitations to serve at the White House. Jews who yearn faintly after Judaism come to Martin Buber only by w
ay of Christian theologians: they do not start with sh’ma yisrael,5 and Buber without sh’ma yisrael as a premise is likely to be peculiarly misleading. We are interested in Buber because we are flattered by the interest of Gentiles in him: the pangs of flattery throb even in our self-discoveries. In America Exile has become a flatterer; the fleshpots are spiritual. The reasons we do not Ingather are not our material comforts, but our spiritual self-centeredness. Craving flattery, we explore how to merit it, how to commit ourselves most responsively. The Jewish community in America is obviously undistinguished, so far, in its religious achievements; but the astounding fact is that we define ourselves as a religious community. This we do ourselves; Gentiles of good will want to receive us mainly as representatives of Mankind, not as a peculiar people. The sociological explanations for our willingness to think of ourselves as a religious community, though most of us profess to be agnostics at least, are multiple, commonplace, accurate, well known—but irrelevant. Our synagogues are empty: this too is irrelevant, because nowadays they are only cathedrals, and we have always done without cathedrals. But our conversations have become our synagogues. Our conversations have become liturgical. Even our professions of agnosticism take a liturgical turn. Our sociologists measure not only our communal safety but our communal commitment, the degree of our dedication or falling-away. We talk to one another unremittingly, querulously, feverishly, constantly, forever, stream after stream of Jewish investigation. We translate Yiddish with the fury of lost love, we publish translations of medieval Hebrew documents, we pour piyyutim6 into the air of every household. Even the enviers brood on the propriety of their envy. Even those who crave flattery are disposed to examine their lust. We have a fascination, not with what we are, but with what we might become. We are not like Germany; we are a good deal like an incipient Spain. Both ended in abattoir, but Germany was nearly in vain. Germany and its language gave us Moses Hess, Heine, Buber, Rosenzweig, Baeck—individuals, not a culture or a willed peoplehood—and no literature. Spain was for a time Jerusalem Displaced: psalms and songs came out of it. And Jerusalem Displaced is what we mean when we say Yavneh.7
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